Twenty years after the events of Tu'an, Collier Rashkil runs an intelligence network out of an underground church in the northern Shenandoah Valley. A hundred miles or so south, Henry Price runs a smuggling ring. Neither is aware the other survived the horrific last stand of the Ghosts. Life is hard: Collier is proscribed; Henry is one step ahead of arrest and execution, yet both have a measure of contentment. But then an old enemy confronts Collier as a new enemy attacks Henry, and a war already lost threatens to reignite and finish them, their families, and what's left of the country.