Full Fathom Five (42 page)

“That doesn’t make sense. You expected the Order to let you go? They have allies around the world who will hunt you down.”

“I dropped a bracelet in a pool; they stuck me in a supposedly inescapable box that I then escaped. The only possible reason for their allies to come after me would be if your Order could prove I helped steal something they claim they don’t have from a vault they can’t afford to admit has been breached. I think it’s more likely we’ll all just chalk this one up as an embarrassing incident.”

“She has a point,” Izza said. “The best stuff to steal is stuff the target can’t admit is gone.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Kai said. “We need to get back into the mountain.”

Izza frowned. “Why?”

Kai didn’t answer at first

Izza resisted the urge to squirm under the pressure of the woman’s stare. The few hours in the Penitent hadn’t broken her; refined her, maybe. Hardened her like forge-steel. “The Blue Lady’s dead.” Izza could say that now without weeping. Without even a hook of emotion in her voice. Just a fact. That’s what she told herself. “So is Margot. The Penitents’ trail is cold. The kids are safe. We could just leave. There’s a whole world out there.” Cat had said as much, and she was right. Why did Izza feel so dirty saying the same aloud?

“You’re welcome to stay with me,” Teo said. “Plenty of water to last the three of us until pickup. We’re bound back to Alt Coulumb first, and then, well. Anywhere.”

“Anywhere.” Izza liked the way that word felt in her mouth. They didn’t have Penitents in Anywhere. The sea rolled around them, endless toward freedom, rippling under starlight.

Until Kai spoke.

“The Lady isn’t dead.”

Izza froze.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Teo said.

Kai ignored her. “The Blue Lady. The Red Eagle. The Great Squid. They’re all alive.”

The words pressed into Izza’s ears like thorns. “That’s not true. I felt them die. I saw them die.”

“They’re masks, Izza. Not masks: faces. The idols in the pool, the myths we make, they aren’t complicated enough to live on their own. But they’re all connected, and all of them together—they can dream. They can speak. Your gods and goddesses are different pieces of the same Lady. She’s still there. Stuck. And my boss will keep killing her forever if we don’t stop him.”

Izza burned with fever, and a cool hand caressed her cheek. She lay on the mountainside beneath the stars, and a beautiful horned woman stepped out of the stone to join her. “The Lady’s alive?”

“All of them. I saw, in the pool. It’s.” There were tears in Kai’s eyes, or else just ocean water. “I can’t describe it. It’s too big.”

Izza remembered the blue bird with the broken neck, and incense that smelled of desert rain.

This isn’t your fight
.

Except it was.

This was her fight, and that, back there, that island swelling on the horizon, that was her home.

They’ll keep killing her forever. The knife, always sliding across the priestess’s throat, and that eternal gasp echoing in Izza’s ears as she ran. The column of oily smoke that would never go away.

“We need to go back,” Izza said. Five words. One syllable each. A door opened in her heart. And to Teo: “You can help us.”

Teo shook her head. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“Of course you can,” Kai said. “Turn the boat around. Your second-story man can get us into the pool. He, she, was going there anyway. I’ll do the rest. If I reach the pool, I can fix this.”

“You’re talking about a revolution. Deposing your boss, and not in the cozy Craftwork sense. You literally want to kick out the head of your priesthood.”

“What’s happening up that mountain is wrong,” Kai said. “I have to stop it.”

“That’s not—” Teo raised her hands. “I can’t. This is too much. The Two Serpents Group solves problems. We don’t overthrow governments. We don’t start revolutions.”

“Some problems,” Kai said, “can’t be solved without a revolution.”

“Spoken like a woman who’s never been on the wrong side of a rebel knife.”

“You’re the one who claims she wants to help the world. So what is it? Will you circle this entire planet saying you want to help people, but only really helping yourself, making your sponsors feel good, scratching some goddess’s back so she’ll scratch yours? Helping changes things. My island is living a lie. People are dead. My friend is inside a Penitent, suffering what we just suffered with no chance of release. My boss stabs over and over again at a goddess’ eyes in the darkness. How much will you sacrifice to preserve the status quo? To keep your hands clean?”

At the mention of sacrifice, Teo stiffened. Her hand sought her wrist.

Kai closed her mouth. She’d been shouting at the last, and the ocean echoed her voice. In the chapel Kai’d seemed uncertain, small, afraid. That was gone now. Maybe the Penitents broke it from her. Or maybe she’d learned something else inside.

Teo didn’t look at Kai, didn’t look at Izza, either. She kept her gaze fixed on the water outside the boat, and the stars reflected there.

Izza reached out and touched the woman on the arm. Teo didn’t brush her off. “We’ll go back ourselves,” Izza said. “If we have to. But it would be easier with your help. Please.”

Teo took her hand, pressed it, held it. Izza forced herself not to pull away.

Teo’s eyes were dark. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

58

They reached shore three hours later. Stars receded as they approached, repelled by city fire and ghostlight and Penitents’ searching eyes.

Kai rowed at first, but soon exhaustion caught up with her. Izza took over the oars while the other woman slept in the stern, shaking from bad dreams. No wonder. Izza didn’t mind rowing. Returning to Kavekana under her own power felt right somehow.

Teo sat at the prow, troubled.

Rather than aiming for the well-lit center of the Palm, Izza angled the boat toward East Claw. Night never fell at the deepwater port by the claw’s tip, but farther north dark lengths of warehouse wharf brooded over the sea-lapped shore. She rowed to a decaying two-story wooden dock that appeared on the verge of collapse. A band of glory smugglers used this place to off-load joss the year before; the Watch rounded them up in a sting, and gangs abandoned the place after, out of a mix of prudence and superstition. But their hideout remained, its crow-pecked skeleton testifying to the bad ends of stupid crooks.

Izza rowed into the dock’s lower level, under a wooden arch hung with broken planks and seaweed like wrecked teeth in a diseased mouth. The odor of rotted wood smothered them.

Izza locked the oars, grabbed a moss-covered pylon, and pulled herself onto the dock. The boat disappeared when she left it; she groped above the water until Kai grabbed her hand and pulled herself ashore.

Kai tried to stand, but winced and sat down slowly on the dock. “Shit,” she said. “Sorry.”

Izza listened for footsteps, for breathing, for any human sound. Streetlamp light filtered through gaps in the dock’s upper level. A flight of rickety stairs rose to the street.

Teo lurched ashore, and stood unsteadily between Izza and Kai. “Okay. Here we are. What now?”

“That,” said a voice from the shadows beneath the stairs, “is what I wanted to ask you.”

Teo cursed and Kai recoiled. Izza alone didn’t move. She had expected the voice, as she had expected the woman who emerged from beneath the stairs. “Hi, Cat,” Izza said.

The streetlight cast a ghostly wash over the woman’s pale skin and blond hair.

Izza remembered her wounded, trembling from withdrawal. Remembered her cloaked in hophouse alley shadows, eyes hard and face fixed. That morning—gods, had it only been that morning?—she’d looked at Izza as if she lay at the bottom of a well, drowning.

Izza couldn’t say how she looked now. Cold. Tense. Excited, even.

But there was a bit of drowning there, too.

“Guess you didn’t leave your goddess all that far behind,” Izza said.

“Not so far.” Cat’s laugh was dry as the dock was damp. “You know that choice I kept saying you’d have to make?”

“Yeah,” Izza said.

“Well.” She slid her hands into her pockets. “I made the wrong one.”

“I know how that feels.”

“I didn’t lie. If it matters. I just left a few things out. My Goddess sent me away. Sent me here. I’ve been a cop all my life, and she asked me to steal for her. Because she trusts me. Because she loves me, and damn if I don’t love her back.” She slid her hands into her pockets. “What are you doing here, Izza?”

“Giving you a chance.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You said you couldn’t help me this morning. But I think you can. I think you’re here to help me—I think that’s why you were sent in the first place.”

“Cat,” Teo said, “you know this girl?”

Cat’s mouth pressed into a thin line. Izza remembered her fighting Penitents bare-handed. “Stay out of this,” the woman said. “Wait here a few more hours, and we’ll leave together. We’re almost free. I go back to my life, and you can come with me, and go wherever after that.”

“Some things are more important than freedom.”

“You don’t know that,” Cat said. “Not until you’re much further down this road.”

“My goddess”—and gods, did that feel strange to say out loud—“isn’t dead. She’s up that mountain being tortured. The people doing it won’t stop until she’s dead or mad. And until she’s gone she’ll keep reaching out to the kids, and the priests will chase them down one at a time and kill them or make them Penitents. You can help us stop it all. Get us into the pool. Kai can do the rest.”

“Kai?”

“Hi.” Kai raised her hand.

“Who are you?”

“I work up there.” She pointed up and inland, to the mountain. “Sort of. They trapped me inside a statue. It’s complicated.”

“You,” Cat said, to Teo this time, “are a bleeding heart.”

“I didn’t spend the last month befriending street urchins.”

“We’re wasting time. We planned for you to set the beacon, not to set off every alarm in the mountain.”

“I didn’t expect my priestly friend here”—and at this Teo nodded over her shoulder to Kai—“to use me as cover for industrial espionage. So we’re even. Hells, that bracelet wasn’t supposed to trip their wards in the first place. Make that I’m one up on you.”

Cat crossed her arms.

“Cat,” Izza said. “I don’t think you made the wrong choice. Just the hard one. Like I’m doing now.”

In the end, Cat was the first to look away.

She paced the dock, footsteps heavy, muttering in a Kathic dialect so thick Izza couldn’t pick out more than a few words, most of them curses. She made a fist and cracked her knuckles, her wrist, her elbows and shoulders.

“Shit,” Teo said. “And you call me a bleeding heart.”

“Get the boat back out to sea,” Cat replied, and to Kai and Izza: “Let’s go.”

59

Kai hadn’t expected a mainlander secret agent to look so much like a washed-up Godsdistrikt wreck, strung out in ripped slacks and a loose black shirt, green eyes darting and hungry. But when Cat moved, she moved with purpose: took Izza by one wrist and Kai by the other, and pulled them both toward the stairs. Whatever her appearance, she was strong.

They climbed rotting stairs to the wharf, into the fresh night wind off the ocean. In direct light, Cat looked harder than she had below.

“What’s next?” Kai said.

The woman smirked. “What do you think?”

“Climb the mountain. Rappel down.”

“That’s subtler than I planned.”

“What do you mean?”

“We start,” Cat said, “with a little shock and awe.”

From her pocket, she produced a piece of silver chalk. She wove the chalk between middle, index, and ring fingers of her left hand, and curled her fingers into a fist. The chalk broke.

Nothing happened.

“I’m not feeling much shock,” Kai said. “Or awe.”

She wondered, briefly, why Izza’d closed her eyes and clapped her hands over her ears.

Then the night split open.

Kai picked herself up off the ground, blinking red-bloomed brilliance. Cat reached toward her, a person in vaguest outline. Distant drums beat through the whine of dead sound.

The drumbeats were explosions, she realized. Eyes recovering, she saw pillars of light rise across the island, West Claw, East, and the Palm, choreographed as casino fountains. She could almost see, almost hear again.

“Distractions,” Cat shouted. Kai heard her as a mumble through a wool blanket. “To keep the Penitents occupied. Like a magician’s show.” Her eyes split the lights to a million colors. “Now, hang on.”

“What?”

Cat grabbed Kai’s wrist and repeated herself, louder. “Hang on.”

Quicksilver sparked beneath the collar of Cat’s shirt, and flowed out and over, covering body and shoulders and back and legs. The hand that held Kai changed from skin to steel. Wings sprouted from Cat’s back, and spread.

When the silver reached Cat’s mouth, she sighed, as if setting down a long-borne burden.

Her wings beat, once, and they flew.

Kai’s and Izza’s added weight did not seem to slow Cat’s climb at all—or else Kai could not imagine how fast the woman would have been unburdened. Streets shrank to ribbons, and they swept up and north as searching Penitents’ gazes lit the earth below—scattered, stunned by the eruptions of light, seeking the phantom army that assailed them. Cat’s laugh did not travel like normal sound, but cut straight to Kai’s heart’s core.

Sirens wailed, warning clarions Kai recognized but had never heard aloud. The island cried in pain.

Cat wound between sweeping searchlights like an eel through a coral maze. Not precisely like: there was no truce with gravity, here, no uneasy accommodation between old foes. Gravity was vicious, and Cat fought him with every beat of her rising wings.

They swept up slopes, borrowing lift from currents of reradiated warmth. Blinking tears, Kai spared a glance to Izza, who hung from Cat’s other arm. The girl had a wild rictus grin, skin drawn tight over her skull.

They rose, and rose, and rose, over the volcano’s lip and higher, trajectory hyperbolic, so high Kai wondered if Cat no longer meant to infiltrate the mountain but to steal the stars instead.