PROLOGUE
The Day the Republic Shook
Night had teeth.
Wind pushed through the cedar branches in sharp breaths, carrying the sound of engines far below the ridge. Not one engine. Many. They came up the valley in a low chorus that the limestone caught and threw back, so that for a moment it sounded like the hills themselves were growling.
Then came the light. White and cold, slicing through the trees like the judgment of God.
For a long moment the Holler held its breath.
Dogs barked first. Kita came up off the porch boards at the Walker place with a low growl, deep in his chest, a sound Jack had heard maybe three times in six years. Then porch lights snapped on across the valley, one by one, small yellow squares blinking awake in the dark. The crack of boots on gravel followed. Then the metallic click of rifles being shouldered, a sound that carries farther at night than anyone would guess.
Voices rolled through the dark like thunder.
“Directorate Guard! Open your doors!”
The shout bounced off the limestone ridges and came back a half second later from the other side of the valley, so that for a moment it seemed to come from everywhere at once, as if there were not one voice at the gate but a ring of them closing in from all directions. Another beam swept the valley and caught the glint of metal roofs, the pale rectangles of mailboxes, a child’s bicycle tipped over in the grass where it had been dropped before supper. And behind curtains, in a dozen houses at once, the terrified eyes of families who had known this was coming and had hoped, the way people do, that knowing might be enough to keep it away.
At the far end of Summer’s Holler, Walt Briggs set down his welding rod, flipped up his hood, and stood for a three count in the dark of his own shop.
He was fifty-six years old. He had buried a brother, raised four children, and once welded a cracked axle on a logging truck in the middle of an ice storm with a flashlight held in his teeth. He had never in his life opened a door because a stranger told him to.
He opened this one anyway, because the alternative was letting them open it for him.
He stepped into the light. The gray just starting to show in his goatee caught the beam, and the hammer in his hand looked too natural to be called a weapon.
“You got a warrant?” he called.
