“Because a girl came into my place of business and accused me of not caring for a woman I’ve known since she could barely sneak out of her mother’s house. The question is, what are you doing here?”

“I.” She said the word, but didn’t have anything to say after it. The wail stopped. Maybe the Penitent ran out of breath, or maybe he’d realized there was no point screaming. “Come on.”

She tugged his hand, and he followed.

*   *   *

Kai hung in star-spackled and surf-washed night.

She was a ghost lost in the dream corridors of her own mind. She watched the water. Any moment, Makawe would arrive. Any moment, the sky would open and gods sweep her up to glory. Any moment, the world would change.

She expected this, because expectation was expected of her. Morality was easy to impose in the face of eschaton.

Trapped inside this expectation, she fought her losing war.

She saw everything, and nothing. She heard surf and sea wind and the beat of flying shorebirds’ wings, and footsteps approaching in the distance, though crystal and stone closed her ears.

Her mind processed the Penitent’s sensation. But her eyes did not see, and her ears did not hear, and her skin felt only sharp wires and crystal spikes.

She was not the thing she was.

Paradox.

Good. That was the first battlefield. She was not the thing she was: who was she, then? A collection of physical parts? But she’d been born with one body, and discarded it for another. A name? Names were words, and words changed through time. Relationships? She’d once loved Claude. Young man, haunted look in his eye, sitting in Makawe’s Rest clutching a bottle of beer white-knuckled as he watched an Altai poet chant two-toned songs about his homeland steppe; she’d wanted him, he wanted her, and that was enough, was everything until it ended.

She was change. She was nothing. She was becoming. But what was it that changed? What was it that became?

Each part of her could be traced to another. Body given by mother and father, remade by her own will. Education received from parents, teachers, priests, from books and plays and music—ideas of others reacting to others’ ideas. Soul composed of contracts and deals: desire, need, and pledge.

She was an evolving network of matter and spirit. Good.

This was another stage of evolution. She was coming, finally, to appreciate the value of community, of stability. Jace had been right: the island was worth protecting. She could work with him to protect it.

Less good.

But what was she protecting? If she was an evolving system, a network of change, what was Kavekana?

Kavekana was five decades’ wait, watching the horizon, hungry for a faded world. A memory of gods and an ache in the center of the chest.