“Gods, do you think he would have taken the initiative on his own? He talked it over with people. I don’t know who. He wouldn’t have kept notes. But he was a committee man. For every person directly involved, there must be ten who guessed, but looked away. Like I did. We didn’t ask questions. We kept to our own business even when the idols started dying. The gods.”

“We would have caught him.”

“Who would have? Nobody wanted to rock the boat. To step out of line. To ask the first hard question, let alone the second or the third. No one wanted to realize the island was changing.”

“Except for you.”

“Except for I only came after him, came after all of you, for selfish reasons. Because everyone acted like I was crazy, and I had to prove I wasn’t. That’s not justice. Mara, maybe she should have been the one to save us. But Jace stuck her in one of those things. I’m not a just woman. I’m not a revolutionary. I don’t know what I am.”

“But you know who you are.”

“I guess.”

“That’s more than I do,” he said.

She looked at him, sideways, really looked at him: strong jaw, flat cheeks and nose, hard eyes under a heavy brow, muscles bulging against shirt and jacket, the man that had been made out of the boy. And she saw, inside him, something younger, like that trace of grit that stuck in oysters for years makes a pearl. Three years they lived together, and she’d never seen that. The broken boy, wondering now, maybe wondering always, what he’d be. The boy who never got the chance to decide, and searched in books for images of the hero he thought he might have been if he had not lost his way.

In that moment she almost forgave him—not everything, but a lot, including some things she should not have forgiven.

“Hey,” she said, and grabbed his biceps. “You got to save the world. Or a piece of it.”

“But I lost the girl.”

“You lost the girl a long time ago.”

Neither of them spoke for a while.

“Why are we standing here?” he said at last.

“I’m waiting.”

“For what?”

She saw a glint of green within the pool and slid her hand inside, smooth and slow. Then she pulled with arm and back and legs and in a confused half second Izza lay flat onshore, coughing. Kai waited as the girl curled into a fetal ball, and covered her mouth, and stopped shaking.

Izza stood. She swayed on her feet, but did not fall. Claude caught her shoulder anyway. She pulled back and glared demon-fire at him.

“I’ve seen this girl before,” Claude said. “Your guide.”

Kai laughed. She hadn’t remembered. “I guess she is, at that.”

“Do you know her name?”

“Izza.”