Brint leaned against the alley’s left wall, twisting his torso so the brunt of his weight was funneled onto his good arm. Slow, careful movements made it possible for him to lift the barrel of his rifle to the empty avenue in case something hostile decided to come stalking down its length. Eoran took up a position next to him, observing the spaces his sergeant’s eyes ignored.

Amstead’s army pressed ever onward across the Ossan landscape. A mountain range loomed to the north, breaking the horizon in a blend of reds and blues, hazy but nevertheless hungry—a hateful challenge always threatening, a topographical tear along the lacquertops of desk-tethered generals overseeing the arrangement of their ground forces. In the vast plateau before that change in elevation, towns and villages lay scattered. These hideaways were known to harbor insurgents masquerading as humble civilians; full of first time mothers claiming boys who, by traditional approximation, were not even close to being related. Any house became a safe house for Ossa’s guerilla rebellion, so Amstead saw fit to discourage such an effort with artillery. Gifts rained from the skies. First in propagandic flyers from unarmed single engine props, then in a flurry of shelling accented with the rapid chittering of cannon fire from low-altitude death dealers. The invading forces left the red clay plastered and pockmarked, then she sent in her clean-up crews.