Dawn in Alabasta arrived like a slap.
The night before had carried the kind of cold that settled in the bones, the particular chill of a desert that gave back none of the heat it borrowed during daylight hours. By the time the sun cleared the horizon, however, it was already well into its revenge. The temperature climbed with the focused ambition of something that had a point to make.
Finn stood at the open window of his hotel room and looked out at the bleached stone of Alubarna's morning skyline, where the heat shimmer had already begun to rise off the pale rooftops. He pressed his lips together.
"Freezing at night. Scorching at dawn. The temperature difference in this place is genuinely unreasonable," he said, to no one in particular.
Behind him, the bathroom door opened and Hina emerged, wrapped in a set of thick, soft pajamas that were, given the morning heat already building outside, a sartorial choice of absolute defiance. She crossed to the wardrobe without apparent concern and began changing her clothes with the casual comfort of someone who had long since decided that maintaining any particular performance around Finn was more effort than it was worth.
"Admiral," she said, pulling on her shirt, "have you noticed something?"
"What?"
"We've been in Alabasta for weeks. Not a single day of rain."
Finn turned back toward the window, rubbing the back of his neck. "Didn't someone mention dancing powder? Some kind of substance that prevents rain clouds from forming? Why hasn't anyone sorted that out?" He frowned at the horizon. "The sky's been bone dry since we arrived."
He stood there long enough to register that he did not have the intelligence to answer his own question, and then decided it was a problem for someone else. He picked up the clay cup of camel milk from the bedside table, took a slow sip, and set it back down.
"Enough of that. Get dressed, let's go eat. We'll find Vergo on the way down." He grinned. "Hehehe."
Hina looked at him. "Why are you making that face?"
"Because," Finn said, with the tone of a man savoring something, "last night I went downstairs to throw out the rubbish. And on the way back, I happened to see something rather interesting involving our reliable, steady, absolutely professional aide."
Hina pulled on her boot. "What did you see?"
"A woman. Being escorted, somewhat reluctantly, back through a doorway by a man matching Vergo's general description." He raised his eyebrows. "Half-heartedly. That's the phrase I would use. The whole thing had a very half-hearted quality."
Hina stared at him for a moment. Then she exhaled through her nose and rolled her eyes with the weary patience of someone who had worked alongside this man for years and had come to terms with most of his qualities, but not all of them.
"We're adults," she said. "All of us. Vergo has been with us long enough that if he's finally found someone he's interested in spending time with, that's entirely his business. It's not strange. It's not worth making a production of."
She tied her boot. A slight color had come into her face.
Finn grinned again. "I wasn't making a production. I was simply reporting facts."
Hina opened the door. "You're insufferable."
"I was just worried about him," Finn called after her, following.
They came downstairs to find Vergo already at a table in the hotel's open-air dining room, positioned with the neat self-containment of a man who had arrived early and made himself comfortable. A modest spread of Alabasta breakfast dishes occupied the table in front of him, several of which showed evidence of having been partially eaten. He had, inexplicably, a small smear of butter on his chin that he appeared entirely unaware of.
He was alone.
Finn pulled out a chair and sat down with deliberate casualness. Hina took the seat across from him.
"Huh," Finn said pleasantly. "Just you this morning?"
Vergo glanced at him with the mild patience of a man who did not yet know he was being circled. "Did you expect me to turn into a dog overnight?"
Hina laughed, the sound bright and genuinely amused.
As if on schedule, a waiter arrived with a cart carrying an additional spread of dishes that Vergo had clearly pre-arranged. Finn reached across and helped himself to a round desert pastry, warm and faintly sweet, and chewed it thoughtfully.
"Come on," he said. "You know that's not what I was asking."
Vergo looked at him. "What were you asking?"
"I'm asking about last night," Finn said, keeping his voice mild, "and the specific events I witnessed at approximately the eleventh hour, hehehe."
Vergo's composure cracked in a way that was, given how rarely it cracked, quite remarkable. A color that had no business appearing on a man of his experience and steadiness rose in his face, and he sat up slightly in his chair with the expression of a man scrambling for high ground.
"I don't know what you think you saw," he said, quickly and with great dignity. "But I had been out the entire day. My feet hurt. I asked someone to massage them. That is all."
"Absolutely," Finn said, nodding.
"That is the complete and accurate account of events."
"Of course it is."
Hina had both hands pressed over her mouth and was shaking.
Vergo appeared to feel that the breakfast table had become, in some fundamental way, hostile to him. He reached for a subject change with the desperation of a drowning man reaching for a rope.
"What are we doing today? I heard there's a mummy exhibition nearby. The museum has specimens over six hundred years old, apparently well-preserved. It could be educational."
Finn gave him a flat look. "If I want to see something mummified, I can go ask Crocodile. He can demonstrate the whole process in about three minutes, in the field, start to finish."
Hina straightened slightly, composing herself. "I want to go to the Kingdom Jewelry Exhibition. They have a stone called Desert Heart on display. Pale yellow, size of a fist, and it produces a light effect in direct sunlight that I've heard is worth seeing."
Both Finn and Vergo turned to look at her with identical expressions of polite disinterest.
She recognized the look immediately. "Don't."
"I just think," Vergo said carefully, "that a jewelry exhibition is perhaps not the most dynamic use of a morning."
"Oh really," Hina said. Her eyes narrowed. "Let Hina explain something to both of you. A jewelry exhibition draws a particular kind of visitor. Specifically, women with taste and the means to indulge it. Wealthy women. Educated women. Quite possibly the daughters of prominent Alabasta families." She settled her gaze on Vergo with the measured patience of a woman doing her civic duty. "What you're calling 'not dynamic' is, for a man in your situation, what other people would call an opportunity. You're a Marine Vice Admiral's aide, you're presentable, and you are no longer young. Maybe if you spent a morning somewhere other than the bottom of the sea, you wouldn't need to hire someone to massage your feet."
Vergo processed this for roughly three seconds.
"Admiral," he said, raising his hand, "I would like to see Desert Heart."
"Can you retain some dignity?" Finn said.
A brief silence fell while Finn re-examined the situation.
"Actually," he said thoughtfully, "are there really that many women like that at these things?"
Hina looked at him.
"I ask," Finn said, with the reflexive self-preservation instincts of a man who has just heard his own question land badly, "purely because I'm thinking about Momonga, Doberman, Yamakaji. Veterans, all of them, none of them young. Fighting and sailing for their entire careers, no time for anything else. Shouldn't a man of Vice Admiral rank be properly settled? A good match from a respected family? Is that not appropriate?"
Hina looked at him for a moment longer. Then she looked away.
"That," she said, "is possibly the most awkward thing you have ever said to me."
"I was speaking about Doberman specifically."
"You were speaking about anyone who came to mind."
In the end, Vergo's vote and Finn's sudden complicated interest in the social welfare of senior Marine officers combined to produce a consensus in favor of the jewelry exhibition, which Hina accepted with the private satisfaction of someone who had engineered this outcome from the start.
The exhibition hall occupied a large leased space near Alubarna's commercial district, the kind of venue that announced itself through the quality of its security before anything else. Uniformed guards at the entrance. More inside. Dozens of locked display cases arranged across a polished floor, each holding something that caught the light with the self-importance of an object that had been appraised recently and expensively.
"How much is Desert Heart listed at?" Finn asked, looking around at the cases as they moved through the entrance.
"Twelve billion berries," Hina said.
Finn stopped walking.
"That's," he said, and paused to do the arithmetic, "approximately fifty warships."
"It's the most perfect yellow gem ever recovered from the Alabasta desert basin. It is historically significant, aesthetically exceptional, and it has been appraised by four independent valuators across three continents." Hina's voice carried the particular quality of a woman who had read the exhibition pamphlet and retained it. "What do you know about gems."
"Apparently nothing," Finn said. "Since I would have bought fifty warships."
"If you bought it for me," Hina said, tilting her chin slightly, "I would wear it every day without complaint, even if it gave me neck problems."
Finn looked at her. "Twelve billion berries is actually not a problem for me," he said, with the offhand tone of a man who had built economic infrastructure across multiple oceans.
Hina blinked.
Then she smiled and shook her head. "Don't. I'm a Marine adjutant. I'm your secretary, on paper. If I showed up to Marineford wearing a twelve billion berry gem, the Inspector General's office would open an investigation before I reached the front gate." She tucked a strand of hair back. "I just wanted to see it."
Finn nodded. The moment settled into something quieter and easier, the way their conversations often did when the banter ran its course and left room for something more comfortable beneath it.
He looked around the hall and located Vergo without difficulty. The man was standing in front of a display case in the middle row, and he was not, notably, looking at its contents. He was talking to a young woman who had apparently also been looking at the same case, and from the angle of his posture and the quality of her attention, the conversation was going considerably better than any conversation Vergo conducted in a professional capacity.
"How," Finn said, genuinely puzzled, "is he this good at this? He's still officially single. How?"
Hina considered it. "Perhaps he's had no space for it until now. A man in a long-term deep cover assignment, surrounded by loyalty obligations that complicate everything, doesn't get to simply talk to someone. Maybe now that the pressure is off, he's just..." She made a small gesture. "Himself."
"He's himself while wearing butter on his chin," Finn said.
"Some women find that charming."
"Do they."
The Den Den Mushi in Hina's bag emitted a soft chirp. She reached in, glanced at it, and her eyes brightened slightly.
"Admiral. It's Lucci."
Finn took it. "Lucci."
"It's me, Admiral." The voice was easy and composed, carrying the particular steadiness of a man who had been operating in difficult conditions for so long that everything else felt like a rest. "I've arrived at the Oasis Hotel in Alubarna. Are you there?"
"I'm not at the hotel right now. Wait in the lobby. I'll come to you." Finn paused. "Sooner than you might expect. Is Jinbe with you?"
"No. After Boss Jinbe saw me off at the Rapeseed Flower Port, we parted ways. He went directly to Rainland to meet with Crocodile. I came ahead to Alubarna alone."
"Understood. Stay in the lobby." Finn ended the call and handed the Den Den Mushi back to Hina.
He stood still for a moment.
"Boss Jinbe," he said, with a quiet amusement in his voice. "The two of them spent enough time together that Lucci's calling him 'Boss Jinbe.' I expected there might be some friction, given the history. Jinbe's ties to the Whitebeard Pirates were always complicated." He glanced at Hina. "Jam Island changed the landscape a lot."
"It changed everything," Hina said, simply.
Finn nodded once. His eyes drifted toward nothing for a moment, the particular look of a man briefly thinking about large things, and then he came back.
"All right. Let's go."
They moved toward the exit together, talking quietly, neither of them giving any particular thought to Vergo, who was still in the middle of the exhibition hall, mid-sentence about the tonal properties of yellow gemstones, demonstrating to the young woman beside him what he apparently understood about the subject.
He was performing well. He was, by any objective measure, having one of the better conversations of his adult life.
Two minutes after Finn and Hina slipped quietly through the exhibition hall's front entrance, Vergo paused mid-sentence. He had glanced, out of habit, toward the place where they had been standing a moment ago.
The space was empty.
He turned. He scanned the hall in both directions with the systematic efficiency of a man accustomed to threat assessment. Display cases. Security personnel. Visitors examining jewelry. Other conversations. No Hina. No Admiral.
He looked at the entrance.
He looked back at the young woman, who was watching him with mild curiosity.
He looked at the entrance again.
He pressed his lips together.
"If you'll excuse me," he said, with whatever dignity remained available to him, "I need to go."