I went up the hill alone.
Nami was rescouting the harbor for the next target. I told her I was stretching my legs. She gave me a look that said she knew exactly where my legs were stretching to, and she didn't say a word about it, which was worse than if she had.
The mansion gates were wrought iron, twelve feet high, the metalwork elaborate in a way that said the family who'd built them had wanted the town to see their money from the road. Beyond the gates: gardens, manicured hedges, a stone path winding through fruit trees and flower beds maintained by hands that weren't the owner's. The house sat at the top of the path, white stone darkened with age at the corners, the windows tall and numerous and mostly curtained.
I knocked at the gate. A gardener looked up from a hedge. Looked at me. Looked at my clothes, which were clean but not wealthy. Went inside.
Klahadore came out.
He walked the way a blade lies in a sheath. Every motion controlled, economical, the body of a man who'd trained it to do exactly what he told it and nothing else. Black suit, pressed. Silver-rimmed glasses that caught the light as he tilted his head to examine me through the gate bars. His hands were gloved. I knew what was under the gloves. Cat Claws. Ten curved blades, one for each finger, that could cut a man apart faster than the eye could track.
"Can I help you?" His voice was polished, courteous, and about as warm as the iron between us.
"I heard there might be work. Groundskeeping, maintenance. I'm passing through and looking for short-term employment."
He studied me. The way a locksmith studies a lock he didn't make. Looking for the mechanism, the vulnerability, the angle of approach. Captain Kuro had survived as a pirate by being smarter than everyone in the room, and three years of playing butler hadn't dulled the habit. He was reading me the way I was reading him.
"We're not hiring," he said. "The staff is complete. I suggest you try the harbor."
"Klahadore." Her voice, from above. Soft, but carrying the authority of someone whose name was on the deed. "Let him in. I'd like to hear about the sea."
He didn't turn around. His jaw tightened, a micro-movement visible only because I was watching for it. The displeasure of a man whose careful control had just been overruled by the one person he couldn't refuse.
"Of course, Miss Kaya." He opened the gate. His eyes stayed on me as I passed through. A warning that his mouth didn't need to deliver.
She was in a sunroom off the main hall. Glass walls on three sides, plants crowding the shelves, sunlight pooling on a tile floor. A chaise by the window, draped with a white blanket. She was sitting upright with a book in her lap, and up close she was more fragile than the balcony had promised.
Blonde hair, unpinned, falling past thin shoulders in waves that caught every frequency of the afternoon light. Pale skin that hadn't seen enough sun, the kind of pale that showed the blue veins at her wrists and the lavender shadows under her eyes. The illness had thinned her. Her collarbones were visible above the neckline of her nightgown, the hollows between them deep enough to hold shadow. Her wrists were narrow. Her fingers, holding the book, were long and careful and slightly translucent at the tips.
But when she smiled, the fragility rearranged itself. The shadows under her eyes became warmth. The thinness became delicacy. She smiled at me as I entered the sunroom and the room got brighter by a degree that had nothing to do with the windows.
"I'm Kaya," she said. "I saw you in the market square yesterday."
The compatibility signal hummed. Not the spike that Nami had been. Not the emergency, not the screaming survival-level pull. This was a sustained warmth, like pressing your palm against sun-heated stone. Gentle. Patient. It radiated from her and settled in my chest and spread downward with a heat that was tender in a way Nami's signal had never been. My body was aware of her. Not urgent. Not desperate. Aware, the way you're aware of music playing in another room.
"Kai," I said. "I'm a sailor. Passing through."
"A sailor." Her eyes lit. The color in them was brown, lighter than I'd expected, almost amber in the direct sunlight. "Tell me about the sea."
I told her about the sea.
Not the truth. Not the isekai, not the cultivation system, not the pirate fights and stolen gold. I told her stories from the knowledge I carried from another world, repackaged as things I'd seen. The Grand Line's weather patterns, the island that was perpetual spring, the school of Sea Kings that surfaced once a year and turned the water silver for miles. I described the way the sky looked before a storm on the open ocean, the green flash at sunset that sailors waited years to see, the bioluminescent currents that lit the hull at night like the sea was full of stars.
She leaned forward. Gradually, without noticing she was doing it. Her book sliding forgotten off her lap. Her hands clasped in front of her, then on her knees, then on the edge of the chaise. Each new story pulled her an inch closer. The color rose in her cheeks, a faint pink on skin so pale it might as well have been painted there.
"The stars in the water," she said. "Could you put your hand in and touch them?"
"Yes. They'd swirl around your fingers. Cold, but bright. Like holding light."
She looked at her own hands. At the fingers that hadn't touched seawater in years, maybe ever. The mansion on the hill with its glass sunroom and its private gardens and its iron gates, and the girl inside it who'd read about the ocean in books and never smelled it up close.
The signal hummed between us. Warm and steady. My body wanted to touch her. Not the desperate grab-and-hold of the degradation-driven encounters with Nami. A quieter want. The desire to press my hand against hers and feel the warmth pass between us. To put my fingers on the pulse at her wrist and feel whether her heartbeat matched what her face was showing me.
She coughed.
A small cough, controlled, but it came from somewhere deep. She turned her head and pressed a handkerchief to her mouth and the cough shook her thin shoulders. When she pulled the handkerchief away, she folded it quickly. Not quickly enough. Red on white cotton. A bright arterial red that had no business being on a handkerchief in a sunroom on a Tuesday afternoon.
She tucked it into her sleeve. Smiled.
"The air in here gets dry," she said. "Please, go on."
I went on. I told her about the Calm Belt and the monsters that lived beneath its surface. She listened with red on her lip that she wiped away thinking I hadn't seen. The illness was real. Not a cover story, not Kuro's invention. She was dying slowly, and the butler who was supposed to be caring for her was waiting for the death to happen on its own terms so the inheritance would be clean.
But Kuro was running out of patience. I knew the timeline. The Black Cat Pirates were already anchored somewhere off the coast, waiting for the signal. Within days, maybe a week, Klahadore would activate them. The attack on the village, the chaos, and in the middle of it, Kaya's "accidental" death. A tragedy that would leave no one alive who could contest the will.
Days. Not weeks.
"Miss Kaya." Klahadore stood in the doorway. He'd arrived without sound. His hands clasped behind his back, his glasses reflecting the sunlight in a way that hid his eyes. "You've been up for quite some time. The doctor recommended rest."
"I feel fine, Klahadore."
"The doctor's recommendation was specific. Rest before dinner. Your color is high."
Her color was high because she'd been leaning toward a stranger talking about the sea, and the flush on her cheeks was life, not fever. Klahadore knew the difference. He didn't care about the difference.
"I'll come back," I said. Standing. "If that's all right."
"Please." Kaya looked up at me from the chaise. The amber eyes, the thin shoulders, the warmth in her face that the illness couldn't reach. "Tomorrow? I want to hear about the green flash."
"Tomorrow."
Klahadore walked me to the gate. His stride measured. His silence deliberate. At the gate he held it open and waited for me to pass through, and as I did he spoke without looking at me.
"Miss Kaya is fragile. She requires careful management of her social interactions. Too much stimulation is harmful to her condition."
"I'm just telling stories."
"Stories excite the imagination. Excitement raises the heartbeat. An elevated heartbeat in her condition can trigger episodes." He closed the gate. The iron clicked. Through the bars, his glasses caught the light again, and behind them his eyes were flat. "I'm sure you understand."
The threat was smooth enough to pass as medical advice. Three years of practice. The man had spent three years learning to threaten people with the cadence of a concerned butler, and the girl on the chaise believed every word because why wouldn't she? He'd been the only constant in her life since her parents died. The loyal servant. The steady hand. The man who brought tea and medicine and closed the curtains when the light was too bright.
I walked down the hill. The signal faded with distance, the warmth dimming as the gate fell behind me, but it didn't disappear. It pulsed, steady, like a heartbeat at the edge of hearing.
On the way down I thought about the curve of her neck as she'd leaned toward me. The way the sunlight had caught the neckline of her nightgown, the cotton thin enough that the light passed through it and showed the shadow of her body underneath. The outline of her shoulders, the narrow shape of her waist, the suggestion of her breasts against the fabric. The illness had made her skin luminous, almost translucent, and the sunlight had turned that transparency into something I couldn't stop seeing. The veins at her wrist, blue beneath white. The flush on her neck that had spread from her cheeks when I'd described the bioluminescent water. The way her lips had parted when she imagined stars in the ocean, and the red on them that she'd wiped away.
She was dying. Kuro was going to kill her. And my body hummed with the memory of her warmth and wanted to go back up the hill.
Days. I had days.
I walked back to the harbor and didn't tell Nami about the blood on the handkerchief or the butler's threat or the way the sunlight had turned a dying girl's nightgown transparent. Some things were mine to carry.
The signal pulsed behind me.