So she read the business section, waited, and pretended not to notice Mara. She ran out of patience halfway through the stock columns. “You should short Shining Empire bonds,” she said then, loud so her voice carried. “Hard and fast. Today. Exchanges don’t close in Alt Coulumb until eight. Plenty of time to arrange the trade.”

“You knew I was here.”

“Saw you climbing the stairs.”

“Glad you’re in good spirits.” Kai didn’t need to look to know the shape of Mara’s smile: slantwise and sarcastic.

“The nurses won’t let me anywhere near spirits.” Kai turned the page, and scanned an editorial by some bleeding heart in Iskar, suggesting that all the other bleeding hearts in Iskar join a crusade to stop the civil war in the Northern Gleb. No plan, just hand wringing and noble rhetoric. Fortunately: Iskar didn’t have a good history with crusades. “Alt Coulumb’s index funds are up, and the Shining Empire debt market’s rebounded. Turns out the rumors of open trade on their soul exchange were wrong after all.”

“Does that matter now?”

“False panics make for overcorrections. Shining Empire soul-bonds are trading twenty points higher than a month ago. The price will normalize in a week. Short-sell. Borrow against our AC index holdings to finance the trade. Act fast, and you’ll make back everything the Grimwalds lost when Seven Alpha died. A peace offering. I’d do it myself, but nobody’ll let me near the trading office. I had to take a nurse hostage to get them to give me a goddamn newspaper.”

Mara strode past Kai to the balcony’s edge. Slope wind whipped the hem of her dress like a luffing sail. “It’s too late for peace offerings. They want a sacrifice.”

“You mean the Grimwalds. And their Craftswoman.”

“Yes.”

“That’s what it sounded like in my deposition, too,” Kai said. “How’d yours go, by the way?”

Mara shuddered, and stared out over the rail, down the volcano.

Kai did not bother to look. She’d grown accustomed to the view. Kavekana, beautiful as always: stark black stone slopes, colonized even at this violent height by lichen, moss, and adventurous ferns. Farther down, grasses grew, and farther still palms, coconut, and imported date. Epiphytes flourished beneath the trees. Past those Mara would see signs of humankind, the fiercest invasive species, asserting presence with rooftop and stone arch, temple and bar and gold-ribbon road, traces thicker as the eye proceeded south until slope gave way to city and beach and the paired peninsulas of the Claws. In their grip the glittering harbor thronged with tall-mast clippers, schooners, the iron-hulled hulks of container ships anchored near East Claw’s point where the water was deep enough to serve them. Other islands swelled, purple ghosts, on the horizon. Craftsmen’s spires hovered out there, too, crystal shards almost as tall as the volcano, flashing in the sun.