“Jeez,” said Donny. “Hang on. How much?” He set down his briefcase and reached for his wallet.

“Five,” said the driver.

He pulled out a worn five-dollar bill. Crisp ones were hard to come by these days, and not because they weren’t printing them.

“Rupees, hon,” said the driver. “Five hundred rupees. Money we can use. If you’re paying greenbacks, I need twenty.”

“How about pesos?” said Donny, digging into the secret stash.

“Bueno,” said the driver, grabbing the cash and pocketing it.

The car lurched forward, and Donny stumbled his way to the back, almost tripping over the suitcases in the aisle. The bags and their owners were on their way to board ships for Guyana, Goa, or Godthab. Nodes in the network of newly minted sovereignties of which New Orleans was the newest, pockets of recovered ecological health in a blighted world that welcomed new settlers, especially if they had skills. Some were clutching their travel documents as Donny stepped over their bags. He found a seat in the very back, by the window, next to a nervous-looking couple telling each other stories of people who had been turned away after making it all the way here.

The streetcar clickety-clacked its way down the wide boulevard, through a city that had spent most of the past decade as a war zone. Along the avenue, it looked more like a city that had been abandoned, in no small part because much of it was, even there in those big old houses on what passed for high ground. Nature had always been winning in New Orleans, a city built on lush riverbanks and wetlands ever-ready to overgrow and devour any structure that didn’t put up a fight. Green fungus on stucco, levees failed, yards gone wild. It was hard to know how much of this de-domestication of the urban environment resulted from inattention and how much from intention. The new regime was running the city on a different model, one that treated the lawn mower as a weapon of mass destruction, and believed in letting the water go where it wanted. The human inhabitants supported by an infrastructure that followed nature’s paths instead of trying to control it.

It had been a long time since anyone conducted a census, at least of the living, but you didn’t need statistics to know that the population was a fraction of what it had been before. Maybe because when the wild came back out, the human wild, you knew that was how things had always really been.