science and the human heart

by trell (qunlat)

Summary:

In which the city of Dresediel Lex suffers a demonic disaster, and Trafalgar Law meets a small god.

Notes:

A love letter in abstract to the Craft Sequence, with sincere apologies to: Max Gladstone, the canon, and m_rosenkov, in order.

Disembarking at DLX is akin to being struck by a physical force. Arid heat mixed with salt bears down on Law as he makes his way down from air-conditioned dragon-back business class, not a drop of the adjacent sea’s humid moisture borne with it; the sun pounds, and the sky is so blue that Law’s eyes ache in their sockets. He tints his corneas against it, and trudges on into customs.

On the way he loosens his collar (which he doesn’t need to do, not with Craft perfectly capable of keeping him cool even in three-piece black) and grips the medical bag at his side tighter (which he does, because customs never likes what’s inside). He finds himself in the usual argument at the inspection, and wins it in the usual way with unusual ease: a presentation of a business card and a signed letter, a request from your local Deathless King.

He still grits his teeth through customs, but there’s much less touching and shoving all around. It’s good to be a Craftsman in the King in Red’s city, Law thinks, and beelines through the rotunda, passing under splendid stained glass that casts mosaic patterns onto a dull patterned carpet endemic to every airport et al.

Outside past the steps carriages and opteran idle, waiting for soul, and Law waves to hail a golem taxi. When the driver asks where to he says, “Six-six-seven Sansilva,” and once more has the vague satisfaction of watching someone snap to instant attention. He sets the fare meter to draw direct from the firm expense account, and climbs wordlessly into the back.

Only there, in the near-dark of the back of the cab, does he manage to shed some of his tension. Being around people—living people—always leaves him on razor-edge, and never more than in places as overburdened with them as airports. He is tired, tired of speaking, tired of being made to react the way living people are supposed to react. Being done with Sansilva and RKC and forced human pleasantries will be a relief, and Law hopes fervently that the Deathless King of Dresediel Lex will let him get straight to the corpses.

At least two hundred dead at their so-called Chamber of Commerce, Monet had told him, seated across from him in her starlit office at Kelethres, Albrecht, & Ao in Shikaw. Dismembered by a demon, and half of them insured to the ears by Red King Consolidated. They keep us on very expensive retainer, as you well know, so we told them we’d send our top postmortem expert for piecing together the bodies. Her taloned bird’s feet had been propped on her desk, and she’d worn a suit and a smile full of inch-long inhuman teeth. Have fun.

Fun hasn’t been in Law’s vocabulary in decades, but he hopes dimly that the work will be interesting. So many cases with demonic causes of death are ordinary in the extreme, but a case with a demon large enough to take out two hundred people under a Deathless King’s nose has at least minimal promise.

His cab rolls north, into the city.

*

It takes them thirty minutes just to get half-way through the Skittersill, and Law looks out while the cab makes its way through the district, chin in his hand and his elbow propped on the door. The streets here are old and narrow, jam-packed; market carts and stalls swarm with pedestrians, and already more than a few drunks lie prone by the road. Plasterboard houses and storefront displays squeeze tight between ancient temples, the latter long since turned into bars.

These once-holy places, he knows, represent all that the priesthood of Dresediel Lex had managed to keep after losing the war. RKC had seized outright much of the derelict infrastructure of their dead gods: foreclosure and sale to private parties had likely looked good by comparison. Back home in Shikaw the devastation of several city blocks had been viewed as something of a real estate opportunity, too—Law has been to the conference center erected on the site of the former water goddess’ temple, utility swallowing beauty.

He’s still thinking about postwar property values when something slams into the side of the cab.

The impact flings him across the back seat, trammeling him into the opposite door and leaving him momentarily stunned. Up front, the driver says, “Oh, shit,” and jerks the wheel sideways, cab skidding, the world past the window turned a colorful blur.

Something massive careens by outside the glass against which Law is wedged, and wheels shriek, and somebody screams. The weighted corner of his bag clips against his cheekbone as he’s thrown forward again, the driver slamming violently on the brakes—

—and then, just as suddenly, everything comes to a stop. Law is left staring at the dirt-stained carpet of the cab, his head buzzing.

Well, he thinks. He’ll be late.

*

The dust is still settling when Law clambers, coughing, out of the cab. The gash on the side of his face oozes blood; he scrubs it away with his sleeve, and swipes a Craft-laden hand right and left to sweep the billowing dirt out of his way.

The scene he sees through the clearing he’s made is a study in chaos. A golem freight truck half-buried in the streetside market carts billows smoke, and a passenger bus lies on its side, its nose bent spectacularly around a municipal signpost. The front end of his own cab looks decidedly more impressionistic than it had at the airport.

Law’s first move is to check on the cabbie, driven by alarm at the state of the vehicle. The man proves—miraculously, surely—unharmed: cursing the blue streak in Quechal and slamming his palms repeatedly against the wheel, but not, apparently, hurt. Law leaves him on a wail of, “My insurance premiums!” and jogs, a little crookedly, towards the bus.

The bus passengers, he sees at once through the windows, haven’t been quite so lucky. Most seem to be conscious, shifting and groaning or crying according to age category and injury; that, at least, is a good sign. But he can see and feel people towards the back of the bus, closest to what looks like the point of impact with the truck, who aren’t moving.

He spends all of three seconds considering forcing his way in through the door before reaching out and peeling off the entire upturned side of the bus, shearing away the metal with a sheet of air convinced it’s sharper than steel. The side parts from the frame like wet paper, and lands in the street with a crash that’s anything but. (Excited murmuring comes from the spectators, gathered inevitably around a major accident in a busy street.)

Property damage be damned, anyway; Law’s pretty sure even DL has some equivalent to the Good Law of Saint Pasad to incentivize helping the wounded, and if they don’t, well. When the municipal authorities ask he’ll send them to hell, first name Ashleigh, surname of Wakefield.

A single amplified leap is enough to get him from standing in the street to touching down carefully inside the bus, choosing his footing cautiously amid the smashed-out windows and less-injured passengers already clambering out over the sides. Most don’t pay him any heed, though a few that are clear-headed enough to have paid attention to both the opening of the bus and his entrance make the connection and try to murmur thanks.

One old woman, geriatric and evidently untouched, catches his sleeve as he squeezes between ugly patterned seats and groaning victims. “Craftsman,” she says, in Kathic. “You help that boy, too, back there. He hasn’t done anything wrong.”

Confused, Law says, “I don’t discriminate between saints and sinners, lady,” which seems to satisfy her: in any event she lets go of his sleeve, and lets him finish making his laborious journey to the persons at the end of the bus.

He finds there two men and a woman, all three unconscious, and a little girl in a dress—herself merely bruised—crying over the man that looks the worst wounded. No boy, whatever the old woman had said; senile, Law decides, and pushes the matter out of his mind.

The crying girl’s damp brown eyes open, and, finding him, prompt her to shriek: “Mister, help him!”

“I’ll help him,” Law says, and at the same time lifts the girl unceremoniously up in the air with the Craft. She shrieks and tries to wrest futilely away, dark braids swinging; Law sets her down outside the bus with a wave of his hand. “You wait out there.” He can’t abide children, much less ones that scream.

Then he closes his eyes and opens his third, surveying the damage.

Within the Quechal woman crumpled strangely around the seat he finds a concussion and an alarming twist of the spine, which he can’t diagnose without closer examination. He leaves her, for now, immobilized in a cushion of hardened air to prevent further damage. In the man slumped almost upright against the very back of the bus—the one over whom the girl had been crying, the striking similarity of their features marking them relations—he sees a perforated lung and a broken leg, plus three smashed-up ribs, not unrelated to the lung. Law convinces the lung and the man’s perforated insides that they remain whole, that blood should flow and pump along its intended vessels, triage enough to hold up until the man can go under a proper surgeon’s knife.

In the immense pale Iskari with an anger-lined face and savage scars down both arms he finds a concussion only, despite where the man must have been sitting. As though something—Craft?—had cushioned the blow.

The fourth body—

The fourth body Law sees only because he is looking through his inner eye, and it makes him hiss in unhappy surprise. Lying next to the unconscious Iskari is the crumpled form of a small god, appearing to Law’s second sight as a slight young Quechal man superimposed on the world as a network of shimmering interlaced lines. The soulstuff of which he is comprised flickers and drains—trickles out of him through a thick red thread tying his wrist to that of the Iskari. That, at least, accounts for the man’s lack of damage: the brunt of the impact had passed through him, and on.

And it had been a great deal of damage, Law sees: the little god is dying, his soul drained to the dregs, the last drops leaving him quickly.

Eyes still closed, the web of Craft that runs over and through his surroundings displayed in bright silver lines all around, Law sits back on his heels and considers. A bound god is not, technically speaking, illegal; some Craftsmen would even find such a contract appropriately ironic, a satisfying reversal of the bondage in which some pre-war gods had held their believers. What he deserves, whispers the back of Law’s brain—the part that put him in six-figure debt with the Hidden Schools and spent a decade learning the trade under the Deathless King of Dressrosa, honing him into something ruthless and calculating and cold. Save the man; let the god die.

And yet.

He hasn’t done anything wrong, the old woman gripping his sleeve had said. Looking at the young countenance of the god lying ragdoll against the side of the bus Law can almost believe it, for all that he knows that the exterior of such a being has little relation to what lies within. Still more to the point: does it even matter if he has? Law had meant it, what he’d said about the saints and the sinners, unable as he is to distinguish himself from the latter.

Above all, Law remembers what it’s like, being bound. Remembers his mind not being his own, giving up his body and his soul and all of himself—

He decides then and there, a single brush with the decade of memories he doesn’t own sufficient to make up his mind. Touches his hand to the line that runs between the little god and the man to examine it, examine the contract, and strikes at it with an argument built of the core principles of the Craft: freedom of contract, and unfair bargaining and unconscionable negotiation, and failure to establish the meeting of minds between signing parties. Unreasonable indemnity, as a finishing touch.

The contract breaks in his hand like blown glass met with a hammer.

The reverse transfer of soulstuff is intense, and immediate. As Law watches a large quantity of soul shunts out of the Iskari, who gains grievous injuries in reverse from what looks like thin air. The little god brightens and lives, his stolen life flowing back where it belongs.

Law turns to scrambling to stem the tide of injuries dealt to the Iskari, triaging as fast as he can make sense of the wounds—and comes up short almost at once. As the last of the borrowed soul flows back into the god the man’s neck snaps, savagely, severing the spinal cord and killing him instantly.

The god’s eyes open in the same moment, and Law sees only a glimpse of wide-eyed surprise before the little god vanishes, disappears from his second vision and leaves only the acrid smell of ozone behind.

Looking down at the corpse of the Iskari, Law thinks: maybe the universe has a sense of humor, and this one’s meant for zombie indenture.

He’s still sitting in the broken chassis of the bus, holding a stranger’s corpse and pondering the ethics of stepping into a wreck and upping the number of human casualties by one, when the authorities arrive.

*

The sun is well on its way into mid-afternoon by the time Law makes it to the monolithic pyramid of Red King Consolidated; still, he doesn’t run up the steps. The desiccated woman sitting behind the receptionist’s desk meets his proffered card with, “We’ve been expecting you,” in a tone that suggests that he should have, and also that the words she’d actually like to say are, You’re late, and my master is annoyed. She points him to a bay of golden elevator doors to her right, and says, “Take the farthest lift over. Floor forty-six, in the big conference room. You can’t miss it.”

“Right,” Law says, dissipates the card between his fingers, and makes for the elevator.

He checks his appearance in the floor-length mirror lining the lift while he rides to floor forty-six, switching his bag into his left hand to tug at his collar. A quick sweep of Craft on the steps of the pyramid’s entrance has repulsed the dust off his dark suit, and the color hides the blood splatters well enough at a glance.

It hadn’t really been all that much blood, by Craftwork standards. Law has had worse merely doing his day-to-day work: the Iskari had only bled on his jacket from the puncture wound in his neck, opening in echo of a piece of debris that would have killed him while it was still there if the damage hadn’t been passed to the god.

The god, for whose life Law traded that of the Iskari. The paramedics had thanked him.

He checks his face last, and his reflection regards him dourly in turn: sunken dark eyes and brown skin marred with white and a mouth curved in a near-permanent moue, the best he can expect. No blood there, though the gash on his cheek is impressive, the skin around it already bruising into interesting colors. Nothing to be done about that; wandering into a room full of Craftsmen with shadows plastered over his face would certainly draw more attention.

Still, Law thinks glumly, he looks like he’s been in a fight.

“Forty-sixth, floor,” says the elevator, halting unnatural comma and all, and the doors open. Law hefts his bag, and steps out.

The receptionist had been right: he really can’t miss it.

On the other side of the glass across from the lift stretches a conference room filled with persons in business suits, coffee mugs and notepads and papers forming a war-torn landscape on the table between them. The table itself is obsidian, same as the walls and the floor and the ceiling, a single slab of perfectly smooth volcanic glass.

When Law looks at it through the glass the table appears to stretch to a vanishing point in the far distance, a conference room ad infinitum. A neat trick; Law appreciates it while he sidles inside, at which point the table acquires more reasonable dimensions, and every eye in the room turns to him.

“Ah,” says a voice like mountains breaking, “our postmortem expert from Kelethres Albrecht, I presume.”

Law looks to the voice—

—can’t help his sharp flinch away, the room wavering, blots rising in the corners of his vision.

The King in Red looms at the head of the table, a weighted focal point even if he’d lacked his namesake color. Red robes and a death’s head grin and polished bone, red sparks in the hollows of the eyes: all as described, all properly terrifying. In life, Lord Kopil had slain gods and led armies; postmortem, he presides over board meetings, crushes opposing Concerns and rules his city with an indestructible skeletal fist. Any Craftsman with a drop of sense would balk at his presence; any of them might flinch.

But it’s not the history of the King in Red that makes Law feel sick while he picks his way across the room to an empty seat, his world lurching. (He thinks he says, Yes, and something about traffic, his own voice distant in his ears.) Deathless Kings are a fact of the job; he’s met enough working for Kelethres, Albrecht, & Ao to take meeting another almost in stride, able to stare down the bloody smear of their hand in history.

No: it isn’t the fact of Kopil’s person that makes looking at him hurt, nor anything specific to Kopil at all.

In the heartbeat during which his universe skips tracks Law sees a Deathless King who dresses differently, favors feathers and not robes; keeps to a different color, too, but for the pince-nez glasses. And surely a mere shape of presence writ over a similar form shouldn’t be enough to rouse the foul nexus of Craft-curse and memory that’s tangled in his head, shouldn’t make Law stop breathing, shouldn’t make the edges of his vision bleed into a shadow that writhes—

Maybe, Monet had said last time, in the frustrated-concerned tone she gets when she’s telling him what’s good for him, you should go see a professional. A specialist. Work out whatever that bastard did to your head, huh?

Law doesn’t quite collapse into his chair. He counts to ten, gaze fixed on the notepad in front of him, and by the last digit the breath unlocks in his chest, time regains its immediate pretense of unilinear motion, the black-and-gold clock ticks on the wall.

“I believe,” the King in Red says, tapping a single finger bone on the table, “we were just getting to the part pertinent to our outside counsel. If you would continue, Ms. Batan.”

“Yes, boss,” says a woman sitting to Kopil’s right hand, and clears her throat. “If everyone could turn to page three of the brief . . .”

*

He does not, exactly, track through the rest of the meeting. A great deal is said; Law catches one word in three during the first fifteen minutes, and gives up after that. Dwells bitterly on his inability to pull free the nails driven into his mind by a Deathless King an ocean and half a world away, and doesn’t absorb a full sentence until the meeting breaks up, scattering businesspersons into the hallway.

“Counsel,” the King in Red says as he rises. “Ms. Batan will take you down to the Chamber to begin your work. Best of luck.”

“Come along, Mr. Law,” says Batan, and gestures for him to follow. Law does.

An elevator ride later they step out into the blazing afternoon sun, where Batan waves away the waiting company car. “We can walk from here, if you don’t mind—it’s just up the street.” Law nods, and thinks about traffic accidents and the dying god and dead Iskari, and lets her lead him around the pyramid corner and up the hill.

The movement and the sun seem to reassert his reality at last, snapping the gears of his mind back into place. By the time they’ve climbed a block-length up the hill Law has regained enough ground to pay attention when Batan says, “The boss doesn’t like to upset the shareholders, but let me be clear—the area is still a Class Three hazard zone. Holes in reality the size of your fist. Officially, we’ve called in Kelethres Albrecht because enough RKC employees with phylacteric trusts were caught in the blast to warrant the best. Unofficially, the King in Red doesn’t want amateurs digging around in bodies that might cause a demonic cascade.”

Perhaps a board meeting wasn’t the worst place to—have a lapse, Law decides: too often his work seems to shake out precisely like this, every Concern in the world on the same script. Here’s our problem, for the not-quite public: here’s your problem, morbid and fully client confidentiality-bound. “Is there anything else I should know?”

Batan grimaces. She’s sweating from their walk, but not in the way of Craftless DL foreigners like those Law had seen sagging around at the airport: her movement stays brisk, her energy level even. “Not that I can tell you, beyond the fact that we’re hoping you’ll be able to cleanse, stabilize, assemble, and put a name to everyone who’s inside. I’m in Contract Management—leaks in the fabric of the universe aren’t my area of expertise. We’ve got containment people on-site, though, and they’ll be able to give you more.”

“All right.” Law frowns. “You’ve done well keeping the risk out of the papers.” No protestors shout in panic at the doors of the building at the top of the hill; no one in the vicinity of their destination seems worried at all, in fact. The businesspersons hurrying past the pillared three-story building move with the usual level of urgency, not in rift-in-reality fleeing panic. The Chamber looks very nearly undamaged on the outside, just a couple cracked windows and police tape lining the sidewalk, a few faceless Wardens beyond.

“We’ve been lucky, so far. Almost everyone at ground zero was either under a family-wide RKC NDA or a stock broker, so there haven’t been too many relatives that would go to the press.”

“A stock broker,” Law repeats, and Batan laughs and says:

“Yeah, you know. Ages twenty-five to forty, loud voices and no dependents to speak of.” They cross the street to the Chamber, and Batan touches her RKC badge to the police line before lifting it up for Law to cross. Law is abstractly aware of a heavy-duty ward weighing down around him as he ducks under, and feels it slam shut once Batan takes her badge away from the line. “Go on in. They’ll get you whatever you need to set up inside.”

“Thank you,” Law remembers to say.

“Good luck, doc,” Batan says, and waves at him as he turns away.

*

Law finds the interior of the Chamber crawling—silver-masked Wardens, insurance agents, zoning inspectors, hazard-kitted containment specialists, all filling the entry hall up to the rafters. Whatever the outside lacked in organized chaos can be found here, and Law flags down the first person whose appearance suggests a glimmer of situational authority. To wit: a large woman in the gray jumpsuit of the containment people, holding a clipboard and bellowing at a tech for not wearing his demonward hardhat. “Specialist.”

“Senior Inspector,” she corrects, automatically, and takes in Law’s suit and medical bag, and the card he presents again in favor of speaking. “About time they got someone out here qualified to deal with this mess. Above my pay grade, you know.”

“Show me,” is all Law says, and follows in her wake as she clears the way through the main hall by sheer force of bulk.

The bustle clears abruptly as they reach the doors that open out onto the trading floor, presently firmly shut. The Senior Inspector stops there; no sign graces the handle. If you’re working in here, the bare metal seems to imply, you’re not dumb enough to go inside without asking. “We haven’t let anyone in there yet except for the guys that did the initial pass. That’s where you’ll find your bodies.”

“Space enough to work?” Law asks.

“Crystal radioactivity is down to neglibile levels, so you won’t have to worry about keeping your distance—it’s fucking everywhere, anyway.”

While she speaks Law sets down his clinical bag and pulls out a set of inscribed silver bracelets, fastens them loose on his wrists and clicks them together to cover his hands with shadows impenetrable. The Senior Inspector casts a wary glance downward, but carries on, “It’s the bodies that are likely to give you the trouble. Everyone inside was, um . . . sort of smeared around. But if you can make it to the center of the floor without triggering another crack in the fabric of the universe, that area’s clear. You can work your way outward.”

“Fine,” Law says. Kneels to fish from his bag two sticks of silver chalk and a silver bowl and scale and a freshly-dead raven, neck broken—he catches a look of momentary disgust on the Senior Inspector’s face at this last—and shoves everything, bird excepted, under his arm. The bag shuts itself as he straightens. “Anything else?”

“List of known occupants.” The Senior Inspector digs in the pockets of her jumpsuit, and comes up with a roll of vellum smelling of Craft. Eyes-only magic, Law guesses, to keep that sort of information from getting around. She holds it out to him, formal-like.

Law takes it with his free hand and hides it at once up his sleeve. “That’s all?”

“That’s all.” She watches him as he turns away.

As he depresses the handle and pushes open the door, she blurts, “Is it true you people get off on this shit? Being around a bunch of dead bodies and torn-up souls gets you, like, high?”

“Sure it is,” Law says, blandly. “Best high in the world.”

By the expression of total horror on her face as the door slams shut, he’s pretty sure she believes him.

*

Demonglass coats the trading floor top to bottom, a nightmare suspended in breathtaking crystal.

Law treads carefully over the glass, looking before each step, pausing only to convince the bottoms of his shoes that they have friction with the ice-slippery surface. He avoids bones and apparent pieces of anatomy, however well-entombed; a wrong step here could plunge him and the whole of Dresediel Lex into a demonic abyss.

Podiums bristling with glow worm market displays and trading booths rise out of the crystalline landscape around him, similarly encased in several inches of translucent glass. The demonglass glows violet from within, and teems with slithering nightmares that Law doesn’t look at directly, takes care to glimpse only out of the corner of his eye.

The dead raven dangles from his fingers, and his breath mists the air when he exhales. The temperature here is perhaps the precise inverse of the desert outside, the alien logic of the demon that broke free still bleeding into the universe a week later. Frost spiderwebs across the surface of the massive whorls of glass that curl out from the room’s center and up past the second floor balcony, material representation of the universe wrestling down its cognitive dissonance.

Silence reigns, leaving him in a world apart, small in a space that human minds shy away from, struggle to categorize between dream and reality. Law is reminded abstractly of a frozen mountain plateau in a moment when the wind stops, or a soundless cavern miles under the earth. A pin dropped here would ring, perhaps—resonate through the glass until it grew into a single shattering note, releasing the creatures within.

He picks his way across it and thinks about unpeopled caves, and the physics of demonglass, and the speed of nerve impulses versus the speed of glass formed so quickly as to catch bodies in the instant between dismemberment and the realization of their new disposition. About stock brokers, and Monet shrugging we bill by the hour, and dozens of families somewhere out in DL told to wait, silent, unknowing when and what they’ll get back in place of the people they love.

The demon that broke this place must have lasted no more than a second, a fraction of a second, to go so far and no further. The vellum scroll in Law’s sleeve bears some two hundred names.

In the center of the room the seal of the Chamber is bare, multicolored marble glinting in the dim light that passes through the distant high windows. Law reaches it, and sends his silver chalk to draw the lines of his initial ward, setting up the contour of his makeshift lab.

He kneels in the middle to set down his bowl and scale, and twists the head off the raven to spill its steaming-warm contents into the bowl. Released at last from death’s-moment suspension the bird’s blood flows freely, forms a perfect black pool. Next he draws a moon-blade scalpel out of the glyphs inscribed into his skin and slits open his palm, the lightning-sterilized blade passing through the shadow-glove as nothing else can. His blood mixes with that of the raven, and begins at once to congeal.

The raven’s head he puts aside, infused with a trick of the Craft to retain words and speak them back at his touch.

Forensic pathology, they’d called this business at the Hidden Schools; everyone else had just called it gruesome.

He reaches, through the blood in the bowl, for a thread, and begins to search and assemble, narrating each action tonelessly to the bird.

The demons in the glass press close to the surface, listening hard.

*

A Warden calling through the door interrupts him in the middle of assembling the fragments of a shattered femur some hours later, announcing that it’s after eight in the evening, Mister Craftsman Sir, time to vacate the premises for the night. Law pushes himself to his feet, body creaking, and stretches to undo the knots in his back: arms straight over his head and then twisting both ways, spine cracking loudly in too many places at once.

The glass is gone from the spaces through which he’s worked—maybe ten square feet near the central circle—and six bodies and a pile of shards lie frozen in his ward, scraps of soul collected by RKC upon hire matched against lingering residue matched in turn against names on the vellum. Law leaves the bodies, reports the names to the Wardens, and picks up his bag by the door.

Pushes his way out of the building, diving from hoarfrost temperatures into the blooming summertime night of Dresediel Lex, and feels as though he’s tumbled out of one bizarre dream and into another.

He pauses on his way down the steps, breathing in—remembers to do so, to properly appreciate the fact that he can. In three years the right to absolute choice has grown less novel, but it sneaks up on him, sometimes, as it does now: he can stop. He can stand in Sansilva and listen to the distant sounds of the nightlife, feel the thaumaturgical thrum of a city of seventeen million souls, smell sandalwood and cooling concrete. He can stop, and do nothing besides that at all.

For as long as he wants, if he disregards more mundane obligations.

He goes down, eventually, into the street.

The firm has booked him a room in a tower on the opposite side of the district, near enough to see from the steps of the Chamber of Commerce. It glitters ostentatiously on the far side of the RKC pyramid, which blocks out a darker triangle of black in the night sky, a space where no light may shine. Too far to walk for anyone that doesn’t have to, but faced with the emptied streets of Sansilva and the city’s night breathing around him Law can’t be bothered to rush.

So he walks, bag slung over one shoulder, watching the sky spires sucking in starlight. The Iskari from this morning and the six people he’s pieced back together for RKC walk with him, maybe; RKC will reanimate their own, activate their phylacteric trusts and send them live and possibly kicking back to their families and RKC desks. The Iskari, the paramedics had said, would stay dead.

He wonders what the Iskari’s name was, and whether it’s wrong that he doesn’t care.

Alone under the stars he at last feels certain, undivided: he’d done the right thing. God or human, the indenture contract he’d broken had been negotiated under duress, saddled the little god with obligation that annihilated freedom of choice, traded away his inalienable right to agree to trades. Had been foul, in a basic sense, too like what Law had suffered for years.

He’s still thinking about those years when he reaches the streetlamp by the corner, too far down the rabbit hole of his thoughts to notice the little god waiting there until they’re almost face to face.

Hey, the little god says, it’s you! I’ve been looking for you!

Law nearly jumps out of his skin. Shadows from the space directly behind the ghostlight lantern above coil around his hand to strike at his assailant before his brain can catch up with his nerves: the red-lit figure floating directly before him isn’t attacking at all, just staring, peering curiously into his eyes from a little too close.

It took me all day just to track you up to Sansilva, the god chatters on, and Law wonders whose soul the god has fed on since to make himself seen. Felt, too, for Law can feel heat billowing off of his form, like holding his hand close to the pavement at noon. You saved me. I wanted to thank you. I’m Luffy. What about you?

With an effort, Law lets the shadow-death held in his hand dissipate, tries to pacify his bowstrung adrenaline. Takes a step back, reasserting his personal space, and doesn’t answer the question. “Track me how?”

The little god—Luffy—scrunches up his nose, a tic so human Law is momentarily thrown. You have a—smell? It’s hard to say, in your words. It’s like there’s pieces of people stuck to you, from people who aren’t around anymore. Like if you stood next to the road while a wagon passed and dust got on you, but again and again.

It dawns on Law that the little god is describing the way in which firsthand contact with death can imprint itself on a Craftsman, leave something like stains on the soul. The little god’s metaphor is crude, but accurate enough in its essentials: souls evaporate, cycle back into the system, but their contact—their passage through the killer, the doctor, the priest of last rites—that remains.

In more forthright terms Luffy is telling him that he smells like death, and Law doesn’t know what to think about that, ignores the chill he feels despite the hot night around him. Responds instead to the other, simpler thing, the one most in need of sorting out: “You don’t need to thank me. What I did was a whim, nothing more.”

You saved my life, Luffy insists, flickering next to the lamppost, and through me maybe the life of one of my friends. At least tell me your name, so I can tell them.

“Your friends,” Law says before he can catch himself, scientifically curious as to the day-to-day life of such a god despite the absurdity of the moment—standing under a streetlight on an evening street in the high-end business district of Dresediel Lex, speaking to a god whose indenture he ended in a convulsion of conscience. “Law. My name is Trafalgar Law.” And I am a Craftsman, a summoner, god-killer, an aberration of human free will, and you should fear me the way children fear the monsters under their beds, he does not say.

Law, repeats Luffy, like he’s testing the word on his tongue. And, his Quechal pronunciation tangling hopelessly around the Kathic name, Torao.

He smiles at Law, then, the effect of the expression nothing short of astonishing. All at once he appears lit up from the inside, fire stoked brighter—and maybe he is, or maybe what Law sees in that moment is a trick of the god’s passive glow mixing with the ghostlight pouring down from above. Maybe Law’s going crazy, in more ways than the ones he already knows.

Thank you, Luffy says firmly. Even if you did it just ’cause, it still matters.

Law inhales sharply. He has learned, in recent years, to let go the question of action versus intent: whether what matters is the thought or the consequence, the mind behind what his hands have done—did for another, once—or the doing, so often final.

The little god cannot know, Law reminds himself; has met him only in passing, has no access to his well-warded mind. Couldn’t have anticipated the way the words would snag against that old scabbed-over wound, fingernails scraped over a scar.

His voice comes out stiff, anyway. “It was nothing. Leave me alone, little god. What’s done is done, and we can go our separate ways.”

I want to give you something back, Luffy says.

“No,” Law says, instantly. “I told you. I don’t deal with gods, and gods know better than to stick around near my kind. I won’t pray, and I won’t let you into my head, and I won’t give you my soul, even just a few thaums. Whatever you want me to have, you can keep it. Go away, before I regret saving you.”

Not like that! Luffy frowns at him, clearly disturbed by the vehemence of his response. I mean, not unless you want to.

“Then what,” Law wants to know, his heart beating too quickly, too erratic, over something so small. There is no danger here, he tells himself, not really; he can break a god of such minimal complexity—life-giving fire, the sharing of a hearth, city street hideaways, had there even been anything more in the contractual web he’d seen through his third eye?—with barely more effort than the binding contract had taken. “What do you want.”

Well, the little god says, maybe we could go for coffee?

*

Law isn’t sure, after, how he gets talked into it. He remembers some more exasperated questioning under the lamppost, and a cab going noisily by, and the part where he’d snapped, “Fine!” and followed Luffy out of the business hours part of Sansilva; but not what, out of any of it, convinced him—a thinking and more-or-less sane human being—to let a grateful god treat him to Muerte Coffee.

Sitting at their out-of-the-way corner table with his hands wrapped around the pins-and-needles heat of his mug Law thinks to check himself for outside influence, or backwash from the god’s contract breaking. Nothing proves to be in evidence, so maybe he’s just—

People leave me spiced chocolate, sometimes, Luffy says cheerfully, interrupting his train of thought, because the heat is like me. I can’t drink it, though. Is it good?

—losing it, definitely. Full mental breakdown, end of the line.

As the anticipatory silence drags on Law realizes that he’s actually expected to answer, and that he can’t without trying the drink. He knows, in the way he knows every action he took in the years he spent running around the globe as a Deathless King’s errand boy, that he’s had it an innumerable number of times: a catalogue of redeye layovers in DL and Agdel Lex flashes by in his mind’s eye, each featuring the same exact order. But the memories are clinical, factually bare, lacking in all the irrelevant contextual data he’d need to answer the question. Smell, taste, texture, whether he liked the feel of it on his tongue, none of those things are there in his head.

He tries the chocolate, and burns his tongue. After a moment, still wincing at the sting, he says: “Yes.”

Which isn’t very informative, as replies go, but Luffy doesn’t seem to mind. Doesn’t seem put off by any of Law’s callous half-answers or acerbic replies at all, actually, despite the fact that Law’s personal standard is driving off strangers in thirty seconds or less.

Remembering his earlier curiosity, and not knowing what else to say, Law asks, “You mentioned that breaking the contract might have saved one of your friends, through you. What did you mean?”

Luffy flickers at the question, and Law wonders about that, too, wishes he knew how to read the less humanoid aspects of divine expression. Luffy says, I did the deal with Arlong so my friends could get out of the city, away from him and his gang down at the docks. They’re probably already in Alt Coulomb. Only, one other friend is still here, and he can’t get out without me.

“Arlong is dead,” Law points out. It feels strange, being able to put a name to corpse, but the personality Luffy’s words imply fits neatly enough with what the contract had made him expect.

This friend isn’t in trouble with Arlong’s gang, Luffy says, shaking his head. He’s lost, and I need to find him. Before Law can parse exactly what that means, coming from a god that managed to trace him through half of DL by thaumaturgical smell alone, Luffy goes on, You helped my other friends, too, saving me. Our connection is strong—I think it would’ve hurt ’em bad, if I died.

Which confirms at least one of Law’s suspicions. “And by ‘friends’, you mean supplicants. Worshippers. People who believe in you, speak your litanies and bring you offerings and pieces of soul.”

They believe in me, Luffy says, but I believe in them, too. That makes them my friends. Like you, because you helped me.

Law snaps alert at once, dragging himself back out of the haze his mind keeps sliding into. He isn’t sure if it’s a passive effect of the god, or the late hour, or the repeated glancing contact of the day with the broken empty spaces in his head where a Deathless King’s machine used to be. He pushes his mug away. “No,” he says. “I don’t accept the existence of any relationship with you, implied or otherwise. A one-time intervention in your favor is incidental, not an overture of initiation.”

Luffy frowns at him. Law stares back, his hands tense on the table, uncaring that to the eyes of the other, Craftless patrons of the shop he’s probably staring into empty space. No one’s started casting alarmed looks his direction for talking to himself yet—maybe they think he’s a dreamcraft banker, high as a kite and lucid dreaming to a Concern a continent away. Maybe they just don’t care.

Luffy looks at him the way Law looks into corpses, when he’s digging for some trace of the thread to their soul. It makes Law feel transparent and anatomical, diagrammed, like there’s something he should be trying to hide.

You’re scared, Luffy says, oddly sad. You’re scared all the time. It must hurt a lot, if I can feel it without you letting me in. I’m sorry.

Law stands in a single violent motion, pushing himself off the table, chair scraping noisily back over the stone. The chocolate in his nearly-full mug sloshes onto the table, and if he didn’t have the attention of everyone in the room before he’s certainly got it now. “I’m leaving,” he says, and, “we’re finished.”

He seizes his medical bag from the floor and doesn’t look back at Luffy’s cry of, Wait, Torao!, nor for anyone else. Side-steps between chairs that aren’t pulled in quickly enough for him to pass, knocks someone’s purse from where it's hooked over a chair back, shoves bodily past a someone in the door that yells something rude in his wake—and escapes, after a fashion, into the night.

Luffy makes it out after him just as Law’s calling down an opteran, the massive dragonfly-thing wrapping its metal legs around Law’s limbs and pressing its proboscis to the back of his neck. Hey, Luffy says, Torao, don’t leave—

“Get lost,” Law snarls, and gives the opteran his hotel address. Then he says, just in case this time the meaning might stick, “I don’t know what you want, but you can go bother somebody else. You won’t get it from me.”

Anything Luffy thinks back at him in response is lost in the rush of the wind as the opteran lifts off, shooting him into the sky.

*

Later, chucking off his clothes in his hotel room, Law fumes at himself: it’s like you’ve forgotten everything the Hidden Schools ever taught you about gods, never mind about argument. Gods find the levers in you that they need, and they pull them, and then you come crawling to them for their aid and their very own need for devotion—

And it doesn’t matter that what Luffy had said to him had been right, in that deep-cutting way of a truth so raw it isn’t meant to be spoken. It doesn’t matter that he’d smiled at Law like he meant it, or that Law had wanted to believe him when he’d said that makes them my friends, or that Law could have managed his exit better than running out in response to a true observation.

Doesn’t matter, thinks Law, and tries to codify that thought into dogma in the way he convinces bones that they’re whole and knits pieces of flesh back together. Throws himself into bed and tries to shut everything out, anger and humiliation and all.

He sleeps badly, and dreams of firebugs crawling inside his skull, tracing the grooves left by the excavated machine of a Deathless King.

*

The next day Law goes back to work, and forgets, with all his might, about Luffy.

He excavates—cleanses—puts bodies together and puts names to bodies, slowly making his way through the surrounding glass. A day passes, then two, then three. His progress is methodical, soothing in the way of familiar complexity: the problems he faces in piecing together a body, even a mangled one, can be solved, have definite answers. There are only so many ways, in the end, that the pieces can fit to complete the whole he wills them to be; only so many ways that people can look on the inside.

As the Senior Inspector had suggested, he prioritizes clearing a path to the door—some bodies lie in his central ward incomplete, waiting for him to come back and find the rest of their missing pieces—and a route around the room’s edges, allowing the containment people to do their work. The silence of the trading floor is broken, after that; by the fourth day ward contractor Craftsmen join him inside, work along the perimeter of the room to shore up reality and clear out the instability which remains.

He works, and forgets to stop. Shadows cling to his peripheral vision. Monet sends him a nightmare from the home office, asking how the work is progressing, and—with a knowing sort of worry that he wouldn’t tolerate from anyone else, tolerates from her only because if he tried to deny the things she knows about him she’d laugh in his face—asks how he’s holding up. He sends back an acidic reply that doesn’t conceal, quite, his frustration at being asked: yes, he’s fine, and why wouldn’t he be, and it isn’t as though he’s normally prone to having sudden personal breakdowns in the course of his routine professional work, thanks for asking.

He wonders if someone from the RKC team mentioned his slip at that first meeting to the home office, and promptly decides he doesn’t care. His work is impeccable; that’s all that matters, he’s proven that again and again.

(On his fifth night in Dresediel Lex he gets back, Actually, I asked because I heard you’d been in accident, but now that you mention it I guess I’ll be worried about your head too—I hope you can keep it until everyone at RKC is back in one piece. Which makes him grit his teeth and feel like an idiot for being so easily played, and most of all makes him wish that he’d just kept his stupid mouth shut.)

On the sixth day, he finds a body that’s not on the list.

*

The body Law finds is badly burned, and RKC don’t know who he is.

After three repeat attempts to match the body’s thaumaturgic signature to RKC’s records the security chief comes down herself, bearing several more notebooks containing what she tells him is eyes-only security information. Flipping through them and staring at the corpse appears to yield little. “I wonder what he was doing in here, that nobody’s come to us or reported him missing,” she says, shaking her head. “We’ll have to keep him around and hope someone comes forward. If not, we’ll cremate him and stick him in the vault.”

It’s clear from the furrow that forms between her brows that this isn’t all that she’s thinking.

Law, sitting back on his heels by the body, looks impassively down at the charred-away features. A memory churns in his head, just under the surface of conscious thought—older and worse and more visceral than all his memories from his decade of being bound, and not one he’s willing to indulge. His time with the Deathless King of Dressrosa did him that favor, if nothing else: he’s good at compartmentalizing when it’s important, at splintering reality into one damn thing at a time.

Aloud, he says, “You think this one could be the source of the breach.”

The security chief looks sharply at him. “Has anyone said as much?”

“No,” Law says, and, hazarding the guess, “and you don’t want them to, because if word gets out this might’ve been more than an industrial accident it’ll be leverage for your local rebels. Your True Quechal.” Or, he does not say, the King in Red will discover some true connection, and more people will die, maybe in a manner not so unlike the dead man before us. Law remembers, in the meticulously detailed way of the memories he formed when only his utility mattered, reading about the protests in Chakal square; about the gripfire, after, rained down on those the King in Red had shaped into his enemy.

(Somewhere in the back of his head Law had been screaming then, too—wishing desperately that his hands would close the paper, that his eyes and his brain would stop reading, stop looking at the faded daguerrotypes. Stop making him remember the thing that scrapes at his consciousness now, clamoring for his attention.)

(No, Law tells it. Not now.)

“Something like that,” the security chief admits, her expression sour. By the hollowness in her eyes Law guesses she’s thinking of the same images, the same newspaper—or maybe, if she’s from a Skittersill family, of stories told through means closer to home. “In any event, let’s not make our inability to identify this one public knowledge. The Wardens will investigate once we start resurrecting everybody who’s got a phylacteric trust, or a zombie contract that we can seize through its involvement in a possible criminal incident. Chances are that’ll tell us who brought the demon through, and if it’s someone we know—whoever this is won’t matter.”

“Yeah,” Law says, “sure.” And thinks: it will matter. It has to matter, somewhere, to someone, in the grand cosmic clusterfuck of the universe, that this man has died. Even if he wandered into the Chamber only by mistake, even if his life didn’t matter, even if he was a street rat that got in through an unattended side door to get out of the heat; it must be that his passing will change the precise shape of someone’s universe, by irrevocable ultimatum, because that’s how death works. One soul disappears, and others bear the mark of its passing.

Even if the only person who will bear that mark is Law, in his role as a very expensive undertaker that bills by the hour. He doesn’t mind: carrying the marks of others’ passing has long been as natural to him as breathing.

He doesn’t look at the charred body after the security chief leaves, turning to continue his work. Still, it weighs on his mind: presses on his awareness from behind his back, and makes him conscious of the need not to turn.

In his head, the old memory burns, waiting for him to give in.

*

He knows, lying down that night, what to expect.

The nightmare that swallows him is familiar, known, no less terrifying for the fact. Memory drowns out imagination, builds around him, through him, eradicates conscious thought. The cold fear it spools through his veins is reflexive, invariable, inevitable—and he knows, as he always does, that he cannot escape this. Not now, not ever, not any more than anyone can escape themselves.

He is ten, and his city burns.

The fire is loud—roaring, whistling, a deafening roil of sound that spills down from the blazing buildings interjected with shrieks and screams that cannot possibly be human, for nothing human could survive long enough to scream in that flame. It presses on him, heat and noise together, tries to squeeze him flat even before it burns him into ash. Law can’t hear himself cry, and he is, tears and snot and blood streaming down his face—crying so hard he chokes with it, chokes on trying to breathe.

The city burns, and Law walks, walks because he can’t run, walks for the same reason he cries: because he can’t stop, because his body won’t let him. One foot in front of the other, despite the heat, despite the screams, despite the bloody smear of his classmates strewn across the courtyard of the chapel. Towards what, he does not know.

An echoing boom rolls across the city, dwarfs all other sound, like the total absence of noise immediately after a thunderclap. For a moment Law doesn’t understand—can’t react, can’t even think over the totality of it slamming through him.

Then it happens again, and Law sees: Knight war machines, plummeting from the sky on the outskirts of the city. The shattering force of their landing is the source of the boom, and as a hundred more materialize under the smoke-black clouds wreathing the city Law claps his hands over his ears, falls to his knees. Curls into a ball just as the first true wave hits the ground, and heaves choking sobs as the sound of their impact blankets the city, again and again.

In his head Sister Magdalene says—shakily, barely audible, the progress of the amber lead reducing her to a tremulous wreck at the altar—God does not want the Knights and their Queen to take us. He gives us the amber lead as a gift, for in this death we belong to him always, and no Knight may touch us. They would do worse to us, if we lived.

Law cannot imagine worse. Law has sat through the sermons and learned of the seven hells, of the beasts and the fire within: but alone in the burning city those things seem simple and safe, a glimpse of home against hell on earth.

Smoke burns his eyes, in his throat, in his slowly ossifying lungs. He scrubs his sleeve over his face and crawls a block under the boiling dark, no longer able to hear the landing of the Knights’ war machines; pushes back to his knees, gets back to his feet. Looks up again.

The street shakes, and a golden orb the size of a carriage rolls into his path.

Law sees the Knight Centurion unfold. He knows, in the way of dreams, what comes next: knows the lance of the gripfire, knows what flesh looks like sloughing away from bone because he has seen the death’s head skeleton of his sister while she was still screaming, remembers scalp peeling away and what was left of the body, not his sister anymore, collapsing to the stone—

The Knight marches towards him, the street cracking under its metal feet. The building to Law’s right belches fire, wrapping around the golden monstrosity and leaving it untouched, the heat of the blast knocking Law back off his feet, leaving him to gasp uselessly on the cobblestones.

And Law prays, then, desperately, not in the form the Sisters have taught him, not in the way of saying grace—goes right back to that most honest way of speaking a prayer, the kind that must have made gods. God, help me, please, I’ll do anything, help me—

The world cracks, and Law, trying to scramble away from the Knight; the heat of the stone under his hands burning the skin from his palms; slips.

*

And falls, suddenly, into a different dream.

Falls to his hands and knees—his hands meet wet sand—his whole body shaking, his breath ragged, all at once himself again. Thirty-two and still alive and stupid-scared, just by a dream, just by a memory.

The relief of knowing the burning city for a dream is so overwhelming that all he can manage is a heaving sob, curling into himself on the sand. Just for a minute, he allows himself to cry, and be desperately glad. Not there. Not now. Not real.

To thank God for this would be so sickeningly wrong as to evoke that other favored word of the faithful, blasphemy. Secular language fails to provide him with anything so concise, and so Law doesn’t think anything, doesn’t think, just sobs into his knees and tries to learn to breathe again.

It comes back to him, slowly, and eventually he uncurls from himself, pushes shakily to his feet. The dream into which he has fallen is unfamiliar, not like any plane of his mind that he knows; not the pliable perfect calm underneath nightmare that Craftsmen bend to do their work, nor a space his own subconscious has constructed.

He stands on a nighttime coastline, quiet but for the ancient sound of waves against the shore. A gentle ocean breeze blows inland, leaves the tang of salt, the sense of a space too vast and primal to be parsed by any younger sense. Bioluminescent plankton glimmers in the foam that does not reach Law’s feet, which are bare against the beach. Perfect white sand arcs away from him in both directions, unmarred by maritime detritus or debris, disappears around an island curve.

Above, the sky is filled with stars, enough that they can hold their own against the dark. So many more than he has seen in years of light-choked cities that he looks up and forgets, just for a moment, about power, about Craft, about willpower and intent—stares into the glow of the Milky Way and thinks that he understands why the priests of Dresediel Lex take it for a road leading safely through the spiderwebs between stars, and out the other side.

Law breathes in, and breathes out, and breaks his gaze away.

A bonfire burns further down the beach, silhouette shapes ringing the fire.

Laughter floats up from the circle and carries towards Law, scraps of conversation swept by the breeze. This fire is to the heat-noise-terror that Law has left behind as a dance is to a war, its flicker safe, contained, maybe even kind; he can, he thinks, walk towards it without screaming. The sand is warm under his feet when he does, bearing the lingering touch of a long-set sun.

He finds Luffy waiting for him in the fire, and wonders how he expected anything else.

Luffy’s supplicants—Luffy’s friends?—laugh and drink around him, paying no heed to Law’s arrival. Merely living dreamstuff, all of them, no different from the rest of the idyll that surrounds him, no different than the sea. Only Luffy, floating amid the flames between them, feels real.

Is real, once Law rouses his drained intellect enough to check his immaterial senses. The thread of the dream spools from this point, bends in the realm the eye can’t see in the way space bends around a black hole. Everything, from the beach to the enormous night sky to the stars writ in faithful recollection, starts from Luffy, and flows out.

Hi, Luffy says.

“Hi,” echoes Law, quiet and woefully inadequate. He is standing in the dream of a god, the lattice of wards that keeps his mind free of deities and demons and other things that scrape at the walls of his consciousness failed, sundered by a lapse in his resolve. This is how a god gets you, the Hidden Schools had taught him; this is how they get inside your soul, how they fill you up until nothing fills you save devotion. One uncareful thought, one prayer, one moment of weakness, and you let them in, give up your will.

He should be angry with Luffy for taking advantage. Should be angry with himself, most of all. Should be scrambling to claw his way out and rebuild his wards, to cast out—be cast out by?—this thing that wants his soul. Should be looking for a way to mend the gaps and save himself, while he still has a sliver of a chance.

He is too tired, too washed out, too post-panic empty, to do any of these things.

How easily his heart fails him, in the end.

Are you okay? Luffy says. The dreamstuff supplicants fade away, wisping into the dark, and then it’s just the two of them, alone on the beach: a ragged Craftsman and a little god, curled up in his little fire.

Law sinks bonelessly to the sand. “Stupid question.” Further motion feels like more than he can bear, and so he stays just as he falls, knees folded under him, hands fallen together in his lap. “In any context where it’s used. Only Kathic would invent a phrase to be used to ask someone wounded whether they haven’t been wounded at all.”

Guess that means no, Luffy thinks at him. Sadness laces through the touch of humor in his tone, weighs against Law’s heart.

“Guess so,” Law says, and, “You pulled me out.” This isn’t a question at all.

Yeah, Luffy says. I heard you, from across the city. I wanted to help. When you reached, I pulled.

And so a prayer in a dream to a dead god was enough to break his wards, and all his power, Law thinks. All that schooling, all that debt and mental discipline drilled into him by the Hidden Schools; and still none of him could stand against the scared little kid wailing in the back of his head, screaming and begging for someone to help. Law could laugh.

Law could cry, if he hadn’t done so much of it tonight already.

Aloud, he says, “Thank you.” The words don’t stick like he thought they would, coming out.

Luffy’s smile warms him from the inside out—because of course it does, of course Luffy can influence him now however he wishes. Caught inside Luffy’s dream, inside the proscribed reach of Luffy’s divinity, Law can be made to feel anything, made to experience any number of feelings not his own.

He does not know how to stop something so small and foolish as a momentary sense of safety and a flutter in his chest, an easing of his heart. Doesn’t want to, sitting there by Luffy’s fire, for all that he knows that’s how the downward slide begins, any ground given at once given away.

Stay with me for a while, Luffy says, and reaches out of the fire to touch Law’s hand. Flame dances on his skin, and does not burn. You shouldn’t be not okay alone.

Law looks away.

Nods, just once, and stays.

*

Everything looks different in the daylight. Night terrors are reduced to just that; an inconvenience of the dark hours, not an insurmountable fracturing of his mind. And so in the morning Law finds the shreds his anger and his sanity at the bottom of two mugs of coffee, rebuilds his wards, and goes to work.

Contractor Craftsmen cluster in his periphery, setting upon the wards of the building itself to refactor them and shore the place up against future attack by things that come from Outside. Law, running sleepless tired, lets blood and scribes glyphs and tags and pieces together the twisted bodies of the expired occupants of the Chamber of Commerce, and only has to escape into a hallway to hyperventilate once.

Fortunately—or maybe inevitably—it happens when the containment people call for everyone to get out while they test one of their wards; robbed of the work to focus his attention Law’s mind drifts, and the burning city rises from within. He’ll be seeing it every time he closes his eyes for days, he knows, but if he doesn’t do something now it’ll get worse, and so while the contractors and the insurance golems go for coffee and sandwiches he goes to wrestle it down. In a hallway branching off the main entrance he crouches with his head between his knees, counts to fifty, and swallows three of the white oblong pills hidden away in his inner breast pocket, prescribed to him by a doctor in Shikaw to keep him from losing his mind.

Sometimes they even work.

Gods, but Law wants to fly home to Shikaw and get drunk.

(Really drunk, like that time after the ZombieGro merger last year—when he and Monet had sat on the floor of her office with their backs to her desk and polished off her entire bottle of the really good whiskey, and smoked the almost-as-good imported cigars. Monet hadn’t gotten her talons yet, then, had taken off her shoes and her stockings and put her feet up against the window that was really a wall; Law had made the floor clear as a glass, and they’d watched Shikaw glittering dark down below, traded the bottle.

Law—so drunk he couldn’t remember it, after, but of course Monet remembered it all, like a traitor—had told her everything, that night, all he never intended. About how the reason his personality and his portfolio didn’t match up was because for the last ten years of his career he hadn’t been at the wheel of his own mind, had been caught fast in the web of another. About how he’d only broken away a mere month before coming to Kelethres, Albrecht, & Ao, and was still learning who he actually was.

Which isn’t exactly a scintillating example of a good time when he’s gotten drunk, but in the part he remembers everything had felt, for a little while, almost all right: fuzzed and distant while he sat next to Monet and looked at the stars with the city an imperfect reflection below, a vast shattered mirror facing the sky.)

He could use that, right now, feeling almost all right. Not good, not okay, not even, exactly, better: but suspended in the way that being up at three in the morning is suspended, too late for exertion and too early for expectations, the safest hour of night.

He does not, standing there in the hallway, think about the things that came after his nightmare. Not about the white sand beach, or the little god that saved him watching him from the fire. Not about how easy it had been to stay, sitting beside him, for hours that ran short.

He cannot hear Luffy now, and that’s all right, that’s as it should be. The rebuilt wards around his mind are strong, reinforced with newer and more randomized algorithms, difficult to reach through from a distance. Unless Luffy has the strength to materialize before him, willing to risk life and limb by popping up amid unrefined and unfinished Craftwork and post-demon carnage, they won’t be talking soon. All the same—by stupid illogic—Law thinks, Stay out of my head, and fails to be reassured by the answering silence.

The work drags on, bones bodies pieces all coming together. Law, for all the broken glass and fire and screams in his head, does not break.

*

Mid-week, the Wardens bring in a hedge witch to reconstruct the face of the burned corpse.

She’s a local practitioner, Law sees at once, nothing like a full Craftswoman. Old and bent, her body sagging with age and a rough life, her eyes almost entirely white: when Law glances over from his own work she seems to be doing hers by touch alone, clay and stone and thread moving under her hands as charred flesh peels away and flakes to the floor.

When she’s finished she calls him over together with the security chief, sitting back with her hands flat on her knees as they approach. “It is finished.”

“Hells,” the security chief swears, as Law’s stomach sinks. “It’s just a kid.”

The hedge witch inclines her head. “That is so.” The face that stares sightless up at them—the witch has molded the eyes open, the mouth parted in surprise, death’s moment expression—is that of a young man, also local, light freckles scattered across his face.

His features remind Law sharply of Luffy, and Law wants to kick himself for thinking something so daft. Unconscious bias, surely, some small similarity in the nose and the structure of bone that’s making him draw the connection: the notion of a god and a human sharing familial appearance is preposterous, no different than assuming similarity between an owner and a pet.

And yet.

He’s still staring down at the face, not letting himself look at the rest of the black-charred body, when one of RKC’s Craftsmen calls to them from the trading floor doors. “Chief! Counsel!” A bearded, heavyset man shuffles towards them, a sheaf of papers under his arm; very small spectacles slide dangerously low on his nose. “You still mucking about with that John Doe? You can leave off. We’ve found the culprits.”

“Who?” says the security chief, tearing her gaze away from the corpse.

“Apparently, those two,” the Craftsman says, pointing with fore and middle finger at two of the bodies still lying morgue-cold in Law’s ward. “Turns out they made a deal with one of the stiffs we’ve just woken up down at Grace and Mercy, insider trading. Our guy, who started singing as soon as the Wardens laid on the pressure, seems to have managed such a warped twist of logic in the unwritten contract that it let the demon they were using to calculate figures come through.” He shrugs, adjusts the papers under his arm, and pushes his tiny spectacles up his nose to lean forward and get a look at the body. “Dunno who this kid is, but we’ve got a clear deposition—he had nothing to do with it.”

The security chief looks relieved; given the possible outcomes had the young man been the source of the accident, Law can’t blame her. “Thank the gods,” she says, and shakes her head. “Thanks for bringing us down the news, Craftsman. You’re right—guess we’ve just been wasting our time.” The old hedge witch, Law sees out of the corner of his eye, takes this valuation of her expertise in stride, though the corner of her mouth twitches downward.

“But we still don’t know who this is,” he finds himself saying, looking again to the dead man’s face: long, with large eyes, framed by shoulder-length hair the hedge witch has reconstructed with uncanny likeness in string and silk. “Or why he was here.”

“Who cares?” the security chief says—callous, now, her crisis averted. “He’s not the one who did this, and he’s not one of ours. If no one comes forward to claim him, that makes him fertilizer.”

She ambles away together with the Craftsman that brought the news, plumbing him for more details on the deal that tore reality’s fabric. A pair of Wardens come by in their place, and lead the old hedge witch away, thanking her courteously for her time.

Law stands by the body for a long time after they leave, thinking of remembrance without name, and tombs raised in memoriam to the unidentified fallen. Someone, he thinks again; someone must have cared, if this man existed at all. No one moves through the universe without trace, without making rings on the surface of water.

He goes back to his work, in the end, his heart heavy, and dwells on the faces of his own dead.

*

By the end of the second week Law’s world is nearly bereft of color, as though Dresediel Lex is an image burned out by its other oppressive overlord, the desert sun. It isn’t that, of course, just progressive loss of soul to his meticulous work on the shattered occupants of the Chamber of Commerce, but the metaphor feels right.

He stops only long enough to replenish his reserves from the company expense account on his way out, no see-you-tomorrows or perfunctory handclasps at all. The world regains color and definition, though not so much as he might have expected: the haze of the late afternoon city, a mix of smog and sand and only the King in Red and the dead gods know what, blurs distance and backslides every color into sepia tones.

The sky turns poisonous orange overhead while he hails a cab, declining a circling opteran. It’s a quiet ride through Sansilva, and Law tips the cabbie ten thaums.

Luffy is waiting for him on the balcony of his hotel room.

Another week of piecing together the bodies of demon-butchered stock brokers has drained Law of any remaining ire. Still, he swears in three languages when he cards into the room and sees the little fire god waving at him outside the glass door, perched on—floating over—the balcony railing. Outdoors because the proprietary wards imposed by the firm make it impossible for him to enter without a dreamway and consent, Law guesses; Kelethres, Albrecht, & Ao have never been the type to skimp on the basics.

Law takes his sweet time divesting himself of shoes, suit, and bag. Tosses the jacket and waistcoat together into the closet, opens his collar and rolls up his sleeves, gets a glass of water before he goes to the balcony door. He isn’t quite sure who he’s trying to bluff, even in his own mind.

“What,” he says as the sliding door pushes itself open at a flick of his gaze, “do you want.”

Came to see how you were doing, Luffy says, apparently totally unperturbed by this callous welcome. Also, I was bored.

Standing at the border of artificial interior cool and the blazing sprawl of desert-industrial modernity Law isn’t certain whether the heat that buffets him rolls off Luffy, but he’s willing to bet that the temperature on his balcony is at least five degrees above any of those adjacent. “Bored,” he repeats, and then, because he can’t quite find it in himself to ignore the first part, after what Luffy did for him during that night: “I’m fine. Better.”

Good, Luffy says, and looks at him expectantly. Law hesitates a moment longer—contemplates the winding string of his bad decisions so far, and the longevity of the ice floating in his glass, and the fact that at least the Craft saves him the trouble of having to sweat. Makes his choice, and steps through the ward and onto the balcony, coming to lean on the railing by Luffy.

Sansilva glimmers in opulence at the foot of his high-rise hotel, falls away downhill towards the Skittersill. Crystal spires hang in the airspace above and refract—nothing, in the daytime, and concentrated starlight at night—down to the firm offices in the pyramids below, their use as a reminder of the presence of Craft a mere added bonus. Palm trees and lush gardens, the surest sign of wealth in a city ever parched for lack of fresh water, fill the cracks of this part of DL with verdant green.

The pyramid at 667 Sansilva looms at the center of it all, black and nightmare-immense. A visual focal point of power—ever its purpose, even before the King in Red broke Ixchitli upon his altar and fashioned that altar into a desk. The dark profile seems to weigh on Law’s consciousness amid the orange glow of the sky, and he looks away from it, then, looks aside.

Finds himself looking at Luffy, not having meant to.

Floating cross-legged over his railing Luffy looks—comfortable, confident, easy. At home in his city, even here under the spires of Craftsmen. Today to Law’s human eye he looks like a Gleblander spirit of summer, varying tones of red flickering across his transparent form, the flames around his edges going nearly invisible against the haze of the heat. To the inner eye he looks much as he did the day before, a tangled knot of small-time obligations and agreements of faith, maybe a little more emptied of excess soul. Not a god who draws heavily on his followers, then, even while he expends his power for—

For people like Law.

“What are you waiting for?” Law asks him—wonders aloud, maybe, hardly expecting a straight answer. “Do you think if you sit here long enough I’ll agree to pray at your altar? That night last week was a lapse of my judgement, however honorable your deed. A theological one-night stand. You’re not supposed to come back, after those.”

Don’t have an altar. Luffy wrinkles his nose in distaste, like the notion of being bound to a rock is repulsive. Law gives a dismissive jerk with the hand that isn’t holding his glass—he hadn’t really thought that a transient small god of fire held court at an altar, had merely been making a point.

Actually, Luffy tells him, I wanted to see if you’d like to go dancing.

Law says, “What?”

*

Ten minutes later he’s still stuck on dancing. Based on the conversation, its pitch rising in time with Law’s blood pressure (his glass sits a ways away on the balcony, now, empty courtesy of an errant gesture that put its contents over the side) he’s pieced together the basics, and tries to outline the offer. “You want me to let you ride along in my body, without soul matrix integration, so that we can—go dancing.”

Yeah, Luffy says, wide-eyed and ruffled. It’s clear he’s getting a little exasperated with how long Law is taking to get there.

“Because you want to go dancing,” Law says, and pauses. This next point, out of all of them, strikes him as most in need of clarification: “With me.”

That’s what I said! Luffy huffs, blowing out a frustrated breath that makes his uncut bangs flare upward—and where did a god learn a projection like that, Law wonders anew, a gesture from the realm of physics and people, and why integrate it into his being? What god cares about how human they seem, walking among the devoted?

Come on. Won’t you try it? It’ll be fun!

“I,” Law says, and stops.

Working with gods even in the professional context is considered—well—unprofessional, or at best an unenviable nuisance, the worst to be had in the field. Letting one ride along hooked into your nervous system (even one-way, unidirectional impulse, no control granted) would be considered preposterous, debased, on par with the behavior of priests and worshipping madmen. Stupid, first and foremost, and more than a little bit questionable.

(He wonders, for a moment, what Monet would say, and doesn’t have to: she’d say, do it, you idiot; do it because you want to, do it because it might make you happy, do it because it might hurt. Do it because people who spend ten years in soulbound servitude to a Deathless King don’t hesitate to take for themselves, to make up for what was taken away—do it, godsdamn it, for you.)

If the firm ever finds out about this, Law catches himself thinking, they’re probably going to fire him for conducting himself with such rampant lack of professionalism while out on assignment. We didn’t send you to DL to sleep around with the street-level pantheon! he can already hear Wakefield squeaking.

And realizes that means he’s already made his decision, will galloping on ahead of conscious thought.

“Yeah,” he hears himself say. “Okay. What the hell?”

Luffy smiles.

*

Just like that, they go dancing.

By the time Law gets down to street level from his hotel room it’s almost full dark, and Luffy glows like a swarm of lightning bugs in the nighttime, waiting for him near the door.

He grins at Law as he approaches, says, You look good this way. I didn’t know before that you had tattoos.

And reaches towards Law’s open collar: slowly, like he’s giving him time to back away. Law’s breath catches, stills in his lungs, and he thinks the only part of him that keeps doing its job is his heart, which beats overtime in his chest. They’re close, closer than they were in his dream, Luffy drifting a little above him and reaching down, so close that Law’s sure that if he closed his eyes to look at Luffy he’d see constellations of Craft instead of lines.

Luffy’s fingers never brush skin, never touch him, just tug his half-buttoned shirt open to see the tattoo that covers the neat horizontal scars on his chest. Law, frozen before him, feels stupidly, inexplicably cheated, like he’s been robbed of a touch so expected that it had already passed, phantom, over his skin.

This one’s good, too, Luffy says.

Law is so utterly scattered that it takes him several seconds to find his tongue. “They—they match the anchoring glyphs in my glyphwork. The ones that ground the rest of the scars used for my Craft.” True of the ones on his arms.

His voice comes out breathy and fast, and he feels hot and foolish and wrong, doesn’t know how to fit inside his own skin. He remembers the confidence with which he’d moved when he was bound, confidence that felt like it was his own, that filled him to the brim and made it so easy to do all the things he was bidden: almost wishes, in that moment, that he could have it back, if only to feel less like he’s fumbling helplessly in the dark.

But Luffy doesn’t look at him like he thinks Law’s foolish, or wrong, or any of those things, and he says, Come on. It’s not far—just down the hill, on the cliffs. Turns fluidly in the air and leads towards the lush and shimmering nightlife portion of Sansilva, Law following after.

The streets on the way are darkened, massive leaves of greenery hanging over the road outlined by the distant neon lights. Groups of college kids pass them going the other way, talking, laughing, touching each other, drinking; Law walks with his hands in his pockets and thinks about offset angles, and unknown missed opportunities, and spending ten years underwater in his own mind.

You look sad, Luffy tells him, and Law glances up to see that Luffy’s floating backwards down the hill, watching him instead of the sidewalk. Tell me?

“Nothing worth telling.” Law looks down at his shoes, and wonders what else he can say to change the trajectory of their conversation, to send it down routes where he doesn’t have to swallow his words. “Your friend, the one you said was lost. Did you ever find him?”

I found the trail, Luffy says, his expression gone momentarily serious. Just today, around noon, and he’s close. I’m going to go looking for him tonight.

“But you’re taking me dancing first,” Law says, faintly incredulous, until Luffy says: Yes. Because that’s important, too.

“I don’t,” Law starts, and catches himself. Speaking of swallowing words.

What? Luffy says, and watches him with big round eyes that Law thinks would have been dark brown if he were human—like his own, maybe, but not so bleak.

“I don’t understand,” he says quietly, “why you’re interested in me, if it isn’t to take of my soul. That would make sense—your followers are gone, you said, except for your last lost sheep. You need another source. But you keep saying that isn’t it, so what is?”

’Cause, Luffy says. And then: ’Cause you were kind to me. ’Cause I think you think you shouldn’t have good things, and I don’t know why you think that but you’re wrong, and I’m gonna show you. ’Cause I want to see what it looks like when you smile.

Law realizes his mouth is open, and closes it. He’s stopped in the street, drawn up short by Luffy’s honesty, so he starts walking again, like someone who can use their feet and process a conversation at the same time. He watches the cracks in the sidewalk: no weeds, not enough water here for growth outside the gardens of the rich.

A breath of saltwater air blows in from the southwest, sharper now than the last time Law had been near the harbor, less stripped-bare by the heat. It stirs something in him like nostalgia, but for that nostalgia would require knowing what it is that he misses: instead there’s only a gap that yawns under his heart and says, this was something that mattered, once, and how dare you forget.

Almost there, Luffy says, as they come to the end of the sloping street that runs from central Sansilva. Law’s gaze follows Luffy’s forward dive, looking along the boulevard onto which they’ve been emptied.

No buildings line the far side of the road, here: the land terminates in a sharp plunge, a cliffside that meets the the rest of the seafront city below. Waterfront Dresediel Lex glows with ghostlights and neon and does not sleep, and the deep dark of the sea washes against it, presses the city in with water that it cannot drink or fish or use to irrigate, concealing monstrosities that no god remains to rein in.

The side of the road on which they stand is lined with dance clubs and bars, blindingly aglow in contrast to the darkness across. Music spills into the street—swing, mostly, since this is still Sansilva, full of foreigners and visiting Craftsmen, but with an aspect to its percussion that sounds unique to Law’s ear, resonant-deep, sharply divergent from the rustling snare brushes used in Shikaw.

Luffy leads them to a dance hall walled at the front by a trellis swarming with vines, multicolored light gleaming in flashes between the leaves, the building swelling with sound and the press of souls. The bouncer at the door looks Law over and lets him through for twenty thaums, and doesn’t seem to see Luffy at all.

Inside is loud and bright and alive, people and skeletons in vibrant colors all spinning and twisting to the music in pairs. Alive in the way Law desperately wants to be, after losing so many years; alive in a way more alien to him by far than dead spaces encased in demonglass, so much so that being faced with it leaves him at a loss.

In his head, Luffy says, Are you ready? and Law had almost forgotten what he’s agreed to, what fool thing he’s elected to do.

Swallows hard, and says, “Yeah.” And then, because a disclaimer seems necessary, and he should have said so sooner, really, would have if he weren’t in the apparent process of losing his mind, “I might not be very good at this.” He thinks—hopes—that he has enough muscle memory from all the times he did this when it didn’t matter, when it was a task no different than any other, the music a sound the way wheels over pavement are sound, waves pushed through medium.

It’s okay, Luffy says, I am.

And flows into him, a surge of warmth and presence that plunges through Law and down his spine and into his peripheral nervous system. For a moment Law thinks that Luffy’s found some way to overwhelm the limits of what Law has allowed, but no: Law can feel Luffy inside, coiled around his soul like they’re two winding snakes but not through, not like thread sunk in with a needle.

Excitement and joy that aren’t his own bubble close enough that he feels the backwash, infectious, though still distinct from his own; not so different from being near someone who brings energy to a room, only immediate-visceral, so much so that it’s easy to go along with, easy for Law to let himself fall. He moves, and each motion feels easy, like maybe that’s what people mean when they say a spring in your step, displacing his own inertia made suddenly effortless.

“Oh,” he says, because there isn’t anything else that he can. He is aware of the weight that had been pressing down upon him only by its sudden absence, by the way worry and pain wash away in the tide of Luffy’s nearby happy assurance. His own soul burns brighter inside him, flowing in amplified synchronicity. “Oh.”

Let’s dance, Luffy says, his voice laughing, and Law wants, and says, “Let’s.”

*

They dance.

Muscle memory, or Luffy’s intuition, or both, they come through: Law catches the rhythm and doesn’t stumble, doesn’t misstep. He dances with a dozen partners, men and women and neither, and doesn’t recall a single one save for as flashing colors and counterbalancing motion, drawing him back as centrifugal force thrusts them apart.

Feels the music and the motion with an overwhelming physicality like nothing that he can remember, as like to his memories as a black-and-white daguerrotype is to the real thing. The universe whirls, the music pulses, and his heart beats in time with the bouncing walk of the bass; he sweats, and breathes faster; hands clasp his and bodies press into his own and turn and transfer momentum and revel in mutual careless use—

—and he feels it, all of it, drinks it in and wants and wants and wants, starved-mad for the sensory input. For knowing, exactly, his precise definition in space.

Fills his own body all the way out to the skin and thinks, somewhere amid it all, that this, this is what he broke away for: not for morals, not for wrong or right, not for anything or anyone else. Just for himself, and being able to know, with total and absolute corroboration, that he’s really alive.

He can’t find it in himself to feel guilty.

All the way through Luffy’s joy buoys his own, bounces it back in perfect matched frequency, strikes his soul into resonance. Says, your joy is my joy, and the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

I told you, Luffy laughs, that it would be fun.

Law hasn’t the breath to answer him, then, and maybe that’s answer enough.

*

And when the music crashes to a stop, as is the style of swing in Dresediel Lex when breaking for intermission, Law stumbles—directional, not quite an uncontrolled fall—backs out of the crowd, off the dance floor, all the way until his shoulders hit wall. The world is hot, laden with the sweat of three dozen spun dancers, Law’s own among them; dark and slashed-open bright by the adrenaline and shared exhilaration, and Law’s breath comes hard, his chest heaving with the exertion.

It feels right, and so good that Law sags against the wall and wonders if his legs might give way, checks himself for god-feeding euphoria. But no: his soul is still intact, still inside him, close against Luffy’s within but not shorn from Law, not taken when he wasn’t looking.

“I,” he starts, and has to catch his breath again, “that was—”

Good, Luffy thinks for him, his bubbling wind-chime laughter filling Law’s ear, and, I like dancing with you.

And Law wants, suddenly, to show him—wants to get across the things he cannot say, to make Luffy understand, to touch, to translate the electricity humming live-wire under his skin into one single action. Wants so much that he can’t put it into words, can’t even ask if it’s possible, and surely he should already know, the thaumaturgical limitations of a small god aren’t so complex.

He doesn’t say it, but it must be that Luffy understands, anyway, or else wants the same, for all that divine systems are nothing like those bearing mortal souls. Amid the heat and the sweat and the crescendo of the band as they dive into their next song Law feels hands reaching up over his shoulders, and fingers brushed against his jaw, darts of heat sinking down through him at each minute contact. A shorter body, pressing warm against his own—

And then Luffy, who is not there; who cannot be there, being as he is a being immaterial; kisses him, close and whole and with all the fierceness of his elemental fire.

Law has only just enough time to think fleetingly of all the contracts that could be sealed with a kiss. Of the Craftswoman who killed men by infusing them with demons through a parting touch, of gods that could use a kiss to drink a human whole—and then he surrenders, heart aching, unwilling to let this go for any risk, for any single thing. Kisses back, and thinks only, Yes, and yes, and please.

The kiss is long, and perfect, and burns like a brand on his lips after they part.

Into the breathless space that follows Luffy says, brightly, I think I like kissing you, too, and fades from touch, seeps back into the aligned matrix of their souls.

Law gives a stunned laugh, and tries to strangle the desire to do that again—and again, and again, and again and again, for a very long time . . . “Do you do that,” he gasps, “very often?”

Never, Luffy says, which makes Law’s heart flip idiotically in his chest.

“Oh,” he says.

I have to go, Luffy says, which pulls a tiny sound of protest out of Law’s throat. But I’ll come back, later. We’ll do this again. Will, not can, like he’s already decided.

“When,” Law wants to know. “When—”

Tomorrow? Luffy says, and Law wants to say, I can’t wait that long, wants to say, I haven’t felt so much in all of the three years since I got away; wants to get across, through some means, please, if I stop I don’t know if I’ll be able to start again, don’t leave me alone.

But he says, “Yeah,” and, “okay,” and, through a throat gone awkwardly tight, “I’ll be waiting. After work.”

Okay, Luffy says, and smiles at him, and Law feels another, parting press of lips against his, a brush that he chases, unable to stop—

But he is alone amid the crowd in the dance hall, and his breath leaves him in one harsh exhale, rather like Luffy himself.

He walks home.

*

The night outside is cool and dry, bliss after the dance hall heat. Law dries out his shirt with a sweep of the Craft, leaves his hair the plastered mess that it is, and trudges back up the hill to his hotel.

Alone in the dark with his hands in his pockets he feels frustrated, poorly contained; like he needs to do something, or tell someone, make someone else understand what’s just happened if only so he can understand it himself. Wants more, having wanted, and thinks that he’s certainly going crazy, a whole different kind from before.

He hasn’t kissed anyone as himself in a very long time.

He wonders where Luffy has gone, and how difficult it would be to find him, to trace a single thaumaturgical signature through who knows how much of the city. Not so difficult as it might have been before what they did tonight, maybe; he’s got an echo of Luffy painted across his own soul, as near-perfect reference as it’s possible to get without an active channel, some devotional object.

He decides to try it, just for the hell of it. Not meaning to go looking for him, not really, just idle curiosity, something for his brain to do while he makes his way back to his room, where maybe steady lighting and a shower will go a long way to make sense of his life—or, equally likely, they won’t.

It proves to be an easy enough trick to manage. He takes the shape of Luffy’s soul marked across his and transcribes it onto the web of the city, drawing the tracer glyph on his palm with a pen he conjures out of a pocket (though not, exactly, the pocket he’s wearing). The glyphs on his arms flare with moonlight, just once, and the concentric circles and symbol he’s drawn cut into his hand, outlining themselves in his blood.

As he crests the hill where his hotel sits, the rest of Sansilva below him, he feels a directional tug at his consciousness. Not far, it says, and makes him look up—

—and stare directly at the dark hulk of the Chamber of Commerce on the far side of the pyramid.

No, Law thinks.

Yes, the glyph says, definitely. I don’t lie, especially not when you’ve made visual contact.

Law breaks into a run.

*

He wonders, as he sprints at impossible Craft-aided speeds towards the Chamber of Commerce at the top of the hill: did you lie to me. Did I tell you something I shouldn’t have, unknowing, or did you find it in my head when I broke. Did you betray me. Did you, did you, did you—

And it doesn’t matter, in the end, doesn’t change what he has to do: get there before the small god tears open a hole in the world, whether by accident or design, whether he’s really just looking for his friend, caught in the blast of three weeks ago, or whether this had been some scheme, some plan all along.

Whether everything Luffy said was just so he could use him, distract him, melt the resolve and reason of the Craftsman getting in his way, or—not.

Anger rises like an arctic tide inside Law. He won’t be placing any bets on the latter: when he finds Luffy, if the evidence points in the direction of inevitability, if he has to, he’ll kill him. Find his contractual ties to his friends and send pain and death crawling down them like spiders, to bite and tear and eat away at the mortal souls this god must protect, because that, always, is how you kill the divine: choke them with their own promises, their struggle to fulfill their oaths turned into death throes. Strangled by their own obligation.

The Chamber sits empty-dark at the end of the block, windows gaping at him as Law closes the distance. No flashes, yet, no earth-rending explosions—maybe he’ll make it. Maybe he can stop this, before it’s too late.

In the late hours of the night the Chamber is still guarded by demonward and Wardens, the latter posted inside in case anyone with clearance enough to pass through the security demons comes snooping around in the night. Law’s clearance, integrated into the wards after the first day, allows him to pass without setting them off, though he moves so fast that they almost activate before his signature is finally read; the Wardens, he suspects, will not be so quick on the uptake.

The doors slam open before him.

The entryway hall looks strange in the absence of work crews, equipment and half-drawn wards and hardhats sitting abandoned for the night. Two Wardens near the exit, armed with lightning rods, surge towards Law by spinal reflex as the doors ricochet off either wall. “Halt,” one says, and the other grits out, “Authorized personnel only,” and both have their weapons drawn.

Law considers trying to explain only long enough to duck the rod swung at him—it passes next to his ear with a displacement of air that suggests that weight, as well as elemental prowess, is part of its lethal charm—and decides against it. The second Warden’s truncheon strikes his left shin in the same moment: pain spikes up to Law’s knee, severe enough that it registers first as a hot-cold flash and only then blooms into agony. He staggers, and hits the ground hard.

In the instant he spends dazed on the floor, the impact of the fall rattling his brain in his skull, Law thinks that it probably doesn’t hurt as much as the lightning he’s sent arcing back into the Warden, closed-loop.

The Warden screams as blue electricity walks in lines across his body, his limbs, his faceless polished-metal mask. The other Warden, the one who’d missed his swing, tries again, angrier now and more dangerous. Law hopes one of them has already sounded the alert to get someone down here—any breach of security ought to be enough to get them to rouse the containment specialist Craftsmen that stop demons as they happen, rather than picking up after—and rolls, the Warden’s bludgeon coming down in the space his head was a moment ago.

He kills the pain receptors in his leg, but it nearly folds under him as he lurches back to his feet, anyway, one hand braced on the nearby wall: broken bone, almost certainly, but he’ll fix it later, hasn’t got time. The Warden he’d got with the lightning collapses writhing onto the floor, still tangled in sparks; the one that remains lunges for him, fast, swinging wide—target already slowed, backed against the side of the hallway, no need to get tactical now.

Law reaches, and makes a single, violent gesture, hand closing into a fist.

The Warden’s truncheon slips out of his hand, hits the marble with a heavy solid sound. His other hand clutches at his chest, and he makes a choked noise and freezes, for a moment, like he’s trying to decide whether to stand or to fall; then topples forward like a felled tree, Law barely managing to scramble out of the way.

He’ll live, Law thinks. Probably.

Not the most impressive entrance for a powerful Craftsman, but then: he’s out of practice. Law limps for the doors at the end of the hall, towards the trading floor, the tracking glyph in his palm growing hot at the proximity.

There’s another silver-masked Warden poised at the door, lightning rod held out in front of him like a sword; smart enough to not charge Law after what he’s just seen happen to his compatriots, maybe. “Halt,” says the Warden, in a high quavery voice that suggests the hulking shape belongs to someone younger than Law would have expected. “I can’t let you pass.”

Law pauses.

Steps forward wreathed in black fire and swarming shadow, larger than life, and reaches for the Warden’s face—the kid shrinks back, doesn’t even think to swing the lightning rod, and Law is close enough to rend his soul right out of his body, looms taller as he nears—

Snaps his fingers in front of the kid’s face, and watches him topple over into a faint, eyes rolling up.

It’s nice, sometimes, when your job title comes with a reputation. Law charges inside.

*

For a moment, he thinks he’s made it in time.

The inside of the chamber is silent and dark, as echoing and alien as the first time Law stepped inside it two weeks ago. The only light comes from the flickering pale red of Luffy, suspended in the air over Law’s ward at the center, looking down at the charred corpse still preserved there, his glow reflecting off the demonglass all around.

Law runs towards him, following the cleared path to the center, ignoring the horrible way his leg keeps twisting under him. He manages, with a little persuasion, to convince the surrounding air that it isn’t possible for him to end up face-down on the floor. “Don’t,” he yells, “don’t—”

Means to say, don’t touch that, don’t reach into the soul matter, wait, you idiot, wait.

The words never make it out of his mouth.

Everything happens at the same time. Luffy looks up at him, astonished, eyes wide; Law reaches the edge of the central circle, skidding; and the massive whorl of glass reaching up to the ceiling right behind Luffy bursts, a million razor-sharp shards exploding outward at once.

Law drops to one knee, pulling darkness over himself like a cloak, shielding himself from the blast. Glass smashes against his shield, which holds, and scatters across the room, pinging off other clusters of demonglass, off the floor, off the ceiling. Law unfurls from his crouch the moment it’s passed, standing to face—

Standing to—

Demon pours forth from the broken space in the glass. Spills in a writhing black mass that looks liquid but is impossibly multifaceted polygonal, changing and changing again so quickly it hurts to look at directly, roils forward, immense, growing larger and taking shape as it escapes out of the glass, a shape Law’s brain can’t make sense of, surges towards—

—Luffy, who is still hanging there above the body, turning to stare at the oncoming mass of teeth clicking teeth not crystals or broken geometry but teeth and claws and sharp sharp sharp made to break disassemble consume and—

—swallows him, instant, inevitable, in less time than it would take Law to blink. Turns on Law next, scouring the moonlight out of his glyphs, claws raking his soul and scraping away his starlit power before it’s even reached him in space. The pain of it takes his breath away, and he falls to the floor, scrambles backwards in mortal, instinctive terror.

Fights back by that same instinct, imposing the rules of his universe onto the demon, dulling its uncaring swath of claws and teeth and talons and ordering the brain-breaking non-shape of it into something that fits into the right number of dimensions—something he can know, and therefore break—

It almost works. The demon almost succumbs to his logic: almost crumbles, almost collapses back into itself. But with a final surge from inside the glass it overcomes the limitations that he’s imposed, comes bearing down on him, a mind-breaking wretched black wave.

Law throws his hands up. Tries to form a shield—wills the air impenetrable, draws on his own blood from the sliced-open cuts in his hand, attempts that last self-consuming form of defense. Anything to survive long enough to try again, to stop the demon’s nightmare logic from taking root in this world, to send it packing back to its own.

The demon crashes through his defenses like he’s done nothing at all, swallowing him like an avalanche.

*

Death might have been better than what comes next.

Then again, Law hasn’t died yet—not in the clinical sense. It’s difficult to draw a proper comparison.

The demon shreds his soul. It splits him open and takes out all the parts that it can make tick and breaks those, too, again and again, and Law does not scream because he has no voice left to do it with. Is broken, annihilated, rebuilt and broken again.

And as the demon consumes him he knows, feels through it that the rules he flung at it hurt; that maybe, when it’s done with him and the containment people get to the Chamber, it will even die. Return, shrinking and pitiable, to its realm, no longer capable of existing in a world where its geometry doesn’t fit.

But time stretches, turns infinite-subjective, and Law will writhe in agony he cannot name for eternity, until the universe shudders to a stop and all the stars wink out. His torment will outlast civilization even if the demon breaks down in seconds, or escapes at once back into its void. He knows that, not knowing how, and the demon knows that he knows, and tells him: give up. Give in. Stop resisting. Be my anchor point in this universe, and in return I will, eventually, let you die.

And Law wants to give in. Giving up is easy: he spent a decade folding, always, whether he wanted to or not. Doing so now would be just like that—

Just like that, and every last part of him howls no—

But Law is not good and he is not strong, and he is only here because he was weak enough to get distracted by want, relearning its form and wanting, at once, all too much. The dark closes in. His resolve collapses in a cascade.

And in the last instant before he plunges he sees Luffy’s light, Luffy’s god-web soul, in the teeming darkness above. Reaching, like hope, like resolve, like fire lit against things that go bump in the night.

Let me in, Luffy says. Let me in, and I’ll knit you back together. And you can fight this thing, and win, and save us both.

Which is also a choice, and one Law recoils from even more than he recoils from giving up to the demon, because at least the demon will give him death. Burn his mind out of his body and use his corpse as its engine to take on the world without having to fight its cosmological framework, but at least Law won’t be there to watch.

And he will not hurt, and he will not have to fight, and he will not have to risk being trapped, again, just a hand’s breadth from his own will.

Trust me, wails Luffy, and Law thinks: I don’t even know why you’re here. I don’t even know if this was your mistake, or your meaning, or something I haven’t thought of at all.

And it would be easier—so much easier—just to let go.

Like he did then, a long time ago.

Like he did every day for ten years after that.

Law reaches for the light, and thinks, All right.

*

He falls, weightless, and Luffy chases him down.

Sews the tattered shreds of Law’s soul back together, Luffy’s own god-soul, that mess of contracts and faith, serving as the thread that pulls the pieces fast. A lifetime melds against Law’s own, memories clashing, and in that moment he sees—

A brighter spark in a fire on the side of a dark and empty road, beside it a freckled boy with a tear-streaked face gazing into the flames. A boy who set out barefoot from the war-torn Gleb to Dresediel Lex with his mother and his father and his brother, until eventually it was just the brother and him, walking away from the war; who reached the city alone, brother buried, nothing left to him but a story of fire and warmth once told to him by a priest.

Who told that story to the fire, sitting alone by the road, and wove his lost brother in, storing the intangible in that which could be repeated. Huddled close to the fire, every night after he made it into the city, and told the story to himself again and again.

Until, in that fire, something awoke.

And Law—still falling, the fragments of his soul reconnecting in the plummet—understands, then. Understands the likeness between the burned corpse and the little god who he rescued, understands why Luffy had taken the risk. Luffy reaches inside him and puts them back together as one, and of course Law knows the base parts of himself.

(And he knows, too, that in the same moment Luffy sees through him in reverse: sees the girl who stumbled, dying, out of her newly-godless city on the Zurish plains; who smuggled herself past the holy front of the Knights of Camlaan in a pile of corpses, all marred with the same deadly white as herself; who cut away her filthy hair, after, matted with blood and ash and maggots from the fallen, and came to the forward outpost of a Deathless King as a boy. Grew in power in his tutelage, and said yes when the Deathless King offered to send him to the Hidden Schools, and signed his life away.)

He knows Luffy, and Luffy knows him, all the way down.

They fall together, in the knowing, intertwined; and find the light again.

*

The demon crashes through his defenses like he’s done nothing at all, swallowing him like an avalanche—

—and Law bursts through it, surges to his feet, leaps burning into the air. The demon twists below him, reforms where it’s been torn, readies again to attack.

And Law, floating above it: Law-who-is-Luffy-who-is-Law, whose reflection in the warped and shattered glass landscape below shows him wreathed in fire, his glyphs blazing white, flames licking up over his skin in a way that scares half of him senseless and makes perfect sense to the other: he says, “You’re done.”

Definition clicks around the demon, traps it in familiar logic, and the universe applies the necessary force. You are too impossible to continue existing, it says.

The demon screams, and vanishes off the face of the earth.

*

They don’t press charges against him over the Wardens, in the end. It probably helps that when the containment people arrive they establish that he’s saved the city, and also that Law’s still on fire when they ask him about it, flickering dangerously and with orbs of black flame blazing in place of his eyes. Plus, with the containment specialists on the scene the Wardens quickly get into a fight over primary jurisdiction, on the grounds that the apparent absence of any remaining demons renders containment protocol moot.

Still, they don’t actually let him go until Teo Batan arrives on the scene and waves them off, at which point the Wardens peel off like flies. “Mr. Law,” she says, weaving around a jumpsuited man rolling a thaumaturgical scanner towards the front doors. “I see now why the boss likes to pay for the best. How did you know the demon would come through?”

“Luck,” Law says, his spine straight with Luffy’s defiance. “Looking in the right place at the right time.”

Which is true, and also doesn’t answer her question. By the look Batan gives him Law can tell she knows it, too, but she lets him go to stagger over to the long-since arrived paramedics.

Who take to looking him over with an enthusiasm that suggests they’d been anticipating rather more casualties, and found themselves with entirely too little to do: Law’s flames go out as he sits down hard at the back of the ambulance, and a pair of junior doctors poke and prod at his leg and eventually convince the fractured bone and damaged muscle to knit back together. Give him a bottle of painkillers—thank the gods—and tell him to go lie down, preferably for no less than a week.

He escapes hotelward after that, ducking the police line while the jurisdiction battle reaches new volumes behind.

*

He—they—make it about half-way to the hotel, limping through the dark, before Law stops: sinks down on the edge of the sidewalk and lowers his head into his hands, and doesn’t move again.

Luffy’s fire flickers inside him, warming him to the fingertips, licking at the edges of his thoughts. There is a softness there, and a fierce desire to protect that turns inward at himself, and a sense of rightness that he could so easily mistake for his own. He knows that looking out now he sees the world differently, colored by Luffy’s thoughts and memories and emotions as much as his own.

The part of him that is Law looks inside, and wonders, asking without really risking to ask: If I asked you to let me go now—would you do it?

And feels the part of himself that is Luffy flow out of him, disentangle from inside his soul, the heat-certainty-confidence that carried him through the last several hours draining away. Feels his body go cold, and the comfortable fuzz in his brain turn to jagged sharp edges and repeating thoughts coiled like springs, all hooked tight to one another, and—

Is wholly himself again, empty broken spaces and all.

It hurts.

Law chokes, “Thank you,” and lowers his forehead against his knees. Spends a long time unable to say anything else at all, dumbly grateful, relieved beyond words to be once again alone in his head. His throat constricts, painfully tight, and his eyes sting.

Luffy floats near him, a warmth that he feels now on his skin rather than under it, and says, I would never keep you unless you wanted, Torao. It isn’t like that.

And Law wants to tell him: you don’t understand. You don’t understand what it’s like, to be broken to accept someone else’s will for a decade of what should’ve been your own life, what that does to your brain. All those empty spaces, they need to be filled, and gods, gods, when you do that I want you to fill them, I want you to be the pieces of me that are missing, I want to give it all up. Wanting it is the problem: it’s like being addicted, because, gods, it’s hard to go back to being yourself.

Says instead, “Never,” and swallows the waver that threatens to rise in his voice. “Never ask me to do that again.”

Okay, Luffy says.

Just like that.

Wants to know, a beat later: Why did you do it? Meaning: why did you trust me? Why did you take me in, if it scared you so much?

Because, Law thinks, some part of his monkey-descended brain must have run the risk calculations, and decided that succumbing to a god was better than giving up to a demon. Because living things come with a survival instinct, and even when he’d wanted to choose the easy way out that instinct must have cut through the bullshit, forced him to cling to the option that might get him out, might, might, might, however small the sliver of chance. Because some part of him had been dumb enough not to think about the things that came after.

Finds himself telling the truth instead, bare foolish thing that it is, vulnerable and torn-open raw. “Because you made me feel alive, like I hadn’t in a long time.” Because it made me happy. “Because I wanted to go dancing with you again.”

A stupid reason to hang on, and fight an impossible battle. A stupid reason to risk losing himself to very nearly the same thing he’d just escaped.

No one had ever said truth must always be sensible.

He opens his eyes, then, looks up at Luffy, though he stays on the edge of the sidewalk, arms wrapped around his knees. “Tell me,” he says, voice carefully steady, “what you were doing in the Chamber tonight.” He can, from what he remembers out of the moment of their coming together, already guess: still, he wants to hear it aloud, from Luffy, in full. “You came there looking for—for—” and the next word catches on Law’s tongue, the word he’d thought when he and Luffy were one. True-but-not-true, factually impossible and yet, to Luffy, still right.

For a long moment Luffy is too quiet, too still, too restrained. It looks wrong on him, utterly unnatural, and Law almost says, never mind, almost lets it go.

He doesn’t.

Luffy says, I was looking for my brother.

There’s the word, and damned if Law would ever dare to be the one to correct him. “To bring him back.”

To take him out of the city. ’Cause I promised. Luffy’s voice is small, as strange coming from him as the silence, the lack of perpetual motion. He didn’t wanna get buried here. He hated this city, kept trying to get both of us out. A long pause, and then: He was gonna go with the others, to Alt Coulomb, but then I made that deal.

Law breathes out, slow, and closes his eyes against understanding, against the sight of Luffy’s pain. “He was at the Chamber that day because he was trying to clear your debt.”

Luffy says nothing at all.

It makes sense, a tragedy of classic form. Two brothers—however unrelated—and a bad contract, one thrown into indenture; the second, on the verge of escape, staying behind to scare up enough funds to buy out the guy holding the other end of the chain. Trying his luck trading for some small-time broker up at the financial markets, hollering in the Chamber of Commerce to buy sell buy, and, in the end, just in the wrong place, at the wrong time . . .

“I’m sorry,” Law says, and means it. For saying it as much as for Luffy’s loss, for laying out that cruel causal chain.

He made me, Luffy says, tersely, and a god can’t cry but Law wonders if he would, just then, if he but had the relevant systems. He believed me into existence. I couldn’t leave him.

Just like he couldn’t leave you, Law thinks, tragedy come nearly full circle: but Luffy goes on, faster, his voice wrung into something fragile and upset, I didn’t know he’d stay ’cause I took that contract. I told him I could take care of myself. I thought he got that, got out. I thought he’d go with the others, and I’d just follow ’em later, that was always the plan.

Luffy’s heartbreak, Luffy’s guilt, rings like a glass struck with a spoon, like a handmade thing breaking. Law’s own heart aches in sympathy, his own old grief and guilt—of which he has so much, all mixed and settled at the bottom of his soul the way silt lines the bottom of a lake, still but for when the slightest motion kicks it up again—roused in biting accord.

“It isn’t your fault,” he says, because he knows it’s what he’s supposed to say.

Luffy’s response is instant. You’re lying. Not angry, not speaking with blind denial, just certain, in the way of one who’s shared, for some scant several hours, Law’s soul. You don’t believe that at all.

He’s right, of course. Law has always thought that breaking down causal chains is reductive, clinging to the word of the law over its spirit. People’s actions can be predicted, understood; people, however free willed, exist in unison, affected and affecting in turn. Making a choice without looking at what choices your choice will elicit in others just means that you didn’t bother to look, and someone killed or gotten killed is still dead, just the same.

But he also knows the rules of the Craft, facts he can quote as immutable, as welded to the shape of the universe as the dark matter constant. He says, still not looking at Luffy, gaze fixed on his shoes:

“You can see the web of free will interactions, if you try hard enough. You can predict what someone’ll do. You can’t predict everything, and you can’t be held uniformly responsible, even if you are the butterfly’s wingbeat that starts the cascade. Limited liability.” Law takes a breath. He can feel the intensity with which Luffy is watching him, listening to him, taking every word in. “You might have known your brother would stay, trying to save you. You should have, maybe. But you couldn’t have known that some stock broker’s attempt at a cartel would have terms so illogical as to break a hole in the universe, and kill your brother dead. The fact that somewhere in the chain of causality that led to his death you might have done different, sent reality tumbling down a different route, that’s—” He makes a sharp throwaway gesture, then, mouth twisting into a sad sort of smile. “Just another possible accident, somewhere else down the line. Another unknowable sequence of disasters. Something to wish for, when you dump the whiskey out on his grave.”

And looks up to find Luffy staring back at him, eyes round. Not red-rimmed, because he’s not human, because he can’t cry, but bearing the echo of that same expunged desperation.

Never heard you say so many words at the same time before, Luffy says.

Which makes Law snort a laugh into the crook of his elbow, arm slung now across the tops of his knees. “Say I’ve had time to think about it. A couple of decades.” And, looking away, “I can help you get his remains, after the cremation. One of your, your friends, they’ll have to file a relative claim, but since there’s no one else to come forward and no assets to speak of—easy.”

I’ll tell them, Luffy says, nodding fiercely. Robin can do it. She’s good at words and papers, she can sign. I’ll send her a dream.

“Yeah.” Luffy’s words remind Law, for the first time, of his own wrung-out exhaustion, too much and too much again in one night after nights and nights without enough sleep. He gives a jaw-cracking yawn that Luffy replicates—surely that shouldn’t work on a god?—and says, “Ask me again when the work is finished. In a few days.” Rather less than would remain if they still had to worry about the demonglass, actually. Perks of heroics, he thinks muzzily.

Luffy waits with him while he calls down an opteran to take him the rest of the way back to his hotel, the dragonfly beast circling slowly out of the sky.

As it readies to pull Law into the air, he says, Hey, Torao?

It’s too late to tell the opteran to wait. Which is all right, maybe, because it means the last thing Law sees as his feet leave the ground is Luffy’s smile, sneaking edgewise onto his face.

I want to go dancing with you again, too.

*

RKC holds the job-well-done happy hour on floor forty-six later that week.

His estimate of three days to finish had been right on, Law reflects, while a skeleton in sharp bartender’s blacks pours appallingly expensive bourbon into his glass. (Appalling, because he won’t drink it.) In the absence of the demon the clean-up and reconstruction had been simplified by a degree of magnitude: he’d kicked out the containment people and the insurance agents, drawn one ward around the entirety of the trading floor to prevent decomposition and another to contain implosion, and smashed all the glass into dust.

Which had felt pretty good, standing there and watching the whole crystalline wreck sublimate at a snap of his fingers; still, working over the place with a baseball bat would have probably been more cathartic. Ah, well.

Drink acquired, Law does his best to blend with the wallpaper. Fortunately, even at a job-well-done party to celebrate his job-well-done, this doesn’t prove difficult: no one, when pressed, really wants to spend time with a man who spends all of his wrist-deep in corpses. Anyway, the local branch of Kelethres Albrecht is perfectly happy to cover the shaking of hands and congratulations, especially when they come with the signing of checks.

He wanders out to the balcony—warded from the wind, of course, RKC doesn’t care to have their employees swept away on a smoke break—and looks down. The sky is shockingly blue overhead, the sun and winds high, any dust that might cast a haze over the city vigorously swept away. Law can see all the way down the obsidian steps of the pyramid, and down the hill to the end of Sansilva, and even down to the sprawl of the harbor beyond. The sea lies even with the horizon, a thin blue-silver line.

He looks down, and thinks about Luffy, absent since the night they slew the demon. Wonders, fingers tightening on his drink, whether the little god is really all right; whether he really means to come back, or whether he’ll wait until Law’s left for Shikaw, too late and too far to reach.

Another gust of sea-scented air strikes the ward, which slows it to a more sensible speed. When Law looks up, reflexive, Luffy is floating outside the ward, grinning at him from a few feet beyond.

Law stares; Luffy waves, and points down to an empty balcony a couple floors down, and waves again.

“Idiot,” Law breathes—with feeling, still staring, but with something warm and simple unfolding where his worry had been. Outside, Luffy laughs, inaudible, and rolls his eyes and points again; Law opens his palm in acknowledgement, okay, fine, you fool, I’ll meet you there. Wanders back inside and picks his way through the party, abandons his drink on the first table he passes, and takes the elevator down to floor forty-three.

The offices on forty-three are busy-quiet, and Law ducks easily past the row of cubicles to the door onto the balcony, wiping his reflection from the row of windows with a wave of his hand.

Hi, Luffy says, as Law pushes through the door. I saw you were finished, down at the Chamber, and was ’bout to go looking, and then I heard you.

Heard him worrying, Law realizes as he comes to the railing, and opens his mouth to protest. And closes it again: he’d wanted to see Luffy, after all. Perhaps his thoughts had wandered close enough to the simplest form of prayer, the forlorn hope.

Instead he says, “I have the papers for your friend. Just need an address—I’ll tell her where to send them back, signed, and then the city should release your brother’s ashes.”

Send it to the Temple of Seril Undying, Luffy recites, in Alt Coulomb. That’s where they’re staying. Just put ‘Nico Robin’ on the outside.

There are certainly worse places to be a refugee than in Alt Coulomb, Law thinks, with two benevolent gods and a support network built out of its own living stone. Being homeless and penniless in the city of Kos Everburning may well be better than being those things in Shikaw, with its bitter cold winter and postwar secular capitalism. Still, Law himself would choose the latter, any day of the week. “I’ll send it,” he says. “Before I fly out tonight.”

Thank you, says Luffy.

“What will you do now?” Law asks him.

Meaning: with your brother and your followers gone, no obvious means of travel to Alt Coulomb, insufficient soul to cross such vast bodies of water and appear to your faithful at once: what now? Law can picture, all too easily, Luffy stumbling into another bad contract, another bad deal. Far more difficult to imagine a path to his ideal outcome, or any favorable outcome at all.

Luffy shrugs—easy, like the complications don’t concern him at all. Dunno. I’ll figure something out. They should be safe, waiting for me in Alt Coulomb.

And as Law stands there on the balcony with his hands on the railing and the wind buffeting him through the wards, tossing his hair into disarray, blowing his jacket open; he finds himself wrestling a strange anticipation, caught by the lingering weight of something unsaid. The sense of a missed opportunity in potentia, a future so likely he can already feel it clicking into its assured place.

The rest of his day—his week—his lifetime rolls out before him, clear and obvious as a broad road. They’ll bid each other farewell on this balcony, and he’ll spend another hour or two at a party he doesn’t care for, and later he’ll take the red-eye back to Shikaw. Return back to his office, and file his report with the firm and get handed his next assignment, and maybe have drinks with Monet; let Dresediel Lex fade into memory, his brush with a small god merely an oddity added to the collection, a series of moments he’ll look back at, some day, and wonder about.

Eventually, he might even forget about Luffy, when he’s grown enough memories of his own to have to make room.

And so Law almost does what he’s supposed to, almost speaks his goodbye. That’s the way reality tends, in the end: mundanity, prescribed routes, lives too heavy-set and inertial to be cast off-course by anything short of a death. Opportunities pass because people are made to let them, unused to grabbing and not letting go.

Then again, most people haven’t had to watch those opportunities sailing by, unable to grab them even should the soul will.

His words come out jumbled, too fast. “I travel a lot, you know, in my line of work. Eventually they’re bound to send me to Alt Coulomb, and I could—I could take someone along, it’s not like an incorporeal being would need a ticket.” He swallows around the knot in his throat. “You could come with me back to Shikaw. If you wanted.”

Luffy looks at him, oddly impassive. Law realizes his hands are tight on the railing, the metal edge biting into his palms, and carefully lets it go.

Takes a breath in anticipation of the inevitable rejection, because sometimes an opportunity only looks that way from one side, and he knows, had known as he said the words, that his was a stupid idea. Lets himself down easy, because he doubts Luffy will. “Just—just a thought. I mean, never mind. You probably have better ideas, other plans—”

A slow smile spreads across Luffy’s face. Law’s heart, traitorous thing that it is, leaps with hope.

I’d like that, Luffy says. His grin is wide, and bright as the sun overhead. I’ve always wanted to see the world.

Law stares at him, his brain processing the words in slow motion. His heart is faster on the uptake, going impossibly light in his chest, tether severed, surely floating away in the wind—leaping, and not coming back down.

“Oh,” he says.

And smiles, helplessly, back.