The interior of Uranus looked like it had been built by someone who had never once considered what a ship was supposed to feel like.
Every surface was smooth and purposeful. Doorways sensed their approach and opened without being touched, closed behind them without being asked. The lighting had no visible source, just a steady, sourceless illumination that made the whole interior feel like the inside of something alive. Eight hundred years old, or older — and it looked newer than anything Finn had ever set foot on.
"Weapon system?" Finn asked, as they walked.
"Powerful," Imlia said, without turning around. "Not inferior to Pluton, in its time."
"What type?"
"Shock waves, primarily." A brief pause. "It has only fired twice. Once to destroy Joy Boy's kingdom. Once to eliminate a particularly difficult problem, centuries ago." Another pause, shorter. "The weapon system is nearly exhausted. In fact, most of the ship is in the same condition. That is why I said it has one crossing left."
Finn looked around at the immaculate corridor, the steady lighting, the doors opening ahead of them like they were expected. "It doesn't look exhausted."
"Appearances," Imlia said simply.
He dropped the subject.
They came to a large control room — the kind of space that communicated importance through proportion rather than decoration. Wide, high-ceilinged, with a console along one wall and, at the center of the floor, a circular halo marked in the material of the deck itself.
Imlia stopped walking. For a moment she was quiet, looking at something in the middle distance that was not in the room. Then she said, without particular drama: "Immortality, without end, without purpose — the slow dissolution of will until you simply stop. That is not a death I want." She glanced back at Finn. "I would rather go out like a signal fire. Bright, and then gone."
Finn looked at her. "And if the ship breaks apart mid-crossing?"
"Then it breaks apart." She said it with perfect serenity. "If it gets me there, it gets me there. If it does not — well, once is all I asked for." She turned to face him fully, and there was something in her expression that he had not seen in their entire exchange: not the assessing calm she used as a default, not the warmth she directed at him specifically, but something older and quieter than both. "I was born to be exceptional. Everyone who has ever known that about me has eventually bowed their head to it." A pause, and then the corner of her mouth lifted. "You never did."
"I kneel for no one," Finn said.
"I know." She sounded, for just a moment, genuinely fond. "It is one of the things I find insufferable about you."
She gestured toward the halo on the floor. "Stand there."
Finn moved into the circle without arguing, though he did ask, "This is safe?"
"I have stood in it myself, more times than I can count." She was already at the console. "There is nothing to fear."
He believed her. He was not entirely sure why — not on evidence exactly, more on the accumulated weight of everything she had done since they met. She had been generous when she did not need to be. She had been honest when evasion would have been easier. She had given him the Fountain of Youth before extracting what she needed, which was the ordering of someone who was not playing angles.
He stood in the circle and waited.
A curtain of light rose from the edge of the halo and enclosed him, passing through rather than stopping at his skin, moving into him the way Observation Haki moved through a space — present everywhere at once, not touching anything it was not looking for. He felt it the way you feel a current of cool air: real, but not threatening.
Imlia finished at the console and walked over to him. She extended one hand into the light, let it pass through her fingers, and said, "I tested this on myself, countless times. You are fine."
"Tuntun," Finn said. One of the alien words the ship's system had used — he had no idea what it meant, but it had sounded like agreement.
Imlia blinked. Then she smiled, which was different from her usual expression in that it reached further. "A long way from fluent," she said.
"A long way," he agreed.
They talked while they waited, which was strange and not strange. The conversation was easy in the way conversations sometimes became easy after the fighting was over and the negotiating was finished and there was nothing left to manage — just two people in a room, running out of time.
After a few minutes, the light curtain shifted in character. The console chimed. Imlia turned toward it, read something in the display, and her entire bearing changed in one instant — the composed reserve she wore like a second skin cracked open, and what came through was pure, unguarded elation.
She crossed the room in three steps and grabbed Finn's shoulder with both hands. "It worked. The coordinates reproduced completely — they're locked into Uranus's navigation. It will actually work, Finn. It is actually going to work."
"That's good," he said, and meant it, and was faintly startled to realize he meant it.
"I should—" He started to say he should go, that the transaction was complete, that there was no reason to linger.
Imlia kissed him.
It was not tentative. She had been alive for eight hundred years and she had made up her mind, and both of those things were evident in the way she moved. There was a faint sweetness to it — clean, botanical, the way the air smelled just after rain on a flowering island. For a moment Finn was simply present for it, and then he was not thinking about anything in particular at all.
The lights went out.
Outside Uranus, the air had grown quiet in the way air did when no one wanted to be the one to speak first.
Kuzan tilted his head. "Has anyone else noticed that it's moving?"
"Warships don't shake," Borsalino said. He squinted at the hull. Then Uranus shifted again, a deep, low movement, like something inside had leaned against a wall. "Hm."
Sakazuki, with the air of a man applying professional analysis to a situation he had no professional framework for, said: "They may be running a high-demand function. The world coordinates transfer, perhaps. Significant energy draw could account for structural vibration."
"They're not fighting in there," Sengoku said, with more certainty than the situation necessarily supported.
"Obviously not," Sakazuki agreed, in a tone that suggested he had arrived at the same conclusion from a slightly different direction and found the conclusion mildly inconvenient.
Gion said nothing. She looked at the hull of Uranus, looked at it for a long time, and then she looked somewhere else.
Half an hour passed. An hour. The vibrations came and went with no particular pattern.
Sengoku eventually sat down on a piece of rubble and closed his eyes. Sakazuki stood with his arms folded and did not make further commentary. Borsalino inspected his fingernails. Kuzan made himself comfortable.
Inside, Finn sat up slowly and pressed his palms against the floor for a moment before trusting his legs. His back was complaining at him in very specific terms. He found his coat by feel in the dark.
Imlia, across the control room, had already retrieved her vest. She sat with her knees drawn up and her back against the console, her pale gold hair loose around her face, and she looked at him with an expression that was more unguarded than anything he had seen from her through the entire conversation in the hall.
"You should go now," she said. Her voice was quiet and completely even. "I don't need you anymore."
He stood. He had things he could say. He turned several of them over and set them down again, because none of them were adequate and she would know that. She had been doing this for eight hundred years and she would hear the inadequacy in every word.
He looked at her for a moment, sitting in the dark of a ship older than every institution alive in this world, preparing to stake everything she was on a single crossing to a place she had never been.
"I hope you get there safely, Imlia."
She did not answer. She did not move.
Finn turned toward the door.
"Three days," she said, to his back. "Uranus needs three days to chart the route and build to full charge. If you change your mind—"
"Don't wait for me," he said. He kept walking.
He was nearly through the door when he heard her voice one last time, soft, shaped around something that was not quite exasperation and not quite affection but occupied the space where they overlapped.
"Bastard."
Finn stepped through the hatch, and it sealed behind him.
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