"Chisen."
"Mm."
"You just said you could completely control the Brand. Then why did you let Hamura Jaku stab you at Bend?"
"Because he needed to take back the information that Chisen's Brand could flare up. If I hadn't shown any weakness, Helian would have reassessed my abilities. He would have changed plans. Switched to something I couldn't predict. I'd rather let him keep using his current plan-using the Brand against me."
"Because you know that plan has a weakness you can exploit."
"Right," Chisen said. "The weakness is that Helian thinks he's controlling me through the Brand, when he's actually revealing his own position to me at the same time."
Shikamaru spun around.
"You can locate him?"
"Not precisely," Chisen said. "But whenever his blood 'plucks the string,' I can sense a direction."
"Not east, west, north, or south. Something vaguer. Say, he's to my left or my right."
"What about frequency? Can you sense how often he plucks the string?"
"Yes. It's been happening more often lately. Three months ago, once a month. Half a month ago, once every three days. Last night, while I was asleep-he did it twice."
Shikamaru remembered what Kagura had said: "There was an extremely slight contraction along the edge of the Brand, as if something had plucked it from far away." That had been Helian testing it. Testing while Chisen slept, because a sleeping person's reactions were the most genuine.
"So he's been testing you since last night."
"Right. He's checking my condition. How badly I'm hurt, how clearheaded I am, how quickly the Brand reacts."
"You're pretending."
"I'm making the Brand's reactions look more intense than they really are. He thinks it contracted twice while I was unconscious, but I only let him cause one contraction. I caused the other myself."