He nodded, once, and smiled. They weren’t shark’s teeth, but some were sharp, and others gone. Hard hands gripped the stick that propped him up. His fingers had been broken several times, and healed crooked.

She recognized him, then, a feeling like being dropped from a height into a cold pool. “I’ve seen you before.”

“I get around,” he said. “I try to know what happens in my bar. Well.” He jerked a jagged thumb back toward the Rest. “Eve’s bar, but I live there and it’s mine by residence at least. And when someone stalks my poets, I try to learn their name.”

“I’m Izza,” she said. The words slipped out before she could catch them.

“Of course you are,” he said. “You don’t have anything to fear from me.”

“You’re a friend of Kai’s.”

“Few enough of us. You know her?”

“I—she works for me.”

Mako laughed, an unpleasant phlegmy sound.

“Kai said I should come find you. If something went wrong.” Not precisely the truth, but he did not need to know that.

“And something’s gone wrong,” he said. “You want a drink?”

He swung his stick behind him, and it struck the Penitent’s leg with a dull thud.

Izza took his meaning, said, “Sure,” and followed him to the bar. On the beach, the old man moved like cats moved in dark rooms, feeling his way. When they reached the Rest’s hard stone floor, he stepped quick, winding between busboys and waiters. Izza followed.

A bartender in a low-cut blouse passed Mako a glass of amber liquid. She glanced a question at Izza, who shook her head.

Mako sipped his drink. “What’s happened to Kai that you didn’t want to tell me?”

“I want to tell you.”

“But you tried to sneak away before I noticed you. So you want to tell me, but you also don’t. What is it?”

The bartender swished off to cut lemons for the night’s drinks. Chair legs clacked and tables ground against the floor. Ghostlamps in the rafters sent follow spots wheeling over the empty house. The sun began to set. Mako drank liquid gold.

“Kai’s been taken by a Penitent.”

Mako choked. He set the glass on the bar, and ran one finger around the lip.

“Tell me.”

She tried to speak, but couldn’t. She’d sworn too many vows of silence, and broken them too often in the last few days.

“Assume,” Mako said, “for the sake of argument, that I know about the Blue Lady. And the Green Man, and all the rest.”

“What?”

“I may be blind. But I’m not deaf. Whatever else one might think of poets, they are excellent barometers for metaphysical shenanigans. Not as good as proper prophets, but these are fallen times.”

“Who told you?”