Beside her, Kay Bliss could have been a mirror image or a copycat sister, but the look and the accent were all part of the office politics; a game they both knew how to play. "Oh, fuck it, Lucy, we're getting paid, aren't we? It's nice not to be out doorstepping some twat until the early hours for a change." Her voice had the hard vowels of a Geordie, though she could hide it when she had to.

"There's some idiot from Downing Street permanently in the newsroom," Lucy continued, "going over every piece of copy with a fine-tooth comb. DNotice on this, D-Notice on that. We'll be like some fucking cheap local rag soon. Golden wedding stories and photos from the Rotary lunch." Lucy strode into the lift the second the doors opened, then rattled her nails anxiously on the metal wall. "Come on. Why are these things so fucking slow? All the technology we've got in this place, you'd think they'd be able to get lifts that worked quickly."

"We're not even supposed to be using them. All those technology crashes-"

"Like we've got time to walk up and down flights of stairs all day."

Kay held her breath until the doors opened on the newsroom floor. She'd spent an hour stuck in it with three monkeys from the loading bay and it wasn't an episode she wanted to repeat.

Lucy was still talking as she dodged out between the opening doors, "It started with that terrorist strike on the M4-"

"Damon covered that." Kay looked puzzled for a second. "Terrorists?"

"It had to be terrorists. It wasn't that long before the Martial Law announcement."

"Someone said a Yank plane had gone down carrying nukes."

Lucy shrugged. "And there were all those phone calls from the great unwashed claiming they'd seen some fire-breathing monster." She flung open the swing doors. "Sometimes I wish I worked for the FT."