Soul-loss visions haunted her down the block. Recessed windows stared from plaster walls, the eye sockets of sun-blanched skulls. Bright sun glinted off broken glass in gutters. The alley stank of rotting mangoes, stale water, and sour wine. Her headache wouldn’t leave. She’d almost died of thirst once, in the desert, after her home burned, before she jumped ship for the Archipelago. Soul loss felt the same, only you couldn’t cure it by drinking.

She was so far gone that her shaking hands woke the man whose purse she slit minutes later, an Alt Coulumbite sailor drowsing on a couch outside a Godsdistrikt gambling den, long pipe propped on his stomach. He caught for her wrist, but she ducked, faster strung out than most sober, grabbed a handful of coins, and ran down the alley. Stumbling to his feet he called for the watch, for the Penitents, for his god’s curse upon her. Fortunately, neither watch nor Penitents were near, and foreign gods weren’t allowed on Kavekana Island.

She ran until she collapsed, beside a fountain in a palm-shaded courtyard, and drank the dregs of soul from the sailor’s coins. White returned to the walls of surrounding buildings, red to their tile roofs, joy to the fountain’s babble, heat to the air, and life to her body.

A single dull gray pearl hung from a worn leather string around her neck. She clutched it tight and waited for the pain to pass.

She wasn’t whole. She did not remember what whole felt like anymore. But she felt better, at least.

*   *   *

Izza met Nick at the corner of Epiphyte and Southern an hour and a half before sunset. He crouched by a lamppost, thin, bent, eyes downcast, scribbling in dust. He looked up when he heard her coming, and did not wave, or smile, or even speak. She often forgot he was younger than her. Keeping quiet made him seem smart.

Together they turned north, and walked up Southern toward the mountain.

They soon climbed out of the city. The bay emerged behind them, peeking over red roofs, and before long they could see the two Claws, East and West, curved peninsulas stretching south to shelter the harbor. They walked fast in the shade of overhanging palms, past large green lawns and sprawling houses. The mountain slopes weren’t priests’ sole property anymore, but real estate was expensive here, and the watch quick to sweep up loiterers.

When houses gave way to jungle, Izza and Nick left the road. Izza stepped lightly through the undergrowth, and only where she could see soil. Trapvines and poison ferns, ghosts and death’s head centipedes lived in these woods. Nick moved slowly through the foliage, and made more sound than Izza liked. Any sound was more sound than Izza liked. She walked softly until the trees gave way to solid rock, and the mountain’s roots rose from the earth.