Though the Plaza had long since lost claim to the title of Kavekana’s most elegant or exclusive resort, its guests remained rich, and numerous enough that a child could drift among them if she walked fast and didn’t linger. If Izza wanted to steal up-market, she’d start here. She’d discussed the issue with Nick before.

The Plaza’s back rooms were a maze, miles of hallways and basements and kitchens and servants’ passages, but she didn’t need to worry about most of that. Nick, if he were here, wouldn’t be anywhere without people he could steal from. That meant public spaces, which left her plenty of ground to cover.

She approached from the beach. Barefoot waiters in white vests and capris whisked cocktails on silver trays from cabana to cabana. On a stage by the ocean, a band of young men and women wearing old Kavekana royal garb, multicolored print kilts and shawls and feathered cloaks, drummed drums and played ukulele; a woman with a pearl circlet at her brow sang a high winnowing song in the lilting local tongue, of which Izza had never learned more than a few words. Far as Izza could tell, the song’s lyrics didn’t include “please,” “thank you,” “hide,” “run,” or any of the meanings of “watch” and “fence.” Behind the band, Penitents stared out into the rolling waves.

A green-skinned man with a taut protruding belly lay in a cabana beside a beautiful blonde covered in scars from her hairline to the soles of her feet. They nodded their heads in half time to the trilling drumbeat. Izza stole a towel from behind their hutch and wrapped it around herself to hide her clothes. She drifted upstream past waiters and those they served. The served were the more varied of the two groups, in a way: the well-heeled of six continents and three thousand cities, of every skin color and creed and species, living and undead, skeletal or carved from stone or pink and flexible, those floppy with excess flesh, these sculpted by surgery and personal trainers into hilariously exaggerated visions of human potential. But their faces all played small changes on the same bovine physical contentment. The servers, though—locals mostly, men and women alike hired to look good in uniform—watch their faces and you’d see a greater range of attitudes. Some loved their job, some resented it, some were tired and others keen and a few hopped up on coke or joss, and that woman kneeling now to set the glasses from her tray onto a low table beside a chair on which sat a tangle of wire and thorns in the shape of a four-armed faceless man, she was three months pregnant.

Izza was taking too long. Don’t linger was the best rule a thief could follow. No Nick on this beach. Check the three balconies, and get gone, out into safety and night.