“Where?” asked Copy.

He pulled out his issue. “Today, page four, you wrote that ‘the protesters, many of them anarchists and socialists, govern themselves via consensus reached at the nightly general assembly.’”

Chief snorted. “You’re telling me you aren’t? Look at you.”

“Well I am,” the redhead allowed, “and my friends here too. But not all of us.”

“Nobody wrote ‘all,’” said Copy.

“You wrote ‘many.’ We think you shouldn’t have mentioned it in the first place.”

“That was Brian’s piece, right?” News asked. (Brian was the young man whom Copy had been with the night before, but if she recognized his name, she gave no sign.) “But he’s on your side! He was calling for the whole city to join you!” News always gets furious about this sort of thing, her uncool readers making uncool demands, and it’s really something to see News furious. She gestures wildly, and all her piercings shake — a war dance. That warrior effect has been amplified since Copy left, because now News pumps iron obsessively. She likes to box these loutish muscle men she finds in Westie gyms.

The redhead whined, “Man, we’re trying to maintain neutral ground here. You say there’s a bunch of anarchists at the tents and some of the people we’ve been trying to reach get put off. Westie people, you know, townies.”

“Yeah!” shouted one of his companions, a pug-faced girl in combat boots. “You should have said ‘allegedly’! Don’t you fascists have a fact-checker?” We did; our fact-checker was Copy. We trusted her implicitly when she told us to write “has been accused of” or attribute the statement to a source, because “allegedly” is a hokey word journos use when they’re begging someone not to sue them.

“Do townies even read us?” Copy whispered to Chief.

“Nah,” he said, and to the anarchists, “Our readers are all from Springvale anyway. So your secret’s safe, assholes. Now get out of our house!” His benign interest in these people had soured sometime in the previous ten seconds; Chief can turn on a dime like that.