She was right, and wrong.

Penitence hurt. The suit was agony. She’d long since cried her throat raw. Swearing supposedly eased pain, but crystal nets locked her jaw. She couldn’t speak any more than she could reach Ms. Kevarian’s business card.

But no voices whispered in her ear. The whispers were beneath.

When the mask closed over her face, she was trapped in darkness, with only her scared breath to relieve the silence. Then the darkness came alive.

She saw Jace’s office. Mara’s Penitent stood in front of the desk. Jace looked from one of them to the other, and sagged into his chair.

She saw the office, yes, but transfigured. Every surface glowed. Colors pressed against her in a billion shades and subtle variations. Light pierced her skull like a needle entering a rotten apple. She saw all of Jace through a microscope at once: individual hairs and pores between them, his stretched skin made up of millions of tiny cells. He breathed and his blood rushed and his heart beat and his brain worked with a high-pitched whine; gods, she could hear his brain. When he steepled his fingers their pads’ touch was a pounding drum, and when he sighed the rasp of air through his vocal cords might have been an avalanche.

In her stone shell, Mara wept. Her heart and Jace’s beat contrasting rhythms. Footsteps in the hall outside. More than the hall: the entire floor, a map in Kai’s mind built from tiny vibrations. In the middle distance, Teo shouted protest as someone forced her into a Penitent of her own.

The floor on which Kai stood cut her feet, as if it were covered with broken glass. The air was a toxic mix of stench. She closed her eyes, but that did not help; light and sound and scents remained. She was not seeing through her own eyes. The Penitent addressed her mind directly. She shared stone eyes’ vision, and the sharpness of stone ears.

“Come here,” Jace said.

She didn’t, but she was done. She decided to resist him, and in exactly the same moment to obey. The thought formed natural as falling. The pain came after, when she realized what had happened. The Penitent shaped her will from the inside out. Makawe built these as a teaching tool. The crystal had no mind of its own, only conviction. It used the prisoners’ minds to act on that conviction. Her thoughts were not her own.

Not quite right, she realized as she approached his desk. Her thoughts were her own—as her thoughts would be if she shared the statue’s faith. The part of her that did not was a railing voice pressed down: her self reduced to a bad conscience, struggling for control.