The refugee council gathered in an empty on-call room Hasim had persuaded the orderlies to lend them: Aedi who’d worked with him in the Refuge for a decade; Akhil who collapsed on their doorstep five years back, having wandered half-blind out of the Wastes shrunken as a dried fig; Zola who handled the shrines’ day-to-day management; quiet Mohem to whom the Refuge’s younger guests looked in their troubles.

Mohem, to his surprise, was the first to speak, her voice velvety with rare use: “We are all here, and gods too. Seventy-one awake, and twenty-eight still sleep. Of those, twenty-four dream shallow enough for me to taste. Four are too far gone for me to hear their voices.”

Zola had found herself a clipboard and everyone proper clothes, though the fabrics were coarse and the styles ill-fit and ill-fitting: Hasim wore twill slacks three sizes too large, a belt in which he’d awled an extra hole, and a cotton shirt with ill-considered checks. Zola had not said how, in a building where people died regularly, she acquired the clothes.

She consulted her clipboard. “Our debts appear to have been canceled.” Murmurs around the circle. Akhil looked up from his stitching. “We have a soul apiece, offered by the Goddess Seril. I applied for credit at HBSE and First Camlaander, without success. By freeing us, the Goddess has placed us in thaumaturgical limbo: we are members of Her community, under Her protection—but the broader Craftwork world does not acknowledge Her existence.”

Akhil had been, among other things, a tailor before his town fell, and was adjusting his Zola-found shirt to fit. He pulled his thread taut, pursing a long seam’s lips. “Then there’s the chorus in the sky.”

“What do you make of that?” Hasim said.

Akhil tied off the thread and cut it with a scalpel liberated from a nursing station. “The city is in danger. These aren’t the days, and this was never the land, for a God so leveraged to Craftsmen to address His people directly. He’s afraid.”

Zola turned pages on her clipboard. “The locals love Kos, but few remember Seril as anything but a threat. Their faith is structured for a diad, but they don’t have the praxis.”

Akhil cocked his head to one side. “How do you know what the people think? We’ve scarcely had a chance to leave this building.”

“A hospital—” She frowned, set a hand to her mouth, shook her head. Hasim recognized that expression. The word had pulled at the cuts on her lips. “A hospital tangles many lines. Nurses have one background, doctors another, and everyone falls sick sometime. People talk, especially when they do not think one speaks good Kathic. I have limited my vocabulary in public spaces.”

Mohem rubbed her upper arms. “We could run to the ghost cults in Alt Selene. A train leaves tomorrow.”