The consolation prize for spending the day traveling across Cancer Alley by bus, train, and boat was the discovery that they sold souvenir T-shirts in utopia. Donny didn’t buy one. But it was pouring rain when he stepped off the barge, and when he saw the canopied merch booth at the landing also sold hot coffee, he took shelter. He was paying for his cup and asking the kid for directions and whether there were any dry modes of local transportation available when he saw the little sign that said the proceeds from all sales went to the fund for the new school. So Donny blew eight bucks on a hand-tooled lapel pin. And when he got up the next day in his spartan room at the inn they called the Library, he put it on, the way some of his colleagues used to put the flag pins on when they wanted the judge to know which side they were on. This one was made from salvaged metal instead of industrial lacquer, with an image of a raccoon holding a book. Donny wasn’t sure what it really meant, but he liked raccoons. And when he looked in the mirror, he convinced himself it would work, and set out to save his ex-friend’s kid.

It had stopped raining that Friday morning when Donny headed to court in the flooded ruins of New Orleans. The locals didn’t call them ruins. They called them liberated territory, and the law they applied in their new court, which they called the Tributary, was a new kind of law no judge had ever seen, even though they said it was the oldest and truest law in the world. Most of the so-called locals were people from someplace else, veterans of the uprising or latecomers who wanted to help beta-test a different kind of future. Donny used to feel like an honorary local, even when the city was under siege, and he expected to soon be reunited with some of his old comrades. But as he waited for the streetcar in the muggy morning air, he knew they might not be happy to see him. Especially when he was showing up on the other side of the case.

And when he checked his phone for news on the case he had left behind, all he got was the warning that he had no signal. Because one of the first things his old clients did when they took over the city was to climb up the towers and replace all the corporate phone cells with birdhouses. They had their own network, which they said was free and open, if you could figure out how to get in. So Donny cursed them, and then tried to convince himself that it was a good thing to be offline for a day, and just focus on the immediate task at hand.