Marines showed up at sunset. Not Nezumi's. A captain from a different branch, proper uniform, proper posture. He took in the wreckage, the fishmen on the ground, my shoulder where the bite wound was still oozing through Nojiko's bad stitching.
"Who did this."
"The village," Nojiko said. She said it before I could open my mouth.
The captain looked at forty people holding farm tools and bleeding from cuts they'd gotten from fishmen three times their size. He looked at Genzo's bent pinwheel. He looked at the old woman with the garden hoe. He didn't push it. Smart man.
"Nezumi is under arrest," he said. "The money will be returned."
"All of it," Nojiko said.
"All of it."
Nami was on the stairs. Hadn't moved. Ink on her fingers, hands in her lap, staring at the rubble of the map room like she expected someone to tell her to go back inside and keep drawing.
Cocoyama got drunk.
The whole village. Lamps strung between houses, tables dragged into the road, tangerine brandy flowing from bottles Nojiko had been aging for years. People were laughing too loud and crying in the middle of laughing and hugging strangers and hugging Nami and Genzo was holding her hand and wouldn't let go and the pinwheel on his hat was spinning in the warm night air.
I was standing at the edge of the square when she found me.
Not Nojiko. Nami. She came through the crowd and the people parted for her because they'd been parting for her all night, touching her shoulders and her arms as she passed, and she walked straight to me and didn't stop.
Her forehead hit my chest. Hard. The bone of her skull against my sternum. Her hands stayed at her sides. She didn't reach for me. She just pressed her forehead into me like she was trying to push through my ribcage and her shoulders started shaking.
I put my arms around her.
The sounds she made were muffled by my shirt. Not clean crying. Ugly. Wet. The kind that comes from somewhere below the lungs where you've been keeping it for eight years because crying would have meant admitting it was real and if it was real then Bellemere was dead and the money would never be enough and the maps would never stop.
She cried for a long time. Her hands came up eventually. Found my sides. Gripped the fabric of my shirt and held on like the ground was moving. I could feel the ink on her fingers through the cloth. The smell of her hair was salt and tangerine and the sharp copper of someone else's blood.
Genzo watched from across the square. The old man with the bent pinwheel, the scar on his face wet. He saw me holding his girl and he nodded once and turned away to let her have this.
She pulled back. Wiped her face with the back of her hand. Hard. Angry at the tears. Her eyes were swollen and her nose was running and she was the most beautiful thing I'd seen in any world.
"Don't," she said. Her voice was wrecked.
"Don't what."
"Don't look at me like that." She wiped her nose on her sleeve. "I look terrible."
"You look free."
Her face did something complicated. She punched my arm. The bitten one. I hissed. She didn't apologize.
"Idiot," she said. Walked back into the crowd. Genzo caught her. Pulled her into his arms again. She let him.
I sat against a wall at the edge of it. The bite wound throbbed. Nojiko had stitched it with thread from her sewing kit and hands that were better with tangerines than sutures. It looked terrible. It was holding.
She dropped beside me. Her left eye was swollen shut. Her knuckles were split. She had tangerine pulp in her hair from the crate she'd broken across Chew's face.
"Brandy," she said. Handed me a cup. Didn't wait for an answer.
We drank. The celebration was loud around us. Someone had brought out a fiddle. Someone else was singing badly. A child was running between tables stealing food off plates.
"Your shoulder's going to scar," she said.
"I know."
"Shark bite. You'll have to explain that to people."
"I'll say I fought a fishman."
"No one will believe you." She drank. "You look like you lost a fight with a dock."
Across the square, Nami was sitting at a table. People kept bringing her food. She wasn't eating. Genzo was beside her, his hand on her shoulder, talking to her in a low voice. She was nodding at whatever he said but her eyes kept drifting. Toward me. Away. Back.
She stood up. Said something to Genzo. He let her go. She walked through the celebration. People reached for her as she passed, touching her arm, her back, her hand. She let them. But she kept walking.
She stopped in front of me. Looked down at me sitting against the wall with Nojiko beside me. Her eyes went to the brandy. To Nojiko's bruised face. To my shoulder.
Her jaw worked. The thing she did when she was processing something she didn't want to process.
She sat down. On my other side. Took the brandy from my hand without asking. Drank.
"You're hurt," she said.
"I'm fine."
"You have a hole in your shoulder."
"It's a bite."
"From a shark."
"From Arlong."
She drank again. Longer. Handed the cup back. Didn't look at Nojiko. Nojiko didn't look at her. I was between them. The wall behind me, the village celebrating in front of me, one sister on each side.
"Three days," Nami said. Quiet. "I was in that room for three days and you were here."
"Recovering," I said. "From the fight."
"With my sister."
There it was. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking at the cup. Her fingers were tight around it. The knuckles going white.
Nojiko leaned forward. Looked at Nami past me. "He needed the energy. I had the energy. The math was simple."
"I know what the math was."
"Do you want me to apologize?"
"No." Nami's voice was hard. Then it cracked. "No. I know why. I know the cultivation. I know what it does. I knew when I walked away with Arlong that you'd have to-" She stopped. Drank. "I drew maps while you fucked my sister. That's the reality. I don't get to be angry about it."
"You can be angry," I said.
"I'm not angry." She was angry. Her ears were pink. The tell I'd learned on a dinghy weeks ago. Pink ears meant Nami was feeling something she wouldn't name. "I'm just. Establishing something."
"Establishing what."
She turned her head. Looked at me. Close. The celebration noise falling away, the fiddle and the laughter and the clinking becoming background. Her eyes were red from the crying earlier. The ink was still on her fingers. She smelled like tangerine brandy and Genzo's aftershave from where the old man had hugged her.
"I'm first," she said. "Whatever this is. Whatever it becomes. I was first. She knows it. You know it. I need you to say it."
"You're first."
"Louder."
"You're first, Nami."
"Good." She took the brandy back. Drank. Handed it to Nojiko without looking. "You can have him during the day. Nights are mine until I say otherwise."
Nojiko took the cup. Drank. "That's fair."
"I'm not being fair. I'm being territorial."
"I know." Nojiko's voice was dry. "That's why it's fair."
Nami's ears were still pink. But the corner of her mouth twitched. Not a smile. The ghost of one. The thing that would become a smile later when she'd had more brandy and less to process.
She leaned against my shoulder. The one that wasn't bitten. Her head against my arm. Her body warm through her shirt.
"You smell like tangerines," she said.
"That's your sister's shampoo."
"I know what it is." Her fingers found the hem of my shirt. Twisted it. The possessive gesture she did when she was thinking. "She better not have used my spot."
"Your spot?"
"My spot." Her hand flat on my chest. Over my heart. "This is mine. I picked it first."
Nojiko snorted. "I'm not fighting you over a chest."
"You wouldn't win."
They were talking past me. Over me. Through me. Two sisters who'd been separated by a fishman's cage for three days and were reconnecting the only way they knew how. By arguing about a man.
The celebration went on. The brandy went down. Nami stayed on my left. Nojiko stayed on my right. At some point Nami's hand slid from my chest to my stomach. At some point Nojiko's knee pressed against my thigh. The heat was ambient, unspoken, the awareness of what would happen when the lamps went out.
Later. When the square was emptying and the fiddle had stopped and Genzo had gone home with his bent pinwheel and the stars were out.
Nami stood. Pulled me up by the hand. Looked at Nojiko.
"I'm taking him," she said.
"I know."
"Don't wait up."
"Wasn't planning to." Nojiko lifted her cup. Drank. "Bring him back in one piece. I have plans for tomorrow."
Nami pulled me through the empty streets. Past the dark houses and the blown-out lamps and the tables still covered in food no one had cleaned up. Her hand tight around mine. Her steps fast. Her breathing faster.
She stopped at a door. An inn at the edge of the village. Pushed it open. Pulled me inside.
Turned around. Looked up at me in the dark hallway. Her eyes adjusting. Her chest rising and falling. The ink on her fingers, the brandy on her breath, the red rims of her eyes. Eight years of maps and money and Arlong's shadow and she was standing in a hallway with the man who'd kicked down the gate and her hand was still in mine and she was shaking.
"Don't talk," she said. "Don't say anything about freedom or debt or any of that. I just-"
She pulled me into the room.