Kai walked. No. That wasn’t right. The shell around her walked, and she moved with it, limp and pliant to keep the crystal from cutting. She didn’t walk so much as she was walked—but that wasn’t right, either, since the drive to walk came from her own mind, and the steps the Penitent took were her own steps.
She’d asked Claude about his time inside, and he answered as well as he could, but she now understood the limits of his explanation. The experience beggared thought. From his broken sentences, she imagined the Penitent as a walking iron maiden, applying pain to force the prisoner to act. She imagined a metallic whisper in her ear, a prompt or request, with torture to follow.
She was right, and wrong.
Penitence hurt. The suit was agony. She’d long since cried her throat raw. Swearing supposedly eased pain, but crystal nets locked her jaw. She couldn’t speak any more than she could reach Ms. Kevarian’s business card.
But no voices whispered in her ear. The whispers were beneath.
When the mask closed over her face, she was trapped in darkness, with only her scared breath to relieve the silence. Then the darkness came alive.
She saw Jace’s office. Mara’s Penitent stood in front of the desk. Jace looked from one of them to the other, and sagged into his chair.
She saw the office, yes, but transfigured. Every surface glowed. Colors pressed against her in a billion shades and subtle variations. Light pierced her skull like a needle entering a rotten apple. She saw all of Jace through a microscope at once: individual hairs and pores between them, his stretched skin made up of millions of tiny cells. He breathed and his blood rushed and his heart beat and his brain worked with a high-pitched whine; gods, she could hear his brain. When he steepled his fingers their pads’ touch was a pounding drum, and when he sighed the rasp of air through his vocal cords might have been an avalanche.
In her stone shell, Mara wept. Her heart and Jace’s beat contrasting rhythms. Footsteps in the hall outside. More than the hall: the entire floor, a map in Kai’s mind built from tiny vibrations. In the middle distance, Teo shouted protest as someone forced her into a Penitent of her own.
The floor on which Kai stood cut her feet, as if it were covered with broken glass. The air was a toxic mix of stench. She closed her eyes, but that did not help; light and sound and scents remained. She was not seeing through her own eyes. The Penitent addressed her mind directly. She shared stone eyes’ vision, and the sharpness of stone ears.
“Come here,” Jace said.
She didn’t, but she was done. She decided to resist him, and in exactly the same moment to obey. The thought formed natural as falling. The pain came after, when she realized what had happened. The Penitent shaped her will from the inside out. Makawe built these as a teaching tool. The crystal had no mind of its own, only conviction. It used the prisoners’ minds to act on that conviction. Her thoughts were not her own.
Not quite right, she realized as she approached his desk. Her thoughts were her own—as her thoughts would be if she shared the statue’s faith. The part of her that did not was a railing voice pressed down: her self reduced to a bad conscience, struggling for control.
Wires cut and rolling joints crushed. She strode through a scalpel thicket, and left pieces of herself on each branch and twig. She stopped beside Mara, faced Jace’s desk, and stood at attention. She tried to run, but pain turned her stomach: physical pain from her body’s resistance, and mental anguish from her own failings.
Resistance meant suffering. But how could she not resist the usurpation of her mind?
By agreeing with the statue. By sharing its devotion, and its judgment.
She didn’t know whether that thought came from her or from the crystal.
She felt sick.
“I’m sorry,” Jace said.
A strange thing to say when he’d done nothing wrong. Justice demanded sacrifice. Even, sometimes, betrayal.
Gods. She tried to push the foreign thoughts from her mind, but felt herself pushed down in turn: her own will an evil impulse, a depraved desire.
“It has to be done,” he said. “You’ll both understand, in time.” He walked to his office door, and opened it. “Send the other one in.” A second Penitent arrived, standard model, moving slowly. Kai could hear a woman inside, and muffled curses in Quechal. Teo. “The two of you.” He pointed to Kai, and then to Teo. “Go to the beach around West Claw Tip. I’ll send someone when I’ve decided on our next step.” Kai tried to stay, and the statue cut her—or made her feel she was cut. Surely Penitents weren’t so reckless with their prisoners. Illusion or not, the pain was real, as was the sense of blood running down her leg.
She joined the other Penitent in the hall, ducking to pass through Jace’s office door.
She wished she could talk to Teo. To Mara. Penitents had that ability, it seemed, though she was not allowed to use it: without word or visible signal, Teo’s and Kai’s fell into step and marched down the halls of Kavekana’ai.
Their run down the mountain slopes, stone feet grinding over stone ledges, skidding along cliffs and down heavy slopes, was a new torment: Kai’s body couldn’t bear the speed and force of their descent. She mangled, twisted, broke herself. Once she swiveled 180 degrees from the hips to catch a cliff’s edge as she fell, and torqued the several tons of her legs around to kick footholds into the rock—then somersaulted ten feet to land stiff legged. Her bones broke, joints popped, muscles tore, and knees shattered—but as she reached the mountain’s base and marched down the supply road to the city, she felt whole. Was the pain a phantom of the mind, which knew her body could not stand such strains? Or had she really broken herself, with only the Penitent left to hold her together?
She remembered Claude’s scars and suspected the truth was a mix of both.
She would not die. The statue hewed her to a righteous path. She could learn, here, in safety and silence, to feel as good people felt, to move as noble people moved, to think as the just thought.
Walking through Kavekana in a Penitent she saw the city in a new way. Always before, it seemed eternal to her. Now she understood how small these buildings were, how venal the wares they sold, how vulnerable the people crouched within their shells. Pedestrians shied from the Penitent—from her. They averted their eyes from guilt and shame.
They needed guidance, and strength. She could give it to them.
This wasn’t her. The strength wasn’t hers, or the patronizing tone. They were attitudes of mind in which she’d been caught and clad. This was her life in the grip of others. A potter’s wheel spun, and wet hands shaped whirling clay.
After an hour’s walk in calm unison (save when Kai’s body rebelled, when she lagged or tried to resist, at which point her world was fire), they reached West Claw’s tip, a beach at the foot of a long low slope. Other Penitents stood here, feet sunk in sand, awaiting the gods’ return. They adjusted to leave a gap for Teo and Kai.
She stood to Teo’s left. The sand underfoot was fine and smooth as flour. She watched the horizon, and sank into obligation.
And such a view!
She’d never seen the ocean like this before. Before she had heard the orchestra’s discordant tuning notes, and now they melded to symphony. Light and wave, a clear view to the earth’s curve broken only by skyspires. The sea was a roiling deep peopled with hungry monsters, but its surface shone bright. Sunlight made the ocean more than monstrous repose. This was her freedom, to watch the waves, ennobled by the light of Penance.
Below the surface, Kai tumbled, drowning.