I think everyone expected it would be the war of conquest all over again, a united and under-equipped Lathraí army facing off against an army that outclassed them a thousand times over. Two sides, clear-cut lines, a good old-fashioned victory.

The fault lines spanned Astera like spiderwebs, however. When things fell apart, they shattered into a thousand pieces. Sostrate’s words seemed even more prophetic as we sat on Brygos’s nephew’s porch in Aisoposí listening to the radio. The polizí can handle one march of ten thousand people in the street. They cannot handle ten marches of a thousand people, a hundred of a hundred.

Even with the original resistance in Seisa either destroyed or driven out, they could not contain the embers borne on the wind by that defeat. Every city with a Lathraí presence was boiling with unrest. It seemed every hour on the radio was the announcement of another bombing, another terrorist action, or another crackdown by the State.

Thaïs handed me a plate heavy with stuffed grape leaves, coarse-grained bread, and grilled chicken covered in salt and pepper. “This isn’t good,” she said with a wave of her hand towards the battered radio. “Did you hear what they said about the Burning Star?”

I shook my head. “Is that one of ours?”

Thaïs sat down beside me on the steps. We were still four days from the Zelen Valley and a chance at creating a secure place. “No. Calling them zealots would undersell them,” she muttered. “They pull from both sides. There is no ethnicity in the eyes of God, only the believer and the despicable. Half their members were anti-government militias already. Now they’ve stopped listening altogether. There’s a lot of them, Karsa.”

“You know them?” Brygos emerged with his own plate, popping a stuffed grape leaf into his mouth. He chewed thoughtfully.

“They have a special place in their hateful, shriveled hearts for prostitutes.” Thaïs’s jaw was so tight she could barely speak. “One of my girls moved to Epiktetos, where there’s a lot of them. They made her a necklace of a tire and gasoline, then set it on fire. Now they’re off whatever piece of dental floss was holding them vaguely in check.”

Brygos’s eyes widened. “That’s horrible!”

Her eyes focused on the dirt at the foot of the steps, watching a small trudging line of ants carrying off a few crumbs of bread. “Didn’t even make the news.”

I put a hand on her shoulder. “We will fight them with everything we have. They are just as dangerous to a free and safe place for us as the state.”

“How many sides can we fight a war on, Karsa?” A tinge of hopelessness was creeping into Thaïs’s voice. Whatever her usual confidence led people to believe, doubt was a powerful foe that even she wrestled with.

“As many as we have to.” I sighed a little. “We need more of us, though.”

Brygos sighed. “I was following the news as we drove. There’s probably twenty or thirty Lathraí factions operating in our half of Astera alone, along with a few big splinter groups from the government’s side. I don’t know how many people each have, but the fighting has been vicious near the old border.”

We were further south and east than that old line, the same one our grandparents had fought so bitterly to defend. I wonder how horrified they would have been to see us now, splintered by generations of propaganda and concerted effort by those in power to break our connections to each other. “If we can form alliances and connections, there is hope. First, we need to make it to Zelen and push out the garrisons there,” I said with a confidence I only half felt. “They will likely have better plans than I do.”

Thaïs ran her fingers through her hair, carefully deliberating before speaking. “There is something else I was going to bring up.”

I bit a piece of chicken off of my skewer. Whether or not I felt like eating, I had to in order to keep going. Life was a ruthless series of calculations for the next battle. Every day when we hid the trucks and bunkered down to sleep between villages, I spent my time with Thaïs teaching her how to best use a rifle and a pistol, skills my parents had ensured were so deeply ingrained in me that even Sostrate had found little to teach. “What?”

“Your name, Karsa.”

My brow furrowed at that. “What about it?”

“The entire country knows the name Endeis Mardas, the girl who martyred herself for the cause in front of the nation,” Thaïs said with her usual blunt honesty. She knew how much the reminder of my sister’s fate hurt me, but soldiered on anyway. “If you want to avoid being held up as a symbol and being kept from the front lines, you had better find another name besides Mardas to wear.”

I knew she was right. “You had some thoughts, I assume?”

“I do.” She took a deep breath and then let it out slowly. “What about Zafeiri?”

My heart knotted painfully in my throat. “Sostrate’s family name?” I lowered my head slightly, feeling entirely unworthy of even the name of the woman who died fighting for our escape. She was a friend whose loss I will grieve until the day I die.

“If there is anyone who should have her name, it would be you. A reminder of those who didn’t make it this far, and a promise to see things through.” Thaïs bumped my shoulder with her own, trying to offer some comfort.

Brygos gave me a smile. “Karsa Zafeiri is a fine name.”

The harmonics felt right, even if I wasn’t entirely certain. I drew in a deep breath, pulling in the memories of Sostrate like life itself. “Alright.”

Brygos ruffled my hair with an uncle’s affection. “I will tell the others. Eat up.”

Thaïs smoothed out my hair after he stepped away, flicking a few stray strands back out of my face with deft movements of her fingers. “Do you want to talk about it, Karsa?”

I shook my head and turned my attention down to my food. It was a mechanical thing, eating. Just one mouthful after another until I was confident my stomach was full. “I appreciate the thought, but you don’t have to do that.”

“Maybe not,” she allowed, “but I want to.” A tired but sincere smile flashed across her face. “I know I didn’t know her as long or as well as you did, but Sostrate was a rare person.”

I closed my eyes, trying not to think of the conflagration in Seisa. Bile rose in my throat at the memory of smoke and flames, dust and the thunder of bombs. “I can’t…talk about when she…”

“Hey.” Thaïs put an arm around me and gave me a comforting squeeze. “I’m not asking you to go anywhere you can’t, Karsa. Let’s spend some time with the good times, mm?”

I nodded and pulled in a deep breath. “What do you want to hear?”

“Meliton said she was quite the cook.”

Something about the innocence of the remark soothed my nerves. It helped to think about Sostrate without the dark shadows of war looming overhead. “I think if things had been different, she would have been happy running a bakery. Her bread was a religious experience.”

Thaïs snorted at that, lips curving into a smile. “Who knew you prayed with your stomach?”

I shrugged a little. “You missed out. The crusts always had just the perfect amount of crunch and she could get more flavor out of flour, water, and salt than any mere human being had any right to. She fussed more over buying flour than a mother hen over her eggs. Even with the shortages, there was always fresh bread in her kitchen and spicy tea, ready for someone with an empty stomach or a hurting heart.”

“She brought me tea once,” Thaïs said softly. “Tea and honey-drops.”

“Honey-drops?”

“They’re little oat cookies sweetened with honey, from the northern parts of Astera. I know you’re a proper southern girl, but I came from the giant sprawl of industry and concrete up there. Honey-drops are about the only good thing to come out of that mess.”

I couldn’t imagine being so far out of our world, so disconnected from the culture that our roots delved deeply into. “That must have been difficult. How did you end up there?”

“My parents were boarding school graduates.” The words were caustic on her tongue, laced with a heavy dose of bitterness. “I suppose an education is all well and good, but they didn’t even remember their own language by the time it was over…or maybe they were afraid to speak it. Not that we had any neighbors who were Lathraí to talk to. I only made it through primary school before I bolted south. I was going to live with my grandmother in Seisa, I told myself. She was dead by the time I made it that far, but there were plenty of other people ready to scoop me up.”

“I’m sorry.” There were horror stories about those schools, though by the time my parents were reaching the dangerous age, the practice had stopped in the south. It was impractical to try to corral children when their parents could so easily hide them out in the mountains and desert—and it was too dangerous to provide those feral ones with an education.

“I’m not. Everyone up there wanted to civilize me, starch out the desert from my skin. I didn’t start believing I was beautiful until I was away from them. Maybe a life of crime and vice in the south was difficult, but I prefer people spitting in my face openly to doing it behind my back and facing me with that condescending smirk.” Thaïs left her arm looped around me for just a moment longer before reluctantly drawing back and refocusing on her food. “I guess I’ve always had an independent streak.”

I smiled at that last comment. “Understatement of the century, Thaïs,” I teased gently.

“Hey, I know what I like: not being told what to do. I enjoyed the brothel. It was fun most of the time, I made more money than I would have working some menial gig, and I felt like I had control over my life’s direction. People took their cut, but safer than street work for sure.” Her mouth twisted slightly, restraining words for a moment, but they slipped out quietly after a pause. “We had each other.”

My hand curled around hers and gave a tight squeeze. Neither of us really had anything left except the revolution. Nothing made sense except the war, and even that probably would not have held up to scrutiny if we gave it any. We kept moving forward all the same, harboring that deeply rooted hope not only that others would be spared what we had endured, but that it would all mean something at the end.

“Sorry, Karsa. Didn’t mean to bring the mood down.”

I shook my head. “Thank you for letting me talk about Sostrate’s cooking, Thaïs.” I knew better than to thank her for sharing any piece of her story. Nothing seemed to shut her talking down faster than drawing attention to her own vulnerability.

Thaïs shrugged a little. “It’s good to talk about happier times. Maybe then we can pretend we’re going to see them again.”

“You think we won’t?” I prodded her in the ribs. “One of us has to be the optimist, Thaïs.”

She rolled her eyes and gave me a long-suffering sigh. “You know you are.”

The laugh that bubbled out of me surprised us both. “I guess so,” I said, embarrassed when the sound faded. In the distance, thunder rolled out across the valley. A few flashes lit up the sky in the distance, my head turning to catch them. It looked like cloud-to-cloud lightning, lacking the regularity of a bombardment or firefight.

“You should do that more.” When I glanced over at her, she was smiling again. “The laugh, I mean.”

“It’s going to rain,” I warned. “The weather changes fast up in the mountains.”

Thaïs stuffed her last bite of chicken into her mouth and stood up. “Might as well enjoy the roof while we have it.”

As we traveled towards the Zelen Valley, more and more people moved that way with us. Brygos and Zita had friends and relatives in every village along the way, just as they’d promised, and there were always at least a handful ready to join the fight even if their elders didn’t approve. We always brought the warning that the war would come to their doorsteps, but many would not believe us until it actually happened.

I followed her into the little house, picking up the little portable radio. It was getting interference now from the storm. The floorboards creaked beneath my feet as I followed her into the kitchen where Brygos and his nephew, Iakkhos, were playing cards and drinking tea. Zita had her young son trapped between her knees so she could trim his hair with a minimal amount of fidgeting getting in the way.

“The storm’ll be good, even if it dumps rain like a firehose,” Brygos observed. “They can’t bomb us through that, not with any accuracy.”

Iakkhos scratched at his thick beard. He was a man so hirsute that he probably went up a shirt size any time someone got him riled. “They’ve been busier with the main roads. These side tracks and the little villages barely get any attention.”

I sighed. “For now.”

He shrugged, looking over at me. “Not much we can do about that.” There was a simple sort of pragmatism to Iakkhos. He spoke ponderously and infrequently, with a weight to every word he used. He had a pipe, and the motions associated with that were most of his conversational ability. You don’t simply smoke a pipe: you pack it with tobacco, tamp it down, finesse it lit with a match—and our matches were terrible things made of cardboard, so that could take time. Then came the puffing, the gesturing, the prodding of the air with the stem. I think he liked having it so he could blow smoke rings and look thoughtful with an extra air of distinguished refinement.

I didn’t mind the blue smoke. It was sweeter and lighter than the tobacco we had from Seisa, with less of that horrible taste of tar. His blend was standard for the area, with a smell of vanilla and cardamom mixed in.

It made for less challenging rolling too, so he’d given me a big paper bag of the stuff in a display of charity I could never repay him for. I still had enough rolling papers from Meliton to keep me supplied until we reached Zelen, or so I hoped. I burned through them slowly enough, savoring the smell and taste of something new while getting that nicotine fix. If all else failed, there was always some kind of paper to be found.

It wasn’t long before the rain came, drumming down hard on the roof. Even with leaks dripping into buckets, I slept almost soundly in that attic, as close as I ever came, sleeping with my face to the door, bunkered down on the floor. Thaïs slept back-to-back with me, facing the window. We both curled around our weapons, well aware that our safety was a feeble illusion that might not last until we were ready to move again.