“I…” Mahir stopped. Squaring his shoulders, he looked me in the eye, and asked, “What is it you need me to do?”

“Check with your Newsies. See who’s posting what and how much they have ready to go up. Also see who can play phone-tree. We’re going to want to hold a short staff meeting before we get out of here—and by ‘we,’ I mean you, me, and Maggie.” Becks and Alaric weren’t department heads. They could be packing the van and gathering any essential supplies from the house while we made the requisite reassuring noises and made it seem like we’d be staying where we were for the foreseeable future. I hated the idea of lying to my crew, I hated it, but I didn’t see any alternative. Not if we wanted to stay alive. I didn’t think any of them were secretly working for the enemy—Buffy was a special case—and I was pretty sure they were all willing to do whatever it took to help us spread the truth. George had a gift for hiring good people, and the best thing about hiring good people is that they’ll recommend other good people when it comes time to expand.

I would trust our staff with my life, and had, on several occasions. But we couldn’t take them all with us, and that meant they couldn’t know where we were going. More cold equations. If someone came looking, it was important there be no one who could give our location away.

Mahir was clearly doing the same math I was because he looked stricken before he nodded. “I’ll get them to report in, and I’ll pass the word about the staff meeting. How long do you think we need?”

“Tell ’em to be online in fifteen minutes. Anyone who isn’t there when we get started can join late and try to catch up as best they can.” I paused. “Also… tell them I’m not my sister. I’m not going to pull a grand gesture like she did. But if they want to quit without consequences, now would be the time to do it.”

George called a staff meeting when we first started to realize the size of the conspiracy we were facing. She made sure everyone was connected—and fired them all. Anybody who wanted to stay on could stay, but they had to sign another contract first. They had to understand what they were getting into. It was a big deal. It was incredibly important. And there just wasn’t time for that kind of theater. They’d stay or they wouldn’t. Anyone who’d signed on during the meeting with George knew the score, and so did anyone who’d signed on since.

“All right,” said Mahir. He was already moving toward the house terminal, my printout clutched in one hand.

I leaned over and pluckedt from his grasp, offering a wan smile in his direction before I turned and started for the kitchen. It was time to get everybody on the same page, get Maggie to start packing, and get ready to go on the run.

Bet you wish we’d never signed up for the Ryman campaign, huh?

“The thought has crossed my mind,” I admitted. “When you said, ‘Hey, Shaun, let’s be journalists,’ I’m pretty sure this part wasn’t in the brochure.”

Would it have made any difference?

I paused with my hand raised to push the kitchen door open. Mahir and Buffy, Maggie, Alaric, and Becks, we knew them all because of what we’d chosen to do with our lives. More important, they were our lives, not mine. If I’d said no, that I wanted to be something else when I grew up, George would still have become a blogger, and I would have lost her long before I actually did.

“Not a bit,” I said, and stepped into the kitchen.

I am a poet, and I am a storyteller, and it is with these two callings in mind that I make the following statement, which comes from my heart, my soul, and my middle fingers:

Fuck you people and the horses you rode in on. You better watch yourselves, because we are done screwing around, and we are going to take your bitch asses down.

This is for Dave.

—From Dandelion Mine, the blog of Magdalene Garcia, June 24, 2041

The world has gone insane, and you can’t get a decent pint of lager anywhere in this bloody country. I think I can safely say that my schoolmates were correct when they predicted my eventual destination, and I am now in hell.

—From Fish and Clips, the blog of Mahir Gowda, June 24, 2041

Twenty-five

The staff meeting went better than I was afraid it would. That’s about the only good thing that I can say about it. Everyone was scared, and everyone was expressing

that fear in a different way. The Irwins were restless and pissed off about being forbidden to go into the field. The Newsies were split into two distinct camps—the ones who wanted to grab an Irwin, get outside, and find out what the hell was going on out there, and the ones who were happy to stay as far away from the disaster zone as possible but wanted information to flow freely while they stayed indoors. That’s the kind of Newsie attitude that’s always pissed me off, since it seems to come with a blanket assumption that the Irwins are overjoyed to be risking their lives for the benefit of the Newsies’ careers.

The Fictionals, on the other hand, were uniformly glad to be staying inside, but were all scared out of their minds and spent half the call going off on tangents that required all business to come grinding to a halt while Maggie calmed them down. She was good at her job, maybe better than I ever realized, and not even she could keep them on track for more than a few minutes at a time. After twenty minutes, I was ready to kill someone—and I wasn’t all that picky about who.

Mahir saved everyone’s asses. He took over the call and led it with calm and grace, pausing when Maggie needed to play kindergarten teacher, and otherwise keeping us moving forward. He fielded every question that was tossed his way, somehow prompting the rest of us to speak up just often enough that no one forgot we were there. If he’d wanted to go into event planning instead of journalism, he probably could have made a fortune.