Chapter Text
The deck of the Grey Vulture smelled of rotten fish and spilled beer, and Batty had been scrubbing it since four in the morning.
His knees were raw from scraping the planks, he had a brush with only half its bristles left, and a bucket of seawater that turned black in ten minutes. He emptied it over the side, he filled it, he started again. Nobody had told him when he would be able to stop. On this ship, nobody ever told him when he could stop: he stopped when somebody found something else for him to do.
"Oi! Crate-of-Beer!"
Batty looked up.
Dutch was leaning against the mainmast, an apple in his hand, with the smile he had every time he had just found a way to amuse himself. Dutch was enormous. He had arms thicker than Batty's thighs and a red beard with a piece of his last meal always left in it.
"Yes?" said Batty.
"Yes who?"
Batty gripped the handle of his brush.
"Yes, Mister Dutch."
"Ah, you see when you want to." Dutch bit into his apple and went on with his mouth full. "You've missed a corner. Over there, under the cannon."
Batty looked under the cannon.
The corner was clean. He knew it, because he always did the cannons first, so as not to have to kneel in the dirty water at the end.
"I did it earlier, Mister Dutch."
Dutch threw his apple core under the cannon.
"Well now it's dirty."
Over by the rail, the three men playing dice burst out laughing. Batty felt his cheeks heat up, and he was ashamed, because he knew it showed and that it was exactly what they wanted to see. He got up without saying anything, went and picked up the core, threw it into the sea and knelt back down under the cannon.
"He doesn't even say thank you," Dutch complained.
"Thank you, Mister Dutch."
"You're welcome, Crate-of-Beer."
They had called him that since the first day. At the start, Batty hadn't understood. He had thought it was because of his build, because he was short and broad-shouldered, and it was only after a week that one of the sailors had explained to him, laughing so hard he was crying, that it was the price he had cost. A crate of beer and a game of poker. The man had found it so funny that he had gone and told the others, as if everybody didn't already know.
Batty had gone on scrubbing.
He was always going on scrubbing.
"You should stop making that face."
Batty jumped and nearly knocked the bucket over.
It was Pell. Pell was the youngest of the crew after him — nineteen or twenty, thin as a nail, with one eye that wandered a bit off to the side — and he was the only one who sometimes talked to him without a chore at the end of it. He crouched down beside him, a flask in his hand, and looked at the sea.
"What face?" Batty asked.
"You're always waiting for him." Pell took a swallow. "You do it every evening. The moment we run along a coast, you look at the boats. All the boats. Even the fishing dinghies."
Batty didn't answer.
"He won't come, you know."
"He's ill," said Batty quietly. "When he drinks, he doesn't realize what he's doing. But when he's sobered up, he'll understand, and he'll come and get me."
Pell looked at him for a long moment.
"It's been two months, Batty."
"He needs time." Batty scrubbed harder. "To find money. To buy me back. Or to find a ship that'll take him. He knows plenty of people at the port, he was a team leader at the shipyard, before. People liked him. He'll find somebody."
"Batty..."
"He'll come."
Pell sighed. He stayed another minute without saying anything, then he got up and left the flask next to the bucket, as if he had forgotten it there. There was a drop of water left in it. Batty waited until he had gone back down to the lower deck to drink it, because he had been thirsty since morning, and because he didn't want Pell to see him pleased.
His mother had died a year earlier, on a Tuesday.
Batty remembered it was a Tuesday because it was market day, and because she had asked him in the morning to go and get onions before all the good ones were gone. The fever had taken her three days earlier, and she kept saying it was nothing, that she just needed a good soup. Batty had come home with the onions. The doctor was in the bedroom, and his father was sitting on the floor in the corridor, both hands on the back of his neck.
Batty had kept the basket of onions in his arms for the whole rest of the day. He didn't remember why.
It was his mother who had taught him to cook. He had started standing on a stool beside her, sorting lentils and shelling peas, and then one day she had put a knife in his hand and laid her own over it to show him how to hold it. Fingers tucked in, sweetheart. You guide with the knuckles. And the knife must never frighten you: you're the one who decides where it goes. He had spent hours cutting carrots into small regular cubes while she sang off-key beside him, and maybe that was why even today, when he held a knife, his hands stopped shaking.
After the funeral, there was the silence.
His father stopped talking. He came home later and later from the shipyard, then he stopped going to the shipyard, and he still came home later and later. He smelled of rum, then of cheap rum, then of something worse that Batty didn't know how to name. He would sit at the kitchen table, in his mother's place, and look at the wall.
"Dad, have you eaten?"
Nothing.
"I made soup. The bean one, like Mum's. I found thyme at the market, the seller gave me a good price."
"Leave me alone."
"I'll just pour you a bowl. You eat it if you want."
"I said leave me alone, Batty."
Batty would set the bowl on the table anyway. The next morning, the bowl would still be there, cold, with a gray skin on top, and his father would have gone out again.
Then there were the cards. Then the dice. Then the cockfights behind the fish market, where his father went to bet the rent money, then the food money, then money he didn't have. Batty learned about it in the spring, when two men knocked at the door asking to see Hal.
They were polite, the first time. Batty told them his father wasn't there, which was true. They came back the following week, less polite. The third time, they didn't knock.
His father was there, that evening. He was on his chair, too drunk to get up, and he was looking at the two men with empty eyes, as if he didn't understand what they were doing in his kitchen.
"Three hundred thousand berries, Hal. The boss has been very patient with you."
"I haven't got..." His father rubbed his face. "I haven't got it, right now. Next week."
"Next week was already last week."
The taller of the two cracked his fingers.
And Batty put himself in front of the chair.
He hadn't thought about it. His legs had taken him there all on their own, and once he was there, he realized he was shaking from head to foot and that he had no idea what he was going to say.
"I'll be the one who pays," he stammered.
The two men exchanged a look.
"You?"
"I unload the ships at the port, in the mornings. I can give you what I earn. Every week. Until it's paid off."
"That'll take you years, kid."
"I know."
"And in the meantime? The boss wants a gesture. He wants people to see you don't owe him money just like that."
Batty swallowed.
Behind him, his father hadn't moved.
"In the meantime, it's me," said Batty.
It was him, that evening. And it was him many other evenings after that.
At the start, they avoided the face, because a damaged face shows and gets the neighbors talking. They hit the ribs, the stomach, the back, the thighs. Batty learned to curl into a ball and protect his head, and above all he learned not to cry, because they hit for longer when he cried.
Then he learned to fight back.
Nobody really taught him. He learned by watching the dockers fight behind the warehouses, by being beaten, by getting up, by starting again. He learned that you hit harder when you're right up close. That an elbow hurts more than a fist. That you can grab hair, a collar, an ear, anything that sticks out. And that there are no rules at all when you're alone at the end of an alley and no adult is going to come and say stop.
One evening, he came home with his brow split open and two fingers bent back, but with the month's money still in his pocket, because that time, he was the one who had won. He set the envelope on the table in front of his father.
"They won't come back for three weeks," he said. "I negotiated."
His father looked at the envelope, then at the blood on Batty's shirt.
"You're late."
Batty stayed standing a while, waiting for him to say something else. He didn't say anything else.
"Dad." Batty sat down opposite him. "You could stop, maybe. Not all of it. Just a bit. Just the cards."
"Don't tell me what to do."
"I'm not saying it to—"
"You're not your mother."
Batty fell silent.
He went and washed his face in the basin, put his fingers back into place himself while biting on a dishcloth, and he made the soup.
Two months earlier, his father had come home at seven in the evening.
Batty had heard the door and thought it was the wind. Then he had seen his father in the entryway, standing, more or less straight, and he had been so surprised that he dropped his spoon into the pot.
"Dad?"
"Have you eaten?"
Batty stayed still, his hand over the pot, fishing for his spoon in the stew. His father hadn't asked him that question in a year.
"No. Well, not yet. There's stew, I made it with the leftover mutton. Do you want some? It's nearly ready, it just needs a bit more—"
"No. Sit down."
Batty sat down.
His heart was beating very fast. He was happy, and he was afraid of being happy, because in his head, already, he was telling himself that maybe, tonight, his father was going to talk to him about his mother. Or tell him he was going to stop. Or just ask him how his day had been, and Batty would tell him the thyme seller had given him a good price again, and his father would nod, and that would already be a great deal.
His father was looking at the table.
"Tomorrow morning, you're going to go to the port. Quay six. There's a ship, the Grey Vulture. You ask for Captain Morrow."
"For work?" Batty leaned forward. "I can unload, I already do it for Gus in the mornings, I know—"
"You're going to work for them."
"All right. For how long?"
His father didn't answer.
"Dad? Is it for the day? For the season?"
"You're leaving with them."
Batty didn't understand right away. He heard the words, he understood them one by one, but they didn't mean anything together.
"Leaving where?"
"With them. On the ship. You work for them, now."
"But... they're pirates." Batty gave a small nervous laugh. "Dad, the Grey Vulture, everybody knows they're pirates. Gus says you shouldn't even unload their crates because they never pay."
"I know what they are."
"Then why do you want me to..."
His father rubbed his hands together. His nails were black and his fingers were trembling, and he was looking at them as if they belonged to somebody else.
"I had a good hand," he said.
Batty felt something tighten in his stomach.
"What?"
"Last night. At the Salt Beak. I had a good hand, a really good hand, it hadn't happened to me in months." He was talking fast now, without looking at him. "I'd already put in everything. The crate of beer Rolf had advanced me, everything. And Morrow raised, and I had nothing left to put in, and I couldn't fold with a hand like that, Batty, anybody would have called, anybody—"
"Dad. What did you put in?"
His father finally looked up.
He didn't answer. He didn't need to answer.
Batty understood.
He understood all at once, entirely, and the first thing he felt was an urge to laugh, because it was so absurd that it couldn't be true. His father had staked him. He had laid him on a table, next to a crate of beer, the way you lay down a watch or a ring. And he had lost.
"No," said Batty.
"Batty..."
"No. You can't do that. I don't belong to you. You can't bet somebody, it's... I'm not a thing, you can't—"
"It's done."
"Then you're going to go back!" Batty had got up without realizing it, and his chair had fallen over backward. "You're going to go back and tell them you were drunk, that it doesn't count, that you had no right! I'll work, I'll pay them for the crate, I'll pay them for ten crates if I have to—"
"They don't want money."
"Dad, look at me!"
His father didn't look at him.
And there was a knock at the door.
There were two of them. Batty would learn their names later, on the ship: Dutch, with his red beard, and Hask, the captain's second, a lean man with a scar splitting his upper lip and a knife he kept turning between his fingers. They came in without waiting to be let in.
"Evening, Hal." Hask looked at the kitchen, the stew, the overturned chair. "We thought we'd save you the walk down to the quay. The captain doesn't like waiting."
"He was just about to..." His father made a vague gesture. "He was ready."
"I'm not ready!" Batty shouted. "I'm not going anywhere!"
Dutch burst out laughing.
"He's got a voice on him, the little one."
"I'm not going anywhere with you! Dad, tell them! Tell them it's a mistake!"
His father was looking at the window.
Dutch took a step toward him, and Batty did the only thing he knew how to do. He threw himself at him.
He fought the way he did in the alleys, with no rules and no restraint. He drove an elbow into Dutch's throat, he crushed his foot with his heel, he bit his hand when Dutch tried to grab him by the collar, and he bit hard enough to taste blood. Dutch roared and let go of him. Batty bolted for the back door, knocked the table over on the way, and for one second, just one, he thought he was going to make it.
Something struck the back of his skull.
He fell to his knees. The kitchen floor tipped sideways. He heard Hask say something that made himself laugh, Dutch swearing and shaking his hand, and the stew boiling over the pot onto the fire, hissing.
The last thing he saw before everything went black was his father, still sitting at the table, not moving.
And, propped against the wall of the entryway, a crate of beer.
He woke two days later in the hold of the Grey Vulture, with a lump the size of an egg behind his head and his ankle chained to an iron ring.
Captain Morrow came to see him that same evening. He was a short round man, very clean about himself, who wore white gloves and spoke softly, and Batty hated him immediately, before he had even opened his mouth.
"Your father lost you to me," said Morrow. "At poker. An honest game, if that's any consolation. He had a straight. I had four of a kind." He took off one of his gloves, finger by finger. "You belong to me. You work, you eat. You don't work, you don't eat. You try to leave, you don't eat for a long time. Is that clear?"
"He's going to come and get me," said Batty.
Morrow looked at him with a sort of curiosity.
"Who?"
"My father."
Morrow started to laugh. He had a very soft laugh, almost kind, and Batty found that worse than all the rest.
"All right, kid. We'll keep a place at the table for him."
Then came the work.
Batty did everything nobody else wanted to do. He emptied the slop buckets every morning. He pumped the water out of the hold. He gutted the fish, he scoured the burned pots, he scrubbed the deck, he polished the captain's boots, he carried the barrels Dutch didn't want to carry and he cleaned up the vomit of those who had drunk too much the night before. He slept in a corner of the hold, next to the pump, on a canvas sack that smelled of whale oil. He was given food once a day, when somebody remembered.
The ship's cook, an old man called Ferris who never washed his hands, took him into the kitchen for a week before sending him back to the washing-up.
"Why?" Batty asked. "Did I do something wrong?"
"You did nothing wrong," Ferris grunted. "The lads said it was better when you were the one stirring. I don't want them getting used to it."
Batty went back to the washing-up. It was the only time in two months he felt like laughing.
Every evening, before sleeping, he scratched a line in the beam above his sack with his thumbnail. There were fifty-eight. Then fifty-nine. Then sixty.
And every evening, he told himself that tomorrow, maybe.
The island appeared one morning, out of the mist.
It was big, bigger than his own, with a deep harbor where dozens of ships lay in rows and white houses climbing the hill in steps. Batty watched it come in from the bow, bucket in hand, and he understood at once that something was wrong.
The men were nervous.
He could see it from the way they were keeping quiet. Usually, when the Grey Vulture came near a port, the crew bawled, made bets on the taverns, fought over the first places in the longboat. That morning, nobody was talking. Morrow stood on the quarterdeck with his spyglass, and he hadn't lowered it in half an hour.
"Why are we stopping here?" Pell asked quietly, beside him. "We said we were going as far as Port-Calme."
"We're out of fresh water," Dutch grunted. "And half the biscuit is moldy. We haven't got a choice."
"But this is—"
"I know where we are." Dutch spat over the rail. "We stock up, we keep our mouths shut, and we leave before tonight."
Morrow came down from the quarterdeck. He tucked his spyglass under his arm and spoke very softly, as always, but everybody listened.
"I don't want a single problem on this island. Not a fight, not a debt, nothing. Nobody drinks. We buy, we pay, we say thank you. And we leave."
"And the kid?" Hask asked, indicating Batty with his chin.
"The kid comes with you to carry." Morrow turned his eyes toward Batty. "And the kid knows what happens if he does anything stupid."
Batty lowered his head.
"Yes, captain."
But he had seen their faces.
For the first time in two months, the men of the Grey Vulture were afraid of something. He didn't know what. He didn't even know what this island was called. He only knew that if men like Dutch and Hask were afraid here, then here, perhaps, somebody could help him.
And with a harbor like that, there was bound to be a ship going back home.
He ran away at the market, while Hask was haggling over the price of a barrel of flour.
His arms were loaded with two sacks of potatoes. He set them down gently on the ground, he took a step back, then another, and he slipped between two stalls. Nobody shouted. He walked, then he ran. He went down a sloping street, he went up another, he crossed a square with a fountain, he turned left, right, left again, with no idea where he was going, his heart hammering in his ears and a single thought in his head: the harbor, find the harbor, find a ship, go home.
He got lost after ten minutes.
The streets all looked alike: white walls, stairways, laundry drying at the windows. He stopped in an alley behind a bakery to catch his breath, hands on his knees, and he smelled the hot bread, and for one second he thought of his mother.
A hand grabbed him by the collar and threw him against the wall.
"Where did you think you were going, Crate-of-Beer?"
Dutch. And behind him, Hask, turning his knife, and Pell, out of breath, who looked as if he didn't want to be there at all.
"Let go of me," Batty breathed. "I won't say anything. I won't say anything to anybody, I just want to go home."
"Go home where?" Hask came closer. "To your father? He sold you, idiot. For a crate of beer. Do you know what he did, when we carried you outside? He opened a bottle. We hadn't even got through the door."
"That's not true."
"He looked relieved."
"That's not true!"
Batty threw himself forward, and Dutch hit him in the stomach.
He doubled over. The second blow caught him on the jaw and threw him to the ground, and after that it was like in his kitchen, like in all the alleys behind the fish market: he curled into a ball, he protected his head, and he waited for it to pass.
"Hask," Pell cut in, in an unsteady voice. "The captain said no problems on this island."
"We're taking him back, that's all. He shouldn't have run."
"But if somebody sees us—"
"Nobody's seeing us. Keep watch instead of whining."
Dutch kicked Batty in the ribs, and Batty felt something crack, and he gritted his teeth so hard he bit his tongue.
"Leave him alone!"
The blows stopped.
Batty opened one eye.
There was a boy at the end of the alley. A boy his own age, maybe a bit older, with messy brown hair and a shirt too big for him, and he had planted himself between Batty and the three men, fists clenched. He looked tiny. Dutch was twice his size, and Hask already had his knife in his hand.
The boy took a step back.
He was afraid. Batty could see it very clearly, from below: his legs were trembling and his face had gone completely white. But he didn't back away any further. He stayed there, and he grabbed the collar of his shirt with one hand to pull it aside.
On his collarbone, there was a tattoo. A cross, and over it, a skull with a crescent-shaped mustache.
"Do you know what this is?" His voice cracked a little, but he was speaking loudly. "Do you know what island you're on? Clear off before I tell my commander everything!"
Nobody moved.
For a whole minute, nobody moved. Batty was looking at the faces of the three men above him, and he saw in them exactly the same thing as on the deck that morning. Pell had backed up to the wall. Dutch was staring at the tattoo as if it were about to leap at his throat.
"Hask," Pell murmured. "That's... that's the mark of..."
"I saw."
Hask studied the boy at length. Then he glanced at the end of the alley, right, left. Nobody. Not a sound apart from the bakery oven purring behind the wall.
"The kid belongs to us," he said at last. "Get out of the way."
"No."
Dutch pushed him.
He pushed him with one hand, without even trying, and the boy went backward and fell on the cobbles. Then Dutch leaned down, grabbed Batty by the hair and lifted him.
Batty screamed. He couldn't help it: the pain went through his whole skull, his ribs cut off his breath, and he felt his eyes fill with tears. He struggled, he clawed at Dutch's wrist, he tried to kick him, but Dutch was holding him at arm's length and dragging him toward the mouth of the alley like a sack of flour.
The boy lifted his head.
"Stop!"
He got up. His palms were grazed and his trousers were torn at the knee, and he got up anyway, and he threw himself at Dutch's arm to pull it back with all his strength.
Dutch didn't let go. But he stopped.
Hask came close to the boy, very close, and leaned down to be level with his face.
"Listen to me, kid. We haven't killed you because you're one of his sons. But don't push it."
He raised his knife.
"What's going on here?"
Everybody turned around.
A man was standing at the entrance to the alley. He was tall, with a white jacket, a scarf knotted around his neck and an improbable hairstyle: an enormous brown pompadour rising from his forehead like the prow of a ship. He was carrying a bag of shopping in his arms, with a leek, a loaf of bread and the neck of a bottle of oil sticking out of it.
The boy let go of Dutch's arm.
"Commander Thatch!!"
The three men froze.
"Thatch?" Pell breathed. "The Butcher?"
The man came forward.
He didn't hurry. He took three steps into the alley, bent down, and set his shopping bag on the ground, against the wall, being careful that the bottle of oil didn't fall over. Then he straightened up and put both hands in his pockets.
Batty, still hanging by his hair, saw his face, and he was afraid of him.
He was a great deal more afraid of him than of Dutch, of Hask, of Morrow and of the whole Grey Vulture put together. The man wasn't shouting. He wasn't threatening anybody. He had a small sideways smile, a mocking and calm smile, and a gaze so serious you would have thought he had never laughed in his life. He looked like the gang leaders Batty sometimes saw crossing the fish market, the ones even his father's creditors stepped aside for.
"It's a nice nickname, isn't it?" he said. "Me, I preferred Blood-Blade. But after the Nebulia incident, nobody calls me that anymore."
He bent down, and he picked up a stone.
Just a stone. A piece of cobble the size of an apple, lying near the gutter.
Batty had time to see it turn black. It blackened in half a second in the man's hand, a shining metal black.
And then his sight blurred red.
He didn't really see what happened. He heard a sharp sound, a wet sound, and the hand in his hair opened all at once. He fell to his knees on the cobbles. He had something warm on his face, on his neck, on his hands. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, and he looked.
Dutch was on the ground.
He was on his back, arms spread wide, and he no longer had a head. Part of one was left. The rest was on the wall, on the cobbles, on Hask, on Pell, on the boy, on Batty. They were all covered in blood.
Batty didn't move. He was frozen. He wanted to be sick, and he was afraid, an enormous fear that filled his chest and stopped him breathing, and he couldn't take his eyes off Dutch's red beard, which was still there, intact, under what was left.
Hask moved first.
He moved very fast. He grabbed the boy by the arm, pulled him against himself, and put his blade under his throat.
"You move, I kill him."
The commander's face changed.
Batty wouldn't have believed it possible, but he became even more frightening. The smile disappeared. His eyes went completely empty, and the air in the alley seemed to grow heavy all at once, to the point that Pell whimpered and pressed himself against the wall.
It lasted a long time. Ten seconds, perhaps more.
Then the commander breathed in, calmed himself, and slowly raised both hands.
"All right," he said. "Let him go."
Hask gave a small nervous laugh.
"Pff. Children really are your weak point, you Whitebeards."
The commander smiled.
"What do you expect. He's my brother. Of course I'm going to protect him."
Batty looked at the boy, then at the commander. He didn't understand. They didn't look anything alike.
"Then don't move," Hask ordered. "And on your knees."
"Commander, no!!!"
The boy had shouted, and in shouting, he had moved. The blade grazed his neck. A thin trickle of blood ran down his throat and disappeared into the collar of his shirt.
"DON'T MOVE!"
The commander's shout cracked through the alley and the boy froze dead. Then the commander smiled at him. A real smile, this time, very gentle, and Batty was so surprised to see that smile on the same face that for a second he forgot to be afraid.
"It's all right, Léo. Don't worry."
And he got down on his knees.
He did it simply, without arguing, without taking his eyes off Léo, hands still raised. He knelt on the blood-covered cobbles, beside Dutch's body.
Hask gave Pell a nod.
"Go and smash his skull in."
Pell didn't move.
He was looking at the corpse. He had been looking at it from the start, eyes round, mouth open, and you would have thought he hadn't heard a thing.
"Pell! Get moving!"
Pell jumped. He bent down, picked up the blood-covered stone that had rolled against the gutter, and he straightened up. He walked toward the commander. He walked badly, like somebody drunk, and he was holding the stone in both hands.
The commander watched him come without saying anything.
Pell raised the stone and struck.
He struck the left side of his face, and the sound was atrocious. Batty heard it right down in his teeth. The commander tipped sideways from the impact, caught himself with one hand, and stayed there, head down. His pompadour had come undone and was falling over his face. He wasn't moving anymore. You would have thought he had passed out.
Léo let out a strangled cry.
"Again," Hask ordered. "Knock him out, so we can go."
And suddenly, something started ringing in the commander's pocket.
Purupurupurupuru.
A Den Den Mushi slid out of his jacket, fell on the cobbles, rolled onto its side and picked up all by itself. It had taken on a furious face, eyebrows drawn and mouth twisted, and a voice came out of it, loud enough for the whole alley to hear.
"Damn it, what the hell are you doing NOW, Thatch?! You've been gone two hours to fetch yeast! Marco's coming, you'd better have a bloody good excuse, he's furious, he's got quite enough to deal with already with the furious matchstick, he's just spent the morning putting out the foremast and you, you're—"
The voice broke off.
"Thatch? Hello? Why aren't you answering? Thatch, I swear if you're arguing about cheese with the cheesemonger again..."
Hask and Pell looked at each other.
"Hell," Hask breathed. "Hell, hell, hell. Finish him. I'll kill the kid and we clear out."
Pell raised the stone again.
It didn't come down.
A hand had closed around his wrist. The commander hadn't lifted his head: he had only lifted his arm, and he was holding Pell's wrist the way you hold a branch, without effort. Then he slowly raised his face. Blood was running from his temple to his chin, half his face was already swelling, and he was looking Pell straight in the eyes.
"Leave him," he said. "And go."
Pell dropped the stone.
But Hask didn't let go of Léo.
He tightened his arm around him, and Léo started to struggle, to kick with his heels, to claw at his forearm to get the blade away from his throat.
"Stop moving, you little swine!"
Hask gave him a backhanded slap. Léo's head went sideways. Hask took a firm grip on his blade and put it back under his throat, and this time, Batty saw his elbow draw back for momentum.
Batty looked at the commander, on his knees, far too far away.
Then he looked at Léo.
He didn't think. There was a dagger on Dutch's belt, a long dagger with a horn handle that Dutch used to clean his nails, and Batty took it. His hands weren't shaking. That was the only thing he noticed: his hands, which had been shaking for two months, weren't shaking at all anymore. He stood up, took two steps, and drove the dagger into Hask's back, just under the shoulder blade, with all his strength.
Léo jumped. Their eyes met over Hask's shoulder.
Hask screamed. He let go of Léo and put both hands behind his back to try to reach the blade, turning on himself like a dog chasing its tail, and Batty backed away, backed away further, until his back touched something.
He blinked.
The commander was in front of him.
He hadn't seen him move. A second earlier he had been on his knees in the middle of the alley, and now he was standing between Hask and the two of them, Batty on one side, Léo on the other, covered in blood from head to foot, with his back to them.
"Léo?"
"B... Blue," Léo stammered.
Batty didn't know what that meant. But the commander seemed to understand, because he breathed. Batty saw his shoulders drop all at once, as if he had been holding his breath from the start.
"Sorry," Batty whispered.
He didn't know who he was saying it to. To Léo, maybe, or to the commander, or to Hask. Nobody heard him.
The commander drew back his fist.
And a blue light flooded the alley.
It fell from the sky like a wave. Batty raised an arm in front of his eyes. For one second, everything was blue — the walls, the cobbles, the blood, the shopping bag — and there was a sound of wind and a sound of fire, except that this fire didn't burn. Batty felt the heat on his skin, but it was a gentle heat, like that of an oven just opened.
When he lowered his arm, there was one more man in the alley.
He had come out of the flames. Blue flames that were still running over his arms and shoulders and going out slowly, one by one. He had blond hair cut any old way, a shirt open over an enormous tattoo, and the face of somebody who has just been woken from a nap he had been waiting three weeks for.
He took in the alley with his eyes. Dutch's corpse. Hask screaming and twisting his arm behind his back. Pell, flat against the wall. Léo, bleeding from the neck. Batty, covered in blood. The Den Den Mushi on the ground, still muttering to itself. The shopping bag. And finally, Thatch.
"Damn it, Thatch," he said.
"I know, I know." Thatch didn't even turn around. "Take the two children, please. I'm coming."
The blond man sighed at length.
"I hate you."
And he changed.
Batty watched him transform before his eyes. His arms lengthened and covered themselves in flame feathers, his face stretched into a beak, his legs became bird's legs with talons as long as kitchen knives, and in two seconds, there was no man at all. There was an immense bird, blue and gold, made of flames, filling the whole alley and looking at him with a man's eyes.
It was too much.
Batty felt his legs give. He saw the cobbles coming up at him, he heard Léo shout something, and everything went black.
Léo caught the boy just before his head hit the cobbles.
He caught him badly, by the shoulder and by the collar, and they both half fell to the ground. The boy was heavy. He was soaked in blood, his eyes had rolled back and his nose was bleeding, but he was breathing. Léo checked twice that he was breathing. His right hand was still clenched, as if he were still holding the dagger's handle.
Behind them, Thatch started to laugh.
It was a small laugh, short, a little tired.
"I think you frightened him, Marco."
"Be quiet, Thatch."
The phoenix lowered his head toward Léo.
"Get on my back, Léo."
"But he—"
"I'll take him. Get on."
Léo got on. He gripped the feathers of the neck, which were warm and which didn't burn, and he felt Marco's muscles tense under his hands. The phoenix put a leg forward, closed his talons delicately around the unconscious boy, the way you pick up a fledgling fallen from the nest, and lifted him.
"Commander Thatch," Léo called. "Your shopping—"
"I'll bring it back," said Thatch without turning around. "Go on."
Marco beat his wings a single time, and the alley disappeared beneath them.
The wind was freezing, up there.
Léo squeezed his legs around Marco's neck and looked down. The white roofs streamed past beneath them, then the stairways, then the square with the fountain. He could see the boy in Marco's talons, swaying gently, head hanging, hair matted with blood.
"Where does it hurt?" Marco asked.
"Nowhere."
"Léo."
"My neck," Léo admitted. "A bit. And my cheek. He slapped me."
"All right. Whiskey will look at that when we get back." Marco banked slightly to the left. "And stop pulling my feathers out, please."
Léo loosened his fists. He had two blue feathers between his fingers. They relit in his palm, flew off in the wind and went and settled back on Marco's neck by themselves.
"Sorry."
"What were you doing in that alley?"
Léo didn't answer right away.
"I was coming back from the tailor's," he said at last. "Commander Izou had sent me to fetch his ribbons. And I heard somebody shouting, so I went to look."
"On your own."
"There was nobody else."
Marco said nothing for a while. Léo felt the heat of the feathers rise up his arms.
"You could have called. You have a Den Den Mushi."
"I forgot it on the ship."
"Of course."
Léo looked at the boy below again.
"He saved me," he said. "The other one was going to cut my throat, and he took the dead man's knife, and he... Commander, I don't even know what his name is."
"We'll ask him when he wakes up."
"Is he going to be in trouble? Because he—"
"No."
Léo nodded against the feathers.
"They wanted to take him back to their ship. They kept saying he belonged to them. As if he were... like a thing." He swallowed. "Commander, I think they'd bought him."
Marco didn't answer.
But his flames intensified all at once under Léo's hands, and they became so hot that he had to let go for a second.
And behind them, far off, in the alley behind the bakery, screaming began to be heard.
Screams of pain, first. Then of terror. They rose above the white roofs, shrill, desperate, and Léo half turned to look.
"Look straight ahead, Léo."
Léo looked straight ahead.
The screams went on a while longer.
Then nothing.