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time, this war would look mighty different.”
    “Well, but we were stabbed in the back then.” Walker sounded as positive as if he’d been there to watch the knife go home. “It’ll be a fair fight this time, so of course we’ll lick ’em.”
    He talked just the way Jake Featherston and Saul Goldman would have wanted him to. He talked just the way the President and his director of communications had been training Confederates to talk ever since Featherston took the oath of office. He thought the way they wanted him to think. He was the new Confederate man, and there were an awful lot just like him.
    Anne, in fact, had come to Charleston to put on a rally for the new Confederate men and their female opposite numbers. When a lot of those men would be going into uniform, and when, in due course, they would start coming back maimed or not coming back at all, they needed to be reminded of what this was all about. Speeches on the wireless went only so far. Nothing like a real rally where you could see your friends and neighbors jumping up and yelling along with you, where you could
smell
the fellow next to you getting all hot and bothered, to keep the juices flowing.
    A gray-mustached man who walked with a limp and carried a submachine gun led a gang of Negroes towards a merchant ship. The blacks wore dungarees and coarse, collarless cotton work shirts. Their clothes weren’t quite uniforms. They weren’t quite prison garb, either. But they came close on both counts.
    Kirby Walker followed the blacks with his eyes. “Lousy niggers,” he muttered. “We work ’em hard enough, they won’t have a chance to get themselves in any trouble this time around.”
    “Here’s hoping they won’t,” Anne said.
    “If they do, we start shooting first,” Walker said. “We’d’ve shot a few of ’em early on in the last war, we never would’ve had half the trouble with ’em we did. We were too soft, and we paid for it.”
    Again, he sounded as if he’d been there. This time, Anne completely agreed with him. She
had
been there. The Marshlands plantation, these days, was nothing but ruins. Before the war, she’d treated her Negroes better than anyone else nearby. And what had she got for it? Half—more than half—the leaders of the Red Congaree Socialist Republic came from her plantation.
    She muttered to herself. Not very long before, she’d been sure she found Scipio, her old butler, waiting tables at a restaurant in Augusta, Georgia. He’d been in the Congaree Socialist Republic up to his eyebrows, and he’d managed to stay hidden for more than twenty years after its last vestiges collapsed. She wanted him dead. She’d been so sure she had him, too, till the restaurant showed her paperwork proving the black man she thought was Scipio really was the Xerxes he claimed to be, and that he’d worked there since before the Great War.
    Anne muttered some more. She hated being wrong about anything. She especially hated being wrong about anything that meant so much to her. As far as she knew, that black man was
still
waiting tables at that restaurant. What would have happened to him if he really were Scipio . . . Her nails bit into the flesh of her palms. How she’d wanted that!
    And she’d been so very certain! Half of her still was, though she couldn’t imagine how that manager might have had faked paperwork that went back close to thirty years handy. Then she shrugged and laughed a singularly unpleasant laugh. Her gaze swung to the Negro work gang, which was hauling crates out of a freighter under the watchful eye of that half-disabled veteran with the submachine gun. Whether the Negro in Augusta really was Scipio or Xerxes, he might yet get his.
    “What’s funny, Miss Colleton?” Kirby Walker asked.
    “What?” Anne blinked, recalled from dreams of vengeance to present reality. “Nothing, really. Just thinking of what might have been.”
    “Not a . . . heck of a lot of point to that, I don’t reckon,” the