The Sky Screen had shown Kurozumi Tama's future to the world.
Specifically, it had shown a version of Kurozumi Tama that shared her face and her approximate frame—scaled upward by years she hadn't lived yet—and shared essentially nothing else with the girl who was currently standing in the back room of the Teahouse trying to process what she'd seen.
The woman in the Sky Screen had stood before Kaido and spoken to him without adjusting her posture. She had made decisions that involved other people's deaths with the calm quality of someone who had long since resolved the question of whether that was acceptable. She had Garurumon and Kuwagamon and an unknown number of other contracted beasts, and her Dango Dango no Mi was fully developed, and she wore the title of Beast Disaster like something that had always belonged there.
Young Tama looked at all of this and felt something that was difficult to categorize.
"Why would I kill innocent people?" she said, to the middle distance, with the specific quality of someone arguing with evidence they cannot dispute. "Even if they made mistakes—they shouldn't all deserve the death penalty." She turned this over. "Is that actually me?"
It was a question the universe had declined to make easy.
She was underage. She had lost both parents when she was young enough that the loss had become structural rather than acute—not a wound she returned to but a condition she had learned to build around. She had never, to her own recollection, deliberately harmed anything smaller than herself without cause. Bugs, specifically. She did not crush them. She moved them.
The woman in the Sky Screen moved people in a different sense entirely.
How does one become that, she thought, from this?
The more practical answer was: by spending years in an environment that produces those outcomes. Which was the Beasts Pirates. Which was where the Sky Screen had indicated she would be found.
She did not, in this moment, have strong feelings about pirates as an institution. She had strong feelings about not starving, which was the more immediate concern.
The Teahouse had emptied in approximately thirty minutes.
This was not a reflection on the establishment's quality—the cooking was excellent, the service was attentive, and the chrysanthemum-print noren at the door was the pleasant understated kind. The issue was the Sky Screen, which had not only shown the character notes for Beast Disaster Kurozumi Tama but had shown them while Tama herself was presently inside the teahouse, washing cups in the kitchen in exchange for a meal.
The cognitive process the customers underwent was relatively simple: the person who will one day be capable of these things is currently in the same room as me, and I have not settled my bill.
The settlements that resulted were, in aggregate, considerably more generous than the actual charges. Several customers left without taking their change. One man left his entire coin pouch on the table by mistake, came back for it, and then left it again because returning a second time seemed worse. The teahouse was fully evacuated within the half-hour with zero outstanding debts, which was unprecedented in its history.
Okiku had been watching this process from near the counter with a quality of anxiety that was, in her case, operating at two simultaneous levels.
The first level was the same as everyone else's: a future Beast Disaster was standing in the kitchen, and she was directly adjacent to that situation, and the situation was moving.
The second level was specific to Okiku, and considerably worse.
She was one of Kin'emon's Nine Red Scabbards. The Sky Screen had not specifically identified her. But the Sky Screen had shown the future in considerable detail, and someone who looked carefully at the pieces it had shown would eventually assemble a picture that included the woman serving tea in a teahouse in the Flower Capital.
If the wrong person makes that connection, she thought, Kin'emon-dono's entire network comes undone.
She smoothed her expression and carried a teacup that no one was present to receive.
There was, however, something the Sky Screen had given to the Red Scabbards in exchange for the exposure it threatened: it had shown Tama's casual mention, in a future conversation, that Kozuki Sukiyaki—Kozuki Oden's father, the previous Shogun of Wano Country, the man they had assumed was dead—was still alive somewhere in Wano Country. He had been, at minimum, alive when young Tama had been in his vicinity. If that timeline could be traced backward, there might be a path to finding him.
So we owe the girl something, Okiku thought, with the complicated accounting of someone who had been handed a disaster and a gift in the same package. And hope no one looks too closely.
Tsurujo emerged from the kitchen to find her teahouse empty of everyone except Okiku, who was standing very still near the counter, and Tama, who had come out from the kitchen and was sitting at one of the window tables looking at the empty room with an expression that contained, at its center, a quality of bewilderment she didn't quite know how to resolve.
"Tama," Tsurujo said, and sat across from her. She reached out and pinched the girl's cheek with a jade hand—gently, the way you handle something that is younger than it has been required to act. "You scared everyone away. I don't think that was your intention."
"It wasn't," Tama said, with certainty.
"No." Tsurujo looked at her—the round purple eyes, the lilac hair that had come slightly loose from its pins during the kitchen work, the kimono that was second-hand and had been mended twice with different thread that almost matched. "You're going to become someone very different from who you are now. I don't know if that's because of the situation, or because of you, or because of something that happens in between."
"I don't crush bugs," Tama said. It came out more defensively than she meant it.
"I know." Tsurujo squeezed her cheek and released it. "That's how I know it's going to be the situation."
The sound arrived before the footsteps—not a combat sound but the specific quality of more people than the space was designed for, moving with the particular coordination of people who did not need to negotiate their way past obstacles because obstacles had learned to move.
"Customers?" Tama asked.
Okiku's face had gone specific.
The answer walked through the front door before anyone needed to provide it.
Black Maria had the kind of height that architectural spaces notice. The blonde hair and the kimono were visible from the street and were exactly what Wano Country's aesthetic conventions specified beauty should look like, if beauty had been engineered to stop a room rather than join it. She ducked the door frame with the practiced ease of someone who had done this every day of her adult life, emerged on the other side, and took in the empty teahouse with the particular intelligence of someone who had arrived prepared for this information and was incorporating it into existing models.
Her Tobiroppō status gave her the specific aura of someone who did not need to threaten things directly because the indirect version worked better.
She smiled.
"I hope I'm not interrupting anything," she said, which was the phrasing of someone who had calculated that she wasn't, and was choosing politeness over accuracy because the outcome was the same either way.
Behind her, through the door, the street contained several individuals who were not entering the teahouse because there was no reason for them to—they were simply present, in the way that cadres are present when a Tobiroppō member goes somewhere and wants the environment to reflect the nature of the situation.
The waitresses looked at Tama.
Tama looked at Black Maria.
Black Maria looked at Tama with the expression of someone completing an identification exercise they had already run from intelligence reports—the round purple eyes, the Dango Dango no Mi-derived ability to pull objects from her own body, the contracted beasts that had been seen in her vicinity. All consistent. All confirmed.
"Captain Kaido will be returning to Onigashima shortly," she said, keeping her voice at the register of a casual social call. "Lord Queen asked me to extend an invitation to you directly." She paused. "Before anyone else had the opportunity."
The before-anyone-else portion carried its weight without being underlined.
The Beasts Pirates' intelligence infrastructure in Wano Country had processed the Sky Screen's character notes for Kurozumi Tama in under thirty minutes. Which meant Kurozumi Orochi's intelligence infrastructure had done the same, or would shortly. And the Kozuki restoration forces would reach the same conclusion on their own timeline. A future Beast Disaster currently working odd jobs in exchange for meals was, from multiple perspectives simultaneously, a target that had recently acquired tactical significance.
Tama understood this. She was young, but she had grown up in a country where understanding the shape of things quickly was a survival skill.
She was also, at this specific moment, aware that she had no leverage. She had a Dango Dango no Mi that she had not fully developed
Against a Tobiroppō-class opponent and however many people were politely not entering the teahouse right now, these resources were inadequate.
"The invitation," she said carefully, "includes my beasts?"
"All of them," Black Maria said. "However many that turns out to be."
"And I'm not being arrested."
"You're being protected," said Black Maria, who had spent many years learning to say accurate things in the language of better options. "There's a difference, and the difference will be clear once you're on the island."
Tsurujo had moved, at some point during this exchange, to a position near Tama—not between her and Black Maria, because that would have been futile and stupid in ways Tsurujo was not, but beside her. Physically adjacent. The small claim of proximity.
She was afraid, and Tama could see this, and the fact that Tsurujo was afraid and still standing adjacent rather than retreating communicated something that didn't require language.
"I'll go," Tama said. "But I need to collect my animals first. And say goodbye properly."
Black Maria's expression indicated that this was both acceptable and had been anticipated.
At the door, Tsurujo pressed a wrapped package into Tama's hands
"Onigashima is not what they say," Okiku said quietly, near the door. She was watching Black Maria's people with the trained attention of someone who catalogued opponents as a habit. "Most of the stories are exaggerations." A beat. "Some of them aren't."
"I know," said Tama.
She looked at the teahouse one more time
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