“The gods. Are they real? Do they live? Do they speak? Do they feel? Do they love?”

She remembered a soft touch on a feverish cheek. She put her hand there, but the skin was cool, and smooth. “Once I fell from a dockside crane. The Blue Lady caught me.” She lifted her shirt, and showed him the rippled scar on her side, the imprint of four fingers and a thumb. “There.” She lowered her shirt again. From his expression, and his caught breath, she knew he had seen. “She wasn’t used to people yet. She caught me, and it burned.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you,” as if she hadn’t heard the first time. “Go.”

She ran inland, away from the sea, away from the false metal cliffs and the neon lights and the man in the green and threadbare suit.

When she knew he couldn’t see her anymore, she retraced her steps and trailed him through the streets toward home.

Chapter 36

36

Kai worked hard, or seemed to, for the rest of the day. She turned many pages of binders, moved her eyes over a hundred intake forms, and all the while planned her confrontation with Mara. Evasions. Pursuit. Mara’s collapse, and the slow determination Kai would help her build to tell Jace the truth, or some of it at least.

Unless Mara really meant to frame Kai for everything. In which case their conversation might take a very different path.

Near sunset she clocked out and headed uphill toward Mara’s house, a few blocks from her own. Kai and Mara rarely met outside work, but Mara’d helped out when the pipes in Kai’s basement burst, and Kai’d leant Mara a hand moving in. She remembered the way, and soon stood on the sidewalk before Mara’s pale purple two-story. Porch ghostlights clicked on as night deepened, timer-driven. The lights cast dancing shadows on the lawn.

No signs of life. Kai checked her watch. A little after seven. Mara wouldn’t be home for an hour yet, at best. She removed a pad from her purse, scrawled a brief note—“Mara, need to see you, urgent, family business, Kai”—ambiguous enough she hoped its meaning would be safe. She opened Mara’s mailbox to slip the note in, but the box was crammed with newsprint, letters, and ads. She folded her message double, sealed it with a drop of wax, and was searching for a cranny into which the paper might fit when her mind caught up with her eyes.

The mailbox held two days’ mail at least. Mara must have forgot to pick up her mail—or else she never came home after her meeting with the Craftswoman. With Ms. Kevarian. The meeting Kai thought had finished too fast.

The empty house watched Kai from behind the fence.