Izza dangled her legs over the edge of an East Claw warehouse rooftop, and drank her stolen beer. Kavekana’s city lights reflected in the black bay below, long false trails to freedom. A few years and forever ago, the two illuminated peninsulas cradling the harbor had welcomed her like her lost mother’s embrace. They’d turned, since, to teeth, and the black water to the fanged mouth’s inside. Clocks chimed two in the morning; Izza had spent the last hour deciding how to leave.

She was no stranger to moving on. Life was movement. She’d lied to herself thinking otherwise. The kids would miss her, fine, but the kids could find their own way, like she had. They didn’t need her.

So she sat, and thought, and hated herself, and drank. She didn’t drink as a rule, but there was a time for breaking every rule. She’d stolen this beer from a fat woman who ran a stall five blocks inland in the Godsdistrikt, selling cigarettes and cheap booze. The woman, caught up in a red-faced hands-flailing argument with a Kosite over the price of cigarettes, hadn’t noticed the bottle’s disappearance. She did notice Izza’s sudden retreat from the stand, and shouted, “Thief!” after her, but Godsdistrikt crowds ran mudslide thick and fast. Izza vanished down a side alley before anyone could hear the woman’s cry, not that anyone would have helped.

The beer needed a bottle opener. Fortunately the slums around the Godsdistrikt were well supplied with drunks. Izza stole a church key from the belt of a broad-backed sailor girl distracted by a clapboard prophet preaching doomsday, and found a rooftop where she could drink in peace.

She ran a finger along the frayed leather of her necklace, and wondered how to leave.

In the last four years she’d grown too big to sneak shipboard. As for work, well, sailors sang old pre-Wars songs about signing on with whalers and the like, but after singing they complained how the bad old days were gone. Shipmasters wanted papers, résumés, union cards. Stealing enough to buy herself a berth—that might work, but so much theft would attract attention. She could talk the kids into helping her, but she didn’t want to, not for this. Pawning everything she owned wouldn’t make up a ticket price. She didn’t own much.

So she paced the passages of her mind, in the small hours of the morning, until she heard the fight.

Fights were common in East Claw. Sailors brawled, and local toughs, and sometimes if the scuffles spread to riot the Watch came, with Penitents to reinforce them. But solitude and alcohol had gone to her head, and this fight was loud and near. Stone footsteps thundered down dockside streets, multiplied by echoes: Penitents, running. Two, maybe more. The Penitents terrified, but they put on a good show.