Chương 64: Clues

Quiet rippled through the room. No one had heard of that happening before. He's really good-looking. The girl two rows from Inohe leaned across the aisle.

"What do you think, Tenten?"

"Hm? Yeah."

"—Hey, Inohe." On the other side of the room, a boy nudged a taller one in the ribs.

"Who is this guy? Why is he transferring into our class?"

"Don't know."

"You think he's any good?"

"Don't know." Sai stepped off the front platform without waiting to be told. He picked an empty seat, and dropped into it. The seat beside Neji Hyuga. Neji had no friends in this class. The two chairs flanking him had been empty since the first day.

"Hello," Sai said. Neji's brow tightened by a fraction. He was not someone who left greetings hanging in the air. He turned, met the boy's eyes, and said: "Hello." Then looked away. Sai's smile didn't shift. He settled his bag under the desk, folded his hands on the table, and turned his attention to the front. Afternoon, Shin said goodbye to a few classmates at the school gate, let the crowd thin, and started home.

Kiba fell in on his left, Akamaru trotting at his heel — still worked up from taijutsu drills, head turning toward every passing smell. They'd gone maybe a block when something brushed the back of Shin's eyes. Warmth. Brief. A shimmer at the edge of vision, there and gone. He stopped. Kiba had gone still mid-step. His head tipped slightly forward. Akamaru, tucked against his shin, had gone just as quiet. Genjutsu. Shin's hand came up. He didn't touch Kiba, just hovered and scanned.

"Not bad." A voice came from the far end of the alley.

"You kept your head." An old man stepped out from the shadow of the corner wall. Right arm in a sling against his chest. Right eye wrapped in bandages. Danzō Shimura. The last time they'd met, Shin had felt nothing from him beyond the weight of being watched by something very old and very patient. This time was different. Shin stepped in front of Kiba.

"Your eyes are rather unfriendly," Danzō said pleasantly.

"What happened to Kiba?"

"A simple technique. He won't remember anything, and there's no harm done." He began to walk — slow, unhurried, closing the distance.

"Relax. I didn't come here to kill you." The sentence landed in a way that did the opposite. Shin stayed where he was.

"What do you want?"

"I came to make good on what I promised." Danzō stopped a few feet away. He looked down at Shin.

"You went back to Tsume after our last meeting, didn't you. That's fine. People in this village will say a great many things about me. Not all of them are worth believing." A brief pause.

"There are other ways to accelerate your growth. Faster routes than what I've already offered. Are you interested?" Shin said nothing. Danzō regarded him for a moment. Then he tilted the conversation sideways, as if trying a different door.

"Your father was a hero." The words arrived without announcement. Shin looked at him.

"Eleven years ago, the Nine-Tails struck the village. Countless shinobi died in that battle." Danzō moved as he spoke, circling slightly, coming around toward Shin's side.

"Your parents were among them."

"Here is the thing about that." Danzō came to a stop just behind Shin's right shoulder. His voice was even, conversational.

"Given Tsukasa Takami's rank, his standing — a man of his abilities had no reason to be anywhere near the front lines. None. That wasn't where someone like him belonged." The back of Shin's neck went cold. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. What is he saying. Is he saying— Danzō let the silence sit there. Then, quietly: "I'll be waiting for your answer."

He turned and walked away without looking back, footsteps unhurried on the packed earth, and disappeared around the corner. Shin stood in the empty alley. A few minutes passed before Kiba stirred — a slow blink, a wobble, one hand grabbing the wall for balance. Akamaru shook himself awake and looked up with confused eyes.

"What— did I just fall asleep standing up?" Kiba pressed his palm against his forehead.

"What's wrong with me?" Shin looked at him for a moment. Then he looked at the corner where Danzō had been.

"Nothing," he said.

"Let's go."

"Wait, hold on—" The Nara compound.

"Early graduation," Shikaku Nara repeated. He was sitting across from Tsume and Shibi, the afternoon light low through the paper screens. He sounded mildly surprised. When Shin had told Tsume about the meeting, Shikaku's first instinct had been to convene the jonin council — a formal block, signatures and all. He'd shelved that instinct the moment he heard what Danzō was allegedly involved in. Early graduation. Not ROOT recruitment. Not a direct move. He turned the word over. Why.

"It wasn't Danzō's idea," Tsume said.

"Shin asked for it himself." Shikaku looked at her.

"He told me he didn't want to spend another year at the Academy." She let out a short, tired laugh.

"That's how he put it."

"Did he." Shikaku laced his fingers together. The boy is eleven. He thinks he's wasting time. He stared at the table.

"Then what's Danzō's angle. If the push came from Shin, what does Danzō actually want out of helping make it happen?" The three of them let the question settle.

"His teammates," Shibi said. Shikaku and Tsume both looked at him. Shibi rarely offered guesses. When he did, he usually meant them.

"His squad placement and assigned jonin-sensei," Shibi continued.

"Those are the variables Danzō could influence without it being traced back directly." Shikaku exhaled through his nose.

"I can block a ROOT operative from being assigned as Shin's jonin-sensei. Lord Hokage and I have eyes on every jonin on record — anyone with ties to Danzō, direct or historical, I can flag before the assignment is finalized." He paused.

"The squad composition is harder. I'd need to go through every student in that graduation class." He was already standing.

"Ensui." Shikaku raised his voice toward the hallway. One of his clansmen materialized at the doorway in short order.

"Pull the full student files from the Academy — the graduation class, every name. Then go to the genin registration office and pull records on all unassigned genin under sixteen." Ensui Nara's expression shifted toward reluctant.

"Clan-head, requesting files from the Academy outright may draw attention. And if this escalates to a direct confrontation with Danzō—" He paused.

"—the other families—""They know what Tsukasa Takami meant to the jonin corps," Shikaku said.

"Danzō is testing the edges of something that will cost him friends he hasn't finished counting yet. We're not picking a fight — we're walking in the direction everyone already wants to walk." He met Ensui's eyes.

"Do it quietly. Don't tell the rest of the clan yet." A beat. Ensui bowed and left. Shikaku saw Tsume and Shibi to the door, and then stood alone in the hallway for a long moment. Getting soft, he thought. When did doing a friend a favor start feeling like this much work. He went back to his desk, pulled over the stack of documents his runner had left and started going through them. He was three pages in when he stopped. Jonin Assessment Application — Yugao Uzuki.

He read the line of text the reviewing officer had flagged. Read it again. Formerly served in ROOT. The residential district.

"What brings you all the way out here?" Buichi Yamamoto settled into the seat across from Shikaku with the comfortable ease of someone who spent a lot of his evenings in places like this. He waved down the server and ordered without looking at the menu.

"Thought you'd be buried in paperwork."

"I'm always buried in paperwork. That's not the same as busy." Shikaku poured himself a measure of sake and drank half of it.

"There's a Special Jonin assessment application on my desk. Yugao Uzuki. Former student of yours?" Buichi's expression settled into something careful.

"Yeah."

"She served in ROOT for a period." The older man was quiet for a moment. His one good arm rested on the table.

"You're asking if she's a problem." He didn't sound offended. He seemed to have already understood why someone might ask.

"Shin's situation has been circulating through the jonin network," Buichi said.

"I figured when you invited me out tonight you were going to ask me to sign onto some kind of formal action against Danzō. I'd been rehearsing my politely worded decline." He paused.

"I wasn't expecting this." Shikaku waited.

"Yugao's placement in ROOT was a formal transfer. Lord Hokage approved it. After the Uchiha situation there was a purge of ANBU operatives from Danzō's branch — she came back out with the rest." Buichi turned his cup in a slow circle.

"You know why those transfers happened in the first place. Lord Hokage wanted eyes in there." Shikaku did know. Buichi looked at him directly.

"Yugao has no current ties to Danzō. None. If she has a flaw, it's that she spent too long worrying about someone who is quietly dying, and she might not always have the clearest judgment because of it. That's not ROOT. That's human." He set down his cup.

"I stake my reputation on it: Yugao has absolutely no connection with Danzō now." The Nara compound, later that evening. Ensui set the folder on the desk.

"The transfer student. Sai. This is everything I could find." Shikaku picked it up and started reading. The file was neat. Complete. The kind of complete that took effort. Parents: shinobi assigned to border rotation. Killed in the line of duty. Child subsequently raised in a border region welfare facility, received foundational shinobi instruction from resident jonin on-site. Age-appropriate return to the village, formal placement application submitted through correct channels.

Every stamp and signature in the right place. The border. Shikaku set the folder down and stared at the opposite wall. The border region was formally administered. It just wasn't administered the way the village was. The further out you went, the more the paper trail thinned. There were a dozen ways to build a file that would hold up to a routine check and dissolve under a thorough one — and putting it together took resources, patience, and someone who knew which offices didn't talk to each other.

He looked at the boy's name. The smile in the attached photo was open and unremarkable. Blank, almost. Maybe I'm overreading this. He looked at the stamps again. Looked at the dates. The discomfort didn't go away. He closed the folder. In intelligence work, the absence of anything wrong was sometimes the most useful data point you had. It meant someone had taken the trouble to make sure there was nothing wrong to find. He set it aside, face-down, and reached for the next file in the stack.