“You should have trusted me without him. Instead you needed someone else to tell you it was okay to believe the crazy girl. Every link in the chain could be a leak. The runner. Your partners. The duty officer. Anyone.”

He tried to touch her, and she pulled away.

“No. A man’s dead, and I have to go.”

“I could make you come with me.”

“Do it, then.”

He had stone in him, in his bones and marrow, as much almost as the Penitents outside. Little veins stood out on the backs of his hands.

But he didn’t stop her as she left.

She pushed through the revolving doors out into the sea’s breath and the heat and the Penitents’ shadow. One turned its head to watch her, leaning on her cane. Stone groaned, and the prisoner too. She did not acknowledge their attention. A cab stopped for her, and she got in.

“Just drive,” she told the horse. She closed the door, slid the curtains shut, and sat in red-tinged solitude.

Leaning back into cushions, she wished she could disappear.

Jace knew about Margot. Maybe this was a good thing. Maybe now he’d see it was futile to keep her on the sidelines. Or, more likely, he’d kick her out forever.

Especially if he discovered what she was about to do.

In which case she should hurry.

She cracked the door, leaned out into traffic, and shouted over the rush: “Take me to the Regency.”

Chapter 49

49

An hour later, Teo and Kai sat side by side in a cable car climbing Kavekana’ai. Beneath and behind them the shoreline city receded. Perspective congealed metal and brick and streets and blocks into a cracked old scab separating ocean from green slopes. They shared the car with a young woman in a green shirt, who wore a silver name tag that read “Jamie” in round sans-serif letters: an employee in the volcano’s coffee shop. Kai’d greeted her with a nod as they boarded the car, and received no acknowledgment in return.

“Nice, this,” Teo said halfway through the climb, as the car rocked past an interchange pole. “Pilgrimage in style.”

“The priests didn’t like the idea at first.” Kai was relieved for the opening. Plots tangled in the cat’s cradle of her mind and left little slack for small talk. “Used to be the mountain was a special space.”

“Sacred.” Teo nodded. “We used to do that all the time, too. My grandparents’ generation, I mean, before the God Wars. Old Quechal were sticklers for class and strata. There were five or six different sectors of the city, and different castes or clans couldn’t visit one or the other during lunar eclipse months, or intercalary days, or when the wind was wrong. Made for all kinds of hassle.”

Jamie the coffee girl leaned against the window and closed her eyes. Her cheek puddled into the glass.