Kai wore a pale suit, matching hat, and dark blouse. After weeks of enforced sexless hospital-gown infancy, she was herself again, in her own clothes cut to her own body—and that body hers, too, not some nurse’s or doctor’s to prod and poke at will. She’d stopped at a salon on the way over to tame her ragged surgeon-shaved hair to a sharper cut. She walked to the Rest under her own power, with the cane’s aid, and she sat here drinking booze bought with her own soul. Gods, she’d missed this—her world, her island with its ragged and rough edges.

Glorious, but the glory wouldn’t take. Maybe it had crawled down the bottom of one of these glasses, or into some other bottle behind the bar.

Bongos drummed, and a trumpet trilled, and under the white ghostlight spots a new poet staggered out onto the thrust stage: a round Iskari man dressed all in green, waistcoat, tailcoat, hat, and slacks.

“Since when do Iskari read here? Their work’s staid for us, isn’t it?”

Mako shook his head. “This a fat guy, dressed like a cabbage?”

“Yes. I mean. Not very fat.”

“Edmond Margot. He has a bit of fire. Listen.”

She listened, and he stood spread legged and inhaled, closed his eyes and dug within him, and declaimed through noise and music:

“Shout the island is our prison

Tied in promissory chains

Waiting for withheld names

Dreaming free wind

Howl, bound world with

Painted gods and wooden

Idols worshipped hungry

For lash and cuff and needle

Scream lost souls and

Writhe beneath satin

Stains and suck juice from

Skeleton fingers and

Sing”

And on and on, rapt and rigid, chest peacocked out, neck bullfrog bulged. Heaving stomach drove air through his thick throat. The music eclipsed him, supported him, crushed him, and he staggered back, eyes wide, uncertain how he’d come here, uncertain what he’d done to earn the applause, the whistles, the jeers. He woke from a bad dream to find himself on stage, naked minded, before a room of men and women cheering. Eve, the Rest’s owner and stage manager, in her tight black high-necked dress, grabbed Margot’s shoulders and escorted him stumbling from the light as the next poet stepped up, a sandy lip-ringed Glebland boy whose sleeve tattoos showed beneath the cuffs of his ragged tunic.

“Three mothers crying / two sons gone”

Margot’s friends received him, swallowed him, applauded him, a small band of layabouts and wanderers, fat, thin, hair stringy, curly, red, black, bald, hungry.