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  The two men exchanged a look before glancing to Ben. Then, slowly, they lowered their guns and stepped to the side, allowing me access to the stairs.

  I did not flee. Fleeing would have implied that I was frightened, and I wasn’t frightened. I was… unsettled, and annoyed, and highly motivated to get the hell out of there. So I didn’t flee, but I did take the stairs two at a time, and I didn’t look back until I got to the bathroom and shut myself inside. The door auto-locked, beginning the mandatory post-field decontamination process.

  Our home security system was old enough that we’d all learned not to go to the bathroom just as someone was getting back to the house: If Audrey had been seized by the need to pee as my blood test was processing, she could have been caught in the decon cycle intended for me, getting locked in the downstairs bathroom until my checks came back clean. It had happened before, and while we were a lot more careful about it now than we used to be, none of us had any doubt that it was going to happen again. It was just part of the reality of living in our situation.

  Carefully, I stripped to the skin, dropping each article of clothing into the white biohazard hamper that fed directly to the washing machine in the basement. Even my bra had to go in, which was hell on my lingerie. Every female Irwin I knew participated in a twice-yearly bra drive to replenish our underwear drawers. Asking people to give us money for dainties was a little grubby, but otherwise, we’d have been holding our tits whenever we had to run, thanks to the total lack of elasticity.

  Before I closed the lid on the hamper, I twisted the dial to “delicate.” It didn’t make much of a difference, but at least the delicate cycle used color-safe bleach, and could extend the life of my average sundress by two or three washings—long enough for me to sew a replacement.

  Sometimes I wondered if male Irwins had these problems. Most of them seemed to default to the classic “tank top or muscle tee and khaki pants” uniform, and nobody was going to notice if those got a little bleach-stained or torn or had to be replaced in the middle of a video. Female Irwins, though—we all had to have our “gimmick.” If we didn’t, we weren’t really trying, and viewers might decide we weren’t strong enough or fast enough or clever enough, let’s go check that other guy, what’s his name, he’s a real journalist. There was no official ruling that said tits and ass were what sold the news, but we knew the score. Humanity had made a lot of changes since the Rising. It hadn’t become a completely new beast.

  The shower turned on as soon as I stepped inside, and the stall door clicked, locking behind me. I’d stay put through a full sterilization cycle, or… actually, there was no “or.” Unless I wanted to take a sledgehammer into the shower, I’d stay put through a full sterilization cycle. Hot water blasted me, just barely this side of scalding. I closed my eyes and turned my face into the spray, enjoying this brief moment of normalcy. It wasn’t going to last. It never did—and indeed, as I finished the thought, the bleach cascaded down, blanketing me, washing away any fomite traces of Kellis-Amberlee that might have somehow been able to find their way onto my skin.

  I’m a natural redhead. Maybe that’s a cliché, but tell it to my genetics, which decided I would look better with too many freckles and hair the color of a good tikka masala. Add regular bleaching and chemical treatments to try to repair my damaged follicles, and I usually look like I spend a lot more time in the sun than would be a good idea for someone with my complexion. Skin cancer isn’t a concern anymore, thankfully. Sunburn still is, and always will be.

  Decontamination showers last a minimum of six minutes, assuming you hit all your marks and rinse all your creams and soaps away with the maximum of efficiency. I’ve been doing this long enough that I have it down to a science, and by the time the shower beeped for the first exit window, I was long past clean and sliding down the hill toward polished. I hit the button to kill the cycle. The door unlatched and swung open, releasing billows of steam into the bathroom and highlighting one of the issues with my having been herded into decon like a zombie being steered into the killing chute: I had no towel, and I certainly had no clean clothes.

  As if on cue, there was a knock at the bathroom door. “You decent?” called Audrey.

  “You said I was pretty damn good last night,” I called back. “If I’ve been downgraded to ‘decent,’ we’re going to have words.”

  She opened the bathroom door and let herself in, holding an armload of fabric toward me. There was a towel on the top of the pile. I grabbed it and started drying my face and hair as quickly as I could manage. Audrey watched me, something between tolerance and trepidation in her expression. It was an odd combination, especially for her. I slowed in my drying and lowered the towel, eyeing her warily.

  “What?”

  “Don’t freak out, all right? We needed to get you into decontamination as fast as possible because of our guests—they might have decided to leave, or they might have decided to shoot you, and either way would have been bad—but I’m up here to get you ready to come down, and to tell you not to freak out.”

  “If I’m getting deported…”

  “If you were getting deported, I would have met you in the garage, and we’d already be fifty miles from here. Screw decontamination.” Audrey’s expression hardened for a moment, turning icy cold. Then she shook her head, and the moment passed. Thankfully. She was scary when she got like that. “I just need you to promise not to freak out, all right?”

  “All right. I won’t freak out.” I resumed drying. “This is definitely weird, however. On the scale of one to ‘alligators in the basement,’ I feel like we’re trending closer to ‘alligators’ than anything else.”

  “Not a bad choice of words,” said Audrey. She took a deep breath. “Does the name ‘Susan Kilburn’ mean anything to you?”

  “Sounds like the girl I dated when I was in sixth form, but her name was Karen, and I doubt she’d come to America just to throw our lives into a tizzy,” I said.

  “She’s the governor of Oregon,” said Audrey.

  “All right, that works as well,” I said. I dropped my towel, taking the panties from the pile she was holding. She’d arranged everything in the order in which it was to be used, which was remarkably clever; I usually just carried an armload of jumbled fabric in, dumped it on the sink, and picked out what I needed.

  The panties matched the bra that had been sitting beneath them. I felt the first prickle of excitement. If this was something that needed me properly put together all the way down to the skin, then this was something big.

  “She’s one of the three primary presidential candidates being put forth by the Democrats this year,” said Audrey. “It’s her, Governor Frances Blackburn out of Maine, and Senator Eliot York out of Illinois. No one’s sure who the front-runner is going to be, but Governor Kilburn is definitely in the running.”

  “All right,” I repeated agreeably, and pulled my bra on. I was still damp; the fabric stuck to the skin, forcing me to spend more time arranging myself than usual. Maybe that’s why I missed the frustrated look on Audrey’s face, and the way her smile had frozen, becoming more of a rictus.

  “Ash,” she said.

  I kept fighting with my bra.

  “Aislinn,” she said.

  I looked up. “Yeah?”

  “Governor Susan Kilburn, one of the Democratic candidates for President of the United States of America, is sitting in our kitchen, enjoying Mat’s attempts at small talk, while Ben tries not to hyperventilate,” said Audrey patiently. “Now, I recognize that murdering you widows Ben and leaves me without a girlfriend, but if you don’t get your clothes on and get downstairs in the next five minutes, I’m going to consider it. Are we on the same page now?”

  I stared at her for a beat. Then I grabbed my sundress, abstractly pleased to see that she’d fished the patriotic one from the back of my closet—white fabric, red and blue stars. I’d worn it to my citizenship ceremony, and then on my first zombie hunt as a genuine American Irwin. The bleach damage was
minimal, and as long as no one was staring at my ass, they probably wouldn’t notice.

  “Oh, good,” said Audrey. “You’re finally moving.”

  “Do I need shoes?” I demanded. “I don’t think I have time to blow-dry my hair, can I go downstairs with wet hair and no shoes? Is there some sort of deportation offense in appearing in front of a presidential candidate with no shoes?”

  “I don’t think anyone’s going to be looking at your feet,” said Audrey. She picked up my discarded towel and hung it on the wall to dry while I was still struggling into my sundress. Then she folded her arms, giving me a critical up-and-down look. “You’ll do. You look like you’ve just come out of the field, but under the circumstances, that can only be a good thing. Now come on.”

  She turned to open the bathroom door. I leaned past her, using my longer arms to push it shut again before she could get out into the hall.

  “Audrey, breathe,” I said. “How serious is this?”

  She looked at me for a moment. Then she leaned up, kissed me, and smiled. “This could change everything,” she said. “Now come on. Let me out, and let’s go meet the woman who’s going to make us famous.”

  I took my hand off the door. Audrey slipped out into the hall and I followed her, feeling a little awkward padding down the stairs in my bare feet.

  The men who’d met me at the garage door were standing in the kitchen doorway when we arrived. Each of them was holding a blood testing unit. I stared.

  “Is this a joke?” I asked.

  “No, ma’am,” said one of the men. He held his blood testing unit out toward me. The other offered his to Audrey. “You must have a clean bill of health before we can allow you to enter.”

  “I took a blood test to get into the house.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I just finished a full decontamination shower. I smell like bleach.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “There is no possible way I’ve been exposed to live-state Kellis-Amberlee between the bathroom and here.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Through it all, the man continued patiently offering me his blood testing unit.

  Audrey already had her thumb on the unit that was intended for her. She looked my way and rolled her eyes. “Just do it, Ash. This is going to take forever if you try to argue with them. These are not men who have a ‘negotiation’ button.”

  “Bloody Americans,” I muttered, and pressed my thumb down on the testing pad.

  I’ll give them this much: Their technology was much more advanced than ours. I didn’t feel the needle go in, just the soft chill of the cleansing foam hitting my skin and preventing even that hairline prick from bleeding. The lights on the top of the test flashed between red and green for several seconds before settling on green, marking me as uninfected. That was a lie—we’re all infected—but I wasn’t an immediate danger, and that was essentially the same thing.

  Audrey had already passed her own blood test by the time I was cleared, and was waiting for me, twisting a lock of her hair anxiously around her finger. She dropped her hand when the men stepped aside, and smiled at me before stepping into the kitchen. I followed. I had followed her this far; I really had no excuse to turn and run away now.

  Ben and Mat were sitting at the kitchen table with a stranger. She looked to be in her late thirties, although the truth of that was anyone’s guess: With enough money, aging can become practically optional, at least on the outside. Her skin was smooth and unwrinkled, and her hair was a perfect shade of chestnut brown that could only have come out of a bottle; otherwise, the bleach damage would have been visible. She had a strong jaw and a mouth that looked designed for smiling, which was probably all that had saved her from a nose job when her political handlers got hold of her. Her nose was strong and slightly squared off at the end, and it balanced her face completely.

  Her clothes were more of a surprise than her carefully considered physicality: When I’d thought about meeting a prominent U.S. politician—which, to be honest, I hadn’t done very often—I had never considered them showing up in my kitchen in a Willamette University sweatshirt and comfortable, broken-in jeans.

  She stood when I entered the kitchen, and reached for me, offering her hand. “You must be Aislinn North,” she said. “We’ve been waiting for you. I’m sorry not to have called ahead. I’m Susan Kilburn.”

  “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” I replied, my manners kicking in despite everything. Her handshake was firm without being overbearing. I wondered how many hours she’d spent practicing that before settling on the right amount of pressure to apply.

  Susan—Governor Kilburn—it was so hard to know what to call her. Yes, she was trying to become the next President of the United States, but right now she was standing in my kitchen looking like she was going to start pumping Mat for makeup tips. As for the rest of my team, they weren’t helping. Audrey was behind me, where I couldn’t see her face. Mat looked starstruck, like they couldn’t believe they were breathing the same air as a woman who might one day hold the highest office in the country. And Ben had just plain shut down, reverting to the perfectly neutral expression he used when he was trying to process what was going on around him. No help there.

  Thankfully, she seemed to understand how strange this situation really was. She smiled, sat, and said, “It’s no concern. If I’d called ahead, I’m sure you wouldn’t have been out in the field. But since your fieldwork is what makes you so appealing to me, I wouldn’t have wanted to interfere with your report. That goes for all of you. I’m not here to get in the way of what you do. If anything, my visit is intended to be about the opposite.”

  “Which is why you said you wanted to wait until everyone was home before you told us what was going on. Not that we don’t appreciate your visit—we just know better than to think this is a social call,” said Ben. “There’s pressing the flesh, and then there’s trying to individually visit every voter in the country. One of them works, the other gets you killed.”

  “Yes, but if the other got me elected, I’d consider it anyway,” said Governor Kilburn, and laughed.

  “We’re all here now,” said Audrey. There was a thin edge to her voice that might have been inaudible to anyone but me. She was excited, and trying to hide it. “Do you want to let us know why you dropped by?”

  “Of course.” Governor Kilburn looked around the table, her expression smoothing out until it had become regal, political—the face of a President in waiting, a woman who was poised to become a commander in chief. “I’m assuming you’ve all heard about the blogger contingent attached to the Ryman campaign over on the Republican side of the fence.”

  “We put in an application, ma’am,” said Ben. Governor Kilburn raised an eyebrow. He shrugged, unrepentant. “Politics are one thing; work is another. My family has always voted Democrat, but if following a Republican around the country for a year would change my status in the blogging world, I’d do it.”

  “I’d eat live eels,” said Mat, not to be outdone. Audrey and I turned to blink at them. They grinned briefly.

  “There are no live eels in my offer, I’m afraid,” said Governor Kilburn, pulling things back on track. “I’m here because you put in that application, although I wasn’t sure you’d admit its existence to me. I have access to certain data from the Ryman office—”

  “Did you hack the competition?” asked Mat, sounding enthralled.

  “Peter is an old friend of mine,” said Governor Kilburn. “We announced our intention to run on the same day. That was a fun phone call. After he’d chosen his team, he thought I might want to follow suit, and since his people had already done all the background checks and baseline vetting, he didn’t see a problem with giving me the data.”

  “Peter—you mean Senator Ryman?” I asked. “You’re on a first-name basis with the competition?”

  “We’re not competition yet,” she said, with a quick, feral grin. “He has to take his team’s nomination, and I have to take min
e. Until we reach that point, we’ll do whatever we need to do in order to support each other, because it’s always better the devil you know in a situation like this one. Right now, we’re just two people gunning for the same job. Maybe one of us will get it, and the other will get a cushy cabinet position for the next four years. Maybe neither of us will get it, and we’ll wind up drowning our sorrows in his wife’s excellent sangria while we plan for our next shot. Either way, we’re still friends until we no longer have that luxury.”

  “He gave you his data,” said Ben. “You mean he gave you all the applications he’d received for his campaign bloggers.”

  “Yes, and the guidelines he’d used to vet them,” said Governor Kilburn. “He was explicitly looking for package deals, groups that already knew how to work together and represented all the major areas of Internet journalism.”

  “A Newsie, an Irwin, and a Fictional, in other words,” said Audrey.

  Governor Kilburn nodded. “Within the loose definitions you set for yourselves, exactly. The team that was his second pick didn’t have a true Fictional; they had someone who generates memes at a rate that I would think was exaggerated if I hadn’t seen the man’s work myself. How anyone can caption that many cat pictures every day, I will never know.”

  “Hey, Jonny does good stuff,” said Mat.

  I snorted.

  “Wait—the folks over at Brag Bag came in second?” Ben frowned. “Their Factual News Division has been fined several times for inaccuracy in guaranteed reporting. If he had people vetting the applicants, they should never have made the top ten.”

  “Well, there were fewer ‘complete’ teams applying than Peter would have liked; fewer than twenty percent of the applicants actually covered all three branches of the news and had the necessary licenses and had the necessary firearms training, and had no arrests or convictions that would interfere with their being able to serve the potential future President of the United States,” said Governor Kilburn. She had a light, conversational way of putting information down in front of you, like she was just reminding us of things we already knew. I could see it serving her well on the campaign trail. I could also see it getting damn annoying in extremely short order. “Several promising candidates were knocked out due to felony convictions in their immediate families. Bloggers aren’t required to have security clearance, but we have to know that no one close to them could present a problem.”