She pondered sneaking into Kavekana’ai herself. Best way would be to tackle a coffee girl. Jump one when she got off shift, steal her uniform, ride the cable car up. But there were too many places a coffee girl couldn’t go, and anyway she’d never been inside the mountain before, would probably get lost in its temple tunnels.

Waiting, she gave up hope. Kai had betrayed her, of course. Which meant Izza’d betrayed herself. Cat. Her friends. Her gods. She deserved to burn in whatever special hell awaited traitors.

Though a half-drunk Telomiri priest had told her once that traitors did not burn in hell.

They froze.

She pondered the tortures of ice. Fire seemed pathetic by comparison—people burned fast, and passed out from smoke. Ice could bind and crush, cut, pierce. From ice one might sculpt hooks. Pliers. Spears. Cages.

She cycled through a hundred different tortures before the part of her soul that she’d bound at Kai’s throat moved—fast, descending. Too fast for the cable car.

Izza craned her neck back to see the mountain.

Two lines of dust sped down the western slope, skiing over scree, trailing dirt and broken rock. Switchbacking faster than a man could run.

And headed, near as Izza could tell, for a freight road at the mountain’s foot.

She guessed their destination and ran into the woods.

The forest here was old-growth, sacred for millennia, and though elephant-ear ferns bobbed and mushrooms spread in musky shade, there was space enough between the trees for a girl to run. And run she did, fast, too fast—a trapvine caught her and catapulted her toward treetops. She let out a brief undignified squawk, and lost too many minutes sawing her leg free of the vine with Kai’s knife, then climbing down.

She could no longer see the dust trail through the trees and fountain ferns and trailing vines, but Kai had reached the mountain’s foot. Izza shrank into herself as she ran, became a rigid curve. Under these trees the air was thick as wet cotton. She wasn’t yet breathing hard. She could run until she broke.

By the time she reached the road, she was close enough to breaking that she skidded out onto bare dirt and glanced up in shock at the blue sky without realizing she’d arrived.

An earthquake shocked her to her senses.

Penitents.

Kai had sold her out.

Izza dive back into the forest and found a tree thick-limbed enough to support her. She climbed in four pulls, and perched on a branch with a clear view of road. If she could see the Penitents, they could see her, but she had to be sure.

She grabbed a vine to steady herself. Heavy footsteps approached, and with them Kai. Birdcalls and insect chirps and wood sprite breezes all stilled before the Penitents’ advance.