Then the night split open.

Kai picked herself up off the ground, blinking red-bloomed brilliance. Cat reached toward her, a person in vaguest outline. Distant drums beat through the whine of dead sound.

The drumbeats were explosions, she realized. Eyes recovering, she saw pillars of light rise across the island, West Claw, East, and the Palm, choreographed as casino fountains. She could almost see, almost hear again.

“Distractions,” Cat shouted. Kai heard her as a mumble through a wool blanket. “To keep the Penitents occupied. Like a magician’s show.” Her eyes split the lights to a million colors. “Now, hang on.”

“What?”

Cat grabbed Kai’s wrist and repeated herself, louder. “Hang on.”

Quicksilver sparked beneath the collar of Cat’s shirt, and flowed out and over, covering body and shoulders and back and legs. The hand that held Kai changed from skin to steel. Wings sprouted from Cat’s back, and spread.

When the silver reached Cat’s mouth, she sighed, as if setting down a long-borne burden.

Her wings beat, once, and they flew.

Kai’s and Izza’s added weight did not seem to slow Cat’s climb at all—or else Kai could not imagine how fast the woman would have been unburdened. Streets shrank to ribbons, and they swept up and north as searching Penitents’ gazes lit the earth below—scattered, stunned by the eruptions of light, seeking the phantom army that assailed them. Cat’s laugh did not travel like normal sound, but cut straight to Kai’s heart’s core.

Sirens wailed, warning clarions Kai recognized but had never heard aloud. The island cried in pain.

Cat wound between sweeping searchlights like an eel through a coral maze. Not precisely like: there was no truce with gravity, here, no uneasy accommodation between old foes. Gravity was vicious, and Cat fought him with every beat of her rising wings.

They swept up slopes, borrowing lift from currents of reradiated warmth. Blinking tears, Kai spared a glance to Izza, who hung from Cat’s other arm. The girl had a wild rictus grin, skin drawn tight over her skull.

They rose, and rose, and rose, over the volcano’s lip and higher, trajectory hyperbolic, so high Kai wondered if Cat no longer meant to infiltrate the mountain but to steal the stars instead.

Kavekana was a shrinking disk, framed by ocean.

Clouds scudded across the sky.

Cat’s metal skin drank moonlight.

She swept her wings back, and dove.

The ground approached.

Fast.

Time slowed.

They fell through space and worlds, following that unseen beacon. They did not slip from realm to realm so much as burst through. The color of the sea changed, wine red and spreading. Constellations danced and transformed.

The volcano’s mouth approached. At its bottom, pinhead small but growing larger, lay the pool, another sky into which they could fall forever. The size of a cherry now, a fig, lemon orange apple pineapple watermelon—