To Alter or Abolish

One: Laying Plans

She’s halfway through Nevada when the DHS drone buzzes her rig.

Low, deliberate, black as a fucking wasp. The kind that doesn’t sting until you forget it’s there.

June doesn’t flinch. She just kills the cruise control, eases into the slow lane, and reaches down like she’s scratching her knee. Her fingers find the kill switch tucked behind the vent panel—custom-wired, unregistered, silent. One tap and the jammer kicks in.

The drone hiccups mid-air. Drifts. Loses lock.

Good. Let it wonder.

She’s already passed four checkpoints today, all of them running facial scans behind “random” searches. She knows the pattern. Every trucker worth her ink knows the pattern. The new America isn’t built on freedom—it’s built on freight. Freight keeps moving, or the cities burn. But she’s not moving freight anymore. Not really.

The manifest says frozen poultry. The manifest lies.

Inside that reefer trailer are three crates of solar inverter chips, three encrypted hard drives, and one woman from Coos Bay who hasn’t spoken since Elko.

This isn’t a route.

It’s a test.

June adjusts the mirror and catches her own eyes—grey, cracked at the corners, steady. The kind of steady you earn by watching people bleed for the wrong cause one too many times.

She drives in silence another ten miles before taking the exit for a closed weigh station. The chain-link gate is padlocked, the weigh lights dead. She rolls over the scale anyway, just out of habit. Then she backs the rig behind the abandoned maintenance shed and kills the engine.

No one follows.

She climbs down, boots crunching gravel, sweat already pooling in her armpits. She walks around back, pops the trailer, and leans in.

The woman is still crouched in the far corner, wrapped in a wool blanket, eyes wide but empty.

“You’re safe,” June says. “Feds won’t scan this place. Not tonight.”

The woman doesn’t answer.

June sets a jug of water down, then a bag of dried fruit. She doesn’t press. Trauma doesn’t like to be interviewed. She just closes the door again and lights a cigarette with hands that don’t shake anymore.

Then she reaches into her jacket, pulls out the ragged paperback, and opens it to a bookmarked page. Margin notes scribbled in truck stop pens. Coffee stains across the spine.

“All warfare is based on deception.”

She flips the page and mutters it out loud, like a prayer.

“The skillful leader subdues the enemy without fighting.”

From her boot, she pulls the burner. Taps out the message. Not yet sent. Not yet.

“M. Reyes – Port of Oakland – Systems Control. Still have access?”

June looks up. The drone is gone. The sun’s going down red and mean. In the distance, a train screams past on a line she used to trust.

She lights another cigarette.

Tomorrow, she crosses into California.

And the war begins—not with gunfire.

Not yet.

But with a woman they didn’t see coming.

And a single message no one can stop.