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by Mira Grant

  We got moving.

  The walk across the blacktop felt like being marched to the gallows. John led the pack, and the rest of the security staffers fanned out around him, forming a bubble around me and Audrey. They stayed at least six feet away at all times, sometimes as far as eight or nine. If I moved toward them, they stepped away, maintaining their distance. I considered toying with their formation, but dismissed the idea as a bad one. I didn’t need to antagonize a bunch of heavily armed, highly strung people who had just had a firsthand demonstration of how dangerous their job was actually going to be.

  Besides, if I was being honest with myself, they weren’t the only ones who were nervous. I had just come terrifyingly close to winding up on the Wall. The adrenaline had had more than enough time to leave my system while I was sleeping off the sedatives, but that hadn’t done anything for my lingering, absolute denial. Now, with time moving around me again, the denial was wearing off. I could have died. I had gone into a bad situation without sufficient preparation, and I could very easily have died.

  The Wall is the great virtual monument where the last moments of everyone who has died due to Kellis-Amberlee are preserved. Facebook status updates, random tweets, blog posts, even snippets of home video, they all go up there, building this constantly shifting landscape of heartache and longing and loss. Anyone who chooses to become an Irwin accepts that one day, their face will appear in the rolls of the dead, a hyperlink beneath it summarizing their life and everything that it contained. But that doesn’t mean it’s something that most of us aspire to. The suicidal and the foolish don’t last long in our community. They get their fifteen seconds of fame, they get their lasting place on the Wall, and the rest of us move on.

  I started to shiver. Audrey put a reassuring hand on my arm, stabilizing me and lending me what strength she could. I cast her a thankful look. She smiled. That was all I needed in the world.

  John stepped aside when we reached the building where the governor and her people—and presumably, the rest of our people—were waiting. “Ladies first,” he said. He somehow managed to make the clichéd old phrase sound ironic, like it was the last thing he wanted to be saying. I decided to forgive him.

  “Aren’t you a gentleman,” I said, and stepped forward to press my palm against the testing panel.

  Bad luck: This one included voice recognition. A snippet of nursery rhyme appeared on the screen. I cast John an alarmed look before I read, “Wee Willie Winkie ran through the town, upstairs and downstairs, in his nightgown.”

  As I’d expected, a red light began flashing above the row that was verifying my blood.

  “My accent’s throwing it off,” I said desperately, resisting the urge to rip my hand away. That could result in a false positive, which would, in turn, make it legal for any of the surrounding men to shoot me in the head. “It thinks I’m slurring. Do you have an override for this thing?”

  “Security clearance John Englund, personal staff of Governor Kilburn, identification number four two seven zero two, alpha gamma zeta,” said John, stepping up next to me and speaking in a slow, clear voice. “The subject currently undergoing analysis is an immigrant from the Republic of Ireland. She is not able to pass the voice verification due to accent, not due to infection.”

  The red light continued to burn above my blood testing strip. Audrey was already done. She stepped back, holding her pin-stuck hand to her chest and watching with wide, solemn eyes. She knew as well as I did how dangerous voice recognition systems were for me. This could be a very big problem.

  Then the light blinked out. The flashing lights of the blood analysis settled on green. I jerked my hand away like I’d been burnt.

  “Sorry about that, Mrs. North,” said John, stepping into position at the testing panel I had so recently vacated. He slapped his own hand down. “We’ve already adjusted all the governor’s personal testing systems to account for your accent. In the case of systems at facilities where she’s speaking or making public appearances, we’ll either suspend voice analysis or make sure you’re traveling with someone who has the clearance to deactivate it for you specifically.”

  “Much appreciated,” I said. We both knew I’d be having a minder for any event that required us to use a voice analysis system: They simply couldn’t afford to make places less secure during a major political campaign. But at least they were acknowledging that this was a problem, and taking some basic steps to fix it. That was more than some would have done.

  The lights flashed green. John nodded to his team, indicating that they should begin their own tests once we were gone. Then he opened the now-unlocked door and motioned us inside, to where the next phase of our already complicated day was waiting.

  Li Jiang was a statue in her stillness, carved from the bones of the earth. It would have taken better than human vision to see the way that she was trembling, so slight and subtle was it, so tied to the marrow of her bones. The slim redheaded woman who sat on Li Jiang’s bed, watching her, had no such supernatural gifts. Grace had paid for her passage to America by sitting in a pirate ship’s smoke-filled hold, repairing damaged uniforms worn by mercenary men. Her eyesight would never recover from that ordeal.

  But she didn’t need to see Li Jiang to know that her lover was hurting. The pain was written in every move the other woman made, every turn of her head and every flick of her fingers. That was why Li had gone so still. She was trying to conceal how much she was hurting, and as was inevitable, she was failing in her quest.

  “I just don’t understand why it always has to be you,” said Grace, her sweet brogue sliding through the room and across Li Jiang’s skin like a caress. “Aren’t there other detectives in this God-forsaken city? Can’t someone else take the bullet for a change, and leave you here with me, not broken and bleeding for the sake of someone else’s war?”

  “But that’s the trouble, Grace,” said Li Jiang. She still didn’t move. She felt as if she might never move again, as if stillness had become her fate. If so, she welcomed it. Still things must eventually move past pain. “It’s never someone else’s war. As soon as the place where you stand becomes part of the battlefield, the war belongs to you. I am only doing what I promised you the day that we met. I’m protecting what matters most to me. I’m protecting my home, and all the love that it contains.”

  Grace began, silently, to weep.

  —From Blood on the Hanging Tree, originally published in Wen the Hurly Burly’s Done, the blog of Audrey Liqiu Wen, February 5, 2040

  Seven

  The room contained a large oval table, the sort used for committee meetings and public interest groups the world over. This one was probably used most often to discuss the types of rose that would be planted in the now-ravaged test gardens: serious horticultural discussions of thorn and leaf and blossom quality. Those people were going to be pissed when they heard what had happened.

  In the present, the table was occupied by the governor, her campaign manager, her head of security, and six other people from the campaign, only a few of whom I recognized, and those only vaguely. Ben and Mat were already there, sitting to flank two empty chairs, which were no doubt intended for me and Audrey. Everyone turned to look at us when we entered the room.

  I considered smiling brightly and saying something pithy. Further consideration showed that I didn’t have the energy. “Sorry for the delay, all,” I said, walking over and dropping myself unceremoniously into the seat next to Ben. Audrey followed, sitting down between me and Mat. We were a united front once more. That made me feel a little better—enough to flash a cocky grin as I said, “Turns out your med staff picked some pretty high-grade sedatives for your security team. Go team.”

  “We’re glad you and Miss Wen were able to join us, Mrs. North,” said Governor Kilburn. She sounded stiffer than I was accustomed to. I wondered if that was what fear sounded like in the good governor. “I’m also glad you weren’t hurt.”

  “I’m not,” said Chuck. The stocky little man gla
red at me, folding his arms across his barrel of a chest. Chuck looked like the sort of man who wrestled bears for fun. In reality, he was a social engineer and image manager who did cross-stitch to relax and owned five bearded dragons, which had the run of any room he stayed in. Walking in to talk to the campaign manager and finding him completely covered in lizards was definitely an experience. “What the hell possessed you to go haring off after danger without alerting someone? Is this the kind of behavior we can expect from you for this entire campaign? Because it’s not too late for you to be replaced, you know. There were thousands of bloggers panting for your job. I’m sure most of them would be thrilled to operate under a more restrictive contract.”

  “Chuck, that’s enough,” said Governor Kilburn.

  I raised my eyebrows and turned to Ben. “Think he’s been sitting on that one for a while?”

  “We’ve been hearing variations on the theme since we sat down,” said Ben, chasing his words with a quick flash of teeth. “Good to see you. We didn’t get your mag back, but Mat pulled all the footage before the cleaning crew destroyed the data storage unit. You’ve got some good material.” We had to manually switch to cloud storage for our raw recordings when we were on the road, weighing the risk of losing something material against the risk of getting hacked. Apparently, I had made the wrong call this morning.

  “Bully for us,” I said. “It’s always nice when the stupid shit I do pays to replace the good stuff I inevitably break.” I settled in my seat, assuming as casual a pose as I could manage, and turned my attention back to Chuck. “Governor Kilburn was speaking. All the security staffers I could see were busy making sure no one tried to pick her off while she was explaining her grand vision for the nation. You were totally out of the picture. Who would you have wanted me to tell? More importantly—and dig way down for the answer to this one, really think before you give your answer—what would you have done if I’d said something? Would you have given me permission to investigate? Would you have summoned some goons to watch my back? Or would you have told me I was borrowing trouble out of boredom, and ordered me back to my chair, where I would have had a front-row seat for the zombies boiling out of the roses and chowing down on a presidential candidate? Because I don’t think I need to tell you which outcome I would be betting on here.”

  “She’s right,” said Governor Kilburn wearily. “Chuck, it’s time to stand down, because you’re not going to win this one.”

  Chuck looked incensed. “I don’t think you understand what this little muckraker did today! She—”

  “Discovered an active outbreak and alerted us to its presence before anyone could be hurt,” said Governor Kilburn. “She’s being hailed as the hero of the hour, and not just by her own people. Do you have any idea what would have happened if those zombies had reached the podium before we heard the gunshots?”

  “You could have died,” said Chuck, sounding wounded.

  Governor Kilburn stared at him like he’d just grown another head. “I could have died?” she said. “I point out the bullet we just dodged, and that’s all you can seize on, that I could have died? There were over fifty people there! There were children there, for God’s sake! My death would have been the smallest part of the tragedy—and honestly, it would have mattered in the most part because I would have gotten the largest headline.”

  “And because this was an assassination attempt,” said Ben. Everyone turned their attention on him. He quailed slightly, adding a belated “Ma’am.”

  “How do you figure that?” asked Amber. She was leaning against the wall, seemingly filing her nails. I say “seemingly” because although the file had been moving the whole time I’d been in the room, I hadn’t seen it make contact with her nails once. It was a covering motion, something to keep people from looking at her too closely. I had a few similar screen saver routines of my own. I respected the nail thing, though. The file could be used as a weapon if things got rough, and that was always useful.

  On the surface, her behavior looked unprofessional, and maybe it was: Maybe that was the point. Of all Governor Kilburn’s people, Amber seemed to have the best situational awareness, and was the first to read any given room. If people underestimated her because she looked like she wasn’t interested in her job, well, that just put her in a better position to react when the need arose.

  “As Ash pointed out, there were zombies buried in the garden beds,” said Ben. “What she didn’t know—what she couldn’t have known, because she was a little busy fighting for her life when she was out there—was that the roses had been replanted after the dead were buried. Someone sedated a bunch of zombies, dug up the rose garden, planted the zombies, and then put the roses on top of them as cover.”

  “Which makes it an assassination attempt exactly how?” demanded Chuck.

  Audrey looked at him. “How is it you’re a campaign manager again?” she asked. “You’re not smart, you’re not clever, and you’re clearly not following the conversation. The governor posted her schedule weeks ago. We’ve been planning for this launch event since we were hired on to follow the campaign. We have weeks of interviews, posts, and profiles prepared to go up, all using the rose garden as a source of imagery and metaphor. This was supposed to prove that she was prepared to grow her constituency and grow her influence, all while using a pleasing pre-Rising symbol wrapped up with modern security ideals. Instead, it’s become another icon for insecurity. This undermines all our symbolism, which means it absolutely undermines yours.”

  “That doesn’t make it an assassination attempt,” said Chuck. “It could just be someone trying to destroy our campaign plans.” He sounded unsettled. Audrey often took people that way when she started talking about symbolism and iconography—usually because she was right.

  As a Fictional, it was Audrey’s job to make the real world less interesting than the fake one, which was no small task, since the real world had zombies, and those were pretty damn compelling, especially when they were trying to chew your face off. She used a thousand literary tricks to manipulate her readers. Some of those tricks worked in the field, too. She was the one who’d suggested that if I was going to wear sundresses all the time, I use fabric that spoke, however subliminally, to my subject matter and the mood I was trying to convey. Even a California winter could become believable if I was running around draped in silver snowflakes.

  Roses were hardy, beautiful, and prized in the post-Rising America. The governor had been planning to tie her image to them, using them as a symbol of fiercely dangerous femininity. It had been a good idea, and it might even have worked, if not for the dead bodies shambling all over her garden.

  “See, that’s the thing about zombies,” I said. “They don’t care if you’re campaigning for something, and they don’t care if you’ll be a better tool alive but humiliated. They care about sinking their teeth into your throat and tearing until all that delicious blood comes out. One zombie might have been an attempt to undermine the campaign’s symbolism. This many is an assassination.”

  “An assassination with asshole roots,” said Mat suddenly. We all turned to look at them. They had been fiddling with their tablet this whole time, remaining quiet while the rest of us chased the conversation down rabbit holes. Now they looked up, blinking at the sudden quiet.

  “I like your makeup,” I said. Mat had clearly had time to freshen up since the garden, and was now wearing eye shadow in a lovely spectrum of pinks and reds. All rose colors. I wondered whether this was their way of working through the trauma.

  Mat smiled quickly. “Thanks,” they said. “Anyway, I’ve been checking the victims—the fresher ones—against local missing persons files, and I have five hits. They’re all from the assisted living facility down the road. People with mental or medical problems that required them to live under extra security.”

  I blinked. “Wait. Five people disappeared from one facility and no one said anything?”

  “Most of those homes are so overloaded that you co
uld make off with twenty and no one would say anything after the proper reports were filed,” said Mat. “The duty nurses were upset, and they’re the ones who called it in. Everyone else just kept up with business as usual.”

  “Are there any other homes like that near here?” asked Ben.

  “No, not that I can find,” said Mat.

  A sudden terrible thought struck me. I looked toward Audrey, and saw from her face that she had thought of something similar. Dry-mouthed, I said, “Is there a home around here for queer youth?”

  “The Rainbow Brigade has a halfway house downtown,” said Mat automatically. Their eyes went wide as they shot me a horrified look. “You don’t think…?”

  “There were more than five zombies in that garden,” I said. “If you’re going for a population you can winnow without a lot of people raising the alarm, that’s one of the big ones. Sadly.”

  “Still,” said Audrey.

  Mat began to type. I waited, lips pressed into a hard line, to hear what would come next.

  Before the Rising, one in four queer teens wound up homeless when they came out to their parents. Just when they needed family love and support the most, they lost it completely. They used to live on the street, gathering in loose tribes, doing whatever it took to stay alive. Then Kellis-Amberlee came along, and homelessness—which had never been safe, for anyone—became the focus of a lot more public attention. Hostels and halfway houses opened all over the world. Mental health care became more accessible, and less stigmatized. I guess when zombies ate most of the homeless population, people finally realized they should start looking after what’s left, even if it was just to cut down on the number of potential future victims who might get infected and come after them next.

  But that didn’t stop teenagers from coming out to their parents, and it didn’t stop parents from kicking their kids out. It just meant that a new set of safety nets had to be created, before those kids fell off the ends of the world.