Welcome aboard the first-ever episode of The Iron Road Reader, the podcast where I read you into the worlds I build, one chapter at a time.

This premiere begins on a closed bridge over the Missouri River, at dawn, during a prisoner exchange between two sides that do not trust each other. Everything about the morning has been choreographed to hold violence at bay: painted rectangles for the observers, numbered positions for the cameras, white flags tied to the antennae.

And then one flag tears loose.

A small thing. An unscripted thing. The only detail not on the diagram.

Lieutenant Colonel Rachel “Rae” Calder starts watching it instead of the men with rifles.

What follows is the complete opening chapter of Live Load, book one of my Patchwork War series: a near-future America that did not end with one clean bang, but came apart at the seams, sideways, by road and rumor and failed authority. No tidy front lines. No map with two colors. Just cities holding uneasy peace under different rules, and the people caught in the gaps trying to move: to find a sister, to keep a hospital running, to get through one more checkpoint alive.

Rae Calder has one rule she will not bend, no matter who is shooting or who is watching:

You do not sort the wounded by which uniform they are wearing.

This chapter is the first test of that rule: a drone, a forged lane card printed on good official paper, a sedan that was not there twenty minutes ago, and a choice Rae makes on camera that will cost her for the rest of the book.

Along the way, I will tell you what this show is and who I am: a novelist who spent years sending stories out into silence, now finally getting to be in the room when they land. I will also tell you what I call the people who ride this line with me.

Not listeners. Not audience.

Fellow Riders.

The book is Live Load, available now as an ebook. Find it, along with my socials, my story, and every book link in one place, at AdamVahn.com, and join the newsletter at adamvahn.kit.com.

Next stop: a war that never happened, and a nurse who refused to let the dead become a slogan.