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wonder whether the real difference between us and the pre-Rising news figures we like to sneer at and claim to despise is a matter of scale. They belonged to big corporations, with all the advantages and disadvantages that came with that position. They made their own rules, sure, but they did it while someone else held the reins. We’ll never be too big to fail, and so we get to make our own choices, tell our own stories… until someone big enough to buy and sell us a thousand times over comes along and shuts us down.
    The disadvantage of being independent is the way you’re never going to have a safety net. All you can do is fly until you fall—and falling is inevitable. Everybody falls, if you give them enough time.
    I pressed my thumb against the testing zone. A hole opened, and a needle bit into my flesh, quick as a whisper. Seconds passed before the door clicked, unlocking itself, a small light set into the frame flashing green. It was meant to be discreet, hopefully preventing a panic if someone turned up positive for Kellis-Amberlee while there was a crowd surrounding them. As if that would ever happen. Even in this brave new world twenty years after the creation of the “zombie virus,” people are afraid of dying. Call it a quirk of mammalian biology, which is the result of millennia of being the ones who survived to pass their genes along, but people tend to become extremely upset when a machine tells them their lives are over. If someone came up positive in a place like this, they wouldn’t step calmly aside and let the rest of the commuters get to their cars while they awaited their inevitable execution. They’d freak right the fuck out, and with good reason.
    I stepped through. Ben, who was waiting on the other side, frowned.
    â€œYou have that pensive look again,” he said. “Ash, what’s wrong?”
    â€œNothing’s wrong,” I said. “I am a paragon of cheer and pith, like a busty leprechaun imported from the land of sexy accents to boost your site ratings.”
    Ben snorted. “Now I
know
you’re upset about something. You only go full Irish when you’re trying to distract me from the way you’re actually feeling. What’s wrong?”
    â€œNo, wait, I want to unpack one of those phrases before we get all touchy-feely.” We started walking, passing rows of parked cars. Many of them were in long-term storage, paid for by the month and marked with blue stickers on their rear taillights. A lot of them were pre-Rising “classics,” the kind of thing that looked great on a movie set or a garage floor, but didn’t add much protection against the living dead. “What do you mean by ‘full Irish’? Am I only half-Irish when I’m eating cereal and drinking orange juice? Does beer activate additional Irish? What about soda bread?”
    â€œYou don’t like beer.”
    â€œYes, and that’s one of the many reasons I felt the need to flee my fair homeland. It was a matter of self-preservation. What were you trying to say? I’m trying to sort out whether to be offended or amused.”
    Ben flashed me a quick smile as he pulled the car keys from his pocket. “Which side of the fence are you coming down on so far?”
    â€œAmused, with a small side order of ‘this is why I play to stereotypes sometimes, because it’s fun to watch you squirm,’” I said. “Could still change, depending on your explanation. Grab a shovel, start digging, see how deep you get before you hit bottom.”
    â€œWhat I meant was exactly what you just said: Sometimes you play to stereotypes, usually because you’re annoyed or deflecting or trying to knock the person you’re talking to off their game.” Ben stopped next to his car, a sturdy old Volvo that looked like a relic of an early era, and that had been completely rebuilt internally and externally, even down to the bulletproof