-Broadcast-
The third-level prisoners were cautious about it, the way people are when they have been locked up long enough to know that freedom offering itself openly usually means something is wrong.
A few of them tested the gap first. Heads out, looking both directions, listening. No guards. No jailer beasts waiting in the corridor. Nothing responding to their presence at all.
Word moved back through the cell population. Then everyone moved at once.
They dragged themselves out in groups — slowly, bodies adapted to imprisonment, the Dead Water's long drain not fully reversible in a few minutes of adrenaline. But they moved. Down the corridor, away from the third level, into the prison's deeper passages, doing the calculation of the situation and deciding that the only reasonable response to a broken seastone gate was to go through it.
In the control room, Hannibal and Domino watched it happen on the surveillance screens.
The footage was live. Real-time. Perfectly clear. Entirely useless to them, because the two of them were in a sealed control room and neither of them was in a position to do anything about what they were seeing.
Hannibal had been making the sound of a man being slowly lowered into something unpleasant for the past several minutes. It had reached a pitch that suggested genuine despair.
"It's finished," he said. "The prison. My rank. Everything. It was right there in front of me — the same level as Magellan, finally — and now it's going to be stripped away in a single night because two people with problems walked through the outer wall."
"We didn't let them in," Domino said, without particular feeling.
"We were here when it happened. That's the same thing to the people who write the reports."
He had a point and she knew it. The Five Elders' assessment of accountability in these situations had a straightforward logic: whoever was nominally responsible for the prison when the prison failed was responsible for the failure. That demotion was coming was a near certainty. Where they would be sent afterward was the open question, and Hannibal's imagination was clearly populating that question with unpleasant answers.
Domino was less focused on the aftermath. She was searching the surveillance feeds, moving through them methodically, looking for Garp.
She had seen the fight. Both of them had watched from behind a camera junction while the Marine hero went into the corridor against Black Sperm, and both of them had watched what happened afterward. Neither of them had been able to do anything useful during it. The old man had thrown everything he had and the calculation hadn't worked out, and now he was somewhere in the prison with a head wound and an unspecified number of cracked ribs, and she needed to know where.
"Garp," she said quietly, to the screens. "Where are you hiding, old man?"
The Magellan situation she had processed and filed. The deputy director was still engaged upstairs — she could hear it in the structural vibrations, the periodic shudder of stone when something hit something else with significant force. Kozuki Momonosuke, half-transformed, had now been fighting the poison giant for long enough that it had become a fact of the building's existence rather than a crisis requiring response. The stalemate, as long as it held, kept Magellan occupied. That was the only protection the lower levels currently had.
The jailer beasts were gone — deployed, intercepted, neutralized at various points in the Black Sperm's route through the prison. The trained animals that supplemented the human staff had done their jobs and found the jobs insufficient. The cells they'd occupied were empty.
"The only real option left," Hannibal said, with the tone of a man who had very little faith in his own words, "is if Thresh gets back in time."
Domino had seen Still Water Prison's actual director exactly once. A skeletal figure with green fire where eyes should be — the kind of presence that made people recalibrate their categories of things that existed. Assigned by the Five Elders, operating on his own agenda, not particularly interested in the administrative side of running a prison. He had been present for the opening and had not been reliably present since.
"If they assigned him here, he must have a purpose," she said.
"He's not here now."
"No." She paused. "He's not."
Both of them were quiet for a moment, doing the honest math.
"Even if he comes back," Hannibal said, "at this point—"
"I know."
They sat with it. Outside the camera range, things were continuing to happen that they could see and not affect.
Black Sperm moved through the upper passages with the efficiency of something that had already decided what obstacles were worth addressing and what obstacles were worth eliminating. The distinction between the two categories was simple: obstacles that could regenerate into a future problem were eliminated. Obstacles that couldn't were passed.
Some of the prison staff were in the second category, and Black Sperm passed them. Some were in the first, and Black Sperm didn't.
Shanks and Dragon watched this from the middle of the escort formation and made a collective decision not to comment. They were both practical people. Objecting to their escort's methods while still needing their escort's help was a contradiction that neither of them was willing to inhabit out loud, however they felt about it privately.
Shanks found himself wondering about Buggy again. These were Buggy's people — operating under Buggy's orders, loyal to Buggy's direction, calling him Lord with a sincerity that would have seemed implausible in anyone describing Buggy the Clown. The crew that had made him a Warlord by showing up had been a collection of motivated misfits with enthusiasm in excess of capability. Whatever these were, they were not that.
How do you manage someone like this? Shanks thought. Not with charisma alone — you could charm a crowd, but you couldn't charm Black Sperm into professional loyalty. There had to be something underneath it. Something Buggy had that commanded this, rather than performed it.
Dragon was running a parallel calculation. Black Sperm's name had not appeared in any Revolutionary Army intelligence file he had ever processed, and he had processed a significant volume of them. A combatant who operated like this, at this level, left marks. Bodies, incidents, witnesses — some trail should have existed. Its absence was itself information, though of what ally he couldn't yet determine.
"We've made contact with Momonosuke's position," the lead Black Sperm reported. "The connected section is sealed — seastone emergency barrier. Getting through to him will take time."
The corridor ended at the wall.
Several meters of high-density seastone, seamless, installed as part of the emergency protocol activation — the same protocol that Magellan had pushed through in the first hour, the one designed to prevent exactly this kind of vertical movement through the prison. It had done its job. The wall was not a door. There was no mechanism to open it from this side, and the control room that could have raised it was the same one that contained Hannibal and Domino, who were watching on surveillance screens and had no particular motivation to help the people currently trying to reach Momonosuke.
The Black Sperms touched the wall with the posture of things that had encountered this problem before and knew it for what it was.
"The scientific ninja tool is spent," one said.
"We know."
"The wall is approximately three meters thick."
"We know that too."
Several of them looked at their combined mass and did calculation that didn't come out well. The tool had worked on the gate because the gate had been a single panel with defined edges. This was a continuous barrier running floor to ceiling across a wide section. Punching through three meters of high-density seastone without specialized equipment, using only consolidated physical force, from a starting position of already being depleted — the math was against them.
"Kaido's done well for himself," one unit said, looking at the wall.
"He really has."
"Selling this to the Marine. Selling to whoever else is buying. No ideology, just transactions."
"And then the Marine puts the people it catches in a prison made of what it bought from the people it's catching."
A brief shared contemplation of this arrangement.
"Let's find another route," the lead unit said. "Momonosuke has the natural water. We get to him, we get everyone out. We don't have to go through this wall."
The group began to reassess the available passages.
In the control room, Domino had found something on the surveillance feed.
The Marine hero was in frame. He was moving differently than he had been earlier — not the measured patrol pace of a man doing his rounds, not the aggressive charge of a man throwing himself into an unwinnable fight. He was moving with something coming off him that the camera rendered as a kind of brightness, a faint luminescence that the footage hadn't shown before. As if something was being spent at a rate that had decided visibility was an acceptable cost.
"What is that?" Hannibal leaned forward.
Domino watched Garp reach the first escaped prisoner in the corridor. She watched what happened next. Watched the second. The third.
None of the prisoners were going back standing up. Garp was sending them back to the third level the way you send something back when you don't have time to be careful about it — collected, turned around, deposited through the gap in the gate, lying down. Not carefully. Not cruelly. Just efficiently, with a thoroughness that suggested the concept of incomplete effort had not occurred to him.
"He's burning through himself," Domino said. More to herself than to Hannibal.
The light coming off the old man wasn't pride or some recovered second wind. It was Haki being spent at a rate that didn't account for what came after. The Marine hero, past eighty, too injured to fight the actual invaders, doing the only thing within his remaining capacity — returning the collateral damage, one body at a time, to where it belonged.
Every one of them went back horizontal.
Every one of them went back.