During the day, Kiyoshi finished throwing stone weights at the training ground, then sat at the edge to drink some water.
He really was drinking. His eyes really were straying across the grounds toward the barren slope, too.
A black corner jutted from a half-collapsed roof.
Three days earlier, a line of people had gone that way under the moonlight.
From this direction, one glance was all it took. Any longer would have been indiscreet.
He broke that glance into pieces and stored them away: beneath the jutting corner should be a door.
This side of the slope was gentle; the other side was steep.
Half the western end of the perimeter wall had collapsed. He couldn't measure the gap from several hundred paces away. He would have to do that at night.
He kept those few entries in his head.
Records on paper couldn't be taken into a place like that.
For the past two days, he had gone to school, come home, and thrown stone weights as usual.
If you planned to travel by night, the more ordinary your days looked, the better.
Shisui had said someone had just used that route. They needed to let it cool before taking it themselves.
Two days to cool. Not one more.
On the third night, he left the clan grounds with Shisui.
Kiyoshi led the way along the sheltered side of the slope, which swallowed most of their silhouettes.
Thirty paces from the wall, Shisui pressed a hand to his shoulder and went ahead alone.
Kiyoshi crouched in the slope's shadow and counted breaths.
At three hundred and ten, Shisui returned, crouched, and wrote on the back of his hand with a finger: two sentries.
One inside the door. One on the collapsed roof.
A shift change every incense stick's worth of time.
After finishing, he added one more note: no dogs.
Kiyoshi nodded. No dogs meant this job was half as difficult.
The other half lay inside the wall.
Before they left, Shisui had asked only one question: was he afraid of the dark? Kiyoshi had shaken his head. He was.
But on this job, fear didn't even make the list.
The gap was at the western end of the wall, half a person's height, its edges long since softened by rain.
Shisui went in first, and Kiyoshi followed.
The warehouse was darker inside than out.
Moonlight leaked through a hole in the collapsed roof, laying a slanted patch of light on the floor.
They crouched in the shadows beside the shelving along the southern wall. Two discarded boards leaned across the top, shielding them perfectly.
By that patch of light, Kiyoshi made out what was in the warehouse.
People.
Seven children and four young adults sat in two rows against the northern wall.
All the children had rope marks on their wrists, new ones over old. No one cried.
Crying took strength. They were conserving even the strength it took to sit upright.
One tiny child slept in a girl's arms. The girl was trembling too, very faintly, afraid of shaking the little one awake.
The four young adults weren't sitting together.
Each guarded a corner, placing themselves between the children and the door.
They had rope marks on their wrists too. The newest marks were still red, left when they had been brought here under guard.
The captives had been the first to arrange a defense.
Kiyoshi noted that down.
A row of bowls stood in the corner.
The bowls were empty, with white rings around their edges-the kind left by licking them clean.
A water jar stood beside the bowls, covered with a wooden lid. Dust had settled along its rim. They didn't get water every day.
Kiyoshi ran through the count in his head: seven plus four, eleven mouths.
Two more than the nine who had been strung together that night.
Shisui was half a step ahead of him and hadn't moved at all.
Only when he saw the row of empty bowls did his breathing deepen for half a beat.
Something stirred by the door.
Light came in first, then people. Two of them.
The one in front carried a lamp. The one behind carried a new cloth sack.
Kiyoshi recognized the face in front.
At the Clan Meeting, when the elder read his name, he had stood, and the short half-row behind him had stood with him.
Before the meeting ended, his eyes had swept across the room, across the corner, across a little boy with an expressionless face, without stopping.
Those same eyes.
Now they were less than ten paces from the shelving where Kiyoshi hid.
Eagle Spring.
He hung the lamp on an iron hook beside the door and looked around like a shopkeeper inspecting his accounts office.
"One missing," he said.
"Sick." The man behind him lowered his head. "No need to look at the sick one."
Eagle Spring didn't respond. He tipped his chin toward the northern wall and studied the children's faces one by one.
He took his time, as though inspecting a newly acquired pair of boots.
No one by the northern wall looked up.
One child turned their face toward the wall.
The man set the cloth sack on the floor and untied it. Several coils of hemp rope rolled out, along with a packet of salt and a neatly stacked pile of clan school textbooks.
"Textbooks?" The man himself froze for a moment, then lowered his voice further. "Boss, will these... work?"
"They'll work." Eagle Spring picked up the top book, opened it under the lamplight, and weighed it in his hand. "Eyes awaken through pain. Waiting for the clan to suffer on its own takes too long."
He tossed the textbook beside the captives.
"Teach the children with good memories to memorize it first. When the day of pain comes, they'll understand it all."
Kiyoshi looked at the pile of textbooks.
He recognized the cover of the one on top.
The Clan Studies Primer. Its first few pages contained diagrams of hand seals.
His own copy was still in his schoolbag, with something else tucked into its spine.
Shisui still hadn't moved.
It was the first time Kiyoshi had seen Shisui this still.
It wasn't like when he was thinking.
His breathing shifted rhythm, then he forced it back down.
The hand resting on his knee curled into a fist. His knuckles made no sound. Then he slowly loosened it again.
Inside the warehouse, Eagle Spring was still speaking.
"Three tomoe comes down to fate. Beyond that, the Mangekyo-then you have to leave them no way out." His voice was quiet, as though reporting this year's harvest. "The village is pushing us. People pushed to the brink will open better eyes on their own. All I've done is bring that day forward."
In the lamplight, he reached up, took down the lamp, and headed out.
At the doorway, he glanced back toward the northern wall.
That glance was utterly level.
The look of someone counting things. A shopkeeper checking stock.
The door closed. The footsteps receded.
The light withdrew with them, leaving the warehouse completely dark again.
Over by the northern wall, someone drew a bowl back a little, so gently it was as though they feared breaking something.
Crouching in the dark, Kiyoshi realized his hand was shaking.
His face showed nothing.
It was the face of a six-and-a-half-year-old, so accustomed to being expressionless that even a household registration check wouldn't change his tone.
Only his hand was shaking, senselessly, as though it had nothing to do with him.
He looked down at that hand and recorded in his mind: Two sentries.
A shift change every incense stick's worth of time. The gap is three bricks wide.
At the third entry, he couldn't keep going.
One line in the ledger remained blank.
That line was for the pile of textbooks.
A ledger couldn't account for a pile of textbooks.
Kiyoshi pressed his hand against his knee and held it there.
He suppressed the shaking and finished the record: the hole in the collapsed roof could admit one person, sideways. There was a second door on the warehouse's western side, locked. Its hinges had been freshly oiled. It was used often.
Shisui touched his arm and pointed two fingers behind them: withdraw.
Kiyoshi understood. All eleven people in the warehouse were hostages. Once the alarm sounded, Eagle Spring's men would pull out, clearing the northern wall first.
Both of them could do that calculation. Neither said it.
They left by the way they had come, Kiyoshi in front and Shisui behind.
They passed through the half-height brick opening one at a time.
The sentry on the collapsed roof had just changed shifts. The new sentry's shadow was slow to appear, giving them exactly the cover they needed.
The bricks around the opening were cold.
Kiyoshi pressed his palm against them and slowly eased himself out, keeping his knees from touching the wall.
Kiyoshi emerged first and crouched close against the wall.
Shisui followed, half of one foot still inside the opening.
Just then, a very, very faint voice sounded from inside the wall.
It seemed to seep through the cracks in the northern wall's bricks, barely louder than the wind.
"...Lord Shisui?"
Shisui stopped.
His leading foot hung in the opening. He neither set it down nor drew it back.
On the collapsed roof, the sound of the new sentry shifting his feet paused for half a breath.
Inside the warehouse, the sound of rope scraping across the floor moved an inch toward the cracks in the bricks.
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