But if you were comfortable with more risk, Penitent-wise—that is, if you were incurably stupid—you might decide to pursue a higher class of mark.

You’d stay clear of longtime wealthy residents, with their strong wards and stronger connections, but there were easily a dozen upscale resorts in West Claw and the Palm, let alone all the beaches and nightclubs and gyms where tourists and business visitors might leave their stuff unattended for the brief magic moment said stuff needed to grow wings and fly away.

Still too much territory to search.

Izza swam into the secret room in the back of the warehouse, to the altar where she’d piled her spoils. Quite a stack, there—wallets and purses and pouches and statues and jewelry. Even so, embarrassing that she hadn’t noticed Nick’s additions. Put it down to the shadows, or to the fact that Izza spent not an instant more than she needed back here these days. Too many bad memories. Too many corpses on the walls.

In all, Nick had added five wallets, leather and elegant and fat with soul, and three purses in questionable high-fashion taste. They held family pictures, thick wads of banknotes, Iskari and Camlaander and Ebonwald and Coulumbite, each stamped with a priestly sigil. No clue to their origins, all documents bearing names chucked into the bay long since.

She picked up a polka-dotted velvet purse and squeezed it in frustration, feeling coins shift round and hard beneath her fingers. Coins, and something else—long, slender, pointed at one end. Izza cleared a space on the floor and dumped the purse’s contents out. Coins, only coins, even in the slight starlight she could see that much. But the purse still clunked against the damp floorboards when she let it fall.

Interesting.

She probed inside the purse with her forefinger, and found a narrow pouch sewn into the lining. No button, only fabric tucked into fabric. Opening the pocket, she drew from within a skeleton key, one end all twisted teeth and the other capped by a medallion inlaid with a tinted mother-of-pearl logo: a mountain bisected by a crescent of blue ocean to form an abstract letter A.

In her dark room, empty but for her stolen treasure and the paintings of her dead gods, Izza swore.

*   *   *

The Aokane Plaza was a seashore palace cradled in Kavekana’s Palm, or at least that’s what its brochures claimed. Multilayered terraces and balconies draped with ghostlights and spackled by tiki torches overlooked the rolling ocean. Guests and waiters, servants and masters, flowed up and down the Plaza’s many staircases, and along the ramps that connected the hotel and its beachside cabanas. Unnaturally white and gleaming, writhing with human bodies, the hotel reminded Izza of a layer cake overrun by ants and set afire.