“Wow,” said Donny. And a dozen ducks took to the sky, quacking their complaints at having to do so.

They had black bellies, orange beaks, and brown bodies.

“Recognize it?” said Percy.

He looked. There was something familiar, but he couldn’t place it. He looked at the wetland. It was almost a perfect circle. He looked back at the direction they had come from. The buildings that marked the way.

“Oh,” he said, looking back at the wetland.

It was the site where the Superdome had been. The arena. “The stadium where the fans learn to scream,” as the lawyers who defended its inmates used to call it. The “temporary” detention camp lasted a lot longer than the temporary autonomous zone the rebels had briefly established. Right up until the riot, when a few prisoners, including one of Donny’s old clients, led an uprising that burned the building badly enough that they had to demolish what was left.

Donny had never been inside it. Not since that one year in the good old days when he went to the Sugar Bowl with Joyce and some other friends. When it was an emergency jail and the prisoners were insurgents, they didn’t need to let the lawyers visit their clients. They didn’t even need to let the clients have lawyers.

Now it was this. A pocket of wild heaven coming up in the spot where man-made hell had been.

Donny saw a deer crossing the shallow water.

“Watch where you walk,” said Percy. “It gets pretty wet. But there’s a dry path, if I can find it.”

“It’s okay,” said Donny.

“Suit yourself, but be careful. Sometimes the remains come up in the boggy parts.”

He looked down at the footprints he had just left, the imprints of his boot tread filling with water. The water made the little pieces of debris in the dirt glisten.

“Who’s buried out there?” he said, looking over the swamp.

“You know who, Donny. The biggest mass grave was farther up there,” she said, pointing north. “Close to the Fairgrounds, where Camp Zulu was. Under a few feet of water now.”

“Jesus,” said Donny, looking toward the horizon line, seeing only damaged buildings. “I’ll follow you.”

Percy led them down a path that was mostly dry. As you walked in there, you could see the rubble. Big chunks of busted-up concrete, half-hidden behind tall grass and wild weeds. A garden of rebar.

He heard the whistle of an osprey, looked that direction, and saw its wide-winged profile against the silhouette of the I-10 overpass terminus, a road to nowhere since it was blown up by the rebels six years earlier.

His attention returned to the trail when he felt his foot sink into the mud, and the water filled his boot.

“You okay?” said Percy.