15 – The Cage
Gion had the four of them running contact drills when the tobacco smoke drifted through the training room door.
The session had been grinding for an hour. Kael was working with Ren on a closing sequence, step, guard, counter, the same pattern they'd been running since Gion set the pace. Ren was clean, quick, forgettable. Good technique, no instinct. Kael could read his strikes a full second before they arrived, which made the drill useful for his footwork and useless for his Observation. Gion had paired them deliberately.
He caught the smoke mid-block. The faint bite of tobacco came through on the afternoon air and it was wrong. Gion's training room smelled like warm wood and sweat and old steel from the weapon rack. Tobacco didn't belong.
He glanced at the doorway. A woman was leaning against the frame.
Pink hair. Long, straight, past her shoulders. A black suit under a Marine coat worn across the shoulders, and a cigarette holder between her fingers trailing a thin line of smoke into the room. Narrow eyes moving across the recruits, the drill, the room, like she was counting things.
Ren's fist caught Kael's shoulder while he was looking. Clean hit. His own fault.
"Eyes on your partner," Gion said from the center of the room. She didn't look at the door. But her posture had shifted a degree.
The woman watched the rest of the session from the doorway. She stayed against the frame, silent. When Gion dismissed the four of them, the woman was still there, unhurried, the cigarette holder at her side.
Kael toweled off and grabbed his water and was heading out when the woman stepped into his path.
She looked at him. Up from his boots, across the Marine uniform he wore with the collar loose and the sleeves pushed, to his face. The narrow eyes paused on his hands. Then his shoulders. Then came to his eyes and stayed.
"Hina is curious what Momousagi sees in you."
Third person. About herself. The sentence came out flat and professional and it took him a beat to land on the fact that the woman was referring to herself as "Hina" and that "Momousagi" was Gion's code name and that this pink-haired woman with the cigarette holder knew Gion well enough to use it in front of a recruit.
Hina. Captain Hina. He knew the name. Smoker's friend from their training days, Ori Ori no Mi, the woman who locked people in iron rings by walking through them. Smarter than most officers gave her credit for.
"Probably my restraint," he said.
The cigarette holder paused on its way to her mouth.
"Hina is not charmed."
"That wasn't charm. That was an honest answer."
She studied him for another second. She was running numbers he couldn't see. The cigarette holder completed its journey. She drew, held the smoke, let it out in a thin stream that passed between them and dissolved against the corridor ceiling.
"Hina will be observing," she said.
She walked past him. The faint trail of expensive tobacco hung in the air she'd occupied. He stood in the doorway and the smoke dissipated and the training room behind him was quiet and Gion was putting the practice equipment away with her back to the door.
He found Gion in the corridor outside the officers' wing. Heels on tile, Konpira at her hip.
"Captain Hina."
"Yes." Gion's voice was even.
"She watched the whole session."
"Hina watches everything. It's what she does."
"She told me she's curious what you see in me. Used your code name."
The heels kept their rhythm. He'd spent enough time in her training room to know when she was being careful.
"Hina is impressed by data," Gion said. "Results she can measure. If you want her to take you seriously, give her data. Don't try to be interesting."
"I wasn't."
"Good. Because Hina has been reading people professionally for longer than you've been alive, and she does not miss." A few steps on the tile. "Be careful which version of yourself you show her."
"Is that what you did? Showed her a version?"
Gion stopped walking. The corridor was empty in both directions, afternoon light falling in long rectangles from the high windows. A pair of boots was abandoned against the wall near a supply closet, laces untied, no owner in sight. She turned her head and looked at him and her mouth was the line and the mole was a dark point and the almost-smile was nowhere near her face.
"Hina and I have been friends for twenty years, Recruit Vance. I don't show her a version. That's why I'm warning you."
She turned and kept walking. The heels faded toward the officers' wing and the corridor smelled like floor polish. Her training room had smelled like the floral perfume for weeks. The corridor had none.
Recruits served the officers' mess on rotation. Block C drew the assignment this month, which meant Kael cleared plates and poured wine and carried trays and kept his head down while officers talked across him like he was part of the furniture.
The officers' mess was a different world from the recruit hall. Chairs with backs. Tablecloths. Wine that came in bottles, not carafes. The food arrived on actual plates and the conversations had rank behind them and the assumption that the people clearing the tables didn't have ears.
He always had ears.
A lieutenant at one table was explaining to a Commander why pirate activity reports from the southern East Blue were "statistically insignificant." The Commander was eating bread and not responding. The lieutenant was undeterred. The gap between what the lieutenant thought was happening in this conversation and what was actually happening was enormous, and nobody was going to tell him, and the Commander's bread was disappearing steadily.
Kael cleared their water glasses and moved on. The mess was half-full tonight, officers scattered across the room in clusters of rank and familiarity. A group of Lieutenants near the window was arguing about a transfer posting. Two women at a table by the wall were eating in silence and reading separate documents, which struck Kael as the most honest dinner he'd seen in the room. Everyone else was performing.
Gion and Hina were at a table in the corner.
The coats first. Both draped on the backs of their chairs. Gion's white Vice Admiral coat and Hina's Captain's coat hanging side by side, and without them the two women were just two women at a table with a bottle of wine between them. Gion's hair was loose against her shoulders and Hina had set the cigarette holder on the table beside her glass and their posture had the ease of people who'd stopped performing for each other a long time ago.
Gion was laughing.
He'd never heard it. He'd tracked the almost-smile across sessions, charted the micro-shifts at the corners of her mouth, the amusement held on a leash. He had never heard what happened when she let go of it. Her hand was near her wine glass and her head was tilted back and the lamplight caught the red of her lipstick and the mole shifted as her jaw moved, and the laugh was low and unguarded and her whole face opened up. Loose-shouldered and warm, laughing at whatever Hina had said like it was the funniest thing she'd heard in weeks.
Hina's mouth had relaxed into a real smile. The narrow eyes were wider by a fraction and she was holding her wine glass with both hands and watching Gion laugh and the smile on her face said she'd seen this before and liked seeing it again.
Kael loaded plates from the adjacent table. Silverware, bread plates, a wine glass with a half-inch of red left in it. He worked quietly.
"Hina sees why you kept that one," Hina said.
He was close. His hands kept moving. Plate, glass, silverware, tray.
"He has unusual Haki," Gion said. The laugh was gone. Her voice had settled back into its professional register.
"Hina wasn't talking about Haki."
The soft sound of a wine glass being set down on the tablecloth. Kael stacked the last plate and lifted the tray and turned toward the kitchen. In his periphery, Gion's hand was on the table near her glass and her mouth was the measured line and she was looking at the wine and she wasn't answering.
He walked the tray to the scullery. The corridor between the mess and the kitchen was narrow and dim and a mouse ran along the baseboard near the pipe junction, small and brown, and was gone under the wall before he'd finished noticing it. The scullery was loud with water and voices and a recruit from Block A was scrubbing a pot with the focused resentment of someone counting the minutes until shift end.
Kael set the tray down. Washed his hands in the basin. The water was cold and his knuckles were still sore from the morning's drills and he stood there with the tap running for longer than he needed to.
He went back for the next round of tables.
The corner table was the same. Coats on chairs. Hina was talking now, gesturing with the cigarette holder she'd picked back up, the smoke drawing arcs above the table. Gion listened with her chin on her hand. Whatever had passed between them after Gion's non-answer had been put away. They'd settled back into their wine and their twenty years.
He cleared the far tables. The lieutenant had finished his briefing. The Commander had finished his bread.
Hina's eyes found him across the room.
She tracked him as he worked, up and down, the same thorough look she'd given him in the training room doorway. Her narrow eyes moved across his shoulders and his hands and how he balanced the tray and how he stepped between the tables, and the attention was clinical and precise and he'd be in a file somewhere by morning.
He looked back. Held it.
She held the gaze for a beat longer than necessary, then turned back to Gion and her wine and the smoke curling from the holder between her fingers.
He carried the last tray to the scullery and set it on the counter and dried his hands on the towel hanging from the basin's edge. The Block A recruit was still scrubbing the same pot.
On his way out, he passed the mess doorway. The corner table was still occupied. Coats on the chairs. Gion had her chin on her hand, and Hina was talking, and the lamplight was warm on both of them and neither of them looked up as he passed.
He walked back to the barracks. The compound was quiet in the early evening and his boots were loud on the paving stones and somewhere across the harbor a ship's bell rang twice for no reason he could determine.