So she rambled along the roof and, after checking her balance and relative level of intoxication, sprinted and sprang across the narrow alley between this warehouse and the next. She ran to the building’s edge, and lay flat with her head jutting over the drop.

At first she did not understand the scene below.

The Penitents were familiar at least: two immense stone figures, broad and thick as battlements, blunt features formed from planes of rock. The Penitent on Kavekana’ai had marched up the slope with grim determination, but these moved so fast the word “movement” didn’t seem enough. The prisoners within cried and cursed from the inhuman speeds their statue shells forced on them: one man, and, Izza judged from the voice, one woman. Their howls scraped the back of her skull, tightened her limbs, and locked her joints.

This much she’d seen before. But the thing—the woman—the Penitents fought was new.

She was quicksilver and smoke and swift water. Green eyes burned in the mask of her face, and great razor-pinioned wings flared from her back. She flowed as she thought: a Penitent swung at her with a granite blur of arm, and she ducked beneath the blow and rose off the ground with a knee-kick that struck the Penitent’s bare rock torso and sent it staggering, chest spiderwebbed by cracks. The woman turned to run, but the second Penitent blocked her way. She tried to dodge around, a mistake: the Penitents were faster than they looked, their arms broad. A stone hand swept out, and she jumped back. Wings flared to catch her in the air and send her spinning down again to earth.

Izza had fought before, wild, bloody backstreet brawls, gouging eyes, biting wrists, bashing stones into skulls and vice versa, combatants a haze of limbs and fear. The winged woman fought different, fast and fierce but tight, too, as if every movement served a higher purpose.

And still she was losing. As she fell, the first Penitent’s stone fist pistoned out and caught her by the arm. With her free hand the woman grabbed the Penitent’s elbow. Wings flared and beat and at the same time she pulled sideways. Stone broke, the joint bent backward, and the Penitent’s scream—the man’s—shivered the night. It released her, and falling she kicked viciously at its knee. The Penitent stumbled, and collapsed. The woman landed, but one arm hung limp from her shoulder. The second Penitent struck; she dodged, too slow, and the fist clipped her side. Izza heard a crunch of breaking bone.

The woman struggled to rise. With eyes of green fire she glared into and through the Penitent above her. A granite arm rose, and fell; the woman caught the Penitent’s wrist. Stone ground and creaked. Inside the Penitent someone sobbed.