Drake spent the first hour below deck because he had no choice.
The stomach wound was the worst he'd taken. Even with Natural Recovery working, the tissue knitted back together unevenly the Seastone bullet had passed clean through, which was something, but the entry and exit both closed slower than normal, like his body was confused about what had happened.
He'd packed it with cloth from a spare shirt, pressed his back against the hull, and breathed through it.
[HP: 178/240 Natural Recovery active]
Above him he could hear Jenny at the wheel. The occasional footstep of John moving around the deck, checking the rigging, staying busy the way men stayed busy when they were thinking about something they hadn't said yet.
By the second hour Drake pulled himself upright and went above.
The sun was dropping toward the western horizon, painting the water copper and red. Reaper's Gale ran before a steady wind with no destination just heading away from Whitecap Island, which was the only goal any of them had agreed on.
John was sitting on a coil of rope near the bow, cleaning his sword. He looked up when Drake emerged, read the way Drake was moving, and didn't comment.
"Heading?" Drake asked Jenny.
"Northwest. Away from Reeves." She didn't look back from the wheel. "I haven't set a destination because nobody told me one."
"Keep northwest for now."
A pause.
"That's not a destination," Jenny said.
"I know."
They ate at dusk. Dried provisions from Kragg's stores the man had kept his larder stocked at least. Nobody said much through most of it. The Jolly Roger moved overhead in the evening wind, the skull's hollow sockets catching the fading light.
Jenny set her cup down and looked at Drake directly.
"I need to know something."
Drake waited.
"That Marine. Reeves." She kept her voice level, the way people kept their voice level when they were working hard at it. "He knew your name. Your bounty. Where you were heading." She glanced at John, then back. "How long before the Marines know mine?"
"They already might," John said. He wasn't unkind about it. "Reeves had scouts watching the harbor. If they logged the crew on Reaper's Gale before the fight, your description is already in a report."
Jenny absorbed that. "I'm not a pirate."
"You're sailing under a Jolly Roger with two wanted men and a thirty-five million berry bounty captain," John said. "The Marines won't distinguish."
The word sat in the air between them. Won't.
"I was a prisoner," Jenny said. "Kragg took me. I didn't choose any of this."
"I know," Drake said.
"Does that matter to them?"
A long beat. Drake didn't lie to her.
"No."
Jenny looked out at the water. Her jaw was tight. She was seventeen years old, from a fishing village, and somewhere between being chained in a cargo hold and standing at the wheel of a stolen caravel, the world had closed off several options she hadn't known she was about to lose.
"My mother is still in that village," she said quietly.
Nobody answered. There was nothing useful to say.
John found Drake at the bow later, watching the last light leave the sky.
"She's going to run," he said. "First port we hit, she'll go."
"Maybe." Drake pressed two fingers against his side, testing. Still tender. "She has the right."
"She's the best navigator we've got."
"She's the only navigator we've got." Drake watched the Jolly Roger move. "But I'm not holding anyone on this ship who doesn't want to be here."
John was quiet for a moment. Then: "Reeves wasn't bluffing. About the other Captains."
"You're sure."
"He didn't have the look of a man bluffing. He had the look of a man reporting facts." John leaned on the rail. "He's had time to prepare for a Logia user in his waters. "The Seastone bullets, though. That's not standard issue. That's personal initiative".
Drake had already reached the same conclusion but it helped to have John confirm it.
"That's the East Blue problem," John said. "It was always going to be."
Drake turned that over.
The East Blue. Couple weeks ago it had felt enormous a whole ocean, every island a new danger, every port a potential fight. Now it felt like what it was: a small sea. A training ground. And they'd run out of room to move in it.
The bounty poster arrived the way bad news always arrived through someone else's mouth.
They raised a small island at dawn the next morning, barely a rock with a fishing settlement on it. Drake brought them in slow and low, Jolly Roger down, nothing flying. Just a beat-up caravel looking for water and dried fish.
The fishermen sold them both without much conversation. One of them older man, weathered, the kind of face that had seen enough to stay quiet about most of it watched Drake counting out berries and said, almost to himself: "You boys just come from the north?"
"East," Drake said.
The old man nodded. "Heard there was a fight at Whitecap Island. Marine Captain got cut up bad. Dock torn apart." He accepted the berries. "They're saying it was the Black Wind Pirates a new crew. Captain's a Devil Fruit user wind type, tall, dark hair with red in it, carries a scythe." He glanced up with eyes that weren't asking a question. "Fancy that."
Drake said nothing.
The old man reached under his counter and set a folded sheet of paper on the wood between them.
It was a wanted poster. Fresh the ink still had that sharp-edge quality of a recent print.
The drawing was rougher than the last one. Someone had captured the dreads, the earrings, the scythe. The expression they'd drawn was colder than Drake thought his own face looked, but maybe they'd gotten that part right too.
DRAKE D. CARTER
The Black Wind
35,000,000 BERRIES WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE
Crimes: Piracy, Assault on Marine Officers, Destruction of Marine Property, Suspected Murder*
Below the main poster, smaller, like an afterthought:
And below that, smaller still clearly the most recent addition, the ink slightly different:
JENNY
WANTED FOR QUESTIONING
No bounty yet assigned
Drake folded the poster and put it in his coat.
The old fisherman watched him go and didn't say another word.
-----
He set the poster on the navigation table when they were back underway. Jenny saw it from across the cabin and went still. She crossed the floor and picked it up. Read it. Set it back down.
Wanted for questioning. No bounty yet. But her name. Her connection to them printed on Marine paper and circulating through every port and fishing settlement in the region.
"My name is on a wanted poster," she said.
"Yes."
She looked at Drake. Not with anger with the flat clarity of someone updating their understanding of reality. "
Jenny picked the poster up again and looked at her name on it for a long moment. Then she looked at the Wanted for Questioning notation and the fact that there was no bounty number. Still a door, barely. Still a way back if she left now, found a Marine post, explained.
Maybe.
She set it down.
"Northwest," she said. "Where are we actually going?"
Drake looked at the poster. At the Jolly Roger through the porthole moving against clear sky. At John watching from the doorway.
"We need a safe port," he said. "Somewhere to resupply properly. Somewhere the Marines don't own." He looked at the chart. "And then we need to decide if we keep running in circles in the East Blue or we start moving toward something."
"The Grand Line," John said. It wasn't a question.
Drake didn't answer right away. He looked at the chart for a long time — the East Blue with its small islands and patrolled waters and Marine Captains. The long stretch of ocean between here and the Red Line. The Grand Line beyond it, enormous and unknown and genuinely dangerous in ways the East Blue only pretended to be.
He wasn't ready. He knew that clearly.
But the East Blue was running out of room to make him ready.
He put his finger on the chart. Not on Reverse Mountain. Not yet. On an island three days north a place he'd heard about from Kragg's charts. Big enough to resupply, find information, maybe find a shipwright to look at the hull.
A last stop.
"There," he said. "We go there. We resupply. We decide."
Jenny looked at the location. Looked at her name on the poster.
"Okay," she said.
She went back to the wheel.
End of Chapter 20