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by Mira Grant

  Rick was at a terminal when we came in. The cat he’d saved was curled up in his lap, purring. I’d be purring, too, if I’d just eaten the better part of a tuna fish sandwich from room service.

  “Lucky cat,” I commented.

  “Oh, thank God,” said Rick, looking up. “Everyone wants to know what we’re doing next. The raw footage has been downloaded so many times I thought we were going to blow up one of the servers, Mahir won’t stop pinging me, and the message boards are—”

  I interrupted him with a wave of my hand. “What are the numbers like, Rick?”

  “Ah…” He recovered quickly, glancing to the top of his screen. “Up seven percent in all markets.”

  Shaun whistled. “Wow. We should uncover terrorist conspiracies more often.”

  “We haven’t uncovered it yet; we’ve just found out that it existed,” I said, and sat down at my own terminal. “Hit your boards and start pinging your people. We’re doing the debrief in thirty, and then we start to edit and recap for the evening reports.”

  “On it.” Shaun grabbed a chair and looked to Rick, adding carelessly, “You get to ping the Fictionals. Buffy isn’t coming.”

  “Oh, great,” said Rick, wrinkling his nose. He was already pulling up his IM lists as he asked, “Why do I get the honor?”

  “Because you kept the cat,” I said. “Kick Magdalene. She’ll help you. Hush now. Mommy’s working.” He snorted but turned back to his computer. Shaun and I did the same.

  It took thirty minutes to beat the message boards into something that looked less like a combination of a forest fire and a conspiracy theorist convention. No one had quite reached the point of linking the outbreak at the Ryman family ranch with the initial release of the Kellis cure and the death of JFK, but they’d have gotten there before much longer. As I’d expected, everyone in my department was already up, online, and doing their best to moderate the mess, and from the crossover threads, it looked like the same was mostly true for the Irwins and the Fictionals. Behold the power of the truth. When people see its shadow on the wall, they don’t want to take the time to look away.

  “My boards are clear,” Shaun called. “Ready when you are.”

  “Same,” Rick said. “The chat relay is humming nicely, and the volunteer mods have things under control.”

  “Excellent.” Since the volunteers weren’t technically employees of After the End Times, they didn’t need to be included in the debriefing. I pulled up the employee chat and typed, Log on now. “Turn on your conference functions, boys. We’re about to see the swarm.”

  “Logged on.”

  “Logged on.”

  “Logging on now. Room eleven, maximum security.” Our conferencing system is half the standard Microsoft Windows VirtuParty setup—allowing people to share real-time socialization through web-cams and a common server—and half Buffy’s own homebrew. All eleven of our channels have varying degrees of security, from the base three, which clever readers can break into with relative ease, to eleven, which has never been successfully violated. Not even by the people we’ve paid to try.

  Windows began spawning on my screen, each containing the small, pixelated face of one of our bloggers. Shaun, Rick, and I appeared first, followed almost immediately by Mahir, who looked like he hadn’t slept in several days, Alaric, and Suzy, the girl I’d hired to replace Becks after she jumped ship to the Irwins. Becks herself appeared a moment later, along with a trio of Irwins I only vaguely recognized. Five more faces followed them as the Fictionals logged in; three of them were sharing one screen, proving that Magdalene was hosting another of her infamous grindhouse parties.

  When all was said and done, we were only missing Dave—one of Shaun’s Irwins, who was on a field trip in the wilds of Alaska and probably couldn’t get to a conferencing setup—and Buffy. I looked from face to face, studying their expressions while the initial quiet still held. They looked worried, confused, curious, even excited, but none of them looked like they had anything to hide. This was our team. This was what we had to work with. And we had a conspiracy to break.

  “All right, everyone,” I said. “This afternoon, we led an expedition onto the Ryman family ranch. You’ve seen the footage by now. If you haven’t, please log out, watch it, and come back. Here’s the topic at hand: ‘What happens next?’ “

  Following the campaign of Congresswoman Kirsten Wagman taught me one important fact about politics: Sometimes, style can matter more than substance. Let’s face it: We’re not talking about one of the great political minds of our age. We’re talking about a former stripper who got her seat in Congress by promising her constituency that for every thousand votes she got, she’d wear something else inappropriate to the floor. Judging by the landslide of that first win, we’ll be seeing congressional hearings graced by a lady in lingerie long after the end of her term in office.

  But she didn’t win. Despite the general malaise of the voting public and their willingness to put “interesting” above “good for them” in nine out of ten cases, Wagman’s run for the presidential seat proved to be the tenth event. Why was this? I place the blame partially on Senator Peter Ryman, a man who proved that style and substance can be combined to the benefit of both, and, more important, that integrity is not actually dead.

  I also blame After the End Times and Georgia Mason, for their willingness to get into the campaign in a way that has seldom been seen in this century. Their reporting hasn’t been impartial or perfect, but it has something we see even more rarely than integrity.

  It has heart.

  It is with great joy that I report that the youth of America aren’t actually riddled with ennui and apathy; that the truth hasn’t been fully forsaken for the merely entertaining; that there’s a place in this world for reporting the facts as accurately and concisely as possible and allowing people to draw their own conclusions.

  I’ve never been more proud of finding a place where I can belong.

  —From Another Point of True, the blog of Richard Cousins, March 18, 2040

  Sixteen

  The discussion lasted late into the morning. People dropped off the conference one by one, until it was just Rick, Mahir, and me. Shaun had long since passed out at his terminal, leaning back in his chair and snoring. Rick’s newly acquired cat was curled up on his chest with its tail tucked over its nose, occasionally opening an eye to glare at the room.

  “I don’t like this, Georgia,” said Mahir, worry and exhaustion blurring his normally crisp English accent into something much softer. He ran his hand through his hair. He’d been doing that for hours, and it was sticking up in all directions. “The situation is starting to sound like it isn’t exactly safe.”

  “You’re on the other side of the planet, Mahir. I don’t think you’re going to get hurt.”

  “It’s not my safety I’m concerned with here. Are you sure we want to continue to pursue the situation? I’d rather not be reporting your obituary.” He sounded so anxious that I couldn’t be angry with him. Mahir’s a good guy. A little conservative, and generally inclined to avoid taking risks, but a good guy and a fabulous Newsie. If he couldn’t understand why we were pursuing things, I just needed to make them clearer.

  “Everyone who died at the ranch was murdered,” I said. His image winced. “The people who died in Eakly were murdered, too, and that set of casualties nearly included me and Shaun. There’s something connected to this candidate and this campaign that someone wants to see destroyed, and they’re not above causing a little collateral damage. You want to know if we want to continue pursuing the situation. I want to know what makes you think we can afford not to.”

  Mahir smiled, reaching up to adjust his glasses. “I was assuming you’d say something along those lines, but I wanted to be certain of it. Rest assured that you have the full support of everyone here. If there’s anything I can do, all you have to do is say so.”

  “You know, Mahir, you
r support is something I never worry about. I may have something for you very soon,” I said. “Although if you play ‘test the boss’ again, I may kill you. For now, it’s almost four in the morning, and the senator’s going to want to talk before much longer. I hereby declare this discussion over. Rick, Mahir, thanks for sticking it out.”

  “Any time,” said Rick, voice echoing as the relay raced to keep up with him. His window blinked out.

  “Cheers,” said Mahir, and logged off. I closed the conference, standing. I was so stiff that it felt like my spine had been replaced with carved teak, and my eyes were burning. I removed my sunglasses and rubbed my face, trying to relieve some of the tension. It wasn’t working.

  “Bed?” asked Rick.

  I nodded. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but—”

  “Get out. I know. Wake me when it’s time to go?”

  “I will.”

  “Good night, Georgia. Sleep well.” Rick opened the adjoining door with a faint creak. I opened my eyes, turning to wave as he slipped out.

  “You too, Rick,” I said. Then the door was closed, and I staggered to the bed, shedding clothes as I went. When I was down to T-shirt and panties, I abandoned the notion of looking for nightclothes and crawled under the covers, closing my eyes again as I sank into blessed darkness.

  “Georgia.”

  The voice was vaguely familiar. I pondered its familiarity for a moment, and then rolled over, deciding I didn’t need to give a damn.

  “Georgia.”

  There was more anxiousness to the voice this time. Maybe I needed to pay attention to it. It wasn’t the sort of anxiousness that said “Pay attention or something is going to eat your face.” I made a faint grumbling noise and didn’t open my eyes.

  “George, if you don’t wake up right now, I’m going to pour ice water over your head.” The statement was made in an entirely matter-of-fact manner. It wasn’t a threat, merely a comment. “You won’t like that. I won’t care.”

  I licked my lips to moisten them and croaked, “I hate you.”

  “Where’s the love? There’s the love. Now get out of bed. Senator Ryman called. You slept through me talking to him for, like, the whole time I was getting dressed. How late were you up last night?”

  I opened my eyes and squinted at Shaun. He was wearing one of his bulkier shirts, the ones he puts on only when he needs to cover body armor. I pushed myself unsteadily into a sitting position, holding out my left hand. He dropped my sunglasses into it. “Sometime around four. What time is it?”

  “Almost nine.”

  “Oh, my God, kill me now,” I moaned, and rose, shuffling toward the bathroom. The hotel had been happy to switch our standard light bulbs for lower-wattage soft lights that wouldn’t hurt my eyes, but management didn’t have a way to swap out the built-in bathroom fluorescents. “What time will he be here? Or are we going to him?”

  “You’ve got fifteen minutes. Steve’s picking us up.” There was a distinctly amused note in Shaun’s voice as he relayed this piece of information. “Buffy’s pissed. She and Chuck are already with the Rymans, and she didn’t have spare clothes with her. I got the world’s angriest text message while I was on the phone.”

  “She wants to have her night on the town, she can take the walk of shame the day after.” The bathroom lights were searingly bright, even through my sunglasses. I looked in the mirror and groaned. “I look like death.”

  “Cute journalistic death?”

  “Just plain death.” I was washed-out and sallow, and it had been too long since I had my hair trimmed; it was getting long enough to tangle. My head wasn’t throbbing, but it would be soon. The light seeping in around the edges of my glasses was telling me that. There was a way I could avoid that, if I was willing to deal with the inconvenience. Muttering under my breath, I grabbed my contact case off the sink and clicked the bathroom lights off. Even with as little as I voluntarily wear my contacts, the nature of my medical condition means I need to be able to put them in despite near or total darkness. Doing otherwise means risking retinal scarring, and I have things to do that require having eyes.

  Shaun’s feet shuffled on the carpet as he crossed to the bathroom door. “George? What are you doing in there in the dark?”

  “Putting in my contacts.” I blinked, and felt the first slide into place. “Find me clean clothes.”

  “What do I look like, your maid?”

  “Nah, she’s way better looking.” I blinked my second lens into place before clicking the bathroom lights back on. Harsh white light flooded the room. I squinted slightly, studying my blue-eyed reflection before I turned to the important matter of brushing my hair and teeth. “Any time now, Shaun. I can’t go see the senator in my undies.”

  “Hunter S. Thompson would go see a senator in his undies. Or your undies, for that matter.”

  “Hunter S. Thompson was too stoned to know what undies were.” The bathroom door opened. I turned, catching the clothes Shaun pitched in my direction. “There, now, was that so hard? Go grab our gear. I’ll be there in a second.”

  “Next time, I’ll let you sleep in,” he grumbled, backing up. “And those contacts make you look like an alien!”

  “I know,” I said, and shut the bathroom door.

  Ten minutes later, Shaun and I were back in the elevator. I was running the final diagnostic checks on my equipment, and Shaun was doing the same, fingers tapping over the screen of his PDA in a series of increasingly complex patterns. This wasn’t a field op, and odds were that Senator Ryman would request a privacy screen on anything we recorded, but that didn’t matter. Leaving the hotel without our cameras and recorders set and primed to go would have been like leaving naked, and neither of us was up for that.

  Some of my cameras were starting to show signs of misalignment, and the memory in my watch was almost full. Making a note to have Buffy take a look at things, I stepped out into the lobby with Shaun half a beat behind.

  “Thank you for choosing the Parrish Weston Suites as your home away from home,” the hotel chirped as we approached the air lock. “We know you have many choices, and we are grateful for your business. Please place your right hand—”

  “That’s enough,” I said, slamming my palm down on the test panel as soon as it finished opening. Getting out of the hotel requires nothing but a clean blood test. They don’t care if you want to go into massive viral amplification as long as you have the common courtesy to do it outside, preferably after you’ve paid your bills.

  Shaun and I checked clean and the outer doors slid open, allowing us to exit while the automated voice of the hotel chirped pleasantries to an empty antechamber. It was cold and bright outside; a perfect Wisconsin day. There was only one car idling in the passenger pickup lane.

  “Think that’s us?” asked Shaun.

  “That, or there’s a pro-wrestling convention in town,” I said. We started toward it.

  When the senator sends a car, he doesn’t screw around. Our intended transport was a solid-looking black SUV. The windows were tinted, and I would have placed bets on their being bulletproof. Possessing a personal fortune has its perks. Shaun nudged me and whistled, pointing to the inset gunner’s windows on the back windshield.

  “Even Mom doesn’t have those,” he murmured.

  “I’m sure she’ll be jealous,” I said.

  Steve was standing by the rear passenger door, holding it open for us—as much, I’m sure, as a reminder that we weren’t allowed to ride up front as a gesture of civility. His eyebrows rose when he saw my contacts. To his credit, he didn’t comment on them; he just held the door open a little wider. “Shaun. Georgia.”

  “I see you drew the short straw this morning,” I said, hoisting myself into the SUV and scooting over to make room for Shaun. Rick was already inside. I offered him a small wave, which he dolefully returned.

  “The senator prefers this meeting be conducted in a
more secure location and thought you might appreciate the chance to take a break from driving.” Steve glanced toward the parking garage and tapped his earpiece. I frowned. They thought our van had been bugged? It was possible—without Buffy running a full diagnostic on our systems, there was no way to tell—but it seemed a little paranoid.

  I stopped that line of thought. Rebecca Ryman was murdered by someone who was willing to use live-state Kellis-Amberlee in an uncontrolled situation to achieve their goals, whatever they happened to be. There was no such thing as paranoia anymore.

  “Looking good, Steve-o,” said Shaun, slapping the security agent a high five as he slid into the car.

  “One day you’re going to call me that, and I’m going to punch your head clean off,” said Steve, and slammed the door. Shaun laughed. The sound of Steve’s footsteps moved around the car, where the driver’s-side door opened and closed again. A sheet of one-way glass separated the front seat from the passenger compartment. He could see us, but we couldn’t see him. How encouraging.

  “He probably means that, you know,” said Rick.

  “As long as I get it on film, I’ll be happy,” said Shaun. Folding his hands behind his head, he stretched out on the seat and propped his feet in my lap. “This is awesome. We’re being driven to a clandestine meeting with a man who wants to be president. Anybody else feel like James Bond right now?”

  “Too female,” I said.

  “Too aware of the fact that I’m not immortal,” said Rick.

  “You realize you’re both wimps, right?” scolded Shaun.

  “Yes, but we’re wimps with a life expectancy, and I have to respect that,” I replied.

  “I’ll trade my life expectancy for a cup of coffee and a nice dark room,” said Rick.

  I craned my head to look at him. He was rubbing his eyes. He looked groggy, and I wasn’t entirely sure he’d changed his shirt. “Didn’t sleep well?”