The naval squadron found King floating on the surface three hours after the battle ended.
He was conscious by then, which made the process of applying the Seastone shackles considerably more tense than the squadron leader had anticipated. King looked at the restraints being attached to his wrists and said nothing, which was somehow more difficult to manage than if he had said something. The doctor who bandaged his wounds worked with the specific focused care of someone who had decided that professionalism was the only appropriate response to the situation and was holding to it very firmly.
The squadron leader contacted Navy Headquarters from the bow, away from where King could hear.
"The person we've detained," he said, keeping his voice level with the deliberate effort of a man maintaining a standard under pressure, "is one of the Beast Pirates' cadres. First of the Three Disasters. King."
The silence on the other end of the line lasted approximately two seconds, which was a long time for Sengoku.
"Listen to me carefully," Sengoku said. His voice had gone to the specific register it took when he was being very serious and needed the person he was speaking to to understand that.
"This does not leave your ship. No transmissions, no logs, no discussion with other vessels. You bring him directly to the escort point and you tell no one what you're carrying. Do you understand?"
"Yes, sir."
"If Kaido finds out before he reaches Impel Down, we have a different problem entirely."
The line closed.
The squadron leader stood at the bow for a moment, looking at the water where an island had been, and then went back to his ship and his very significant and very secret cargo and concentrated very hard on doing his job correctly.
---
At Navy Headquarters, Sengoku and Tsuru sat with the battle report between them and the specific silence of two people who have arrived at the same conclusion and are each waiting for the other to say it first.
Tsuru said it first.
"Evan Lindsay."
Sengoku nodded. "Has to be. Crocodile is cautious — he doesn't engage the Three Disasters head-on without a reason. The reason walked into Alabasta with him."
"Six hundred and fifty million berries," Tsuru said, "and that was before this."
"We'll need to revise the number again."
Tsuru looked at the report. At the notation about the destroyed island. At the wing-shaped wound pattern documented on King's body. At the notation about an unknown aerial entity observed by fleet personnel on both sides.
"He was flying," she said.
"Apparently."
"He learned to fly during the fight."
"Apparently."
They were quiet again for a moment.
"The bounty revision," Tsuru said, "is going to cause questions."
" Yes." Sengoku closed the report. "For now, the priority is getting King to Impel Down Level Six before Kaido's intelligence network figures out what happened. Everything else waits." He looked at Tsuru. "Including questions about what exactly Alabasta has been doing with its time lately."
Tsuru's expression said she had not forgotten about that and would not be forgetting about it.
---
King arrived at Impel Down a week later.
The transfer was clean — Sengoku and Tsuru had arranged the logistics with the thoroughness they applied to things that could not afford to go wrong. The Seastone constraints, the route, the personnel, the documentation that didn't exist in any accessible record. King was processed into Level Six with the specific unremarked efficiency of an institution that had handled significant arrivals before and had developed protocols for managing them without spectacle.
He walked through the Level Six corridor under his own power, the Seastone limiting what the fruit could do but not what the man could. The warden noted this and noted it privately, because noting it aloud served no useful purpose.
King was placed in his cell.
He sat down.
He had known, when Lindsay's blade found him in the final exchange and the decision resolved itself, that this was the probable outcome. Not feared — assessed. He had lost cleanly and without excuses and the aftermath was the aftermath's business. He would wait. Kaido would come eventually or would not, and either outcome was one he had already made his peace with in the years he had spent in service to someone whose ambition was larger than most people's conception of what ambition could be.
He pulled the canvas cloth tighter around his face and sat in the dark and waited with the patience of someone who had learned patience from a very long time of needing it.
---
South Blue.
Kaido drank.
This was not unusual. What was unusual was the quality of the silence he drank in — the Beast Pirates' camp giving its captain a wide berth, the subordinates who had delivered the news having delivered it and retreated to a safe distance and remained there.
King. Defeated. Captured. Impel Down.
Kaido turned the information over and let it settle into the shape it was going to take. Seven defeats in his lifetime. Eighteen captures. Forty death sentences, none of which had arrived at their stated conclusion. He understood imprisonment from the inside in a way that few people did, and what he understood was that it was temporary for the right kind of person.
King was the right kind of person.
"I'll come for you," he said, to the cup, to the camp, to the distance that currently separated him from a subordinate he had chosen himself and kept for years. "Wait."
Then he drank and said nothing more for a long time, which was the Beast Pirates' signal that the moment had been acknowledged and the business of the day was resuming.
His intelligence network would keep working. Somewhere in the information that came back from it was the name Evan Lindsay, which he noted in the specific way he noted things that would require returning to.
The Devil, he thought. Six hundred and fifty million. Defeated King.
He filed it.
---
Year 1507.
The Holy Land of Mariejoa burned.
Not literally — not all of it, not in any way that touched the palaces of the Celestial Dragons themselves. But in the slave quarters and the holding areas and the corridors that connected the parts of Mariejoa that the World Government acknowledged to the parts it preferred not to, Fisher Tiger moved with the specific focused anger of a man who had been building toward this moment for years and had finally decided that waiting was finished.
He went alone.
He climbed the Red Line alone, which was itself a statement about what a fishman at the peak of his ability could accomplish when he had decided to accomplish it. And then he went through Mariejoa doing what he had come to do, which was to open every door he could find.
The flames were distraction — set and maintained to keep the response occupied, to buy the minutes that freed people needed between captivity and the sea. He moved through them with the ease of someone whose element was water and whose relationship with fire was therefore theoretical rather than personal.
Slaves scattered in every direction.
Some of them were people who had been there a long time and ran with the pure animal urgency of people who had stopped believing escape was possible and had just been given evidence that it was.
Some were recently arrived and ran with more direction, toward specific goals they had been sustaining in the dark.
A young man with gray-green hair found Tiger in the chaos and stopped long enough to shout: "I'll remember this. I'm Gild Tesoro. I'll repay you."
Tiger had no particular response to this. He was already moving.
Three girls, stumbling through smoke, ran into him at a corridor junction. One of them fell. Tiger steadied her — a reflex, the same one that had turned him to shield Vivi on the warship without thinking.
The girl looked up at him.
Long black hair. Eyes that had seen things they were too young to have seen and were carrying them anyway, with the specific determination of someone who had decided that the weight was not going to be what defined them.
"What is your name?" Tiger said.
"Boa Hancock," she said.
He looked at her for a moment — at all three of them, the two beside her holding her up, all of them carrying the same marks in different degrees. Then he pointed toward the sea route and moved on, because there were more doors and the time was finite and this was what he had come to do.
---
Alabasta. Alubarna. The palace study.
The room was quiet in the way of a space that had been given over entirely to reading — the particular settled atmosphere of somewhere a person had been sitting alone with something for long enough that the room had taken on the quality of the concentration.
Lindsay held Tiger's letter with both hands and read it slowly, the way you read something from someone you hadn't seen in a while and were glad to have word from.
The letter was characteristically Tiger — direct, slightly awkward in the places where warmth was trying to get through the directness, full of the compressed energy of a person who had too much to say and had decided to say the important parts and leave the rest implied.
The Sun Pirates. A crew of fishmen from Fishman Street, the gangsters Tiger had always pretended to find exasperating and had always, demonstrably, cared about. Mariejoa and what he'd found there. The ancient book, sourced from the Holy Land through a method Tiger described only as *I asked a reliable sea beast,* which Lindsay found entirely plausible.
He looked at the book sitting on the desk beside the letter.
Old. Not Poneglyph-old — this was human old, the age of something that had been preserved carefully by people who understood its value. The cover was plain. The script inside, from the pages he'd turned, was archaic but readable — not the ancient language of the Poneglyphs but something more recent, more personal. The notes of someone who had listened to something and written down what they heard.
Music, and something about the nature of the thing that had been singing.
He was still reading when the knock came.
Crocodile entered without waiting for a response, which was consistent with his approach to most situations. He looked at Lindsay, at the letter, at the book, at the expression on Lindsay's face — which was the soft one, the expression-management-slightly-compromised one, the one that only appeared when something had genuinely moved him rather than merely interested him.
He sat down across the desk without commenting on the expression.
"You wanted me here," he said.
"Yes." Lindsay set the letter down carefully and picked up the book. Turned it to the first page. "I wanted to tell you something."
"Tell me."
Lindsay looked at him with the quiet that preceded things that mattered.
"Tiger went to Mariejoa," he said. "He freed slaves. He survived."
Something moved briefly behind Crocodile's eyes — not warm, exactly, but the acknowledgment of something that had been hoped for without being said.
"And he found this." Lindsay held up the book. "In Mariejoa's restricted archives. Something they were keeping away from everyone." He set it back down and let his hand rest on the cover. "It's a record. Someone's account of hearing a piece of music, a very long time ago. They wrote down everything they could remember — the sound of it, the place it came from, what it seemed to mean." A pause. "And who they believed was playing it."
Crocodile looked at the book.
"What does that have to do with us?"
Lindsay smiled — the real one, quiet and certain, the smile of someone who has found the next thing worth following.
"The player," he said, "is described the way I am described."
Crocodile was very still.
"A devil," Lindsay said. "From before the Void Century. Playing music that the writer said sounded like the world remembering something it had forgotten." He opened the book to the first marked page. "Which means somewhere out there, there's a piece of music. And music means an instrument. And an instrument means — "
"Another Poneglyph," Crocodile said.
"Or something older," Lindsay said. "We won't know until we find it."
Outside the study window, Alubarna went about its evening in the dry, unhurried way of a desert capital that had survived many things and expected to survive many more. The sky was going dark above the palace roofline, the stars beginning to appear in the specific hard and numerous way desert stars appeared.
Crocodile looked at the book.
At Lindsay.
At the book again.
He took a slow drag of his cigar.
"A concert," he said flatly.
"Of a kind."
"You want to find a concert."
"I want to find what's playing at one." Lindsay turned another page. "There's a difference."
Crocodile exhaled smoke toward the ceiling and thought about ancient music and Poneglyphs and a person who had been sealed in stone for five centuries and had apparently not run out of things to be curious about.
He thought about the Poneglyph trail he had been following. About the weapons at the end of it. About the way Lindsay's interests and his own had been running in parallel for months and had not yet diverged in any way that was inconvenient.
"Where?" he said.
Lindsay looked up.
"That," he said, "is what we need to find out."