But Kavekana was poetry, too, chanted on a thrust stage by madmen from distant shores. Kavekana was a refugee girl who lived on an island Kai had never known existed, though she’d spent her entire life upon its shores. Kavekana was Eve radiant onstage, was Margot the seeker, transfigured in his need and rapture. Kavekana was Seven Alpha, was the Blue Lady, drowning in the pool, betrayed by her own priests. Kavekana was Kai’s leap to save her.

Kavekana was changing.

No. She mistook ephemera for fact. Kavekana was the shore, was the hunger of the horizon. Kavekana was fixed as stone.

And there, that certainty, that denial of the things she’d seen, the world she knew—that wasn’t her. That was reality imposed. That was what she was told to think. That was the Penitent.

She knew the truth and she was being convinced to ignore it, by voices too subtle to hear. She sank through a void that tried to rip her apart. And she had to put herself back together.

She’d played this game before.

Inside the knife-edged cradle, she began to work.

*   *   *

Izza led Mako down the slope to the beach where the Penitents waited. He tripped, but she helped him to his feet. They walked together; he leaned on her and on his stick.

Penitents stood guard in long rows. Cooling joints popped and clicked. The air above them rippled with reradiated heat. Izza had expected the screams and moans and wails to be worse down here, but she heard only waves and wind and cooling stone. A soft sob, unless that was the wash of ebbing tide. Ten Penitents stood on this short stretch of sand. Maybe they were all veterans, or only a few held prisoners.

The stone monsters might not speak, but their sharp angles and heavy limbs and sheer mass all warned Izza off. She’d survived by not drawing attention to herself. This was as far a departure from that philosophy as possible, short of mugging people with a burning sword on Epiphyte at high noon.

So when the old man asked, “Can you see her?” she almost told him no, or that the trail ended here or that her connection to Kai had been cut off—almost said anything but the “Yes” she managed at last.