Chapter 10

Nick wasn’t easy to find. Izza made the mistake of asking Ivy where he spent his time these days, which Ivy claimed not to know, though of course she did. Not weeks before Ivy would have told Izza anything she asked, would have spun fantastic tales in an attempt to please. Now she lied, and badly.

For which Izza had no one to blame but herself. Taking in Cat, announcing the end of their game of gods and goddesses, saying she’d run rather than let herself be caught for a Penitent—the kids might not know what to think, but at least they knew not to trust her. Good instincts. Not great, or else they would have run away themselves years ago, but good.

So Ivy, who Nick trusted and liked, cared for almost as for the kid sister he claimed he never had, said she hadn’t seen Nick in a while, and must have put out word that Izza was looking, because after that Nick was nowhere to be found, his old haunts unhaunted, his Godsdistrikt rooftop pallet abandoned, and his cubby holes throughout East Claw cub-less.

Which might sound like it left an entire island for Izza to search, but in truth there were only so many places a kid looking to steal rich could go. A crooked alchemist who came to Kavekana to cook dreamdust had once explained the principle to Izza. You drew (and he drew, in the dust with his fingertip) a simple graph—put value on the vertical axis, and risk on the horizontal. The value-risk curve for most endeavors, criminal and otherwise, increases steadily to the right. The more comfortable you are with risk, the more value you might realize. The more value you wanted to realize, the more comfortable you had to be with risk. Kavekana (he said) was too risky for most crooks, but the combination of spendy sailors and mainlanders come for business promised high value.

The alchemist was taken for a Penitent soon after, but he left his graph behind, which had to count for something, even though Izza wasn’t sure why he called the line a curve when it looked straight.

Anyway. The Godsdistrikt was low value, low risk. Few Penitents, little attention from the watch, because who cared what foreign sailors got up to so long as they didn’t trouble the good people of Kavekana—those being, of course, the people of Kavekana who happened to look and talk like the ones in the Watch. Your average sailor didn’t have much soulstuff, though, and tended to keep what little he had locked deep inside his own head. A few pieces of preciously guarded jewelry, a keepsake or two you could steal, a purse of coin. Not much else. Sailors watched where they put themselves.