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Chapter One
“The smoke-smell is never going to come out of this room.”
Leon Hess rolled out his map of Southern Tava onto the huge, sturdy table in the center of the room. “Open a window, then.”
“Yeah, obviously, but that’s not going to be enough.” Joan picked her way through busted furniture and chunks of plaster and threw open all the windows she could reach—even the broken ones.
Leon ignored her and grabbed a few things to weigh down the curling edges of his map: half a chair leg, a couple hunks of rock, the used canister of a smoke grenade. Once the map was spread out beneath him, he surveyed it with his hands braced on the table. He pulled a red pencil from his pocket and tapped it a few times on the wooden surface. He took a deep breath, swallowed, stood up straight, pulled his shoulders back, and then tapped it a few more times on his palm.
“Did you cross it off yet?” Garrett strode into the room, and his exuberant voice with his still-there rural accent bounced off the bullet-pock-marked walls. He had a cut over his forehead that had been bandaged but needed to be redressed.
Leon shook his head. “Not yet. I was just about to.”
“It’s just a mark on a paper, Garrett.” Joan tsked but still came to watch as Leon again leaned over the old map—marked up with various colors of lines, Xs, circles, and words—and poised his pencil over the dot labeled Ralscoln.
Then Leon slowly and deliberately circled the city and wrote: Retaken.
Garrett let out a whoop, and even Leon allowed himself a small, tense smile. He stared at the words for a second, letting them sink in.
Joan put her hand on his shoulder. “We did it.”
Leon showed her a slightly less tense smile and nodded. “For now.”
Garrett clapped his hand down on Leon’s other shoulder and stared at the map with a grin. “Finally! Well, this was fun. I gotta go see about the barricade.”
“Garrett,” Leon called to him before he left. “See who of the soldiers are ready to move to the front. We can only give them another day of rest. This is just getting started.”
That sobered even Garrett. The younger man nodded crisply and disappeared out the ruined doorway.
Joan sighed and moved around to the other side of the table. They both trailed their eyes up to the northern edge of the map, and eventually, Leon pointed to the numerous small circles in green ink dotted throughout the continent.
“What’s the status of all the orbital and atmospheric guns?”
“We managed to take maybe eighty percent of them?” Joan pulled a pen from her pocket and started making small marks next to some of the circles. “So we don’t exactly have air superiority, but we can definitely blast any Klah’Eel ships out of the sky that get within Southern Tava air or orbit space.”
Leon raised his brows and nodded. “That’s better than I expected.”
“Yeah, I was pretty proud of us, actually.”
“And what about all the other cities?”
“No surprises there.” Joan pulled out another color and started marking the continent’s scattered small cities and towns. They were numerous but minor—Ralscoln far outstripped them all in size. “The Klah’Eel in each one with a Resistance cell will be too busy fighting our people to help out the main force. And any of the cities without a Resistance cell never had enough Klah’Eel to be a problem anyway.”
Leon watched her mark which cities had the most fighting and which were already primarily held by them or the Klah’Eel. The people in the cities outside of the main thrust of the war would simply have to hang on and hope for the end of it. But Leon knew from experience that hanging on was never simple.
Leon turned his attention to the line of cities along Southern Tava’s northern border. “Tell me about the cities at the front.”
Joan tapped her finger over Yol, Kaston, and Loral.
“Yol doesn’t have enough food stockpiled to defend against a siege—some of it got ruined when a ship’s water tank leaked,” she said. “And Loral doesn’t have enough ships to support an evacuation if we lose it.”
Leon nodded and knocked a knuckle against the table’s wood as he leaned over his map. He glanced up at Joan when she didn’t continue. “And what about Kaston?”
Joan made a face. “There’s just…some interesting intel coming out of Kaston.”
Leon straightened. “What sort of interesting intel, Joan?”
“Some of the inventory numbers don’t line up.” She crossed her arms and pursed her lips. “Some of the operations have been randomly foiled by a stray patrol. Things like that.”
