“My goddess”—and gods, did that feel strange to say out loud—“isn’t dead. She’s up that mountain being tortured. The people doing it won’t stop until she’s dead or mad. And until she’s gone she’ll keep reaching out to the kids, and the priests will chase them down one at a time and kill them or make them Penitents. You can help us stop it all. Get us into the pool. Kai can do the rest.”

“Kai?”

“Hi.” Kai raised her hand.

“Who are you?”

“I work up there.” She pointed up and inland, to the mountain. “Sort of. They trapped me inside a statue. It’s complicated.”

“You,” Cat said, to Teo this time, “are a bleeding heart.”

“I didn’t spend the last month befriending street urchins.”

“We’re wasting time. We planned for you to set the beacon, not to set off every alarm in the mountain.”

“I didn’t expect my priestly friend here”—and at this Teo nodded over her shoulder to Kai—“to use me as cover for industrial espionage. So we’re even. Hells, that bracelet wasn’t supposed to trip their wards in the first place. Make that I’m one up on you.”

Cat crossed her arms.

“Cat,” Izza said. “I don’t think you made the wrong choice. Just the hard one. Like I’m doing now.”

In the end, Cat was the first to look away.

She paced the dock, footsteps heavy, muttering in a Kathic dialect so thick Izza couldn’t pick out more than a few words, most of them curses. She made a fist and cracked her knuckles, her wrist, her elbows and shoulders.

“Shit,” Teo said. “And you call me a bleeding heart.”

“Get the boat back out to sea,” Cat replied, and to Kai and Izza: “Let’s go.”

Chapter 59

59

Kai hadn’t expected a mainlander secret agent to look so much like a washed-up Godsdistrikt wreck, strung out in ripped slacks and a loose black shirt, green eyes darting and hungry. But when Cat moved, she moved with purpose: took Izza by one wrist and Kai by the other, and pulled them both toward the stairs. Whatever her appearance, she was strong.

They climbed rotting stairs to the wharf, into the fresh night wind off the ocean. In direct light, Cat looked harder than she had below.

“What’s next?” Kai said.

The woman smirked. “What do you think?”

“Climb the mountain. Rappel down.”

“That’s subtler than I planned.”

“What do you mean?”

“We start,” Cat said, “with a little shock and awe.”

From her pocket, she produced a piece of silver chalk. She wove the chalk between middle, index, and ring fingers of her left hand, and curled her fingers into a fist. The chalk broke.

Nothing happened.

“I’m not feeling much shock,” Kai said. “Or awe.”

She wondered, briefly, why Izza’d closed her eyes and clapped her hands over her ears.