Full Fathom Five (38 page)

A thousand small sharp talons held her. Needles stroked her cheeks. Her free hand clutched for Mara, for Jace, for vengeance, for freedom.

Mara pushed it back.

One of her legs was still free. She kicked the Penitent. Mara gasped, but her statue did not flinch.

Jace did. He watched her from behind the desk. His eyes glittered. She thought he might be crying.

The mask closed over her face, and she saw nothing more—and everything at once.

52

Izza begged near the cable car station for three hours. Twice attendant workers chased her from the gates, though she hadn’t bothered anyone. They weren’t used to beggars here, and neither called a Penitent to shuffle her away, nor offered her soulstuff to leave. So each time they chased her off she came back, sat with knees drawn to her chin, and waited.

She pondered sneaking into Kavekana’ai herself. Best way would be to tackle a coffee girl. Jump one when she got off shift, steal her uniform, ride the cable car up. But there were too many places a coffee girl couldn’t go, and anyway she’d never been inside the mountain before, would probably get lost in its temple tunnels.

Waiting, she gave up hope. Kai had betrayed her, of course. Which meant Izza’d betrayed herself. Cat. Her friends. Her gods. She deserved to burn in whatever special hell awaited traitors.

Though a half-drunk Telomiri priest had told her once that traitors did not burn in hell.

They froze.

She pondered the tortures of ice. Fire seemed pathetic by comparison—people burned fast, and passed out from smoke. Ice could bind and crush, cut, pierce. From ice one might sculpt hooks. Pliers. Spears. Cages.

She cycled through a hundred different tortures before the part of her soul that she’d bound at Kai’s throat moved—fast, descending. Too fast for the cable car.

Izza craned her neck back to see the mountain.

Two lines of dust sped down the western slope, skiing over scree, trailing dirt and broken rock. Switchbacking faster than a man could run.

And headed, near as Izza could tell, for a freight road at the mountain’s foot.

She guessed their destination and ran into the woods.

The forest here was old-growth, sacred for millennia, and though elephant-ear ferns bobbed and mushrooms spread in musky shade, there was space enough between the trees for a girl to run. And run she did, fast, too fast—a trapvine caught her and catapulted her toward treetops. She let out a brief undignified squawk, and lost too many minutes sawing her leg free of the vine with Kai’s knife, then climbing down.

She could no longer see the dust trail through the trees and fountain ferns and trailing vines, but Kai had reached the mountain’s foot. Izza shrank into herself as she ran, became a rigid curve. Under these trees the air was thick as wet cotton. She wasn’t yet breathing hard. She could run until she broke.

By the time she reached the road, she was close enough to breaking that she skidded out onto bare dirt and glanced up in shock at the blue sky without realizing she’d arrived.

An earthquake shocked her to her senses.

Penitents.

Kai had sold her out.

Izza dive back into the forest and found a tree thick-limbed enough to support her. She climbed in four pulls, and perched on a branch with a clear view of road. If she could see the Penitents, they could see her, but she had to be sure.

She grabbed a vine to steady herself. Heavy footsteps approached, and with them Kai. Birdcalls and insect chirps and wood sprite breezes all stilled before the Penitents’ advance.

Izza hadn’t planned to hold her breath, but her breath stopped on its own when the Penitents passed below.

There were two, both halting and awkward, newly paired. The left one, a normal model, didn’t concern Izza much. The other, though: smaller, more agile than the usual street patrollers, features rough, face painted. She’d seen this one before—it had killed Edmond Margot.

No. She looked closer. The eyes were wrong. Hard to see from this angle, and moving, but they were rubies, or red stones anyway, not sapphires. Same model. Different unit.

With Kai inside.

At first she’d thought Kai was hiding behind the statues, but no human walked that dirt road—only Penitents, proceeding to and through their sentence.

Izza breathed again, fast and shallow. Her hands burned; the vine she held was the stinging kind, and its sap singed her skin. She clutched harder, unwilling to rustle branches by letting go.

If they heard, the Penitents might turn, see her. Catch her.

Like they caught Kai.

Stone-still, hands aflame, she tried to quell the voices in her head. Gods. Kai had kept her vow. And this was her reward.

Tough, the hard and snub-nosed part of Izza said, the part that lurked around corners and figured that if someone hadn’t locked their house tighter they must not have liked their stuff much on some level. Kai stuck her neck out, and was burned. Others had burned before her, harder, and longer.

Another part of Izza wanted to see the Penitents broken, the island in flames. And still another wanted to leave Kai, to flee into the forest, to an outbound ship, because she was afraid. Because once the Penitents broke Kai the law would descend, and leave no place for her or any other kid to hide.

This place isn’t worth you.

The Penitents’ footsteps faded. She was alone.

She dropped to the ground and buried her hands in soil until the burning passed.

Cat wouldn’t help, not with this. She had been right, in the warehouse this morning: Izza had to choose her path.

But the choice scared her.

She ran through the forest toward the city.

53

Kai walked. No. That wasn’t right. The shell around her walked, and she moved with it, limp and pliant to keep the crystal from cutting. She didn’t walk so much as she was walked—but that wasn’t right, either, since the drive to walk came from her own mind, and the steps the Penitent took were her own steps.

She’d asked Claude about his time inside, and he answered as well as he could, but she now understood the limits of his explanation. The experience beggared thought. From his broken sentences, she imagined the Penitent as a walking iron maiden, applying pain to force the prisoner to act. She imagined a metallic whisper in her ear, a prompt or request, with torture to follow.

She was right, and wrong.

Penitence hurt. The suit was agony. She’d long since cried her throat raw. Swearing supposedly eased pain, but crystal nets locked her jaw. She couldn’t speak any more than she could reach Ms. Kevarian’s business card.

But no voices whispered in her ear. The whispers were beneath.

When the mask closed over her face, she was trapped in darkness, with only her scared breath to relieve the silence. Then the darkness came alive.

She saw Jace’s office. Mara’s Penitent stood in front of the desk. Jace looked from one of them to the other, and sagged into his chair.

She saw the office, yes, but transfigured. Every surface glowed. Colors pressed against her in a billion shades and subtle variations. Light pierced her skull like a needle entering a rotten apple. She saw all of Jace through a microscope at once: individual hairs and pores between them, his stretched skin made up of millions of tiny cells. He breathed and his blood rushed and his heart beat and his brain worked with a high-pitched whine; gods, she could
hear
his
brain
. When he steepled his fingers their pads’ touch was a pounding drum, and when he sighed the rasp of air through his vocal cords might have been an avalanche.

In her stone shell, Mara wept. Her heart and Jace’s beat contrasting rhythms. Footsteps in the hall outside. More than the hall: the entire floor, a map in Kai’s mind built from tiny vibrations. In the middle distance, Teo shouted protest as someone forced her into a Penitent of her own.

The floor on which Kai stood cut her feet, as if it were covered with broken glass. The air was a toxic mix of stench. She closed her eyes, but that did not help; light and sound and scents remained. She was not seeing through her own eyes. The Penitent addressed her mind directly. She shared stone eyes’ vision, and the sharpness of stone ears.

“Come here,” Jace said.

She didn’t, but she was done. She decided to resist him, and in exactly the same moment to obey. The thought formed natural as falling. The pain came after, when she realized what had happened. The Penitent shaped her will from the inside out. Makawe built these as a teaching tool. The crystal had no mind of its own, only conviction. It used the prisoners’ minds to act on that conviction. Her thoughts were not her own.

Not quite right, she realized as she approached his desk. Her thoughts were her own—as her thoughts would be if she shared the statue’s faith. The part of her that did not was a railing voice pressed down: her self reduced to a bad conscience, struggling for control.

Wires cut and rolling joints crushed. She strode through a scalpel thicket, and left pieces of herself on each branch and twig. She stopped beside Mara, faced Jace’s desk, and stood at attention. She tried to run, but pain turned her stomach: physical pain from her body’s resistance, and mental anguish from her own failings.

Resistance meant suffering. But how could she not resist the usurpation of her mind?

By agreeing with the statue. By sharing its devotion, and its judgment.

She didn’t know whether that thought came from her or from the crystal.

She felt sick.

“I’m sorry,” Jace said.

A strange thing to say when he’d done nothing wrong. Justice demanded sacrifice. Even, sometimes, betrayal.

Gods. She tried to push the foreign thoughts from her mind, but felt herself pushed down in turn: her own will an evil impulse, a depraved desire.

“It has to be done,” he said. “You’ll both understand, in time.” He walked to his office door, and opened it. “Send the other one in.” A second Penitent arrived, standard model, moving slowly. Kai could hear a woman inside, and muffled curses in Quechal. Teo. “The two of you.” He pointed to Kai, and then to Teo. “Go to the beach around West Claw Tip. I’ll send someone when I’ve decided on our next step.” Kai tried to stay, and the statue cut her—or made her feel she was cut. Surely Penitents weren’t so reckless with their prisoners. Illusion or not, the pain was real, as was the sense of blood running down her leg.

She joined the other Penitent in the hall, ducking to pass through Jace’s office door.

She wished she could talk to Teo. To Mara. Penitents had that ability, it seemed, though she was not allowed to use it: without word or visible signal, Teo’s and Kai’s fell into step and marched down the halls of Kavekana’ai.

Their run down the mountain slopes, stone feet grinding over stone ledges, skidding along cliffs and down heavy slopes, was a new torment: Kai’s body couldn’t bear the speed and force of their descent. She mangled, twisted, broke herself. Once she swiveled 180 degrees from the hips to catch a cliff’s edge as she fell, and torqued the several tons of her legs around to kick footholds into the rock—then somersaulted ten feet to land stiff legged. Her bones broke, joints popped, muscles tore, and knees shattered—but as she reached the mountain’s base and marched down the supply road to the city, she felt whole. Was the pain a phantom of the mind, which knew her body could not stand such strains? Or had she really broken herself, with only the Penitent left to hold her together?

She remembered Claude’s scars and suspected the truth was a mix of both.

She would not die. The statue hewed her to a righteous path. She could learn, here, in safety and silence, to feel as good people felt, to move as noble people moved, to think as the just thought.

Walking through Kavekana in a Penitent she saw the city in a new way. Always before, it seemed eternal to her. Now she understood how small these buildings were, how venal the wares they sold, how vulnerable the people crouched within their shells. Pedestrians shied from the Penitent—from her. They averted their eyes from guilt and shame.

They needed guidance, and strength. She could give it to them.

This wasn’t her. The strength wasn’t hers, or the patronizing tone. They were attitudes of mind in which she’d been caught and clad. This was her life in the grip of others. A potter’s wheel spun, and wet hands shaped whirling clay.

After an hour’s walk in calm unison (save when Kai’s body rebelled, when she lagged or tried to resist, at which point her world was fire), they reached West Claw’s tip, a beach at the foot of a long low slope. Other Penitents stood here, feet sunk in sand, awaiting the gods’ return. They adjusted to leave a gap for Teo and Kai.

She stood to Teo’s left. The sand underfoot was fine and smooth as flour. She watched the horizon, and sank into obligation.

And such a view!

She’d never seen the ocean like this before. Before she had heard the orchestra’s discordant tuning notes, and now they melded to symphony. Light and wave, a clear view to the earth’s curve broken only by skyspires. The sea was a roiling deep peopled with hungry monsters, but its surface shone bright. Sunlight made the ocean more than monstrous repose. This was her freedom, to watch the waves, ennobled by the light of Penance.

Below the surface, Kai tumbled, drowning.

54

At first Izza couldn’t find the blind man. She perched outside Makawe’s Rest and watched the waitstaff prep until raised voices at the water’s edge caught her attention.

Two men stood on a stretch of sand between Penitents, though calling both “men” stretched the word to extremes. One was almost too young: local kid in a garish orange shirt and torn slacks, hair a black mop. He held a notebook out like a ward, and his eyes glimmered with tears. In front of him, an old man slouched against a crooked stick. “Old,” another poor word. Ancient, more like, his face lined and cracked the way plate glass got after you chucked a rock through it. He was not looking at the boy in front of him, his head turned to one side, presenting ear rather than eye.