The poet lived in a walk-up apartment on the second floor of a two-story stucco house. Bed linen hung drying over the balcony. Palm trees grew in neat rows to the house’s either side, and more in the narrow yard behind, near the alley wall. Izza climbed that wall, jumped to a palm tree, and kicked a coconut crab off the trunk when it snapped a massive claw at her heel. The crab was large, and landed heavily, but it raised itself on spindly legs and lumbered off. From her perch, she watched.
Edmond Margot sat by his window. Candlelight glinted off his bald patch. She couldn’t see the details of his room, the packed bookcase and the bare china cabinet, the worn rug and the bed with no blanket but a sleeping pouch sewn out of a doubled cotton sheet. She didn’t need to see these things; she’d surveyed his apartment earlier, looking without success for hidden weapons or the remains of kids abducted, tortured, butchered. The room made him seem unbalanced, a good sign: the worst predators she’d known were the ones that put the most effort into seeming normal. Still, even poor predators had teeth.
The wraparound balcony ran beneath the window where Margot sat writing. Long jump, but this way she wouldn’t be seen from the street.
So she jumped, caught the railing, and pulled herself up and over, light as falling leaves. The poet, though, was less focused than she’d thought. His shoulders twitched, and he looked up. His eyebrows rose, mazing his high forehead with furrows.
Before he could speak, she set a finger to her lips. He closed his mouth. Izza thanked whoever was responsible that she was a girl, and skinny. She might be a threat, but she didn’t look it. If she’d been larger, or a boy, Margot might have cried for help before he recognized her.
“Pick up your pen,” she said.
“What?”
“Your pen,” she repeated.
He looked down. In surprise he’d let the pen droop to paper, and a pool of green ink had welled around the tip. He wiped the pen and slid it into a metal stand. “Thank you.”
“Do you know me?”
He nodded. “From dreams. And”—hasty, remembering their last meeting—“the police station. The girl whose name isn’t Marthe.”
“That’s right.”
“You sought me.”
“You’re not hard to find.”
“Artists learn not to be. Obscurity is our mortal enemy. I’ve seen minstrels in Palatine stand between lanes of traffic, holding their sonnets overhead.” He mimed in miniature, hands not higher than his eyes. “Painted on pine boards, you know. Dripping. Atrocious calligraphy. The word ’God’ ends up indistinguishable from ’gad.’”
“Good poems?”
“Not as a rule.”
She leaned back against the balcony. “How did you find me at the watch station?”
“Visions,” he said, and covered his mouth, and coughed. “As I said.”
“Visions of the Blue Lady?”
Drunks stumbled down the alley behind her, singing sea shanties off-key. Margot’s eyes were the same shade as the ink spilled from his pen. Fear showed in the green, under light. “I hadn’t dreamed of her for weeks. You understand? Find the love of your life. Fear her at first. Welcome her into your mind, your work. And one morning, wake to find you’ve lost her for good. You cannot even dream her anymore. Watch your fame grow in her absence as you struggle to mate dead words on dry paper. Then, when you stand drunk in a spotlight reciting stale work, you see a vision, strong and clear as yours used to be—a girl, in danger.”
“You saw her.” Izza had not meant to whisper. “That night.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I saw you. I knew where you were, and I tried to help. I thought you could lead me to her again.”
She’d felt nothing since the Lady died. No presence, no dreams. But Cat said ties still bound the faithful, even once their gods were gone. If so, she’d never be free, no matter how far she ran. Unless she gave the Lady up forever.
“Please,” Margot said. “Tell me about the Blue Lady. I miss her. Where did she go?”
She wanted to tell him everything: tell him about the Lady wreathed in fire who blessed the hungry with her kiss, who fought Smiling Jack to save the souls of Kavekana’s children. She wanted to tell him how she had healed Izza from the depths of a searing fever. The Lady set a cool hand on her brow, whispered a promise in her ear. Day broke when Izza thought she would never see another dawn.
But when she opened her mouth, those words wouldn’t fit through, because they were bigger than mere sound, like islands weren’t just the part above the water but the parts below it, too, mountains rising miles over seabed.
In the end all Izza could say was, “She died.” She owed him that at least.
He did not flinch. Did not cry. Did not move except to ask: “How?”
She knew that look, the hunger behind it. Margot needed her, surely as the children did, and that need would not fade no matter how many answers she gave him. Izza would remain priestess of a dead goddess, clutching the jagged edges of a broken dream, until she broke.
Cat’s voice: You have to choose.
“The same way as anybody else,” she said, and leapt away into the deepening night of her failure.