"We don't have a way to spin this," Jason said, pacing back and forth in his office. The reading glasses he'd been wearing for the last three hours glinted in his hand as he waved them around. "There isn't a way to spin this."

"Look, Silena says that even the press doesn't have the full…" Percy sighed from where he was sagging in his chair on the other side of Jason's desk. He reached up to loosen his tie. "God damnit, there isn't a way to spin this."

"Well, we'd better come up with one." Jason picked up one of the many crumpled-up sheets of paper on his desk and lobbed it at a nearby recycling bin.

"What about… Okay. Back up. Do we know for a fact that it was..."

"We've been over this," Jason shook his head. "The officer was wearing a body cam. So were the two next to him. It's one of the fingerprint signature guns, and if there's any doubt now, someone will come back with an autopsy and a matched bullet in the next twenty-four hours. And the guy was wearing a vest that said PRESS on it in big capital letters."

"And we've got to get out ahead of it. Somehow." Percy ran a hand through his hair. "Shit. Okay. And the reporter. He wrote about us. This administration."
"Yeah. From the start, actually. From the campaign bus."

"Favorably," Percy nudged.

"Yeah," Jason agreed.

"And he's covered protests before."

"Extensively, yeah." Jason shoved his glasses into the front pocket of his shirt. "It's what got him noticed at the Post, what got him on the campaign trail and into the press room. He was at the BLM stuff, the women's marches, March for Our Lives, all of them."

"Including ones that have gotten violent." Percy drummed his fingers on the page of his open notepad. "So he'd know, in theory, how not to—"

"It's not a question of knowing how not to get shot, it's a question of the guy who shot him knowing when to pull and not pull a trigger," Jason snapped.

"No, I know, it's just…" Percy reached for a file that had been sticky-noted orange. Which, apparently, according to Luke Castellan's old system, meant hot-button-policy-issue, flagged for midterm speeches. Percy passed the file across the desk to Jason. "This is the speech we were working on, to have ready for the Virginia midterms."

"Swapping guns for tasers and increasing high-pressure weapons training before allowing armed officers out in the field, yeah. I wrote it." Jason flipped the file back around and passed it back to Percy. "Why are you bringing it up now? Besides the obvious thing where we're going to have to rewrite it in light of recent events."

"I'm not sure, it's just…" Percy shook his head. "Something feels off."

"One of our cops shot a journalist in our backyard, of course it feels goddamn off," Jason said, arms crossed. "We just need a press statement. We can just say that we knew him well, we appreciated his integrity…"

"That's not going to be enough." Percy stood up, pacing from his chair to the closed door and back. "It's… we already came out too soft on guns. This whole election season it's been a problem. And now in the middle of being too soft on guns, one of our guys gets shot, and it's a fucking PR nightmare on all sides."

"Is it?" Jason asked. "I mean, it's awful and callous to put it like this, and we obviously can't say it in a condolence speech, but isn't it kind of a yardage gain for us? We say guns are bad and that police need more training and less heavy artillery, and they shoot a journalist at a protest against police violence. Every single thing about this points to political promise in our favor."

"Sure," Percy said. "I just… something feels wrong. Besides the part where someone's dead. Something's fishy about this, and I don't like it."

"Noted. In the meantime, we've got to cover our asses." Jason picked up a pad of paper and started scribbling. "I'm writing a condolence speech. If you can run it over to Annabeth and double-check that she and Reyna are good with it, then you can conspiracy-theorize it to pieces when you go home."

"Fine." Percy picked up the orange-sticky-noted file again and started scanning through its language. "I will."

"Great. On your own time." Jason picked up a cup of now-cold coffee that had been sitting on the corner of his desk for at least the three hours that he and Percy had been sitting there and downed the dregs at the bottom of it. "Okay. I'm going to draft three lines, you're going to give them to Annabeth, she's going to give them to Silena."

"Yeah, you've already said that," Percy responded crossly. He pulled his phone out of his pocket. "In case you're curious, the right-wing gun-toting conservatives on Twitter are already saying that if Michael Yew had had a gun on him, he'd be alive and fine."

"The day I start worrying about what right-wing gun-toting conservatives have to say about good guys and guns is probably the day I leave this office for good," Jason said, pointing his pen at Percy aggressively. "I hope to God you know better than to post anything, even from your personal account, before this statement comes from the President's lips to the press corps's ears."

"Obviously." Percy shook his head. "Just thought it was worth pointing out that it's not all yardage we've picked up."

"Whatever. Just hush up for five seconds so I can finish getting this on paper." Jason pulled his glasses back out and perched them on the bridge of his nose.

In the lull that followed, Percy thumbed through the Virginia midterms speech. The language in it was all the usual buzzwords— public safety, consumer awareness, personal protection, and so on. But something about it still felt off, somehow. It was like something was itchy in the back of Percy's brain, a complete thought on the tip of his tongue, but his mind unable to articulate it. He let out a quiet groan and tipped his chair back.

His phone buzzed.

I'm guessing you're too busy for a cup of coffee? It was Rachel, the redheaded bartender from the gala.

Percy leaned forward and picked his phone up to respond. Yeah. Probably going to be at the office til midnight or later.

It's already practically midnight or later, came the instant reply. I'm working late, someplace downtown? Percy asked.

Over at Mist, if you know where that is, she responded.

Percy thought for a moment. Mist was one of the older bars on the scene— less of a bar and more of a whiskey lounge, really. He'd heard of it but had never been. Not sure, he finally typed back.

Well, if you ever feel like stopping by… And then, immediately, Obviously, not tonight. I'm watching the news here, I'm sure you've got your hands full.

One corner of Percy's mouth twitched into a sort of sad half-smile. Another time, he typed back.

"Okay, here's the rough copy," Jason announced, tossing a handwritten two-paragraph memo down on the desk between them.

Percy scanned it quickly. "This is basically just an obituary with a condolence sign-off."

"Yeah, it is," Jason confirmed. "We're not using this as a policy point. It's sad, it's horrifying, we're moving on."

"But..." Percy looked up, eyebrows knit together. "Our voter base has pretty strong feelings here. Defunding the police, making gun acquisitions harder, those are things that they want."
"Those are things that some of them want," Jason corrected. "And frankly, I don't think we're going to lose them on this. The ones we might risk losing are the centrists who just don't like the other guys very much."
"But…" Percy read it again. "It's a little impersonal, don't you think?"

"His paper can do the emotional one," Jason said, shoving his reading glasses back into his shirt pocket. "He's getting an announcement from the President. His family— his family and his friends and his paper can at least know that he's getting that."

Percy gave it one last look. "I guess."

Jason made a shooing motion at him. "Go, take it to Annabeth."

"I'm pretty sure she'll have the same reservations I do." Percy frowned.

"I'm not rewriting it," Jason said. "Go, and then go home for the night. Tomorrow's going to be a long day, too."

Percy folded the note into fourths and tucked it into his pocket. He hauled himself out of the chair and down the hall to the Deputy Chief of Staff's office. The light was still on and he could hear murmured voices coming through the door, but couldn't quite make out what they were saying.
He knocked twice, then poked his head in. "Annabeth?"

He'd expected to see her neck-deep in paperwork, already furiously on top of the next days news, or meeting with Silena about whatever secretive thing they'd been meeting about for the last week. Instead, she was on the phone. She held up a finger and mouthed "one second."

Holding the phone between her ear and her shoulder, she scribbled something down and passed it to Percy. One the phone with Michael's brother.

"I know. Lee, I know." Annabeth said into the phone. "It's… yes. I know. Thank you. I'm so sorry. Really. And hey. I can't do much from my official position, and you know… yes. Precisely. But I've known… yeah, since then. If I can do anything, me as a person, not me as my office, please let me know. Sure. Yeah, it'll be out in the morning, Percy's here with it now. Thank you. Night, Lee." She sighed, tapped end call on her phone, and turned back to Percy. "You are here with the statement Jason's been drafting, right?"

"Yeah." Percy pulled it out of his pocket and passed it over to her. "It's a little…"

She raised her eyebrows. "A little what?"

"Never mind," Percy said. "Just read it. Jason wants to know if it's got your okay to go to Reyna."

Annabeth's mouth pressed into a thin line as she kept reading. Finally, she set it down on her desk with a sigh. "A little impersonal, don't you think?"

"Jason thinks… the paper can do the emotional address, I guess?" Percy shrugged. "He wasn't a huge fan of my input."

"What's your input?" Annabeth asked, head tilted to the side.

"First impulse is that we should use it to talk about policy. Gun legislation, police reform." Percy crossed his arms, drumming his fingers on his bicep.

"But?" Annabeth asked.

"But something feels weird about it," Percy said. "I don't know what yet. Something feels off. Jason told me not to worry about it, that it'll be…"

"An uptick in political yardage?" Annabeth snorted. "Of course he thinks so."

Percy frowned. "Why's that?"

"Because he thinks like a nice, honorable, rule-following lawyer, not a politician," Annabeth explained. "He's Army. He might understand the aftereffects of dirty politics, but he'd never think to implement them, which means he doesn't always see them coming."

"I don't think I'm allowed to agree with you, considering you're talking about my boss," Percy said with a grimace. "But, just for argument's sake. Dirty politics? In this case. What are we talking?"

"Anything from staged photos to checking for bribery and seeing if someone paid off a cop to shoot him." Annabeth smoothed down the stray curls that had fallen loose from her usual smoothly tucked back hair. "I'm not saying that's what happened, and our communications absolutely should not reflect that we think it might've, but…"

"But you think something's fishy, too?" Percy thought back to the orange-tabbed file back in Jason's office. "Hey, you don't think…"

A strange look crossed Annabeth's face. "Define fishy."

Percy glanced down at his watch, then at the short note in his hand. "Nah, it's nothing. I think. So, uh. Are you formally approving this so it can go to Reyna, or do Jason and I have to agonize over it for another hour?"

Annabeth waved her hand at him and the note. "Yeah, it's fine. I mean, you're right, it's impersonal, and it's weak on policy, but frankly I think it'd be wise for us to stay quiet on both of those fronts until we know more."

"Right." Percy turned and started to leave her office.

"Hey, Percy, wait," she called after him.

"Yeah?" He wheeled back around.

"Do you still have that speech on gun positions and police reform for the Virginia midterms?" Annabeth asked.

"The new one I started today, or the one that Castellan drafted that's sitting on Jason's desk right now?"

"Luke wrote it himself?" Annabeth asked, that same strange look crossing her face again.

"Yeah, why?" Percy asked.

"Nothing. It's late, I'm going to head home, I think." Annabeth tucked a notebook and her phone into her bag. "Hey, do me a favor and bring it by my office in the morning?"

"Sure." Percy nodded. He lingered in her office doorway for another second before heading down the hall towards Reyna's office, trying to puzzle out what exactly Annabeth suspected that he didn't know.

As promised, back to the regular writing/posting schedule. And as always, thank y'all for still reading- your views, reviews, and readership are much, much appreciated. ~GT