Full Fathom Five (5 page)

The Penitent’s head swiveled round to Izza. Gem eyes gleamed, and Izza felt herself seen: five six and skinny and scared, standing in the open on flat ground before monsters. She stopped breathing.

A silver streak struck the Penitent in the side of the head, and again. One jewel eye went dark. Stone crunched. The statue swayed, stumbled, and fell. It lay twitching across from its brother with the broken leg.

The silver woman stood over them both, cradling her useless arm. One wing hung from her shoulder at a bad angle. She limped around the fallen Penitents and away, up Izza’s alley.

As the woman left the street, her silver tarnished and broke. Black cotton shirt and denim pants showed through widening gaps in her mirrored carapace, and pale skin too, bruised and dirt smeared. One human eye, also green, paired with the eye of emerald fire. Blond hair, cut short. Muscle and sharp lines. The wings melted last, and the silver woman was silver no more. She lurched down the alley, clutching her injured arm, favoring the side where the Penitent hit her. She swore to herself, words too low for Izza to catch. Their eyes met as the woman passed, black into green and back again.

That should have been the end of it. The woman limped half the alley’s length, gait weaving and uneven, then stopped, slumped against a red brick wall, and bent her head to breathe.

This was not Izza’s problem. She’d helped enough already. Time to run.

The Penitents’ cries rose to an impassive sky. More would come soon to aid their comrades.

Izza knelt before the woman. Green eyes stared through strings of golden hair, not at Izza but around her, refusing to focus. Sweat slicked the woman’s face, and she breathed so heavily Izza thought she might throw up. Izza snapped her fingers twice in front of those green eyes. “Hey,” she said. “Hey. We need to get you out of here.”

“Who?” The voice was cloudy and unfocused as her gaze. Izza’d heard that vagueness before, from sailors rising out of opium dreams or divine rapture. Great. Whatever this woman was, she was in withdrawal. The Penitents must have smelled the god on her, and come hunting. No foreign gods allowed on Kavekana.

“The Penitents won’t stay down long.” Izza risked a glance back: the stone around the fallen statues paled and lost color as they drained its essence into themselves. Healing, fast. A few minutes before they recovered, no more. “Do you have a place to hide?”

She shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Shit.” Leave her. Or dump her in the Godsdistrikt with the other grace addicts. Hard-luck cases aplenty on this island. But none of them could fight off a Penitent, let alone two. “Follow me.”

Izza offered her hand, but the woman slapped it away. She closed her eyes, and drew a shuddering breath. When she opened them again, she took a step, and this time did not fall. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Izza led her through twisting Godsdistrikt alleys, to mask their trail with the stench of trash and foreign joss. The woman followed, around Dumpsters, over unconscious sailors, beneath the red lights of hothouse windows, and through puddles of foul water. At last, trail good and lost, Izza turned them back west toward the bay.

“I don’t know your name,” the woman said.

“Izza.”

“Cat,” she replied in answer to Izza’s unasked question.

*   *   *

Cat passed out across the street from the collapsed warehouse. Izza heard her slam into a trash can, and caught her before she fell farther. The woman weighed more than she looked, as if her skeleton were not made of bone. Izza crouched beside her in the stink of garbage and stale water, and waited for the road to clear. When Dockside Boulevard was empty of Penitents and freight traffic all the way south into East Claw, and north until it joined the Palm, she draped Cat’s arms over her shoulders, hoisted her up, and stumbled across the road. She ducked through a hole in the wall next to the warehouse’s padlocked gate, and in.

Rats and beetles scrabbled away over the slab floor. Rotten crates and dust, muck and fallen beams and tangles of rusty wire crowded them round. Decay and wisps of incense hung on the heavy air, and stars shone through gaps in the half-fallen ceiling. This warehouse had stood abandoned as long as Izza’d known or anyone else could remember. Its roof fell in one hurricane season, wrecking whatever cargo it contained and ruining the owners; nobody had fixed up the place in the years since. Piled debris cut the warehouse in half, and as far as most knew, the shoreside half was the only one open enough for folk to walk or sit.

She laid Cat in a patch of moonlight, left her there, and went to clear a space for her to sleep near the debris wall.

When Izza turned back, she saw a thin figure standing over Cat’s body. She forced herself to relax. “Nick. Hi.” She recognized him by the way he held his shoulders: hunched forward, as if pushing against an unseen wind.

“Who’s this?”

“I found her,” she said. “She’s hurt. Give me a hand.”

She walked back to the moonlight and lifted Cat by her armpits. Nick did not move to help.

“Fine.” She dragged the woman across the floor, into the space she’d cleared. Her heels left trails in the dust. Cat groaned, and Izza shifted her grip to put less pressure on the injured shoulder.

“I thought you were going.”

“I am,” she said. “But she needed help. What do you want from me?”

“Stay,” he said.

So simple.

“I can’t.” She looked down at Cat. “I’ll take care of her, for a while. I’ll stay that long.”

“You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say you’re breaking up the gang, and then bring someone here to put us all in danger.”

“We were never a gang, and I
am
leaving. Just. She knocked out two Penitents. She deserves our help. My help.” Izza searched the warehouse, but they were alone. “And what’s this ’all,’ anyway? I don’t see anyone here.”

“Me.”

“Except for you.”

“The kids are hiding,” he said.

“We’re kids.”

“No. We’re not.”

“I need to leave, Nick,” she said. “Nothing’s safe here. Not gods. Not us.”

“Change your mind.”

“No.”

Cat groaned, and Izza returned to her side. The woman’s eyes rolled behind closed lids, and her lips twitched. If they formed words, Izza couldn’t read them.

When she looked up, the warehouse was empty.

She waited for Nick to speak again, from hiding. But he was gone, like her family, like her gods.

Izza left Cat unconscious on the warehouse floor, and went to look for water.

5

Kai didn’t hear from Mara for two weeks. When the other woman finally made it up the steep cliff steps to the balcony where Kai lay convalescing, she waited out of sight by the stairs, presumably working up the will to speak.

At first Kai—pillow propped in bed, white sheets pooled around her waist, wearing a hospital gown and reading the
Journal
—ignored her. Mara didn’t like pain, physical or emotional, always last to shed her blood on an altar stone. Kai’d mocked her reluctance, but fourteen days into recovery, she was coming to understand the woman’s caution.

So she read the business section, waited, and pretended not to notice Mara. She ran out of patience halfway through the stock columns. “You should short Shining Empire bonds,” she said then, loud so her voice carried. “Hard and fast. Today. Exchanges don’t close in Alt Coulumb until eight. Plenty of time to arrange the trade.”

“You knew I was here.”

“Saw you climbing the stairs.”

“Glad you’re in good spirits.” Kai didn’t need to look to know the shape of Mara’s smile: slantwise and sarcastic.

“The nurses won’t let me anywhere near spirits.” Kai turned the page, and scanned an editorial by some bleeding heart in Iskar, suggesting that all the other bleeding hearts in Iskar join a crusade to stop the civil war in the Northern Gleb. No plan, just hand wringing and noble rhetoric. Fortunately: Iskar didn’t have a good history with crusades. “Alt Coulumb’s index funds are up, and the Shining Empire debt market’s rebounded. Turns out the rumors of open trade on their soul exchange were wrong after all.”

“Does that matter now?”

“False panics make for overcorrections. Shining Empire soul-bonds are trading twenty points higher than a month ago. The price will normalize in a week. Short-sell. Borrow against our AC index holdings to finance the trade. Act fast, and you’ll make back everything the Grimwalds lost when Seven Alpha died. A peace offering. I’d do it myself, but nobody’ll let me near the trading office. I had to take a nurse hostage to get them to give me a goddamn newspaper.”

Mara strode past Kai to the balcony’s edge. Slope wind whipped the hem of her dress like a luffing sail. “It’s too late for peace offerings. They want a sacrifice.”

“You mean the Grimwalds. And their Craftswoman.”

“Yes.”

“That’s what it sounded like in my deposition, too,” Kai said. “How’d yours go, by the way?”

Mara shuddered, and stared out over the rail, down the volcano.

Kai did not bother to look. She’d grown accustomed to the view. Kavekana, beautiful as always: stark black stone slopes, colonized even at this violent height by lichen, moss, and adventurous ferns. Farther down, grasses grew, and farther still palms, coconut, and imported date. Epiphytes flourished beneath the trees. Past those Mara would see signs of humankind, the fiercest invasive species, asserting presence with rooftop and stone arch, temple and bar and gold-ribbon road, traces thicker as the eye proceeded south until slope gave way to city and beach and the paired peninsulas of the Claws. In their grip the glittering harbor thronged with tall-mast clippers, schooners, the iron-hulled hulks of container ships anchored near East Claw’s point where the water was deep enough to serve them. Other islands swelled, purple ghosts, on the horizon. Craftsmen’s spires hovered out there, too, crystal shards almost as tall as the volcano, flashing in the sun.

Kai had tired of it all in her first week of bed rest with nothing to do but watch the sea beat again and again on Kavekana’s sand. Boring, and worse, a reminder of her own atrophy. No doubt the nurses thought the physical therapy they guided her through each day would help, but to Kai it felt like a joke. Raise this arm, lower it, raise it again. No weights, no failure sets, no rage, no fight, no victory.
If it hurts, tell me and we’ll stop.
The first time she tried not to tell them, they threatened to give her even easier exercises unless she cooperated. Not that she could imagine easier exercises. Perhaps they would devise a system to help raise her arm, some elaborate contraption of counterweights and pulleys.

She set her newspaper aside and watched Mara’s back. Her dress was the kind of blue desert folk said skies were: dry and pale and distant. A curve of calf peeked out beneath her skirt’s drifting hem. Whatever bravery brought Mara here had given out, or else the scenery had crushed her into silence.

“If my mother saw you like this,” Kai said, “she’d have you lacquered and mounted on a ship’s prow.”

“Do they do that? Living ships?”

“I think someone made real ones back in the God Wars, for the siege of Alt Selene. Forget whose side it was, or whether they kept the spirit’s source body on ice for later. Probably not. It was a rough war. So I hear.”

“I feel like that, sometimes. Don’t you?”

“Mounted? Only on a good day.”

She laughed, without sound. Kai could tell by her shoulders’ shake. “No. Like those bowsprit figures, I mean.” When Mara turned from the view, Kai saw she wore a blush of makeup. Interesting. She’d come armored. “Other people trim the sails and turn the wheel and the ships go where they want. The bowsprit woman’s stuck. She’s the ship’s point. Whatever danger they meet, she meets it first. She can’t even mutiny, or leave.”

“Maybe she does,” Kai said. “Maybe she bails, and takes the ship with her. Breaks it on rocks. Dashes it to pieces in a storm.”

“Hell of a choice. Live imprisoned or kill everyone you know breaking free.”

“Is it life if you’re trapped inside it?”

“As long as you’re breathing, that’s life.”

Kai touched her chest through the stiff scratchy gown. “I’m breathing now. I don’t know if I’m alive. Don’t feel alive wearing this thing, anyway.”

“It looks good on you.”

“There hasn’t been a person made that a hospital gown looks good on. They say I’ll have my own clothes back next week, Seconday probably.”

“That long?”

“Jace doesn’t want me to leave before I’m healed, and he knows he won’t be able to stop me once I can put on my own pants.” Using her arms as a prop, she sat up, twisted sideways, and rested her feet on the stone floor. Mara stepped forward to help, but Kai waved her back, groped for, and found, her bamboo cane. She leaned into the cane, testing its strength and hers. Satisfied, she stood, though slower than she liked. “So, why did you come?”

“There has to be some secret motive?” Mara’s face betrayed no pity, only the fear Kai had seen in her few visitors’ eyes already, the fear of the healthy in the presence of the hurt. “I miss you. Gavin does, too, but he’s afraid if he visited you’d get the wrong idea. You can’t imagine the turnings in that boy’s mind. He asked me how much I knew about your family, because he wants to come visit, but he wants to bring orchids because his mother always told him to bring orchids to convalescent women, but he wants to know if you were raised traditional enough to get the reference, because he doesn’t want you to think that he’s bringing you flowers because he likes you, not that he doesn’t like you, but. You see. He thinks of conversations like a chess game, and I don’t mean that in a good way.”

Mara paced as she spoke, addressing cliff face and ocean and empty bed and her own hands, everything but Kai herself. “I’m glad you miss me,” Kai said, “but that’s not why you’re here, especially not in that dress.”

Mara stopped midstride. “I like this dress.”

“So do I, but you dress fancy when you’re scared. What of? Kevarian? The Grimwalds?”

“Of you, I guess. A bit.”

“I got hurt. It happens sometimes.”