Here to stop her from guarding Makawe’s people. Misguided. Illegal. Traitors.

Her fingers twitched, and she almost reached for them.

No.

She broke the statue’s certainty on a wall of will. Too many voices had told her who to be, what to think. And they were so often wrong. Wrong to say they knew her; wrong to say what she should do, or be, or become.

Izza and Mako shuffled into view. She wanted to warn them away, but wire cut her and fire burned her and she knew her righteous facade was false. She ignored her friends’ faults rather than helping them grow.

They stood before her, Mako with hands crossed on his walking stick, Izza staring up at the Penitent—at Kai—with horror, and a clear expression of guilt.

Mako said: “I need to touch her.”

She recognized his voice.

Of course she recognized his voice. He was her friend. Seize him now. Anything less was to fail the cause of justice, to abandon the island’s defense.

Or not.

They were here to help her. They were working for Kavekana, the real Kavekana, ever changing, not the image burned into the Penitent’s crystal mind. To stop them was to betray the island.

The Penitent demanded, but the judgment belonged to Kai.

She did not raise her arm.

And so she suffered.

*   *   *

Izza led Mako to the Penitent. Her whole body was cold iron, and moving broke it rather than bent. She’d snuck into back-room offices while old women and potbellied men snored on their lunch break, and stolen fragments of their dreams. But she never felt this way before: like trying to walk over frost without melting it.

The Penitent stood strong and stiff. Izza wondered what battles Kai fought within its shell.

Five steps left. Four. Three.

Too close to run, now.

Idiot. You’ve always been too close to run.

Kai screamed.

Izza saw herself reflected in the paint on the Penitent’s chest, and in the facets of its eyes.

“Here.”

Mako extended his hand. His fingers shook.

The Penitent moved.

*   *   *

Kai wrestled with an angel, and she was losing. She’d hurt before, in Jace’s office, as the Penitent taught her how to move, and she thought that was pain. In the intervening hours the crystal had studied the courses of her mind, tangled itself into her thoughts. It crushed her and burned her and cut her and froze her and broke her and re-formed her only to break again. She fought back, tearing, wild, a cyclone of agony. It hurt her because it knew her, and because it knew her it could fade away before she struck.

She fought herself—the self the Penitent wanted her to be.