“Anyway, things heated up. The Army started calling in their deep reserves, guys like me who’d been out for dadgum near a decade. This was after the feds nuked Dallas, so goin’ active duty again didn’t sound good to anyone.”

He lifted away a fallen limb, and revealed a massive log, roughly the size of Sasha’s torso. Jonah shifted everything he’d gathered over to his right arm and then hefted the log with one hand. He nodded at Sasha’s much smaller pile. “We prolly got enough,” he said.

They headed back to the campsite. She could see Jonah was doing that twitchy jaw thing again, thinking carefully about every word.

“I grew up real patriotic, y’understand? I loved my country, fought for it down south. But I also grew up with a Confederate flag on the back of my dad’s truck. I wasn’t on board with those Marxists who started the civil war. So when Governor Galen had his referendum on secession, well, that felt right. I was on board with the UCS back before it was even born.”

They sat around the fire again. Jonah started to add in larger branches. He slowly built the fire in a u-shape around the flat stone.

“Now I was never a fanatic. Went to church most Sundays, but I had Jew neighbors. There were a couple Muslims in my unit, good guys. I wasn’t real political, y’know? But Pastor Elgins gave a speech, the only time I saw him in person, he said diversity wasn’t making us strong anymore, ‘A melting pot’s all well and good, but the quality of the soup depends on the recipe.’ That made sense to me.”

He sat back, popped the kettle onto the rock, looked over to Sasha.

“The idea was, a Christian ‘recipe’ would make for a stronger nation. But the UCS wound up being a dadgum prosperity gospel pile-a-nonsense. Better than the AmFed, sure. Maybe we got less queer poli­ticians, less rich Jews running things, but it’s still corrupt here.”

Sasha really wasn’t sure how to handle this…disclosure. She’d run into similar attitudes among believers online; uncomfortable references to Jewish, gay, or gay Jewish conspiracies. That sort of nonsense had always gotten on her nerves, but she’d written off its purveyors as edgelords and trolls. Part of her thought that they might be CIA plants, hell bent on making the Kingdom look bad. But she knew they didn’t speak for the actual heart of the movement.

Sasha wanted to speak up, but she held her tongue. The fact that Jonah had been nothing but kind and respectful to her didn’t change the fact that he was twice her size. Who knew what he might do if he got agitated? Sasha fought for calm and recalled a specific passage from Revelator, in one of their guides for young women emigrating to the Kingdom.