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“Ah! Yes, I saw them, and they're here.” Congresswoman Wagman waved a hand vaguely, indicating what felt like the entire club. “You're all going to join back up for lunch, I promise, but first I need a little one-on-one time with Suzy. It's nice to meet you both. Ricky?”

“I'm on it,” said Richard. He motioned for us to follow him. “Come on. I think I know where we can find your friends.”

“Yay,” I said blithely, falling into step behind him. I couldn't resist stealing one more glance over my shoulder at the congresswoman. She and Amber were already deep in conversation as they walked in the opposite direction, heading for a table surrounded by security agents from both campaigns. Governor Kilburn was in there somewhere, shielded from view by the ranks of the people who were paid to protect her. She didn't need us right now. I still felt funny walking away like this.

“You're a Newsie, right?” asked Ben, looking at Richard. “I've heard of you. You have a reputation for doing good work. Boring, but good.”

“Mmm-hmm,” he said. “It's ‘Rick,' by the way.”

“I didn't think you were a Ricky,” I said.

Rick made a face. “No. Never have been, never going to be. The congresswoman likes to keep things as informal as she can get away with, even when we're alone, so she won't accidentally slip up and reveal her secret plan in the presence of a camera.”

“She has a secret plan?” I asked.

“In the sense that no one ever seems to believe it, yes,” said Rick. “She's talked about it in every interview I've ever read, and a few that her campaign manager had to dig up and transcribe for me. She wants to improve funding for schools, women's health, vocational planning for children—a few dozen good, solid, philanthropic goals that would benefit the people of this country. She's managed a surprising number of her goals on the state level. I say ‘surprising' because if you asked most of the people in local politics, they wouldn't be able to name a single one of her successes.”

“But I bet they could tell you what she was wearing every time something came up to a vote,” I said.

Rick nodded. “Exactly.” We had reached a door labeled
employees only
. He pushed it open, not missing a beat as he led us through. “Wagman is the ultimate Vegas showgirl, only she's not after drunk men's wallets. She's after the whole country. And hell, maybe she's got a chance. Ryman's performing solidly in the polls, but she's been ahead of Tate for most of the campaign, and I think the American people might choose novelty over what they perceive as dignity.”

“Tate's a bit of a tosser, I've always thought,” I said.

“If ‘tosser' means ‘flaming asshole,' then yeah, you're right about that.” The door fed into a break room almost as large as the bar outside. The only thing that really marked it as a private space was absence: the absence of stages, the absence of dancer's poles, the absence of plastic upholstery on the furniture. Instead, there were overstuffed couches and easy chairs scattered around the floor, creating a comfortable, almost homey atmosphere. There was a bar, flanked by two large refrigerators. A young woman in a U.C. Irvine sweatshirt was asleep on one of the couches, seemingly dead to the world. Good for her.

“You learn to roll with Ash's slang,” said Ben. “I think she makes half of it up.”

“I'd believe it,” said Rick. “What's your accent? Australian? Scottish?”

“Irish,” I said. “If that was a serious question, and not you pulling my leg, you need to get out more. It's not an accent you can mistake for much of anything else.”

“Sorry,” said Rick. He didn't sound sorry. He sounded amused. “This is my first major Internet news gig. I was a newspaperman for years, and when I went virtual, I had a hard time finding a place that suited me. So actually
hearing
people isn't such a normal thing where I come from.”

“If you're that new to online journalism, how did you land a position with one of the campaigns?” asked Ben. “We had to apply as a team to have a chance, and the Ryman campaign still passed us up.”

“Not that we can blame them,” I said, drifting toward the bar. I wasn't planning to drink—not this early in the day, and not while we were working—but you could tell a lot about a person by what sort of booze they set aside for their employees. A few labels might unlock the mystery of Kirsten Wagman, or at least give me a place to start. “They had access to the Masons. Who'd take us over them? Someone who'd hit their head recently, maybe, if the concussion was bad enough.”

“That's Shaun and Georgia Mason, out of Berkeley, right?” asked Rick. His tone was too casual, like he already knew the answer, but wanted it verified by an outside source for some reason.

I shot him a sharp look over my shoulder before meeting Ben's eyes and giving a small, tight shake of my head. Ben nodded his understanding. We might not be married in the biblical sense, but we'd been a unit for long enough to have developed some useful shorthand, especially where prying rival journalists were concerned.

“Depends,” I said, slowing my voice until it was virtually a drawl. “Why do you want to know? There's plenty of places you can go for information without extracting it out of someone else's press corps.”

“I just thought that since you were from California—the Bay Area, even—that you might know something about them,” said Rick.

“You think the congresswoman is going to get knocked out before the convention, don't you?” Ben's question was mild, but it had teeth lurking behind the seemingly innocuous façade.

Rick paused before he answered. Then he sighed, and said, “I think she's yoked herself to a gimmick that makes sense on the local level, but is too polarizing at the national level. Some of the things people have said about her—even people who brag about how unbiased and reasonable they are—there's no coming back from that. Wagman knows it, too. She's not willing to concede yet, but I think that's more pride and the hope for a VP nomination than anything else. If Ryman picks her as his running mate, she could wind up in the White House anyway. It's all in which fringe he wants to court. The hard left or the hard right.”

“The Republicans don't really have a hard left,” said Ben.

“Wagman is as close as they get to a hard left, and she'd bring those votes to the table with her,” said Rick. “So there's still a chance. No point in throwing in the towel before she has to. What about your candidate? You think Kilburn has a shot at the big chair?”

“I think it's going to be either her or Blackburn,” said Ben. I climbed behind the bar, letting him talk while I checked the labels. “York has been essentially a nonentity throughout this campaign. I can't remember the last time I heard him mentioned in anything other than a full candidate roll call.”

“Even I know that running a virtual campaign doesn't work unless everyone else is doing the same thing,” said Rick. He paused, and while I could no longer see his face, I could hear the confusion in his silence. “What's your friend doing?”

“Ash is Irish. She has a strong personal relationship with alcohol. Ash? What's your verdict?”

I popped up from behind the bar. “Not top-shelf, but not rotgut, either. Good selection, good investment bottles, obviously a strong sense of ‘you shouldn't be drinking anything I wouldn't be willing to put in my mouth.' I give it a seven out of ten as hospitality bars go. I'd host a party here.”

Rick blinked at me. “Seriously? You were assessing the booze?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Does Congresswoman Wagman own this club?”

“Yes.”

“Is this the employee break room and hence the employee alcohol supply?”

“Yes.”

“Then yes, I was assessing the booze, because the booze is relevant. The booze tells me things.” I hoisted a bottle of bourbon. “This is a thirty-dollar bottle. Not the best thing you can buy for a place like this, but a long way from the worst. This is Christmas-party bourbon. You pour it for your friends and family, for people you give a crap about. This tells me more about what sort of woman Wagman is than any amount of ‘oh she gives money to animal shelters.' This tells me she's
kind
.”

Rick looked dubious. “What if it had been the really fancy stuff? The three-hundred-dollar stuff?”

“That would tell me she didn't stock her own bar, and was either too disconnected from the common man to know that you don't need to pay that much for basic social drinking, or was trying to impress people with how generous she was. Neither of those buys you many points in my book.” I put the bourbon back under the bar before leaning forward, resting my weight on my elbows and smiling at him. “Sometimes the middle of the road is the only decent place to be.”

“You people are very strange,” said Rick.

“You don't know the half of it,” said Ben. “As for the Masons, yes we know them, but we're not friends. We're not even associates. They're…”

“Snobs,” I supplied.

Ben shot me a look, sighed, and said, “They're insular. Neither of them has ever been interested in forming strong outside friendships with other locals. I know they
have
friends, but with a few exceptions, it's always been people who are far enough away that the Masons don't have to worry about being asked to get together and socialize. They've been hiring for their own site since they hooked up with Ryman. I know a lot of Bay Area folks who applied, and only one who was hired. Dave Novakowski, whose big passion is wandering away and nearly getting himself killed in remote locations.”

“Which means he's not so much living in the Bay Area as he is storing his stuff there until the inevitable estate sale,” I said.

Ben snorted, but he didn't contradict me.

Rick nodded, looking thoughtful. “I heard they were working with Georgette Meissonier.”

I gave Ben an exaggeratedly blank look. He smirked and supplied, “Buffy,” before he turned to Rick. “She's their team Fictional. Our friend Audrey fills the same role for us. Do you have a Fictional working with the congresswoman?”

“No. Wagman doesn't need someone to make up stories for her. She can provide the old razzle-dazzle without anyone telling professional lies.”

The role of a good Fictional was a lot more than “telling professional lies,” but I decided not to get into it. Yes, defending Audrey's profession always made me feel like a good girlfriend—and I was bad enough at being a good girlfriend to want any opportunity I could get to be a better one. At the same time, she didn't
need
me to. She made more money than I did, she had better ratings than anyone else with our group except occasionally Mat, and most importantly of all, she had nothing to prove to people like Rick. Him thinking she wasn't an important part of the news media didn't change her job, or impact how good she was at doing it.

“How many people does Wagman have working for her?” asked Ben.

“Six,” said Rick. “We're all from Factual News, which makes things unbalanced sometimes—it gets weird when you have six people trying to come up with new angles on the same story. Between you and me, I think a few of my colleagues have already started hunting for new gigs.”

“But you're going to stick it out until she doesn't get the nomination,” I said.

Rick shrugged. “Someone needs to. Hell, maybe I can get a book out of it. It's definitely one of the more interesting campaigns I've seen since the Rising.”

“And someone tried to kill her, yeah?” I tried to keep my tone light.

Not light enough. Rick stiffened, eyeing me warily before he said, “I don't know what you mean.”

“That's why we're here, isn't it? Our candidate wants to talk to your candidate about the outbreak at her fund-raiser, find out if maybe that accident wasn't as accidental as everyone wants to make it out to be.” I straightened, pressing my hands against the bar. “I mean, it's that, or we coincidentally had attacks on three of the five mobile campaigns within the same week.”

“Now, Ash,” said Ben. “We don't
know
that there wasn't an attack on the York campaign. It's not fair to leave him out of things just because he's a recluse.”

“If there was an attack, no one noticed, including him, so I don't think it counts,” I said. “For it to matter, someone would need to set his house on fire, drive him outside, and put zombies on the lawn. Not exactly subtle.”

“But York isn't doing well in the polls,” said Rick. Ben and I both turned to look at him. He shrugged. “The three highest-performing candidates right now are Ryman, on the Republican side, Wagman, also on the Republican side, and Kilburn, on the Democratic side. If you write Wagman's numbers off as people trolling the government—which sadly, I think is the case, hence my not expecting her to get the nomination—your girl and the Masons' boy are our top candidates. And they were both attacked.”

“I appreciate that you're infantilizing everyone equally,” I muttered.

“What?” asked Rick.

“Nothing,” I said. There was a time and a place for telling people off about their word choices: This was neither. As long as he was willing to talk, I needed to be willing to listen. From the sidelong look Ben shot in my direction, he was feeling the same way. We needed to tread carefully.

“So are you saying Tate and Blackburn are nonentities?” asked Ben. “Tate is polling well. He has strong support among white males age thirty-five to sixty. The pre-Rising generation thinks of him as a visionary.”

“Everyone else thinks of him as a throwback,” said Rick. “He's too reactionary, he's too insular, he wants to build a wall across the Canadian and Mexican borders. A
wall
. As if the damn fences in Texas and Arizona didn't get people killed during the Rising. He's not going to take the nomination, no matter how well he polls. The Republicans want the White House, and they know better than to put him in front of the nation. I'm betting he'll get the VP nod from Ryman. That gets him to a place where he can push some of his legislative choices, without giving him the power to do any real damage.”