— Real World. World Government Suite. —
Three identities, all of them real.
Stussy: Queen of the pleasure district, known across the underground's darker networks as someone with and significant connections. CP0 agent, one of the Celestial Dragons' highest-tier operatives. Artificial human — first-generation prototype, created by Vegapunk through bloodline cloning.
Everyone who had known her through any one of those faces was, upon discovering the other two, realizing that the version they had known had been completely accurate and entirely insufficient. The woman was not secretive so much as she was organized, and the organization had been thorough enough that the categories never touched each other.
The CP9 operatives watching the Sky Screen's coverage of Rome absorbed this information in the particular silence of people who are revising multiple assumptions simultaneously.
Kalifa had the most complicated relationship with what she was looking at.
The strength Stussy had displayed — the kind that punched a man built like Garou through multiple floors of reinforced structure — was not the kind of strength that years of training produced. It was the kind that was given, by someone who could give it, to someone they had decided was worth giving it to. Vegapunk had decided Stussy was worth giving it to, and now Stussy had it, and Kalifa had been training since she could walk.
She could not, honestly, say that the math worked out in her favor.
If I had that, she thought, I could take my parents somewhere that isn't this.
The World Government protected its assets in the same way that valuable equipment was protected — from damage, from loss, from going somewhere it wasn't supposed to go. It did not particularly protect its assets from being allocated to the uses Celestial Dragons identified. If one of them decided that Kalifa was an interesting acquisition, the institutional response would not involve the word "no." It would involve drums, and a palanquin, and the careful management of paperwork.
She had been careful with her visibility for years. Long-term undercover assignments were her preference for reasons that had nothing to do with professional dedication. Time spent abroad was time spent somewhere that most Celestial Dragons didn't look.
Having power that made looking irrelevant was a different solution to the same problem.
"What's the point," Kaku said, from across the room, with the desolation of someone who has just watched years of effort be contextualized into irrelevance. "All of it. All the training. We bleed for this."
He wasn't being dramatic. He was doing the same calculation Kalifa was doing and arriving at the same place. Stussy had not bled for what she had. She had been given it by a man who had apparently decided that putting the capabilities of an artificial god into a person was a reasonable design choice, and who continued to treat that person as something valuable rather than something useful. Choices, as someone in the organization had once observed, were more powerful than effort, when the choices were the right ones.
Spandam had arranged the suite's room assignments with a logic: Ada was separate from the others. No contact with her former CP9 colleagues. The arrangement communicated priorities without requiring explanation.
Lucci was staring at the ceiling.
He had been loyal. That was the relevant fact, and it was the fact that was most in danger of becoming unpersuasive. Years of work, complete executions of whatever the mission required, the particular devotion of someone who had never allowed the question of whether the mission was worth it to reach full articulation. He had been a dog for the Celestial Dragons in the way that a well-made tool was a tool — without complaint, without hesitation, without the friction of personal interest.
What the Sky Screen was doing to him was slow and not entirely welcome: it was introducing information that had nowhere to go except into the category of things he could not un-know.
He thought about Garou on the recording — the man's physical architecture, the adaptability, the quality of someone who had encountered and integrated more combat inputs than most people could survive long enough to accumulate. That was interesting to him in the way that genuinely dangerous people were interesting: as a puzzle that deserved the respect of being solved properly, up close, through the medium that both of them understood.
"He's still alive," Lucci said to no one in particular, about the mercenary currently embedded somewhere in a hole in Rome's scientific laboratory. "After that. Interesting."
He was more curious about strong men than about most other things. The prospect of exchanging techniques with someone who was functionally a different category of fighter — that prospect had more pull than it should have, given his current professional circumstances.
— Ada's room. —
Three knocks. Then Spandam's voice, doing the thing his voice always did when he wanted something from her: careful, attentive, the register of someone managing the distance between what they feel and what they're permitted to express.
"Ada. I brought you something."
"I'm resting," she said. "I don't want company."
Footsteps outside the door — he hadn't moved yet. He never moved immediately. He stood there and processed the rejection and then produced a response that managed to be both concessive and completely not giving up.
"Of course. I'll leave them by the door. If you need anything—"
"I won't."
The footsteps eventually moved. She waited until they were genuinely far enough away, then pushed her door open.
Flowers. A reasonable arrangement, thoughtfully chosen, which told her that he had put thought into it rather than just delegating the purchase to someone else. She picked them up. Went back inside. Closed the door in a single continuous motion.
Spandam, from the corner of the corridor where he had stopped, watched all of it.
His mind immediately began the process of generating a narrative that would hold the feelings he was experiencing without rupturing anything important. She had kept the flowers. She had not kept them the way someone who resented the giver kept things — there had been a moment of pause before she picked them up, a quality of consideration rather than obligation. This was evidence of something. Of the relationship still existing beneath whatever current difficulty had put distance between them.
He replayed the memory — not the real one, because the real one did not exist in the form he remembered it, but the one that felt real, the one where they had talked like equals, where she had laughed at something he said without the layer of management that her laugh carried now. The version where this was a real relationship between two people rather than whatever it had become since Lucci had entered the picture.
Lucci.
The transition in his thinking was immediate and the destination was the same destination it had been arriving at for months. Rob Lucci was taller than him. Lucci was more physically capable. Lucci was, by any honest accounting of personal qualities, a more impressive specimen in most of the categories that Spandam lacked. This was not a list that Spandam enjoyed maintaining.
He did not need to compete in those categories. He had never needed to compete in those categories. That was what political means were for.
Lucci required an assignment commensurate with his capability. A man of that level should be deployed to positions where those capabilities were genuinely tested. Wano Country had a reputation for testing people. It had a particular record when it came to how operatives fared once they arrived.
Spandam thought about the paperwork. How complicated it would be to arrange. How long it would take for someone to notice, if they noticed at all.
Not very complicated. Not very long.