Snow hammered Detroit like shrapnel softened into water. It was heavy, relentless, and piling on steel and concrete until the city no longer resembled America's industrial crown jewel, but the mausoleum of a nation pretending it wasn't dying.
The factories were silent, the furnaces were cold. And for the first time since the war began, the workers finally understood why.
Too many tanks had rolled out of these buildings. Too many jeeps. Too many crates of munitions bound for oceans and continents they'd never see.
And yet so few sons came home to drive the machines they'd built. Those absences were the water boiling over a pot.
The lack of steel, the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of it, was the oil tossed directly onto the flame.
Shipments had been rerouted east, toward Delaware. This hadn't been an accident, or a mistake.
And nobody at the factory level, not even the foremen, supervisors, or plant managers, had been told a damn thing.
