-Broadcast-
The Sky Screen returned its gaze to Wano Country.
Those watching from the outside world leaned in without meaning to—the closed nation was a mystery by design, its borders sealed, its suffering invisible to the sea at large. Most civilians had never seen its coastline. What they knew of Wano Country came from myths and rumors and the occasional tradesman willing to risk the currents to find out why this island that had once given the world samurai and swordsmanship had gone so completely, so deliberately, quiet.
The Sky Screen showed them why.
Five years under Kaido's protection and Kurozumi Orochi's administration had built more factories than the land's old geography could comfortably support. The smoke was visible from altitude—a permanent grey ceiling that turned the Flower Capital's famous sunsets into something muted and orange, and turned the air in the lower districts into something that settled in the lungs and stayed there. Citizens coughed and went to work. Children grew up with the cough. The old died from it, and then other old people arrived to replace them and began the same process.
The formula was straightforward: men who could labor were sent to the factories and the forges and the docks, working hours that left no surplus for anything else. Women who were deemed insufficiently attractive were assigned the same. Women who weren't were assigned to the kabuki halls and the entertainment houses, where Orochi's preferences about leisure made the term "entertainment" mean something specific and grim. The system was not accidental. It had been engineered to produce maximum output from the population while consuming as little of its goodwill as necessary.
The people of Wano Country had adapted, the way people always adapt when the alternative is ceasing to exist.
They kept their heads down. They did not speak loudly in the streets. They did not discuss the Orochi Oniwabanshu, who patrolled in groups of four and issued fines for infractions that changed week to week without announcement. And when something happened in the street—a fight, an accident, a body—they moved away quickly and came back after, because being present at the wrong moment cost money that nobody had.
There was one exception to the keep-your-head-down principle, and she was currently on fire.
Not literally. The building next to her was on fire. Yamato herself was simply the reason.
The man's leg had been broken in three places.
This was, in the technical sense, Yamato's fault—she had grabbed him by the ankle when he'd tried to leave the teahouse without paying the geisha whose time he'd purchased, and the structural consequences of her particular grip strength on a human femur were not ambiguous. She had not intended three fractures. She had intended to stop him from leaving. The distinction mattered to her considerably more than it was going to matter to the man in question, who was currently on the ground making the specific sound that people make when the pain is too complete for conventional expression.
The fire was a secondary development.
Yamato had knocked over a lamp during the altercation. The lamp had cooperated with gravity and landed on a paper screen. The paper screen had cooperated with the lamp. By the time Yamato registered the smell of smoke, the side wall of the teahouse was participating enthusiastically, and the wind coming down the street from the harbor was a very willing collaborator.
She had been in the process of formulating a plan when a voice cut through the smoke with the particular tone of someone who had arrived at this kind of scene before and found it only marginally surprising.
"Young Master. This is the nth time."
The girl who had spoken was small enough that she could have stood in Yamato's shadow without either of them noticing, and her appearance presented a contradiction that took a moment to resolve: the round purple eyes were deep and bright as polished amethysts, the dark lilac hair was pinned neatly into a bun with yellow combs and pink hairpins, and the light green kimono was pressed and clean. She looked like someone who had been on her way somewhere pleasant and had made a terrible navigational error.
Her expression, however, was the expression of someone who had seen this before. Many times. Someone who had developed, through repeated exposure, a particular economy in how she allocated her exasperation.
[Sky Screen Character Notes: Beast Disaster of the Beasts Pirates — Kurozumi Tama. User of the Paramecia-type Kibi Kibi no Mi (Millet-Millet Fruit).]
"Tama," Yamato said, with the slightly sheepish energy of someone caught doing exactly what they were going to keep doing. "About the fire—"
"About the fire," Tama said, "if Captain Kaido finds out about this, you'll be spending another month in solitary. The last time they let you out, I was very specific about not burning down streets."
"The lamp fell on its own—"
"The lamp fell because you threw a man into it."
"I didn't throw him. I was applying pressure."
"To the lamp?"
Yamato opened her mouth, found she did not have a satisfying response available, and closed it.
The fire had continued being enthusiastic during this exchange. Tama turned her attention to it with the resigned efficiency of someone delegating to a subordinate she found annoying.
"Garurumon. The fire."
The creature that responded to this instruction was not visible at first—it had been sitting in the shadow of a side street with the casual concealment of something large enough that casual concealment required a genuine effort. When it emerged, the passersby who had not yet fled to sufficient distance had cause to reconsider their definition of "sufficient."
Garurumon was approximately ten meters from snout to haunches, covered in blue and silver fur that caught the firelight and made it look like something lit from inside. It had the architecture of a wolf—strong limbs, wide shoulders, the profile of something that had been eating very well for a long time—but at a scale that made the distinction between "wolf" and "natural disaster" feel somewhat academic. It moved toward the burning building without particular urgency, opened its jaws to a width that should not have been geometrically possible, and inhaled.
The fire went into its mouth.
Not scattered. Not gradually. The flames came off the building in one collected motion, like water reversing course up a waterfall, and disappeared between Garurumon's teeth. The building stood, smoke-scarred and structural but no longer burning. Garurumon sat back on its haunches and looked at its owner with the expression of a creature waiting to be told it had done something correct.
"Good," Tama said, and then, noticing what Garurumon had subsequently located: "Garurumon, spit that out. We talked about this."
The this in question was the man whose leg Yamato had broken, who had been attempting to crawl away from the scene of the fire in the direction of anywhere-else and had found himself moving toward a set of very large teeth without either of them intending it. By the time Tama's instruction reached Garurumon, the upper portion of the man's body had already cleared the teeth.
Garurumon obeyed. Completely. Without complaint.
The man was returned to the street in the condition that results from a ten-meter wolf's mouth having been involved in his recent history. He had stopped moving.
Yamato recognized him by the embroidered hem of his kimono—the customer whose leg she'd broken. She stood very still for a moment, looking at the result of an afternoon that had compounded its way to a conclusion nobody had specifically planned for.
"He was just a person who didn't want to pay," she said, to no one.
"The blood of people like him is dirty anyway." Tama produced a handkerchief from her sleeve—small, white, embroidered with a flower pattern—and cleaned the corner of Garurumon's mouth with the brisk efficiency of someone doing a task they'd done before. "Besides, there's hardly any meat on humans. All bones. You'd think they'd be better fed."
She said it the way you say things about the weather. Observation, not cruelty. The cruelty was past the point of requiring intent.
Yamato looked at her friend.
Tama had not always been like this. Yamato could remember—with the specific, slightly mournful quality of someone cataloguing a change they couldn't name the moment of—when Tama had been different. When there had been something behind the calm purple eyes that was not this flat, assessing remove. When she had been a person who made jokes and complained about the heat and argued about which of Wano Country's rivers ran fastest and had opinions about dango that went beyond the clinical.
That had been before the Beast Disasters title. Before the pets and the position and the years of doing what the Beasts Pirates required Beast Disasters to do.
When did she become this? Yamato thought. And is this what they call growing up, in this country?
She did not say it aloud. She didn't have the right words for it, and Tama had an appointment.
"I'm already late." Tama tucked the handkerchief back into her sleeve and looked at Yamato with an expression that contained, buried somewhere several layers down under the remove, something that might have been affection. "You're perfectly capable of handling a body on your own, Young Master. Try not to start any more fires. I mean it."
Garurumon knelt—an improbable motion for an animal of its dimensions, performed with surprising elegance—and Tama grabbed a fistful of silver-blue fur at the scruff and pulled herself up onto its back with the practiced ease of someone who had done this approximately ten thousand times. She settled into the animal's movement before Garurumon had finished rising.
"Who is it?" Yamato called after her. "Sister Tsurujo"
"Don't be late to your own obligations," Tama called back, and Garurumon departed at a pace that made the word "running" feel inadequate. The silver-blue fur caught the afternoon light and seemed to burn with it, and then they turned a corner and were gone, and the sound of large paws on cobblestone faded into the ambient noise of the city.
Yamato stood alone in the street with a dead man and a smoke-darkened building and the specific feeling of watching someone she'd known for years become a person she wasn't sure she recognized.
"I'm sorry, brother," she said quietly, to the body. "I only meant to stop you from leaving. The rest of it—that wasn't supposed to happen." She crouched down and started to figure out the logistics of moving him somewhere appropriate. "You were very unlucky today. I hope you will be reincarnated somewhere that isn't Wano Country."
She meant this last part sincerely.
It took thirty seconds for the street's other inhabitants to determine that neither Tama nor Garurumon were still present, and another ten for the first curious heads to appear from doorways and alleyways and the gaps between stalls.
"Young Master Yamato." A broad-shouldered man with a cart appeared from somewhere practical. He was one of three men Yamato recognized vaguely from the neighborhood—the kind of people who knew the rhythms of the street the way sailors know the rhythms of the sea, and who had learned that a certain amount of pragmatic goodwill toward Kaido's son was better for business than a principled distance. "Let us handle the body. You'll get your clothes dirty."
"The lackeys of the Oniwabanshu are coming up the east end," said a woman from a second-floor window, in a tone that had evacuated its urgency and replaced it with simple information. "If they see the scene before it's cleared, they'll levy a disturbance fine."
"Then clear it quickly," said the first man, and three more appeared with the cart, and the business of disposal began with the practiced efficiency of people who had learned not to be surprised by the existence of bodies on streets they used every day.
Yamato stepped back and let them work.
The Wano Country she'd grown up in had been terrible in ways she was old enough now to name. The Wano Country that existed now was the same terrible plus the additional terrible of people no longer registering it as remarkable. The body on the cart was not a shock. The fire on the building was not a shock. The Oniwabanshu coming around the corner to issue fines for things that had not been crimes last week was not a shock.
This is the world that we—that my father—
She didn't finish the thought. The men with the cart were already turning the corner, and the woman in the second-floor window had closed her shutter, and the street was becoming a street again, the evidence of an afternoon's accumulation of accidents being folded back into the general landscape of Wano Country's daily existence.
Yamato stood in the middle of it and breathed the smog-laced air and felt, as she often felt these days, like she was trying to keep her footing on ground that was moving under her and pretending it wasn't.