-Real World-
The Sky Screen had not specified when the plague would come. That was the fact Usopp was operating on, and it was not sufficient to stop what his body was already trying to do — stand up, find the ship, leave.
Sanji and Nami stopped him before he'd gotten both feet under him.
"Sit down," Nami said. Not unkindly, but with the firmness of someone who was not going to argue about this. "Listen."
"Kaya is —"
"Is alive in the future. She's on this island with us, in that clinic." Nami held his arm until the resistance went out of it. "The broadcast doesn't tell us when. If you sail back to Syrup Village alone, you could arrive before it happens, during it, or after — and if you arrive during it, you die with the rest of them, and we have two people to mourn instead of none."
Usopp sat back down. The effort it took was visible.
"She's right," Sanji said. "Even getting out of Arabasta right now isn't straightforward. Once we're finished here, we go back together. Take Chopper. If there's a medical solution, he's your best resource."
Chopper, who had been listening from Robin's lap with the focused expression of someone doing urgent professional assessment, nodded. "There were plagues shown on the Sky Screen that I've been wanting to study properly. Even if my current knowledge isn't sufficient, I can start the research now so I'm prepared. And the strange doctor might be able to help."
Usopp looked at him for a moment.
"You were almost asleep on your feet ten minutes ago."
"I was resting. There's a difference." Chopper's ears were flat. "This is Kaya's village. I'm going to be ready."
Usopp pressed both hands over his face. When he lowered them, his eyes were still red but the urgency in his posture had settled into something heavier and more manageable — grief, which was quieter than panic.
"The three little ones," he said. "I didn't expect them to be that brave. They were just kids. They wanted to be a craftsman and a bar owner and a novelist, and instead they died holding up a door for someone else."
Nobody said anything to that, because there wasn't anything useful to say.
Ace had been sitting quietly through the exchange, and the expression on his face suggested he'd been thinking about the plague's origin rather than the emotional weight of it.
"A sudden outbreak like that, moving that fast — it's not natural." He was speaking carefully, working through the reasoning as he said it. "The speed, the progression, the timing. This looks like it came from a Devil Fruit. Someone in the Blackbeard Pirates carries one."
That refocused the room.
"Doc Q," Ace said. "He has a fruit that produces and spreads disease — the Shiku Shiku no Mi (Sick-Sick Fruit). Blackbeard picked him up for that capability ally. If the Blackbeard Pirates passed through the East Blue before Arabasta, if they wanted test subjects or just wanted to create chaos, a small island in a quiet sea would be exactly the kind of location they'd choose."
Chopper's expression had changed from grief to something colder.
"A doctor who weaponizes disease," he said.
"It's not doctoring," Ace said. "Don't give it the name."
Chopper filed this away. Doc Q was a person who could be found, which meant he was a problem that had a solution. The solution could wait until Chopper had more information. He had learned, over the years since Drum Island, that the best medical response to an unknown disease was preparation rather than urgency — urgency without preparation was just moving fast in the wrong direction.
He thought about Dr. Hiriluk, who had spent his whole life treating people with medicine he'd invented himself, some of which worked and most of which didn't, and who had died for the belief that a doctor's purpose was to try regardless. He thought about the strange doctor in the clinic ahead of them, who saved one life and ended one. He thought about the gap between those two philosophies and where Chopper himself stood in it.
"Once we're done here," he said, "we go back. All of us."
Syrup Village
The news had moved faster than the islanders had.
That was the problem with the Sky Screen. It didn't announce itself only to the people it was relevant to. It announced itself to everyone, simultaneously, and everyone drew their own conclusions — and the conclusions that outsiders drew about a plague island were not nuanced ones.
The first group of Syrup Village residents to reach the coast and find a ship had been turned back by the time the second group arrived. The sailors on the hired vessel had done the math the moment they understood where the passengers were from: if the plague was real and the passengers were already carrying it, then letting them aboard was a death sentence for everyone the ship touched afterward. Every island in the East Blue. Every port.
The sailors were not wrong. They were also not considering the people on the dock.
Both things could be true at once, and the dockside fight that broke out when the villagers realized they were being refused was the expression of that particular tension — people who wanted to live on one side, people who didn't want to die from helping them on the other, and no resolution that didn't cost someone something.
The islanders, who had spent their lives farming and fishing and doing the quiet work of people who lived on a small island in the least dangerous sea in the world, were not equipped for the kind of fight that sailors who worked the Grand Line approaches could produce. They were sent back.
The water around Syrup Village had been effectively sealed by the time darkness came.
In the Kaya manor, Merry — the butler, the man who had managed this household since before its young mistress could walk — was already directing the servants through the packing that needed to happen before they could attempt their own departure. The Kaya family had a boat. They would not have to fight for a ticket. That was the plan.
Kaya stood at the window and watched the lights coming on in the houses along the lane. She had checked the future on the Sky Screen with the hope that futures could be altered — and the future she had seen had Usopp returning to her, had her as a doctor on a cherry blossom island, had decades of things worth having ahead of both of them. The future existed. She just had to survive long enough to reach it.
The door burst open.
Piiman, Ninjin, and Tamanegi came in the way they always came in when something was urgent — all three at once, slightly out of breath, operating as a unit.
"Miss Kaya." Piiman was the one talking, which meant it was bad. He only spoke for the group when it was bad. "The boats at the harbor. The people who got on were sent back."
"All of them," Ninjin added.
"The sea's been blocked," Tamanegi said. His voice was smaller than the other two.
Kaya absorbed this.
She looked at the three of them. She had always found their loyalty disproportionate and been moved by it in equal measure.
She opened her arms.
They crossed the room to her without discussion, and she held all three of them, and the one who started crying first — she couldn't tell which — made the other two start, and for a while the room was full of the grief of people who have been handed a situation with no good exits and are being honest about it together before they figure out what to try next.
The island was sealed. The plague was coming.
What happened between now and the moment the strange doctor's boat saw the smoke was the space where survival would either happen or not.
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