56

Kai had no plan, no powers, no miracle hidden up her sleeve, no gods to answer the prayers she didn’t make.

She had Ms. Kevarian’s business card in her pocket. And she was out of options.

The stars were too bright. Thinking hurt. An Iskari experimental painter had come to the Kavekana Museum once when she was a kid, and the school took them all to see. The man painted canvasses solid colors that did not exist before he invented them: blues that tugged the eyes, greens that melted the air and lingered in nightmares long after you looked away.

After Penance, freedom felt like that.

The advancing Penitents mounted toward the sky, Teo’s nearest, and behind hers two more. Kai wished she could stand straighter, walk steadier to meet them. Her legs quaked. Her shoulders and back would not obey. She didn’t limp, though: every part of her hurt equally for once.

Teo was inside that front-most statue, trapped as Kai had been. What had it done to her mind in these few hours?

“Teo,” she said. She didn’t bother to speak loudly. The other woman could not help but hear. “Teo, I’m sorry.” She groped for words to bring the Quechal woman back to herself, but thought of nothing the Penitent wouldn’t use to its own advantage. She barely knew Teo, really: saleswoman, swimmer, smiler. Not enough to free her from the prison into which the Penitent sculpted her mind.

Izza and Mako hadn’t run.

They thought she knew what she was doing.

More than one way to get yourself killed, she supposed.

The two Penitents flanked Teo’s now.

Kai put her hands into her pockets, and stepped forward.

Teo’s Penitent moved.

The wind of its passing fist blew Kai’s hair and the tatters of her jacket. Her jaw tightened, her stomach tensed, her legs locked—and the Penitent’s fist slammed into the face of the statue to its left. Rock buckled, crystal broke, and the Penitent fell. The third crouched and charged, striking Teo’s Penitent in the midsection. Stone arms circled around a stone chest. Teo’s Penitent crouched, sank low, wrapped its arms around the other statue’s back, and lifted. Light erupted from crystals at the joints of elbow and shoulder as its muscles shed waste heat. The third Penitent’s grip broke.

Teo’s Penitent turned, spun, and let go. The other statue tumbled ten feet through the air, landed with a sound like a cliff collapsing, and lay still on the sand.

The second Penitent, the one Teo had punched, was struggling to rise. Teo kicked it sharply in the side, and it collapsed with a scream and a crunch of broken rock.

Kai watched, eyes wide, as Teo’s Penitent turned back to her. Her fingers tightened around the business card, but she did not tear it, not yet.

The Penitent spasmed, and cracked. Dust rained from its joints; arms jerked and knees buckled and it sank to the sand. It screamed—the statue itself, not the woman within, a scream of dead material pressed to breaking and beyond. Pain and fear flickered through emerald eyes, quick as a bird crossing the moon.

The Penitent’s chest cavity broke open.

Two halves of the geode shell swung out so fast Kai had to jump back. One panel listed on a broken invisible hinge.

Teo stood inside the Penitent. She wasn’t smiling. She stepped out from the crystal cage, and where Kai’s crystal had flowed open around her, Teo’s broke, shards disintegrating as they fell until a fine quartz dust painted the sand onto which she stepped.

Teo looked like she’d fought her way up from hell. Vines of light wound her left arm: green, curved and sharp edged and elegant, a geometer’s drawing of fire save for the single savage scar that ran down the inside of her wrist. Kai had seen Craftwork glyphs before, and they didn’t look like this. These were harsher, and did not so much glow as eat surrounding light and make it theirs.

In her hand, Teo held a thing without a name: a red spider with too many or too few legs, an anemic jellyfish, or a small, vicious octopus. She glanced down, as if surprised she held the thing, and tightened her grip.

Kai heard a snap.

The Penitent toppled. It took a long time to fall, and hit the beach with a heavy sound.

Teo let go of the thing she held, and falling, it faded, until when it splashed against the sand it left only an odd gray stain.

“Shit,” she said. “That stings.” She shook her arm as if burned; light dripped from her fingers.

“Teo.”

“See? It’s not so hard to lose the ’Ms.’” She nodded to Kai, and to Izza and Mako behind her. “Glad you made it. I didn’t expect them to grab you, too.”

“Teo, what the hell did you just do?”

“Some day maybe I’ll tell you about Quechal priests and the scars they leave. Trust me, it hurts more than it looks.” Behind her, the fallen Penitents struggled to stand, prisoners screaming as the cracks in their shells healed. Up the ridge, searchlight eyes woke and scanned the beach. “We need to leave.” She bit her lip. “Can you swim?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a simple question.”

“I want answers.”

“Me first. Can. You. Swim.”

“Yes.”

“Okay then. You, kid. You swim?” Kai glanced back to see Izza nod, once. She was looking at Teo with a mixture of awe and fear. Mostly awe. “Old guy. Damn.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“Hells we won’t, Mako. Those things are coming after us.”

“I do not fear them.”

“You should. You were afraid of hers a second ago.” Kai pointed toward the statue Teo had broken.

“I was afraid for you. Not of them. I know these things, and they know me. I’ll meet you back at the Rest, if you make it. Go.”

“Okay,” Teo said. “Fine.”

“We’re not leaving him!”

“I am. And so are you, unless you want to explain what just happened to those guys up the ridge.”

“Mako, I—”

He shook his head. “Kai. Go.”

“Follow me. Close as you can.” And before Kai could object, the Quechal woman ran into the ocean. Waves broke around her ankles, knees, hips, and falling forward she swam.

Penitent gazes swept the night; some pinned Kai where she stood slack jawed. She might have remained there forever had Izza not pulled her after, into the waves. Once she took her first step, the second was easy.

“You stink at running away,” Izza called over her shoulder, laughing almost, or else hysterical.

Kai fell into waves and water.

After the initial wet shock, the sea took her in. She swam, following Teo’s head as the Quechal woman slipped through and disappeared behind ocean swells. Izza cut the water like a knife, the kind of speed Kai’d had when young. Kai dipped below the surface. Salt stung her eyes, and the Penitents’ light lit the sea blue and green, chiseled silhouettes of coral and darting fish from the black. A hundred yards from shore Kai rolled onto her back, risking a moment’s lost sight of Teo for a glimpse of the beach. Penitents swarmed there, and in their midst Mako stood, alone and as yet unharmed.

How had he freed her? That burst of unearthly light, of overwhelming force, was no Craft Kai knew.

She rolled onto her stomach, and after a panicked moment saw Teo and Izza. During her retrospection they had pulled ahead, and she’d drifted west. She adjusted course to follow.

Night swimming resembled daytime swimming as little as an ocean resembled a pool. Daytime, you knew where you were, relative to where you had been. After sunset, the coast was a confusion of light, and only texture separated the dark above from the dark below.

They drew even with the docks and factories of East Claw, and pressed south. Kavekana receded. Ahead, Kai saw only the skyspires miles distant. Surely Teo didn’t plan to swim all the way there. Long before they reached the spires, they’d pass the harbor wards, and then nothing would stand between them and the ocean’s hunger.

“Familiarity breeds contempt” was a saying Kai’d heard at school. The saying did not apply to Archipelagic ocean. In waters beset by star kraken, sentient storms, and sunken cities where alien monsters lived, familiarity bred terror and, failing that, death.

When Kai next looked for Teo, she was gone.

A second before, the woman had been swimming steadily ahead of them. The next, she vanished.

Kai knew better than to panic. Aching, she still wasted strength treading high in the water for a better view. She saw nothing: only Izza pressing doggedly forward. She called the girl’s name, softly: sound carried over the open ocean, and she did not know who else might be listening.

Izza turned toward Kai. Her eyes widened—and she too disappeared.

Kai swam alone, far from shore.

“Izza!” She made for the spot where the girl had sunk. She heard her father’s voice chant the litany of beasts that preyed on unwary sailors, and the remedy for each. Kraken be craven, shark-teeth blunt, gallowglass sail clear, scissorfish hunt. Even as a kid she’d thought the rhyme’s suggestions impractical. Oh, yes, when the shark comes for me, I’ll blunt its teeth.

She did not, until that moment, realize the rhyme’s purpose: not to advise, but to fill the mind in the face of danger. Chants might not deter sea monsters, but they were marginally better than the alternative litanies Kai would have composed of all the ways she was about to die.

She thought she had reached the spot where Izza sank; she saw nothing, felt no leviathan underwater. She drew a deep breath, and dove.

She opened her eyes. Water lay beneath, only water, down to the mirror coral–crusted sea floor a hundred feet below. No Izza. No Teo. No sharks or gallowglasses. The water carried sound: clicks of tiny shrimp, ship wakes and propellers, and beneath all that, far away, so deep she heard it more in her blood than in her ears, music. Long notes rose and fell, glissando and trill. Praise song.

Salt water burned her eyes. She sought, and did not find.

She raised her arms above her head and swept them down to her sides like wings.

As she rose, she scanned the sea floor one last time for her—what were they? Not quite friends. Izza, maybe, though they’d barely known each other. And Teo, she’d never known Teo at all.

She’d almost breached the surface when something struck her in the head.

Twisting in the water she choked and clawed at her assailant. In the confusion she saw nothing, but her fingernails scraped a slick curved surface. She kicked and pummeled this thing she could not see. One out-flung hand breached the water’s surface, and struck something long and thin and hard. She grabbed it and pulled down, hard as she could, but instead of pulling whatever it was into the water she pulled herself up, and rose sputtering and cursing into air.

She held an oar draped over the side of a black shallow-drafted boat. Teo and Izza braced the oar’s other end. Izza wheezed, bent over. The oar must have caught her in the stomach as Kai thrashed.

“What the hells,” was all she could say at first.

“Here.” Teo held out her left hand. The light had mostly faded from her skin, but the scars still glowed. She saw Kai’s expression, and offered her other hand instead. “It’s not much, but it’s all I have.”

Kai pulled herself into the boat. Water slopped from her shirt and pants and thin sandals. She’d lost her jacket, shrugged it off for speed. Sea breeze on wet skin set her shivering. She sat and hugged herself and breathed.

The boat was Kavekana make, shallow draft for crossing shoals and sandbanks, a vessel for short distances. An anchor chain ran over the side, though she’d seen no anchor in the water. Teo sat on the bench. Izza leaned against the stern, watching them both. All shivered.

“This boat wasn’t here before,” Kai said.

Teo pointed to the prow. A charm hung there, a shark’s tooth marked with foreign glyphwork, glowing green.

“That means nothing to me.”

“Keeps people from noticing the boat. For a little while.”

“Cool, right?” Izza said.

“Who are you really?”

Teo shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“You got us both stuffed inside Penitents. You owe me.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Teo said. “Had a long time to think inside that thing. I thought at first you might have been punished because of me. But then I realized how hard you tried to get me into the mountain, into the pool. Profit wasn’t your goal: you brushed me off twice, easy. When your boss showed up, he treated me like a routine nuisance, but you—you were special. It’s a bit excessive to lock a prospective client inside a Penitent without trial, isn’t it?”

“But you’re not a client, are you? You never were.”

“No,” she said at last.