The cold reality of the frontier is that a border does not just keep external threats out; it often catches the desperate, volatile fallout of neighboring collapses. For the reserve guards stationed along the northern state highways, the night shifted from routine surveillance to tragic confrontation when a Punian dissident, originally born in the Tanakvik Soviet Socialist Republic, forced a passage across the line. Having already fled the T.S.S.R. into the neighboring Atyrias Soviet Socialist Republic, the culprit pushed through the illegal crossing points into Punian territory, driven by the mounting panic and purges ripping through the eastern bloc. Long after the radio died and the cold rain washed the blood from the dirt, the surveillance monitors kept blinking in the empty room; scanning blindly into the dark for a killer who had already dissolved into the quiet heartland of Punia.
