Full Fathom Five (6 page)

“Hurt. People pull a muscle dancing, or break their arm rock climbing, or if they’re having a bad year they tear a tendon. That’s what hurt means. You, though. Do you even know what happened to you?”

“They read me the list. I recognized most of the words.”

“You almost died.”

“I almost a lot of things.”

“I saw Jace’s eyes when he looked into the pool as you were drowning. I didn’t think he could feel fear. Or pain. You scared him down there. I’ve only seen him look that way in prayer: awed. By you, and what you’d done.”

“Awe,” she said, tasting the word. “Awful, maybe. I tried to help, and it didn’t work. That’s all this is. If I’m lucky Jace won’t fire me.”

“I wouldn’t have done what you did.”

“That’s obvious.” Kai saw Mara flinch, and regretted her choice of words.

“That idol was my charge, and I didn’t try to save her. And don’t say it’s because I’m smarter than you.” She held up a hand. “Don’t say it. You talk tough, but you jumped into the water. I keep wondering why.”

“The Craftswoman asked the same thing.”

“She scares me.”

“Me too.”

“I read your deposition,” Mara said.

“I didn’t think they were showing those around.”

“Do you really think you were wrong to jump in?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes. Because if you lied, that’s twice you’ve thrown yourself on a sword for my sake. By the pool, and in the deposition.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. We’re all at risk here. Jace. Me. The priesthood. The island. It’s easier if I was wrong.”

“Why did you jump?”

I jumped because she screamed. Because her eyes were open. Because she was alone. Because you were frightened. Because no one else would. “You and Gavin were boring the twelve hells out of me.”

Softness in Mara’s eyes, and in the declination of her head. “Don’t be cute. Please. I want to know.”

Kai felt naked on that balcony save for bandages and scars, in front of Mara in her makeup and her dress. She ground the tip of her cane into the floor. Her left shoulder ached where Seven Alpha’s teeth had torn her. “Haven’t you ever felt sorry for a hooked fish on the line?”

Mara smiled slantwise once more, not sarcastic this time. Some weight kept her from smiling in full. She approached, heels on stone, and stood warm and near. Before Kai could pull away—cane, injury, two weeks’ rest slowing her down—Mara grabbed her arms, then hugged her, pressing against Kai’s bandages. Her touch was light, but Kai still bit down a gasp of pain. Mara withdrew. “I do now.” Another step back, and a third. “I didn’t come here to thank you. You took the worst moment of my professional life and added the guilt of almost killing a friend. And even if Jace fires you he never will look at me the way he looked at you drowning. I came here planning to cuss you out, but I don’t have it in me. I’m glad you’re alive, is all.”

“Thanks,” Kai said. And, because there was no other way to ask it: “Mara. Did your idol … did you ever hear anything in the pool? A voice? Words?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing like that.”

Howl, bound world,
Kai heard again, on the mountain wind.

“Did you?” Mara asked.

Kai did not meet her gaze. “Will you make the trade?”

“Short the Shining Empire bonds, you mean.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“You should.”

“You’re no good at letting things go.”

“So folks have said.”

Mara stood still as a shoreside Penitent or a bowsprit maid. Then she shook her head, smile softer now and wistful sad, and walked away.

Kai sagged into her cane, but tensed again when Mara spoke behind her. “Get better. And be careful.”

“I’ll try.” She listened to the wind and to Mara’s receding footsteps. When only wind remained, she walked three-legged to the balcony’s edge. The cable car descended the slopes below. Through its window she saw a flash of blue dress.

6

Izza tended Cat for three weeks. The woman slept for the first night and day, shaking and sweating in her nightmares. When she woke, she propped herself against a broken crate and drank water by the gallon. The only food she could bear was the blandest gruel, which was fine because that was all Izza could afford to bring her.

The next day Cat opened her eyes, and this time they focused, dancing around the room to settle on Izza. “I know you. Thank you for helping me.” Her voice had rough edges and a New World Kathic accent, all rhotic
r
’s and dropped
g
’s.

“Don’t get used to it,” Izza said.

“I’m not.” She reached for her pocket, and found a coin there. Izza had searched her, but hadn’t robbed her yet. Cat sank soulstuff into the coin, and flicked the coin to Izza, who plucked it out of the air. The woman’s soul burned going down. As it dissolved Izza felt Cat’s suspicion, and her hunger.

Izza knew hunger. “For saving your life?”

“For food,” Cat said. “Can I stay here awhile?”

“What’s awhile?”

“A few weeks. Maybe a month, worse case two. I need a quiet place to lie low. Then I’ll move on. It’s okay if you say no.”

“How do you know I won’t kill you while you sleep?”

“Have you tried?”

Izza crouched out of Cat’s reach, and watched her. Being watched bothered some people. Cat wasn’t one of them.

“What do you want?” Cat asked. “I can’t offer much. I don’t have any more soulstuff than what you’ve seen, and I won’t go into debt for you or anyone.”

Every cradle story Izza knew cautioned against pressing the issue of payment: travelers could be gods in disguise, or demons, waiting to avenge a breach of hospitality. Izza didn’t want much, but she didn’t know what a woman who fought Penitents singlehanded could offer. “I want off this island.”

“What’s keeping you here?”

“Only the ocean.”

“I can take you with me,” Cat said, but her voice failed and she had to breathe deep and gulp more water before she could continue. “I can take you with me when I go.”

“Stay then,” Izza said. “Until you’re well.”

The woman lowered her head and slept. As she slept, she began again to shake.

Izza knew the shakes, the patterns of withdrawal. She was ready with a stolen bucket and a mop on the third day, when it turned bad. Cat threw up into the bucket, twice, and gritted her teeth. She convulsed, swatted at hallucinations, and sometimes babbled in a language that sounded more like grinding rock than a human voice. But the next night she slept, if not easy, then easier.

Cat became part of Izza’s routine. She used the woman’s soulstuff to buy them food, and stole to supplement. Begged in West Claw, a little, when the Lunar New Year came and tourists danced mad dances and soul flowed like water.

Izza only regretted her decision to care for Cat when the children came back. One evening she returned to the warehouse and found Ellen and Ivy and a boy she didn’t recognize seated in a triangle around Cat, asking questions. The kids looked ragged, and Izza could smell the boy beneath and through the warehouse rot. “Did the Blue Lady send you?” Ivy asked, and Cat looked at her, blank eyed, confused.

“No,” Izza said from behind them both. Ivy’s head darted around, and she stared at Izza, expectant first, then sad when she didn’t find what she sought. “What are you doing here? I told you the game was over. I told you to get gone.”

“We want a story,” Ellen said.

She sank to her knees, so their heads were level. “No more stories. Come on. You want to waste time with this stuff? You have a life to worry about.” The boy didn’t look her in the eye. She didn’t wonder what had happened to him.

“Who’s she?” Ellen pointed to Cat.

“She’s sick.”

“Is she going to help the Blue Lady?”

“No one can help the Blue Lady,” Izza said. “Not now.”

Ivy sat, and crossed her legs. Izza returned her stare.

“I’m not leaving,” Ivy said, “without a story.”

So she told them a story. Gods help her, she told them a story, an old one about the Blue Lady saving a girl caught by Smiling Jack’s dead boys. They listened, the three kids, and Cat, too. Izza kept waiting for the woman to interrupt, but she said nothing until the story finished and the kids nodded and left, padding softly over the warehouse floor. “Don’t let me catch you back here,” Izza called after them, but they did not seem to hear.

Once the kids were gone, she offered Cat a meal of rice and mangoes and something pretending to be pork, which she’d bought off a food cart down by the docks where meals came cheap. Cat ate in silence. Some of her color had returned, and yesterday Izza’d caught her doing push-ups one-handed beside her bedroll.

“You tell good stories,” Cat said when the food was done.

“Too good,” she said.

“Who’s the Blue Lady?”

Izza did not answer.

“Okay,” Cat said. “Why did you chase them off?”

“They need me.”

“People need each other sometimes. Nothing wrong with that.”

“I won’t be around forever.”

Cat laughed, but the laugh stopped when Izza looked at her. Not that Izza’d put any special malice into her eyes. She just looked, like normal. “You’re young to say things like that and mean them.”

“I’m leaving, aren’t I? Soon as you’re well.”

“Why?”

Izza stood and paced, waiting for Cat to change her question. She did not. At last Izza stopped, returned, and sat again. “They don’t put kids in the Penitents, okay?”

“Okay.” Cat set the bamboo box aside. “You’re scared.”

“We’re not all made of silver. We can’t all fight those things off.”

“You have to run,” she said, “and you don’t want them to be lost without you.”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes people have to work together, though.”

“That why you left your god?”

Cat said nothing.

“I see the withdrawal. And I saw you fight the Penitents. A god made you. And you left him.”

“I wasn’t made,” she said at last. “Not any different from you at least.”

“But you had a god.”

“A goddess. Yes. I worked for one, back onshore. Guess you could say we’re separated now.” She smiled briefly, after that, a pained kind of smile.

“What happened?”

“You know how I said people have to work together?”

“Yeah?”

“Sometimes the best way to work together is to be apart for a while.”

Izza didn’t understand, but she knew better than to ask questions. If Cat wanted her to know what she meant, she would have spoken plainly.

One night, Izza came to the warehouse and found Cat gone, the wad of dirty linens where she’d slept folded into a neat square. Not even footprints remained. Izza set down the box of rice and fruit she’d brought and searched the warehouse, even the little chapel hidden behind the debris, searched the docks beneath and the road outside. Nothing. Cat had vanished, quick as she came, and left her here.

She sank down beside the boxed rice, crossed her legs and hugged her knees, and stared over the horizon of her arms. Steam twisted out from under the box lid, rose a few inches, faded into air.

Of course. Cat needed food, and rest, time to recover. She hadn’t ever meant to bring Izza along. Who would? Made as much sense as Izza bringing Ivy or Ellen. Or Nick or Vel or Seth or Cassie or Jet. Or any of the others.

Sunset purpled the sky. A single star gleamed through a gap in the roof. She didn’t know the star’s name. Her mother would have. Her mother was gone.

She remembered a song, and wished she hadn’t.

Her jaw clamped and her arms tensed and her nails bit into her wrists and forearms. She would have stood and kicked the box across the warehouse, but she didn’t want to waste the rice.

She stared instead into the steam and imagined fingers around a throat, and didn’t know whose throat or whose fingers. A Penitent patrol marched by outside in thunderous array. She did not flinch. They passed. Even their echoes failed.

“Hey,” Cat said a few minutes later. “Sorry I’m late.”

Izza twitched to her feet, whole body taut at once. Her eyes were used to the dark by now. The mainland woman stood by the hole in the warehouse wall. Must have crept in while Izza wasn’t looking. Stupid. Distracted, feeling sorry for herself.

She tried to look calm, but still she took a step back as Cat neared. The woman’s limp was better, not yet healed. She moved slowly over rubble, into and out of light.

“I thought you left,” she said.

“I went for a walk, got lost in the warrens. Too many side streets. I need you to help me make a map.”

“I thought,” she repeated.

“I’m here now.” Cat spoke slowly, hands out. “I just took a walk, that’s all. Trust me. When it’s time to leave, you’ll know. You’ll be ready. Okay?”

“I brought you rice.”

“Thanks,” Cat said, and sat, and ate.

The next day, Izza stole a purse and did not sell it: kept it, rather, on the altar in the hidden warehouse chapel, under the gaze of dead gods. The day after that, she stole two, and the next two more. Building a little storehouse for the kids, tribute to whatever new gods they might find after she was gone.

She’d leave them ready. But she’d leave all the same.

7

Kai woke to find a folded letter on her sickroom sheets, parchment marked in spindly writing that faded as she read: “My office, one hour. —J.” Economical. She placed the paper, folded again, on her bedside table, stood with aid of cane, and staggered to the bathroom. Sleep gummed her mind and body. At least Jace didn’t come to her by nightmare. Her dreams the last few weeks had been dark and drowning.

Mara and Gavin had enlivened the bathroom with a few touches from Kai’s house, but purple duck-shaped soaps and green towels did not soften the sterile white and chrome. Her hospital gown husk lay discarded on gray tile. Too-bright ghostlights reflected off her skin and off the mirror to her eyes: a worn, ill-used body made of meat, webbed with old and new scars. The bite wound on her shoulder looked like the angry outline of a blinded eye. More scars on her back, from the idol, as if she’d once had wings and someone sawed them free. They’d cut her hair short to operate, the clipped black fuzz grown out since to something like a pageboy cut. Mapping her scars, she imagined her next trip to the beach, once she’d healed.