Donny looked at the guy to make sure he really meant it.

“You have got to be kidding,” said Donny.

The shotgun was pointed right at Donny’s guts.

“Come on, man!” pleaded Donny. “I don’t have time for this. I came to meet with the Tributary. I need to do that and get back to Houston. If I don’t—”

“Don’t make me gag you, lawyer. We all know that tongue in your mouth is the one that freed the president from the punishment he deserves. Now, go on and get up there. Or I’ll cut your tongue right out of your mouth, toss it up there, and let you go chasing after it.”

Donny looked the man in the eyes and decided to stop talking.

The ladder was a lot shakier than it looked.

22

When the treaty negotiators let the rebels keep the territory they had occupied in New Orleans, it was damaged goods. A big chunk of the eastern part of the city—the property whose remediation Lecker had funded—was a toxic site that had been cleared out for as long as most folks could remember. The north and the middle were underwater much of the year. And the rest of it had been emptied by hurricane, uprising, and occupation, a cycle that repeated until most of the infrastructure was shot and the buildings abandoned.

The new owners would be so busy trying to get the city functioning again that they couldn’t cause any more trouble for their neighbors. That was the idea.

For the rebels, it was everything they had fought for. Real autonomy. A chance to prove their ideas in action.

They invited Donny to help the working group that would develop the new legal code. It was a volunteer gig, but one he was happy to take.

They all liked the idea of starting their own truth and reconciliation tribunal, but they were bound by the general amnesty. El Presidente was the only one of the domestic war criminals who would face real justice. So they got creative.

Donny told them about the work he had done representing the nutria of Houston. About the smattering of cases over the years that had flirted with the idea that animals, plants, and even entire ecosystems might have rights under the law. Others on the committee had similar ideas, informed by their own work helping build the fresh constitutions of other newly liberated territories elsewhere in the hemisphere. As it took shape on a big blackboard in the old church where they met, the Tributary looked more like a tree, with elaborate branches of sources and outputs at both ends. In action, it would be a different kind of truth and reconciliation commission. One where the genocide was not of a people, but of a place. An entire ecology of diverse lifeforms that had been extinguished by human appetite.