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lights.
    The Mall itself was a straight-line strip of shops, once a pedestrian precinct, with rusting tram lines and tree stumps. The shoppers’ trolley-buses no longer ran, but heavy vehicles from the Sheriff’s office and the police passed slowly along the road, occasionally barking instructions from bullhorns. Patrick was struck by how many military and security operative types he was seeing. He suspected that the Mall was being used as a control corridor, stretching through the Central Business District and maybe up to Lower Downtown.
    The walking turned out to be relatively easy, with only a fringe of homeless camped under heaps of blankets and cardboard in the doorways, some families with children. Cops and Homeland Security on foot were checking the permit papers and biometric ID markers of the unresisting IDPs, making sure no more illegals had slipped into the city during the night. Aid workers handed out cups of beans, rice and hot water.
    Some of the shops were still functioning. The food stores and restaurants sold local produce almost exclusively. In the other windows you saw rebuilt and repaired electronics, clothes and accessories, shoes and coats, even books, everything recycled or reclaimed from drowned cities. Patrick found the existence of the shops comforting, a sign that he was in a functioning city, a contrast to the chaos prevailing over much of the surviving country. But if any of the original character of Denver had lasted into the twenty-first century, anything of its origins as a western trading post, nothing had survived the great erasure of the refugee flows. Without buying anything, they walked on.
    They came to California Street, and cut down to the Colorado Convention Center on 14th. This had been turned into a refugee processing camp, and long lines wound through the streets around it. The IDPs, from a distance, were gray clumps of misery, as they always were. The time for the meeting was approaching and, following Alice’s lead, they turned down 14th toward the civic center park. As they tried to cross Colfax Avenue, the main east-west artery through the city, they had to get through a cordon around the civic center, manned by police and military detachments.
    Patrick led his daughter past the monumental buildings set around the park: the US Mint, the curving frontage of the City and County Building, and the public library where Thandie Jones was due to give her briefing. The Art Museum was particularly striking, and Holle stared at its angular geometric forms, like the abandoned origami experiments of a giant. But the thin metal panels were streaked and corroded, the windows boarded up, the billboards empty. The coming of the flood had frozen all Earth’s great cities at around 2015, save for emergency construction to cope with refugee flows, where it hadn’t drowned them altogether. That was a decade ago, and buildings like the Museum, neglected or co-opted for purposes for which they had never been designed, were showing their age.
    Denver, as the largest city for a thousand kilometers around and a key junction for transport and communications, had been a significant federal center long before the flood. Since the capital had decamped here after Washington had flooded six years before, properties around the city had been requisitioned by the great departments of government. President Vasquez herself, the first three-term president since Roosevelt, had moved into the governor’s mansion. Patrick happened to know that much of the government’s business was run out of a more secure location, an old FEMA regional command center, a two-story bunker refurbished and revamped for the purpose. There were even embassies here, some from drowned nations, their flags hanging limp in the morning air. These struck Patrick as pitiful relics.
    In this civic center, however, you had the sense of a great capital, the way Patrick remembered DC in the old days. People in suits bustled everywhere, many of