"Kates is back."

It was known soon after the Bonaventure reached Detroit from Buffalo with an illegal cargo and a woman it should not have carried.

"Kates is in Detroit."

It was said by busy men grinding away the hours in dark factories, women reclining in a salon with narrowed eyes, by men sharpening knives in the back rooms of countless speakeasies. Said with disgust, with excitement, glancing from the corner of their eye at one of their number. Only sometimes a young man's voice would say it with a different note and then laugh a little.

Kates own men had known she was coming. They waited, what was left of them, in the mansion on Belle Isle. Unconcerned with how she'd evade a swarm of federal agents trying to track her down before she return to the safe confines of Detroit, whose officials' pockets had been sufficiently lined to guarantee her safety.
Silently, she slipped over the side of the ship and softly parted the water below, as the December wind occasionally rattled the trees along the shore of Belle Isle and the surrounding land. The blackness of the skintight jumpsuit, along with her dark hair, made her nearly invisible as she glided through the water towards her home. She'd been away, it seemed, for far too long.

Rising from the lapping river as close to downtown Detroit as she could make it, and dodging the last of the searchlights, the woman let her hair down as she strode up towards the street. The hotel clerk may not have seen too many soaking wet women in skintight fabric take a room before, but he'd hardly forget this one- or the hundred dollar bill she slid into his hand. A few calls to various city tailors and the woman who emerged the next morning seemed unchanged from the one who was dragged from it.

It had been hard, to say the least, to be taken away from her family. Against her will, held apart from them in a far off land. To watch the edges of it begin to fray, and even the core begin to erode. The past, however, could not be changed. Only the future. And since by its very nature a renaissance was a rebirth, a bright future hardly seemed impossible. The air of Detroit, that smell that is unique to every city, and to home, filled her nostrils as she closed her eyes and said a brief prayer of thanks, and of strength.