Then he took the old man by the elbow, and the two slowly disappeared into the darkness of the Ancient Riverbed, heading back the way they had come.
Five people remained in the cavern.
Saki stood at the entrance, with faint stars in the night sky and the Ancient Riverbed's cracked mudflats behind her.
She wore a short jacket of thick gray-blue cotton. The hemp cord cinching her cuffs had frayed, and the soles of her straw sandals had worn down by nearly half after a night of walking mountain trails.
She rearranged the remaining Sharp Bamboo Tubes in her basket, then looked up at Guy.
"When do we leave?"
Guy glanced at the horizon.
The night sky was shifting from pure black to an extraordinarily deep indigo-not a sign of dawn, but the Milky Way briefly dominating the heavens after the moon had set. Starlight spilled across the open Ancient Riverbed, illuminating the patterns in the cracked mud like the surface of crazed porcelain.
He estimated the time-somewhere between two and three in the morning, with roughly four hours left until dawn.
If the old man's estimate was accurate, four double-hours meant eight hours—in other words, they would still have a long way to go after sunrise before reaching the Otogakure Ruins.
But the problem now was that the ten beads outside the branch gully were still flashing.
Kabuto was still blocking the way outside.
They could take the old road around the Jinchuriki, but once they left the cavern, the Jinchuriki at the gully entrance would notice the chakra signatures dropping from four to zero.
Kabuto's surveillance system would immediately detect that his pursuers had vanished-and he would deduce that they had taken a detour.
Once Kabuto knew his pursuers were no longer in the gully, he would