Momentum

I’m still riding the high of Maddie’s announcement—my announcement, in many ways—when I stride into the lobby. I don’t know what I expected to see, but a bunch of well-dressed men and women hiding right beyond the doorframe, talking rapidly in hushed whispers and occasionally peeking out at the gathering outside, was certainly not it.

I stare at them, bewildered, saying “Wha—” when somebody pulls me to the side. Irene evades the arm that tries to pull her in, but spying the stern faces that suddenly point her way, she too steps out the doorframe.

“Quiet,” the woman who grabbed me hisses, her arm still clutched around mine. Her dark red hair is tied up in a bun, and she’s dressed similarly to Maddie, sporting a jacket and blouse. “Follow me. No talking until we’re twenty feet away from the door.”

With that, she takes off at a brisk walk, heading deeper into the building through a brightly polished wood corridor.

“I’m Reagan, the senator’s chief of staff, but I expect you both knew that already or you wouldn’t be here,” she says, her voice just barely loud enough to be audible. She glances back at us, and then at the small group of suits clustered by either side of the building’s entrance, through which Maddie is still taking questions from the audience. “We always have people watching when she makes a public appearance,” she says, answering our unspoken question. “It’s good for keeping message, and this way we can run answers and do live briefings as necessary. You just met most of the communications team standing by there.”

She pauses, pointing through another door at an open office space. It’s occupied by a collection of desks and offices, where another handful of men and women are arguing over some graphs spread out over the central table.

“This is the legislative team. They’re a bunch of policy wonks, but they’re our wonks,” she says, giving them a pointed smile as they look up at us striding by. “These are the people who are going to make your big dreams into something concrete, Ashworth.”

“It’s a cool bill,” one of the guys calls out, giving me a cheery grin that looks incongruous against the dark bags hanging under his eyes.

“It's not a bill until you lot are done writing it,” Reagan calls back.

The legislative team sweeps out of view a second later as we stop by the stairwell. I glance down at my phone, reading the latest notification, and almost lose track of Reagan as she speeds down a corridor, talking quickly the whole time.

“Hey Steve, how are the favorables looking? Same as before? With an announcement this big, I refuse to believe that. Get us new data,” she says, her conversation with a passerby in a pinstriped suit over in an instant as he turns down another corridor, speaking into his phone. She looks back at me. “HR’s up the stairwell and on the east side. Irene’s your personal assistant, is that right, Ashworth? I’ll talk her through the PA protocol while HR handles the onboarding process for you, since payroll’s not going to apply in her case. That means you—”

“I double as Mr. Ashworth’s bodyguard,” Irene says, barely able to get the word in edgewise. “There have been a number of **** threats made against Mr. Ashworth, and I’m tasked with keeping him safe. It wouldn’t be wise to split us apart, even in the perceived relative safety of this building.”

Reagan gives the two of us a hard look, before nodding.

“Alright. That’s no issue with me,” she says. “I’ll leave the two of you to it. If you’ve got nothing for me, I need to get back to the senator’s press conference, debrief and figure out next steps—”

Reagan’s already turned around and begun walking away when I call out to her, saying: “Have you heard Herbie’s latest move?”

“What, the 9 o’clock attack ad? Already handled, we’re airing a response by tomorrow, going to have a radio spot to cover it—”

I shake my head, cutting her off.

“His team just released a statement. He claims that he had the idea for our energy bill first,” I say.

“What? That’s nonsense,” Reagan retorts, frowning. “How could he possibly prove that? And besides, why wouldn’t I have heard of it?”

“It was released just a minute ago,” I say, holding my phone up. “I’m sure somebody’s going to alert you soon.”

Just then, Steve in the pinstriped suit has come bustling back from the corridor from whence he left, a panicked look in his eye.

“Vanderbilt’s claiming the energy bill for his own!” he cries out, waving his phone at Reagan. “He’s accusing the senator of plagiarism!”

“He’s just making a fool of himself,” Reagan smiles. “He’s got no way to prove that he wrote the bill first. Besides, I already said, it’s not a bill until—“

Two members of the legislative team burst out from their office space, waving their phones in the air too.

“Vanderbilt’s got a bill, its’s all written up, it’s just been released!” they cry out.

“I don’t believe it,” Reagan says, momentarily floored, staring at the staffers all bearing the bad news on their phones.

“We need to write a response for Maddie,” I say. “Get her to read a statement in front of the cameras now, before Vanderbilt steals our thunder. She’s got to tell them that the idea came from our camp, and that Vanderbilt’s a damn liar for trying to take our credit.”

“What could we possibly say?” Reagan says, her eyes darting back and forth. “They’ve released their bill. We don’t have one. The best we can do is damage control—"

“Not if there’s a working version of the bill already out on the internet with Maddie’s name attached to it, with the timestamps to prove it came first,” I say.

“But that doesn’t exist,” Reagan says, exasperated now. “It takes time to fake something like that, and we don’t have time, the news always demands an answer now. Steve, do you have someone on tech who can pre-date a document—”

“What do you think this is?” I say, holding out my phone, displaying a PDF of the bill posted two weeks ago.

Reagan’s eyes narrow as she reads the text, and then they widen.

“Where… how…?”

“My draft of the bill, pre-emptively posted online with Maddie’s name—”

“But you had no permission to do so, how did you even know two weeks ago—“

“Are you complaining?” I ask. I flick open to another screen on my phone and pull up a separate document. “Remarks ready for Maddie to deliver. Vet them if you want.”

Reagan scans the text quickly, hardly needing a second before she says: “Send this to Communications. Now. We need these words in the senator’s mouth as soon as humanly possible.”

“Already done,” I say, firing off the document to the team.

Reagan’s already moving, back towards the entrance of the building, ready to brief Communications, when she spares a look over her shoulder for me.

“You’re going to fit in well on this team, Ashworth,” she smiles. “Glad to have you on.”

For the first time, I see a look on her face that could be mistaken for appreciation or admiration. With a redhead a pretty as her, I resolve to make it far from the last.