Cover

Dedication

For Octavia and Ajin

Part One
Things Fall Apart

1

The failure of the American legal system turned out to be good for the lawyers. It was not so good for the clients, but in those first few years after the uprising, everybody had to adapt.

For Donny Kimoe, the hardest thing about adapting was that he had to spend a lot of time in Dallas. That he had grown up there only made it worse. But it was where what passed for justice in those days could be found, far enough from the disappearing coast that they only had to close the courthouses during tornado season. As a bonus, Dallas still had real food, if you could afford it. And the air conditioning still worked, which was more than you could say for most cities in those days, when the infrastructure that hadn’t been destroyed in the fighting or died of old age and inattention was often out of juice, or saved for when it was really needed. Half the people Donny knew back home in Houston, and all the ones with money, had bailed for Big D over the past decade, the same way they had vacated New Orleans as it drowned. And so Dallas was still rich, or at least good at making you think so, by keeping things as shiny as it could with available materials. As shiny as the waxed BMWs and Benzes you could still find proud corporate execs driving down the increasingly empty freeways, usually with armed chauffeurs who were also the ones they paid to wait in the gas lines.

Those execs were the ones Donny came to hunt. Them, and their investors, assets, and insurance policies, and whatever else they had managed to hold on to through the years of dictatorship, blight, and civil strife that burned up the hard-earned savings of most. Donny did not have a BMW, a Benz, or even a Chevy. He did have a locked file drawer crammed full of jewelry and expensive watches he had accepted as payment in lieu of fees from the political dissidents he had represented during the long emergency. The contents of that drawer could be enough to retire on, if the economy ever recovered enough for people to afford such luxuries again. Or to really care what time it was, in an America where the idea of the future was a form of nostalgia rarely discussed outside of corner bars and neighborhood marijuana dispensaries. And where most people, including Donny, were focused on settling the scores of the past.

The judges still cared what time it was, but there were not enough Rolexes in the world to correct Donny Kimoe’s knack for showing up late. Even when his own future was on the line.