Wires slithered like serpents and unwound from her neck, arms, legs. Claws unclenched. Lightning thorns withdrew. Shaking, she pushed the machines away, and on the third try grabbed her cane. She trusted it, and stepped out of the niche into the cavern.

The empty cavern.

Mara was gone.

Her conversation with the Craftswoman had sounded serious, midpoint of another long interview like Kai’s—hours ahead yet, the kind of drawn-out meeting no one quite knows how to end. Kai’d expected to leave long before Mara woke.

Don’t panic, she told herself. She might not have seen you. Conversations with Craftswomen took a toll on the mind. Maybe she staggered from her niche, down the stairs and out, without a backward glance. Yes. And maybe tomorrow morning Makawe would return from the Wars on a treasure-brimming boat, to usher in a new age.

Best not to depend on either.

Mara had probably left to find guards, or Jace, rather than confront Kai herself. A few minutes’ grace, then. With luck, Kai could escape down the mountain, deny the entire thing. Her word against Mara’s. Who would Jace believe: the woman he’d just promoted, or the one he transferred for mental health reasons?

She walked faster.

No one tried to stop her as she left Mara’s carrel; the library remained quiet. Plush green carpet consumed her footfalls, and the taps of her cane. The night owls didn’t look up as she passed. The librarian golem did, though. As Kai neared the door, it extended a talon to stop her. “Excuse me.” It had a voice of blades and wind. “I must inspect your bag.”

She almost ran, but couldn’t beat the golem on foot; she’d seen it reshelving books, quick as a blink. So she stopped, and opened her purse. Jointed metal fingers split into thin manipulators, and crawled through the jumble of wallet, medicine, notebooks, cosmetics. Kai blinked. Notebooks? She carried a small notepad for jotting down dreams and shopping lists, wire-bound with a thick green cover. But her bag held two: hers, worn green, and a newer volume covered in red leather and bound with a ribbon. The librarian golem returned the bag without comment and nodded once, a tickling of gears. Its eyes followed her as she left.

She kept her pace slow until she was out of sight. She wanted to tear the red notebook from her bag and read, but there wasn’t time. Her watch showed half an hour gone since she’d entered the niche.

Down she ran through echoing halls into the mountain’s beige depths, down until she reached the entrance she had used, and stepped out through rock onto the moonlit balcony. Slope wind blew cool beneath a black velvet sky. From this height the island’s green was a brief skirt before the spreading legs of the sea.