Bigsby and Sardar loaded Ryan, Nadine, and Azime into the transport. Will just stared at him. His gaze locked on Roland’s tears as if each one were the Loch Ness Monster. Roland didn’t care. His hindbrain kept up its glitchy feed of data, a mix of information on the men he’d just killed and men he’d killed years ago.

Once the wounded were loaded up, everyone filed into the Mattis APC. Will popped the top hatch and sat gunner with his grenade launcher. Inside the APC, Bigsby and Pedro did their best version of first aid on their wounded companions. There wasn’t much for them to do, though. Everyone in the squad had fairly advanced healing suites.

Roland trudged into the APC and took his seat. No one made eye contact with him. Sardar kicked it into gear, and off they went.

Waco had always been one of the worst cities in Texas. In the late 1800s, it had been a refuge for former Confederate loyalists. In the 1900s, it had developed a reputation as a haven for kooks and religious extremists. Caught between the economic powerhouse of Dallas and the relative cultural mecca of Austin, Waco was a second-rate college town at best and, at worst, a meth-filled rest stop between Texas’s good cities.

The Revolution had changed that. After the Lakewood Blast, Dallas had bled 60 percent of its population. Most of those people had fled to Austin, since constant flooding had rendered much of Houston uninhabitable. But half a million of them, ish, had swelled Waco into something resembling a worthwhile place to exist. The city had thrived in the post-revolutionary years. It was nominally controlled by the Austin Regional Government, and so it had been spared the worst of the Republic of Texas’s corruption.

But now it looked like Waco would be the next city eaten by the expanding Heavenly Kingdom. Roland could smell the stink of fear in the air when they were still a half-dozen miles out from the city limits. Once they hit the city proper, their convoy halted at a military checkpoint. Power-armored Austin Republican Guardsmen opened the side hatch of the Mattis APC and inspected the squad. Bigsby spoke for them, beamed over some credentials from the SDF, and they were waved in.

They stopped at a fueling depot with the rest of the SDF column and Roland hopped out of the APC to stretch his legs and roll another blunt. He picked a cherry-apple wrap he’d dipped in a vat of extra-strength hydrocodone syrup earlier that morning. As he rolled it tight and sealed the seam with his saliva, he watched the SDF unload hundreds of wounded warriors from half-tracks and APCs and the beds of flatbed trucks. Many of the walking men and women looked wounded too. Most of the vehicles were damaged.