The mountain went up and the ship went up it.
Nobody on board believed it until it was happening. Water ran uphill. The Merry climbed a river that had no business existing, with Nami at the tiller shouting instructions and Usopp shouting for other reasons. Then they were over the top and going down the far side, and the Grand Line was spread out below them under a sky that wasn't the right colour.
Then the whale.
It filled the exit. Zoro had seen large things in the old life. He'd never seen anything alive that large. It sat in the water with its head against the cape, and its skin was scored over with old scars, most of them self-made.
The lighthouse keeper explained it while Luffy climbed the whale. Fifty years. A crew that had promised to come back and hadn't. The whale had waited, and when the waiting got too long it had started throwing itself against the cliff, and it was still doing that.
Fifty years on a promise. Zoro stood at the rail and looked at the scars for a long time.
Luffy broke the mast off on the whale's head, called it a draw, and painted the Jolly Roger over the worst of the scars. Then he told the whale to wait, because they'd be back once they'd sailed the whole line, and the whale stopped hitting the cliff.
Crocus watched all this with his hands behind his back. Then he watched Zoro for a while, longer than he'd watched anyone else.
He came over while the others were arguing about the mast.
"You move wrong."
Zoro looked at him.
"For a man carrying what you're carrying." Crocus nodded at his chest. "I was a ship's doctor forty years. I can see a scar through a shirt. You've got one that runs corner to corner, and you climbed that rigging like it wasn't there."
"It's healed."
"Show me."
It wasn't a request. Zoro thought about refusing, decided refusing would be worse, and pulled the shirt open.
Crocus looked for a long time. He put two fingers on the line near the collarbone and pressed hard, watching Zoro's face while he did it.
"How long."
"Three weeks."
"That's not a three-week scar." He took the hand away. "That's a year old if it's a day. I've stitched men who took less than that and buried more of them than I kept." He looked up. "What did you do?"
"Healed."
Crocus grunted. He didn't push. He turned and looked at the whale instead, at the paint drying on its head.
"I sailed with a crew once. A long time ago. A few of them healed like that. Not many." He was quiet a moment. "This sea looks at people who have something. It looked at them."
"What happened to them?"
"Most of them are dead. One of them got where he was going." He shrugged. "Make of that what you want."
He started back toward the lighthouse, then stopped.
"You understood him." A nod at the whale. "I watched you. Everybody else on that ship saw a whale."
Zoro didn't say anything.
"Whatever you waited on," Crocus said, "I hope it was worth it." Then, already walking: "Watch the boy in the hat. He just made a promise to something with a long memory."
He didn't turn round again.
He sent his Log Pose down to the ship with a boy from the lighthouse, and a note for Nami about how the islands pulled it. The crew went east with two strangers aboard who'd been hunting the whale an hour ago and now said they were from a town called Whisky Peak.
Zoro watched the strangers more than the sea.
Whisky Peak welcomed them with a brass band.
The whole town came out. Food on every table, barrels in the street, women hanging off Sanji before he'd got both feet on the dock. The mayor made a speech with his hair in curlers. Somebody put a drink in Zoro's hand. When it was empty somebody put another one there.
By the second hour Luffy was face-down in a plate. Usopp went over backwards off a bench. Nami went last, telling a man she'd out-drunk him and then sliding under the table.
Zoro sat and drank and nothing happened.
The body took the alcohol in and burned it, the way it burned everything now. The man across the table had been watching him drink for an hour and had stopped pretending to do anything else. Zoro let his eyes get heavy. He let his head go down onto his arms. He listened to the man get up, go to the door, and say something to someone outside.
The music stopped. The town went quiet.
He sat up in the dark and they were everywhere.
He didn't see them. His eyes hadn't adjusted and nobody had moved yet. He felt them — a hundred small pressures on the night, on rooftops and behind shutters and in the alleys between the houses, all of them tense, all of them pointed at the building he was in.
He counted. He didn't decide to.
Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. Two more in the bell tower with something long.
A hundred.
He sat on the edge of the table with that for a moment. It was new. The second thing Zeff had named, come up on its own because a hundred men were aiming at him in the dark and some part of him wanted to know where.
Observation. Zeff's word. He'd have picked a different one. It would do.
He picked up his swords and went out the back.
It took about a quarter of an hour.
He'd fought in the dark before and he'd fought crowds before, and the rule was the same for both. You didn't fight a hundred men. You fought one, and then the one behind him, and you never let them find out how many of them there were at once. The town helped. Narrow streets, low roofs, a corner every ten paces. He went up onto the roofs where they weren't looking and came down where they were, and each time he came down someone stopped moving.
He didn't use the black. Nobody here was worth it.
They worked out he was on the roofs around the time the fourth group went quiet. They pulled back into the square and someone started shouting orders. He went along the ridge of the church and dropped into the middle of them, and it was a bad place for them to have gathered.
The mayor came at him with a saxophone that turned out to be a gun. Mr. 9 came at him with bats. The girl from the whale, Miss Wednesday, came at him with something that was half a dance. The big one, Miss Monday, came at him with her fists, and she was the only one who made him step back.
He put her down last and stood in the square breathing.
Somewhere above him a rifle went off, and he'd already moved, because he'd felt the man decide to fire.
He went up the tower after it.
They came at dawn. Two of them, out of the desert.
A man in sunglasses whose hands exploded things. A woman with a parasol who came out of the sky as heavy as a dropped safe. They'd come to kill the mayor and Miss Wednesday, and they said so, and said why.
Baroque Works. A boss called Mr. 0 whose name nobody was supposed to know. The two on the ground had found it out. That was a death sentence.
The mayor's name was Igaram, and he was a captain of the royal guard of a country called Alabasta. The girl was a princess. Her name was Vivi.
Zoro stood at the edge of the square with his arms folded and listened.
Nami asked who Mr. 0 was. Vivi said she couldn't tell them, it would put them all on the list. Nami said fine, don't. And Vivi, who had been awake for two days and watched her guardian sail off in a decoy ship that blew up before it cleared the headland, said Sir Crocodile out loud before she could stop herself, and put her hand over her mouth.
The name meant something to the boy. A Warlord. One of seven. The same rank as the man on the dinghy.
Zoro looked at the smoke still coming off the water where the decoy had been, and then at the princess, and thought this went a good deal further than a town.
Luffy woke up in the middle of it.
He came out of the tavern with a plate still stuck to his face, looked at the square, and saw the town he'd been eating in the night before lying in heaps with Zoro standing in the middle of it.
He didn't ask.
He came across the square at a run with his fist already going back. Zoro felt it a second before it happened, the way he'd felt the rifleman. Luffy's weight, Luffy's intent, the arm stretching.
He stepped inside it.
The punch went past his ear. He got a hand on the back of Luffy's neck, another on his belt, turned him over in the air, and put him face-down on the cobbles with a knee in the small of his back and both of Luffy's arms folded up behind him.
Luffy's arms stretched. They kept stretching. They went ten feet in either direction and found nothing to hit.
"Let go! You attacked the — they were nice, they gave us —"
"They drugged you."
Luffy stopped stretching.
"Look at the food. Look at Nami." Zoro didn't move his knee. "They put something in the drink and put you all to sleep, and then a hundred of them came to collect. I stopped them."
A long pause.
"Oh," Luffy said, into the cobbles.
"Yeah."
"You could've said."
"You were punching."
Zoro let him up. Luffy rolled over and sat on the ground and looked at the square again, properly this time. Then he looked at Zoro for a while without saying anything, which he had never once done.
"You put me down really fast."
"Yes."
"Huh." Luffy got up and dusted off his shorts. "Okay. Where's the food that's not drugged?"
Nami was awake by then, and negotiating.
A billion berries, she told the princess, was what it would cost to get her home. The princess said Alabasta didn't have a billion berries. Nami said she'd take instalments. Luffy said they'd do it for free and Nami hit him.
Zoro wasn't listening.
There was a woman on the roof.
The roofline had been empty. Now she was sitting on it, legs crossed, hat tilted, watching the negotiation like someone who'd paid for a seat. Miss All Sunday. The one who'd blown up the decoy ship. The one who'd heard the name.
He looked at her the way he'd looked at everyone else in this world, and got nothing back.
Not a lie. He'd have felt a lie. She wasn't still, either. She moved, she smiled, she tilted her head. But there was nothing under any of it for him to get hold of. A very long time reading people, and it was like looking at a lit window with the curtain drawn.
She saw him looking. She smiled at him, specifically, and inclined her head about an inch.
Then she dropped an Eternal Pose into Nami's hands, told them it would take them somewhere safe, and was gone off the roof.
Luffy took the Pose out of Nami's hands and broke it against the wall.
"We're not going where she says. We're going where we were going."
Zoro was still looking at the empty roofline.