Dawn came slowly to the Roland Sea, gray at first and then the color of old brass, and the Fourth Division spent it all searching.
The searchlights had been running since the previous night, sweeping the water in long arcs that found nothing except the uncooperative emptiness of the New World at night. By the time the sun had climbed high enough to be useful, it was obvious to anyone with navigational sense that a fast assault ship with a six-hour head start and a crew of one who knew exactly where he was going was not going to be found by a fleet of sailing ships moving at combat speed in an unknown direction.
They searched anyway. The crew of the Fourth Division needed to search. The searching was the only available expression for something that had no other outlet yet.
By mid-morning, the story had completed its circulation through every deck and watch station. The shape of it was simple: Rob Lucci, Second Division, had used the information he fed to Thatch about the caravan as a setup. He had attended the banquet. He had waited for his opportunity. He had gone to Thatch's cabin while Teach was retrieving the Devil Fruit Encyclopedia, and he had killed the captain of the Fourth Division and taken the Devil Fruit that Thatch had found in the hold.
The crew believed it.
They believed it because the shape of it made sense, because Lucci had already gone, because Teach's grief was visible and unmistakable, and because the alternative explanation required conclusions that none of them had any reason to reach.
By the time every member of the Fourth Division had heard and accepted the story, Teach allowed himself to breathe.
He stood at the stern and looked at the water and felt the anger about the Dark-Dark Fruit coiling tighter in his chest and deliberately did not think about Thatch. Not yet. The situation required management before it allowed feeling, and feeling was a luxury that would have to wait.
He picked up the Den Den Mushi.
The Moby Dick moved through her morning routine with the order of a ship that has been organized by the same person for a very long time.
Edward Newgate stepped out of his quarters into a corridor that had, somehow, filled with nurses during the night. Six of them, in pink uniforms, each holding something that represented a different category of his medical maintenance: a small cup of pills, a drip bag with tubing, a menu on a clipboard, a blood pressure cuff, a heating pad of some kind, and one who appeared to be present specifically to smile.
Newgate looked at all of them.
He swallowed the pills without water, which made two of the nurses wince slightly. He accepted the menu and read it with the expression of a man reviewing a document he objects to.
"No drip today," he said. "I want to have a drink."
"The drip is scheduled, Captain." The head nurse had the specific quality of pleasantness that operates as a form of absolute refusal. Her smile did not shift. "It will take two hours. After that, you can see about the menu."
"Everything on this menu is vegetables."
"Vegetables are very nutritious."
"Where is the meat? Where is the barbecue?"
"The Captain's dietary plan for this week—"
"I am the Captain."
"Yes," she said, in the same pleasant tone, "and the Captain needs to take care of himself."
Newgate looked at her for a long moment. She looked back at him with the absolute serenity of someone whose position cannot be undermined by an intimidating stare because she has decided, professionally and permanently, that it cannot.
He was in the middle of choosing which objection to raise next when Marco came in from the outside corridor.
Marco's face was wrong.
Newgate saw it immediately, the specific quality of a controlled expression that is controlling something significant. The Den Den Mushi in Marco's hand was open.
"Dad," Marco said. He came close and dropped his voice. "Something happened to Thatch."
The room became a different room.
The invisible weight that Newgate carried in his body shifted, and the quality of the air around him changed in the way it always did when his composure moved in a particular direction. The nurses, who had been holding their ground admirably until this moment, suddenly found reasons to be elsewhere. They were gone with a speed that suggested professional experience with danger.
Marco extended the Den Den Mushi.
Newgate took it.
"Teach," he said. "What happened."
It was not a question.
On the other end, Teach was silent for one beat, the silence of someone who is genuinely feeling something and is deciding how much of it to let through, and then he spoke and the anger and the grief in his voice were real because they were real, in their way, even if the story wrapped around them was not.
"Dad." Teach's voice was rough. "Thatch is dead. I should have seen it. I brought that bastard Lucci with me, I vouched for him, and he—" A pause. The sound of a man who is pressing through something. "He killed Thatch for the Devil Fruit. I went back to get the encyclopedia and when I found Thatch he was already— I saw Lucci running. I tried to chase him but it was dark and he had the assault ship and by the time we had the searchlights up he was already at the horizon."
Newgate stood very still.
The thing in his chest was not grief yet. It was something that precedes grief, large and shapeless and very hot.
Marco put one hand briefly on his father's arm, then took it away.
"Tell me everything," Newgate said, and his voice was the voice of a man who has been ambushed by something and is currently holding himself together through the force of will that has defined him for forty years.
Teach told it. The story moved cleanly, each detail supporting the next: the intelligence about the caravan, the Fourth Division's haul, the banquet, the Devil Fruit Thatch had found in the hold, the plan to look at the encyclopedia together afterward. The moment Teach had gone back to his vessel to retrieve the book. The return. The open door. The cabin.
The story had no gaps because Teach had spent the night finding the gaps and filling them.
Newgate listened without speaking.
When Teach finished, there was a long silence on the line.
"Dad," Teach said, quieter now. "It's my fault. I brought him. I trusted him. I should have—"
"This is not your fault," Newgate said. Each word was placed with deliberate heaviness, the heaviness of someone being careful not to break something with what they are saying. "None of us saw it. That is on all of us, or it's on none of us." A pause. "Come back."
"I can't." Teach's voice firmed. "Thatch was my brother. Lucci made a fool of the Second Division in front of everyone. I am not coming back until I find him and make this right. Please understand, Dad."
The silence on Newgate's end had a texture to it.
He was looking at Marco. Marco was looking at him. Between them passed the shared knowledge that Teach's anger was the anger of someone who had genuinely lost something, and that the anger sounded true, and that Thatch was dead and someone had to run toward that with everything they had.
"Be safe," Newgate said finally. The words cost him something.
"I will, Dad."
The line closed.
Newgate held the Den Den Mushi for a moment and then handed it back to Marco.
The silence stretched.
"Dad," Marco said carefully.
"I am fine," Newgate said.
He was not fine. The past two years had been a particular kind of difficult: Jam Island, the injury that had never quite finished healing, the territory that had shifted, the strength that had declined to a level everyone on the ship noticed and none of them would name. And now this.
He closed his hand into a fist.
"Captain's order." His voice came out steady, which required something. "Every division. All of them. Find Rob Lucci. Wherever he's gone, whoever's seen him, whatever ship he boarded after that assault vessel. I want his position." He looked at Marco. "Ten billion berries on his head. Dead or alive."
Marco's response was immediate. "Yes, Dad."
"Go."
Marco went.
Newgate stood in the corridor by himself, the menu still in his hand, and the morning light came in through the porthole and landed on the floor without any particular comment on what had just occurred.
He set the menu down on a table without looking at it.
On the Delicious Cook, Teach put the Den Den Mushi away.
He reviewed the conversation in his mind with the careful attention of a craftsman checking his work after a difficult joint. He found no significant gaps. The Fourth Division's account would corroborate his own. Newgate's trust had held. The hunt for Lucci was now an official Whitebeard Pirates operation, which meant every allied crew and every informant in the network would be turning over information without being asked.
If Lucci surfaced anywhere in the New World, Teach would know about it.
He stood at the deck railing and let himself acknowledge, for the first time without the urgency of performance around it, how thoroughly the night had gone wrong. He had come so close. The Dark-Dark Fruit had been in that cabin. He had been in that cabin. The box had been on the table.
Lucci.
The name had a specific flavor in his mind now, different from any other name he could think of. It was the flavor of something that appeared to be one thing for years and revealed itself to be something else entirely, and the length of the deception was what gave it its particular bitterness.
Ten years old. The boy had been ten years old when he came aboard the Moby Dick.
Teach stared at the horizon and thought about Finn.
Finn had sent a ten-year-old operative onto the Whitebeard Pirates' ship. Had waited. Had presumably been receiving reports for over a decade. Had planned for the moment when the Dark-Dark Fruit became available and had the asset in the correct position to move.
Teach thought about what it meant to think that far ahead.
He thought about the Press-Press Fruit. He thought about the black blade cutting through the sky at Jam Island, through Conqueror's Haki and through Great Grade steel. He thought about a man who had deployed Planetary Devastation on a Yonko to buy time for an evacuation and who had apparently been running an eleven-year intelligence operation simultaneously.
The Dark-Dark Fruit would have been the instrument. The plan had been clear enough: acquire the fruit, use it to neutralize the Press-Press Fruit's gravity, take the Press-Press Fruit in the aftermath. Two rule-category abilities. Both of them.
He would find another way.
He did not know what the other way was yet, but the conclusion that there was no other way was a conclusion he was not prepared to reach.
He was still working through the possibilities when something caught his attention on the horizon.
A figure. Moving through the air at speed, between the clouds, pulling itself forward with what looked at this distance like threads of silk catching the wind. The trajectory was aimed directly at the Fourth Division's fleet.
Teach watched it come.
The figure descended in the last stretch, the pink feathered coat spreading briefly like wings, and landed on the deck of the Delicious Cook with a solid thud and the complete comfort of a man who has never found a deck that he did not own from the moment he stepped onto it.
Doflamingo straightened. He looked at the assembled crew of the Fourth Division, who had come toward the sound of landing with the fighting instincts of people who have been in bad moods since the previous night.
"Back off," Doflamingo said, without looking at any of them specifically. "I don't have time for this."
He released the Conqueror's Haki like a man exhaling, unhurried, a tide going out.
The wave passed through the crowd. Pirates dropped in sequence, their bodies deciding that consciousness was temporarily optional. Those who were stronger stumbled and planted their feet and breathed hard. Those who were not strong enough were already on the deck.
Doflamingo surveyed the result and turned to look at the single man who was still standing.
Teach looked back at him.
"You," Doflamingo said, with the slight narrowing of eyes that meant he was placing someone. "Second Division. Teach." The evil smile came up. "Fufufufu. I've heard of you."
He clasped his hands behind his back and tilted his head.
"Where is the captain of this division? Thatch. I have a grievance with this fleet, and I want to hear his explanation personally." The tone made clear that the word grievance was doing significant work. "My family's goods came through this part of the New World recently. It appears they did not arrive where they were supposed to arrive. I wonder if you know anything about that."