Just as Liam trying to asked about the Namekian.
Bulma was already ahead of him.
"I thought of the Namekians," she said. She crossed to the window, looked out at the broken skyline of West City, and talked to the ruins the way people talk to things that can't argue back. "Twenty years ago, when the Dragon Balls here disappeared the first time, we flew to Namek to find theirs. Same principle. I figured, if their Dragon Balls still exist somewhere, we find them, we use them."
"So it failed?" Liam asked.
"No. It succeeded." She crushed the cigarette on the windowsill. "I built a radar. Took years. It works perfectly. The problem is the distance. Their whole population is tiny now, after everything that happened on Namek, and whatever planet they resettled on is very, very far away. The biological signal is so faint it's basically noise. If the Namekians were the size of a planet, we might get a lock." She shook her head. "They're not."
She reached for the cigarette case. Reconsidered. Put it back.
"For the living, it's a dead end. Only the dead can ask the dead."
"That's exactly what I was going to say," Liam said. "Goku died before the Androids even appeared. He's been in the Other World for over a decade. King Kai can find anything in the universe from his planet, and he can transmit telepathically across any distance. All Goku has to do is ask, and King Kai finds the Namekians. Then Goku knows where to send someone."
Gohan's head came up. Something shifted in his expression, old memory surfacing.
"Before Namek exploded," he said slowly. "Dad used the Namekian Dragon to teleport everyone on the planet to Earth. And then, on Earth, we heard Uncle Yamcha's voice. He'd found King Kai after he died. King Kai passed the message through." He paused. "He told us Dad died in the explosion."
He didn't say the rest of it. That his father had survived, had escaped in a ship, had come home. That this had been the last real good day before everything started falling apart.
"King Kai as a relay," Bulma said. She was nodding, but the nod had a mechanical quality, the motion of someone working toward a problem they already knew the shape of. "Gohan. Twelve years."
Gohan went quiet.
"Piccolo died," she said. "Krillin. Tien. Yamcha. Vegeta. Twelve years ago, and not one of them has sent a word. Not through King Kai, not through anyone. Nothing." She pulled the cigarette case back out, decided she'd earned it, and lit up. "Now. Maybe King Kai is busy. Reasonable. The Other World is apparently enormous, and the dead don't stop having things to do just because they're dead. Maybe Vegeta did enough terrible things during his life that he ended up somewhere without a body. That's also possible. Maybe, and this one really does keep me up at night, they've all just moved on. Decided they're dead, and the living should sort out their own problems."
The smoke curled up toward the cracked ceiling.
"Or maybe Goku died before the Androids arrived, and he simply has no idea what happened to Earth. No one in the Other World thought to mention it. He's just been training with King Kai, happy, completely unaware that we've been eaten alive down here for twelve years."
Trunks had gone very still. "Dad," he said. "Did Dad do enough bad things that he'd lose his body after death?"
Nobody answered that with the speed that would have been reassuring.
Gohan's voice, when it came, was low. "My Dad died from a heart virus. Fourteen years ago. Before any of this started. If the others couldn't reach him after they died in the Android battles..." He pressed his fist against his palm. "He might not know. He might genuinely not know."
Liam let the silence run for exactly as long as it needed to, then said: "Then we stop waiting for them to contact us and take the initiative."
Everyone looked at him.
"Find someone who can reach the Other World directly. Someone who travels between the living and the dead as a professional service." He smiled at their expressions. "There are one and a half such people on Earth. The one is Fortuneteller Baba. She can call up the dead. You've met her, Bulma. The half is someone I'm less certain exists here, so she only counts as half. Supposedly lives near Five Elements Mountain, keeps company with an Eight-Trigram furnace."
Bulma stared at him for a long moment. "Can they do it?" she said.
"Potentially."
"You're not sure."
"Hence: half."
She pushed herself off the wall and started moving, digging through the organized chaos of her workspace with the focused energy of someone who had forgotten nothing but misplaced everything. Maps emerged from under circuit boards. Reference sheets slid out of half-disassembled components.
"Fortuneteller Baba," she muttered. "Baba, Baba." She spread an old map across the table and bent over it, finger tracing island chains, desert regions, coastlines. "Goku took me there on Nimbus once. I wasn't paying attention to the route, I was exhausted, I just wanted to go home. Somewhere desert, I know that much."
Her finger circled several dead zones on the map. Then stopped.
"I can't remember." She straightened up, jaw tight. "I was on a flying cloud, half asleep, twenty years ago. I can't reconstruct the route."
"Nimbus can," Liam said, and looked at Gohan.
Bulma's head came up. Her eyes went sharp.
"Gohan," she said. The word landed like a starting pistol. "Nimbus is a spiritual entity. It remembers. Can you call it?"
Gohan had never considered this. The possibility rearranged itself across his face in real time, surprise becoming focus becoming something tentative but urgent. He crossed to the window, opened it, looked up at a sky that was, against all evidence, still the same sky he'd grown up under.
He cupped his hands and shouted: "Nimbus!"
The name went out over the ruined city.
Trunks had no idea what Nimbus was. He found out approximately four seconds later when a golden cloud materialized at the top of the sky, dropped like a dive-bombing sunrise, and pulled up just outside the window in a way that suggested it had done this before and was quite pleased to be doing it again.
Gohan made a sound that had no business coming from someone his age. He jumped out the window and landed on the cloud and grabbed it with both hands, and for about three seconds he was twelve years old again.
"Nimbus," Bulma said from the windowsill, and her voice had done something complicated. "He does look like Goku."
Liam summoned Jade.
She materialized beside him in the ruined house, light blue robes and jade mask and wide sleeves, completely unthreatening to anyone who didn't know what the sleeves were for. Bulma and Trunks couldn't see her, which meant the first warning they had was Liam saying their names in a specific tone.
"Bulma. Trunks."
They both looked.
The sleeves took them.
Gohan stared at the empty room. Then at Liam, who had stepped through the window and landed on Nimbus beside him.
"They're fine," Liam said, before the question formed. "Time stops for them in there. When we arrive, I release them, and from their perspective no time passed at all. It's safer than leaving them here."
The cloud dipped slightly under a second person's weight, then adjusted, golden and warm and entirely unbothered.
Liam looked down at his feet. He was standing on a cloud. The cloud had accepted him.
He considered what this implied about his moral character, decided to take it as a compliment, and filed it away.
"I'll admit," he said, "I wasn't certain that would work."
Gohan looked at him sideways. "Nimbus only accepts the pure-hearted."
"So I've heard."
A pause.
"Congratulations?" Gohan offered.
"Let's not read too much into it." Liam crossed his arms as the wind shifted around them, his own aura weaving into the slipstream without resistance. "Nimbus. Take us to Fortuneteller Baba."
The cloud hesitated for exactly one breath, as if consulting some internal record.
Then it moved, golden light streaming behind it like a comet tail, and West City shrank beneath them until it was just another scar on the landscape, indistinguishable from all the others.