Donny got lost pretty quickly trying to find his way to Bywater, with entire swaths of the old city razed and overgrown with wild foliage. So he found the one landmark he knew they couldn’t change.

But as it turned out, even the river had changed. The boardwalks were gone, and Mississippi had recovered something closer to its natural condition. The water was sick, but not as sick as it had been, and the banks now hosted tall grasses crowded with green and blue dragonflies. As he walked, one of the big tankers was chugging out toward the Gulf and the open ocean beyond, carrying its load of seeds for planting and refugees for resettlement, many of whom were there on the deck waving their goodbyes to the broken country they would probably never see again.

Donny wondered what it would be like to do that, to leave. He had passed on one such opportunity, at a time when it was much more attractive. He had thought seeing Joyce would heal the tumors of regret he had nurtured, but it only made them flare up. The hardness in her eyes amplified it, reminding him that his failures as a lawyer and lover had allowed her to undergo the traumas that got her to that place.

As he walked along the banks, he began to notice little artifacts in the mix of rock and mud at his feet. He stopped to investigate some. The best ended up in his briefcase. A quartz crystal. A shard of pottery with a floral pattern that looked like it could be two hundred years old. A piece of flint that you could tell when you held it had been knapped by human hands, probably thousands of years earlier. A big shell that turned out to be a fossil, the remains of some sea creature that had died millions of years ago. A tooth, the fang of some unknown mammal, still shiny white. He watched the river flow, and thought about what Percy said, about how time works differently there. He could feel it, and feel the freedom in it. But then he thought about what he needed to do. The deadlines that were waiting on him back in the real world. Especially the deadline Thelen had imposed.

In a proper utopia, they would not let any lawyers in.

After a while, Donny found his way to where the old Industrial Canal emptied into the river. The canal was the landmark he needed to find Heather, in the area just east of there, which had now morphed into a wide bayou full of wild plants growing along the waterline. The zone on the other side had been a toxic no-go zone since an industrial accident many years earlier, even before the coup. Now it was a farm. Not just for crops, but for plants that clean the air and heal the soil.

Phytoremediation, Lupe called it.