"Evie!" Sara whisper-yelled. "Evie! Come check this shit out!"

  "What?" The feline whispered back. "Have you found something– oh."

  "Check it ouuuut!" Sara excitedly whispered, wiggling her hips.

  "You are pissing on the dirt."

  "With a dick!" Sara said, jiggling it up and down for emphasis. Spray spttered across her boots. "How did I not think of this before now?"

  "What? I don't know. I would hope it is because you've never before had such a childish impulse."

  "Childish?" Sara asked, affronted. "Fuck that! This is practical as all hell. Do you know how paranoid I've been about getting poison ivy on my bare ass? Now I can stand and piss! This is amazing!"

  "Truly wondrous," Evie deadpanned.

  "You're just jealous."

  "Of course."

  Sara ignored her girlfriend's disinterest. This was a groundbreaking achievement. The development of the next generation of cannons, right in her pants. She'd have articles published on this, she swore.

  She eventually finished her bathroom break, still awfully pleased with herself as she tied her pants back into pce.

  She had ordered a stop for water and rest right around the apex of the day's heat, when the sun wasn't quite high overhead, but still burned furiously. As she emerged from the short cluster of young trees she'd used for privacy, the entire army slowly sprawled out before her. Evie folded herself up to Sara's, not quite close enough to be touching, but close enough to grab her if the need became apparent.

  Evie was not fully healed, her wound still knitting shut beneath her raw, pinkish skin, but she had outright refused to stay behind. She'd successfully called Sara's bluff, though that may have only been because she had healed enough to (mostly) take care of herself. Sara could only thank the gods that they'd never know if she really would have followed through with using the colr against Evie's will. The feline was mostly fit for battle, and mostly was good enough for them. It wasn't like they'd always gone into fights in the best of conditions, anyway.

  Sara herself felt different. Strange. But a familiar kind of strange. That might've seemed like an oxymoron, but it was true. She felt strange in a way that used to be normal. It was the strange old way she had made it through each and every day, back on Earth. Her muscles were profoundly sore, anxiety pounded in her head, and she welcomed the ache. It reminded her of getting home after a long day at work, her skin rubbed raw from blue jeans and safety gear, her skin red from the baking sun.

  She even had the safety harness, to complete the set of long-forgotten sensations. Of course, it wasn't really for safety, but it was still a harness. She began to wrap leather straps around her chest, thick and numerous enough to absorb multiple tons of weight. The wooden wheels of a cannon's carriaged creaked and jittered as she dragged it over the bumps that littered the dirt road, and each jostle had the leather digging deeply into her skin. She could feel a rash building, and it was only going to get worse. She would have quite literally killed for a horse to drag the cannons, but the few cavalry steeds they'd captured had ftly refused to be harnessed. Evie had expined that cavalry horses, being altered by the Levels of their masters, were unlikely to ever be of any use. That meant the new cannons had to be dragged by teams of volunteers, shed together like beasts of burden under the searing Tulian sun. Sara had proudly decred she'd drag one of the lighter cannons all on her own.

  It was a cim she was steadily beginning to regret.

  The entire army stretched out behind her. Three thousand men and women had marched through the morning in neat columns, boots raising a cloud of dust so massive it could be seen for miles. The front ranks marched just behind the cannons, rather than in front, to preserve the road for their fragile wooden spokes. They kept close, ready to rush in and protect the priceless weapons at a moment's notice. The Royal Army was only twenty miles away, within a rough day's march, and tension was so thick in the air Sara swore she could taste it.

  Yet, somehow, Sara barely felt affected herself. She was as carefree as she'd ever been, calmer than she had been in months. It took her a while to understand why, a long while, but when she was hauling a cannon all on her own, she had plenty of time to think. Eventually, she figured it out.

  She was fucked. She had next to no chance of winning. She was forcing herself to take on an impossible task, a fight she had no chance of winning, and she knew it.

  And what a relief it was. All her life, for as long as she could remember, she'd been the underdog. Caring about things no one else gave a shit about, fighting for causes that, deep down, she knew were hopeless. She'd been a borderline violent left-winger fighting against the unyielding titan of American capitalism. Living a life like that, a pervasive sense of nihilistic helplessness had been as much a part of her as her skin and bones.

  So, for some godforsaken reason, it felt damn good to be back on track. She was fucked, and she knew it. How neat was that? It was such a relief to know that there was only one thing left to do, only one outcome left to see to fruition. She was no stranger to throwing her all into something, putting her nose to the grindstone until it was chewing through bone, and that was all she had to do.

  "You are disconcertingly pleased with yourself," Evie said. She was walking beside Sara, rapier drawn, one hand resting on her revolver's grip.

  "About the pissing?"

  "No. Well, yes, about the pissing, but not that. Your entire demeanor since this march has begun is baffling. Before we exited the walls, you were nearly distraught. Now you are... well, giddy to discover a new form of relieving yourself. It's bizarre."

  "I know, right?" Sara wiped sweat from her forehead. "Weird as hell. But I can't wait to get to the fight."

  "Do you care to expin why?"

  Sara shrugged, still adjusting the straps to find a modicum of comfort. "Hard to say. Because it's all or nothing, I guess. I'm too damn tired of fucking around with all these maybes and should-I's and who-knows. At least I know what's going to happen next, no matter what."

  "Crity of purpose can be invigorating."

  "Sure, you can say it like that. If you want to be all fancy." The cannon's wheels rocked forward for a moment as she gave an exploratory pull, then caught a slight hitch in the road, rocking back. Sara swore under her breath. "Shit. Man, though. What I'd give to have some horses."

  "Yet another expense that will be stretching our coffers when the war is won. Acquiring a proper stock for breeding will be extraordinarily expensive."

  Sara cocked a smile at her girlfriend. "So you're actually thinking of what things are going to be like after the war, then? Not just assuming doom and gloom?"

  "Do not mistake me, Master. I doubt we have any chance of success in this battle. But as always, I pn for victory while preparing for defeat."

  "You're full of good quotes, y'know that?"

  "They are military maxims."

  "They belong on a fortune cookie."

  "I'll take that utterly inane statement as a compliment."

  Sara was about to say something back, but her attention was stolen away by the sight of the other cannon teams returning to their charges.

  Behind and beside the cannon she was hooking herself up to were other cannoneers, helping to pull their own burdens. The four original Napoleons were front and center, a pce of honor that Lieutenant Shale had insisted upon, with the newer iron cannons fnking them. With them lined up neatly during the army's break, it gave the illusion of a stately procession, and if it weren't for the fact that these were far from fanciful floats, Sara would have gone so far as to say it looked like a parade. But it wasn't. This was a dispy of the most lethal artillery this world had ever seen.

  If Sara had all the time and money in the world, every cannon on the field would have been made of gleaming bronze. Unfortunately, for the material cost of a single Napoleon, she could order four iron cannons. Tulian had only a single copper mine that wasn't colpsed, very few trained miners, and no native source of tin. Iron, on the other hand, was practically falling out their ass, because it was the only metal practical enough for mine operations to be maintained after the Kingdom had colpsed. Thus, the iron cannons.

  Of the thirteen cannons on the field, four were Napoleons, four were enchanted Ordnance Rifles, and five were something new– the first cannons that weren't copies of Civil War weaponry. They were twelve-pounders, using the same ammunition as the Napoleons, but made of thick bck iron. To hopefully stave off detonation, the cannon's metal walls were half again as thick as the Napoleons, and even had the reinforcing band of a Parrott rifle wrapping around the rear breech where the cannon would be suffering the brunt of the explosive charge. To compensate for the massively increased weight of the thick iron, their barrels were considerably shorter, axing their effective range from 1,600 yards to 800, at best. That was something that couldn't have been excused if she were fighting an enemy that had their own artillery, seeing as the they'd have been smashed to pieces at range, but it hardly mattered when the enemy Irregur archers couldn't reach 400 yards with their shots.

  Put simply, they were compromise weapons. Tools she never would have used if she had any other choice, but were now regrettably necessary. The artificers had hurriedly spped enchantments on the breech before Sara had marched away, but the reinforcements were rush jobs, better than doing nothing at all. She'd personally made it clear to the cannoneers serving the weapons that she had no idea how they would perform in the battle. They might jam, or be uselessly inaccurate, or even detonate without warning.

  Of course, that hadn't given a flying shit. The cannons were the ultimate symbol of Tulian defiance, as much a symbol of the burgeoning nation as Sara herself. Already several proposals had been brought to her for the official heraldry of Tulian, the medieval equivalent of a national fg, and every single one had featured a cannon front and center. As far as these volunteers were concerned, the risk of ten pounds of red-hot shrapnel scything through your intestines was was nothing next to working on a legend in the making.

  In fact, the Tulian people's obsession with firearms was reaching a nearly cult-like level of idotry. Sara didn't think the the deepest bayous of Louisiana had rednecks that loved guns more than the Republic's soldiers. When she'd first given them out, the troops held them like porcein ptes, nervous to even march with them in hand, much less fire them. Now they gripped their muskets like a lost lover's hand, rebelling against any order that would require them letting go of the weapons for even a few minutes.

  And as the weeks had ticked by and their familiarity with the weapons grew, she'd found another aspect of their burgeoning gun culture developing. One that was, at this very moment, rearing its ugly head. Her ears perked up as her Blessings caught, then brought to her attention, the sound of a growing scuffle.

  "FUCKing goddammit," she said, peeling off her harness. "Evie, can you help me out here?"

  The feline leapt to the task immediately, but kept her ears flicking back and forth for whatever Sara had noticed.

  "Another fight?" She guessed.

  "Not a fight yet, but it's sure on its way there."

  Sara threw off her harness, looked down at herself and realized sweat had soaked her shirt to nothing more than cloth-clung nudity, and stomped off anyway. The brewing argument was a half-mile away, but she covered the ground quickly, troops practically diving out of her way as they saw her approaching.

  "Hey!" She called as she reach the two once-arguers, who had upgraded themselves to combatants. Fists were being thrown back and forth with wild abandon, which wasn't ideal when there was a goddamn rifle as the object of a tug-of-war between them. "HEY!"

  She strode up and ripped the rifle out from between the man and woman. The force of it stumbled them both to the ground, but they didn't stop swinging at each other, their shouts devolving into irrelevant shit-slinging as they scrabbled in the dust. She stepped between them, catching their wrists in mid-swing.

  "Hey," she said once more, this time in a sickly sweet tone. She hit them both her best award-winning smile. "How are you two doing? Enjoying your brawl in the middle of the march? Having some fun with it?"

  "This fuckin' bitch stole my–" The man began to scream. His face turned to Sara, and the words died with a pitiful squeak. He'd probably been expecting some middle-ranked Sergeant, only for his eyes to widen to a ughable degree as he recognized The Founder of Tulian, The Chosen Champion of the Goddess Amarat, First Herald of the Powder Age, Sara Brown.

  "Uh. Um? Shit."

  "Yeah." Sara turned to the woman. "And the fuck was your problem?"

  "He was, uh, he came up to me and said I'd taken his Hot Rifle off him while he slept," she said. She tried to stand, but Sara's grip on her wrist was iron. She made the better choice of sitting cross-legged, like a child being lectured.

  Christ, she might as well be, Sara realized. I thought I told them no one younger than eighteen in this army. She looks like a preteen. But I guess if she was actually putting up a fight against a grown man, she's at least gotta have some kind of Css.

  "And why would either of you give a shit?" Sara asked. "A musket's a musket, and we've got almost all of them rifled by now. Who gives a shit which gun you're shooting?"

  "'Cause it's a Hot Rifle!" The man snapped, doing a worse job of controlling his temper, which was fair, considering he thought he'd been robbed.

  "A Hot Rifle?" Sara asked.

  "Yeah. You know 'em. The ones your wife made."

  "She's not my wife yet," Sara corrected, though it was half-hearted, considering her distraction. She turned around, looking at the musket that she'd thrown in the dirt. "Evie? Could you bring that over?"

  "Of course."

  While the feline retrieved the weapon, Sara gred down at the two soldiers. "If I let go of you, are you going to behave yourselves? Or are you going to keep acting like toddlers."

  "I was defending myself–"

  "And I was defending my goddamn gun–"

  "Will. You. Behave?" Sara's voice cracked like thunder, the force of the air rushing from her lungs blowing up a cloud of dirt twenty feet long. The two soldiers withered and covered their eyes from the dust, giving meek nods.

  Evie presented the firearm with its breech facing upward. "Here you are. It is indeed one of Hurlish's works. It is also loaded."

  The woman stared incredulously at the man. "You loaded it?"

  "In case we were ambushed!"

  "You were going to shoot me, you fucking bastard!"

  "That's enough," Sara snapped. Her Blessings had already told her that while both these soldiers were stupidly headstrong, neither were murderers. At least, beyond that which you could call any professional soldier a murderer. She dropped their wrists, accepting the weapon from Evie.

  Indeed, just as they'd cimed, Hurlish's new crest had been neatly engraved into the top of the breech, right where the bckpowder would sit beneath the iron.

  Back when Sara had opened up the manufacture of firearms to all of the city's smiths, she'd very quickly run into a problem. Though everyone was using the same blueprints for their weapons, despite her efforts the parts they created weren't truly interchangeable. The barrels were made by pounding glowing iron with a hammer, the flintlocks poured into casts and smoothed with worn files, and none of that was precision work. To the naked eye, the work of two smiths was mostly indistinguishable, but that was an illusion. The slightest of metal burs or offset metal grain could catch against other mechanisms, jamming the entire thing. If one part of a musket broke, you couldn't just swap it out with another gun's part; it had to be from the same smith, made by the same tools, or it would invariably jam.

  Thus, she'd started the rudimentary beginnings of an industrial inventory system. She ordered the smiths to create a personal crest, or logo, or bel– whatever you wanted to use, it didn't matter– and to begin marking the date that the weapon was completed. After all, with how dependent the weapons were on the tooling used to make them, something as simple as a smith buying a new iron file was enough to throw off the compatibility of parts made before and after the date of that new tool's purchase. If some Private came in with a busted flintlock, the quartermasters could look at the markings, find a part made by the same smith in the right time period, and fit it right in. Before she'd implemented that, it'd been a matter of trial and error, sometimes requiring dozens of attempts before a part that actually worked could be found.

  Sara, Evie, and Hurlish had argued for quite a while over what Hurlish's crest should be. Hurlish had wanted a symbol that represented her and Sara's work; something like H&S, arguing that since Sara had provided the design of the weapons, she deserved equal credit. Sara had fought back, insisting that all she did was conjure up someone else's design, and it was Hurlish that actually put all the effort in. After an hour-long back and forth, Evie had eventually taken Sara's side, settling the debate. Then the matter of what, actually, Hurlish's crest should be had consumed the next few hours. In the end, as Hurlish had once been known as "Hurlish of Hagos," they'd decided to keep the trend going.

  Every rifle out of Hurlish's forge was now marked with an initialization of her new title: "Hurlish of Tulian."

  Or, as written, "H.O.T."

  Sara had been pretty damn proud of that one.

  "The Hot Rifles are good," she told the two thoroughly cowed Privates, "but they are not this good. There's no good goddamn reason people should be fighting over them."

  "Well they are," the man said petuntly. "And I know she was the one that stole it, 'cause just yesterday she offered me a month's wage to swap guns." A month's fucking wages? Sara wondered, though she didn't voice her disbelief. The man kept talking, oblivious to her shock. "Now she's walking around today, Hot Rifle in hand, and mine's missing? Don't take much to put two and two together."

  "I traded for one from someone else, you stupid bastard." She looked ready to hit him again, and Sara stepped between them, preparing to stop it before it could start. "You really think you're the only one around with a Hot Rifle?"

  He scoffed. "Then who stole mine, huh?"

  "None of this matters," Sara snapped, "because the rifles aren't that different. They're all built the same, goddammit. The only reason there's a mark of who built it is to make the quartermaster's jobs easier."

  "That's bullshit, and everyone knows it!" The man snapped. As soon as the words left his lips, he cowered even further, remembering who he was speaking to too te. "With, uh, respect, ma'am. Respectful bullshit."

  Sara rolled her eyes. She didn't have time for this.

  "Alright, how about this? Tumok, you're going to do three things: first, you're going to go down to Captain Lask for remedial gun safety drills, because if you think it's smart to struggle over a loading fucking gun, I don't want you in my army. You're also getting a formal warning that one further instance of brawling in teh ranks, no matter the goddamn cause, will get you dishonorably discharged."

  "How do you know my name?" He asked. Sara ignored him. Her eyes swung to the right, where the woman sat.

  " Paal, you are going to expin to your Sergeant, in detail, who you actually got that rifle from, how much you paid, and if no one can back up your cim, you're going to be written up on charges of theft of cssified equipment, under penalty of dishonorable discharge. Neither you nor the person you got it from own that weapon, soldier. They're property of the state, and they're not yours to own or barter. When I think up whatever the proper punishment for that is, you'll be first in line to suffer it."

  She shouldered the rifle, yanking them both up by their colrs. "And the both of you, assuming you're cleared of those charges, will be spending every evening training under Sergeant Ham for close-combat lessons." Their eyes widened. Sergeant Ham was by far the most maligned Sergeant in her army. He was so hated amongst the troops that if he hadn't been so extraordinarily skilled at teaching unarmed combat, she would have drummed him out of the service months ago. "Why?" Sara asked, preempting their questions-ssh-pleading. "Because that fight I just walked up on was fucking pitiful. I've seen schoolkids throw straighter punches than you twoo. I'm surprised neither of you broke your wrists."

  "That's–"

  "Nope," Sara snapped. "We've reached the point where you have two options: saluting and saying 'Yes ma'am,' or getting your asses thrown in jail." Sara paused, smirking. "Also, you're both banned from using Hot Rifles for the foreseeable future. I'll inform your Sergeant of that shortly, and it'll only be at their discretion that this particur punishment will be loosened. Now, what do you say?"

  They exchanged gnces, then both straightened, saluting firmly. "Yes ma'am."

  "Good."

  Sara kept the Hot Rilfe on her shoulder as she walked away, satisfied with her handling of the scuffle, if not the fact it had happened in the first pce.

  "You know, Master, at least one of your comments was inaccurate. I received the reports ofThe H.O.T. rifle's test firings recently. They are a dramatic improvement over any other handheld firearm in the army."

  "Yeah?" Sara asked, lowering her voice a bit. Best not to have the General herself feeding problematic rumors. "How much so?"

  "Well, for a baseline, your father cimed the Springfield Model 1862, when firing minié balls, was accurate up to 500 yards. Among the selected weapons from various smiths, many were only able to reliably strike a human-sized target at a range of 300 yards."

  "Fuck. Well, that's not great, but with all the smoke, we're usually fighting well under that. Not to mention the fact that none of them are well-trained enough to even hit at those kinds of ranges."

  "True," Evie hummed, sliding her own rifle off her back. It had been one of the earliest 1862 rifles Hurlish had made, and since it had been going to Evie, she had bored over it for far longer than any ter example. "This particur rifle, Master, was proven to strike within one foot of its aiming point at just over 900 yards. The other examples of Hurlish's rifled works, after filtering out her apprentice's examples, performed simirly, being accurate at 700 or 800 yards."

  "That's... damn," Sara eloquently intoned. "So they're beating genuine, factory-made rifles. That's pretty insane."

  "Hurlish theorized it is more to do with your bolstering of her Levels than any personal skill, though I suspect we will both disagree on that point. For all her outward arrogance, she is remarkably humble at her core. Regardless, at her Fourteenth Level, she has reached a height that few non-elven smiths dare to dream of."

  "I remember her talking about it, but not that dramatically. She was bitching that her Skills had outgrown her actual, y'know, practiced skill. She didn't have a fraction of the knowledge required to take advantage of what her Levels were giving her."

  "Just so. Which is why I feel the superb quality of her weaponry is more easily attributed to her own talent, rather than her Champion-bolstered Levels. Regardless, the stark superiority of a certain selection of our weaponry does have far-reaching tactical implications."

  Sara and Evie reached the cannon she'd volunteered to drag. Her girlfriend helped her into the bulky harness as they talked.

  "You're wondering if we should concentrate the Hot Rifles, then," Sara guessed. "Maybe put them behind the lines up on some hill, use them as snipers. If we spread them out enough, the smoke shouldn't throw off their aim too hard."

  "Precisely. But there are risks."

  "The Knights."

  "Mm." Evie cinched a belt down tight, checking that it didn't pinch Sara's skin. "If they manage to reach the distributed sniper contingent, they would easily run them down. Not only would we lose our most skilled rifle-armed troops, the enemy would doubtlessly capture a great number of our most effective weaponry."

  "That won't matter in the middle of battle," Sara said, before pausing, considering. For all Evie said she was a tactical commander, rather than strategic, her political acumen always lent her a perspective Sara cked. "You're worried about the second war, though. When they come at us again, maybe with weapons they copied off Hurlish's work."

  "It is something I have considered." Evie reached around Sara's shoulders, buckling the final strap. She gave it a firm tug, testing its hold, then stepped back. "Of course, we must survive this war before we begin to worry about the next, but no nation was ever born from short-sighted thinking. It is a difficult line to walk."

  "You're telling me," Sara grumbled. She stood up on her tip-toes, checking to see how close the army was to readying their march. She was growing impatient. She didn't intend to meet the enemy in battle today, but she still wanted to cover as much ground as possible. Every hour of march was another hour that Graf could be preparing his defenses, shifting his position as more and more reports of her army's disposition poured in.

  As she finally began to pull the cannon once more, the army lurching into ponderous motion, Lieutenant Shale made an appearance.

  "I like the leather getup," she said, by way of greeting.

  "I don't," Sara huffed. "This shit ain't exactly easy on the skin."

  "Easy on the eyes, though."

  Evie suddenly bolted forward, ears perked high, tail ramrod straight.

  "You!" She poked a finger into Shale's chestpte.

  "Me?" The artillery lieutenant asked, taking a bewildered step away.

  "You are the one Master taunted me with, all those months ago."

  "Huh? Oh! Oh, yeah." Shale ughed. "Yeah, that was me. Took you a while to figure it out?"

  "Of course it did," Evie said, throwing her hands in the air. "You fucked like a blushing virgin, not a veteran commander. Were you really so pliable?"

  "What can I say?" Shale shrugged. "Your girl's got a good cock, and she knows how to use it. Hard to do much more than lie there and take it."

  "And you knew that I would be receiving the sensations of Master's body, then?"

  Shale grinned lecherously. "Oh, yeah. That was hot as hell. Little bit worrying at first, didn't want to screw anything up while you were out in the field, but Sara said she had a general feel that you were just bored at the time, which made it fine. And then the fact that you couldn't do anything about it? Just feel her plowing me? Oh, yeah. That made it even better."

  Evie's tail broke from its rigidity, taking up a nguid left-to-right swipe, while her ears rexed, fur fttening. Shale had said the right thing.

  "Well," she purred. "It seems you and Master haven't found much time since that isoted event, it would seem." Evie raised an eyebrow. "Why not?"

  "That an invitation?"

  "It's not not an invitation."

  The two women had begun to close the gap between each other as they spoke, until their chests were nearly touching. Sara, who normally would have been perfectly happy to watch this develop, was forced to butt in.

  "Alright, dies, break it up. We've got shit to do. Shale, what'd you come over here for?"

  "Permission to halt the march before sundown, ma'am," the lieutenant replied, easily slipping back into military formality. "Nine of our thirteen guns have never been fired outside the test range. I want the crews drilling on them at least once before the battle."

  "Our powder supply is incredibly limited, if you'll recall," Sara said.

  "Limited for a siege, sure," Shale half-agreed. "But for one big battle? It oughta st us. And either way, even if we used up too much powder practicing, I'd rather my crews were actually hitting something with however many shots they have left."

  Sara pursed her lips, considering. Halting the march early to drill the cannoneers would be a risk. It would give Graf even more time to prepare his defenses, and it would let any nearby scouts take an account of her force's capabilities.

  On the other hand, both what Shale had said and Evie's earlier points bounced around Sara's skull. They had rifles now, good, accurate rifles, but the army barely knew how to use them. Every shot they'd fired after the first had always been popped off near-blind, smoke obscuring the battlefield. Sure, the rifles could hit five hundred yards, but could the soldiers? She doubted it. And in this fight, range was going to be everything.

  "Fine," Sara said. "We'll halt three hours before sundown. Pick your targets and get to it, because the second it gets dark, I'm calling it quits. The troops are going to need their sleep. Also, talk to the colonels about where you're going to set up. I'm going to be drilling the rest of the troops in long-range shooting, if we can manage to organize it on such short notice. Don't want a cannonball ripping through our own troops."

  "Perfect," Shale beamed. "I'll get right on it."

  As Shale left, Evie sidled up closer to Sara, pressing against her side properly.

  "Really, Master? Her?"

  "Are you kidding me?"

  "She's not particurly attractive, at least physically."

  "Sure, but have you seen what she's like with those cannons? She kisses them between every shot, Evie. She's crazy as shit."

  "So?'

  "Crazy's hot."

  "That's..." Evie trailed off, reconsidering what she was about to say. "Fortunate, I suppose, for me."

  Sara ruffled the feline's ears, just enough to tease. "Oh, c'mon. You're not crazy. Just... manic. And angry. And okay, maybe a little bit crazy."

  "As I said. Your tastes are fortunate for me." Evie reached up to adjust her hair, which had begun to unravel in the Tulian humidity. "What about Hurlish, though? She's by far the sanest of us."

  Sara snorted. "Eve. Evie, babe. She's got every single wall in our house covered in weapons. Literally every single wall."

  "Point taken." Evie finished clinching her hair back into pce, then eyed Sara's harness. "Well? Are we ready to begin the march to our doom?'

  "As ready as we'll ever be."

  Sara took a deep breath, then began to tug. The cannon's wooden carriage groaned, creaking, and then finally began to lurch forward. At the sight of their General beginning to move, the army began to creep forward, kicking up a cloud of dust that began to spiral up into the sky.

  Tomorrow, Sara thought. It all comes down to tomorrow.