The Quechal woman had worked the bracelet off her wrist, and held it above the pool. Sunlight caught silver.

Teo dropped the bracelet.

Kai did not swim so much as fly up through the black. Cold bit her limbs and entered her lungs.

The bracelet spun as it fell, and spinning, it glowed from within.

Kai burst from the pool. The million subtle constraints of physical law closed around her like the jaws of an enormous beast. Her fingers caught the falling bracelet—and bracelet flowed through them, silver sifting like sand. She grabbed for it again, and again her hand passed through as the wire hoop sank into unreal depths, a solid disk now, a moon shining within the pool, and gone.

The sky above turned red. The ground shook.

Pebbles trembled on the broken rock beach. Stone ground against stone.

Around them boulders shivered and stood, long-dormant legs and arms shattering free of hunched shells. Ten Penitents towered on the beach. Ruby eyes glowed in slab faces. Fingers flexed. Dust rained from joints of knuckle and wrist.

This was bad.

Kai didn’t know what Teo had done, or why. No time to care. Silhouettes appeared at the windows overlooking the caldera, priests drawn by the alarm and the crimson sky. They saw her.

Teo sprinted for the shelter of the cave, but Kai, diving, caught her leg, and they both fell hard onto rock. Teo kicked Kai’s hand, scrambled to her feet again, too late. These Penitents might have slept for years, but once woken they moved as fast as any that patrolled Kavekana’s streets. One caught Teo in its fist and lifted. Her shoulders strained, but she couldn’t shake the statue’s grip.

Kai tried to run, too. Rocks and pebbles cut her feet.

These Penitents lacked prisoners: slow crystal brains, that was all, urges and instincts without room for reason. If she was fast enough, she could cross the water, retreat into the cave, find an exit before the mountain locked down.

Two more feet to the water—

A stone hand caught her from behind.

She’d seen Izza struggle in a Penitent’s grip, and Teo just now, and wondered why they tried to fight. Muscle could not break stone. Now, she understood. The body fought on its own—the animal yanked and tugged and jerked to free itself. Proof in a way of Teo’s argument for evolution: the muscles remembered being a small mouselike creature in the claw of some prehistoric lizard. Trapped in the Penitent’s fist, lifted off the ground, Kai strained against the rock that held her. Her arms and shoulders and ribs and back burned. She could not breathe.

Groans of broken and shifting stone settled into silence. She glanced left, and saw Teo, also caught.

“Sorry,” Teo said, with a rueful grin. A bruise purpled her left cheek. “I didn’t expect that to happen.”

“What in the hells were you doing?”