“They’re letting us drive our own fucking truck up there. This ain’t gonna be like a real army. I guarantee you we’ll have time to do our shit. Stay calm. Stick close to me. Do what I do. I’m real fucking good at soldiering. If you follow my lead they’ll love us and our job’ll be that much easier.”

“And what if something goes wrong?” Manny asked. “What if they catch us?”

Roland shrugged.

“If they catch us, then we’ll already be in the middle of their army. That’ll save me so much time.”

Chapter 15

Sasha.

The man on the gurney was the most comprehensively broken human Sasha had ever seen. His jaw had been ripped completely out of its socket and shattered in four places. His eyes had been gouged into horrible smashed-grape looking things. His hands and fingers were all broken, as were his feet and shins. His ears appeared to have been bitten off. His tongue had been severed and the wound cauterized with something that had charred the flesh black.

Sasha hadn’t known a person could take such punishment and survive.

The chart at the end of the bed identified him as Sergeant Lufkin, a two-year veteran Martyr who’d been guarding a checkpoint outside of Dallas. He was conscious; every now and then he’d thrash about and let out a burbling moan. But the man didn’t appear capable of any sort of intelligible communication.

“Well, these aren’t combat injuries,” Dr. Brandt said. “These men look almost like they’ve been in a car wreck, only the damage is too precise and too deliberately targeted. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

It was Sasha’s duty to administer the men’s painkillers, just a tiny drop of morphine each. It wasn’t enough by any proper hospital’s standards. The soldiers were all in clear agony. But the Heavenly Kingdom was short on painkillers and this was the most they could afford to spare for “invalids,” as Dr. Brandt had called them.

This frustrated Sasha. Her mother’s hospital could’ve restored all four men to full health and vigor with, perhaps, a month of treatment and physical therapy. But the Heavenly Kingdom forbade vat-grown organs and limbs. Cloning contravened the Lord’s will. Sasha agreed with that, in theory. She’d fled to the Heavenly Kingdom partly because she believed JuvEn treatments had robbed the AmFed of its humanity.

But still. It seemed so wrong that these men would go the rest of their lives as twitching, insensate lumps of flesh.

The number of things that felt wrong about this place grew every day. The executions had been the first big shock to her system. But she’d accepted Helen’s justification. The Bible was filled with decent men doing awful things in times of war. The gallows weren’t pretty, but they were hardly without Biblical precedent.