She could have found her way blind, just by following the heat: cook fires and bonfires and torches and drunken bodies mashed together. And after the heat, the stink symphony of drug smoke, spilled liquor, vomit, barbecue, incense, blood sacrifice, and burnt offerings. Noise too, a wash of sitar and swing and contrabass chant, theological argument, hawk and sell, sin and expiation, lust resisted and satisfied. She slid down a drainpipe into the red-lit mess of the Godsdistrikt.

She landed behind a priest selling indulgences out of his open black coat, and snatched a prayer book from his hand. “Thief!” The priest lunged for her, missed, and tumbled instead into the back of a hefty henna-inked cultist from the Gleb, who turned smooth as sunrise and punched the priest in the face.

The fight spread, and Izza slid away through the crowd, skipping, dodging. She risked another glance back, and saw her Penitent pursuer wade into the Godsdistrikt, brawl. The crowd broke like waves against its chest.

A woman by an incense salesman’s cart reached for her purse and found it gone, then turned to see it in the grip of a hapless young monk, who had blindly taken the bundle a young girl thrust into his arms as she ran past. Izza tripped, and poked, and ducked away. She shouted discord into a missionary chorus. The crowd rose from simmer to boil. Fights broke out and merged into a riot like streams merging into a river. At last, she ducked into an abandoned confession booth, hugged her knees to her chest, and listened until she heard the drum swell of more Penitents approaching.

Six pairs of spotlights opened at once on the Godsdistrikt crowd, and Izza, hiding, waited, and hoped.

Penitents did not kill. This one had. Which presented two options: either all Penitents killed, or this was an exception. If all killed, they went to great lengths to keep people from learning of their murders. Preserve the people until Makawe and his sisters return, that was their mandate, and Izza had never heard of them breaking it. Which meant this statue was murderer more than Penitent—and like all murderers, it had to hide its deeds.

Hence, the riot. The more Penitents, the greater her danger of being taken, but the less her danger of being killed.

She waited in the confessional as Penitents cordoned off the street. The smell of cedar boards edged out the incense, sweat, and musk outside. A great shadow passed in front of the confessional door. She tried not to move, but could not stop shaking.

The riot died. The Penitents moved on. Izza slipped from the confessional, crossed the recovering roil of the Godsdistrikt, and from there, unobserved, walked north and west into the Palm.