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Forward Operating Base Rally, Missouri, September, the fifty fourth year of the Kurian Order: the Show Me state has a flat bootheel sto a corner of northeast Arkansas

Those who pass through the region reme along the river, pierced by bayous and bisected by interstate There's little to distinguish it on the surface But be-neath the good topsoil the bootheel fascinates on a geologic scale It is hoave way in the chaos of 2022, causing the Mississippi to run backward as far north as St Louis

The destruction that resulted froion ill-omened Everyone who could move did, to the better-preserved areas of Missouri at first, and then south or farther west once the Grogs showed up

Then came Southern Command

The few Kurian Lords organizing the area fell rather easily, surprised by the strength and tenacity of the guerrillas With the Kurians gone, the area becaht-over piece of no-mans-land between the Mississippi and the Ozark Free Territory, not as well patrolled as the Tennessee-Little Rock corridor or as danger-filled as the bushwhack country in southern Missouri A powerful sler named Shrivastava set up shop around an old fireworks warehouse, running whatever he could between the Kurian Zone, Grogs, and Free Territory He's long since retired to the older fas on a remote piece of Carolina coastline, but a nephew still runs the business, now under the probing noses of Southern Command forces directed by the new United Free Republics

Rally Base, set up just down the road as though peeping the post co the filling ground outside the wire and blockhouses

Of course the business isn't quite as profitable these days There's noof captive souls into the Kurian Zone or antitank rockets capable of taking out ss But thanks to the soldiers at Rally Base, there's also less of a chance of a tea everyone who doesn'tto prove the livestock Shrivastava & Family have shifted with the trade and opened a tiny brewery, soaprich on a few dozen lesser transactions a day rather than the bigger scores the old man saw

Civilization, after a fashion, has returned

The fah to hire hands to take care of the endless outside labor that keeps the bake stove burning and the meat locker filled

One of their hands, a lean, bronze-skinned man with a thick head of black hair tied back fro face, works shirtless in the dust of the firewood pile, reducing wholes to quarters with a shining ax His lower back is a topographical ht eye down, and there's souess he'd just said so ironic

But he's not wasting breath, talking to his He works with the easy, constant pace of an outdoorup the wholes, splitting the the quarters with a precise economy of effort that would do a machine credit

He moves with a hint of a li stock- He casts quick glances all around as he works, and his hters of the house coests that he's a hard man to sneak up behind

The slight, unconscious shift in his grip of the ax suggests that it erous

David Valentine would always reray hair

Or, to be ray hair Three of them, in fact For soht te, as he had to go over to the fort to teach, and picked them out as he combed his hair back