The whole time the call was going, Alaric and Becks were packing up supplies and moving them to the back of the kitchen, just outside the closed garage door. Maggie and Alaric had done a lot of packing before the rest of us got there, but neither of them was an Irwin, and Becks felt the need—probably rightly—to go through everything and make sure that we had enough supplies to reach our destination in one piece.

“All right, folks,” I said, breaking into the fifth near-identical argument over who was getting more screwed by the current embargos, the Newsies or the Irwins. “I’m glad we’re all on the same page now, but the wireless booster is about to shut down from lack of juice, so I figure we should wrap this up. I don’t know how long it’ll be before they get our little slice of the Internet back online. In the meantime, everybody has their assignments, and we have our temporary department heads. Are there any questions?”

There were no questions. That was practically a goddamn miracle. Our three temporary department heads—Katie in Connecticut, for the Fictionals; Luis in Ohio, for the Newsies; and Dmitry in Michigan, for the Irwins—were nervous enough that their tiny digital pictures looked faintly ill. Still. We wouldn’t have asked them to do the jobs if we didn’t think they were ready. Not that anyone could really be considered ready to take over one-third of a major news site during a disaster this large, but they were about as prepared as the rest of us, and no one was shooting at them yet. That had to count for something.

“Okay, then, I’m going to shut this baby down before something manages to actually catch fire and we have to kill it with sticks.” I looked at my screen. The faces of After the End Times looked back at me, all filled with the same anxiety. The world might actually be ending. That was a bit more than we were used to dealing with on a normal workday.

Say something inspirational, prompted George. They need to hear it from you. You’re the leader.

That was a job I never applied for. I managed to bite back the words “Like what?” before they could quite escape, and cleared my throat instead, trying to think of a single damn thing to say. My mind was a blank. This was a threat way too big to prod with a stick.

You can do it, said George, quietly.