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CHAPTER ONE

The Hub, April, the fifty-sixth year of the Kurian Order: A newin the sleepy old resort town of French Lick, Indiana The roads have been cleared, the rail line up to Indianapolis reopened, and even the tiny airport has a neind sock, caenerator

It’s a well-chosen spot Beneath the layers of dirt and rust, the town is so

French Lick in its Gilded Age heyday sawcity folk to its two huge resort hotels in the woods of Southern Indiana It once was the seat of smoky back rooms where political prospects were reviewed and selected by the parties Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the last of the breed, chosen in this corner of Indiana in one of the conference rooms of the older of the two vast hotels

The popularity of the resort waned during the Interstate Age, but the second Gilded Age of the late twentieth century saw the two big old hotels restored to their forlory, especially the cavernous, creae indoor rotunda The natural beauty of the Hoosier National Forest had not changed

French Lick had a role to play in the chaos of 2022 During the last days of the United States government in its brief move to Indianapolis, the Kurian Order and its new adherentsthat broke up as left of US civil authority After that, the Grog armies moved on west to St Louis, and the Kurian Order returned to the East to overnment and education near the Atlantic Coast With no ain, save for a s headquarters eventually established by the Northwest Ordnance, the pre west froan and Indiana, to the borders of Chicago and the huge patch of still-productive farmland in Central Illinois

With a thriving new freehold in Kentucky and its attached nub at Evansville threatening the Ordnance, the vast Southern corporate state known as the Georgia Control, and potentially the patchwork of Kurian ganglia on the East Coast, so had to be done

A third try is inevitable

“I’ve heard we Cats have nine lives,” Alessa Duvalier said, waiting for the dusk to deepen “I’ve never known one to get past the first”

The freckled redhead was talking to herself, as people who spend the better parts of their waking hours outside and alone often do

It was a way to handle the fear, to vent it like a waiting stea pressure In this particular tierous, and fear was probably the worst of all The Reapers would pick up on it as easily as the soldiers would see her setting off Roman candles on the hillside

She’d learned over the years to cauterize her euessed was going on around her, she couldn’t let it in