Mr. Popo pressed a handkerchief to his eyes and made no attempt to explain himself.
Kami stood on the pale stone of the Lookout and looked at his own hands, checking that the resurrection had been thorough. Piccolo stood two meters away and looked at the lower world, already computing distances.
"Earth's Dragon Balls will come back," Bulma said, exhaling smoke, relief in every syllable. "Once we deal with the Androids, we can use them to undo everything they've destroyed. Piece by piece."
"We haven't dealt with the Androids yet," Trunks said. He wasn't being difficult. He had simply spent his entire life being careful about hope and wasn't ready to stop. "Goku still can't be resurrected. We're getting ahead of ourselves."
Piccolo had not turned around. He was looking at the clouds far below, at the ruined patchwork of the world he'd watched fall apart from exactly this vantage point, years ago, before his own death. He spoke without looking back.
"Gohan," he said. "You turned yourself into a god. What possessed you."
Son Gohan's voice arrived from everywhere and nowhere, the new god's telepathy still fresh and slightly surprised at itself. "Mr. Liam worked out the strategy. The Androids, Fortuneteller Baba, the Lookout, and the Time Chamber. He put it together. He also saved Trunks and me from the brink of death."
Piccolo turned his head. His dark yellow eyes found Liam and held there. The gaze had a quality to it, the assessment of someone who had spent decades measuring threats, and was currently doing it out of pure reflex.
Liam raised a hand. "Hello."
Kami's wrinkled green face moved toward something that might have been a smile. "Two wishes remain on the Namekian Dragon. Before we discuss them..."
"Why couldn't I find you?" Piccolo asked.
The question came out flat, but it wasn't flat. It had fifteen years behind it.
Kami looked at his other half with the patience of someone who had expected this conversation. "What do you mean?"
"In the Other World. After I died. I looked." Piccolo's hands were at his sides. "There was no trace of your soul anywhere I could find."
"Of course not." Kami's expression shifted into something contemplative, old, turned inward. "For a soul to be in the Other World, it has to have died. I am alive. My soul is alive. How would you find a living soul among the dead?"
"Then what were you, when you died, the first time? In the Saiyan battle?"
"The same thing I always am. Half of something."
Akane descended from Liam's shoulder and hovered at approximately Kami's eye level, examining him with the frank curiosity of someone with no instinct for self-consciousness. "When you died that first time, where did your consciousness go? What are you, without a soul?"
Kami looked at her for a moment. His expression shifted into something that was definitely kindness, the particular warmth reserved for questions asked without agenda.
"You said something slightly wrong," he told her. "I have a soul. We have a soul. One soul, between two bodies, two voices, two very different temperaments." He glanced at Piccolo. "The question of which of us is 'me' is a question that only has meaning if you believe we are two people. We are not. We never were. When I am in the Other World, I follow his will, because his will and mine are the same will wearing different clothes."
Piccolo was quiet.
"Same source," he said finally. "Two tributaries. Same river."
"The same river," Kami agreed. "And now you want to reunite it."
"You knew I would."
"I guessed." Kami's smile was complicated. "You are the brave part. The fierce part. You always were. I was the part that chose the quiet of the sky over the noise of the world and told myself it was wisdom."
"Stop being poetic and assimilate," Piccolo said, with feeling.
"Wait," Bulma said, stepping forward with her hand up. "After fusion, do the Dragon Balls still work? If Kami's energy disappears into you, do we still have a functioning Dragon?"
Liam had been considering this. "If they're the same person, the full ability should be available to the combined form. Splitting doesn't distribute power evenly, it just assigns it to different containers. Fusion recombines the containers."
"In theory, yes," Kami said. "In practice, the Dragon Ball abilities are bound to the aspect of my nature that remained in the temple, the quieter aspect. For them to function fully after fusion, that aspect would need to dominate."
Everyone looked at Piccolo.
Piccolo's expression communicated, without words, his opinion of that prospect.
"Then we find a Namekian," Liam said. "New Namek has Dragon Ball creators. We use one of the remaining wishes to bring one here, have them build a new Earth Dragon from scratch."
Gohan's voice returned to the air. "I'll ask the Grand Elder."
A pause, while the Other World handled its own logistics.
"Dende," Gohan said. "The Grand Elder recommends Dende. He's willing to come."
The second wish settled quietly into the world. A young Namekian appeared on the Lookout's pale stone, 1.8 meters tall, green-faced, blinking in the unexpected sunlight of the living world. He looked around at everyone, at Kami, at Piccolo, at Bulma's research trailer parked on the Lookout like it owned the place.
"Hello," Dende said, and smiled.
The third wish resurrected Master Roshi.
The old man materialized in a sitting position, which was fortunate because it took him a moment to process the transition. He looked at his hands. Looked at the sky. Looked at Bulma, who was laughing despite herself, the laugh of someone who had not expected to have this problem today and was very glad of it.
"You used a rare wish to bring back a useless old man," Roshi said. "That's either sentimental or wasteful. Probably both."
"The Earth Dragon can't revive the same person twice," Dende said, already consulting with Kami on the technical specifications of what came next. "Once we build the new one, we can modify that restriction. Multiple revivals, group revivals. It will take a month to do it properly."
Kami listened, nodded, contributed specific insights that Dende received with the focused attention of a student who had found a teacher. They spoke in the language of Dragon architecture, deeply technical, completely opaque to everyone else present. Liam caught perhaps one word in five and concluded that whatever they were building would probably be adequate.
"I'll leave the rest to you," Kami said, and put his hand on Dende's shoulder. Then he looked at Mr. Popo, who had put the handkerchief away and was standing very straight.
"The Dragon model," Kami said. "Give it to Dende."
Mr. Popo nodded.
Kami turned to face Piccolo.
Something moved across Piccolo's face, fast and suppressed, before the usual stillness returned.
Kami placed his palm against Piccolo's chest.
The light that came was warm and white, and in it, for just a moment, Liam saw something that wasn't quite memory and wasn't quite vision, a palace in the sky, a god and his cast-out shadow, a decision made centuries ago in the belief that separating evil from good would purify what remained. And the long consequence of that decision, the wars, the deaths, the earth burning while the sky kept its hands clean.
The light said, very clearly, what the words had not quite said.
We should never have split apart in the first place.
The light faded.
What stood on the Lookout was a Namekian whose face held something complicated, old grief resolving into something steadier. He looked at his hands. Then he looked at everyone else, and the look was direct and certain.
"Give me a few minutes," he said. "I'll deal with the Androids."
And he jumped off the Lookout.
He fell like a decision.
"He is extremely impatient," Bulma observed.
Gohan arrived on the Lookout in a white robe with a gold trim, still adjusting to the reality of his own divine authority, and found everyone looking at the sky where Piccolo had been.
Bulma stepped off the trailer, reached into her jacket, and threw him a watch.
"Finished it while you were gone," she said, cigarette still going, entirely casual about having solved a biological engineering problem in the same afternoon she'd also been conducting a resurrection. "S-Cell density, real-time monitoring. Anger curve analysis. It updates continuously."
Gohan caught it and turned it over in his hands. A small screen, a graph already populating with numbers, a secondary display tracking emotional state in a smooth clean readout.
He looked at it for a long moment.
Then he put it on.