“I didn’t expect to see you here so soon,” Jace said from the balcony’s edge.

Every part of her stopped at once, and restarted slowly. He leaned against the banister, a sliver of shadow in gray turtleneck and navy slacks, thumbs hooked through his belt loops. She tried to walk toward him, calm and measured, but her knee buckled and she had to catch herself with her cane. “I had work to do.”

“Work up the mountain?”

“A pilgrim asked me some questions today. I needed an answer.”

“No answer you find here will help a pilgrim decide whether to invest. Some need us; some don’t. The ones that do, you only have to guide them. The ones that don’t, nothing you do will change their minds.”

She forced herself to look him in the eye. The hollows of his face were deep wells in the moonlight.

“Why are you really here?” he asked.

Someone else could have lied to him. Not Kai, not now. “I thought we were in danger. I thought Ms. Kevarian and her clients might be trying to learn about other idols—to use their suit as a pretext to map the pool, to learn our secrets.”

“You climbed the mountain, and snuck into the library. And what did you find?”

“Nothing,” she said. “They haven’t pushed discovery that far back.”

“They tried,” Jace said. “We stopped them.”

“Then Kevarian does want to map the pool.”

“Kevarian wants every scrap of information she can pull from us. Everything she doesn’t yet know is a potential weapon in her case.”

“They have a plan,” she said. “There’s something deeper at work here.”

“Even if there was, discovering it is not your responsibility.”

“I am a priest. I have a duty to the gods. The idols. The island.”

“And I sent you away.” The calm facade slipped, and beneath she saw his anger and his fear. “For your own good, for our good. If Kevarian heard you snuck in to investigate Seven Alpha, she could argue that you lied in your deposition. That you think we could have saved the idol. One lie blows the case open.”

“I thought we were in trouble. Was I supposed to stand by and do nothing?”

“Yes. Let us deal with the mess. Let go. Accept that good intentions don’t count.”

He stopped. The night closed around them both. In their anger they had grown large, but silence made them specks on the mountain under a spreading sky.

He walked to her, and around her, shoulders slumped. Kai tensed as he passed behind her back. When he emerged, he seemed smaller, like a comet part-melted by its orbit.

“Go on,” Kai said. “Might as well get all this out in the open.”

He removed his glasses, and rubbed his temples between the thumb and fingers of one hand. “Kai, why did you join the priesthood?”

“Does it matter?”

“It’s an honest question.”