55

The first stars shone at sunset. As blue gave way to black their comrades joined them, mockingly bright. Skyspires on the horizon ate starlight and moonlight and sea reflections alike.

Cool wind blew off the water.

Penitents watched, and waited.

Decades past, their master had left Kavekana for the God Wars, traveling with his sisters and the Archipelago’s finest men. Bound west to war, they stopped at every island, held tournaments, chose the best and brightest to join their number. They sang as they paddled, one man choosing a melody and others joining in as the fleet became a choir. They rowed to war, warrior-poets, sailors, and scholars. One day they would return, bearing riches won in hidden battles across and beneath the earth. A crown of light would ring Kavekana’ai. The world would break and change.

Meanwhile the Penitents stood watch, and kept faith. This was Kavekana’s duty, the duty of the whole Archipelago—but weak flesh forgot its promises. No matter. Stone endured. Stone watched. Stone reminded.

And if reminders failed, stone would punish.

*   *   *

“You sure this is the way?”

“Yes,” Izza said. “I can feel it.”

“I can feel my legs about to give.”

Near the tip of West Claw, stores and parks and boulevards ceased. Tall iron fences replaced them, guarding private property. Mansions stood here, owned by Old World magnates and New World entrepreneurs, inhabited one week a year if not less and warded so intensely even Craftless Izza could see them. She wondered if Mako had to close his eyes to see.

She decided not to ask.

All this private property complicated their pursuit of Kai. Rather than circle around the beach, Izza led the old man uphill to the fields below Penitent Ridge. No estates here. Maybe the screams made even Deathless Kings nervous.

She crept from moonshadow to moonshadow, and tried not to look up at the Penitents silhouetted against the night, matte black save for their gemstone eyes. “Hurry.” She’d taken this path before, trying to escape a gang of local kids—what it was she stole she’d forgotten, a knife or a favorite skipping stone—but that time she’d been able to run.

“Why?” Mako’s breath whistled through his throat and teeth. He held her hand; his skin was dry and loose, his bones thin twigs beneath. He stumbled, and she caught him, but when she tried to pull him forward he didn’t follow.

“Every minute we waste is one more that thing has to work.”

“It’s already worked.” The old man stayed curled over. A wail drifted down the green slope from Penitent Ridge, and he flinched. “People break differently than you think. It’s not that you hurt someone enough and one moment they snap. It happens by degrees. Small accommodations. Insinuations. She’s moving now, from shade to shade.”

“What can we do?”

“Little. This is her fight.”

“I thought you could help her. Get her out.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I know tricks. One or two, from way back. I’ve never tried them. They might not work.”

“Then why are we even doing this?”

“Because a girl came into my place of business and accused me of not caring for a woman I’ve known since she could barely sneak out of her mother’s house. The question is, what are you doing here?”

“I.” She said the word, but didn’t have anything to say after it. The wail stopped. Maybe the Penitent ran out of breath, or maybe he’d realized there was no point screaming. “Come on.”

She tugged his hand, and he followed.

*   *   *

Kai hung in star-spackled and surf-washed night.

She was a ghost lost in the dream corridors of her own mind. She watched the water. Any moment, Makawe would arrive. Any moment, the sky would open and gods sweep her up to glory. Any moment, the world would change.

She expected this, because expectation was expected of her. Morality was easy to impose in the face of eschaton.

Trapped inside this expectation, she fought her losing war.

She saw everything, and nothing. She heard surf and sea wind and the beat of flying shorebirds’ wings, and footsteps approaching in the distance, though crystal and stone closed her ears.

Her mind processed the Penitent’s sensation. But her eyes did not see, and her ears did not hear, and her skin felt only sharp wires and crystal spikes.

She was not the thing she was.

Paradox.

Good. That was the first battlefield. She was not the thing she was: who was she, then? A collection of physical parts? But she’d been born with one body, and discarded it for another. A name? Names were words, and words changed through time. Relationships? She’d once loved Claude. Young man, haunted look in his eye, sitting in Makawe’s Rest clutching a bottle of beer white-knuckled as he watched an Altai poet chant two-toned songs about his homeland steppe; she’d wanted him, he wanted her, and that was enough, was everything until it ended.

She was change. She was nothing. She was becoming. But what was it that changed? What was it that became?

Each part of her could be traced to another. Body given by mother and father, remade by her own will. Education received from parents, teachers, priests, from books and plays and music—ideas of others reacting to others’ ideas. Soul composed of contracts and deals: desire, need, and pledge.

She was an evolving network of matter and spirit. Good.

This was another stage of evolution. She was coming, finally, to appreciate the value of community, of stability. Jace had been right: the island was worth protecting. She could work with him to protect it.

Less good.

But what was she protecting? If she was an evolving system, a network of change, what was Kavekana?

Kavekana was five decades’ wait, watching the horizon, hungry for a faded world. A memory of gods and an ache in the center of the chest.

But Kavekana was poetry, too, chanted on a thrust stage by madmen from distant shores. Kavekana was a refugee girl who lived on an island Kai had never known existed, though she’d spent her entire life upon its shores. Kavekana was Eve radiant onstage, was Margot the seeker, transfigured in his need and rapture. Kavekana was Seven Alpha, was the Blue Lady, drowning in the pool, betrayed by her own priests. Kavekana was Kai’s leap to save her.

Kavekana was changing.

No. She mistook ephemera for fact. Kavekana was the shore, was the hunger of the horizon. Kavekana was fixed as stone.

And there, that certainty, that denial of the things she’d seen, the world she knew—that wasn’t her. That was reality imposed. That was what she was told to think. That was the Penitent.

She knew the truth and she was being convinced to ignore it, by voices too subtle to hear. She sank through a void that tried to rip her apart. And she had to put herself back together.

She’d played this game before.

Inside the knife-edged cradle, she began to work.

*   *   *

Izza led Mako down the slope to the beach where the Penitents waited. He tripped, but she helped him to his feet. They walked together; he leaned on her and on his stick.

Penitents stood guard in long rows. Cooling joints popped and clicked. The air above them rippled with reradiated heat. Izza had expected the screams and moans and wails to be worse down here, but she heard only waves and wind and cooling stone. A soft sob, unless that was the wash of ebbing tide. Ten Penitents stood on this short stretch of sand. Maybe they were all veterans, or only a few held prisoners.

The stone monsters might not speak, but their sharp angles and heavy limbs and sheer mass all warned Izza off. She’d survived by not drawing attention to herself. This was as far a departure from that philosophy as possible, short of mugging people with a burning sword on Epiphyte at high noon.

So when the old man asked, “Can you see her?” she almost told him no, or that the trail ended here or that her connection to Kai had been cut off—almost said anything but the “Yes” she managed at last.

Even without the tug in her soul, she would have recognized Kai’s Penitent: shorter than the rest, crudely fashioned, blunter in the lines of face and body, and yet more lively than the common model. Modern Penitents, drunken watchmen whispered in their cups—drink was the one vice permitted them, and they indulged like other men and women, maybe worse—modern Penitents were sculpted under a Craftsman’s guidance, from living rock on some distant atoll to which even the Iskari Navy now gave a wide berth. They were sharp, industrial, and reminded Izza of the warships that docked at East Claw: straight lines and planes angled to form a joint or suggest a muscle. Kai’s Penitent was different. Thin furrows whorled its back, as if a giant had built the thing by hand and left fingerprints behind.

It scared Izza all the same.

She led Mako to the Penitent.

He shuffled over the sand, swinging his stick.

The Penitent’s fingers twitched.

Izza caught her breath. Maybe Penitents shifted sometimes in their sleep, or in their watch. After all, they had human beings inside them. But Izza had never seen another Penitent twitch.

She guided Mako along the beach. Though shorter than the rest, Kai’s Penitent was a mountain still, flanked by mountains. Starlight caught in ruby eyes; night robbed of color, the paint’s slick surface was almost blood.

Izza turned the old man’s shoulders until he faced the Penitent. “Here she is.”

He pressed his stick into the sand, and folded both hands atop it. A breeze blew his loose gray hair and ragged clothes. She released his wrist and retreated a step, not knowing why. He looked taller, and older, than she had thought.

Kai’s Penitent groaned. Or Kai groaned. Izza recognized the sound: the nameless animal terror that came when you woke to find a knife at your throat.

Kai was awake. Which meant the Penitent was, too.

“What now?” she whispered. The old man seemed carved out of the same rock as the sentinels. She didn’t expect an answer.

“Bring me closer,” he said. “I need to touch her.”

*   *   *

Kai heard the approaching footfalls with dim sympathy. She hoped these interlopers would leave. She’d found a grip on the crystal brain and its laws. Without distraction, with only stars and rolling ocean to occupy her mind, she might carve herself some space, some minor freedom.

Unless even this slight victory was only the Penitent sinking deeper into her mind as her resistance flagged.

No sense thinking that way. You had to trust yourself. Some parts of you, at least. There was nothing else.

Then the newcomers spoke, and she recognized their voices.

Izza. Mako.

Gods.

She tried to suppress the realization, her certainty as to what they’d come to do, or try; too slow. The old man and the thief were here to rescue her.

Here to stop her from guarding Makawe’s people. Misguided. Illegal. Traitors.

Her fingers twitched, and she almost reached for them.

No.

She broke the statue’s certainty on a wall of will. Too many voices had told her who to be, what to think. And they were so often wrong. Wrong to say they knew her; wrong to say what she should do, or be, or become.

Izza and Mako shuffled into view. She wanted to warn them away, but wire cut her and fire burned her and she knew her righteous facade was false. She ignored her friends’ faults rather than helping them grow.

They stood before her, Mako with hands crossed on his walking stick, Izza staring up at the Penitent—at Kai—with horror, and a clear expression of guilt.

Mako said: “I need to touch her.”

She recognized his voice.

Of course she recognized his voice. He was her friend. Seize him now. Anything less was to fail the cause of justice, to abandon the island’s defense.

Or not.

They were here to help her. They were working for Kavekana, the real Kavekana, ever changing, not the image burned into the Penitent’s crystal mind. To stop them was to betray the island.

The Penitent demanded, but the judgment belonged to Kai.

She did not raise her arm.

And so she suffered.

*   *   *

Izza led Mako to the Penitent. Her whole body was cold iron, and moving broke it rather than bent. She’d snuck into back-room offices while old women and potbellied men snored on their lunch break, and stolen fragments of their dreams. But she never felt this way before: like trying to walk over frost without melting it.

The Penitent stood strong and stiff. Izza wondered what battles Kai fought within its shell.

Five steps left. Four. Three.

Too close to run, now.

Idiot. You’ve always been too close to run.

Kai screamed.

Izza saw herself reflected in the paint on the Penitent’s chest, and in the facets of its eyes.

“Here.”

Mako extended his hand. His fingers shook.

The Penitent moved.

*   *   *

Kai wrestled with an angel, and she was losing. She’d hurt before, in Jace’s office, as the Penitent taught her how to move, and she thought that was pain. In the intervening hours the crystal had studied the courses of her mind, tangled itself into her thoughts. It crushed her and burned her and cut her and froze her and broke her and re-formed her only to break again. She fought back, tearing, wild, a cyclone of agony. It hurt her because it knew her, and because it knew her it could fade away before she struck.

She fought herself—the self the Penitent wanted her to be.

Her anger flagged, and in that moment her arm shot out. One hand caught Mako’s skull between thumb and forefinger, and began to squeeze. He gasped. She pressed harder: the Penitent knew the precise breaking tension of human bone, could stop before it shattered. He would not speak again with that too-familiar voice.

There it was again, Kai thought, drowning. She knew Mako. Knew his voice. Had since childhood.

And yet she recognized his voice in some other way—like a song she’d long forgotten.

That confused rifling through her mind for a fact she’d never known she knew, that wasn’t hers. That was the Penitent.

That was something she could hold, and hit.

Swift as a sea storm she followed that feeling back, destroying as she came.

The Penitent, stunned, released its grip. Mako set his hand on the Penitent’s chest. He stared into the crystals of her eyes.

Then his true eyes opened, and light poured forth.

*   *   *

Izza pried at the Penitent’s fingers with all her strength and no success. When the grip gave, she sprawled back on the beach. Mako swayed, but remained upright. He touched the Penitent.

And his eyes opened.

They were already open, but he seemed to have another pair of eyelids, opening sideways. Light shone from him. No. “Shone” wasn’t the right verb. There was a word in Talbeg her mother used when telling old stories in which people saw something they weren’t supposed to see and the sight burned through them, and they died or else wandered as blind oracles for the rest of their lives, scraping the edges of the truth they’d glimpsed. That word meant “shine” the way “torrent” meant “stream” or “batter” meant “push.”

So.

His eyes opened, and there was light, brief, blinding.

Through the raw red-pink afterimage, Izza saw Mako stagger. She caught him as he fell.

Behind, she heard a crash of stone, and tensed herself to die.

No killing blow came.

She turned to look.

The Penitent opened like a stone flower. Crystals lined the inside, glistening wet. Kai stood within. Thorns retreated from her skin. A long cut across her cheek, a drop of blood on her neck and at her wrist, suit torn and tattered, hair a black tangle, but Kai nonetheless. Izza’s pearl hung around her neck.

The Penitent opened for her, or flowed open around her. Her first foot touched the sand. Her second.

She wobbled, but did not fall.

Izza stared into her eyes. Had she changed already? And if so, how much?

Then Kai hugged Mako, and the old man hugged her, and laughed, and she tried to laugh, too, but coughed and said, gravelly as a twenty-year smoker: “What the hell was that?” And, hearing her own wrecked voice: “Sorry. I’ve been, um. Screaming.”

Mako’s chest heaved, and he took a long time to speak. Whatever he had done all but shattered him. “The girl dragged me here. Dared me to come.”

Kai turned to Izza. “Thank you.”

Which Izza knew she was supposed to answer, but instead she pointed, and Kai looked behind her, to the next Penitent: the big modern model that had escorted her down from the mountain. It opened floodlight eyes, and turned toward them with a sound of grinding rock. Down the beach, two more came to life.

Kai swallowed. “Mako? Any chance you can do whatever that was again?”

The old man tried to stand, but could not.

Kai turned to Izza then. “I don’t suppose you have any ideas.”

Izza shook her head.

“Fair enough,” she said, and advanced to meet the Penitents.