Dearest Martha, we're leaving Lenalune this morning. The mayor fed us, sheltered us, let her smith fix our golem, and never once asked for more than honest labor and cost in gold. I repaid her by bringing a war to her doorstep that she didn't ask for and can't win. Two of my men are in the ground here now, and a woman I owe more than I want to owe is standing on her porch watching us leave, and the best thing I can do for her is make sure nobody ever connects her name to mine.

  Hughes.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  We reach Lenalune at four in the morning, and Mercy is waiting at the east hill with a lantern and a count of every horse and every man who comes over the ridge.

  "Sixty out," she says when the last rider clears the tree line. "Fifty-eight back plus horses. Plus one I don't recognize."

  "Wilkes. He's with us now."

  She looks past me to where Wilkes is riding a Confederate horse in a Confederate saddle with a Federal musket across his lap and the careful posture of a man who understands that the people around him killed ninety-four of his friends six hours ago. She doesn't ask why he's alive and two of ours aren't. She counts him, adds him to the number in her head, and moves on.

  "Lott and Innes are on the last two horses," I tell her. "Wrapped."

  "I'll handle it." She lifts the lantern higher to get a better look at the column filing past her. Blood on uniforms, blood on hands, blood on musket barrels that nobody's cleaned yet because cleaning weapons requires light and fine motor control and right now these men have neither. "The camp's struck. Phelps has the column ready to march. Gospel finished cold start twenty minutes ago."

  "How's she running?"

  "Decker says the shoulder's holding. He won't know how long until she takes a load." Mercy falls into step beside me as we walk down the east hill toward the village, and the lantern throws our shadows ahead of us on the road in long shapes that look nothing like people. "You got what you went for?"

  "Dispatches. Horses. Ammunition. Confederate cavalry company wiped out." I hand her the folded papers from inside my coat. "Colonel Breckinridge is at Cold Harbor ford, eighteen miles east. He's the advance screen for Beauregard. Colonel Tate commands the cavalry brigade, at least three screening companies. Sills was one of them. The other two are still out there, north and south."

  "How long before they know Sills is dead?"

  "Two days. Maybe three. Maybe tomorrow."

  She walks beside me in silence for a few steps, processing the numbers the way she processes everything, converting information into tactical geometry. "Then we're gone before sunrise."

  "We're gone before sunrise."

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  We bury Lott and Innes behind the church before dawn.

  The ground is rocky. Two privates from Hollis's squad do the digging because they volunteered and because volunteering for grave detail is something soldiers do when the dead were men they ate beside and marched beside and slept beside, and the sound of shovels hitting fieldstone in the dark is a sound that every soldier recognizes and none of them will ever describe. The holes are shallow. Two feet, maybe two and a half where the soil is deeper between the rocks. Proper graves are six feet, but proper graves require time we don't have and ground that cooperates, and this ground doesn't cooperate with anything, which is why the church was built here, because the people who built it wanted their dead close and the rock keeps the animals from digging.

  We lower them in wrapped. Lott in the blanket we carried him in. Innes in his own coat, buttoned to the throat because someone, Fenn maybe, or one of the men in Hollis's squad, took the time to button it before we put him on the horse, and that small thing, the buttoning, the care taken with a dead man's coat in the dark by hands that were still wet with other men's blood, is what I'll remember longer than the killing. The killing fades. The small courtesies don't.

  Twelve men attend. The raid veterans who served with Lott and Innes and the sergeants who sent them forward and the captain who gave the order that put them in the ground. The graves are shallow because the ground behind the church is rocky and we don't have time to dig proper holes, and the headstones are fieldstones pulled from the wall with names scratched into them with a bayonet point. Private Adam Lott. Private Wallace Innes. 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry. Year 3.

  No dates. Nobody's kept the calendar well enough to trust it anymore. Year 3. That's what the stones say, and that's enough.

  Clementine stands at the head of the graves with her pocket Bible open in both hands. The spine is cracked and the pages are soft from three years of handling in rain and blood and lamplight, and the ribbon marker is set at Job because the ribbon is always set at Job. She doesn't read from the Psalms. She doesn't read from the parts that comfort. She reads from the book that asks the question and doesn't pretend there's a good answer, because Clementine stopped pretending about answers somewhere around the second year of the war and hasn't started again.

  She reads in the voice she keeps for the dead.

  "Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down. He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not."

  Her voice holds steady, pitched to carry no further than the twelve men gathered at the grave's edge, the voice of a woman reading words she's read over too many holes in too many kinds of ground, and the steadiness isn't performance. It's practice. It's the voice you get after the fortieth grave, when the grief has been sanded down to something flat and functional that does its job without breaking.

  "For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground, yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant."

  She pauses. The twelve men are still. The sky behind the church is gray turning lighter at the eastern edge, and the first birds are starting in the tree line above the village, and the sound of the column packing in the barn carries across the road in scraps of noise that belong to the living and have no business here among the dead.

  "But man dieth, and wasteth away. Yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up, so man lieth down, and riseth not. Till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep."

  She closes the Bible and tucks the ribbon between the pages, and nobody speaks for a long moment afterward. The passage sits in the air the way Job always sits, heavy and unanswered, because Job doesn't offer resurrection and doesn't promise reunion and doesn't say the dead are in a better place. Job says the tree gets a second chance and the man doesn't, and if that's not fair then take it up with the God who made it that way, and good luck getting an answer you can live with.

  Clementine chose it on purpose. She always does. She could read from John or from Revelation or from any of the passages that put a floor under grief and tell you there's something waiting on the other side. She reads from Job because these are soldiers, and soldiers don't need to be told it gets better. They need to be told the truth, which is that it doesn't get better, it just gets further away, and the distance is what you learn to live inside of.

  Oakes stands at the edge of the graves with his hands at his sides and his face empty. He's the one who caught Lott's musket before it hit the ground when Hollis killed the sentry, and six hours later he was the first man into the sleeping camp with his bayonet, and six hours after that he's standing over the grave of a man who was ten feet to his right when the wagon volley came and took Lott through the face instead of through him. The distance between those two outcomes was ten feet, which is nothing, which is everything.

  I don't say anything over the graves because I've learned that anything a captain says over a grave sounds like justification, and Lott and Innes don't need me to justify why they're dead. They're dead because I ordered a night assault on a sleeping camp, and the assault succeeded, and two men out of sixty didn't come back, which is a ratio that any commander would accept and no mother would forgive. So I stand at the foot of the graves and I keep my mouth shut and I let Job do the talking, because Job is honest about the cost and I owe these men at least that much.

  The dirt goes back in. The fieldstones go on top. Clementine walks back to the church to check her patients one last time before we move them onto the road, and the Bible goes into her apron pocket where it always rides, next to the scissors and the roll of cotton thread she uses for stitches when the catgut runs out.

  The twelve men disperse. Oakes is the last to leave, and he stands there for another half minute after everyone else has gone, looking at the fresh dirt and the scratched stones. His hands are clean. Someone gave him water and a rag when we got back, and he scrubbed the blood off his knuckles and his forearms and the backs of his hands where it had dried into the creases of his skin, and his hands are clean now in a way that has nothing to do with what they did six hours ago and everything to do with what he needs them to be for the next six hours.

  He turns and walks toward the barn where his squad is packing, and I watch him go, and I think about the passage Clementine read, the part about the tree getting a second chance. The tree gets cut down and it sprouts again through the scent of water. The man gets cut down and where is he. Lott is in a shallow hole behind a church in a village that's going to pretend we were never here. Innes is beside him in a buttoned coat. And the twelve men who stood over their graves are walking back to the barn to pick up their muskets and their packs and get back to the business of staying alive, which is the only answer to Job's question that soldiers have ever been able to give.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  Gospel is standing at the east end of the village, and she's standing on both legs with both arms at her sides and steam rising from her back vents in steady white columns that catch the first gray light of pre-dawn and glow against the dark hillside behind her.

  Decker is at her feet with his tool bag closed and his prayer book open, and he's doing the thing he does after a repair where he reads a passage and touches the golem's ankle plate and whispers something that isn't prayer and isn't engineering and is probably both. I've never asked what he says. Some things between a man and his machine are private.

  "She's hot," Decker says when I approach. "Full pressure. Both arms responding. The bearing's holding but I can hear it." He tilts his head the way a man tilts his head when he's listening to a sound that only he can identify. "There's a vibration in the left shoulder that wasn't there before the repair. High-pitched. Metal on metal at a frequency that means the surfaces aren't mating clean. The field-cast bearing is doing its job but it's not factory-grade and it won't pretend to be."

  "How long will it hold under field conditions?"

  "Under normal march conditions, weeks. Under combat load, the vibration generates heat, and the heat warps the bearing, and the warp increases the vibration. Feedback loop. If she fights hard for more than twenty minutes continuous, I'd want to pull her off the line and let the shoulder cool before the bearing deforms past the point where it's doing any good."

  "Twenty minutes of sustained combat, then."

  "That's my honest answer, Captain. Could be more. Could be less if the fighting's heavy and she's swinging that left arm." He pats the ankle plate one more time and stands up and puts his prayer book in his coat pocket. "She's ready to walk. She's ready to fight. I'm just telling you where the wall is so you don't hit it without warning."

  「Unit Status: Gospel (Mark IV Sentinel War Golem). Core Status: HOT (full pressure). HP: 52%. Steam Pressure: 100%. Shoulder Joint: Functional (field repair). Left Arm: Operational. Combat Duration Limit: 20 minutes sustained before thermal risk. March Status: Ready. Combat Status: Ready (limited). Operator: Cpl. Amos Decker. Note: High-frequency vibration detected in left shoulder bearing. Thermal feedback loop under combat load. Factory-grade bearing replacement recommended at earliest opportunity.」

  Gospel turns her head toward me when I put my hand on her leg plate, and the motion is smooth and heavy in the way twelve feet of iron and steam and whatever else is inside a war golem moves, deliberate and certain and carrying the weight of its own existence. The iron is warm under my palm. Just the steady warmth of a furnace that's been lit and is doing what furnaces do, and I don't know if Gospel is aware of anything in the way that people are aware of things, but Decker treats her like she is, and Decker's spent more time inside her chest cavity than anyone alive, so I take his word for it.

  "Good morning, girl," I say, and I don't know if she hears me, and it doesn't matter.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  Wilkes is sitting on the low stone wall at the edge of the barn eating hardtack and salt pork from a Confederate ration tin, and nobody is sitting within ten feet of him.

  He's still wearing his gray trousers because nobody's offered him blue ones yet, and the musket Hollis gave him is leaning against the wall beside him, and he's eating with the mechanical concentration of a man who knows that food is fuel and fuel is survival and survival is the only thing he's sure about right now. The men walking past him on their way to the column don't look at him directly, but they all know where he is and what he is and how he got here, because soldiers talk, and the story of what happened at the creek bottom was through the camp before the raid force finished unsaddling the horses.

  I sit down on the wall beside him. He stops chewing and studies me for a long moment, calculating whether the question is a test or a pleasantry, and decides it's neither.

  "How's the breakfast?"

  "Same rations I was eating yesterday, sir. Tastes different on this side of the line."

  "You ride well. Cobb says you kept pace on the return march without difficulty."

  "Raised horses in the Rappahannock Valley before the war, sir. Cavalry was the natural posting." He takes another bite of hardtack and chews it slowly. "Most of the men in Sills's company were horse people. Farmers and breeders and stable hands who got handed carbines and told to ride for the Confederacy." He pauses. "Most of them."

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  He's not asking me to feel guilty about it. He's telling me who died, which is something I should know and something he needs to say.

  "You're in Hollis's squad. He'll assign you duties and a position in the march order. You'll carry a Federal musket and follow Federal orders and when we fight you'll fight with the men on either side of you, whoever they are." I wait until he's looking at me. "You're not a prisoner. You made a choice at the creek and I'm holding you to it. If you want to leave, you walk south and you keep walking and you don't come back. But if you stay, you're one of us. Not halfway. Not provisionally. One of us."

  「The Liberator's Gaze: Trooper Wilkes. Loyalty: 24/100 (Blue Coat, forming). Alignment: Neutral. Change: +2 since creek. Assessment: Commitment building. Flight risk reduced. Note: Loyalty trajectory positive but fragile. Integration dependent on squad acceptance and continued fair treatment.」

  Wilkes sets down the ration tin and picks up the musket and stands up. "I'll stay, Captain."

  "Good." I stand up and leave him there because lingering would make it seem like the conversation was bigger than it was, and right now the best thing I can do for Wilkes is treat him like a soldier and not a project. Hollis will do the rest. Hollis has a way of folding new men into his squad that involves very little conversation and a great deal of shared work, and by the time they've marched twenty miles together and dug a latrine and stood a watch, the question of where Wilkes came from will matter less than the question of whether he pulled his weight.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  I find Harwell on her porch at five in the morning with the ledger open on her knees and a cup of something hot in her hands, and the sky behind her is turning the color of old iron at the eastern edge where the sun is still below the ridgeline.

  "We're leaving within the hour," I tell her. "Column's forming now."

  She doesn't close the ledger. She's been running numbers since before I got back, probably since Mercy started packing the camp at midnight, calculating what the Blue Coats consumed and what they left behind and what the deficit looks like in a column of figures that will determine whether Lenalune makes it through the winter.

  "I have something for you." I take the copied dispatches from my coat and hand them to her. Not the originals, which I'm keeping, but copies that Phelps made by lantern light on the back of a requisition form while I was burying Lott and Innes. "These are the orders we captured last night from the Confederate cavalry company. They confirm that Colonel Breckinridge is commanding an advance column for General Beauregard at Cold Harbor ford, eighteen miles east of here. He's got a cavalry brigade screening the hill country between the river and the Shenandoah road."

  Harwell takes the papers and reads them line by line, weighing each word against what it costs her. She gets to the postscript, the one in Beauregard's handwriting, and her fingers tighten on the edge of the page.

  "All Federal remnants to be destroyed on contact," she reads aloud. "No terms offered."

  "That's the standing order for the Western Theater. Beauregard isn't taking prisoners and he isn't negotiating. When his people come through here, and they will come through here, they'll be looking for anyone who helped Federal forces or gave them shelter or sold them supplies or let them sleep in their barns."

  She folds the papers and sets them on the ledger and picks up her cup and holds it with both hands and doesn't drink from it. "You're telling me my village is in danger."

  "I'm telling you your village has been in danger since the day this war started, and I made it worse by stopping here. We killed the scouts who saw this valley, and we killed every man in their company, and we burned the wagon and the dead inside it. Nobody who saw your smoke is alive to report it. But Breckinridge has other screening companies, and when Sills doesn't report back, Tate will send someone to find out why, and eventually someone will ride through this valley and ask questions."

  "And what do I tell them?"

  "You tell them nothing. You tell them you're a farming village that grows wheat and minds its business and hasn't seen a Federal soldier in months. You tell them the truth about everything except the three days we spent here, and you make sure every person in this village tells the same story the same way."

  "We're not liars, Captain."

  "You're survivors, Mayor. And survivors do what they need to do." I look at her for a long time because this is the last time I'll see this woman and I want to remember what she looks like, this person who opened her valley to five hundred strangers because the numbers said she had to and the numbers were right. "You could also leave. Pack what you can carry and go south to Sutter's Ford or west to the Blue Ridge. Get your people out before the cavalry comes through."

  "This valley feeds eight hundred people, Captain Granthem. Those fields you worked are planted to winter wheat that's three weeks from harvest. If we leave now, that wheat rots in the field and eight hundred people starve wherever they end up, and the Confederacy takes the valley anyway and plants their own crops on land we cleared with our own hands." She sets the cup down on the railing. "We're not leaving."

  "Then keep your heads down and tell the same story."

  "I intend to." She stands up and closes the ledger and tucks it under her arm, pressed against her ribs, the weight of eight hundred lives in a book of numbers. "You paid an honest price for three days' food and lodging, and your men worked my fields and fixed my smith's grinding wheel and your artificer taught Josiah's brother something about bearings that'll keep our mill running through the winter. The account is square, Captain." She extends her hand. "Don't come back. And don't let them connect you to us."

  I shake her hand. Her grip is dry and firm and the calluses on her palm are from a hoe and a ledger pen and twenty years of running a village through a war that won't end.

  "Mayor."

  "Captain."

  I turn and walk down the steps and I don't look back because looking back is a luxury and I've just used the last of mine on the conversation we had.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  The column forms on the main road at five-thirty with Gospel at the head and the captured horses distributed through the line and the sun still below the eastern ridge.

  It's the first time this army has looked like an army since Fort Independence. Two full-strength companies in column formation with bayonets fixed and muskets loaded and twenty rounds per man and a resupply of captured carbines distributed to the sharpshooters who know how to use them. Horses under the scouts and the runners and the worst of the stretcher cases, because a wounded man on horseback moves at four miles an hour instead of two and doesn't require four healthy men to carry him. Mama Thunder rides on a captured pack horse because Mercy's shoulder has been carrying that weight for four days and even a half-giantess has limits that she won't admit to but her body will.

  Gospel walks at the head of the column with Decker beside her, and the ground shakes with each step in a way that the men behind her can feel through their boot soles, and the sound of twelve feet of iron walking on packed dirt announces what this column is and what it can do better than any speech from a captain on a rock.

  「Army Status: 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry "Garryowen." March formation. Total: 485. 1st Company (Lt. Phelps): 236. 3rd Company (Sgt. Marsh): 238. HQ Element (Cpt. Granthem): 11 (incl. Wilkes). Combat Power: 1,015. Morale: 52/100 (Steady). Mounted: 22 (scouts, runners, stretcher cases). Dismounted: 463. March rate (estimated): 3 mph (improved from 2 mph with horses for wounded). Direction: South. Objective: Shenandoah road crossing.」

  The village watches us leave with the same quiet attention it showed when we arrived: from doorways and windows and the low stone wall on the east hill where the sentries sit with their hunting rifles and their careful observation. Nobody waves. Nobody cheers. A few men nod as the column passes, the brief acknowledgment between people who've shared something they won't talk about afterward, and the women stand in their doorways with their children and watch us go with faces that carry the expression of people who are glad to see trouble leaving and worried about what trouble left behind.

  Harwell is on her porch. The ledger is under her arm. She watches the entire column pass, counting heads the way she counted us in, and when the last man clears the west end of the village she goes inside and closes the door.

  We turn south on the cart track that leads toward the Shenandoah road, and Lenalune disappears behind us within half a mile, swallowed by the hill country and the morning mist that's rising from the hollows between the ridges. By noon there'll be no sign we were ever there except two shallow graves behind the church and the memory of five hundred soldiers who ate their wheat and slept in their barn and left before the war caught up.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  Cobb and Ennis ride ahead of the column by a mile on captured horses, and I've told them to look for three things: Confederate patrols, civilian traffic, and the Shenandoah road crossing.

  The hill country south of Lenalune is emptier than the country north of it. The ridges are steeper and the hollows are deeper and the cart track narrows to a single-wagon path that switches back and forth along the spine of a ridge before dropping into a valley that's thick with hemlock and rhododendron and undergrowth dense enough to swallow a column of infantry and never give it back. The air smells like wet earth and rotting leaves and the faint mineral tang of creek water running over limestone somewhere below us, and the only sounds are the column's boots on dirt and Gospel's iron feet and the creak of leather and the breathing of four hundred and eighty-five people moving south because north is death and east is death and west is mountains and south is the only direction that offers anything other than a grave.

  The morning is cool and overcast with a ceiling of gray cloud that sits on the ridgetops and turns the valleys into bowls of mist. Good weather for marching. Good weather for hiding. Bad weather for spotting cavalry at distance because the cloud cover kills the dust signatures that mounted columns leave in dry weather, which means Cobb and Ennis are my only early warning and they're a mile ahead and out of sight.

  Cool and overcast. Cloud ceiling on the ridgetops. Gunpowder stores are dry for now, but six hours of rain turns that sixty percent reliability at best, and half the muskets in 3rd Company still haven't been properly cleaned since the raid. Ranged effectiveness: full under current conditions. Under rain: minus forty percent and falling. The captured cavalry rations gave us a buffer, but the wounded are eating more than their share because healing costs calories, and Clementine's stretcher cases are pulling from the column's supply at double rate. Supply status: fourteen days at current consumption, ten if we pick up mouths to feed. Fatigue: 1st Company is fresh enough, four hours' sleep in the barn before march. 3rd Company got less, two hours at most, because Marsh had them breaking camp while 1st slept. Morale in 3rd: Steady, but they're running on pride and habit more than rest, and pride stops being fuel around hour twenty. The fifty-nine non-combat wounded are spread across both companies and seven of them need Clementine's attention twice a day, which means she's stopping the column or working on horseback, and neither option is efficient.

  I walk at the head of the column behind Gospel and in front of 1st Company, and I think about what I know and what I don't know and the gap between the two.

  I know Breckinridge is at Cold Harbor ford with the advance column. I know Tate has at least three screening companies, one of which is now ninety-six corpses in a creek bottom. I know the other two are operating north and south of Sills's sector, which means they're somewhere in this hill country, sweeping toward the Shenandoah road from the east. I know Sills's report is due in two days and when it doesn't arrive Tate will react. I know Beauregard's standing orders are to destroy on contact, no terms.

  I don't know where the other screening companies are. I don't know if Tate has more than three. I don't know what's waiting at the Shenandoah road crossing, whether it's open or watched or blocked by a force we can't see yet. I don't know what's on the other side of the road, what the terrain looks like, where the next settlement is, or whether the people there will open their doors the way Harwell opened hers.

  I don't know where we're going. I know where we're going away from, and right now that's enough, but it won't be enough for much longer. The men in this column are marching south because I told them to march south, and they trust me because I held the fort and blew the magazine and negotiated shelter and led a night raid that came back with horses and guns and two dead instead of sixty. That trust is a resource, and resources get spent, and when a captain runs out of trust the column stops moving and the war is over.

  I need a destination. I need a plan that goes further than "stay ahead of Breckinridge." I need to know what this army is for, beyond surviving, and I need to be able to answer that question before someone asks it, because someone will ask it soon, and "I don't know" is an answer that spends trust faster than anything except silence.

  Silas would've had an answer. Silas always had an answer, or at least a question that was better than the one you'd asked, and the question would lead somewhere that nobody else had thought to look. I don't have Silas. I have Phelps, who is excellent at counting things and organizing things and not particularly good at imagining things that don't exist yet. I have Mercy, who will fight anything I point her at and won't ask why until afterward. I have Clementine, who keeps men alive and doesn't concern herself with strategy. I have Marsh, who is steady and dependable and doesn't think laterally because thinking laterally wasn't in the NCO manual.

  I have myself. A captain who can see loyalty and alignment and whose soldiers will follow him into the dark, and who has no idea where the light is.

  That's the thought I'm sitting with when Cobb comes back over the ridge at a gallop.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  He pulls up hard enough that the captured horse slides on the loose shale and nearly goes down, and Cobb is off the saddle before the horse has stopped moving, which tells me everything I need to know about what he found before he opens his mouth.

  "Settlement ahead, Captain. Three miles south, in the next valley over. Big one, bigger than Lenalune. Maybe a hundred and fifty buildings along a river." He's breathing hard from the ride and his words come fast. "And there's smoke, Captain. The wrong kind. Black smoke from the south end of the settlement, and I could see people on the road moving north away from it. Refugees. Families with carts and livestock. Maybe two hundred, maybe more, and they're coming this way on the same track we're using."

  "Confederate forces at the source?"

  "I couldn't get close enough to see who set the fires without being spotted, but the smoke's coming from the south end and the people are running north, which means whatever hit them came from the south." He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "If it's one of Tate's screening companies, they're between us and the Shenandoah road."

  「Tactical Assessment: Settlement 3 miles south under attack. Estimated 150+ buildings. Source of attack: south end (probable Confederate forces, direction consistent with Shenandoah road approach). Civilian refugees: 200+ moving north on cart track toward Blue Coat column. Confederate force disposition: Unknown (could be screening company, could be larger). Complication: Refugees moving toward us will encounter column within 1-2 hours. If Confederate forces pursue refugees north, contact with Blue Coat column is likely.」

  The column behind me has stopped. Phelps is already moving forward with his notebook open, and Mercy is walking up from the middle of the column where she was riding beside Mama Thunder, and Marsh is coming from the rear at a jog. The command staff gathers because nobody needs an invitation when word comes down that the plan just changed, which is to say quickly and with the grim efficiency of people who've learned that plans change faster than the ink dries on them.

  "Talk to me, Cobb. Everything you saw."

  Two hundred refugees coming north on our road. A burning settlement between us and the Shenandoah crossing. An unknown Confederate force on the other side of it. And a column of four hundred and eighty-five soldiers with a bum golem and an empty hex-cannon that just used up the last of its quiet morning.

  Four hundred and eighty-five against an unknown number. Gospel's shoulder gives us twenty minutes of sustained combat before the bearing cooks itself. Mama Thunder is seven hundred pounds of dead weight on a pack horse until we find hex-shells to feed her. Two hundred civilians bearing down on us who'll need food and water and protection we can't guarantee. And a Confederate screening company, if that's what it is, sitting between us and the only road south that doesn't dead-end in the Blue Ridge.

  The numbers tell a simple story. The answer they demand isn't simple at all.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  * * *

  === CAMPAIGN STATE: YEAR 3, DAY 4 (MORNING) ===

  Location: Cart track, 3 miles north of burning settlement. Hill country south of Lenalune.

  Virtue & Reputation: 65/100 (Honored, slipping)

  Treasury: 124 Dollars

  Army: 485 soldiers (2 companies + HQ + 1 defector)

  - 1st Company: Lt. Phelps. 236 soldiers. Power: 455.

  - 3rd Company: Sgt. Marsh. 238 soldiers. Power: 440.

  - HQ Element: Cpt. Hughes. 11 soldiers (incl. Wilkes) + Mercy, Clementine, Decker. Power: 120.

  - Total Combat Power: 1,015. Morale: 52/100 (Steady).

  - Combat-Effective: 425. Non-Combat: 59 (wounded).

  - Mounted: 22 (scouts, runners, stretcher cases). Dismounted: 463.

  Golems:

  - Gospel: Operational. HP 52%. Full pressure. Shoulder field repair holding. 20-minute sustained combat limit (thermal feedback). Factory bearing needed.

  Hex-Cannon: Mama Thunder (0 hex-shells). On pack horse.

  Captured Hex-Pistols: 3x (low charge, ~4 shots each).

  Supplies: 2 weeks half-rations + 12 days cavalry rations (captured). 2,200+ rounds ammunition. 62 horses.

  Buried at Lenalune: Pvt. Adam Lott, Pvt. Wallace Innes (shallow graves behind church, fieldstone markers).

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