After a brief and solemn silence, Teo said: “Can you show me the moon?”

Kai nodded. “We have plenty of moons. Care to be more specific?”

“Whole-package moon myths, you know. Femininity. Water. Stone. Rebirth.”

“It’s a popular archetype. We can do this one of two ways. I can run the show from here, which takes longer: my control over the pool’s limited while I stay on the shore. Or I can jump in.”

“Be my guest.”

“Talk to the pool as if it were me. No need to shout. I’ll hear. And really, don’t touch the water.”

Kai shucked shoes and jacket and shirt, and stepped out of her pants. She’d worn a bathing suit under her clothes in anticipation of this moment, but still she wasn’t prepared. Months ago, she had stood upon this rocky beach, ready to save Mara, to save a dying idol.

So she dove, knowing nothing.

She thought she knew why she was here today, and it scared her.

She stepped off the edge, and fell.

Chapter 50

50

Cold snatched her down into the night beneath the world. Bubbles of light and life and heat fled up toward the surface. Teo receded, a silhouette against a shrinking circle of blue sky.

Kai fell.

Her shadow tore itself once more from the cave wall. Free, in the darkness: free of mortality, form, and limit. She gained more dimensions than the customary four and lost them in an instant. The world turned inside out, her dive a sickening arc through the night of the gods.

She hung suspended in the pool, surrounded by darkness and their light.

Finding the moon idols was a moment’s work. She called them to her, a lunar battalion, four hundred skeleton forms of silver ladies.

“This is a sample,” Kai said. “We can be less traditional. Some cultures have moon gods, not goddesses, and in a few the moon’s just a place like any other.”

She formed the words in a bubble of thought, in her hand, and released them to float up toward the surface.

Alone, she sought the figures from Izza’s temple wall, and one after another found them.

The Great Squid at first resembled the many other squids that drifted lifeless in the currents. But only one swelled through time; only one stared at Kai with an hourglass pupil and seemed to know her. The Great Squid stretched out tentacles as if to consume the sun—but then it died. Simple accident: a zombie-crewed containership from Southern Kath wrecked in a storm. The containership had been hired to transport a horror from beyond the stars, but the horror broke free and twisted a few hundred miles of Kathic coastline into unearthly geometries before the Coast Guard caught it. Resulting market fluctuations broke the Great Squid. Steve, the priest responsible, was promoted after the event, for exceptional skill managing a crisis, Jace had said.