The news ticker ran across the bottom of the screen in red.
'BREAKING: Alexander Dalton — Senior Strategist, Meridian Party, Confirmed Dead. Circumstances Unknown.'
The anchor's face was doing that thing faces do when a person has spent their career describing storms from behind a desk and now, without warning, is standing in the rain.
"—what you're seeing in this footage is not, according to our technical team, edited. Not filtered. Not CGI. This is raw video pulled from a media unit's camera at the Dalton estate, and I want to be absolutely clear with our viewers—"
The footage played.
The bullet becoming ash.
The helicopter going soft, its engine dissolving from the inside like something learning it was always supposed to be liquid.
The cameras lifting off their mounts.
"—no prior incident of this nature has ever been recorded. We have confirmed with two independent network teams present at the scene that all footage shows identical events. The man you see here—"
