She walked north two blocks to Epiphyte, then west, circling the bay. Across the water East Claw sprawled, its hills a warren of warehouses, flophouses, and docks.

West Claw’s streets, by contrast, ran straight and broad between boxy pastel houses. Pale Iskari and Camlaanders strolled along the sidewalks here, tourists and expats wearing straw hats, loose shirts, and shorts that bared skinny sunburned legs. Hotels rose near the shore, fewer facing the bay than on West Claw’s sunset side, but hotels nonetheless, with white verandas and stretches of private beach and rooftop decks and pools warmed by Craft and sun.

Kai hadn’t come this way since her injury, and she was shocked as always by how fast the commercial landscape shifted. Locals owned half the stores here, but the rest belonged to mainlander émigrés, who came to Kavekana as pilgrims only to find they liked island life better than the rule of gods and Deathless Kings. They opened shops to pass the time on an island that ignored time’s passage, and these flourished and died quickly as jungle flowers, devoured by the earth.

On this corner, a wizened man from northeast Telomere used to run a map store—though Kai could only charitably call it a store, since she’d never seen a customer inside. The maps he stocked were ancient, of Kathic lands before the Quechal wars split them in two, pre–God Wars charts of island empires long since sunk or broken, yellowed cracking parchments pressed between thin glass sheets, worlds lost to time and touch. She’d planned to take one of his maps home someday, hang it in her living room, close the curtains, and sip wine and ponder a vanished world. Now the shop itself was gone, replaced by a store that sold tart frozen yogurt with berries and crumbled sweet crackers on top. Kai bought a yogurt, turned right, and climbed the ridge.

Buildings thinned a few blocks north of Epiphyte, and soon gave way to a slope of mown green grass. The families that once lived here departed decades past and left their homes to rot. Only the grass grew now, tended by the same Concern that trimmed the golf courses on Kavekana’s leeward northern shore. Old houses’ decaying remains rose amid the green: mossy wooden hillocks with stone foundations, skeletons of discarded lives.

No one had forced these people to move, nor did the law stop locals or mainlanders from building on the slope. The Penitents’ screams were more effective than any rule.

At the base of the ridge Kai couldn’t quite distinguish the screams from the wind. Climbing, she heard them better, moans and cracks and high faint whistles like the complaints of a forest in a storm. Soon they were too loud, too clear, to be anything but human voices in dissonant chorus, and in pain.

About that time, she saw the Penitents.