Kai tried to stand, but winced and sat down slowly on the dock. “Shit,” she said. “Sorry.”

Izza listened for footsteps, for breathing, for any human sound. Streetlamp light filtered through gaps in the dock’s upper level. A flight of rickety stairs rose to the street.

Teo lurched ashore, and stood unsteadily between Izza and Kai. “Okay. Here we are. What now?”

“That,” said a voice from the shadows beneath the stairs, “is what I wanted to ask you.”

Teo cursed and Kai recoiled. Izza alone didn’t move. She had expected the voice, as she had expected the woman who emerged from beneath the stairs. “Hi, Cat,” Izza said.

The streetlight cast a ghostly wash over the woman’s pale skin and blond hair.

Izza remembered her wounded, trembling from withdrawal. Remembered her cloaked in hophouse alley shadows, eyes hard and face fixed. That morning—gods, had it only been that morning?—she’d looked at Izza as if she lay at the bottom of a well, drowning.

Izza couldn’t say how she looked now. Cold. Tense. Excited, even.

But there was a bit of drowning there, too.

“Guess you didn’t leave your goddess all that far behind,” Izza said.

“Not so far.” Cat’s laugh was dry as the dock was damp. “You know that choice I kept saying you’d have to make?”

“Yeah,” Izza said.

“Well.” She slid her hands into her pockets. “I made the wrong one.”

“I know how that feels.”

“I didn’t lie. If it matters. I just left a few things out. My Goddess sent me away. Sent me here. I’ve been a cop all my life, and she asked me to steal for her. Because she trusts me. Because she loves me, and damn if I don’t love her back.” She slid her hands into her pockets. “What are you doing here, Izza?”

“Giving you a chance.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You said you couldn’t help me this morning. But I think you can. I think you’re here to help me—I think that’s why you were sent in the first place.”

“Cat,” Teo said, “you know this girl?”

Cat’s mouth pressed into a thin line. Izza remembered her fighting Penitents bare-handed. “Stay out of this,” the woman said. “Wait here a few more hours, and we’ll leave together. We’re almost free. I go back to my life, and you can come with me, and go wherever after that.”

“Some things are more important than freedom.”

“You don’t know that,” Cat said. “Not until you’re much further down this road.”