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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 mine. 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.”

“Where did we rank?” I asked. It was a bald, borderline rude question. Someone needed to ask it, and the nice thing about being the team Irwin was that “someone” was almost always going to be me.

“You would have come in second, but you were disqualified,” said Governor Kilburn.

“Why?” demanded Audrey. “We have no arrests, no convictions, no outstanding warrants. Half of us don't even have
families
.”

“At the time the application was filled out, Mrs. North's naturalization was under a year old. In the eyes of the Secret Service, she was still a foreign national.”

My knees felt suddenly weak. I didn't look at Ben. I
couldn't
look at Ben. Our relationship had cost him as much as it had given me. He'd managed to find a few girlfriends who were fine with the fact that he was married to another woman, but none who were willing to keep going out after he made it clear that they'd be dating in secret, or that she would be publicly dating me as well. He'd had uncounted fights with his mother about being married to me, and what it was going to mean for his chances of having grandchildren. If I had cost him the gig of a lifetime, just by existing, I didn't know how I was going to live with myself.

“I read the application requirements myself,” said Ben stiffly. “They indicated that they were open to all journalists, regardless of nationality, who were living legally in the United States, or who did the majority of their reporting for U.S. audiences. I know several teams with members in Mexico or Canada who also applied.”

“Their applications were accepted and looked at the same way all the others were,” said Governor Kilburn. “Being a foreign national wasn't an automatic disqualification. It was just… a black mark, of a sort, that had to be outweighed by everything else in order to go away. In Mrs. North's case, her prior citizenship combined with her involuntary committal was too much for Peter to risk. He's a conservative man in many ways. He had the opportunity to work with an all-American team—how do you top a brother-sister pair and one of the last evacuees from Alaska? The people he picked were the ones he saw as the best possible assets.”

“This is a very circuitous way of telling us why you're here, ma'am,” said Ben. His voice was even stiffer now. He knew me well enough to guess what I was thinking, and from the way he kept glancing in my direction, he didn't like it one little bit.

He'd always been my greatest cheering section. That was just the sort of friend he was.

“Not really,” said Governor Kilburn. “Mrs. North is an American citizen now. The things for which she was committed are not crimes in this country; if anything, they're marks in her favor. She fled here because she wanted the right to live her life as she saw fit, and she lived within the system until we accepted her. Mr. Ross, you live in the home of your grandparents, and you survived the Rising under the care of a single mother who had lived through one of the most racially and economically troubled decades our nation had ever known. Miss Wen graduated at the top of her class from Yale before choosing to write crime fiction for a living. And, ah…” She stumbled.

There was only one member of the team left. I decided to take pity on her. “Just ‘Mat' is usually fine, right, Mat?”

“Yup,” agreed Mat. “Sometimes I think about going to medical school, just to get a gender-neutral salutation.”

“I find that ‘Governor' also works for that problem,” said Governor Kilburn.

Mat laughed. “Well, once you're in charge of the country, maybe I'll run for your job.”

“Fashion bloggers are common. Fashion bloggers who come with an intact group that touches all three branches of the news are exceedingly rare. Mat's presence on this team gives you an edge I don't think Peter took into account. Part of being conservative is a rather rigid approach to gender roles in society.” Governor Kilburn shook her head. “He would never have seen a makeup artist as an advantage against the opposition.”

“Clearly he is a man who has never beheld the raw cosmic power of really good eyeliner,” said Mat primly. They sounded utterly offended. “I take it back. I didn't want to work for him anyway. No one who can't see the vital importance of what I do deserves to have me fighting for them.”

“Which is why I want you all to be working for me,” said Governor Kilburn.

You could have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed, although I wasn't sure why, even as I held my breath along with everyone else. There was no other good reason for her to be here, in our kitchen, talking to us. She
had
to be here to offer us a job. And yet hearing it, actually
hearing
it leave her mouth, was like the whole world tilting on its side and laughing at us. This couldn't be happening. This was the sort of wish-granted, lottery-won moment that happened to other people, people like the Masons, people who lived enchanted lives. It didn't happen to people like
us
.

Audrey recovered first, thank God. “What are your terms?” she asked. She wasn't technically in charge—inasmuch as our collective had a “boss,” it was Ben, who was generally responsible for finding us jobs and figuring out ways to leverage our collective skills into better pay and wider exposure. At the moment, though, Ben was overwhelmed with too many things in too little time, and so she was stepping in, covering for him. That was what she did. That was what we all always did for one another. It was our job, our real job, the one that everything else was built around.

Governor Kilburn swung her attention around to Audrey. The friendly, conversational pose was gone, replaced by pure business. I liked her better this way. It felt more like I was seeing a real person, and less like I was seeing a persona designed by focus groups and market needs. “You follow my campaign. Starting in two days, when I launch my campaign, and staying with me until my race ends in either the White House or defeat. I sign contracts with your team and with each of you individually. If one of you elects to leave before the contract term is up, it is the responsibility of the team to replace you with someone who covers a similar area of the news inside of forty-eight hours. If they fail, I am allowed to hire your replacement myself. You get access to the inner workings of my cabinet, and to any nonclassified briefing. You—”

“All briefings,” said Ben abruptly.

Governor Kilburn stopped. “I beg your pardon?”

“We get access to all briefings. We won't post things you tell us are vital to national security, but we need to know the whole picture, even if we're only reporting on parts of it. If you want us to do this, you need to let us do it.” Ben leaned forward. He was still stiff, but he was coming out of his shock, and coming quickly up to speed on the situation.

That was the trick to dealing with Ben. Sometimes he took a while to process things, but it wasn't because he was slow. More the opposite. He was considering all the angles, looking at all the ways a thing could go. By the time he was ready to move, he was going in for the kill. It would have made him a terrible Irwin. He would have been a smear on the pavement before the end of his first urban expedition. But it made him a
fabulous
Newsie, and there was no one I was happier to have at my back. No one.

“We'll sign a single group contract, and handle dispersion of rights and funds within ourselves. No one's going to find themselves caught between two masters,” he continued. “I'm assuming, since you have access to Ryman's data and you've clearly decided that we're the team for you, that you've already done a deep background check. We're going to get some scrutiny when you announce us as your blog team. I do not want our backgrounds being used to score political points. We aren't here to prove how open-minded or progressive you are. We're here to do a job. We'll do it very well, if you let us. We'll walk if you don't.”