54

At first Izza couldn’t find the blind man. She perched outside Makawe’s Rest and watched the waitstaff prep until raised voices at the water’s edge caught her attention.

Two men stood on a stretch of sand between Penitents, though calling both “men” stretched the word to extremes. One was almost too young: local kid in a garish orange shirt and torn slacks, hair a black mop. He held a notebook out like a ward, and his eyes glimmered with tears. In front of him, an old man slouched against a crooked stick. “Old,” another poor word. Ancient, more like, his face lined and cracked the way plate glass got after you chucked a rock through it. He was not looking at the boy in front of him, his head turned to one side, presenting ear rather than eye.

Izza approached down the beach, and listened. “I don’t want to show things as they are,” the kid said. “Kid” also wasn’t right—he was at least ten years older than Izza. But he sounded like a kid. “What’s the use of showing them how they are if we don’t talk about how they could be?”

The old man laughed, a crumbling sound. “Don’t be an ass. I don’t blame you for writing damn fool love poetry. I said you shouldn’t write about riding horses unless you’ve ridden a horse. Especially not if you want to write lines like ’surging bone-white sides / and dew-sparked flanks at dawn.’”

“Would you tell Cathbart not to write about colors because he was blind? Or not to write about angelic battles because he’d never fought in one.”

“Cathbart fought in the Tyranomachia, back in Camlaan, and angels never made so grand a war. And he’d seen for forty years before he lost his sight. You think we forget how these work once we lose the use of them?” The old man’s hand shot out faster than Izza could follow or the poet could flinch, and rapped the kid’s skull.

“Oh. No. Gods, Mako. That’s not—”

He bared broken yellow teeth. “I’m telling you this for your own good.”

“You’ll let me perform?”

“Perform on the street if you want, I can’t stop you. And if you show up to the open stage, Eve won’t turn you away. But go up there with these and you’ll deserve all the rotten fruit they throw.”

The kid closed his book. “I need to think.”

“Go. Think. Tell me when you’re ready to do. Or, better yet, don’t tell me. Do first, and I’ll hear.”

The kid stormed off without sparing Izza a glance. The old man shrugged, and turned back to the surf. Izza crept closer.

“Not a bad poem,” Mako said to no one in particular. “All things considered. Needs a few more passes, tighter imagery. Not to mention he thinks he’s the only person on the planet ever thought of alliteration. But if we threw out every kid who thought they were god’s gift to whatever, we’d be short geniuses in a decade or so. So what are we to do?”

Izza decided to go. She’d hoped this Mako might be a fierce operator, but here he leaned on his stick, talking to waves.

She’d send him a note, explaining what happened. Then leave the island with Cat, if Cat would take her.

“I said, what are we to do?”

Mako was looking at her.

“Ah,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“What’d you sneak up on us for, if not to listen? Why listen, if not to form an opinion?”

She swallowed hard. “I. Um. You’re Mako.”

He nodded, once, and smiled. They weren’t shark’s teeth, but some were sharp, and others gone. Hard hands gripped the stick that propped him up. His fingers had been broken several times, and healed crooked.

She recognized him, then, a feeling like being dropped from a height into a cold pool. “I’ve seen you before.”

“I get around,” he said. “I try to know what happens in my bar. Well.” He jerked a jagged thumb back toward the Rest. “Eve’s bar, but I live there and it’s mine by residence at least. And when someone stalks my poets, I try to learn their name.”

“I’m Izza,” she said. The words slipped out before she could catch them.

“Of course you are,” he said. “You don’t have anything to fear from me.”

“You’re a friend of Kai’s.”

“Few enough of us. You know her?”

“I—she works for me.”

Mako laughed, an unpleasant phlegmy sound.

“Kai said I should come find you. If something went wrong.” Not precisely the truth, but he did not need to know that.

“And something’s gone wrong,” he said. “You want a drink?”

He swung his stick behind him, and it struck the Penitent’s leg with a dull thud.

Izza took his meaning, said, “Sure,” and followed him to the bar. On the beach, the old man moved like cats moved in dark rooms, feeling his way. When they reached the Rest’s hard stone floor, he stepped quick, winding between busboys and waiters. Izza followed.

A bartender in a low-cut blouse passed Mako a glass of amber liquid. She glanced a question at Izza, who shook her head.

Mako sipped his drink. “What’s happened to Kai that you didn’t want to tell me?”

“I want to tell you.”

“But you tried to sneak away before I noticed you. So you want to tell me, but you also don’t. What is it?”

The bartender swished off to cut lemons for the night’s drinks. Chair legs clacked and tables ground against the floor. Ghostlamps in the rafters sent follow spots wheeling over the empty house. The sun began to set. Mako drank liquid gold.

“Kai’s been taken by a Penitent.”

Mako choked. He set the glass on the bar, and ran one finger around the lip.

“Tell me.”

She tried to speak, but couldn’t. She’d sworn too many vows of silence, and broken them too often in the last few days.

“Assume,” Mako said, “for the sake of argument, that I know about the Blue Lady. And the Green Man, and all the rest.”

“What?”

“I may be blind. But I’m not deaf. Whatever else one might think of poets, they are excellent barometers for metaphysical shenanigans. Not as good as proper prophets, but these are fallen times.”

“Who told you?”

“Nobody. And I’ve told nobody. Wasn’t my place. The wars are done. I’m a private citizen. Margot himself barely understood what he was. I take it you know he died.”

“I was there,” she said. She hadn’t planned to, but the words slipped out, as if she were talking to empty air or to an ancient friend rather than someone she’d known for five minutes and didn’t trust.

“I’m sorry,” the old man said. “Now. Tell me about Kai. Quickly.”

“She thought the gods, my gods I mean, the ones that died—that they might have something to do with the Order. With Kavekana’ai. So she went in to investigate. She came out inside a Penitent. Screaming.”

“What will you do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want a drink?”

Yes. “No.”

“Fair.”

“If the Penitents took her,” Izza said, “they’ll know everything she knows soon. Which means I need to get out of here. On the one hand. But.” The next part took some preparation. “She trusted me when she had no reason to. She tried to help, and she ended up inside one of those things. I can’t leave her.”

Mako laughed as if she’d said something funny. “You’re young. Maybe this is the day you learn that some debts can’t be paid.”

She’d worn out inside herself already, talking. This last scrape burned, and she hated him for it. “Look. I don’t know you. I don’t know if Kai’s your friend, or your student, or your pet project, or whatever. I’d save her if I could, but I can’t. And I won’t sit here at a bar and drink self-pity until this world looks like the best possible. I won’t accept this. That kid on the beach might be an idiot, but at least he knows the way life is isn’t the way it ought to be.”

Mako stayed bent by the bar, an echo of something old and vicious and set in its ways.

She was about to leave when he spoke. Before, his voice had sounded as if filtered through cobwebs and dust and layers of mud. All that remained, and more: He had grown new depths, or accepted old ones. “Can you find her?”

“Yes.”

“Show me.”