"Law." Lira crouched slightly, speaking to the small figure pressed against the back of her leg. "Go and say hello to big brother Lucien. Ask him about the ocean. He travels a lot. Aren't you curious?"
Law did not move immediately. He stayed where he was, fingers curled into the fabric of his mother's coat, eyes fixed on the white-haired stranger who had walked into his house with his parents. He had not broken eye contact since Lucien stepped through the door.
The expression on his face was serious in the particular way that four year olds were serious, as though he was still deciding whether this situation required more information before he committed to anything.
Lucien looked back at him and said nothing. He didn't crouch down, didn't soften his expression, didn't do any of the things adults usually did when faced with a small child who was staring at them. He just waited.
Law apparently found this acceptable. He released his mother's coat, walked across the room with the gravity of someone approaching a negotiation, stopped in front of Lucien, and looked up at him.
"Why is your hair white?" He delivered it with complete seriousness. "Did you change it?"
"Born that way," Lucien said.
Law studied him for another moment, visibly processing this. "Does it hurt?"
"No."
"Oh." He looked at Lucien's hair a while longer, then apparently closed the matter. "What's the ocean like?"
Lucien considered the question with the same weight the boy had asked it. "Big," he said. "Loud when it wants to be. Quiet when it doesn't."
"Have you seen sea kings?"
"Not yet. Probably will eventually."
Law absorbed this with a small nod, as though filing it under things that made sense. Then, apparently satisfied that he had extracted what he needed, he turned and ran to his room. He came back a minute later with a book tucked under one arm, crossed the room, and climbed onto Rocco without ceremony or announcement. Rocco shifted to accommodate him with the automatic ease of someone who had stopped noticing he was doing it.
What Lucien expected was for the boy to hand the book over and wait to be read to. Instead Law opened it himself, settled it across his knees, and began reading aloud in a slow and careful voice, working through each word with the deliberate concentration of someone who had recently discovered he could do this and had not yet stopped finding it worth doing.
Rocco sat very still beneath him and looked at nothing in particular.
"He's quite intelligent for a four year old," Lucien said. "Looks like the Trafalgars will have another doctor on their hands."
"He's smart." Lira came in from the kitchen and sat down, watching her son turn a page. "But he's so serious all the time. He doesn't want to play with children his age. Just reads. All day if we let him." She paused. "I don't want him shut inside the house all the time, especially now when Rocco and I are both away most of the day."
Lucien looked at Law, who had not acknowledged any of this.
"Every child is different," he said. "My parents put me on a boat and waved me off at twelve because I told them I was bored and curious about what else was out there. Maybe he just hasn't found anyone interesting enough to bother with yet."
Lira looked at him for a moment, then back at her son.
"Where are you headed next?" Rocco asked. "You said you were leaving tomorrow."
"Germa Kingdom. I want to see what they're actually building there. It sounds worth the trip."
Law's head came up from the book.
"Can you get me something from Germa Kingdom?"
Lucien raised an eyebrow. "You want me to bring something back from Germa. That's a long trip. What do I get for it?"
Law closed the book on his finger to mark the page and stared at the middle distance with the focused expression of someone running calculations. The silence stretched long enough that Rocco quietly reached for his cup.
"I'll give you my book," Law said finally.
Lucien held his gaze with the same seriousness the boy had brought to it, then nodded slowly. "Deal. It might take a while. But I'll get you something from Germa."
Law appeared satisfied with this and slid off the chair. Lira called from the kitchen and Rocco sent him in to help her, and then it was just the two of them in the quiet of the sitting room with the sounds of the kitchen coming through the wall.
Rocco leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "What you said earlier. About the Amber Lead. Could it really be that?"
Lucien shrugged. "It might be. What surprises me is that no one has looked at it already. The ore comes out of the ground here, it covers everything, you breathe it in every day from birth. It was always going to have an effect eventually. The only question was when."
Rocco was quiet for a moment. "It seems obvious when you say it like that."
"Most things do, after."
"But why now? If it's been here this long."
Lucien had no answer for that and didn't pretend to. He shrugged again.
Rocco sat with it for a while. Then he straightened. "I'll bring it up at the meeting tomorrow. Put it on the table and see what the others think. We need to be looking at every possibility, and we should have been looking at this one already."
"I hope you resolve it quickly. Can't have more people dying from something that might have an answer."
Rocco nodded, still somewhere in his own thoughts.
They sat in silence after that, comfortable enough not to need to fill it. When Lira called them through for dinner, they went, ate together at the small table with Law asking Lucien two more questions about the ocean between spoonfuls, and then apparently decided he had gathered enough information for one evening.
They went to sleep early. It was a short night for all of them. The Trafalgars had the hospital in the morning. Lucien had the sea.
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