She hung inside the gaping mouth, in the blackness charged with idols. They formed a perfect sphere with Kai at the center, frozen skeletons of many-colored lightning. Some she recognized, forms she’d helped Mara shape. Fish-men, kings of ocean and stream. Great burning bull-beasts who ate children and dispensed prophecy. Winged serpents who bore planets in their talons. Others she did not know, older projects, even a few quaint ancestor spirits. She found Seven Alpha at once: winged woman, legs bent backward, floating dead and dull in the black. An echo of her former glory, echo even of the frightened, drowning creature Kai had tried to save. Patches of her had been torn open, lines of breast and stomach. One wing hung crooked, pinions shorn. The ray-trace suggestions of her eyes seemed closed.

Kai approached, and heard voices.

“I don’t know how many other ways I can say it.” Mara, tired. Drawn drum-tight. Nervous. “An individual idol has too few believers to support more than a handful of basic functions.”

“That much I understand.” The second voice she also knew, cold, precise, clipped. Pinstriped suits, and an arched eyebrow. Ms. Kevarian. Kai froze in simulated space. The Craftswoman could walk through nightmares, and this was a sort of nightmare. Her body might be on the other side of the world. The how wasn’t so important as the fact of her presence. If Mara didn’t notice Kai, the Craftswoman would. “Which means the idol’s behaviors are automatic, and circumscribed.”

“That’s the theory.” Kai heard the slight hitch in Mara’s voice. She didn’t like this conversation.

“Then, if your records system works, any discrepancy in the accounts must result either from malice or negligence. Which is it?”

Space and size were malleable in this imitation realm. Kai became small and swift, and gnat-sized swam toward the skyscraper of dead Seven Alpha, toward vast and broken wings and the gaping seas of her wounds. So close to discovery. Kai’s throat constricted. Damn it, she didn’t even have an endocrine system here. Shouldn’t that soften the fear a little? Control yourself. Do what you came to do, and leave.

“This is a complicated situation,” Mara said.

“Truth is truth, Ms. Ceyla. People make it complicated.”

Kai slipped between two lines of Seven Alpha’s body and hovered. Mara sat huge and cross-legged on the idol’s spreading back, between the roots of her wings. Ms. Kevarian paced in front of her, along the idol’s spine, her footsteps sharp, as if she strode on stone.

They hadn’t noticed her yet. Good.

Kai turned back time, and felt the idol wake around her: a shudder in the lines, a memory of breath. Mara and Ms. Kevarian vanished, phantoms of the abandoned present. Kai sank back past the idol’s death, her flail for almost-survival. Months rewound in minutes.