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“We have copies, if you want to see them,” said Amber.

Chuck didn't like that. “They're
reporters
, not the FBI,” he said. “What good is sharing your darkest secrets with them going to do? Unless you wanted everything splashed across the front page of tomorrow's paper.”

“There you go again, forgetting that we're as deep in this shit as you are,” said Mat. They shook their head. “I
like
you, Chuck, but you're being way more narrow-minded than I expected you to be. We're not going to report on anything that might get us hurt too. I mean, that's just common sense.”

“And if, as Governor Kilburn says, everyone who runs for office gets threats like the ones she's received, how would our reporting the facts be some sort of shock to the public?” asked Ben. “We're here to accurately document the campaign, not serve as political advisors, but if you ask me, admitting that there are credible threats only strengthens her position, especially after this attack.”

“Come again?” said Amber. Everyone turned to look at her. She shrugged. “Okay, look, security's supposed to stay quiet and hug the walls, I get that, but come on. How does this strengthen her position? There's been an attack in a public place. People could have been hurt. People
were
hurt, since the dead guys had to come from somewhere.”

“We know where they came from,” said Mat, in a small voice.

“Which is why coming forward about the threats doesn't hurt anything in this situation,” said Ben. “The governor passed the threats along to the authorities, according to the protocol, and people got hurt anyway. So now she's speaking out about the danger, and about the cowards who would violate Raskin-Watts by using zombies as a weapon.”

“Ooo, nasty, make it a terrorism charge,” I said approvingly. “Hit whoever decided to go for the political symbolism where it really hurts.”

The governor sat up straighter. “You really think this won't backfire? I don't want anyone else getting hurt, but—”

“You still want to be President one day, and that means not sounding like you've accepted too much culpability in the matter,” said Ben. “We understand. We're not going to lie for you. We're not even going to spin things too hard in your favor. We will find the names and identities of everyone who died because your campaign was starting here, and we'll run obituaries on each one of them. We'll talk about the need to respond quickly and conclusively to threats during the political process, to prevent situations like this one from occurring again. This should never have happened in the first place. I'm not blaming you, governor, and I'm not going to blame you in my articles. I'm blaming the whole political process. We should have better safeties in place.”

“Aren't you the one who's always saying the world isn't as dangerous as we make it out to be?” demanded Chuck. “You can't have it both ways. Either it's too dangerous for us to have a simple election, or it's so safe that we should take away the blood testing units in schools. Try to do both at once and you're going to give yourself a headache.”

“There's a big difference between specific danger and environmental danger, which you would know if you weren't all tied up in knots and worried about losing your job,” said Ben. “This was a tragedy. It's our job to report on it, and it's your job to help the governor move past it. We need her to keep going as much as you do, remember? Without her, we don't have a job.”

“Now that everyone has snapped at everyone else, I'm hoping we've all managed to get that out of our systems, and can move on to doing something productive,” said Governor Kilburn, leaning forward as she put herself back into the conversation. It was smoothly handled. She had clearly been hanging back, giving everyone else a chance to talk. I had to admire that, even if I was one of the people she was handling. “Nothing we do is going to bring those poor souls back to life, but the journalists are right, Chuck: Whoever did this went for the most vulnerable members of my voting bloc. They wanted to hurt me, and they wanted to send a message in the process. They're trying to intimidate me.”

“Well, they've definitely intimidated
me
,” said Chuck.

“So quit.” The suggestion was made calmly, clearly, and with no indication that the governor was kidding. He flinched. She smiled, trying to reassure. I wasn't sure it was going to work. Most people don't take kindly to being told that they're not needed. “I enjoy working with you, Chuck. You're damn good at your job, and I feel like I have a better shot at the big white house up on the hill if I have you here to guide me. But if you're going to balk every time you don't like the way things work around here, this isn't going to go well for either one of us. I'm going to get mulish and dig my heels in. You're going to pull all your hair out—and let's face it, honey, you don't have that much to spare.”

Nervous silence from the people at the table who'd been part of the governor's camp since the beginning. My team remained stone-faced. This wasn't our place. We were onlookers, nothing more, in a scene that didn't really need us. And it chafed. I know everyone thinks of themselves as the heroes of their own stories—Irwins maybe more than most, since we're usually the ones risking our necks for the scoop, which makes it hard not to consider yourself the center of the world—but there were better things we could have been doing with our time.

Much better. Almost before I realized I was intending to move, I'd placed my hands on the table and pushed myself into a standing position. Ben and Audrey followed my lead, leaving Mat to scramble to their feet so that we would present a united front.

“Well, this has been fun, but while we've been sitting in here chatting with you lot, everyone else who was at today's ruckus has been getting their footage online, giving exclusive interviews, and basically making a mockery of our so-called ‘access.' So we're going to go now, and get started on doing our actual jobs, while you all figure out what you want to do next. Drop us an email when you know where we're needed.”

“You could be replaced,” said Chuck.

“So could you, and wouldn't that be a funny how-d'ye-do for all of us,” I shot back. “We need to
work
. We saved your bacon today.
I
saved your bacon today. Rewarding us by keeping us from doing our jobs doesn't do you any favors, but it does piss us off rather royally. And as for firing us, do you really want a bunch of journalists with a vendetta against your candidate out there?”

“You reviewed our credentials alongside the governor when she was trying to decide whether or not to hire us,” said Ben, and his tone was as calm as mine was not, balancing me out. This was his territory as much as it was mine. I would get angry, and then he'd step in, not to defuse the situation, but to cover it with napalm. “You know what we're capable of. Maybe we're not as fancy as Senator Ryman's pet blog team, but what we lack in prestige, we more than make up for with viciousness.”

Audrey didn't say anything. Audrey just smiled. She had a way of making a simple, nonaggressive expression look like a threat, and she was using it now. As usual, it made me want to kiss the violence off of her face. That would have to wait.

“Go,” said Governor Kilburn. “Document events. Report the news. Make the world understand that what happened here today was my responsibility, but not my fault, and that we are absolutely going to do better.”

It was a good line, delivered with enough conviction that I almost believed her. All four of us nodded, with varying degrees of sincerity. Then we turned, still presenting a united front, and walked out of the room.

No blood test was required to exit.

“Well,” I said, as we walked across the wide stretch of blacktop toward the fence. Our cars were on the other side, waiting for us to reclaim them. “That was bracing.”

“That's a word,” said Mat. “It has letters and everything.”

“I don't like any of this,” said Audrey. “We should bail now, while we still have half a prayer of getting out.”

“That's easy for you to say,” said Mat. “You're a Fictional. Nobody cares if you're associated with real news. I need to get some actual stories under my belt, or I'm going to get kicked out of Factual News.”

Audrey and I exchanged a look. There was a lot Mat didn't know. She shook her head minutely. There was a lot Mat was going to continue not to know.

“No one's bailing,” said Ben. He paused before amending, “Or rather, I'm not bailing. If you want to bail by yourself, that's your call. But I made a commitment to this campaign, and I'm going to see it through.”

“My bank account made a commitment to all those lovely payments that should be coming my way.” The gate to the parking area
did
have a blood testing unit attached. That was normal, and I was about to slap my hand down on it when the part of my mind responsible for noticing things kicked in and stopped me cold. I froze.

“If you're not going to get pricked, let me,” said Mat, and started to step in front of me.

I didn't think. I just reacted, grabbing them by the shoulders and yanking them away from the testing panel so fast that they lost their footing and went sprawling. Mat's small, deeply offended “Hey!” was of no real consequence. I was too busy spreading my arms as far as I could, blocking Audrey and Ben from coming any closer to the fence.

“Audrey, I need you to go get John,” I said. My voice came out stiff and almost lifeless: Every word was a zombie, shambling toward its target. I hoped that she could read my tone as the terrified thing that it was, and not as anything else. “Hurry.”

“Ash, what are you…” She trailed off. I couldn't see her, but I knew her well enough to picture what was happening behind me. Her eyes flicking over the testing unit and seeing the same thing I had. Her mind revving into action, and coming up, inevitably, with the same conclusion. It was so simple that it was almost a miracle I'd seen it in time. Finally, she said, “I'll be right back,” and turned, and ran.

I stayed where I was, staring at the false front that had been installed atop the standard blood testing unit, and wondered how much worse this was going to get before it started getting better.

F
alse fronts for blood testing units are structurally similar to the credit-card skimmers that caused so much commercial havoc in the years immediately prior to the Rising.” Ben made a suitably dramatic figure, standing in front of the team that was meticulously dismantling the false front, backlit by the floodlights they'd brought in to make their impossible job a tiny bit easier. Really, no one would know he was wearing his emergency suit, or that Mat had used a hair straightener to steam the wrinkles out of it in the women's bathroom.

Audrey was off to one side, as close to the security team as she was allowed, filming every second of the dismantlement and removal. If there was any information to be gleaned from the false front's design, she would capture it and bring it back for the rest of us to go over.

“By slipping a tailored piece of plastic or metal over the top of an existing blood testing unit, the culprit or culprits can modify the unit's original purpose. There was an incident in San Antonio several years ago, where ‘activists' used half a dozen of the city's blood testing stations as delivery points for psychotropic drugs to make a point about how the media continues to lie to us. Their message was somewhat diluted when one of the women, Heather Lyons, age thirty-seven, suffered an allergic reaction to the drugs she had unwittingly received. She died before paramedics could arrive. She rose, as was to be expected. She then went on a rampage through the neighborhood where she had been shopping, the drugs in her system making her even more aggressive than the average infected.” Ben was only providing background—most of the people who clicked on this report would know the basics, would remember the San Antonio incident as a modern tragedy—but he showed no signs of finding the task either boring or unnecessary. Every word was loaded with the appropriate gravity. If Heather Lyons's family saw this, they wouldn't find anything in it to call disrespectful.

That was always important to him, and it was one of the things that set Ben apart from most of his peers: As far as he was concerned, the worst thing about Kellis-Amberlee was the way it robbed the dead of their dignity. He wanted to give it back, inasmuch as he could, even if it was only one sentence at a time.

That was also one of the things that set Ben apart from me. I understood where he was coming from, but I didn't have time to waste thinking about the dignity of the dead. Not when they were generally doing their best to chew my face off, and I was doing
my
best not to let them. He had luxuries I didn't. That was always and forever the way of the world.

“The pranksters who installed their hallucinogenic false front didn't mean to hurt anyone: They had even disengaged the original testing needles, preventing the impacted door from opening when the test unit was used,” said Ben. “They were as benign as it is possible for something like this—something that tampers with the essential systems we all depend upon for our safety—to be. Most false fronts have a more sinister purpose.”

I snorted. I couldn't help myself. Then I moved away. There was too much chance that the sound would be picked up by his microphones, and I didn't want to ruin his report. There was no denying the powerful imagery of the men behind him, dismantling the death machine that had been installed to trap us.

It was a simple trick. Take a blood testing unit, preferably a wall panel like the one on the parking lot. Build an identical plastic shell to slip over it, sitting as flush as possible with the original mechanism. Insert a needle array, again, identical to the array in the original mechanism. A well-done false front wouldn't raise any red flags, not even when you started bleeding. But needles can do a lot of things. They're not just a way of taking blood. They're a way of delivering drugs, as Heather Lyons learned to her swift and permanent regret.

And they're a way of delivering diseases. Infected blood was the most common: Gather a bunch of samples the old-fashioned way, with syringes and razorblades. Mix it together, and then set up a bunch of needles preloaded with death. Anyone who used the unit would find themselves going into full amplification, and it only took one. A single zombie was a better delivery mechanism for Kellis-Amberlee than any needle array could ever have hoped to be.

The governor was still on-site, since she couldn't get to the parking lot any more than the rest of us. She could have sent for a helicopter, being the one in charge and all, but she'd elected not to; with her security staff around her, she was as safe here as it was possible for anyone to be, and this way anyone who asked would be told that she hadn't run out on her people. It was a sensible political choice, and I respected her for making it, since she wasn't putting anyone in danger by staying. If her presence had been increasing the risk for anybody else—especially anybody from my team—I would have been shoving her ass onto the nearest air transport, and screw anyone who wanted to argue with me.

Governor Kilburn beckoned me over when she saw me prowling toward her. “Do we know what the mechanism was intended to do yet?” she asked.

“Not in detail, but it was a good match to the metal; we weren't supposed to see it. And it definitely came with its own needle array. We have to assume whoever put it there was planning to do some damage. We just don't know what kind.” I scanned the fence line. “What's the camera coverage like in here? Is there
any
chance we got this asshole on film? Because it may be my fabled redhead's temper speaking, but I've the great and burning desire to smash some fingers with a hammer.”

“Please don't smash any fingers with a hammer,” said Amber, coming out of a deep huddle with some of her fellow security staffers long enough to shoot a meaningful glance in my direction. “If you smash their fingers, we don't get to have any fun with them. You want us to have fun, don't you, Ash? You want us to have lots and lots of fun.”

“Amber, we've talked about this,” said Governor Kilburn. “You sound like a serial killer when you say things like that. If someone who's
not
a part of our dedicated media team hears you sounding like a serial killer, you won't be able to stay with the campaign.”

Amber flashed her a quick, not entirely professional smile. “I never say anything where the public can hear me,” she said, and returned to her huddle.

Governor Kilburn signed. “Sometimes I wonder why I decided to go for this gig. What do you think, Ash? Should we be considering this more terrorist action, or should we be looking at it as a prank?”

“The unit's a standard Apple model, so creating a new shell wouldn't be as hard as we'd all like to pretend it is, but nobody does that sort of false front in a weekend, or because they think it's funny,” I said. “The thing was properly installed, and connected to the baseplate with the right model of screws. If this was a prank, it was overkill.”

“All right, I need to ask this, and please don't take it as an attack of any sort—I'm too tired and strung out right now to deal with this,” said Governor Kilburn. “Everyone I've spoken to has stressed how well designed the false front was, and how lucky we are that it was spotted. Now, I know your team had nothing to do with the zombies in the garden.”

“Thanks for not assuming we'd risk our lives, and my life in specific, to liven up a political event,” I said dryly, feeling my eyebrows climb toward my hairline. “What's your point?”

“Did you, or someone from your team, install the false front on the testing unit to make me appreciate your presence?” Governor Kilburn looked at me solemnly. “After the day we've had, I'm sure you understand why I have to ask.”

I stared at her for a moment before saying, “After the day we've had, I'm sure you understand why I have to tell you to go fuck yourself.”

“I do,” said the governor. She sounded serious.

Good. “Go fuck yourself,” I said, with a sharp shake of my head. “Do it twice if you need to, just to drive home how incredibly offensive and unnecessary and… and
stupid
that question was. We're professionals. We don't falsify the news, because we don't need to. We can make
string
interesting if we have to, because it's our job. We do our jobs. That's why you hired us in the first place. If you'd wanted people who would need to pull bullshit like planting a false face to make a story, you would have found them. You would have gone to them. But you came to us.”

“So how did you know not to follow normal protocol?” The question was calm, even relaxed, but I knew as soon as it was asked that my answer mattered. My answer mattered a
lot
. The small huddle of security guards hadn't moved, but they had stopped talking, going very still as they waited to hear what I had to say.

“The edges were almost perfect. They lined up exactly.” I crossed my arms, looking at her coolly. “This site is used daily by tour groups, therapeutic excursions, gardening associations, and the staffers who work here. A conservative estimate puts a hundred people through that gate every single day. Seems a bit unbelievable, if you ask me. Most of you Americans are about as willing to go outside where the fresh air lives as you are to gargle with live spiders, but hell, what do I know? I'm just the bloody foreigner who saved all your arses today. Twice. Clearly, I don't count.”

“Last numbers put the test gardens at an average of a hundred and fifteen visitors per day,” said the governor. She sounded grudgingly impressed, like she hadn't expected me to perform this well. The urge to punch her in the stomach a few times was rather strong.

Violence is not always the best solution to problems, but it's usually a good start. Especially when the problems involve human beings. “Right, so a hundred and fifteen visitors a day. Most blood testing units have an internal cleaning system that keeps their panels and needles in tip-top shape, so you don't have to worry about tetanus or any of those other fun things. Interesting fact about machines with internal cleaning systems: Most people will tend to assume they're taken care of. No need to do anything to shine them up, they're already shipshape.”

The governor looked at me with an expression of dawning horror on her face. I smiled coldly and pressed on.

“The fence around the testing panel showed no signs of bleach-blasting or any other form of aggressive cleaning. The pavement under our feet had no discoloration; I'd say it was last cleaned about a month ago, using nothing more penetrating than a hose. The whole area was in decent repair, sure, and there was nothing about it that should have triggered a deep decontamination—not before today, anyway, and that happened in the garden, not at the gate—but the testing panel? Not a speck of dust. That thing was as pristine as if it had been installed yesterday, which, as it turns out, it had been.” I continued to smile. Sometimes, that was the only thing I
could
do. And sometimes, smiling when I clearly didn't want to was the best way to get my point across. “I stopped because I noticed how damn clean that thing was, and that made me look closer. When I looked closer, I saw that the screws didn't match the metal fittings around them. Faux bronze instead of faux copper.”

“You could tell the screws were wrong because they were the wrong color?” Amber moved away from the huddle, moving to stand next to the governor. I couldn't tell from her expression whether she was impressed or dubious. To be honest, in that moment, I didn't care.

“It's a very distinctive color,” I said. “Anyone who's made a study of these testing units would have been able to catch it, if they'd taken the time to look.”

“I assume this means you've made a study of these testing units,” said the governor.

“They use an earlier version of this same model on all the National Heritage Sites in Ireland,” I said. “I saw a lot of them when I was in the early stages of my career and why are we still talking about this bullshit? You know I didn't plant the false front. Amber's checked her wrist display five times while I've been standing here, so I know that by now
you
know exactly what was loaded into that damn machine. We're still not writing our reports or posting our stories, which means we're losing hits, we're losing revenue, and we're losing our primary reason to stay with you. Your campaign was supposed to be
good
for us, remember?”

“My campaign wasn't supposed to get anyone murdered, and look how well we're doing with that,” said Governor Kilburn. For a moment—just a moment—her veil of professional control flickered, and I saw the woman underneath the politician, even more clearly than I'd seen her when she was sitting in my kitchen. She looked tired. She looked done with all of this. But most of all, she looked like a real person, as confused and frightened and out of her depth as the rest of us.

Maybe that should have made me more forgiving. Since my life—and the lives of my loved ones—were probably still in danger, it just made me want to punch her even more.

“She's right about one thing: I know what was in the false front.” Amber's face was grim. That wasn't encouraging. “The needles were loaded with small doses of live-state Kellis-Amberlee virus. Enough to cause almost instant amplification in even the largest adult human.”

Governor Kilburn's hand flew to cover her mouth, a look of sick horror filling her eyes.

I cocked my head to the side. “Does the rest of my team know that?”

“Your hubby's still filming his piece on finding the thing; I figure they'll tell him when he turns the camera off,” said Amber. “The makeup kid's working the uploads, and your girlfriend… okay, she probably knows, since she's with John, and he's with the team that was taking the thing apart.”

Which meant Audrey was somewhere nearby, without a protective suit, in the presence of live-state Kellis-Amberlee. A cold needle of fear pricked the back of my neck, making the hair stand on end. “Please ping me if anything happens that I, or any member of my team, ought to know about,” I said, and turned on my heel and fled, racing back across the pavement toward where I'd last seen Audrey.