“How could I miss it?” For the first time in his years since taking office, Jace stood unbowed, shoulders straight and back, immaculately calm. “You shouted through dreams.”
The smell of dust and rock hung about and between them. Shadows watched from lit office windows overhead.
“You worried me this afternoon in my office, Kai. You didn’t seem to understand the situation. When you disappeared from the Penitent, I feared the worst. That you’d left us for good, that you were working against Kavekana all along. Stupid of me. I know you’re loyal. I’m glad to see that loyalty manifest.”
Mara’s Penitent stood behind Jace, ready for battle. Ready to kill, if needed. “How could I abandon this island?”
“How indeed,” Jace said. He kicked a pebble, and smiled like a boy as it bounced. “What gifts have you brought us?”
* * *
Izza drowned in starlight, and Cat with her. They fell together, and the bright circle of the surface receded overhead. Cat’s silver arms surged against the nothing, but nothing was not water.
She betrayed us, Cat said. Her voice was a razor down Izza’s back.
“No.” She inhaled the darkness, and did not die. “I trust her. And it doesn’t matter, anyway. Let’s do what we came here for.”
As they sank, strange stars assembled into many-colored shapes. Thousands, hundreds of thousands: a crowd of idols. A gaggle of gods.
“Well?” she called. “Here I am.”
Night pressed in on all sides.
“You know me. I know you. I told your stories. Sacrificed to you. Mourned you. Missed you.”
Mute idols watched.
“I’m not leaving.”
The quality of the void changed: a great mass swam between them and the pool’s surface, cutting off all light but the faint glimmer of Cat’s skin.
So this was the end, she thought. Drowning in a pit beneath the world.
Fitting.
Then the darkness shone green.
* * *
“One intruder,” Kai said. “And her hostage.” Jace joined her by the pool, and looked where she pointed, in time to see shadows swallow the pair of them.
“Lost,” he said.
She hoped not. “We can still save them both. Even if we wait, there should be enough left to question.”
“Gods, Kai. You can be vicious when you put your mind to it.”
“Turns out our problems have a single source,” she said. “A bit of living goddess, stuck inside the pool. She contaminated the other idols.”
“But if we remove her,” Jace said, “our problems should stop. Good. I don’t need to tell you how much of a weight this has been.”
“What will you do with that goddess-piece when you find it?”
“Don’t know yet. Melt her down, I suspect. Recast the soulstuff in another form. Or sell it—plenty of market out there for a living goddess, even a piece of one.”
“If your offer’s still open,” she said, “I want my old job back.”
“Better than your old job. You’ve shown your worth in blood. You’ve earned a promotion, even more than Mara.”
“What about Mara?”
“What do you mean?”
“You still haven’t let her out of the Penitent.”
“She’s less understanding than you are,” he said, and turned from the pool. “And she’s seen more than you.”
Kai too turned away. “You mean the poet’s death?”
“Mara’s not an inherently violent person. She has blood on her hands, but she doesn’t know why it’s there. She will understand, eventually. A little island like ours, in the middle of a big ocean, is a garden: it must be carefully managed.”
“Which makes you the gardener?”
“Basically,” he said.
“Uprooting flowers where necessary.”
“Better to prune than to uproot. It’s a shame we can’t put gods inside the Penitents as well. We’ve had to kill those idols that woke up, and use the Craft to reassemble them. People, on the other hand—we can make them do what they must. Like your friend Claude.”
Kai kept her voice level. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, it’s fine. Claude,” Jace said, “you can come out now.”
Footsteps echoed down the cave-passage behind Jace; Claude emerged. He wore his uniform, and walked stiff backed.
“You see,” Jace said, “I find it interesting that, after sending me a nightmare, you sent one to your friend, asking him to come to the pool in secret. He came to me first. He was worried for you, you know. Your sanity. Now. I hope you asked him here to arrest our friends in the pool. Because if you were betting he would arrest me, well. I think you’ll find that of the two of us, you are the greater threat to our island. And Claude is a child of the Penitents first: he must guard Kavekana from threats foreign and domestic.”
Jace stepped back out of Kai’s reach. Not that Kai considered trying to tackle him. The Penitents would reach her before she could do damage.
She thought she saw the beginnings of an apology in Claude’s eyes. He was sorry for what he was about to do, but he would do it anyway.
“So, which is it? Did you come to join us, or destroy us?”
* * *
“Hello, Izza,” the green man said.
Izza heard his voice in her bones. At first she saw him as a collection of stars, no different from the others that filled the nothing through which they fell. As she watched, his outline grew form, as if absorbing the attention she paid him.
She recognized his face.
“Margot,” she said, without moving her lips.
“Something like that.” He nodded to Cat. “Care to introduce me?”
“I don’t even know who you are.”
“A memory,” he said.
“Cat, this is a memory of Edmond Margot, a bard of Iskar. Edmond, this is Cat, from Alt Coulumb.”
Pleased to meet you.
“The pleasure’s mine.”
“I saw you die,” Izza said.
He bit his lower lip. “You said I should hide. I did. In the page, in the ink. Deeper. I found my way here.” He waved his hand at the gods and at the empty space above. “She saved me. Saved part of me. So much I can’t remember. I don’t remember what I don’t remember. Of course.” He grimaced. “But she needs me. Us.”
“What do you mean? Who needs? Who saved?”
He spread his hands, and raised them, and she saw.
* * *
“Neither,” Kai said.
Jace raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“I hoped you would turn yourself in. Resign. Maybe you meant well at first, but you’ve made bad decision after bad decision. You’ve angered gods and Craftsmen. I hoped Claude would see the threat you pose.”
If a hint of tension crept into Jace’s shoulders, Kai saw none. “I’ve done the best I could. And in a few minutes, the problem will be resolved. The last witness taken care of. The affair remains within our walls, and the danger passes.”
“Except for the Grimwalds’ suit.”
“Which will fail.”
“I think you underestimate their Craftswoman.”
“Ms. Kevarian has suspicions, but no proof. Mara gave her a few scraps, but without evidence those scraps amount to nothing. And if you planned to tell her about this, you’re a greater danger than I thought.”
“I don’t plan to do anything,” she said.
She took her hand from her pocket, and opened it. Two pieces of paper floated to the ground: a business card, ripped neatly down the middle. Half the name landed facing up. The card’s reverse side was eggshell white, marked only by the embossed logo of Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao.
* * *
They stood on the skin of a goddess. They floated in her blood. They lived in the warp and weft of her.
I know Her, Cat said.
“Of course you do,” Margot replied. “She grew here in silence, for decades, a mind emerging from countless transactions and transfers, as unaware of the human world as you are of the cells in your blood. And then, a few years back, she found within herself a piece of your goddess—a memory of light, of human space, of how it felt to bond with the world and be worshipped. She has her own memories now.” He took from his pocket a piece of paper, which he unfolded into a moon. “I think this belongs to you. Or you belong to it.”
Both.
“Here,” he said. “Tell our foster-mother farewell. We don’t need her anymore. We’re ready to stand on our own. To fly.”
He handed the moon to Cat, who received it with both hands.
“What we need,” he said, turning back to Izza, “is you.”
* * *
At first, nothing seemed to happen, and for that brief moment Kai feared she’d miscalculated, that the Craftswoman couldn’t hear or didn’t care.
Jace shook his head. “I’m sorry, Kai.”
But then his smile faltered.
* * *
Izza stared up, around, at the immensity of Her. She’d known her small gods, each in their own way, but how could those compare to this undeniable fact, this curvature of space? “What can I do?”
“Teach her,” Margot said. “How to speak. How to be. She can’t make sense of herself—built from too many myths. She tries on masks, and none fit. She needs a storyteller. She needs a prophet. She needs someone to break open the walls of the world. She needs someone to interpret her to herself. She needs a partner.”
“First though,” Izza said, “she needs a thief.”
* * *
Stars flickered overhead, and an orange shadow fell across the moon.
Ms. Kevarian stood between Jace and Kai, her expression grim and her suit so black it seemed cut from the inside of an unlit cave. She set her briefcase down. “Good evening.”
“You have no power here,” Jace said. His voice quivered less than Kai expected.
Ms. Kevarian cocked her head to one side. “Interesting assertion. I can speak, at least, and words have power wherever they are heard.” She gestured to her briefcase, which rose off the ground and snapped open. An envelope floated to her hand; she removed a few papers. “I’m prepared, based on what I’ve heard, to name you personally, as well as the Sacerdotal Order of Kavekana in general, in a suit for fraud and mismanagement of my clients’ funds.”
Jace kept his balance, and his composure. “You do not frighten us. We have allies.”
“You do not,” she said. “You have clients. And how long will they support you, I wonder, once people learn that you mismanage funds and kill Iskari tourists? Your clients will not risk war in your defense, I think. And without them, what do you have? You are, in the end, one small island.”
And so the web pulled tight. Kai stood rigid in silence that felt much longer than the few seconds her watch ticked out. The war played out in her mind: skyspires around Kavekana pulsing with light, Craftsmen and Craftswomen swarming the island’s defenses in their thousands, crackling with fury and unholy magic. Penitents would fight on the beaches and in the forests, and they would break. The Iskari would let the island suffer. Docks would burn, streets run molten, the sky melt.
All this, if she’d guessed wrong. She hoped she hadn’t.
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Kai said.
* * *
You don’t have to do this, Cat said. This is too much for anyone to ask of you.
The goddess filled space, warped time. Secret and strange, newborn heart of the world that had torn her life again and again to rags. Unknowably vast.
Yet she remembered running with the Blue Lady through West Claw alleys at four in the morning, pockets full of stolen coin, blasted out on bliss and worship. As they ran their feet trailed fire. She fell, here, too, as once she’d fallen and the goddess had reached out to catch her. She tumbled through the air and did not die.
If you do this, that’s it, Cat said. No more running. No more hiding.
“I know,” she said.
The world was too big to change, this dread Lady too much to comprehend at once.
But she knew where to start.
Izza saw herself by the gods’ light, reflected off Cat’s silver skin. She didn’t want to turn away.
You could be safe, with me.
“Maybe,” she said, “but this is a broken place. And my people need me. And nowhere’s safe, not really.”
What people, she mocked herself as she said the words. A few refugees. Street kids. Children of no country, and a goddess with no children. Yet.
Are you sure?
And then there was Cat. Chosen of a goddess, and alone.
Like her, in a way. And maybe she’d known that weeks ago, when she saw the woman fight Penitents bare-handed. Lonely, unsure, marooned on a strange island, she saw a girl, a woman, about to make her own mistakes, and tried to save her from them.
“I am,” she said, and touched Cat’s arm. The silver shell parted, and so did the secret skin Izza wore outside her own. “Thank you.”
Then they let each other go. Izza turned to the goddess and the ghost. She cracked her knuckles. The sound did not echo. No walls off which to echo, here. “Come on. Let’s steal you.”
* * *
The Craftswoman turned to Kai, one eyebrow raised, silent.
“Jace,” she said, “was never working on the Order’s behalf. He operated in secret, against the island’s interests. He set all of us at risk, as your threat demonstrates. The Council of Families and the Sacerdotal Order bear no guilt for his crimes.” She was not looking at Ms. Kevarian. “In fact, that’s why Claude is here.”
Come on, she thought. Get it.
* * *
The goddess curled around Izza, a web of a thousand million strands, and she was in that web, and she was that web. The goddess settled over her like a mantle, like a shroud, and she felt fire on her skin, and the edge of a knife, and the weight of love.
* * *
“Yes,” Claude said.
Ms. Kevarian turned. Kai watched gears revolve behind Claude’s eyes. He looked younger than she’d ever seen him since his Penitence—a kid once more, watching a fight on the docks, unwilling to get involved.
“Yes?” the Craftswoman said.
Kai slid her hands into her pockets so no one could see her crossed fingers.
“We’ve come to arrest Jason Kol.” He sounded the words syllable by syllable. “For murder, and fraud, and the abuse of powers.”
Jace wheeled on him. “Claude.”
Claude kept his eyes on the Craftswoman. Kai was glad Ms. Kevarian had turned away from her. She didn’t want to see the woman’s triumph. “We have evidence,” Claude said, “that he’s been working to … to defraud his pilgrims. That he’s imprisoned people wrongly, and corrupted Penitents to help his schemes.”
And killed, she thought. Say the last bit.
“And that he has murdered an Iskari citizen. The island of Kavekana cannot countenance his actions.”
Jace stared.
“I will, naturally,” Ms. Kevarian said, “still bring suit against the Order.”
“And the Order,” Kai said, “will defend itself by disavowing Jace. He stands alone.”
Jace turned to her, and she took a step back when she saw his face. She had expected fury. She didn’t know what she saw: a slow shattering expression, a life stripped bare. He’d built a veneer of confidence over years of making what he thought were right decisions. With that scoured away, what remained wasn’t even fear.
He moved for her, fast.
Mara’s Penitent moved faster: a stone streak, and Jace barely had time to scream. She caught his wrist and yanked him off his feet. He twisted there, and did not speak—glared, instead, at Kai, at Ms. Kevarian, at Claude.
No one spoke.
Stone ground on stone, and the Penitent split open; green-tipped crystals gleamed inside, and within them, Mara, her eyes open.
Kai ran to her, and caught her as she fell. She was lighter than Kai would have guessed, and feverish. Her eyes met Kai’s, clouded, unfocused. She hadn’t used them in days. And what she’d seen in the meantime she didn’t want to remember.
“Hey,” Kai said, and held her closer. “Hey.”
Mara’s hands found Kai’s shoulders, squeezed. “Kai. It was in my head. It was my head.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” Her voice broke. She swallowed, hard.
The Penitent moved again, on its own. Granite jaws closed around Jace, and they were alone, on the shores of the pool: Kai, and Mara, and Claude, and Ms. Kevarian.