Izza begged near the cable car station for three hours. Twice attendant workers chased her from the gates, though she hadn’t bothered anyone. They weren’t used to beggars here, and neither called a Penitent to shuffle her away, nor offered her soulstuff to leave. So each time they chased her off she came back, sat with knees drawn to her chin, and waited.
She pondered sneaking into Kavekana’ai herself. Best way would be to tackle a coffee girl. Jump one when she got off shift, steal her uniform, ride the cable car up. But there were too many places a coffee girl couldn’t go, and anyway she’d never been inside the mountain before, would probably get lost in its temple tunnels.
Waiting, she gave up hope. Kai had betrayed her, of course. Which meant Izza’d betrayed herself. Cat. Her friends. Her gods. She deserved to burn in whatever special hell awaited traitors.
Though a half-drunk Telomiri priest had told her once that traitors did not burn in hell.
They froze.
She pondered the tortures of ice. Fire seemed pathetic by comparison—people burned fast, and passed out from smoke. Ice could bind and crush, cut, pierce. From ice one might sculpt hooks. Pliers. Spears. Cages.
She cycled through a hundred different tortures before the part of her soul that she’d bound at Kai’s throat moved—fast, descending. Too fast for the cable car.
Izza craned her neck back to see the mountain.
Two lines of dust sped down the western slope, skiing over scree, trailing dirt and broken rock. Switchbacking faster than a man could run.
And headed, near as Izza could tell, for a freight road at the mountain’s foot.
She guessed their destination and ran into the woods.
The forest here was old-growth, sacred for millennia, and though elephant-ear ferns bobbed and mushrooms spread in musky shade, there was space enough between the trees for a girl to run. And run she did, fast, too fast—a trapvine caught her and catapulted her toward treetops. She let out a brief undignified squawk, and lost too many minutes sawing her leg free of the vine with Kai’s knife, then climbing down.
She could no longer see the dust trail through the trees and fountain ferns and trailing vines, but Kai had reached the mountain’s foot. Izza shrank into herself as she ran, became a rigid curve. Under these trees the air was thick as wet cotton. She wasn’t yet breathing hard. She could run until she broke.
By the time she reached the road, she was close enough to breaking that she skidded out onto bare dirt and glanced up in shock at the blue sky without realizing she’d arrived.
An earthquake shocked her to her senses.
Penitents.
Kai had sold her out.
Izza dive back into the forest and found a tree thick-limbed enough to support her. She climbed in four pulls, and perched on a branch with a clear view of road. If she could see the Penitents, they could see her, but she had to be sure.
She grabbed a vine to steady herself. Heavy footsteps approached, and with them Kai. Birdcalls and insect chirps and wood sprite breezes all stilled before the Penitents’ advance.
Izza hadn’t planned to hold her breath, but her breath stopped on its own when the Penitents passed below.
There were two, both halting and awkward, newly paired. The left one, a normal model, didn’t concern Izza much. The other, though: smaller, more agile than the usual street patrollers, features rough, face painted. She’d seen this one before—it had killed Edmond Margot.
No. She looked closer. The eyes were wrong. Hard to see from this angle, and moving, but they were rubies, or red stones anyway, not sapphires. Same model. Different unit.
With Kai inside.
At first she’d thought Kai was hiding behind the statues, but no human walked that dirt road—only Penitents, proceeding to and through their sentence.
Izza breathed again, fast and shallow. Her hands burned; the vine she held was the stinging kind, and its sap singed her skin. She clutched harder, unwilling to rustle branches by letting go.
If they heard, the Penitents might turn, see her. Catch her.
Like they caught Kai.
Stone-still, hands aflame, she tried to quell the voices in her head. Gods. Kai had kept her vow. And this was her reward.
Tough, the hard and snub-nosed part of Izza said, the part that lurked around corners and figured that if someone hadn’t locked their house tighter they must not have liked their stuff much on some level. Kai stuck her neck out, and was burned. Others had burned before her, harder, and longer.
Another part of Izza wanted to see the Penitents broken, the island in flames. And still another wanted to leave Kai, to flee into the forest, to an outbound ship, because she was afraid. Because once the Penitents broke Kai the law would descend, and leave no place for her or any other kid to hide.
This place isn’t worth you.
The Penitents’ footsteps faded. She was alone.
She dropped to the ground and buried her hands in soil until the burning passed.
Cat wouldn’t help, not with this. She had been right, in the warehouse this morning: Izza had to choose her path.
But the choice scared her.
She ran through the forest toward the city.