Perfection: The New Confederacy, #3

By Marella Sands

Baton Rouge is the most alien place agent Delilah Thorn has ever been. Everything from the local cuisine to the alligators to the French-speaking populace works to keep her off-balance. Thorn is surrounded by potential enemies, a religion she does not understand, and deceit. Can she succeed in sorting through the conflicting information to understand why Louisiana has begun closing its death camps and has started to forge its own way independent of the rest of the Confederacy?

Dane Rook has finally been cleared to go into the field full-time. Though it means time away from his personal life, he is excited to get back to what he does best, this time in a place he's never before visited: Louisiana. He is to be back-up to his old partner, Delilah Thorn. But forces conspire to keep them apart and his mission appears to be over before it even begins.

The bayous hold many secrets, and their waters are deep and dark. Can Rook find Thorn, and together, can they determine who is friend, who is foe, and do their part to support those trying to bring Louisiana out of the darkness?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Untreed Reads
• Release date: Nov 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798888601402

Book preview

CHARACTERS

Abernathy LeCroix – governor of Louisiana

Adjoa – one of the people who lives in Perfection; friend of Ellenora LeCroix’s

Alouette – a teenaged girl that works in Madame Bois D’Arc’s shop

Callum Durocher – friend of Abernathy LeCroix

Chrissy – Rook’s girlfriend

Dane Rook – Union agent, former partner of Delilah Thorn, a native of Kentucky

Delilah Thorn – Union agent placed on Pritchard’s staff as Danielle Ashbury

Ellenora LeCroix – the governor’s wife

Etienne – a man rescued from one of the camps, loyal to the governor

George Threadfell – sheriff of Baton Rouge

Johann Stahl – consultant from the German Empire assigned to Louisiana

Lois Levallier – Governor LeCroix’s secretary

Madame Bois D’Arc – the owner of a small shop near the governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge

Mayfield Porter – Thorn’s significant other, undercover as a janitor at the state museum next to the governor’s mansion; never uses his first name

Miss Frannie – Underground Railroad depot leader

Miss Valerie – Porter’s landlord, a former member of the Underground Railroad

Morris – Underground Railroad depot leader from Perdition, Arkansas, married to Captain Lynne Jensen, a Free States Special Ops agent

Obadiah – member of the Baton Rouge depot of the Underground Railroad

Reginald Pritchard – Free States’ ambassador to Louisiana

Remy Bayou Man Arceneaux – a cousin of Abernathy LeCroix’s

Roger Duff – an undersecretary in the newly-formed Office of Confederate Relations

Silas Bradenton – president of the Confederacy

Travers du Champ – lieutenant governor of Louisiana

STATES OF THE UNION

Colorado

Connecticut

Delaware

Illinois

Indiana

Iowa

Kansas

Kentucky (Occupied Territory – never seceded but opposed the Union during the Great War)

Maine

Maryland

Massachusetts

Michigan

Minnesota

Missouri

Montana

Nebraska

New Hampshire

New Jersey

New York

North Dakota

Ohio

Pennsylvania

Rhode Island

South Dakota

Tennessee (Occupied Territory – captured from the West during the Great War)

Vermont

West Virginia

Wisconsin

Wyoming

STATES OF THE FREE STATES OF AMERICA (FORMERLY THE EASTERN CONFEDERACY)

Florida

Georgia

North Carolina

South Carolina

Virginia

STATES OF THE WESTERN CONFEDERACY

Alabama

Arkansas

Louisiana

Mississippi

MAP

HISTORY

The rout of Gettysburg in early July 1863 almost saw the end of the Union, but Lee was unable to capitalize on his success and did not capture Washington, D.C. However, the public was so dismayed by the performance of Lincoln and his generals that George McClellan went on to win the 1864 presidential election. By 1865, the McClellan-Davis Accords had brought an end to the war and the dream of a unified United States.

The Union realized that leaving its capital on the banks of the Potomac overlooking Virginia was strategically unsound, and so the capital was moved to Philadelphia, and then, finally, to New York City. The country continued to build its industrial base, and with ports on the east coast and access to the St. Lawrence Seaway, trade with other nations continued much as it had before the war. Treatment of minorities remained poor for some time, especially toward the Native Americans in the western half of the nation, but ultimately, civil rights were extended to all. Yet a lingering paranoia about British influence coming across the Canadian border, and a deep-seated fear of the Confederacy, kept the Union on its toes. Security became a national obsession.

Meanwhile, the Confederacy split in two shortly after the war over the issue of slavery. The Eastern Confederacy gradually abolished the institution, though minorities were required to live in designated zones and could not vote, attend university, or serve on juries. Eventually, minorities were allowed to open their own universities and hospitals. The Western Confederacy, with its weak central authority based in Birmingham, became more and more insular. Slavery continued well into the 20 th century.

When the Great War broke out in Europe in 1914, the Union allied itself with the British, and the Confederacies with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Trench warfare came to Kentucky and Tennessee. Though Kentucky had not seceded during the Civil War, its citizens had never been happy as part of the Union and many joined the Austro-Hungarian cause. By the end of the war, the Union had regained control of Kentucky, and had captured Tennessee from the Western Confederacy. Kentucky and Tennessee were labeled Occupied Territories, and New York dedicated an entire governmental agency to those restless states.

The twentieth century passed in relative peace and quiet, with the British, Germans (the successors to the Austro-Hungarians), and then, the Japanese, jockeying for territories and control over trade. By the 1980s, German scientists were rapidly closing in on the secret of nuclear power, though several catastrophes meant sections of Europe became radioactive.

The Eastern Confederacy renamed itself the Free States of America in the late 1990s. Minorities gained the right to vote in local elections, and universal suffrage became a national movement.

Without the financial ability to fund national defense, and four squabbling state governors to contend with, Birmingham had to feel its way carefully into the 21 st century. Enmity with the Union, especially over the loss of Tennessee, continued to rankle, while the world’s empires looked for ways to exploit the area for their own good. Birmingham was increasingly isolated in an evolving world where it could exercise little power. But what power it has, it will try to use.

1

THORN

The governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge was one of those antebellum homes that was held together with baling wire and chewing gum. Or, it would have been, if chewing gum were something one could acquire in Louisiana. The Western Confederacy was the poorest nation on the continent, and it could afford to import very little. Its tobacco, seafood, and cotton industries helped somewhat, but without a good way to get the goods to markets in the German, British, or Japanese Empires, many goods that could otherwise have been exported rotted on the docks.

Since Ambassador Pritchard was out fishing with the mayor of New Orleans today, and Governor LeCroix was absent, the second floor of the mansion contained merely Delilah Thorn and Lois Levallier, the governor’s secretary. Lois was hardly a chatterbox to begin with, but she certainly did not gossip or confide in Thorn, a foreigner. Thorn had become quite familiar with the upper class white woman style of freezing others out of their social circle when she’d been in Atlanta. Here in Baton Rouge, the social stigma of being different, in any way, was even worse, and Thorn had committed the sin of being both from another country, and being unashamed of it.

If Lois had even an inkling that Thorn were actually a Yankee, someone so deranged and degraded that she would barely qualify as human, she’d probably faint from shock. Thorn had sometimes imagined what it would be like to walk up to Lois and admit her bosses were in New York and see if she could actually induce Lois to shriek, faint, or even jump out the window, but she had restrained herself. Imagining the scene was fun; actually doing it in person would not be, since it would ruin her cover and probably cost her her life.

She didn’t mind the social repercussions of being from another country. Her job wasn’t to make friends; it was to find out what Governor LeCroix was up to regarding the death camps in Louisiana. The Underground Railroad, with some help from the Free States and the British Empire, had been destroying as many camps as possible, or doing its best to make them impossible to run by convincing people not to work there, or to pull up the train tracks that ran closest to the camps so people couldn’t be transported all the way in windowless rail cars. When people saw hundreds of half-dead people being dragged out of the cars to be loaded onto trucks instead, they could no longer deny the truth of the camps near their towns.

Some didn’t care, of course. Others approved. But Thorn had been surprised at the number of people who had begun to protest their government’s actions. The few white allies of the Underground Railroad had recruited others, or had recruited themselves by showing up to train depots or the camps to tear down fences, block the passage of trains, or even, on occasion, shoot someone.

The violence had been sporadic and unwelcome. The President of the Confederacy, along with the governors of Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama, had found excuses to mobilize their military units to suppress protests in towns where violence had happened.

Thorn would have liked to do more about the camps directly, but that wasn’t her assignment. She got up from her desk and walked down the hall to the small room where the governor’s staff ate lunch. Lois was drinking her chicory coffee and eating a small meal of greens and pork. One thing Thorn had almost immediately adopted once in Louisiana had been the cuisine. One of the things she had not adopted was the habit of drinking hot coffee in the middle of a miserably hot afternoon. She felt overheated enough.

Greens were a new favorite of Thorn’s, as were local staples like crab and crawfish. It was only when the cuisine got to gumbo that she’d, so far, failed to develop any enthusiasm. Okra was simply too…exotic. By which she meant slimy.

Lois smiled her pasted-on fake smile, the same one she greeted Thorn with every day. Good morning, Miss Danielle. Her dark blond hair was limp with sweat even though she had pulled it back tightly to keep it from hanging in her face. Wisps had escaped the bun, though, and that, combined with the flush of her cheeks, managed to give Lois the air of someone who, despite fighting the effects of the heat, had succumbed anyway.

Thorn was posing as an aide named Danielle Ashbury in the staff of the Free States’ Ambassador to Louisiana, Reginald Pritchard. This was the first joint Free States-Union mission, and Thorn felt the pressure of making it go well. The Free States, formerly the Eastern Confederacy, was made up of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. Up until two years ago, they and the Union had had nothing to do with each other. That was changing. The Union had placed an ambassador in Atlanta and now this joint spying enterprise had been initiated. Maybe one day soon, the border would even be open enough for people to travel from one country to the other.

So far, Thorn felt she had succeeded in pulling off being Miss Danielle.

Thorn smiled broadly in the same wide and insincere smile she had been practicing since she’d arrived, and nodded. Good morning to you, Miss Lois. Those greens from your own garden? The attribution Miss was something she was still trying to accept without embarrassment, and she felt strange using it herself, but she wasn’t going to let people like Lois be superficially friendly with her without being superficially friendly in return.

Thorn had learned early on everyone in Baton Rouge liked to brag on their home garden. This was about as foreign a concept as Thorn had ever encountered. Few people in the Union raised gardens, and no one she knew personally in the Free States did, either. Yet here, everyone had to supplement their diet with whatever they could grow at home. Food scarcity was a problem in the Confederacy, even in the capital cities.

Lois nodded. The greens are growing real good. Real good. Maybe because Jubal shot all the rabbits that were eating them up last year. They made a great stew.

Thorn hoped she looked appropriately impressed rather than appalled. Shooting guns within the city limits, much less killing the local wildlife in order to cook it on one’s stove, was simply something she had not encountered in the Union, or even during her tenure as a quasi-ambassador in Atlanta. The casualness of an armed populace and the importance of being self-sufficient in terms of acquiring vegetables and meat for your family was still something that felt entirely alien.

She was sure the stew had been tasty, though. One thing every woman in Baton Rouge seemed to know how to do was cook well.

I’m sure they did, she said in her cultivated Atlantan accent.

I’m heading home in a bit, said Lois. Sammy’s been sick and Miss Bridget can only watch him until around two. You’ll be okay here by yourself?

It was phrased as a question, and Thorn nodded, though she thought she was supposed to take the question more as a warning. You’ll be here all alone, foreigner. She wasn’t sure why that was supposed to be something that frightened her, but Lois had made it clear that being alone in the governor’s mansion was something a Free States’ woman really ought to avoid.

She supposed it was a warning that any locals who didn’t appreciate the Free States having a woman in the governor’s mansion, even if she were only an aide, would feel free to come by and teach her a lesson. The men of the Confederacy were quite comfortable with managing women and minorities with violence. All men, not just those with the police or military. What had always struck Thorn as odd was that the authorities appeared to approve of this random violence committed by citizens.

Well, if some local jackass thought to come here this afternoon to rough Thorn up, he’d get a surprise. Thorn had started out her undercover career without much knowledge of weapons or fighting, apart from being able to shoot a pistol at a target with moderate accuracy. These days, she could shoot almost anything, and fight. She wasn’t an expert at hand-to-hand combat, but she’d learned enough to take care of herself under most circumstances.

I’ll be just fine, she said, pasting on an even-wider smile. It’ll be me and the mosquitoes. Could you direct me to a place to find a lotion or herb concoction to help repel them? They’re driving me crazy and I’m covered in bites.

Bellman’s down the street has some stuff, said Lois.

Thorn shrugged. The staff at Bellman’s had been outright hostile to someone who didn’t sound local. But Thorn was, in any case, more interested in learning about the back alleys of Baton Rouge, not the more official businesses. I’ve been there. They don’t seem to have what I need. They mentioned there might be other places to go, but wouldn’t direct me to any.

Lois stared at her for a few seconds, then shrugged. Try the Madame’s place. Just across the street, in the back of the yellow building. There’s a crooked door with no markings but a splash of red painted above it. Go in there, ask for what you need.

That was more like what Thorn wanted to hear. She’d been cooling her heels too long in the office without opportunity to really explore the city or learn why Louisiana was doing things differently from the rest of the Confederacy these days. To understand Baton Rouge, she needed to understand more about the local population and their eccentricities.

I appreciate the directions, said Thorn. I’m sure I’d never have found it on my own.

Atlanta must be very different, said Lois.

Thorn smiled. Lois probably hadn’t been farther from Baton Rouge than twenty or thirty miles in her life with the sole exception of going to New Orleans, which it seemed most Baton Rouge citizens did at least once in their lives. She’d more than likely never set foot outside Louisiana.

People are the same everywhere, said Thorn with a smile. But shops do have signage, and licenses, and are regulated by the government. A shop off the street with no markings wouldn’t be allowed.

This is Louisiana, said Lois, as if that explained everything.

So it is, said Thorn evenly. I’ll stop by there in a bit. I suppose the shop is open in the afternoons.

Lois shrugged. They’re open when they’re open. I don’t know when that might be.

That was the answer Thorn had expected. She had not yet determined any rhyme or reason for when governmental offices, businesses, schools, churches, and other institutions were open or not. Every day was a holiday to someone, it seemed, and no one much cared to keep track of them all.

Thorn walked back to her office, and stared out the window at the street. Baton Rouge had few paved roads, but at least the street outside the governor’s mansion rated that luxury. Most of the people who walked by wore hats to ward off the sun. A sole police officer stood in front of the mansion; he appeared to be dozing on his feet.

Security here in Baton Rouge was non-existent, even by Atlantan standards. It was the twenty-first century elsewhere, but here, it might as well have been the nineteenth still. In the Union, there would be surveillance cameras on every office and focused on every corridor, with guards, retinal scans, and badge identification scanners nearly everywhere. Even in the Free States, there would have been cameras on at least the entrances to government buildings and multiple police officers and other security outside the governor’s residence.

But here, security cameras didn’t exist. Closed circuit television wasn’t even a dream. Lois had probably never even heard of retinal scanners or biometric technology. The single telephone line worked well enough, but it only went to Lois’ desk. This afternoon while Lois was out, there would simply be no one to pick up any calls.

It wasn’t just the lack of technology that made Lois, and the other people Thorn had met here in Baton Rouge, seem alien. It was also that they didn’t even seem curious about such things. If people like Lois wanted to have more than they did, they kept it to themselves.

Soon enough, Lois went down the creaky wooden staircase to the first floor. Thorn watched the other woman walk down the oak- and myrtle-lined street. Lois nodded to every white person she passed and studiously ignored everyone else.

Thorn left the window and