It was about a three-mile jog. At full speed, Roland could’ve cleared the distance in a few minutes. But a low profile was the name of the game. He stuck to a fast walk and kept to the shadows and alleys as best as he could. Plano hadn’t been a very dense city before the Martyrs had taken over, so there were a lot of times where he was basically out in the open. He had to trust that his uniform and the general state of chaos in the newly-founded Kingdom would obscure him.

This was the first look he’d gotten of the Kingdom on foot. Roland decided he didn’t care much for it. There was a great deal of foot and vehicle traffic but most of the people seemed to be either soldiers or refugees without anywhere else to go. He passed two checkpoints where twitchy-looking Martyrs performed datascans on decks and personal hard drives. He even saw one soldier sorting through paperback books in the trunk of some poor fuck’s car.

Roland noticed several white vans with black crosses painted on the side. They cruised the streets, clearly on patrol for something. He watched one stop in front of a family of refugees, heavy with backpacks and carrying intake papers in their hands. Men in white jump suits with gold cross badges piled out and surrounded the family. Roland concealed himself behind a dumpster and watched as the patriarch of the family handed them his papers and spoke in a frantic, animated tone. One of the men pointed at his daughter, who wore a stained t-shirt and a ragged pair of denim shorts. They were baggy and hardly stylish. But the men in the jumpsuits seemed furious. They pointed and shouted. The man put his hands in the air and tried to say something, but one of the jump-suited men smashed his head with a cane.

Cold rage bubbled up inside Roland. Fuck this place, he simmered to himself, fuck these janky-ass throwback fundamentalists and their fascist bullshit. He wanted to charge out from behind the dumpster and tear into these low-rent, hisbah motherfuckers. He wanted to shove those thick wooden rods so far up their asses they’d be shitting splinters for weeks. The mission, he reminded himself, the fucking mission.

And so he watched as the men in white beat the old guy. He watched as they pulled the poor bastard’s daughter into a van and forced a hide­ous gray woolen dress over her head. It didn’t fit and it looked liable to give her heat stroke in the late Texas summer. She didn’t fight them though.