The country itself seemed like a wound.
Kael stood at the bow of the Going Merry as Alabasta materialized from the southern seas, and even before he had any idea of what he was actually seeing before him, he could feel it.
It was a disturbance; a long, deep hurt of an ambient field that ought to be clear but wasn’t.
He had been learning, these last weeks, to read countries from a distance, and he had learned to understand that each country had its own chakra.
Not the chakra of any particular person inside it, but a field made up from everything in it—a kind of average of the lives of all those people, shaped by all their accumulated stresses.
This country had a chakra that read as if it had been getting thrown rocks into it for years.
Kael stood with his hand resting on the ship’s railing and let the field wash into him.
He felt the people in it—the population, hundreds of miles long, and the way they were shaped by all that time of being afraid.
Vivi appeared beside him.
She didn’t speak for several minutes.
He gave her the silence.
She’d been standing by the rail most mornings in the last few days.
Afterward, she hadn’t been sleeping properly or eating enough.
Her discipline, which she used to hold all of this in check, was beginning to falter as such things usually do under the stress of the entire nation she represented.
“You can feel it.”
She drank.
“What does it feel like?”
Kael thought about how to describe it to her without scaring her.
“It feels like the country has been waiting a long time for something to break down.
It’s partly hope.
Mostly exhaustion, the kind that people feel when they’ve been hoping too long without having a solution to their problems.”
She didn’t reply for a moment.
Her face remained blank; the line of her jaw and the vein that throbbed in her temple were the only signs that she might be crying.
She was past crying, at least for now.
“There’s a city to the east.
A big one.”
“Nanohana.”
“Nanohana,” he acknowledged as he let his senses reach farther.
“There are three agents in Nanohana currently.
Their chakras…
are folded, held close and tight and trained to hold fast.
They’ve been in that place for at least a week already.
One in an inn by the harbor, another at the bazaar on the eastern road.
The third is wandering through the marketplace right now.”
“Baroque Works?”
“That’s what I’m assuming.”
She curled her fingers tighter into the wooden rail till her knuckles showed white.
“I found the palace too.” He concentrated on the location.
“Its chakra signature is…
surprisingly stable.
Whoever is running it now knows how to control it correctly.
People in the palace aren’t worried for themselves, but for the country as a whole.
That’s different.”
“My father is alive.”
“Mhm.”
Her eyes closed.
The first tear slid down her cheek.
She didn’t wipe it, but kept crying quietly while tightening her grip until the rail made a noise.
Kael touched her hand, without any special show of emotion, and rested his hand next to hers, right against the wooden rail.
She transferred her hand just a little bit so that her fingers covered his.
They stayed like this for quite a while without looking at each other, while the Going Merry cruised forward through the seas and the country rose ahead of them, thin line of yellow turning into cliffs and beach with the hint of the dunes behind it.
Some time passed, and then she pulled her hand back, wiped her cheeks with the palm, and went to turn the wheel of the Going Merry.
She had been staying there more often lately, using it to take her mind off of what was happening around them.
“You said three agents in Nanohana.”
“What kind?”
He checked his sensors again.
This part required focus, and he closed his eyes the way Nami did when studying the clouds.
“Two of them are mid-ranking killers trained to protect their employers.
The third one is…
older, more experienced.
His chakra is complete, which means that he has worked for the organization for many years already and graduated beyond the part about killing people.”
“Mr.
2.”
“He fits the description perfectly.”
She nodded, turned, and went back to her post at the helm of the ship.
At noon, the Going Merry landed in a port west of Nanohana, thanks to Nami’s careful analysis of his data on the sea and Vivi’s agreement.
They landed far from the Baroque Works presence, in the middle of the port quay.
This was the kind of town that existed at the edges of a country in trouble—small and dusty with the resigned alertness that Kael had noticed in Drum.
Here, the surface was warm instead of cold.
Kael stood on the very edge of the quay and felt the field around him.
The citizens of the town seemed to be tired, but not exactly afraid; rather, they had taken their fear into themselves and learned to live with it somehow. Follow the newest chapters on novelping . com.
One man, a baker living near the quay, had done just this and had become his best defense against the chaos.
The man seemed to find his work to be the only refuge he could get from the troubles of his country.
Nami joined Kael on the quay, holding her notebook in one hand and a pencil behind her ear.
“How accurately do you read countries?”
“At the big scale—quite accurately.
At the fine scale—I am improving.”
“Big scale in the coming weeks.”
“It’s going to get much worse before it gets better.
The army assembling at Yuba will start marching soon, and the rebellion will be ready for them.
The resolution to this whole situation is going to happen within the next dozen days, and there will be certain points where one wrong action will ruin everything, and others where the right actions will clean it up.”
Nami wrote something down in her notebook, adding to the dating she started in the last weeks; every new entry now got its number in a sequence he’d never seen before.
Then she closed the notebook.
“How will you know which point is which?”
“I’ll feel it.”
She didn’t argue anymore.
Behind them, Vivi was greeting an old man whom she had apparently recognized; the man bowed to her in the manner of one who had only his manners left.
She returned the bow in the same polite manner, and Sanji looked at them both thoughtfully, calculating what they would need to prepare for dinner.
In the meantime, Chopper was exploring the quay with Usopp’s help.
Usopp told the little reindeer a story about a desert he had crossed once alone without water, and Luffy had already gone to eat something he had bought on shore.
Zoro approached Kael from the other side of the quay without a word.
He looked at the country as a swordsman looks at the country, which is to say, as a man looks at the blade that has been with him too long.
“How bad?”
“Bad enough.
But not irretrievably damaged.”
“Crocodile.”
A nod.
“He’s a Logia.”
He drank.
“You’ve faced a Logia.”
“Not in this world.
Not yet.”
Again, Zoro nodded without questioning.
He had become a swordsman in the last few weeks who trusted Kael’s powers enough not to ask for verification every single time.
It was enough for him to see them once, at the cliff; afterward, he accepted them the way they were.
An hour later, the crew left the shores of Alabasta.
Vivi led the group.
Kael hung back and studied the desert around them, reading the country in it, and the course of events to come.