Even in the heat, people were damn certain they’d enjoy War Night. A party was a luxury they wouldn’t give up.

There weren’t many wrought-iron balconies left on Bourbon Street. But people still filled them because you couldn’t have a parade in New Orleans without throws. Beads were expensive and not exactly a priority for military convoys, but paper was still easy to come by, so necklaces of twisted paper and folded flowers had become another War Night tradition. Folks on the balconies wore dozens of necklaces on their arms, and they tossed them over the parade as it passed, filling the air with paper petals.

I snatched two as they fell, handed one to Tadji, and we slipped them over our heads. The twisted necklace and its flowers, big as old-fashioned peonies, were made from folded phone book pages. Not that we needed them—war had destroyed most of the phone, cable, and fiber-optic lines and towers. The Paras had learned quickly enough to target them.

We were six blocks into the parade, and the sweaty crowd had bunched together again, any sense of personal boundaries completely abandoned. Gunnar had found a dance partner a few people away, so when the fourth sweaty person in a row bounced against me, I decided it was time for a break. I grabbed Tadji’s hand and maneuvered through jostling bodies to the edge of the crowd.

The breeze felt like a miracle.

“Oh my God, that’s better,” Tadji said, flapping her tunic to cool herself. “Good call.”

I nodded. “I was about to punch the next sweaty person who elbowed me in the stomach.”

“The next person who elbowed you in the stomach, or you were going to punch them in the stomach?”

Sometimes it didn’t pay to be friends with a woman obsessed with words. “Har-har. The point is, there are a lot of sweaty people in that crowd.” I glanced back, surveyed the mass of people. “I think the party’s even bigger than last year.”

She nodded. “The population’s actually gone up a little in the last few years. Some people think it’s safe to come back, that there’s no chance the Veil will open again. And some people are fascinated by what happened, really hope that it will.”

Her voice had gone quiet, and I glanced at her, found her gaze on the high wall that surrounded Devil’s Isle, visible at the other end of Bourbon Street, the sky orange above it from the glow of the electrified mesh that covered the neighborhood and kept the Paras from escaping upward.

“Do you ever wonder what it’s like in there?” she asked.

I had wondered, and hadn’t liked what my imagination had come up with. A few thousand Paranormals and Sensitives interned for our protection—and because the government had no idea what else to do with them. We’d closed the Veil, after all. That made them prisoners of war from a world we could no longer access.

That made me think of uncomfortable things. I wasn’t bad, and Containment still would have tossed me into Devil’s Isle. If I wasn’t bad, what about the other Sensitives who’d been locked in?

“I try not to think about it,” I said honestly.

“It’s a complicated issue. But man, what I wouldn’t give to get in there. Can you imagine the vocabulary they’ve developed? The Paranormals probably had to create a completely new language just to describe what they’re going through.”

She was probably right, and I could admit it was intriguing. But I still didn’t want any part of Devil’s Isle, and I had no interest in going in there. Not when the odds were good that they wouldn’t let me out again.

While Tadji watched the parade, bouncing to the music, I checked out the street. There was a former walk-in daiquiri shop on the corner. It was missing a front wall, but an off-duty Containment agent—a man I’d seen in the shop—stood behind the bar and poured red liquid into plastic cups. His version of Drink, probably, and an opportunity to make a little extra money. Couldn’t fault him for that.