Vivi had been explaining her country for two hours and she hadn't got to the part where she asked them for anything.
"The rain stopped in the south three years ago. Not less rain. None. And it kept falling in Alubarna and Nanohana and Erumalu, every week, on schedule, which people noticed." She had a map on the table and she was pointing at it without looking down. "So the south says the capital is stealing the weather. The capital says that's absurd. Both of them are right about the other one and neither of them is right about anything else."
"How many rebels," Zoro said.
"A million." She said the number without stopping. "Yuba's the staging ground. My father hasn't been able to speak to them for a year. Every time he sends someone, the messenger is intercepted, and the message that arrives isn't the one he sent."
"By Baroque Works."
"By Baroque Works." She moved her finger west. "Which is why if I can get to Yuba, and get to Koza, and show him one piece of proof, then this doesn't have to happen at all. One conversation. That's all it needs."
Nobody said anything.
Zoro watched her hands on the map. She'd rehearsed all of it. Not the facts, the shape — the order she put things in, the way she landed on one conversation at the end, which was where she wanted to land because it was the smallest the problem could be made to look. He'd have bet money she'd been running it in her head since Whisky Peak.
He knew the sound of a person talking themselves into carrying something alone.
He'd made the same speech to himself for four centuries, and there'd been nobody in the room to hear it, and it had killed him.
He didn't say that either.
"So we go to Yuba," Luffy said, upside down off the rail. "Is there food in Yuba?"
Vivi laughed, which was the first time anyone on the ship had heard it.
Nanohana at noon was hot enough that the air over the roofs bent.
The crew came apart the moment they hit the street. Nami went for a clothing stall. Usopp went for anything explosive. Sanji went for the market. Luffy went in a direction that had food in it and was gone before anyone could stop him, which was going to matter later.
Chopper stood at the mouth of the main street with his hooves together and didn't move.
"Too many," he said.
"Too many what."
"People. There's — " He counted, visibly, and gave up. "That's more people than I've seen. Total. In my life."
"Stay next to me."
They walked. Chopper kept close enough to Zoro's leg that he stepped on him twice, and apologised both times to the leg rather than to Zoro, and by the third street he'd stopped flinching every time somebody laughed.
He was also, Zoro noticed, looking at people. Not nervously. Cataloguing them. A man loading crates got a long stare. A woman with a stick got a longer one.
"Her hip's wrong," Chopper said, when he caught Zoro watching him watch. "It healed crooked. Somebody set it badly six or seven years ago and she's been walking on it ever since and it's ruining her knee." He reported it and moved on. "That's how you can tell. The knee goes before the hip does."
"You can see that from here."
"I'm a doctor." He said it with total certainty, and then, immediately, with none: "I mean. I was trained by one. Sort of. Mostly I read his books after."
They walked another block.
"Zoro."
"Mm."
"Your pulse is thirty-one."
Zoro kept walking, because stopping would have been an answer.
"I counted it on the ship. Twice, because I thought I'd got it wrong the first time." Chopper wasn't accusing him of anything. He sounded delighted. "Thirty-one is what you get from someone who's been running mountains their whole life, and even then it's low, and you're nineteen. And your temperature's up, which shouldn't happen with a pulse like that, those go the other way. And you eat like Luffy."
"I train."
"Everybody says that." Chopper trotted to keep up. "Sanji trains. Sanji's pulse is sixty-four. That's a very fit man. You're not a very fit man, you're something else, and I don't have a word for it."
"You don't need one."
"No," Chopper agreed, cheerfully. "But I'll work it out eventually. That's what doctors do. Doctorine said the body always tells you, you just have to be patient and stop asking it questions it can't answer."
He said the name without noticing he'd said it. Then he heard it, and went quiet, and walked on three legs for a bit while he thought about something.
Zoro let him have that.
Zeff had been suspicious. Kureha had been curious and armed with a machine. This was worse than either, because a doctor who wasn't suspicious of him at all was going to keep looking for the rest of his life, cheerfully, from close range, on the same ship.
There'd be no way to stop him. There was nothing to stop. He was just going to keep counting.
The restaurant was on fire.
Not the whole restaurant. The street outside was full of people who had recently left it at speed, and there was a hole in the front wall, and Luffy was standing in the hole with his cheeks full.
There was another man beside him.
Zoro came up the street at a walk and stopped about thirty feet out.
The man was dark-haired, shirtless, with a hat that had two faces on it and a tattoo down his arm. He was talking to Luffy and Luffy was talking back with his mouth full, and neither of them seemed concerned about the wall.
The air around the two of them was wrong.
Zoro had felt this once before, on a road in Cocoyasi with a knife in a girl's hand, coming out of his own chest and tearing him doing it. He'd felt it a second time in the same instant, from Luffy, and had never worked out whether he'd imagined that.
He hadn't imagined it. It was here now, off both of them at once, and it wasn't doing anything. It was just present, the way weather is present, two lots of it standing in the same doorway arguing about breakfast.
Zoro's back teeth ached.
"That's my brother," Luffy said, when he noticed him. "Ace. He's looking for someone."
"Portgas D. Ace." The man put a hand out and Zoro took it. "Second division, Whitebeard. You're the swordsman."
"Zoro."
"I know. Baratie." Ace's grip was ordinary. His eyes weren't doing anything Zoro could read, which was becoming a theme in this world. "Whole East Blue's been talking about a rookie who took Hawk-Eyes to a fifth minute."
"I lost in ninety seconds."
"That's not the version that's travelling." Ace let go, and grinned, and it was Luffy's grin on an older face. "Nothing ever is."
Then somebody in the crowd said the word Marines, and the street emptied.
Smoker came round the corner about forty feet away.
He had a jitte across his shoulder and two cigars going in the desert heat, and he saw Luffy, and Zoro watched him see Luffy and put it aside. He didn't look at Ace at all.
He looked at Zoro.
"You," he said.
Tashigi came round the corner behind him.
She had her sword out already and she came past Smoker at a run before he'd got another word out, and Zoro had about a second and a half to notice that her feet were different.
They were different. She came in on a line he hadn't expected and she didn't look at his hands once.
He put Wado up and took the cut on the flat and she was already gone from where she'd been, going low and right, and he had to move his back foot to answer it.
He hadn't had to move his back foot for a woman with a sword since he arrived in this world.
Four exchanges. She lost the fifth, because she was still half a beat behind what she was seeing and there wasn't a way around that except time, and he put her sword up and out of line and stepped inside it and stopped with the edge an inch off her collar.
She didn't move. She was breathing hard and she was furious and she wasn't looking at the sword.
"You watched me," Zoro said.
"I did."
"How long?"
"Two months. Every day." She still hadn't moved. "I got you on the third one. Don't tell me I didn't. You went right because I made you go right."
"You did."
"Then fight me properly."
Zoro didn't answer that.
"You're holding back. You've been holding back since the first three seconds, you're doing it now — " her voice went up and cracked in the middle of it " — and I don't know what that is but it isn't mercy, and I'd rather you cut me than stand there deciding how much of yourself I'm worth."
He took the sword away from her collar.
The trouble with looking at her was that he'd never met Kuina, and the boy had, and the boy's chest did things about it that had nothing to do with Fang Yue and couldn't be reasoned with. It came up every time. He'd had eight hundred years of governing his own body and none at all of governing this one's memory.
"It isn't about you," he said.
"That's worse."
"Yes."
He stepped back and put Wado away.
"Third exchange," he said. "You committed your shoulder before your foot. That's how I knew where you'd be. Fix the order and I won't."
Then he turned around, because Smoker had crossed half the distance while they were talking.
Smoker stopped ten feet out.
He didn't come at him. He stood in the middle of the empty street with the jitte down at his side and took his time about looking.
"Two months," he said. "I've had a hole in my side for two months. It's healed. It shouldn't have been there."
"No."
"Marines don't get cut by East Blue rookies. I'm not being proud about it, that's just the arithmetic. I've been past the Red Line. I know what it takes to do what you did and I know roughly how long it takes, and you've had nineteen years and most of those you spent in a dojo in the North Blue chasing a dead girl's record."
Zoro's hand stayed off the sword.
"So I'll ask you again," Smoker said, "and I'll keep asking every time I catch up to you. Who taught you."
"Nobody."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the true one."
Smoker looked at him for a long stretch. Behind him Tashigi had got up and was standing with her sword still in her hand and her attention entirely on the two of them.
"You know what I think," Smoker said. "I think you're not lying. That's the part I don't like."
Then Luffy said something extremely rude about the Marines, and the moment went, and the street turned into a chase.
Ace covered the retreat.
He did it by putting a wall of fire across the road from one side to the other, which stopped the pursuit and also set a fruit stand alight, and he apologised to the owner while he was doing it.
They made the harbour with Smoker's voice somewhere behind them, and the Merry was already moving because Nami had seen the smoke and drawn the correct conclusion.
Ace came aboard long enough to give Luffy a scrap of paper.
"Burns slow. Points at me." He folded Luffy's fingers over it. "Not for you. It's so I know if you stop."
"That's stupid, I'm not gonna stop."
"Then it's a stupid piece of paper." Ace put his hat back on. "Vivi. Whitebeard's name is worth something in this sea. If Alabasta needs it, say it out loud and somebody will hear you."
Vivi didn't manage to answer before he'd gone over the side onto his own boat.
They cleared the bay with the light going.
Zoro took the rail. Chopper came and sat near him without saying anything for a while, which was new, and then said, "Sixty-four is high for Sanji, actually. He'd been carrying the shopping."
"Go to sleep."
"I'm just saying my numbers are good."
He went below.
Vivi stayed on deck. She stood at the stern and watched Nanohana go down under the horizon, and she'd been standing there long enough that Zoro had stopped expecting her to move.
"It's worse than the reports," she said, eventually. "The market. There were four stalls with water and there used to be twenty. That's Nanohana. Nanohana's the part that's fine."
"Yes."
"I keep saying one conversation." She wasn't looking at him. "I've been saying it since Whisky Peak. I say it out loud so it stays true."
Zoro thought about a threshold he'd stood at for forty-one years telling himself that the next attempt was the one, and about how many people had been standing next to him when he died.
"Say it to Luffy," he said.
"What?"
"Whatever you're carrying. Say it out loud to him." He pushed off the rail. "He's bad at almost everything. He's good at that."
He went to find somewhere to sleep.
Behind him Vivi stayed at the stern a while longer, and then went and stood near the mast, where Luffy was lying on his back with the scrap of paper held up against the last of the light, watching it not burn.