Full Fathom Five (33 page)

“Can you find your way out?” Izza said.

“Yes.”

“You’re a good swimmer.”

“My father taught me.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died.”

“Oh.” Izza didn’t say, I’m sorry. “Where can I meet you?”

“Tomorrow after sundown, at Makawe’s Rest. A poetry club in the Palm, near Epiphyte and Southern. Thatch roof, open walls, lofted hut. I know Mako, the old blind guy who works there. You can trust him.”

“Okay,” Izza said. “Now go. Someone might come. I don’t want to have to explain you.”

“That makes two of us.”

Kai dove into the water without a splash. The bottoms of her feet kicked twice, pale against the black, and she was gone. Izza felt her go. Kai had already absorbed the soulstuff Izza added to the necklace when she fastened it around Kai’s neck. But some of Izza lingered there: bits of self sunk into that necklace through years of wearing. Not so much you’d notice, unless you almost starved yourself to death.

Which Izza had, many times.

So a piece of Izza sank with Kai, and wriggled free into the ocean. Distance attenuated the sensation: Izza’s soul pulled like toffee, bond stretched long and thin, fading to a toothache in the heart.

Maybe Kai would keep faith. Maybe the contract would hold. Maybe not. Either way, Izza would find her. The necklace could look after itself: the knot Izza had tied would warn her if it was broken, or the cord cut. Only the wait remained.

She stood before the altar and pondered how to wait.

46

Shivering, wet, Kai checked into a hotel in the Palm, one of those cheap transient places with ratty gray carpet that could look clean for a decade between shampoos. Luckily she’d found a cab after a few minutes of limping soaked and cold down the dockside streets. Her clothes dried, mostly, in the cab, but she still looked a mess. The desk clerk barely glanced up from his book—passed her a contract on a clipboard that she signed without reading. She rode the lift to her third-floor room. Floral print wallpaper, holey sheets. Walls and curtains and table and chairs all had a stain-proof sheen, slick as the back of a beetle’s shell.

She wrung out her clothes in the bathtub, and hung them over the towel rack to dry. Harbor scum crusted her skin, and stained the whites of her nails black. She steamed herself off in the shower. Dark rivulets ran down her body. Dirt and scraps of seaweed flowed into the drain. She painted figures with grime on tile: the half gods of the hidden temple.

She had to dive into the pool, to see the idols, to learn the truth behind the records. Of course, she wasn’t allowed back into the mountain.

Which did not leave her many options.

Before her shower, the room had smelled stale. After, it smelled stale and damp and bodily, like crumbled mushrooms. She opened the window. Curtains bellied in the night wind.

She stared down at the dirty carpet. When she looked up she saw her own eyes in the mirror across from the bed, wide and framed by wiry hair. A deer watched from a painting on the wall behind her—the artist had aimed for majestic and settled for frightened—a creature that didn’t belong on this island, framed by forest Kai didn’t recognize, fat sun-dappled leaves hunter green on top and gold beneath, the forest of a country with a winter.

She lay back, and hugged the bathrobe against herself. It smelled of laundry soap and fake lavender.

There it came, bubbling up from subconscious depths. Not exactly an answer, not exactly a plan. But she could get into the pool. All she had to do was apologize.

First, though—thoughts vague now as sleep seized hold—she had to go shopping.

Gods, maybe she was going mad.

*   *   *

The next morning, quarter past nine, Kai stood poolside at the Kavekana Regency in a new suit (cream pants and jacket, navy blouse), hands folded on the head of a new cane (dark hardwood with a silver head molded like a pre-Contact totem), and watched Teo Batan swim.

The Regency’s pool deck overlooked the ocean, which here on the outer face of West Claw was the kind of intense blue painters never used for fear gallerists would laugh at them. The pool water seemed transparent at first glance, but compared with the bleach-white towels and pool attendants’ uniforms it had a slight green shimmer of chemicals or Craft. Water flowed over the deck’s seaward edge into a trough below eye level, and recirculated. To a swimmer, the pool would seem to extend forever, merging with ocean—though the slight green tint probably spoiled the illusion.

In the shallow end, a middle-aged woman helped a toddler tread water, child in one hand and a mimosa in the other. The mother (or nanny—their hair color was the same, and beyond that Kai had a hard time telling mainlanders apart) wore a thin gold necklace and diamond stud earrings with the air of someone who thought gold necklace and diamond studs did not quite rate as jewelry. Behind the woman, two kids played tag.

On the deck, three men bent in identical attitude of hangover or prayer around a glass table that supported three many-umbrella’d drinks. A skeleton in sunglasses reclined in a lounge chair, tanning mirror angled toward his face. Or hers. Hard to tell.

In the deep end, Teo swam laps alone.

You could tell a swimmer’s skill by how they related to water. Kids first thrown into the ocean spasmed and flailed against it. Dogs that weren’t born swimmers did the same, scrambling to keep dry. The better you became the less you struggled, until like some of the fishermen who’d worked with Kai’s dad you approached an aquatic asymptote. Kai had admired those men, in a left-handed and horrified way: artists in the water, they moved unsteadily on land.

Teo wrestled the pool. Her hands pierced the water, threw it behind her, emerged dripping from the surface to pierce once more. She trailed a V-shaped churning wake. The pads of her toes were pale, and her silver bracelet glinted with each stroke. Reaching the wall she turned a somersault, gathered herself, and pushed off, a submarine missile. That one push carried her a third of the pool’s length, and Kai examined her while she was underwater. Sleek, rounded, wearing a swim cap and a black one-piece bathing suit, she looked like a seal. Then she breached the surface, and white water obscured her again.

This was Teo’s eleventh lap since Kai’s arrival. The woman knew she was here, and hadn’t stopped swimming. Not a good sign.

Twelve laps. Thirteen.

Teo somersaulted and pushed herself off again, holding her breath half the length of the pool this time. When her speed waned, she surfaced, gulped air, and wiped her eyes, treading water with both legs and one hand. She squinted against the sun, waved to Kai, and swam a breaststroke across three lanes to the edge. Her hands clutched the pool’s stone lip, and muscles shifted in her shoulders and back as she pushed herself up. Scars marked her left arm: a single long straight line down the inside of her wrist over the vein, and other curving cuts around it. Pale emerald drops rolled down her skin; she stood, and Kai took a step back before she shook herself.

A white-suited attendant appeared with a towel. Teo grabbed it blindly, wiped off face and body and hair (prying off swimming cap to reveal a damp crown of thorny black curls), and threw the towel onto an empty chair. “Kai. Thanks for waiting. I don’t like to stop in the middle of things.”

“You’re a strong swimmer.”

“I’m trying to be a stronger everything,” she said. “Can’t count on other folks to bail you out of trouble.” Her smile seemed to pack more teeth into it than most people’s. Kai spent more willpower than she wanted to admit dragging her eyes from the scar on the woman’s wrist.

“Do you get in swimming-related trouble?”

She laughed. “First time for everything. What can I do for you?”

“I’m here because maybe I can do something for you.”

The water had stained the whites of Teo’s eyes a gemstone green; it wept out as she blinked. “Go on.”

“When you came to me, you said you wanted to invest in an idol. But you were worried about ethics.”

“Is ‘ethics’ the right way to put it? I don’t like gods. Neither do our investors. I don’t mean it personally. I like things I can see and touch. Good strong deals. Clear terms of engagement. Accountability and limited liability.” A white grid ran down the front panel of her swimsuit, and as she breathed its geometry shifted from hyperbolic to planar to parabolic.

Kai swung a chair away from an empty table and sat, so she looked up at the Quechal woman rather than down. “I’m sorry for how I acted when we first met. And later.”

“Hey, no problem.” Teo planted one leg on the seat of a nearby chair and toweled off. “I wasn’t nice, either.”

The pool attendant returned with a drink menu. Kai waved him away, and he retreated with an expression of your-loss regret she recognized from the faces of a hundred high-touch salesmen. “Most of my work has been behind the altar, which gives me a different perspective on rules and regulations than most salespeople.”

Teo’s laugh was fuller and rounder than Kai expected. “I know how that feels.”

“I think I can get you into the pool.”

“Really.” Teo threw the towel on the table, reclined in a lounge chair, and laced her fingers behind her head so her elbows stood out like the peaks of wings. Wet trails ran from the corners of her closed eyes; drying, the pool water left green sparks on the skin. Bones clattered as the skeleton turned over to sun its back. “I thought that was impossible.”

“Well. My boss needs to approve it. But with help from you, I think I can sway him.”

Her nod wasn’t visible so much as audible: the back of her head knocking chair slats. “What sort of help?”

“Listen to a story?”

“Go ahead.”

“Say I had a client who wanted to deposit a lot of soulstuff with us. Say that client had concerns about our methods. It happens sometimes. You might want a fertility idol who was never more than ten percent exposed to any particular grain future.”

“I do so enjoy grains.”

“In situations like that, sometimes we sign a conditional agreement. You commit the funds to us pending proof we can build an idol that meets your needs. No transfer takes place. If you don’t see what you like, none ever will. But your commitment lets me convince my bosses to get us inside the mountain. Once we’re there, I can show you what you need.”

“Why didn’t you mention this to me before?”

Because this is borderline ethical behavior. Because I didn’t need you before. “Because we’re talking more soulstuff than people tend to commit out of curiosity. But you sought me out twice so far. If you’re as interested as I think, I can bring you up the mountain this afternoon.”

Glasses clinked. Water rolled over the world’s fake edge. Teo did not open her eyes, but she grinned anyway.

“It’s a date.”

47

Izza lay restless through the night on her rooftop bed. Stars stared down like Penitents from the sky. When morning threatened, she rose, bought—bought!—a cup of coffee to burn off the cobwebs of undreamt dreams, and walked the seashore. She felt Kai moving in her heart.

The surf rushed and gurgled like Margot’s dying breath. She remembered her home long since abandoned, remembered how blood ran from the cut on the priestess’s neck. She remembered the joy of running, and the sick fishhook feeling when she heard Sophie had been taken. She remembered the Blue Lady’s scream.

She wanted out. She did. But her every step tied her more deeply to Kavekana and its people. Even to Kai, the lost priestess. Who she still did not quite trust.

She threw rocks into the waves, but the waves kept coming.

Two hours after daybreak, she gave up, and went to the warehouse.

Cat was packing. She’d brought little with her, and acquired less on the island. Silver chalk, the clothes on her back, a change of clothing she rolled up for use as a pillow. She folded the blankets, stuffed her few possessions in a sack, and swept the surrounding rubble into a semblance of undisturbed mess.

“You’re leaving,” Izza said from the hole by the door.

Cat smiled when she saw her, as broad and open and easy an expression as Izza’d ever seen on her face. “I hoped you might come. I would have gone looking if you hadn’t.”

“What’s happened?”

“Time to go. Next day or two. Not longer, I hope, or else I’ll have to get myself all moved in again. Say your good-byes, if you have any left. We’ll need to move fast when the time comes.”

“Yeah,” Izza said, and even she could tell that her own voice sounded flat.

Cat stopped sweeping. “Are you okay?”

Izza should have gone to her when the poet died. When the pain still bled like a wound. Now the scab had formed, and tearing it open again hurt more. “No,” she said.

“What happened?”

“Margot died yesterday.”

From how hard the words were to say, she expected them to hit Cat harder. The other woman closed her eyes and breathed and opened them again. “Shit.” Cat slumped onto a blackened, half-rotten crate. The boards sagged, but supported her. “What happened?”

“The cops did it. The Penitents. They’re all—” She broke off. Better to keep quiet than speak in that quivering quavering tone. Telling Kai had been easier. Izza knew Cat, and knowing her she felt the need to be strong in front of her.

“Tell me.”

“A Penitent came for him. He fought.”

“You saw it.”

“I did.” She paced angrily among rusted wires and broken barrels until she could come up with more to say. She didn’t say, I need you, would not admit that even now. “They killed him. They’ll go on and kill my friends. I can’t leave until they’re safe.”

Cat’s grip tightened on the broom, and she stared down into the scrapes its bristles left in the dust. She growled in that tongue Izza did not know, with words like breaking rock. Then she let the broom fall. It clattered on the floor. She stood. “It won’t be safe,” she said. “Not ever. If they killed Margot, they’ll hunt for anyone connected with him. That’s you. That’s the kids. Hells, that’s me. You should have stayed away.”

“I have a…” Gods, what should she call Kai? “A friend trying to help me find out what happened. To get to the bottom of this. Figure out what made the Penitents go crazy.”