“I know a spot.” He groped, found the corner of a table, and used the graffiti carved there to orient himself toward the bar. From beneath the locked liquor shelf, he retrieved his crooked stick, leather handled and brass shod. “Follow me.” She walked with one hand around his arm, the other on her own cane. His skin felt dry and loose beneath her palm. He’d been larger, once.

Mako guided them away from the beach, north three blocks, and west down an alley of shuttered laundries and closed convenience stores, most long since taken over as outbuildings for the great gleaming coastal hotels.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Kai asked.

“Another block down, at the corner, on the left.”

There, true to Mako’s word, they found a small diner, a grimy place with plush booths upholstered in green fake leather. When Kai opened the door a smell of cigarettes and bacon wafted out; stepping inside, she noticed the lack of ashtrays and the NO SMOKING sign. Behind the counter, a round cook slid plates through a slit window and called an order number. No one looked up.

Mako lowered himself into an empty booth. His bent knees cracked and popped, and when he sat they pressed against the underside of the table. Kai ordered a cup of coffee and dry toast when the waitress came. Mako ordered coffee, too, black.

“This,” he said after the waitress left, “was the first place I ate when I came home from the Wars.”

How to answer that? “Because you knew it?”

“No. Any place I knew would remind me how much the island changed since I left.” He rapped his forehead with a knuckle. “Or how much I had. I wanted somewhere it wouldn’t feel strange to be a stranger.” The waitress returned with coffees. Mako drank all his in a gulp, then grabbed Kai’s, drank half, and set the mug back down in front of her. Steam rose from the black liquid. “Course, even someplace new gets the old familiar stain in time.”

She grabbed her coffee in both hands. Still too hot for her to drink, but safe at least from further theft. “Why come back, if it hurt you to be here?”

“Firstways, didn’t know it would hurt so much. Secondways, you can’t escape yourself, and you’re the only thing that hurts you in the long run.”

“That and rocks.”

He laughed. “And rocks. And knives and swords. Lighting, thorn, paper cuts, fire, acid, teeth, claws, ice, drowning. Well. Drowning only sort of hurts.” He banged his empty mug on the table, and the waitress looked over. Her sallow, up-all-night expression made her seem ten minutes’ hassle short of serial murder, and with Mako she was counting down the seconds. “What do you want from me, Kai?”