He watched the view from his window seat as they rolled into town. The Woodlands, once the most attractive suburban development, had been mostly abandoned as people moved back into town, though some folks who could afford it kept weekend places up there in the pines, tearing down the fat tract homes that the elements had already started to rot and replacing them with these little prefab eco-cabins. The area around the international airport had been heavily militarized, first by the feds during the long emergency, then by units of UN peacekeeping troops. The flag was still up over one of the camps by the freeway, but you could see most of the troops were already gone.

Donny saw the sign for the big Walmart just north of 610, with the whole property fenced off behind chain link, the building a charred ruin that had been destroyed in the riots.

When the bus finally exited at the edge of downtown, it stopped at the first light in three hours. And when Donny looked out into the predawn cityscape, he saw a couple of hungry-looking kids rummaging in a dumpster, just like those raccoons he’d seen. Behind them was a big lawn, something you never expected to see along the side of the feeder road in the shadow of the elevated expressways. And then he realized it was the funeral home where they had taken Miles.

Miles just had the one brother left when he died, his older brother, Milton III, who opted for medicine instead of law. Beyond that, the closest thing he had to family were his workmates. That’s how Donny and Percy ended up going to the funeral home with Milton to see the body.

Percy had become Miles’s only law partner by then, after she started out a decade earlier as Donny’s part-time legal assistant while she was still in law school at U of H, only to be poached by Miles and his then-partner, who had since retired. Donny was never formally affiliated with the firm. Miles said that was partly for cultural reasons, but mostly because of the quote his malpractice carrier had given him when they were talking about that possibility and Donny filled out his part of the questionnaire. So they ended up working as co-counsel on a lot of cases, and trading notes on others, as the courts went crazy and the country went crazier.