A moment of quiet settled over the room before Newgate broke it.
"So that's what this is," he said. "You brought me all the way to Gran Tesoro to ask me to join forces against the Marines."
"What's the matter," Linlin said, her voice carrying a sharp edge, "did Finn knock the spine right out of you?"
It was a deliberate provocation. Newgate recognized it for what it was and didn't bother rising to it. Instead, his eyes moved to her arm.
At Jam Island, Finn had taken it. By any reasonable accounting, Charlotte Linlin should have been sailing the New World with one arm, the kind of permanent reminder that even Emperors had limits. But her arm was there, attached, whole, moving naturally as she reached for her drink. The only evidence of what had happened was a brutal suture scar that ran the full circumference of the joint, thick and discolored, impossible to miss if you were looking.
Newgate was looking.
Something was off about it. He couldn't have said exactly what, not without getting closer, but the arm didn't feel quite the same as it once had. He had known Linlin long enough to notice.
What had actually happened, though she had not advertised it, was that Linlin had done something she had never needed to do before in her life. She had never taken a serious injury. Not as a child, not in decades of piracy. When Finn's blade had separated her arm from her body, it had opened a door that had always been there but never found.
She had poured Homies into it. Infused the severed limb with the concentrated essence of one of her souls before reattaching it, binding it back to her body not just with flesh and bone but with something else entirely. Whether it was Zeus or another Homie she had sacrificed for the purpose, the result was the same: the arm was hers and not entirely hers. A thing that had not existed before Finn's blade had created it.
The blow that was supposed to diminish her had, in some quiet and outrageous way, made her stronger.
Linlin caught Newgate's gaze on her arm. Something cold moved through her eyes.
"I will not forget what he did," she said, low and even.
Newgate exhaled slowly. "Alas."
If this was their angle, if threats and wounded pride and provocations were the sum of what they had brought to this meeting, he genuinely wasn't interested. He had crossed a lot of ocean to sit in this room. He had not done it to be baited.
"If this is all you have to say to me," he said, setting his glass down, "then let's call it here. We'll have honored the old connection. After that, there's no need to arrange another meeting."
Linlin and Kaido went quiet.
Linlin looked at him for a long moment, then picked up her wine bowl and drank deeply from it. Newgate had already begun to read it as concession, was already calculating how quickly he could be politely out the door, when she lowered the bowl and said:
"Rob Lucci. And Marshall D. Teach." She paused. "Aren't you curious, Whitebeard?"
The temperature in the room changed.
Newgate's eyes settled on her with an intensity that hadn't been there a moment before.
"If you're about to tell me you had something to do with either of those situations," he said, and his voice had gone very quiet, "then this neutral zone or not, I will sink you both to the bottom of the sea, Linlin."
The threat was not rhetorical. Lucci and Teach were the two things that had been keeping Newgate up at night. Lucci had committed a murder aboard his ship and vanished. Teach had gone after him and never come back. Two of the people connected most closely to his Fourth Division, gone, and Newgate had no satisfying explanation for either of them. It was the kind of unresolved thing that sat in the chest and didn't move.
"I have no interest in your internal affairs," Linlin said sharply. Then, after a beat: "Do you want to know what I found out, or not?"
Newgate held her gaze. The anger didn't fully leave his face, but it receded enough for him to say, "Tell me. Whatever it is, I'll owe you for it."
Linlin gave a dismissive snort. "What good is a debt from an old man." But she didn't press the point. "I was going to tell you anyway."
She set the bowl down.
"Rob Lucci is currently a Vice Admiral at Marine Headquarters," she said. "He's attached to the Intelligence Department. Before that, from what I was able to piece together, he was a direct subordinate of Rodriguez Finn. He worked under a Marine intelligence organization called..." she hesitated slightly, as if still uncertain of the name's implications, "the Non-Existent Agency."
She watched Newgate's face as she said it.
The Big Mom Pirates had a well-earned reputation for intelligence work. It was the best private network in the pirate world, and it was because of that network that Linlin had been able to dig up what she had. Once Lucci had returned openly to the Marines, there was no longer any reason to keep his history buried, and enough threads had been left exposed for her people to pull. But even with everything she had at her disposal, the Non-Existent Agency had been a wall. Every avenue she followed turned cold. Every lead dried up before it reached anywhere. She had invested real effort into it and come out with almost nothing.
To her, that silence was information. Organizations that were difficult to find were usually the kind that had been designed not to be found. The name itself, something that didn't exist, and the fact that this organization had been founded and once led by Finn himself, had made her more wary of it, not less. Finn had a track record of building things that worked. If he had built something invisible, the invisibility was probably intentional.
She had no way of knowing that the Non-Existent Agency was effectively defunct. One of Finn's various experimental projects from the Intelligence Department's reorganization period, it had mostly run dry and the handful of people still nominally attached to it had long since moved into back-office work. The silence she had mistaken for careful concealment was really just the silence of something that had quietly stopped mattering.
But she didn't know that. So she remained guarded.
Meanwhile, across from her, Newgate's expression had been shifting as she spoke. Confusion, refusal, and then something harder beneath both of those.
"Impossible," he said. "When Lucci came aboard, he was barely—"
"I'm not here to debate it with you," Linlin said. "Check for yourself. Lucci is at Marine Headquarters right now, working openly as an instructor at their Military Academy. That much is easy enough to verify."
Newgate fell silent.
With the Whitebeard Pirates' intelligence resources, a blind search would have gotten them nowhere. But Linlin had handed him the answer. All that remained was the verification, and she was right that it wouldn't be difficult. Which meant he was already most of the way to believing her.
He thought it through.
Lucci had boarded the ship as a boy. He had been young enough that no one would have looked twice at him, young enough that the thought of him being anyone's operative would have seemed absurd. And yet, if what Linlin was saying was true, he had been Finn's subordinate from the beginning. A sleeper, placed precisely where Finn had wanted him, for reasons Newgate was only now beginning to calculate the shape of.
"This was all a Marine operation," he said. Not quite a question.
"Probably," Linlin said, and for once didn't elaborate with sarcasm.
She didn't need to. The implication was plain enough.
Newgate sat with his arms folded, staring at nothing. After a long silence, he asked: "And Teach? You're not going to tell me Lucci and Teach were running some kind of scheme together?"
"Teach is a pirate. I don't doubt that." Linlin shook her head. "His identity is solid. He was with Doflamingo, the two of them tracking Lucci all the way to Alabasta." She paused. "But something happened there. Crocodile had his own schemes running at the time, and things got complicated. Doflamingo eventually answered a Warlord summons and pulled out of the chase. And your Teach disappeared around that same time. Am I right?"
"That's right," Newgate said.
"I can't tell you exactly how much Doflamingo knew or whether he was involved in what came next," she said. "But I can tell you that after the situation in Alabasta resolved, a Marine base there accepted a secret prisoner. That prisoner was later transferred to Impel Down." She met his eyes. "My intelligence says it was your son. Marshall D. Teach."
The anger in Newgate's face deepened, slow and heavy, like a tide coming in.
He had spent weeks assuming Teach was caught in something, some complication in Alabasta's chaos that had cut off communication. Missing, not gone. He had not let himself think the worse version of it. Now someone was putting the worse version in front of him and calmly asking him to consider it.
Teach had followed Lucci to Alabasta without knowing Lucci was a Marine. Lucci had known Teach was coming. And in Alabasta, with Finn making his final appearance in that theater, surrounded by Marine resources, Teach had walked into something he hadn't understood until it was already too late.
"I don't have evidence to show you," Linlin said. "Nothing I can hand over. It's your call whether you believe it."
Newgate already believed it. If Lucci's Marine identity could be confirmed, and it could, then the rest of it followed. It was not a complicated chain of logic. It was the story of a man who had been deceived by someone he'd trusted, and had paid the price in a place where his enemies had every advantage.
He picked up his wine, finished what was left in the bowl, and set it down. Then he stood.
"I owe you, Linlin," he said. "I need to look into Teach and Lucci. Goodbye."
Linlin nodded once. She didn't try to stop him, didn't add anything more, and Newgate walked out of the villa and into the city beyond.
When the sound of his footsteps had faded, Kaido clicked his tongue.
"We're just letting him walk? Wasn't the whole point of this to bring him into the alliance?"
Linlin smiled. It was not a warm expression.
"I didn't lie to him," she said. "Once he confirms everything, he'll come find us himself. Because if he doesn't..." She let the thought complete itself. "He wouldn't be worth calling Whitebeard."
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