Remains Brave {New War Series Book 1}

1300 Hours

The beacon has a sound, I swear it does.

Rheon: Love was in the air that night.

1MNYRB: I wouldn't call it love. More like adrenaline influenced lust I would say.

Rheon: A few days before you were saying how certain you were that sort of thing wasn't going to happen at that point in your life.

1MNYRB: Things change by the minute in all things love and war related. Sometimes those things aren't mutually exclusive.

Rheon: That day put some strain on your relationships with the different factions within your good. Do you think this had any impact on the events that happen later on down the road?

1MNYRB: Looking back I completely understand Sofi's reaction, and Jax was justified for getting angry with me. At the time my survival instincts made me lose my temper faster than I normally would. We've talked about it since and there's no hard feelings. It was all for survival.

Rheon: Was Javi's body ever found?

1MNYRB: I didn't realize this but when we were hiding from the above assailant Ash had pinged our location in case it was a force that overcame us. We never found his remains between the ash of the fire and the length of time it took us to get back there, but we found the spot, and a stone was placed there to remember him.

Rheon: Sofi lost basically her twin brother that day. Did that bring any sort of pain for you thinking about losing a family member or losing your own brother with you guys running closer and closer to deaths door?

1MNYRB: I had a lot of regret and fear moving forward after watching Javi die. There is not much to compare the feeling of watching a troopmate die in front of you, let alone the close, basically family member to another troopmate. Yeah, I did have a lot of fear for my brother's life, and for every person's life in our group. We narrowly missed the feds so many times that day, so at the time I wasn't feeling the mourning and such, but that night the nightmares were merciless, and if it weren't for Dak, I probably would've been way worse off heading forward.

Rheon: How was the groups dynamic after Erik let Cash and his father's friends join the group knowing they weren't the most accepting members to join?

1MNYRB: It was definitely strained while I was with them the next day. Luckily from then on we didn't have much time outside of war efforts to talk about such problems. The two groups stayed away from each other for a while from what I've been told, but as the group grew closer with time and close calls, they grew to accept each other. By the time I made it back to the group they would talk a little, but that first day they stayed apart for everything pretty much.

Rheon: Why did Erik invite them to join your group, knowing how strained it would most likely be?

1MNYRB: Erik was very much all about promoting acceptance and working to bring opposites together to help move relations between strained groups to a better spot. He liked to change people's minds when it came to preconceived notions of other groups based off stereotypes. His view was that if all people knew was the stereotypes of another that they wouldn't understand how completely false those ideas would be. He knew how ignorant Cash's group was, and he took their group as a project to bring them around the idea that all people could be good members of society, and not the criminals they had thought the African American population encompassed. He felt he could change the minds of others through his actions, and for the most part he did. His example really moved race relations along, and I don't regret bringing the white supremacists together with their enemy one bit. Any man can change their views when faced with death.

Rheon: Why did Mr. Rice not accept the presidential nomination?

1MNYRB: Erik was a family man, and he wanted to focus on his children after the war. He was in my cabinet until his passing.

Rheon: What was the group like knowing the dangers moving forward to the city?

1MNYRB: We didn't really worry about the danger because we were always in danger. Every morning we woke up knowing it could be our last. We were nervous going to the city because of the increased probability of being caught, but it didn't cause any disruptions.

Rheon: Virginia was mostly supporter run at that point.

1MNYRB: At the time we didn't know that. I was running off old knowledge. The Virginia governor had turned supporter at that point, but Roanoke's mayor was still quite rebel. We had anticipated it being safe enough to visit.

Rheon: That doesn't sound like it was safe at all.

1MNYRB: The outskirts were. We underestimated them for the first and only time since.

Rheon: Were you on foot after you dropped the horses off?