Chapter Text
The sea has not killed her, and Robin has begun, in the strange unmeasured stretch of time since the storm began, to suspect that this is deliberate.
It is a foolish thought, of course. The sea cannot want anything. Professor Clover would have corrected her for giving intention to something without a mind, and she can almost hear the patient shape of the explanation even now: currents, wind, pressure, the movement of water beneath the moon, all those vast indifferent forces which had existed long before Nico Robin and would continue long after there was nobody left to remember her name.
The sea has no reason to spare her.
The sea does not know who she is.
And yet she is still alive.
There had been a point yesterday, perhaps (though yesterday has become difficult to distinguish from the night before it, because time has loosened itself from all the ordinary things which once held it in place, from meals and bells and the familiar rhythm of voices calling through rooms) when Robin had stopped believing the little boat would remain upright. The waves had risen higher than the mast and come down with such weight that each one seemed certain to be the last; rain had struck her face so hard that breathing became an effort of timing, a matter of turning away at precisely the right second, while water gathered around her ankles faster than she could scoop it back into the sea.
Whenever lightning split the sky, the world appeared for an instant in terrible completeness: black water veined with white foam, the thin shuddering shape of the boat and, beyond it, nothing at all. No island waiting darkly against the horizon, no ship with lights burning somewhere in the distance, no enormous hand reaching down to lift her clear of the waves. Only water, spreading away in every direction as though the world had always been sea and Robin had merely imagined there was ever anything else.
She had curled herself beneath what remained of the sail and wrapped both arms around the small bundle she had managed to save, pressing it against her chest until the corners of the books dug painfully into her ribs. At some point, cold and exhausted and no longer entirely certain whether she was thinking or dreaming, she had decided that books could not drown if somebody held them tightly enough.
Even then she had known how stupid that was.
Books were paper. Paper absorbed water; it swelled and softened, ink wandered from the shapes people had carefully given it, glue dissolved, bindings warped and split. There was nothing sacred in the materials themselves, nothing which made knowledge less vulnerable because people had spent their lives gathering it, or because others had chosen, at the end, to carry what they could towards the lake instead of saving themselves.
People had died for words.
It had not made the words immortal.
Still, Robin had held them, perhaps because letting go would have meant admitting that there was nothing left for her hands to protect; perhaps because if she loosened her arms, even for a moment, the books would become only wet paper, and she had not been ready—not yet—to discover how quickly the remains of an entire world could become ordinary objects.
So she had held on.
When the mast snapped sometime during the night, the sound came strangely clean through the storm, wood splitting with a crack so sharp that for one impossible second everything else seemed to fall silent around it.
Then the broken half vanished into the dark.
Robin watched it disappear and thought, with a calmness that frightened her only afterwards, so this is where it ends.
Not in fire, after all, nor beneath cannon smoke with the island vanishing behind her; not while Saul laughed through his tears and told her to run, to keep running because the world was large and somewhere within it there would be people who would not leave her alone.
Here.
In a nameless stretch of sea where nobody would know to search and perhaps nobody would ever know that she had survived long enough to die somewhere else.
The thought ought to have terrified her.
Instead there had been something almost gentle in it, which was worse.
She had been so tired.
Tired enough that death no longer seemed like something advancing towards her, but simply another place she might stop.
Then, because the world had apparently not finished being cruel in its inconveniences, morning came.
The storm moves on without explanation. The waves diminish by degrees until the boat ceases trying quite so determinedly to overturn itself, and light spreads thinly across the water, grey at first and then silver, touching everything with the obscene calm of a morning which has no knowledge of what the night contained.
Robin opens her eyes and discovers the books still against her chest, the boat still beneath her and herself (devil child, archaeologist, seventy-nine-million-berry problem to a Government which apparently wants her dead) quite stubbornly alive.
For a long while she simply lies there listening to water move against the hull.
The sea has not killed her.
She is no longer certain what to make of that.
By afternoon, uncertainty has become anger.
It is not particularly reasonable anger, though very little about the last several days has remained reasonable. Her lips have split from salt and thirst; her stomach cramps whenever she moves, and so she has begun moving as little as possible. Her dress dried stiff against her skin sometime during the morning only to become damp again beneath the spray, and one sandal disappeared in the storm, leaving the sole of her bare foot tender from the rough boards. There is a cut beneath her knee which she cannot remember receiving, already crusted dark at the edges, and whenever she tries to stand, the horizon tilts sideways with such confidence that for several seconds she can almost believe it is the sea which has remained still and the whole world which has gone crooked around her.
She is hungry, thirsty, sunburnt and tired of being grateful for things as unimpressive as continuing to breathe.
Worse, there is nothing to do except think.
Robin has discovered very quickly that thinking requires rules.
There are safe subjects: the amount of water remaining in the bottle, the condition of the sail, whether the clouds gathering far to the east mean rain, how long the books might take to dry if she ever reaches somewhere dry enough to open them. Practical things. Things with edges.
Then there are thoughts which look harmless until she touches them.
She wonders how long it has been since she saw land and, before she can stop herself, remembers her mother.
The memory comes not as fire or gunshots or any of the other things her mind has begun learning to keep at a distance, but as something much smaller and therefore harder to avoid: her mother turning towards her at the edge of the forest.
Robin had spent years wondering what Nico Olvia might say if she ever saw her again, years constructing conversations out of almost nothing, and in the end there had been so little time that the things she remembered most clearly were not words at all.
Her mother’s face when Robin called her Mama.
Her arms around her.
How warm she had been.
How quickly she had let go.
Robin realises her fingernails are digging into her palms and slowly opens her hands.
There.
That is why there are rules.
She concentrates on the boat instead, on the grain of the boards beneath her knees and the fine white crust of salt gathering where the water has dried, until memory withdraws to whatever part of her mind it came from.
There has to be somewhere ahead.
That is the useful thought.
Not what lies behind her, but what has to exist somewhere beyond the next stretch of water: an island whose name she does not know, perhaps, or a harbour where a small battered boat might drift close enough to shore for her to climb out of it; somewhere with drinking water and food and people who have not yet seen her face on a wanted poster.
Saul had believed there would be more than that.
He had believed there would be people.
Friends, eventually.
People who would—
Robin stops herself.
Hope, she is discovering, requires rules too.
She lowers her gaze to a knot in the wood between her knees and traces its crooked shape with one finger, following the line round and round until the pressure in her throat eases.
Saul had meant well.
She knows that.
Still, given the present evidence, it is becoming increasingly difficult not to suspect that Saul had been overly optimistic about several things.
Then the boat strikes something.
Robin pitches forward hard enough that one palm slaps against the boards, and for one terrible instant she thinks the hull has found a reef at last, that after everything the sea has simply been saving the obvious ending for later. She waits for the splintering crack of wood, for cold water to burst through beneath her feet.
It does not come.
Instead there is another impact, softer but no less unpleasant, followed by a long scraping groan beneath the hull as the little boat shoves itself forward and then stops.
Robin remains where she is for several seconds, listening.
No water rushing in.
No cracking wood.
Only the quiet knock of something loose against the side of the boat.
She lifts her head.
A broken plank floats beside her.
Beyond it is another, then the cracked side of a barrel, a length of rope stiff with salt, part of what might once have been a chair. The sea around her has become crowded with debris, all of it shifting lazily together in the calmer water, until Robin realises that the boat has not reached shore at all.
It has run itself into a graveyard.
Scrap rises ahead of her in uneven heaps: warped timber, rusted metal, shattered furniture, pieces of hull large enough that she can still see the curve of ships in them, ropes knotted around broken masts and things whose original purpose has been lost entirely beneath salt, weather and time. The storm has scattered some of it outward into the water, but farther in the wreckage gathers densely enough to form something almost like land beneath the gulls.
Robin stares.
It is not beautiful.
After days of seeing nothing but sea, it is wonderful.
She drags herself upright, one hand braced against the side of the boat, and only then looks beyond the heaps of discarded things.
The city rises behind them.
For several seconds she cannot understand what she is seeing.
Buildings climb one above another from enormous foundations, crowded together beneath layered roofs and crossed by scaffolding, cranes and bridges. Great walls of stone seem to rise directly from the water, and everywhere she looks there are channels gleaming between them, broad ribbons of blue passing beneath bridges and curling around foundations as naturally as roads.
Water does not surround the city.
It belongs to it.
Farther off, ships gather around docks in such numbers that their masts stand against the pale sky like a forest, while towers and rooftops climb behind them in impossible tiers.
A city built inside the sea.
Robin has never imagined such a place.
For several moments she forgets the pain in her stomach, the salt tightening her skin, the books clutched against her chest and even the enormous, terrible question of what she is supposed to do now that the sea has deposited her somewhere instead of killing her.
She simply looks.
There is something almost absurd about arriving at a city like this through its rubbish, herself and the broken little boat caught among all the things the water has carried here and nobody has wanted badly enough to retrieve.
Robin does not think about that too carefully.
Not yet.
After days in which the world has narrowed to water, sky and the fragile boards beneath her, even a mountain of wreckage means people have been here.
People mean food.
Water.
Information.
Possibly danger.
Almost certainly danger, actually.
But for the first time in days, fear loosens its grip enough to let something else through.
Wonder, perhaps.
Robin has nearly forgotten what that feels like.
Then the boat tips.
There is hardly time for Robin to understand what is happening before the boards shift violently beneath her and the world turns sideways, scrap and sky and dark water exchanging places in a blur. She falls with a splash that seems enormous after the relative quiet, striking the shallows hard enough that her knees find the bottom almost immediately, though this does nothing to stop the shock of water closing over her head.
She comes up choking.
Wet hair clings across her eyes and mouth, salt burns the cracks in her lips, and for several confused seconds she can think of nothing except air—until she sees the bundle floating beside the overturned boat.
The books.
“Books—”
She lunges towards them.
Her body does not.
Or rather, it tries; her legs push against the uneven bottom and one arm reaches desperately forward, but whatever strength has carried her through the storm has apparently decided its obligations end the moment land appears. Her muscles tremble uselessly, and before she can close the distance a small wave rolls through the shallows and lifts the bundle away.
“No.” The word escapes before she knows she has spoken.
Robin stumbles after it, one hand stretched so far that pain pulls through her shoulder, watching the wet cloth bob maddeningly beyond her fingertips while another wash of water begins drawing it back towards the scattered wreckage.
Not those.
She has already lost too much.
The thought comes without shape or reason, enormous in its simplicity, and instinct moves faster than exhaustion.
A hand appears against the ruined side of the boat.
Then another.
Small fingers blossom from the wet timber one after another, pale against splintered wood, reaching where Robin herself cannot. One catches the trailing edge of the cloth; another closes around it farther down, and suddenly the bundle stops drifting.
Robin pulls.
The books come back to her through the water.
She gathers them against her chest with both arms and sinks down where she stands, knees buried in the shallows, breath shuddering through her while water moves gently around her waist as though nothing at all has happened.
For a while she can do nothing except hold them.
Then another thought arrives.
Has anyone seen?
Robin looks up sharply.
The heaps of scrap stand silent around her, gulls shifting somewhere overhead. Beyond them the city continues whatever distant business cities conduct when they have no reason to notice one exhausted child washing up among their rubbish.
No one is looking.
Thankfully.
She presses the bundle more securely beneath one arm and forces herself upright.
The first step hurts. The second requires thought. By the third she has stopped distinguishing between the ache in her knees, the burning beneath her bare foot and the deeper exhaustion which seems to have settled into the bones themselves.
Still, she moves.
That is what Saul had told her to do, after all.
Run, walk, crawl—perhaps the distinction no longer matters very much, provided she keeps going.
Robin makes it several metres into the wreckage before the world begins tilting again.
She stops and waits for it to settle.
It does not.
The distant city leans strangely to one side; the heaps of timber seem to slide past one another, and Robin has just enough time to think that this is inconvenient before her knees give way beneath her.
She lands beside a great weathered piece of timber, still clutching the books.
For a moment she means only to sit.
Just until the dizziness passes. Just until her arms stop shaking. Just until she can decide where water might be found, whether anyone nearby looks safe, whether hiding would be wiser than asking for help.
There are things to think about.
Important things.
Robin rests her head against the wood.
She does not remember deciding to sleep.
“Whoa.”
Robin hears the voice before she opens her eyes, loud enough that for one confused instant it seems less a human voice than another piece of the city intruding upon her sleep. Whoever owns it is nearby, moving through the wreckage with the careless confidence of someone who has no reason to fear being discovered, and Robin lies still while her mind, awake before the rest of her, begins its familiar inventory: one person, boots, tools perhaps, no second voice; not enough information yet to decide whether opening her eyes is safer than pretending she has not heard him.
“Now that is good wood.”
Something scrapes nearby.
Robin remains still.
The instinct comes before thought now: do not move, do not speak, do not let whoever has found you know that you are awake until you know what they are. Her fingers tighten almost imperceptibly around the damp cloth bundled against her chest while, beneath her closed lids, possibilities arrange themselves according to danger.
A Marine would be bad.
Someone from the Government would be worse.
A fisherman might ask questions. Someone from the city might recognise her eventually, although surely the posters could not have reached every corner of the sea already—surely there must still be places where Nico Robin is only a name nobody has heard.
She does not trust the thought enough to keep it.
Instead she listens.
One set of footsteps, heavy enough to be boots, moving without any particular caution through the wreckage. No second voice answers him. No weapons she can hear, though that means very little. There is the occasional clink of metal as he walks, tools perhaps, and then the unmistakable sound of wood being dragged across other wood.
“Look at you,” the voice says with something approaching admiration.
The footsteps stop very near her.
Robin’s fingers close more firmly around the books.
“Storm practically does my work for me. Couple more pieces like this and I’ll have enough for—”
The sentence stops.
There is a brief silence.
“Huh?”
Robin opens her eyes.
A boy is standing over her.
Not a Marine.
The recognition comes first and so quickly that relief almost follows it, though Robin has learned enough in the last few days not to confuse not a Marine with safe. She keeps still and looks at him properly.
The second thing she notices is his hair.
It is blue.
Very blue.
It sticks out around his head in several improbable directions, and Robin, who has read enough books to know that lightning can do peculiar things to the human body, briefly wonders whether he has recently survived some severe electrical accident.
He is broad through the shoulders and older than her, though not by enough to belong comfortably among the adults she has learned to distrust on sight. Scratches mark his knees beneath his shorts, while a loud patterned shirt hangs open over his chest as though buttons are another convention he has decided not to respect. Goggles have been pushed up onto his forehead, tools hang heavily from a belt around his waist, and a dark streak of grease crosses one cheek.
None of it looks official.
That is promising.
Less promising is the fact that he is holding one end of the enormous weathered piece of timber against which Robin has apparently fallen asleep.
Her head is resting against the other.
For several seconds neither of them speaks.
The boy stares down at her.
Robin stares back.
His frown deepens, not with recognition (she watches carefully for that and finds none) but with what appears to be genuine confusion over the unexpected complication of finding a person attached to a useful piece of scrap.
His gaze travels from Robin to the timber.
Then back to Robin.
Then, with visible reluctance, to the timber again.
“Are you using this?”
Robin looks at him.
For several seconds the question refuses to arrange itself into anything sensible. She has imagined, since the first grey line of the city rose behind the scrap heaps, what somebody might ask if they found her here: her name, where she came from, whether there had been anyone else on the boat. Questions with dangerous answers, questions for which she has already begun constructing safer ones almost without noticing, because lies, she is beginning to understand, are another sort of shelter and perhaps one ought to build them before the rain starts.
She has not prepared for this.
The boy jerks his chin towards the enormous length of timber beneath her head.
Ah.
Robin studies him again, just in case there has been some misunderstanding she can attribute to thirst, exhaustion or possibly the blue hair.
There has not.
“I was gonna take it,” he adds.
Her throat feels lined with salt. When she speaks, her voice comes out thin and rough enough that for an instant she hardly recognises it as her own. “I was here first.”
The effect is remarkable.
The boy draws back as though she has accused him of piracy.
“You weren’t using it!”
“I was sleeping.”
“Exactly!”
He says this with such triumphant certainty that Robin’s brows draw together.
There must, she thinks, be some principle of ownership operating here which has escaped every legal and historical text she has ever read. Apparently one may claim discarded timber by discovering it, unless one happens to fall asleep against it, in which case unconsciousness constitutes forfeiture. It is not an especially sophisticated system, although the boy seems very pleased with it.
He crouches closer.
Up close he becomes no easier to understand. There is still that grease smeared across one cheek (but now she also notices it beneath his fingernails), the small scratches along his knees, the tools hanging from his belt in such numbers that they knock softly together whenever he moves. He smells faintly of salt, metal and machine oil, and there is something restless about him even when he is still, as though his body has not entirely accepted the concept.
“You can’t call dibs on something just ’cause you passed out next to it.”
“I didn’t call dibs.”
“Well, good.”
Robin has just enough time to suspect that she has somehow lost an argument she did not know they were having before he grips the timber.
“Then we’re settled.”
He pulls.
The world beneath Robin’s head disappears.
Her cheek meets the damp ground with a soft, undignified thud.
She lies there.
For a moment this feels like the simplest available response.
The boy, meanwhile, drags the timber away with considerably more enthusiasm than the situation deserves, boots grinding through wet grit and broken shell while the wood rasps behind him. He makes it several paces before slowing.
Then stopping.
Robin watches his back.
He turns.
The change in his face is small enough that another person might miss it, but Robin has spent much of her life watching people decide what they think of her, and she knows the moment when looking becomes seeing.
Without the timber propping her upright, there is very little left to disguise what the storm has done. Her hair hangs wet and tangled across one side of her face; one sleeve of her dress is torn, the fabric stiff with salt and dirt, and dried blood has darkened the skin beneath her knee. She is barefoot on one side. Her arms are wrapped tightly around the sodden books pressed against her chest, because apparently even unconsciousness has not convinced her to loosen her grip on them.
The boy looks from the books to her face. Something uncertain enters his expression.
Still not recognition. Robin searches for that first.
No sudden widening of the eyes. No glance towards the city. No shape of a name forming behind his teeth. Only confusion, and perhaps the belated understanding that children do not ordinarily wash up among broken ships looking half-drowned.
“You dead?”
Robin considers this.
It is not, in fairness, an entirely unreasonable question.
“No.”
“Oh.”
He scratches at the grease on his cheek.
“Good.”
Then he turns and begins dragging the timber away again.
Robin watches him go, partly because there is nothing else to do and partly because she still does not quite understand him. The wood bumps noisily over the wreckage behind him as he goes, five steps perhaps, then six, then seven, before his pace slows and his shoulders sink with the unmistakable weariness of somebody losing an argument with himself.
He stops.
For a moment he simply stands there.
Then his head tips backwards.
“Oh, come on.”
The timber drops from his hands, landing with a heavy clatter.
He turns and comes stomping back through the scrap with enough force to suggest that whatever decision he has reached, he resents Robin personally for having made it necessary.
Robin stiffens before she can stop herself, one arm tightening around the books while her free hand presses against the ground, ready for a movement her exhausted body may or may not be capable of making. “What?”
The boy stops in front of her. “What what?”
“You came back.”
“Yeah,” he says, with the aggrieved expression of somebody who has somehow been inconvenienced by his own decision. “I noticed.”
Robin studies him, waiting for the part which explains anything.
It does not arrive.
“Why?” she asks.
He plants both hands on his hips and looks briefly towards the sky as though appealing to some higher authority for patience.
“Because apparently if I leave some half-dead kid lying around out here, everybody’s gonna act like I’m the problem.”
For an instant Robin forgets to be suspicious.
There is something almost impressive about the logic. He has returned not because she is injured, apparently, nor because she might need water or food or somewhere dry to sleep, but because abandoning her would reflect badly upon him.
Then suspicion settles back into place, familiar and useful.
“I don’t need help.”
“Yeah? Great.”
His relief is immediate and entirely unconvincing. He thrusts one hand towards the distant city.
“Stand up.”
Robin dislikes him at once.
It is a clean, uncomplicated feeling, almost pleasant in its simplicity. Hatred would require too much effort and, besides, she has known people worthy of hatred; this boy has merely achieved the much more ordinary distinction of becoming intolerable within minutes of meeting her.
Fine.
If he wants her to stand, she will stand.
Robin plants one palm against the ground and gathers what remains of her strength. The books stay tucked beneath her other arm. She pushes.
For a moment it seems possible.
Then the muscles in her arm begin to tremble.
She ignores them.
Her body has been behaving badly all day (refusing food that does not exist, demanding water she does not have, going dizzy whenever she stands) as though it has forgotten that survival requires cooperation. Robin shifts her weight and pushes harder.
Her elbow folds.
She drops back down.
The boy says nothing.
This is somehow worse than laughing.
Robin keeps her eyes on the ground while heat gathers unpleasantly in her face. It is ridiculous to be embarrassed. There is no reason to care what some strange blue-haired boy thinks of her ability to stand upright.
Unfortunately, knowing a thing is ridiculous has never prevented it from being true.
She tries again.
This time she manages to force herself upright far enough to sit, though the world immediately sways around her. The distant city tilts; the scrap heaps seem to slide gently sideways, and Robin has to brace one hand against the ground while she waits for everything to remember where it belongs.
When it finally settles, she looks up.
The boy is watching her with one eyebrow raised.
“That was inspiring.”
Robin studies him, perhaps more harshly than she realises. Might be even a glare.
Perhaps, she thinks, if she survives the day, she will push him into the sea.
Something like satisfaction flashes across his face, quick and irrepressible, as though getting a visible reaction from her constitutes some private victory.
“Oh, good. You can make expressions. Thought the sea washed those off too.”
Robin considers him.
“I don’t like you.”
“Yeah,” he says easily. “People say that.”
There is something irritating about how little this troubles him. Most people dislike being disliked, or at least pretend they do; this boy accepts it with the comfortable familiarity of someone being told the weather.
Then he crouches.
Robin moves before she thinks.
It is hardly a movement at all, only the instinctive shifting of her weight away from him and the tightening of both arms around the books, but her body has become quicker than thought in matters like this. Someone comes closer, so she makes space. Someone reaches, so she watches the hands. Someone speaks kindly, so she listens for what they want in return.
The boy notices.
His expression changes so quickly she might have missed it if she were not already watching him with such care. The foolishness does not disappear exactly, but something sharper looks briefly through it—not recognition of her face, thank goodness, but recognition of the movement itself.
Of fear.
He stops coming closer.
“I’m not gonna hit you.”
Robin says nothing. People can say almost anything before doing the opposite; she has learned that words are not promises simply because somebody speaks them as though they are.
His gaze drops instead towards the sodden bundle against her chest.
“Wasn’t planning on robbing you either, but now I’m curious what you’ve got in there.”
Her arms tighten.
His eyebrows rise.
“Okay. Definitely stealing something.”
“They’re mine.”
“Didn’t say they weren’t.”
“You were going to.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“You said—”
“I said I was curious.”
“You said stealing.”
“I said you looked like you stole something.”
“That isn’t what you said.”
The boy stares at her.
Robin stares back.
Somewhere during the exchange the argument appears to have become important to him, though Robin cannot imagine why. Perhaps he is simply the sort of person who walks into a position accidentally and then feels honour-bound to defend it to the death. Professor Clover would have found that an exceptionally poor method of scholarship.
At last the boy squints at her. “…You’re annoying.”
“You woke me up.”
“I was talking about the wood.”
“And then you dropped my head on the ground.”
“I didn’t know your head was on it!”
“You looked at me.”
“After!”
Robin’s mouth tightens.
There is something astonishing about being argued with over this. The sea has nearly drowned her, the Government has put a price on her life, everyone she knew is gone, and somehow she has reached land only to find herself debating the chronology of her own head hitting the ground with a blue-haired stranger who appears sincerely convinced that after is a complete defence.
He squints harder.
For one uneasy instant she thinks he might shout.
Instead, he laughs.
The sound bursts out of him without warning.
There is nothing polite about it, nothing restrained; he throws his head back and laughs with his whole body, loud and bright and entirely too large for the quiet scrap shore, until the noise carries over the water and between the broken ribs of ships and sends a gull flapping indignantly from somewhere above them.
Robin flinches.
It is small. She hates that it happens at all.
But the body remembers sounds before the mind has time to explain them. Loud voices, cracking wood, cannon fire; noise followed by fire, by running, by the certainty that something terrible has already begun. For one confused instant the scrap yard disappears beneath all those other sounds, and her shoulders pull inward while her fingers dig painfully into the wet cloth around the books.
The laughter stops.
Not slowly.
The boy looks at her.
Robin immediately resents him for noticing.
She straightens as much as her exhausted body permits and fixes her attention somewhere near his shoulder, willing the moment backwards, as though if she behaves normally enough he may decide he imagined it.
For a second he only watches her, and she can see the question arrive in his face and, more importantly, see him decide not to ask it.
Then he scratches his cheek.
“…Okay,” he says.
The word is quieter than anything else he has said, and because of that Robin becomes aware of the silence left behind it—the sudden widening of the shore once his voice is no longer filling it, the soft knock of water among the wreckage, gulls somewhere overhead, the distant city carrying on beyond them as though nothing unusual has washed up at its edge.
Robin looks towards it.
She had thought, when she first saw the buildings rising beyond the scrap heaps, that a city meant safety simply because it meant people. Food, perhaps. Water. Somewhere dry enough to open the books and discover whether any of them had survived the storm.
Now, with the boy’s laughter still seeming to hang in the air, the same city rearranges itself into something else.
Windows.
Bridges.
Streets.
Eyes.
Had anyone heard him?
The question arrives and immediately breeds others. Perhaps somebody on one of those bridges had turned at the sound. Perhaps there are Marines somewhere among the rooftops. Perhaps the newspapers travelled faster than damaged boats and storms, and somewhere inside that enormous maze of stone and water her face is already hanging from a wall beneath a number too large for her to understand properly.
Seventy-nine million.
She still cannot think the number without feeling that it must belong to somebody else.
Her gaze moves over the nearest walkways, the distant docks, every figure small enough to be harmless from here and therefore impossible to trust. Large places should make a person easier to lose, she thinks, but Ohara had been an island full of people and the Government had found every one of them.
Beside her, the boy turns to follow her attention. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re looking for something.”
“No.”
He looks from the city back to her. “Someone chasing you?”
The question enters her like cold water.
For one instant Robin forgets the careful arrangement of her face. Fear drops straight through her stomach, heavy and unmistakable, and she has to gather herself around it quickly, smoothing whatever may have shown before he can catch hold of it. “No.”
The answer comes evenly enough.
She hopes.
The boy studies her.
Not cleverly, perhaps. Robin does not yet think clever is the word she would choose for him. But there is an unsettling directness to the way he looks at things, as though he has never learned the polite habit of pretending not to notice what is directly in front of him.
His eyes remain on her long enough for Robin to know that he does not believe a word she has said.
Then he shrugs.
“All right.”
Robin blinks.
That is all?
No who? No why? No demand that she explain herself, no clumsy attempt to trick the truth out of her. The question seems simply to end because she has refused to answer it, and Robin finds herself almost more suspicious of that than she would have been of persistence.
People always want to know.
Or perhaps that is not true.
Perhaps she has simply met too many who believed wanting to know entitled them to an answer.
The boy rises, brushing grit from his knees with both hands. “Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
“Liar.”
Robin’s suspicion evaporates beneath immediate offence. “I can.”
“You fell over twice.”
“I’ve been on a boat.”
He looks at her as though she has offered information of very little practical value.
“People usually stand on boats.”
“There was a storm.”
“No kidding.”
He throws one arm towards the wreckage around them with such force that several tools at his belt knock together.
Robin follows the gesture.
Seen all at once, the shore looks less like land than the aftermath of some enormous creature emptying its mouth: broken planks and pieces of hull, rope wound around shattered furniture, barrels split open and scattered among lengths of timber bleached pale by salt. The storm has thrown half the sea here and left it for somebody else to sort through.
The boy looks back at her.
His attention moves, rather too obviously, over the torn sleeve of her dress, the salt dried stiff along the hem, the missing sandal and the darkened cut beneath her knee.
“How long?”
Robin says nothing.
She does not know which answer would be safe. Two days? Three? Long enough for the newspapers to reach this island? Long enough for the Government to know she survived?
The boy’s mouth twists when it becomes clear she has no intention of answering.
“Fine. Don’t tell me.”
Again.
Just like that.
Robin watches him turn away, still suspicious enough to expect the trick to reveal itself eventually.
It does not.
Instead he stoops, gets both hands beneath the timber he had abandoned earlier and hauls it upright with a grunt before tucking the bulk of it beneath one arm. The ease of this irritates Robin more than it reasonably should; less than ten minutes ago she could barely hold herself upright, and he is carrying a piece of ruined ship as though it has personally agreed to cooperate.
Then he points towards the city with his free hand.
“There’s food back at Tom’s.”
Robin looks at him.
Food.
The word reaches her stomach before it reaches the cautious part of her mind.
Pain twists sharply beneath her ribs, sudden enough that she has to press an arm against herself, and for one humiliating moment every question of Marines and wanted posters and strange boys with blue hair becomes less urgent than the remembered shape of something warm to eat.
She hates that.
Hunger should not be allowed to make decisions.
Unfortunately, Robin’s body appears to have developed opinions of its own, and they are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
She looks towards the city again, where roofs rise one behind another beyond the scrap heaps and bridges cross ribbons of water bright beneath the afternoon light, then back at the boy, who is still standing with the timber wedged beneath one arm as though offering food to half-drowned strangers is merely another inconvenience he has picked up along with the wood.
He looks at her.
Robin lowers her eyes. “I don’t have money.”
The boy barks a laugh so suddenly that she nearly regrets speaking. “Neither do I.”
Robin looks up again. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Sure it does.”
“How?”
“I don’t pay.”
She considers this.
“Then you’re stealing.”
“What? No, I’m not.”
“You just said—”
“It’s my house!”
“Oh.”
That does alter matters somewhat.
Except the boy immediately ruins the clarification by shifting the timber higher beneath his arm and adding, “It isn’t really my house.”
Robin stares at him.
“It’s the workshop.”
She continues staring.
“Where I live.”
“So it’s your house.”
“That’s what I said.”
“No, you said—”
“Are you coming or not?”
Robin closes her mouth.
There seems little point pursuing it. He possesses the remarkable ability to contradict himself without suffering any of the inconvenience normally produced by contradiction, and she suspects that if permitted they could remain here until sunset debating whether a building one sleeps in is technically a house.
The city waits beyond him.
That is the actual problem.
Every instinct Robin possesses tells her not to go towards it—not with panic exactly, because panic is loud and therefore useless, but with the quieter certainty that has kept her watching doors, listening to footsteps and learning which adults smile before they become cruel. Cities mean people, and people mean questions; they mean newspapers folded beneath arms and pinned inside shops, faces remembered because somebody important has told everyone they ought to remember them.
News travels faster than children.
Perhaps it has travelled faster than her boat.
Somewhere among those streets there may already be a sheet of paper bearing her face and the name Nico Robin, followed by seventy-nine million berries and all the things the Government has decided she has done: warships destroyed, soldiers killed, Ohara reduced to a single surviving child dangerous enough to justify the number printed beneath her photograph.
She has not seen the poster herself.
That almost makes it worse.
Her imagination is free to invent one.
She can picture the photograph too clearly, the enormous bounty beneath it, the hard black letters promising DEAD OR ALIVE to whoever happens to recognise her first.
People will smile before that happens.
That is how it usually begins.
They will see a little girl with wet hair and one missing sandal; perhaps they will ask whether she is lost, whether she has parents nearby, whether she would like something warm to eat. Then somebody will look for a second too long, and the child will disappear beneath the number.
After that comes fear.
Or greed.
Sometimes they seem to arrive together.
Robin turns her gaze back towards the sea.
The little boat is already surrendering itself to the water. One loosened board rises and falls with each small wave, knocking softly against another, while the hull sits crooked among the wreckage as though exhausted by having carried her this far.
She could steal another boat.
The thought comes calmly.
Not now. Tonight, perhaps, when the light is gone and fewer people are watching. A harbour large enough to hold all those ships must contain at least one vessel whose owner is careless, and Robin has never required very much space.
She only needs to remain long enough to recover.
Food first. Water. Something dry if she can find it. Perhaps a place to sleep for a few hours where nobody asks who she is.
Then she can leave.
Before the newspapers find her, if they have not already; before the boy asks enough questions for one answer to catch against another; before he discovers that the half-drowned child he found sleeping on his timber is worth more money than either of them is likely to see in a lifetime.
The plan settles itself into place piece by piece, and Robin feels some of the tightness inside her ease. Plans are useful because plans have edges. One thing follows another. Food, water, rest, boat. Nothing in that sequence requires trust.
“Hey.”
Robin’s attention snaps back.
The boy is already walking away.
Apparently, while she has been deciding whether following him is sensible, he has decided she is going to do it.
The timber bumps against his hip as he picks his way through the wreckage, sending smaller pieces skittering whenever he kicks them aside. He moves with the careless confidence of somebody who has never considered that the world might require permission before entering it.
After several paces he looks back.
Robin has not moved.
He jerks his head impatiently towards the city.
Then, as though remembering some minor detail he has neglected:
“You got a name?”
Everything inside Robin stills.
There it is.
Not where did you come from? Not who’s chasing you? Not even what happened?
Something much simpler.
And therefore much more dangerous.
A name is only a word, Professor Clover might once have said; a collection of sounds people agree belongs to a particular thing.
But Robin has learned, rather quickly, that some words can become crimes.
The boy waits.
For once, he does not rush to fill the silence, and Robin discovers that this somehow makes the question worse.
A name ought to be easy. There are thousands of them. She has read genealogies crowded with people dead for centuries, lists of kings whose descendants have forgotten them, scholars whose names survive only because somebody once thought to write them down. Surely there must be one among all those syllables she could borrow for an afternoon and return without consequence.
Instead, when she opens her mouth, she says, “Olivia.”
The word hurts immediately.
Her mother’s name had been Olvia, not Olivia. Robin knows this. Of course she knows it. One small sound separates the two, hardly anything at all, and yet once spoken the difference feels absurdly thin, like paper held towards a lamp until whatever lies beneath begins showing through.
For one uneasy moment she wishes she could take it back.
The boy only grins.
“I’m Cutty Flam.”
Robin looks at him.
He looks back.
The silence which follows is of a different kind entirely.
Robin waits for him to laugh, or correct himself, or admit that this is some joke she has failed to understand. He does none of those things. He merely stands there with the timber tucked under one arm, apparently satisfied that Cutty Flam is a perfectly ordinary collection of sounds for a human being to answer to.
At last Robin says, “That’s not a real name.”
His jaw drops. “What?!”
“It sounds made up.”
“It is not made up!”
“It sounds like it.”
“Well, Olivia sounds fake!”
The words hit somewhere entirely different from where he intends them.
Robin’s thoughts stop.
The city, the scrap heaps, the smell of wet timber and salt—all of it seems to recede at once beneath the sudden certainty that she has made a mistake.
He knows.
Cold moves through her so quickly that she barely feels herself breathe. Perhaps Olivia was too close; perhaps a newspaper has already reached this place after all, carrying not only Nico Robin’s face but Nico Olvia’s name beside it, and this strange boy has been pretending not to recognise her because—
“Sounds like the name of an old lady who owns twelve cats.”
Robin stares at him.
The fear collapses so suddenly that it leaves her almost dizzy.
He knows nothing.
Of course he knows nothing.
He is standing there looking pleased with himself because he has insulted an imaginary elderly woman.
Robin releases the breath she has been holding slowly enough that he does not seem to notice.
“I like cats.”
“That explains a lot.”
She frowns. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
Before Robin can decide whether this makes the insult better or worse, he turns and starts walking again as though the conversation has concluded itself.
She watches him go.
Cutty Flam.
It still sounds fake.
Perhaps more fake than Olivia.
The thought is oddly comforting.
Her borrowed name sits uneasily inside her now, too close to her mother to be harmless and yet already becoming attached to something else: not Olvia beneath the trees, not the woman who had held her only once, but this exhausted child sitting among broken ships while a blue-haired stranger argues about cats.
Olivia.
For now, perhaps, that is enough.
Robin places one hand against the ground and pushes herself carefully upright. Her legs tremble beneath her, but they hold, which feels like a victory too small to mention.
Ahead of her, Cutty Flam does not look back immediately. He simply keeps moving through the wreckage, timber balanced under one arm, tools knocking against his belt as though he has already decided she will follow and sees no reason to question it.
Robin gathers the books more securely against her chest.
Then she follows.