Розділ 1
The island appeared at dawn, which Nami said was suspicious, and Luffy said was amazing, and Robin said was consistent with certain navigational legends she'd read in Ohara that described the Reflection Archipelago as "islands of sufficient desire."
"Sufficient desire for what?" Usopp asked.
"The text was unclear," Robin said pleasantly.
They went anyway. This was not surprising.
The fog rolled in as soon as they beached the skiff, thick and warm, smelling of something floral that Sanji couldn't identify, which bothered him more than the fog itself. He knew every flower that could be pressed into oil. He knew what jasmine felt like in the back of the throat. This wasn't jasmine. This was something older.
The visions hit them at the tree line.
Sanji saw the restaurant first — his restaurant, the one he'd sketched in margins since he was twelve, windows looking out over a harbor he'd never specified, tables full, a kitchen with two dozen burners and a staff that actually listened. And at the corner table, a woman with a warm smile who looked like something between memory and invention—
He blinked. The trees.
"Don't stop," Robin said calmly, from somewhere to his left. She'd been watching them, he realized. She hadn't slowed down. "The visions are keyed to desire. If you stay in them they deepen. We need to move toward the center."
"What did you see?" he asked.
"Libraries," she said, in a tone that made further questions feel unnecessary.
Nami had seen the map — the complete map, every blank space filled, every island charted, the whole world at once — and she'd had to wrench herself back from it, nails in her palms. She'd seen her village. She'd seen Bellemere. She'd moved past it, jaw set, blinking hard.
Zoro had apparently not noticed anything amiss. Either the island couldn't find sufficient desire in a man who only wanted to be the greatest swordsman in the world, or his vision had lasted two seconds and he'd cut through it on reflex. Both seemed plausible.
Luffy, when they found him, was standing in a clearing laughing at something nobody else could see.
"Luffy."
"They were all there," he said — and his voice had something in it that none of them had heard before, or heard rarely enough that it landed hard. "Everyone. The whole crew. Even — " He stopped. His grin was enormous and wet at the edges. "We were all there."
Nami put her hand on his arm. "We're here," she said.
The island chose that moment to stop being welcoming.
The trees came first — the roots, more accurately, erupting from the ground in thick cables, and Robin said, in the tone of someone who had been expecting this, "Insufficient departure ritual. The island retains what it shows." She flowered arms in four directions before the sentence finished.
It was a good fight, as fights went. Zoro was already cutting before Nami finished asking what was happening. Chopper had shifted to his horn point and was clearing root-growth from the path back to the shore. Usopp, who had under different circumstances described this island as the most terrifying thing he'd ever encountered, was laying suppressive fire with a speed that suggested he'd decided his feelings were less important than everyone else's survival — a transformation that happened, reliably, whenever the crew needed it.
Luffy stretched his arm to the tallest tree in the clearing, hauled himself up, and looked at the island from above.
"It's the fog," he called down. "The whole island is the fog. If we get past the beach the fog goes with us."
"Then we run," Nami said.
They ran.
The roots chased them to the water line and stopped, which Robin noted was consistent with boundary-bound spirit phenomena. Sanji picked Nami up without asking because she was bleeding from her ankle and she elbowed him but didn't fight it. Usopp tripped once, got up, tripped again, and arrived at the skiff complaining about the specific texture of the sand.
Chris the sea breeze — Luffy had named the ship's figurehead Chris; nobody had agreed to this; it had become a fact anyway — seemed glad to have them back.
They sat on the Sunny's deck as the fog dissipated behind them, island already fading into the kind of sea haze that made you uncertain it had been there at all.
"What did you see?" Nami asked Luffy.
"I told you."
"You said everyone was there. Where were you?"
He thought about it with the same seriousness he brought to very few questions. Then he said: "On the ocean. Somewhere I'd never been. And nobody was missing."
Nami looked at the horizon. The others did, too.
"We should log the coordinates," Robin said eventually.
"Absolutely not," said Nami, and pulled out her chart paper, and began to mark them down.