The words pressed into Izza’s ears like thorns. “That’s not true. I felt them die. I saw them die.”

“They’re masks, Izza. Not masks: faces. The idols in the pool, the myths we make, they aren’t complicated enough to live on their own. But they’re all connected, and all of them together—they can dream. They can speak. Your gods and goddesses are different pieces of the same Lady. She’s still there. Stuck. And my boss will keep killing her forever if we don’t stop him.”

Izza burned with fever, and a cool hand caressed her cheek. She lay on the mountainside beneath the stars, and a beautiful horned woman stepped out of the stone to join her. “The Lady’s alive?”

“All of them. I saw, in the pool. It’s.” There were tears in Kai’s eyes, or else just ocean water. “I can’t describe it. It’s too big.”

Izza remembered the blue bird with the broken neck, and incense that smelled of desert rain.

This isn’t your fight.

Except it was.

This was her fight, and that, back there, that island swelling on the horizon, that was her home.

They’ll keep killing her forever. The knife, always sliding across the priestess’s throat, and that eternal gasp echoing in Izza’s ears as she ran. The column of oily smoke that would never go away.

“We need to go back,” Izza said. Five words. One syllable each. A door opened in her heart. And to Teo: “You can help us.”

Teo shook her head. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“Of course you can,” Kai said. “Turn the boat around. Your second-story man can get us into the pool. He, she, was going there anyway. I’ll do the rest. If I reach the pool, I can fix this.”

“You’re talking about a revolution. Deposing your boss, and not in the cozy Craftwork sense. You literally want to kick out the head of your priesthood.”

“What’s happening up that mountain is wrong,” Kai said. “I have to stop it.”

“That’s not—” Teo raised her hands. “I can’t. This is too much. The Two Serpents Group solves problems. We don’t overthrow governments. We don’t start revolutions.”

“Some problems,” Kai said, “can’t be solved without a revolution.”

“Spoken like a woman who’s never been on the wrong side of a rebel knife.”