“You’re the one who claims she wants to help the world. So what is it? Will you circle this entire planet saying you want to help people, but only really helping yourself, making your sponsors feel good, scratching some goddess’s back so she’ll scratch yours? Helping changes things. My island is living a lie. People are dead. My friend is inside a Penitent, suffering what we just suffered with no chance of release. My boss stabs over and over again at a goddess’ eyes in the darkness. How much will you sacrifice to preserve the status quo? To keep your hands clean?”

At the mention of sacrifice, Teo stiffened. Her hand sought her wrist.

Kai closed her mouth. She’d been shouting at the last, and the ocean echoed her voice. In the chapel Kai’d seemed uncertain, small, afraid. That was gone now. Maybe the Penitents broke it from her. Or maybe she’d learned something else inside.

Teo didn’t look at Kai, didn’t look at Izza, either. She kept her gaze fixed on the water outside the boat, and the stars reflected there.

Izza reached out and touched the woman on the arm. Teo didn’t brush her off. “We’ll go back ourselves,” Izza said. “If we have to. But it would be easier with your help. Please.”

Teo took her hand, pressed it, held it. Izza forced herself not to pull away.

Teo’s eyes were dark. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Chapter 58

58

They reached shore three hours later. Stars receded as they approached, repelled by city fire and ghostlight and Penitents’ searching eyes.

Kai rowed at first, but soon exhaustion caught up with her. Izza took over the oars while the other woman slept in the stern, shaking from bad dreams. No wonder. Izza didn’t mind rowing. Returning to Kavekana under her own power felt right somehow.

Teo sat at the prow, troubled.

Rather than aiming for the well-lit center of the Palm, Izza angled the boat toward East Claw. Night never fell at the deepwater port by the claw’s tip, but farther north dark lengths of warehouse wharf brooded over the sea-lapped shore. She rowed to a decaying two-story wooden dock that appeared on the verge of collapse. A band of glory smugglers used this place to off-load joss the year before; the Watch rounded them up in a sting, and gangs abandoned the place after, out of a mix of prudence and superstition. But their hideout remained, its crow-pecked skeleton testifying to the bad ends of stupid crooks.

Izza rowed into the dock’s lower level, under a wooden arch hung with broken planks and seaweed like wrecked teeth in a diseased mouth. The odor of rotted wood smothered them.

Izza locked the oars, grabbed a moss-covered pylon, and pulled herself onto the dock. The boat disappeared when she left it; she groped above the water until Kai grabbed her hand and pulled herself ashore.