“Is it gasoline?” he asked.
“What?” Tadji blinked in surprise. “What do you mean?” She took another drink, tasted. “It’s good, right? It’s good.”
“It’s definitely almost a beverage,” Gunnar said, then pointed toward Bourbon Street. “Ooh! Fire-eaters.”
When Tadji turned to look, he took my cup and tipped both his and mine into a planter box overgrown with weeds. I doubted the plants would survive the night.
“Gumbo,” he whispered, the word a warning.
I loved Tadji. But as we’d learned during Sunday night dinners—our weekly ritual—she could not cook. As far as I could tell, she didn’t taste things the way other people did, and didn’t have much interest in food anyway. I didn’t consider myself a foodie, but I preferred edible to gummy cardboard. Which generously described the “gumbo” she’d made for us one evening. Gunnar and I had worked to keep her away from the stove after that.
Since there was no point chastising someone who literally didn’t have a taste for cooking, Gunnar just kept smiling.
“So good,” he complimented after handing my cup back to me, but shook his head when she held up the bottle in invitation. “Don’t want to push things too early.”
The look in her eyes said she didn’t buy the excuse, but she didn’t argue about it. “Suit yourself. I like your dress,” she said to me.
I glanced down. It was probably a little old-fashioned for War Night, but that made it feel more appropriate. That was why we were there, after all—to remember traditions and luxuries we couldn’t afford anymore.
“Thanks,” I said. “You look amazing.”
Tadji shrugged off the compliment. She wasn’t great with them, which I thought was residual guilt about coming home with more than she’d had when she left. And probably more than her family had now.
The music grew louder as the Vanguard prepared to move. Gold fireworks arched over us, sending my heart stuttering again as the crowd’s roar grew to a thundering crescendo.
“Nous vivons!” we shouted together. It meant “we live,” and was our mantra of remembrance, of grief, of joy that we’d survived war, even as we lived in its shadow.
The Vanguard stepped forward, feathers and sequins flashing in the gaslights that had replaced streetlamps. We were a few dozen feet from the front of the crowd, and we could take only tiny steps forward. It took ten minutes for us to reach the arch, which was guarded on both sides by a pair of Containment agents in gray fatigues and black boots. Their gazes passed over the crowd, looking for troublemakers.
One of the agents made eye contact with me. I forced a vague smile and pretended to be nothing more than a red-haired girl in the crowd.
Gunnar, Tadji, and I linked our hands as we passed beneath the arch, the soda can flowers glittering as they shimmied in the breeze.
Gunnar squeezed our hands. “Let’s make this a War Night to remember, ladies.”
? ? ?
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?”