She’d dropped her cane, and bent to retrieve it. The cane’s head hung at a sharp angle from the shaft: it must have broken when she hit the cat. Inside, she saw a glint of metal.

Strange.

She twisted the cane further, and through the widening crack saw its core was webbed with silver wire. She couldn’t read the patterns, but she recognized Craftwork when she saw it.

Something hid inside her walking stick. A monitor, maybe. Simple medical Craft to keep her safe, help her heal.

Or not.

Night wind blew cold around her.

Mara might have stayed at work. Taken an unannounced vacation. Sickness. Death in the family.

She went up the mountain yesterday. She did not come down.

Kai took her orange from the table. The cat statue’s eyes seemed to follow her as she followed the stone path back to the front yard. She looked back, into the hole between its teeth.

Two blocks from Mara’s house, Kai took a last glance into her cane’s broken heart, and tossed it into a compost bin.

Chapter 37

37

Edmond Margot returned to his flat and cleaned. There was not much to clean: he owned little, most of that spread out on his floor due not to laziness but to an inveterate affection for chaos. This, at least, was what he told guests he wanted to impress. Few in number, these. More lately, but Margot doubted he had many latelies left before he became late altogether. As in, the late Edmond Margot.

So, his possessions: Seven socks without mates, holes in three. Two shirts, first ink stained on right wrist and left breast and ripped in the back, second paint smeared across the left shoulder, missing three buttons and left cuff. One pair trousers, mangled. One intact sandal, and its mate with strap broken. Three of the insufferable, and insufferably cheap, bright patterned short-sleeved shirts the local beach bums loved, which Margot wore around the house when awake during the day (seldom) and writing (often). Two notebooks, pages torn out, empty. A box of stationery, likewise empty, consumed in correspondence during one of the dark periods early in his Kavekana stay when he wrote only weepy ten-page letters home to friends laboring through university adjunctship and drowning their sorrows in overpriced absinthe bars. One book of stamps, half consumed. Stubs of three pencils. Empty ink bottle. Before he’d come to Kavekana he hadn’t even known those could empty; he drained one in a week, after his beating, when the words first came. Broken pen nibs, five. Broken quills, two. He had experimented with quills out of a hope they’d feel more authentic than writing with a fountain pen, but after two weeks of hives he deduced he was allergic to down.