Darryl’s truck was the oldest vehicle, and the first non-autonomous one, she’d ever ridden inside. It was frightening to think that one person’s movements were the only thing that stood between her and a grisly death. But her fear at that soon faded into anxiety at the state of the world around them.

The signs identified this as Plano. She knew the center of that city had been a stronghold for the Republic of Texas and its corporate masters. They’d been content to leave many of the surrounding cities in the hands of the Heavenly Kingdom, since that had meant more work for the SDF and Austin. Despite its proximity to the front, Plano’s status as a stronghold for some of the Republic’s wealthiest citizens and corporations had made it seem unassailable. The notoriously stingy Republic had spent heavily on the city’s garrison.

Sasha still didn’t know what had happened, how a Republican stronghold had fallen so fast. But she saw evidence of how the fall had gone down all around her. The city was devastated. They drove by a police station that was filled with bullet holes and burnt black around its windows. They passed an elementary school that looked as if it had been barricaded, turned into a fortress, and then blasted apart with rockets. The streets they rolled over had been cracked and broken by shellfire. Sasha stared out with wide, excited eyes as they passed mansions that had completely collapsed under the weight of heavy bombardment.

And all around them the streets were filled with soldiers. There seemed to be a checkpoint every two or three minutes. The Martyrs who manned those checkpoints looked impossibly young. That made Sasha feel a little less lonely. This is what it looks like when a generation comes back to God, she thought. At each stop Darryl pulled a laminated paper ID out of his pocket. The soldiers would take it, look it over, and then ask him about her. None of them met her eyes.

“Just arrived today,” Darryl always said. “She’s here to help build the Kingdom.”

“Thanks be to God,” was the usual reply. Some of the men at the checkpoints were enthusiastic, and shouted it with all the joy she’d expected to hear. But a few of them just looked at her with eyes that were half sullen, half hungry.

“Darryl?” she asked, twenty minutes and three checkpoints into their drive. “What…exactly happened here? I left home the day after Plano fell. It felt like, just, such a miracle. It seems impossible for things to change so much, so fast.”

Darryl fixed her with a look that Sasha couldn’t quite read. It made her nervous. The next words jumbled up as they left her mouth.

“It’s just, erm. Um, I mean– I know all things are possible through God but…how? How did we win here? From what I read on the news–”