and checked his pulse. Then she yelled, “Someone call a vet, please.” The stalwart heart still beat.
Jenna bolted out of the studio, past officers and emergency medical technicians consumed by the crime and all its gruesome tally. She didn’t stop till she found Dafoe lying on his back, eyes open but unseeing. Their emptiness formed a void in Jenna that felt dark and rank and endless.
She dropped to her knees in a puddle of her lover’s blood, and with her hands shaking visibly, she controlled herself long enough to check his pulse. He had a heartbeat, but it wasn’t strong—and the puddle swelled.
Two EMTs ran up.
“He was hit in the back at least once,” Jenna said, moving aside for them.
Now, for the first time, she realized that tears were spilling down her face. She wiped them away, smearing more blood on her cheek. It also dripped to her neck from the bullet that had grazed her head.
Slowly, as she stood, she became aware that news photographers and video camera operators were focusing on her, present like phantoms, silent and surreal.
Jenna never could have known during these grief-filled moments that the photos of her that would appear in seconds on the Web would never be forgotten, or that one of them would earn a Pulitzer for a journalist at the Times. His carefully framed shot would reveal a beautiful young meteorologist with a wash of blood in her white blond hair and red streaks painting her face, standing with her hands hanging limply by her side, eyes wide with deepening sorrow.
* * *
Nicci sat in front of Dafoe’s laptop carefully—scrupulously—executing the keystrokes. No room for error. None. Dafoe had been adamant about that: “Hunt and peck only. I don’t care how good you are. Go slowly. One mistake and the whole sequence falls apart, and there’s no going back.”
The pressure on Nicci was enormous. Jenna hadn’t given the world the warning it needed. Nicci had seen it all—Jenna’s bloody entrance into the studio followed by a brief disappearance. Then her star had gotten a pistol from somewhere and come up firing. Nicci had guessed that with every passing second, millions of new viewers had tuned into The Morning Show. Nothing like this had ever been seen on television—a gun battle in real time, with real death.
And real consequences: Jenna had looked like she was in shock when the shooting stopped. When she’d walked past the camera without pause, Nicci had glimpsed horror on her friend’s face, and had understood her muteness: Although Jenna had grown up hunting, and had been handy with both a rifle and pistol since childhood, she’d never shot a person before. When her face had filled the screen for that fleeting second, Nicci had seen not only the horror, not only blood and tears, but sadness so deep that she herself had filled with the ghostly presence of grief. Her own eyes had quickly pooled and spilled.
Two more keystrokes. “Don’t fuck up,” Nicci admonished herself aloud. Forensia and Sang-mi stared at her, faces wracked by tension.
Nicci finished typing. All she had to do was hit “return.” She pointed her index finger, noticed it trembling, and tapped the bar. She breathed like it was the first air she’d taken in a century.
“Let’s check,” Forensia said immediately.
“You do it.” Nicci couldn’t sit still a moment longer.
Forensia took her seat, navigated to WhiteHouse.gov, and saw the result of their hacking in all its cyber-glory: A news banner about the North Koreans and the sulfate rockets crawled across the screen beneath a photograph of President Reynolds in the Rose Garden. Nicci guessed that it might take thirty seconds for CNN, FOX, and all the other networks, cable channels, and news websites to hijack the banner as effectively as Al Qaeda had taken control of that supertanker.
“You did it,” whispered Forensia. The Pagan witch sounded awed.
Sang-mi took Nicci’s hand and held it tightly. Then she whispered three simple words: “Thank you, Nicci.”
* * *
Nine thousand miles away, Adnan stared at the TV in the wheelhouse of the Dick Cheney, struck speechless by the shootout in a New York City studio. Even the Shopping Channel could no longer entice him with its bejeweled watches and floral tableware. Adnan had abandoned the consumer paradise for Al Jazeera, which replayed the video of the shootout over and over. He could not look away from the mesmerizing violence.
There they were, all kinds of people getting killed—right now—then dying all over again in slow motion. Even a