Nami came aboard with a new tattoo on her shoulder. A tangerine, and a pinwheel behind it. The skin around the ink was still red. She wore a shirt that covered it for the first two days and then stopped bothering.
Luffy's face turned up on a wanted poster on the third day. Thirty million berries. He held it at arm's length and laughed at it, then made everyone look at it, then laughed again. Usopp found the back of his own head in the corner of the picture and was quiet about that for the rest of the afternoon.
Zoro read the poster once. Thirty million. He didn't know what that bought in this world. He'd find out when someone tried to collect it.
They made Loguetown two days later. The harbour was full of Marine ships and nobody seemed to think that was a problem.
The sword shop was down a side street under a cracked sign. It smelled of oil and old iron. The owner looked at Zoro's clothes, then at the sword on his hip, and named a price for the first rack that was three times what the rack was worth.
Zoro walked the racks anyway. A hundred thousand berries and he needed two swords, and there was nothing in the room that would survive being used. He'd got as far as the door when it opened inward and a woman in a Marine coat came through it, caught her foot on the step, and went into the counter with both hands.
She straightened up. Glasses. Dark hair, cut short. A sword at her hip that was worth more than the shop.
Then she looked at him and his chest went tight.
He didn't know why. It came up hard under the breastbone, a pull that had nothing to do with him, and for a second he stood there with it not understanding. Then the memory arrived. A girl in a dojo after dark, with a wooden sword, standing over him. Two thousand and one.
The face was the same.
He looked at the rack beside him and put his hand on it and waited for the body to stop.
"Is that — sorry, is that a —" She'd seen Wado. She crossed the shop before he could turn and stood staring at the hilt with her mouth a little open. "May I? That's a meito. That's Wado Ichimonji. That's one of the twenty-one great swords, do you have any idea what that's —"
"No."
"Ten million. At least." She said it quietly, the way people say the names of the dead. "Where did you get it?"
"It was given to me."
She looked at him then, properly, and stopped talking about the sword. "You're a swordsman."
"Yes."
"I'm Tashigi. I — sorry. I'm with the Marines here. I collect swords. Not for myself, for — there are too many famous blades in the wrong hands, and I want to —" She stopped. "That's not your problem. Are you buying?"
"Trying."
She helped. She couldn't seem not to. She went through the racks he'd already been through and rejected everything he'd rejected, for the same reasons, in three times as many words. She had a good eye, better than her feet. Her hands on the hilts were sure. Then she stepped back between two racks and caught her coat on a corner and had to stop and unhook it.
Then she found the barrel.
"Oh," she said.
It was in a bin of junk blades at the back, and Zoro felt it before she'd finished lifting it out. A cold line down his spine. Faint. As if something in the room had turned to look at him.
"Sandai Kitetsu." She was almost whispering. "That's a meito too. Lower grade. But it's cursed, everyone who's owned it has died badly, the shop can't —"
"I'll take it."
The shopkeeper went white. "No. Absolutely not. I've had that thing eleven years and I've watched two men walk out with it and I'm not — I won't sell it. I won't have that on me."
Zoro took it out of her hands and drew it.
Red down the edge. The cold came off it stronger with the sheath gone, and under the cold there was something else, a kind of attention, and he knew it. He'd spent a very long time in a world where swords had tempers. This was the first thing here that felt like home.
He tossed it up and put his arm out underneath.
The shopkeeper shouted. Tashigi made a sound. The blade turned twice in the air, came down point-first, and stood quivering in the floorboards a finger's width from his wrist.
He picked it up.
"It didn't want to," he said, and put it through his belt.
Nobody spoke for a moment. Then the shopkeeper went into the back without a word. He was gone a while. When he came out he had a second sword in a plain black sheath, and he set it on the counter and pushed it across with two fingers.
"Yubashiri. It was my family's." He wasn't looking at Zoro. "Take it. No charge. I'm not watching that and then selling you rubbish."
Zoro took both. He put money on the counter anyway, what he had, and the shopkeeper didn't touch it.
Tashigi was still looking at the hole in the floor.
"Who are you," she said.
He didn't have an answer for that he could give her. He went out.
The storm broke around noon. Lightning came down somewhere near the square hard enough to shake the windows, and Zoro didn't need anyone to tell him what had been standing under it.
He was three streets away when Tashigi caught him.
She came out of a doorway with her sword drawn and her glasses gone and rain plastering her hair flat, and she was shouting. Something about the swords. Something about criminals. It took him a second to understand she wasn't warning him. She was challenging him.
"Move."
She didn't.
He fought her because there wasn't time not to.
She was good. Her form was clean and her sword was real and she meant every stroke. It didn't matter. She watched his blade, and he watched her, and when her weight went onto her front foot he stepped through the gap and put her on her back in the running water with Wado at her throat. Her sword skidded away into the gutter.
She looked up at him.
Kuina's face, soaked, furious. He held the sword steady and didn't let himself look at it for long.
"Do it."
"No."
"Because I'm a woman. Because you can't —"
"Because you were watching my sword."
She stopped.
"Your hands are good. Better than most. You never once looked at me." Rain ran off his chin. "The sword isn't the thing. Watch the man. Where his weight goes. What he wants. You'll see the cut before he makes it, and then it won't matter what he's holding."
"You don't get to —"
"Ask yourself how I knew where you'd be." He stepped back off her. "Then go and find out."
He left her sitting in the water. He didn't look back. He wasn't sure what would happen if he did.
Smoker had Luffy against a wall.
Zoro came into the square at a run and took it in without stopping. The platform behind them was down, black timber steaming in the rain. A Marine captain in a white coat, two cigars going despite the weather, a jitte in one hand. Luffy on the cobbles under the jitte's tip with his face gone grey and his arms lying wrong.
Seastone. The boy had known the word. He'd never seen it. It looked like a rock.
Zoro drew Wado and put haki into it while he was still crossing the square.
Smoker turned his head. He looked at the black on the blade and stopped. He knew what it was. Zoro watched him know it, and watched him not believe it.
"Where did you —"
He didn't finish. He came apart into smoke.
Zoro had known it was coming and it was still a strange thing to watch. A man becoming weather, pouring across the square at him, a fist gathering out of the front of it. He didn't dodge. He cut into it, straight through where the chest would have been.
The blade caught.
Not much. A line of resistance, like cutting cloth, and then a sound from inside the smoke that smoke shouldn't make.
Smoker came back together three paces off with his hand pressed to his ribs. Blood came through his fingers.
He looked at it. Then at the sword. Then at Zoro's face, hard, like he was trying to place it.
"Who taught you that."
Zoro didn't answer.
"Rookies don't have that. Nobody in this sea has that. Who taught you —"
Zoro went past him while he was still talking, got a fist in Luffy's shirt, and pulled. The jitte had rolled clear. Luffy came up off the ground gasping and the colour started back into him, and Zoro got a shoulder under his arm and turned for the harbour.
Behind them, hoarse: "Answer me —"
Then wind.
It came down the street from above, straight down, and it flattened the rain and put Smoker on one knee. Zoro didn't stop to see what had done it. He ran.
Smoker got up.
His side was open. He put his hand on it and the hand came away red, and he looked at that for a moment and put the hand back.
The square was empty. The platform was a heap of black timber with the rain hissing on it, and half the Marines in Loguetown had come running when the lightning hit and none of them had got here yet, which was about what he'd learned to expect from the Marines in Loguetown.
He'd stood at the foot of that platform once before.
Twenty-two years. He'd been a boy in the crowd, and Gold Roger had been on the scaffold with his hands tied, and the man had smiled before they took his head. Smoker had never found the words for that smile. He'd tried, for a while, and given up, and joined the Marines, and spent every year since making sure nobody ever got to stand up there and smile like that again.
Then a rubber idiot in a straw hat had climbed the same scaffold, and Buggy the Clown had put a sword to his neck, and the boy had smiled.
The same smile. Smoker had been close enough to see the teeth.
Then lightning. Then the chase. Then the boy on the ground under the jitte, going grey the way they all went grey, and Smoker two seconds from done with it. Thirty million. A rookie. Not worth the ink they'd spent on the poster. He'd have had him on a ship to Impel Down by nightfall and gone back to his cigars.
And then the swordsman.
He made himself go over it again.
Green hair. Three swords, where the report from the Baratie had said one. He'd come around the corner already moving and the blade had been black.
Armament. Smoker had known it the second he saw it. Two years past the Red Line, he'd watched men bleed for that black, and most of them had been twice the boy's age before they got it. He'd stood in the rain looking at it on a rookie from the East Blue and for half a second it hadn't made any sense at all. Then he'd stopped caring whether it made sense, because whatever the boy had, he couldn't have enough of it, and gone to smoke.
He'd gone to smoke a thousand times. Nothing touched him when he was smoke. That was the whole of what he was.
The blade had gone through and caught.
He'd felt it. That was the part that wouldn't sit down. He'd felt steel go through a body he didn't have, and now there was a cut in his side he could put a finger in, and the man who'd put it there was nobody. A bounty hunter from the East Blue who'd taken up with a fool.
He'd asked. Twice. The boy hadn't answered. Hadn't so much as looked at him. Had walked past a Marine captain with a hole in his side without breaking stride.
The hooded man was standing in the mouth of the alley across the square.
He hadn't been there. Smoker was certain of that. He was there now, tall, the hood pulled forward, and the rain was coming straight down again and he stood in it as if it were somebody else's weather.
"Who the hell are you."
The man didn't answer.
"You saw him," he said instead. His voice didn't rise and it carried anyway. "The green one."
Smoker said nothing.
"The captain, everyone will see. That was always going to happen." The hood turned, slightly, toward the harbour. "The other one wasn't in anything I've read."
"You read Marine reports."
Nothing.
"That's a Marine jitte he knocked out of my hand. That's a thirty-million-berry rookie he carried out of here. Whoever you are, you just —"
"Let them go, Captain."
"I don't take orders from —"
"You'll see them again. They're going where you're going." A pause. "And when you do, you'll want to have thought about what you saw today. So think about it."
Smoker opened his mouth.
The alley was empty. Rain fell into it and hit stone.
He stood in the square for a long time with his hand on his side. Then he went and found Tashigi, who was sitting on a step three streets away with her sword across her knees and her glasses in her hand, not putting them on, and she looked up at him and started to say something and stopped.
"Get up," he said. "We're putting in for transfer."
"Sir?"
"Grand Line." He was already walking. "Both of those two are going to be trouble. I want to be there when they are."