Izza knew the shakes, the patterns of withdrawal. She was ready with a stolen bucket and a mop on the third day, when it turned bad. Cat threw up into the bucket, twice, and gritted her teeth. She convulsed, swatted at hallucinations, and sometimes babbled in a language that sounded more like grinding rock than a human voice. But the next night she slept, if not easy, then easier.

Cat became part of Izza’s routine. She used the woman’s soulstuff to buy them food, and stole to supplement. Begged in West Claw, a little, when the Lunar New Year came and tourists danced mad dances and soul flowed like water.

Izza only regretted her decision to care for Cat when the children came back. One evening she returned to the warehouse and found Ellen and Ivy and a boy she didn’t recognize seated in a triangle around Cat, asking questions. The kids looked ragged, and Izza could smell the boy beneath and through the warehouse rot. “Did the Blue Lady send you?” Ivy asked, and Cat looked at her, blank eyed, confused.

“No,” Izza said from behind them both. Ivy’s head darted around, and she stared at Izza, expectant first, then sad when she didn’t find what she sought. “What are you doing here? I told you the game was over. I told you to get gone.”

“We want a story,” Ellen said.

She sank to her knees, so their heads were level. “No more stories. Come on. You want to waste time with this stuff? You have a life to worry about.” The boy didn’t look her in the eye. She didn’t wonder what had happened to him.

“Who’s she?” Ellen pointed to Cat.

“She’s sick.”

“Is she going to help the Blue Lady?”

“No one can help the Blue Lady,” Izza said. “Not now.”

Ivy sat, and crossed her legs. Izza returned her stare.

“I’m not leaving,” Ivy said, “without a story.”

So she told them a story. Gods help her, she told them a story, an old one about the Blue Lady saving a girl caught by Smiling Jack’s dead boys. They listened, the three kids, and Cat, too. Izza kept waiting for the woman to interrupt, but she said nothing until the story finished and the kids nodded and left, padding softly over the warehouse floor. “Don’t let me catch you back here,” Izza called after them, but they did not seem to hear.

Once the kids were gone, she offered Cat a meal of rice and mangoes and something pretending to be pork, which she’d bought off a food cart down by the docks where meals came cheap. Cat ate in silence. Some of her color had returned, and yesterday Izza’d caught her doing push-ups one-handed beside her bedroll.

“You tell good stories,” Cat said when the food was done.

“Too good,” she said.

“Who’s the Blue Lady?”