Izza hadn’t planned to hold her breath, but her breath stopped on its own when the Penitents passed below.

There were two, both halting and awkward, newly paired. The left one, a normal model, didn’t concern Izza much. The other, though: smaller, more agile than the usual street patrollers, features rough, face painted. She’d seen this one before—it had killed Edmond Margot.

No. She looked closer. The eyes were wrong. Hard to see from this angle, and moving, but they were rubies, or red stones anyway, not sapphires. Same model. Different unit.

With Kai inside.

At first she’d thought Kai was hiding behind the statues, but no human walked that dirt road—only Penitents, proceeding to and through their sentence.

Izza breathed again, fast and shallow. Her hands burned; the vine she held was the stinging kind, and its sap singed her skin. She clutched harder, unwilling to rustle branches by letting go.

If they heard, the Penitents might turn, see her. Catch her.

Like they caught Kai.

Stone-still, hands aflame, she tried to quell the voices in her head. Gods. Kai had kept her vow. And this was her reward.

Tough, the hard and snub-nosed part of Izza said, the part that lurked around corners and figured that if someone hadn’t locked their house tighter they must not have liked their stuff much on some level. Kai stuck her neck out, and was burned. Others had burned before her, harder, and longer.

Another part of Izza wanted to see the Penitents broken, the island in flames. And still another wanted to leave Kai, to flee into the forest, to an outbound ship, because she was afraid. Because once the Penitents broke Kai the law would descend, and leave no place for her or any other kid to hide.

This place isn’t worth you.

The Penitents’ footsteps faded. She was alone.

She dropped to the ground and buried her hands in soil until the burning passed.

Cat wouldn’t help, not with this. She had been right, in the warehouse this morning: Izza had to choose her path.

But the choice scared her.

She ran through the forest toward the city.

Chapter 53

53

Kai walked. No. That wasn’t right. The shell around her walked, and she moved with it, limp and pliant to keep the crystal from cutting. She didn’t walk so much as she was walked—but that wasn’t right, either, since the drive to walk came from her own mind, and the steps the Penitent took were her own steps.

She’d asked Claude about his time inside, and he answered as well as he could, but she now understood the limits of his explanation. The experience beggared thought. From his broken sentences, she imagined the Penitent as a walking iron maiden, applying pain to force the prisoner to act. She imagined a metallic whisper in her ear, a prompt or request, with torture to follow.