Izza stood, snatched the notebook, and stuffed it into her pocket. Heat surrounded her: the twin spotlights of the Penitent’s stare. Margot twitched one last time, and hung still. The Penitent let him fall, and then Izza was alone, pinned by light from the murderer’s eyes.

She ran.

The first step was the hardest. She dove over the railing, fell, and rolled to her feet on the grass. Up again, running for the alley wall. Behind her, three heavy footsteps and an eruption of plaster and brick: the Penitent burst through Margot’s wall, scattering dust and broken glass. It crashed after her into the yard, tearing up great gashes of turf. She vaulted into the alley and ran. She was halfway down the block when she heard a cliff face collapse as the Penitent landed where she had been a minute before. Searchlights swept the darkness, and she felt that telltale heat.

Izza didn’t bother knocking over trash cans in her wake. The Penitent would ignore them. She could take to the rooftops, but the Penitent had strong eyes. It would follow, and she couldn’t hide forever.

Stone footfalls accelerated into an avalanche, and behind that avalanche she heard the prisoner’s cries as gears and needles and knives goaded her on. Izza squeezed down a narrow gap between two walled gardens, and heard the Penitent turn left onto a larger, parallel street to keep pace.

Out onto Victoria, two blocks from shore, two steps ahead of the Penitent. Options, hastily assembled, more hastily compared—across the road and down to the docks, a maze of narrow passages and turnings before she reached water and safety. To make it, though, she had to beat the Penitent in an open sprint. And if the statue tracked her to the water it could just follow her from shore.

Not the docks, then, she decided ten steps after she sprinted south into East Claw. Two blocks down, up onto a shop awning, from there three windows’ climb to a rooftop, then south again. Searchlight eyes swept the night and caught a flash of heel, an arm, a glint of eye turned back to check how much distance she’d lost. Once, as she was leaping across a gap between buildings, the light flooded Izza, so dense it seemed to lift her up before she arced out into shadow.

Her legs throbbed, her heart pounded. She could not run much farther. Fortunately, she did not have much farther to run.

She cut east, away from shore, up the slope. The Penitent followed.