It was in the most wasted-out rural corners of the Midwest that the insurgency first brewed. No one even realized that’s what it was, when it was just a news report about somebody blowing up a bank or vandalizing the big ag-bots or burning one of the GMO granaries. Not until they started putting out statements to the press, signed with names like the Platte River Posse or the Hawkeye Freedom Network. Donny had never expected that the idea of a Cornhusker could be so scary. But he also knew better than most that it was the government’s treatment of restless people as a threat that turned them into bona fide rebels.

Having invented segregation zoning a century before, Dallas quickly restricted the refugees to designated zones, far from the nice parts of town. It had been very effective during the long emergency, when there were legal and martial means to enforce it. But now there was a new wave of displacements in the aftermath of the rebellion. And one of the new nationwide rules was that no one could be prohibited from sleeping on public property as long as they were not impeding some other recognized use. In Dallas, that meant the refugees who refused to live in the camps congregated in the natural areas that the city had otherwise mostly forgotten. And the floodplain of the Trinity River was one of the biggest urban greenbelts in Texas, even if people rarely remembered it was there.

Until they had no choice but to remember it—and remember they didn’t like what was happening there.

Donny followed the trail down the bank, scouting the remains of his favorite outlaw skate ramps and spots where he had left graffiti tags back in the day. The columns that held up the Commerce Street overpass were still covered in street art, but it was all new, much of it telling the story of environmental blight and internecine conflict through beautiful pictograms, the kind of street art some kid raised under the big skies of a Kansas farm makes to let her mind fly free after she’s been locked up in a Texas refugee camp. He found remnants of the prior batch of shanties here and there, bits of plywood flotsam and shreds of Tyvek in the bare trees that were left behind when the last flood washed most of the shelters away, after the town fathers and their vigilante sons had cleared it with force and fire, saying they were there to save them. While a few newcomers had resettled farther up the banks, the displaced persons were now mostly congregated in two big camps out by DFW, one at a new biofarm and the other in a former shopping mall. And some were getting resettled for real, finally, in the brownout zones that had been partially revitalized, or at least cleaned up enough for people to safely move back in.