One Piece: Lust Haki

I slept for maybe an hour. The hammock held my weight and the ship rocked and my Observation held Isuka's heartbeat at ninety-four until some point before dawn when it dropped to sixty-one and her breathing changed and she was actually asleep. I followed her down by maybe twenty minutes. Then Bekke's whistle blew through the compartment and every hammock jerked and the day started.

Isuka looked tired. Dark under her eyes that the dawn light through the hatch caught. She tied her hair back with the white one and got dressed and stowed her hammock and didn't look at me. Her rapier went on her hip with the practiced motion of someone who'd been arming herself since childhood.

I looked tired too. A recruit named Oda told me I looked like I'd been awake all night. I told him the hammocks were bad. He agreed. They were bad.

Day two was harder. Bekke had designed it that way. Simulated battle stations before breakfast, emergency drills mid-morning, navigation under duress after lunch. The duress was Bekke shouting conflicting orders while the helmsman tried to maintain course. Two squads failed. Ours didn't because I'd already corrected Hiro's headings and the navigator had the chart memorized.

Isuka sparred on the forward deck at midday. Her rapier work was fast and clean and if she was running on an hour of sleep it didn't show in her blade. It showed in her face. The set of her jaw tighter than usual, the recovery between bouts a beat longer. But the blade was the same. The blade was always the same.

Tashigi ran a rigging check and identified a frayed line on the port shroud before the bosun did. Bekke noted it. Tashigi didn't notice Bekke noting it because she was already checking the next line.

The afternoon was long. The sea was flat, the wind was low, the ship barely moved. Heat gathered below deck and everyone was slow and irritable and the galley served the same salted fish as yesterday except somehow worse. A recruit from Block D threw up over the starboard rail and two others looked like they wanted to follow.

Watch assignments for the second night went up at 1800. I found my name on the 0200-0600 rotation. Next to mine: Isuka.

Tashigi was on the 2200-0200 rotation. She'd be asleep by the time we went up.

I slept from 2000 to 0145. The hammock was the same. Isuka's was empty. She was on the opposite side of the compartment, having swapped with a recruit from the third row. Her heartbeat was forty feet away instead of eighteen inches. I fell asleep faster than I expected.

The deck at 0200 was another world.

The daytime ship was loud, crowded, forty people in a small space doing drills. The nighttime ship was empty. Two people on watch, the helm officer drowsing in the wheelhouse, and the ocean. Black water in every direction and the sky above it full of more stars than any sky I'd seen in either life.

The wind had picked up since sunset. Cold. The persistent chill of open water at night where the wind came off nothing for a hundred miles and arrived with whatever temperature it wanted. My uniform jacket wasn't enough. I'd known it wouldn't be but there wasn't a heavier one available.

Isuka was at the starboard rail. She'd been there when I came up the ladder. Rapier on her hip. Arms folded. Looking at the water.

I went to the rail and stood next to her. Arm's length.

"You look terrible," she said.

"You look worse."

"I slept."

"How much?"

"Enough." She didn't unfold her arms. The wind pushed her hair across her face and she let it. "The navigation exercise today. Hiro took credit again."

"Hiro's supposed to take credit. He's the squad leader."

"Hiro couldn't navigate a bathtub."

"Hiro can follow corrected headings. That's all I need him to do."

She looked at me. The lamplight from the wheelhouse caught the edge of her jaw and the bandage on her cheek. "You're strategic about it. About people. Who gets credit. Who you correct and who you let be wrong."

"Some people learn better from being wrong."

"And Hiro?"

"Hiro learns better from thinking he was right."

The wind blew. The ship creaked. A wave hit the hull below us and the spray came up but didn't reach the deck. The stars were absurd. More than I'd ever seen. The Milky Way was a band of light cutting the sky in half.

Isuka was cold. She hadn't brought a heavier jacket either. Her arms were folded tight and her jaw was clenched and the wind was steady and she was pretending the cold wasn't there.

I put my arm around her shoulders.

She stiffened. Her whole body went rigid under my arm, the muscles across her back locking, her shoulders pulling up. She didn't shrug me off. She didn't step away. She stood there with my arm across her shoulders and her body rejecting the contact while her feet stayed planted.

I didn't say anything. I kept my arm where it was and looked at the water.

Ten seconds. On nine her shoulders dropped a quarter inch. On ten her weight shifted. She leaned into me. Her body tipping sideways until her shoulder was against my chest and my arm was holding some of her weight.

She was cold through the uniform. The wind had been at her longer than me. My arm across her back was warm by comparison and she pressed into it.

Five minutes. Neither of us talked. The ship rocked. The stars moved overhead or we moved under them. The water was black and the wind was steady and her shoulder was against my chest and her hair smelled like salt, the rapier oil fainter now, two days at sea wearing it down.

"Don't make this a habit."

Her voice was flat. She was still leaning into me. My arm was still around her.

"Okay."

The watch continued. The helm officer hadn't come out of the wheelhouse. The ocean hadn't changed. My arm stayed. She stayed.

"That one." She pointed. A cluster of stars above the horizon, low in the southeast. "Seamen's Cross. It's on the Marine navigation charts. Four stars in a diamond pattern. You sight the bottom star for due south when the Log Pose is resetting."

"I know that one." I pointed higher, thirty degrees above hers. "That line of five. You see it? Runs north-south with a hook at the end."

"I don't know that one."

"The Fisherman's Hook." I'd learned it in a planetarium on a school trip when I was twelve. In a world with different constellations. But the stars here matched close enough in some places that I could fake it. "Sailors in East Blue use it to find the current break between the Calm Belt boundary and the trade routes."

"I've never heard of it."

"Small-town thing. The fishermen near where I grew up called it that." The lie was easy. It was always easy when the truth would require explaining a planetarium and a school trip and a world where the ocean didn't have a Grand Line running through the middle of it.

She looked at the stars for a while. "Show me the hook."

I traced it with my finger. The five stars and the curve at the end. She followed my hand with her eyes. My arm was still around her. Her weight was still against me.

"The hook curves the wrong direction for a real fishhook," she said.

"It's a constellation, not a blueprint."

"Constellations should be accurate."

"Constellations are pictures people drew on the sky because the dark scared them. Accuracy wasn't the priority."

She almost smiled. Her mouth moved and stopped. She looked back at the water.

We stood there. The watch was quiet. The wind blew and the ship creaked and the stars turned slowly and neither of us talked for a long time.

Near the end of watch. The sky had shifted. The Seamen's Cross was lower. The Fisherman's Hook was gone below the horizon. The first gray was coming up in the east, the sky less black and more deep blue.

"Kael."

My first name. She'd used it maybe twice.

"Yeah."

"The person you're with. Whoever she is."

My chest tightened. She was still leaning into me. My arm was still around her. She said it to the ocean, not to me.

"Yeah."

"I don't want to know. Not yet."

"Okay."

A wave hit the hull. The spray came up this time and the mist touched our faces and neither of us wiped it off.

"But I want you to know that I—"

She stopped. Her jaw worked. Her throat moved. She swallowed the rest of it.

"Never mind."

She straightened. My arm slid off her shoulders as she pulled away. She stood at the rail for one more second, her hands flat on the wood, her back to me. Then she turned and went to the ladder and went below deck and her boots on the rungs were the last sound she made.

I stood at the rail. The east was getting lighter. The wind was colder without her against me. The ocean was the same ocean it had been four hours ago, flat and black, and it didn't help with anything but it was there.

The watch ended. I went below. The compartment was dark and full of sleeping recruits. Isuka was in her hammock on the far side, facing the wall. Her breathing was even.

Sixty-one beats per minute. She was asleep. Or she was good at faking it.

I climbed into my hammock. The canvas held. The ship rocked. I stared at the hull beam above me and thought about the sentence she'd swallowed and whether I wanted to hear it.

I didn't sleep.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!