Tate stayed where he was, expression blank. Before I moved toward the stage exit, still filming, I paused long enough to get a reaction shot of a man whose dreams had just been dashed. “Go, Pete, go,” I murmured, unable to keep from smiling. He had the nomination. That was our man out there on that stage, accepting the nomination.
We were going on the road.
My ear cuff beeped three times, signaling an emergency transmission. I tapped it, stepping away from the opening. “Shaun, what did you—”
Buffy’s voice cut me off. It was all business, and so cold I almost didn’t recognize it at first. “Georgia, there’s an outbreak at the farm.”
I froze. “What farm?”
“The Ryman farm. It’s on all the feeds, it’s everywhere. They think one of the horses went into spontaneous conversion. No one knows why, and they’re still digging in the ashes and setting the perimeter. No one knows where the… where the—oh, God, Georgia, the girls were in there when the alarms went off, and no one knows—”
Slowly, as if in a dream, I turned back toward the opening. Buffy was talking, but her words didn’t matter anymore. Senator Ryman had formally accepted the nomination and was standing there grinning, his beautiful wife holding his arm, waving to the crowd that chose him to bear their banner toward the highest office in the country. They looked like the happiest people in the world. People who had never known what a real tragedy was. God help them, they were about to learn.
“—you there? Mahir’s trying to control the forums, but he needs help, and we need you to find the valid news feed into all this, we—”
“Tell Mahir to contact Casey at Media Breakdown and arrange a fact-only feed-through of the situation at the farm; tell him we’ll trade an early release on my next candidate interview,” I said, tonelessly. “Wake Alaric, get him backing Mahir until Rick finishes on the floor, then throw him in there, too. He wanted to join the party? Well, here’s his invitation.”
“What are you going to do?”
Emily Ryman was laughing, hands clasped together. She had no idea.
Grimly, I said, “I’m going to stay here and report the news.”
BOOK III
Index Case Studies
The difference between the truth and a lie is that both of them can hurt, but only one will take the time to heal you afterward.
We live in a world of our own creation. We’ve made our bed, ladies and gentlemen, whether we intended to or not. Now, we get the honor of lying down in it.
I’ve done a lot of difficult things over the course of my journalistic career. Few, in the end, were pretty; most of the supposed “glamour” of reporting the news is reserved for the people who sit behind desks and look good while they tell you about the latest tragedy to rock the world. It’s different in the field, and even after doing this for years, I don’t think I grasped how different it was. Not until I looked into the faces of presidential candidate Peter Ryman and his wife and informed them that the body of their eldest daughter had just been cremated by federal troops outside their family ranch in Parrish, Wisconsin.
You’ve heard about Rebecca Ryman by now. Eighteen years old, scheduled to graduate high school in less than three months, ranked fifth in her class, and already accepted at Brown University, where she was planning to study law and follow in her father’s footsteps. She’d been riding since she was old enough to walk; that’s how she was able to bridle that postamplification horse and get her baby sisters off the grounds. She was a real American hero—at least, that’s what all the papers and news sites say. Even mine.
If you’ll allow a reporter her brief moment of sentiment, I’d like to tell you about the Rebecca that I met, if only for a moment, in the words and the faces of her parents.
Rebecca Ryman was a teenage girl. She was petulant. She was sulky. She hated being asked to sit for her sisters on a Friday night, especially when there was a new Byron Bloom movie opening. She liked to read trashy romances and eat ice cream straight from the container, and nothing made her happier than working with the horses. She stayed home from the Republican National Convention partially to get ready for college and partially to be with the horses. Because of that decision, she died, and her sisters lived. She couldn’t save her grandparents or the men who worked the ranch, but she saved her sisters, and in the end, what more could anyone have asked of her?
I told her parents she was dead. That, if nothing else, qualifies me to say this:
Rebecca, you will be deeply missed.
Thirteen
The funeral services for Rebecca Ryman and her grandparents were held a week after the convention at the family ranch. The delay wasn’t for mourning or to allow family members time to travel; that’s how long it took for regional authorities to downgrade the ranch from a Level 2 hazard zone to a Level 5. It was still illegal to enter unarmed, but now at least nonmilitary personnel could enter unescorted. The area would return to its original Level 7 designation if it could go three years without signs of further contamination. Until then, even the kids would need to carry weapons at all times.
Most public opinion held that it wouldn’t matter how long it took for the hazard rating to drop; no family would choose to stay in a home and a profession—viewed by many as a dangerous, glorified hobby—that claimed the life of one of their children. They said the ranch would be long deserted by the time that happened.
I wish I could say that attitude was confined to the conservative fringe, but it wasn’t. Within six hours of Rebecca’s death, half the children’s safety advocacy groups were clamoring for tighter guidelines and attempting to organize legislation that would make the life led by the Rymans illegal. No more early riding classes or family farms; they wanted it shut down, shut down now, and shut down hard. It wasn’t a surprise to anyone but the Rymans, I think: Peter and Emily never attempted to map out the scenarios leading to the martyrdom of their eldest daughter, and so they’d never considered what a boon her death would be to certain organizations. Americans for the Children was the worst. Its “Remember Rebecca” campaign was entirely legal and entirely sleazy, although its attempts to use pictures of Jeanne and Amber had been quashed by the Rymans’ legal team. It didn’t matter. The images of Rebecca with her horses—and of postamplification horses attempting to disembowel the federal authorities putting them down—had already done their damage.
In the chaos and noise surrounding the outbreak at the ranch, it wasn’t really a surprise that Senator Ryman’s selection of a running mate barely made anyone’s radar, save for the hardcore politicos who couldn’t care less that people were dead… and me. I wasn’t surprised, although I must admit that I was more than slightly disappointed when it was announced that Governor Tate would accompany Senator Ryman on the ballot. It was a good, balanced ticket; it would carry most of the country, and it stood a good chance of putting Senator Ryman in the White House. The tragedy at the ranch had already put him twenty points up on his opponent in the early polls. The Democratic candidate, Governor Frances Blackburn, was a solid politician with an excellent record of service, but she couldn’t compete with a teenage heroine who sacrificed herself to save her sisters. This early in the race, people weren’t voting for the candidate. They were voting for his daughter. And she was winning.