The first shopkeeper threw me out before I finished crossing the threshold.
I'd chosen the store carefully — or thought I had. Small, quiet, a faded awning over the door. A rack of children's clothing visible through the window. It looked like the kind of place that survived on regulars and didn't ask questions.
I was wrong.
The man behind the counter was thin-faced and sharp-eyed, the type who catalogued everything that entered his space the way a bird of prey tracks movement. He took one look at me — the filthy yellow raincoat, the bare feet, the mud-caked hem — and his mouth thinned into a line.
"Out."
I opened my mouth. "I have mon—"
"You have nothing that didn't belong to someone else first." He was already moving around the counter, not fast, but with the unhurried certainty of a man who'd done this before. "I know your kind. Dock rats. Pickpockets. You think because you're small, people won't call the Watch?" His hand found my shoulder — not rough, but firm enough to steer. "Get out before I do exactly that."
The door shut behind me. A bell jingled — cheerful, indifferent.
I stood on the street with my fists clenched inside the raincoat's pockets, where a dead man's money pressed against my fingers like a secret.
He wasn't wrong.
That was the part that burned. Not the humiliation — I could swallow that. But the accuracy. The money in my pocket was stolen. The child wearing the raincoat was a criminal, whether the shopkeeper knew the specifics or not. He'd read the truth off my skin like text off a page, and the fact that his conclusion was correct made it worse, not better.
Move on. Find another way.
I moved on.
---
Three blocks from the waterfront, I stopped pretending I could walk into a store and be treated like a customer.
Instead, I started watching.
The first shop had a wide front window. I drifted past it, glancing inside — a narrow space, racks of clothing, a man folding shirts with mechanical precision. His face was closed. Neutral at best. I kept walking.
The second shop's window was smaller, half-blocked by a display. I slowed, peered through the gap. Inside, a customer was haggling. I couldn't hear the words, but the shopkeeper's posture — arms crossed, chin lifted — said enough.
The third shop was on a corner where two streets met. Its window gave a clear view of the interior, and I stood across the street and studied what I saw: a woman behind the counter, middle-aged, heavyset, with thick forearms and a face that looked like it had been weathered by decades of salt air and other people's problems.
I needed more than a window could give me.
The Flower-Flower Fruit responded to intention more than gesture — I'd learned that much in the crate. I crossed the street, pressed my back against the shop's exterior wall near the window frame, and focused. I knew the wall's surface. I'd seen the interior through the glass. That was enough.
An eye and an ear bloomed on the wall's inner surface, behind a display shelf.
The sensation was disorienting — my own vision doubled, the street I stood on overlapping with the shop's interior like two photographs laid on top of each other. I blinked, forced myself to prioritize the new eye, and the street faded to background noise.
The woman was speaking to a customer — a young mother with a toddler on her hip — and her voice carried the easy warmth of someone who talked to strangers for a living and hadn't grown tired of it yet.
"— grows out of everything in a week, I swear — here, this one's got room in the shoulders, he'll get two seasons out of it at least —"
The mother laughed. The toddler grabbed a fistful of hanging fabric and yanked. The shopkeeper rescued the garment without breaking her sentence.
I let the eye and ear dissolve.
Her.
---
The bell above the door rang as I entered. Softer than the first shop's — a wooden chime, not metal.
The woman looked up from behind her counter. Her eyes moved over me the way the first shopkeeper's had — raincoat, bare feet, the whole picture — but where his gaze had narrowed, hers simply settled. The way you'd look at weather. Something to note, not something to judge.
"What do you need, sweetheart?"
No suspicion. No pity. Just a question.
I'd prepared for this. In the twenty minutes I'd spent watching shops, I'd also been building a story — not the clumsy, half-formed lie I'd tried on the ship's gangplank, but something constructed. Something with edges that fit together.
"I need clothes." My voice came out steadier than I expected. "Everything. Shoes, pants, a top. Underclothes."
"Well, you've come to the right place." She stepped out from behind the counter. Up close, she was taller than I'd guessed — broad-shouldered, with hands that looked like they could knead bread or haul rope with equal competence. "Let's see what fits. You look like a — what, seven? Eight?"
"Eight."
"Eight." She nodded as if confirming something she already knew. "Small for eight. Come on, then."
She led me through the racks with a practiced efficiency that suggested she'd dressed a thousand children and remembered the measurements of none of them and all of them at once. She pulled items without asking — holding them against my shoulders, eyeing the length, putting some back, keeping others.
It took her less than a minute to notice.
"You're picking from the boys' side."
I'd been reaching past the skirts and blouses she offered, pulling plain shirts, trousers, a hooded top. My hand froze mid-reach.
Careful.
"If I look like a boy," I said, "people leave me alone."
The words landed in the shop like a stone dropped into still water. The woman's hands stopped moving. She didn't look at me — she looked at the shirt I was holding, and something shifted behind her eyes. Not surprise. Recognition.
She'd heard this before. Maybe not in those exact words. But close enough.
"Smart girl," she said quietly. Then, lighter: "Dark colors, right? Nothing bright?"
"Nothing bright."
"I've got boots in the back. Sturdy ones. They'll last longer than those —" She glanced at my bare feet and chose not to finish the sentence. "Wait here."
She disappeared into a back room. I stood among the racks, one hand still gripping the shirt, and realized my throat was tight.
She didn't ask why.
She just — understood.
It shouldn't have mattered. She was a shopkeeper. This was a transaction. But something about the way she'd said smart girl — not sad, not pitying, just factual — made the space behind my ribs ache in a way I didn't want to examine.
She returned with boots. Dark leather, lightly worn, laces intact. They looked like they'd been made to survive a childhood.
"Try those. And here —" She added a pair of thick socks to the pile in my arms. "Cold feet are the enemy of everything."
---
The pile on the counter: boots, two pairs of socks, underclothes, canvas trousers, a white shirt, a black hooded pullover. Simple. Durable. The uniform of a child who needed to not be seen.
"That's seventeen thousand three hundred," she said. Then, softer: "Can you manage that? I could take something off the —"
I was already reaching into the raincoat's inner pocket. The bills came out creased and grimy — I'd spent time on this, rubbing them against the alley's cobblestones, folding and refolding them until they looked like money that had been hoarded coin by coin over months. Not fresh. Not stolen yesterday.
The woman counted without comment. If she noticed anything odd about the denominations, she kept it to herself.
"Is there somewhere I can change?"
"Back corner. Curtain on the left."
I gathered the pile and walked to the changing area, and the last thing I heard before the curtain fell was her voice, quiet, maybe not even meant for me:
"Take your time, sweetheart."
---
The yellow raincoat fell to the floor like a shed skin.
I stood in the changing alcove and looked at what remained: a child's body, small and pale, wearing nothing. The bruises on my shins had darkened overnight. My feet were filthy, the soles cracked. In the cheap mirror bolted to the wall, a girl stared back at me with blue eyes that were too large for her face.
Not for long.
The new clothes went on piece by piece. Underclothes first. Then the shirt — white, plain, the fabric rough but clean. Trousers, loose canvas that hung past my ankles until I rolled the cuffs. Socks, thick and warm, and the boots, which were slightly too large but would do. The hooded pullover last — black, heavy enough to hide the shape of the body underneath.
In the mirror, the girl was gone. In her place: a child. Just a child. Gender uncertain. Dirty-faced but clothed. Unremarkable.
I left the raincoat where it lay and walked out.
The shopkeeper looked at me and smiled — small, private, a smile that said she'd seen this transformation before and still found satisfaction in it. She didn't comment on the raincoat I'd left behind.
"You look better," she said. "Stay warm."
"Thank you."
The door chimed behind me.
---
The barber didn't ask questions either, but for different reasons.
He was old, wire-thin, and operated out of a shop barely wider than his chair. When I sat down and told him to cut it short, he glanced at my long black hair, raised one eyebrow, and reached for his shears.
I watched the hair fall.
Black strands, Robin's strands, landing on the floor in soft arcs. Each one a severed thread. The barber worked quickly, efficiently, shaping what remained into something short and shapeless — a boy's cut, utilitarian.
"Color too," I said. "Brown."
Another raised eyebrow. But he reached for a bottle without argument. The dye was decent — not the cheapest on his shelf, but the kind he said would hold its color for a month or so. Black became a muddy, unremarkable brown.
After the barber, I found what I needed at a cramped stall near the market square: a tin of stage grease, the kind performers used. Flesh-toned, thick, waterproof enough to last a day. I bought it along with a brimmed cap and a pair of dark-lensed glasses — the cheap kind, wire-framed, meant for sun.
In an alley behind the market, I opened the tin and dabbed it across my cheeks and the bridge of my nose with my fingertip — small, irregular marks, the kind that could be freckles or old blemishes or the faded remnants of scrapes that never healed cleanly. Nothing dramatic. Nothing that would draw a second glance. Just enough to change the geography of the face underneath.
Cap on. Glasses on.
---
I found a rain barrel at the mouth of the alley, its surface still enough to hold a reflection.
A boy looked back at me.
Brown-haired. Faintly marked. Eyes hidden behind dark lenses. The black hoodie swallowed the shoulders, made the frame ambiguous. The cap's brim shadowed the forehead. Nothing about this face said Nico Robin. Nothing about this child matched the wanted poster that was, even now, pinned to boards in Marine offices across four seas.
Relief hit first. A full-body exhale, the kind that loosened muscles I hadn't known were clenched. For the first time since Ohara, the air felt breathable — not safe, not yet, but no longer actively trying to crush me.
They won't recognize me.
I can walk. I can move. I can exist without every pair of eyes being a threat.
Then the second thing hit.
It came from lower — from somewhere beneath the relief, beneath the strategy, in the part of me that still remembered a face in a puddle on a nameless island. Blue eyes. Black hair. A child's face that belonged to someone who had loved books and earned a bounty for the crime of wanting to read.
I had erased her.
First her mind — whatever consciousness Robin had carried was silent, buried, overwritten by me. Now her face. Layer by layer, I was dismantling the last evidence that Nico Robin had existed, and the worst part — the part that made my stomach fold in on itself — was how good it felt.
The relief was real. The safety was real. And it was built on the removal of a girl who had already lost everything.
Stop. You can't afford this. Not now.
I pressed my palms against my thighs and forced the thought down. Down past the guilt, past the ache, into the same locked place where I kept the sound of Saul's laugh and the heat of a burning library.
Survival first. Guilt later.
Later.
The reflection in the barrel didn't argue. It just watched — a stranger's face, patient, waiting for me to finish deciding who I was.
I turned away before it could ask again.
---
The coins in my pocket clinked as I walked.
I counted what remained without pulling them out — fingertips reading the edges by shape and size, the way a blind person reads raised letters. Nine hundred and fifty berries. Enough for a meal. One meal, if I chose carefully. After that — nothing.
The port stretched ahead of me, wide and loud and full of people who had somewhere to be. Ships rocked at the pier. Gulls screamed overhead. A man pushed a cart loaded with netting, its wheels leaving tracks in the wet cobblestones.
I pulled the cap lower and walked toward the waterfront.
Clothes on my back. A fake face. Less than a thousand berries to my name.
Somewhere out there, beyond the harbor and the gray horizon, there was an island where I could disappear. I just needed to find it.
And figure out how to get there with empty pockets.
To be continued...