Kai hadn’t expected a mainlander secret agent to look so much like a washed-up Godsdistrikt wreck, strung out in ripped slacks and a loose black shirt, green eyes darting and hungry. But when Cat moved, she moved with purpose: took Izza by one wrist and Kai by the other, and pulled them both toward the stairs. Whatever her appearance, she was strong.
They climbed rotting stairs to the wharf, into the fresh night wind off the ocean. In direct light, Cat looked harder than she had below.
“What’s next?” Kai said.
The woman smirked. “What do you think?”
“Climb the mountain. Rappel down.”
“That’s subtler than I planned.”
“What do you mean?”
“We start,” Cat said, “with a little shock and awe.”
From her pocket, she produced a piece of silver chalk. She wove the chalk between middle, index, and ring fingers of her left hand, and curled her fingers into a fist. The chalk broke.
Nothing happened.
“I’m not feeling much shock,” Kai said. “Or awe.”
She wondered, briefly, why Izza’d closed her eyes and clapped her hands over her ears.
Then the night split open.
Kai picked herself up off the ground, blinking red-bloomed brilliance. Cat reached toward her, a person in vaguest outline. Distant drums beat through the whine of dead sound.
The drumbeats were explosions, she realized. Eyes recovering, she saw pillars of light rise across the island, West Claw, East, and the Palm, choreographed as casino fountains. She could almost see, almost hear again.
“Distractions,” Cat shouted. Kai heard her as a mumble through a wool blanket. “To keep the Penitents occupied. Like a magician’s show.” Her eyes split the lights to a million colors. “Now, hang on.”
“What?”
Cat grabbed Kai’s wrist and repeated herself, louder. “Hang on.”
Quicksilver sparked beneath the collar of Cat’s shirt, and flowed out and over, covering body and shoulders and back and legs. The hand that held Kai changed from skin to steel. Wings sprouted from Cat’s back, and spread.
When the silver reached Cat’s mouth, she sighed, as if setting down a long-borne burden.
Her wings beat, once, and they flew.
Kai’s and Izza’s added weight did not seem to slow Cat’s climb at all—or else Kai could not imagine how fast the woman would have been unburdened. Streets shrank to ribbons, and they swept up and north as searching Penitents’ gazes lit the earth below—scattered, stunned by the eruptions of light, seeking the phantom army that assailed them. Cat’s laugh did not travel like normal sound, but cut straight to Kai’s heart’s core.
Sirens wailed, warning clarions Kai recognized but had never heard aloud. The island cried in pain.
Cat wound between sweeping searchlights like an eel through a coral maze. Not precisely like: there was no truce with gravity, here, no uneasy accommodation between old foes. Gravity was vicious, and Cat fought him with every beat of her rising wings.
They swept up slopes, borrowing lift from currents of reradiated warmth. Blinking tears, Kai spared a glance to Izza, who hung from Cat’s other arm. The girl had a wild rictus grin, skin drawn tight over her skull.
They rose, and rose, and rose, over the volcano’s lip and higher, trajectory hyperbolic, so high Kai wondered if Cat no longer meant to infiltrate the mountain but to steal the stars instead.
Kavekana was a shrinking disk, framed by ocean.
Clouds scudded across the sky.
Cat’s metal skin drank moonlight.
She swept her wings back, and dove.
The ground approached.
Fast.
Time slowed.
They fell through space and worlds, following that unseen beacon. They did not slip from realm to realm so much as burst through. The color of the sea changed, wine red and spreading. Constellations danced and transformed.
The volcano’s mouth approached. At its bottom, pinhead small but growing larger, lay the pool, another sky into which they could fall forever. The size of a cherry now, a fig, lemon orange apple pineapple watermelon—
She braced herself for impact, too late.
They stopped in darkness ringed by light.
Cat’s silver skin glowed in the pool’s black. Kai saw her shock, saw Izza scramble to tread water that wasn’t there, to orient herself toward a surface that did not precisely exist. Kai had felt the same way on her first entry to the pool. Momentum and distance did not work here the way they worked outside.
Which gave Kai the opportunity she needed.
In the pool, strength of will mattered more than physical power. Here Kai could, and did, twist her wrist and slip away from Cat. And before the other woman recovered, Kai swam up, pulled herself out of the nothing, and stood, dripping, on the shore where she had watched a goddess die.
Below, Cat and Izza sank.
Kai crossed her arms.
Penitents ringed the pool—the guardians who’d caught her earlier that day, and one smaller, the Penitent in which Mara was trapped. They watched Kai with gemstone eyes.
Jace stood in front of her.
Her suit was torn and salt-stiff, her hair tangled. Unreality dripped from her, but enough had soaked into her skin and clothes to work her will upon. Her hair slithered straight. Her clothes were clean, pressed, and whole. She slid her hands out of her pockets. Light sparked off lacquered nails. The cut on her face knit, and the pain in her hip faded.
When she was quite done, she smiled at Jace.
“I see you got my nightmare.”