As the enlivened city of Cincinnati is about to be transformed, and the enslaved citizens freed, Verity causes the construction of a huge nanotech riverboat, launched so that she and Blaze can accompany the released but nano-plagued people of that city down the Mississippi River to the mysterious city of New Orleans, where a rumored salvation awaits them. On and on they travel, through a landscape altered and strange, past dead cities, drowned cities, and cities weirdly alive, always accompanied by the music of the river, possessed by jazz and the blues.