“Who?” The voice was cloudy and unfocused as her gaze. Izza’d heard that vagueness before, from sailors rising out of opium dreams or divine rapture. Great. Whatever this woman was, she was in withdrawal. The Penitents must have smelled the god on her, and come hunting. No foreign gods allowed on Kavekana.

“The Penitents won’t stay down long.” Izza risked a glance back: the stone around the fallen statues paled and lost color as they drained its essence into themselves. Healing, fast. A few minutes before they recovered, no more. “Do you have a place to hide?”

She shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Shit.” Leave her. Or dump her in the Godsdistrikt with the other grace addicts. Hard-luck cases aplenty on this island. But none of them could fight off a Penitent, let alone two. “Follow me.”

Izza offered her hand, but the woman slapped it away. She closed her eyes, and drew a shuddering breath. When she opened them again, she took a step, and this time did not fall. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Izza led her through twisting Godsdistrikt alleys, to mask their trail with the stench of trash and foreign joss. The woman followed, around Dumpsters, over unconscious sailors, beneath the red lights of hothouse windows, and through puddles of foul water. At last, trail good and lost, Izza turned them back west toward the bay.

“I don’t know your name,” the woman said.

“Izza.”

“Cat,” she replied in answer to Izza’s unasked question.

*   *   *

Cat passed out across the street from the collapsed warehouse. Izza heard her slam into a trash can, and caught her before she fell farther. The woman weighed more than she looked, as if her skeleton were not made of bone. Izza crouched beside her in the stink of garbage and stale water, and waited for the road to clear. When Dockside Boulevard was empty of Penitents and freight traffic all the way south into East Claw, and north until it joined the Palm, she draped Cat’s arms over her shoulders, hoisted her up, and stumbled across the road. She ducked through a hole in the wall next to the warehouse’s padlocked gate, and in.

Rats and beetles scrabbled away over the slab floor. Rotten crates and dust, muck and fallen beams and tangles of rusty wire crowded them round. Decay and wisps of incense hung on the heavy air, and stars shone through gaps in the half-fallen ceiling. This warehouse had stood abandoned as long as Izza’d known or anyone else could remember. Its roof fell in one hurricane season, wrecking whatever cargo it contained and ruining the owners; nobody had fixed up the place in the years since. Piled debris cut the warehouse in half, and as far as most knew, the shoreside half was the only one open enough for folk to walk or sit.