I knew she was good at pretending things were okay. The tell was in what she did, action-wise. We’d have to be mindful.

Tristan had taken the seat closest to the table. The next seat, mine, was empty, followed by Lookout and Swansong at the end.

Conversely, at the table, Hamza was the closest to us, followed by John, Lynn, and then Gary Nieves at the end. Given the description I’d gotten of Hamza, and my surface assessment from the segments of show I’d watched to research, Hamza was a bad pairing to put so close to Tristan. They were both too prone to butt heads.

This show was a very specific kind of machine. I’d seen fragments of it before, and it hadn’t been the kind of show that I enjoyed. Investigative journalism leading into segments with the panel, exploring what was uncovered. It was too aggressive a show, leaving me uneasy and tired—and I didn’t watch television to be uneasy and tired.

I’d also studied two episodes, my finger hammering the ‘skip 5 seconds ahead’ key at times to get to the next scene, where I could let it play at normal speed, see the tone, read the expressions, and see how the guest or topic were handled. It looked like they always had the initial segment, setting the tone with an easy-to-understand story. Then the guests, or the expert like our Gary Nieves here would get a chance to say their piece. A slow roll, getting the audience used to things, and then the steady pressure, like they were interrogating a witness, looking for cracks or discrepancies. John liked to create them, Hamza liked to attack them, and Lynn managed the tone. However things ended up in the end, the audience would often find one of the three personalities hosting this show to be a rough approximate of their own feelings on the matter, even though all three were on the same general wavelength.

They feigned being something between a friendly talk show and a more intellectual panel show, but if they had an excuse, things tended to devolve into the attack dog dynamic. Like the personalities, the show’s identity was nebulous enough that a given viewer could claim it was any one of the three things—friendly, intellectual, or aggressive problem solving.

For them, success meant sticking to their gameplan. On our end, doing this right meant avoiding any sign of weakness, reinforcing ourselves and each other, and holding on to the card up our sleeve—the promise of information. We had the advantage of knowing how they’d operate.

“Team Breakthrough,” Hamza said. “Or is it only Breakthrough?”

“Either is fine,” Tristan said.

“And do you want me to introduce you, or will you introduce yourselves?”

“I’m Capricorn,” Tristan said. “This is—”

“Victoria,” I said. I pulled my hood down, trying not to mess up my hair in the process. “Antares in costume.”