The hand released her arm. She looked pointedly away from the cop, at the wall decorated with engraved plaques, awards for deeds of dubious virtue. In Kathic, the yellow crust on teeth was called a plaque.

“Really.”

“In the receiving hall. Says she’s his apprentice.”

His. Not Cat, then.

“How’d he know to come here?”

“Says he has a tracking glyph on her. She snuck out yesterday.”

The first cop, the hard one, examined her, slantwise, skeptical. “You have a boss looking for you?”

She nodded, once, because it was a way out.

“What you do for him? What kind of an apprentice are you?”

She mimed sweeping.

He grinned when he got the joke. “And you’re sure you want to go back?”

She heard a stitch of sympathy in his voice. He could think whatever he wanted, so long as he let her go. She nodded. This time she let herself look, if not quite at him, at least near him. Three deep wrinkles cut across his forehead. A disbeliever, a raiser of eyebrows.

“Fine,” he said, and led her back through the office to the bright receiving hall. She spent the walk wondering how she might tell her rescuer from the others waiting; the cop was suspicious already, and if she didn’t recognize her supposed boss, or he didn’t recognize her, the game was up. She walked ahead of him a few steps, fast as she dared. She remembered the route from when they brought her in: between the desks, beneath the yellowed lights and the exhausted gaze of half-dead officers propped up by bad coffee and a soured sense of duty.

The waiting room was small, well lit, pale, with metal furniture bolted to the floor. Behind a tall wood desk sat the duty officer, cap pulled low over her head. Izza recognized the hollows under her eyes, the face harder than usual for a woman of her age: a former crook, Penitent-reformed.

Few possible saviors among the room’s other occupants. Two women in their forties, one in a suit, another wearing a ratty shirt blazoned with the logo of an Iskari band last famous two decades ago, both seated, both reading old magazines. A bearded man sprawled across three chairs, hands bound, a spreading stain on his crotch. A thin kid she didn’t recognize, knees jutting through ripped trousers, sat balled up beside the bearded drunk. A round-bellied Iskari gentleman in a green velvet suit, threadbare at elbows and underarms, stood by the door. The green-clothed man dressed poorly for an Iskari, and formally for an islander; a visitor who’d been a long time on the island. Shifting nervously from foot to foot. Waiting.

She didn’t recognize the man, but her choice was clear. Whatever he wanted, she could escape him more easily than the watch station. Probably.