Chapter 347: The Glass Above the Depths
They gathered in a room built like a witness's conscience: dim, spare, and suspended directly over the interrogation floor. One wall was a pane of chakra-treated crystal—clear enough to watch a pulse in the neck, opaque enough from below that the prisoner would never know who watched. Beneath that glass, Amachi sat cuffed to a steel chair, pale and still, a long shadow pooling under the line of his jaw.
Up here, the air hummed with strong words, thoughts, and sober purpose.
Tsunade stood with her arms folded, the Hokage's cloak thrown over a dark haori. Her expression said no theatrics and no mistakes.
Shisui—lean, composed, eyes half-lidded to hide her dark black eyes telltale glimmer—leaned against the far column with the easy poise of someone who could cross the distance and end a life before a heartbeat finished.
Ibiki was a granite silhouette at the end of the table: trench coat, gloves, the glint of old scars when the light shifted.
Inoichi had a slim ledger open and a tangle of sensor wires coiled at his hip, the picture of quiet, patient precision.
And Malik—perfectly silent, for once—sat on a low stool with a plate of sesame crackers and dried persimmon slices, listening, watching, nibbling.
No one remarked on the snacks. If anything, the small domesticity sharpened the severity of the rest.
"Status," Tsunade said, not raising her voice.
"Vitals steady," Inoichi replied, two fingers touching a seal-scripted panel embedded in the far wall. "He's not suppressing chakra, only conserving it. Micro-tremors in the left hand when the door opens—he isn't anticipating, just seems like a old habit, might be left-handed, not panic."
"What's the Read on him in the room?" Ibiki asked without looking up.
"Wants to perform," Inoichi said. "Wants to be bigger than the chair."
"Amachi seems like that type," Tsunade muttered.
Shisui rapped the knuckle of one finger lightly on the glass. The sound was a thin tok that didn't carry down. "And he will, if we give him the right stage. That's his weakness. Vanity, dressed up as scientific rigor."
Tsunade glanced once at Malik—who was still diligently being furniture—and then back to the prisoner. "Fine. Let's talk scope. We are not on a fishing expedition. I want targets."
"Five baskets," Ibiki said, concise as a ledger. He lifted a hand and counted them off. "One: Orochimaru's current infrastructure—names, cut-outs, dead drops, medical caches, shelled identities. Two: Research continuity—data shards he smuggled out, where he archived, what redundancies he used. Three: Personnel—active collaborators, coerced talent, seeds placed in other villages. Four: Method and doctrine—how he selects sites, how he secures them, how he burns them. Five: Vulnerabilities—supplies, superstitions, habits, the tells of a creature who thinks she's past being human."
Tsunade's mouth curled just enough to show approval. "Good. Add six: Remedies. If there's anything in his head that actually helps the people he broke—especially Isaribi—we take it."
Inoichi made a small notation. "On that last point: if Amachi believes 'cure' equals 'dissection,' he'll hold hope hostage longer than he'll hold information, or any location on a map. We should plan to bypass his ego loops."
Shisui's gaze flicked down through the glass. "He's rehearsing lines right now. Watch his lips."
They all did. Amachi's mouth moved once, twice, barely a whisper, syllables shaped against the inside of his cheek. Ibiki's eyes narrowed.
"Cataloguing how he'll deny. Good," he said. "Means we can predict the narrative arc and cut it in the second act."
Tsunade let the silence breathe, then set both palms on the table. "Approach. We have options." Her gaze slid to Inoichi first. "Classical probe?"
"Doable," Inoichi said, "but suboptimal. When a mind is layered with self-justification, the conscious stream is performative. We'd spend hours peeling off what he wants us to see. Better to meet him where the monologue shuts up."
Shisui's chin lifted a notch toward Malik. "Dream."
Malik stopped chewing, and he gave Shisui a look.
"I said options," Tsunade continued, pace even. "Genjutsu staging?"
Shisui answered herself as much as she answered Tsunade. "I can construct a memory theater—no pain, clean edges, enforce continuity. But it's still perception filtered through his defenses. He'll know he's on a stage. He'll remember that later. Dreamwork collapses that distance; it's him talking to himself when he thinks we're not listening."
Ibiki folded his arms, the sound of leather creaking just audible. "And physical?"
"Counterproductive at first contact," he said to his own question. "Pain narrows the aperture and forces him to default scripts. We need breadth first. Later, if he withholds a key, I can pry. But I don't waste hammers on locks that haven't been tested."
Inoichi exhaled through his nose, then turned to Malik with the same deliberate calm he used when teaching interns to knot a mind-link. "I know what you can do," he said mildly. "Ino never shuts up about it, and I've seen the results firsthand. You can walk into someone's dream without leaving footprints. You can set a table, and they'll sit because they think it's theirs."
Malik raised a finger as if to demur.
"And," Shisui said over him, voice smooth as a blade's side, "you won't pull levers you don't believe in. Which is why I haven't asked you to do this for Root. Pride, yes. But mostly respect. We don't weaponize husbands if we don't have to."
Tsunade cut a look at Ibiki. "Tell him."
Ibiki didn't glance at Malik; he stared through the glass and spoke like he was reading off a weather report. "You go first, nothing breaks. You look for doors, not confessions. You leave the man's mind the way you found it, minus a few secrets. If it fails, then I go. Either way, we move faster than we would with the usual ladder of pressure."
Malik lifted both hands, palms up, like a small, polite surrender. "Does anyone want to hear the part where I say I'm not enthusiastic about rummaging in heads?"
"No," four voices said in eerie unison.
Shizune—who had been quiet at the back of the room, taking notes and putting tea on the warmer like the goddess of sanity—covered a smile with her sleeve.
Tsunade tapped the table twice. "Good. Procedures. I want this clean and logged."
Inoichi flipped a switch; a thin lattice of chakra hummed under the floor. "Shielding's active. No bleed, no echo. We'll tether you—" he nodded at Malik "—through a passive link. You are not to imprint. No sigils, no suggestions. You stand the dream up, you observe, you ask questions that let him fill in blanks. If he tries to drag you into manufactured nightmare, withdraw on phrase."
"Extraction cue?" Ibiki asked.
Shisui's voice softened, private despite the room. "Come home." She met Malik's eyes, no humor in them now. "I'll be on the line. You hear me say it, you follow the sound back."
Inoichi's pen ticked. "We'll triangulate emotional spikes. If we hit a hazard—curse-seal backlash, booby-trapped memory, the usual Orochimaru filth—I'll cut the link. Ibiki will open with a controlled shock downstairs to interrupt the loop."
"Levers?" Tsunade asked.
"Three," Ibiki said, finally looking up at Malik. "One: professional vanity. Let him teach. Ask him how he solved problems no one else could. People who hurt for a living prefer monologues about genius to apologies."
"Two: resentment toward Orochimaru. A discarded subordinate wants his architect to look over, just once, and regret. We can let him audition for that."
"Three: Isaribi. Hope is a handle. We will not promise a cure we don't have—but if we can legitimately say we're trying, the urge to be included in the solution will do work for us."
Inoichi added, "Avoid moral framing. He'll brace. We want procedural framing. 'Show me your method.'"
Tsunade's jaw set. "And if he tries to bargain for freedom?"
Ibiki's answer was immediate. "He doesn't leave the building on his feet without every map we need and every name double-verified. And even then, I prefer a cell with sunlight twice a week and books in a library he doesn't get to choose."
"Humane," Tsunade said dryly, then, softer, "and nonnegotiable."
They let that settle. Through the glass, Amachi shifted his weight and examined the cuff as though it were an instrument he was tempted to calibrate.
Malik, who had been making a serious meal of a single sesame cracker, finally cleared his throat. "Short version," he said, almost apologetically. "I go in, build a neutral place, let him talk to himself, and ask for maps drawn in his own hand. If he throws monsters, I leave. I don't need to; I'm rather skilled in the dream world, but I'll play along. I don't want him tightening anything in his own head. If he tries to seduce the scene into something grotesque, I leave. If he offers me an answer too clean, I mark it and ask for the ugly parts around it, not the answer itself."
Shisui's mouth curved. "There you are."
Tsunade rolled a wrist. "What does your neutral place look like?"
"Depends on the mind," Malik said. He glanced down. "His looks clinical. Clean surfaces, controlled humidity, the soft whine of machinery. Something that tells him he's in charge because the knobs are familiar."
"Clinic," Ibiki translated. "We can work with that."
Inoichi set down his pen. "For the record, we are not simply chasing Orochimaru. We're proving a protocol. Integration across divisions. Dreamwork in tandem with T&I, with full medical oversight and Root's perimeter security. If we do this correctly, we have a template for future work: enter gently, extract cleanly, corroborate relentlessly."
Tsunade snorted. "Put that on a plaque."
"Already drafted," Shizune murmured.
Ibiki checked his watch. "Two minutes." He turned his head just enough to fix Malik with a level, unblinking stare—a strange kind of blessing, coming from him. "If he says anything about the children, remember he is testing you, not confessing. Don't let him turn guilt into a theater you have to applaud."
"Understood," Malik said softly.
They moved then, like a practiced handoff. Inoichi reeled out a slim thread of chakra-silk and clipped it to a seal cuff on Malik's forearm. Shisui stepped close enough to touch his shoulder—a touch she didn't quite make, stopping a breath away—and gave him the smallest nod. Ibiki spoke into the throat mic that fed the floor below: "Stand by."
Tsunade lingered a beat longer than the others. "If he hurts you," she said, not quite joking, "I'll personally . . ."
She started, but Malik stopped her as he smiled without showing teeth. "He can't and won't stop worrying too much, but if he tries, I'll come home."
"Do that," she said, and turned away before her expression could soften any further.
The Village's Knife and Needle: How They Fit Together
While Inoichi checked the last seal, the talk briefly widened—professional habit as much as strategy.
"Post-capture pipeline remains the same," Ibiki said. "Dream pass, then classical interview, then analysis review. If he reveals hardware, Logistics tags and retrieves with ANBU escort. If he reveals victims, Medical triage first; T&I arrives second."
"Root on perimeter," Shisui added. "No theatrics. No masks in the hallways. If he sees us, he's still in Konoha, not a ghost story. We rotate silent patrols on a twenty-minute loop. If he panics and tries to transform, I suppress with ocular genjutsu before he finishes the thought."
"Inoichi's team records the memory-cartography," Tsunade said, "then hands copies to Analysis and to my desk. If this intersects with the Second Chance contingents, Malik's people handle their debriefs with my oversight."
"Clear lanes," Inoichi agreed. "No turf wars. Orochimaru thrives in seams and resentments. We do not give her any."
Ibiki grunted. "And when we're done, we eat."
Shisui glanced over. "You eat?"
"Sometimes," Ibiki said, perfectly straight.
"Saints be praised," Tsunade muttered.
Descent
"On your word," Inoichi said to Malik.
Malik stood, set the plate of snacks aside, and drew a slow breath. The room seemed to steady itself around him; even the seals in the walls felt like they leaned closer.
"Neutral ground," he murmured, to the team and to himself. "No crowns. No knives." He clasped his hands once, relaxed them, and let the magic rise—not a flare, not a spectacle, but a soft change in pressure, like a room exhaling.
Shisui's voice slid into his ear through the link, low and clean. "I've got you."
"Link live," Inoichi confirmed. "Counting you in from five."
Through the glass, a guard touched Amachi's shoulder, a harmless pretext to fix the cuff. The scientist's attention followed the motion, pupils narrowing, mouth tightening in the smallest display of control reclaimed.
"…two, one," Inoichi finished. "Enter."
Malik closed his eyes.
He didn't fall so much as step sideways into a place Amachi already knew. The first hint of it was sound: the thin, high keening of sterilizers, the distant plink of cooling metal, the hush of a sealed door yawning open on hydraulic arms. Then came the smell—antiseptic, brine, paper. And light, always light, white as exhaust, white as an unmarked page.
He didn't speak. He built the room the way you roll a patient onto their side: gently, with clear intent, letting the weight move itself.
Below the glass, Amachi's breathing hitched half a beat. His eyelids fluttered. His hands—not straining against cuffs anymore, but touching a phantom countertop in a room only he could see—relaxed.
Up in the chamber, Tsunade, Shisui, Ibiki, and Inoichi watched the small tells and said nothing.
Only when Malik's voice finally entered the dream—quiet, administrative, impossible to argue with—did anyone move.
"Let's begin with the harmless part," he said, to the man and to the ghosts behind him. "Show me your lab. Show me where you started before anyone told you to hurry."
Ibiki's mouth tilted, just once, like the shadow of a smile.
Tsunade said nothing—but the set of her shoulders eased a fraction, as if a knot she'd carried for years had loosened a single loop.
Shisui closed her eyes halfway, listening for any wrong tone. When none came, she breathed out.
Inoichi's pen didn't scratch. He simply watched the lines on his monitor swing, saw the dream map unfurl in a language all four of them spoke.
And Malik—who had come into the room intending to just be furniture—stepped into another man's midnight and began, carefully, to turn on the lights.
Time in the waking room was measured in the steady march of an ANBU's second hand.
Time in the dream bent like light under water.
Malik stepped sideways with Amachi into a space that smelled of brine, ink, and old antiseptic—a clinic assembled from the man's own memories. Counters were perfectly arranged, steel gleamed, and somewhere out of sight a centrifuge spun with that thin soprano whir only lab people find comforting. The floor was dry, but every surface felt as though a film of seawater had kissed it and retreated.
"Show me," Malik said—not an order, not a genjutsu prompt, but the tone of someone already on your side. "Where it started. Not the clever part. The lonely part."
A door opened of its own accord.
The child
They were in a narrow house by the docks—salt-eaten railings, a window that rattled when ships groaned out of harbor. A small boy with light gray-green hair sat cross-legged with a chipped basin between his knees. Inside, minnows darted in a stutter of silver. He watched them with the rapture of a child who has found a machine that runs without him.
"Amachi," Malik said, kneeling beside this younger echo. "What do you see?"
"Patterns," the boy said, not looking up. "They breathe… in the same beat. If I can find the beat, I can make it bigger."
His father's boots thumped once in the hallway—then the memory rippled and folded past it, protecting something, refusing to linger on absence.
The student
They were in a corridor of Konoha Hospital years later. The walls were too bright, the air too dry. A lanky teenager in a borrowed lab coat shadowed a young medic who moved like a quiet storm—sharp, efficient, all edges tucked in tight. On her badge: Mitarashi. Anko, but younger. Smiling anyway.
"You memorize the procedure," she told the boy, "then you memorize how to break it when the patient doesn't know the rules." She looked back over her shoulder at someone we couldn't see. "Sensei?"
And the corridor cooled half a degree.
Orochimaru stepped into view as if she had been leaning against the air the whole time—Konoha flak vest hanging open, hair framing a face too calm for comfort, eyes with slitted poise that made the fluorescent lights seem unnecessary.
"Curiosity," she crooned, as if tasting the word. "You have it in the right direction, Amachi. Keep it away from people's approval and toward the unknown. Approval is cheap. The unknown resists."
The boy stood straighter. The dream thickened with that first, heady recognition: to be seen by someone who valued you for what no one else understood.
"She was… kind?" Malik asked gently, letting the question mark hang where judgment could have been.
"Precision is kind," Amachi's adult voice said from behind and ahead at once. "She corrected me before the mistake. That's a kind no one else had time for."
The apostate's lab
Dream-steps floated them to a cavern carved into stone and plated over by cold metal—Amachi's true comfort: the lab in the Land of the Sea. Tanks glowed along the walls, that sickly green that never appears in nature unless nature has been talked into something terrible. Diagrams papered a board—gill slits, lung sacs, chakra flow annotated with tight handwriting; three drafts of a seal meant to coax amphibious affinity without shredding the host; twelve names crossed out.
The cylinders burbled.
Things drifted in them.
A handprint smeared once across the inside of one tank and then was gone, because in dreams we only see what we can survive seeing.
Malik didn't flinch. He stood with the patient gravity of a surgeon before the first incision.
"Walk me through your method," he said. "Start where you were proudest."
Amachi appeared beside a table, already rolling up sleeves he wasn't wearing in the waking room below. "Salinity gradient to trick peripheral chakra perception," he said, tapping a dial. "We found that if we lied to the body about where it thought it was, the body would try to become that place. Then we stabilized with protein scaffolds—animal, at first. Crude."
"The hybrids?" Malik asked, softly.
Amachi's mouth twisted. "Crude," he repeated. "But proof."
He moved to another station—a lattice of seal paper around a bubbling bath. "Second phase: seal harmonics. If you hum to a room at the right pitch, glassware sings. Chakra does the same. We tuned it to the ocean's pressure. The body has to answer or it breaks."
"And when it broke," Malik asked, not looking at the tanks, "what did you do?"
A beat. A change in the hum of the centrifuge, a small betrayal.
"We recorded failure," Amachi said. "Data is merciless or it is nothing."
Malik let the silence be a bowl that could take the weight. Then he stepped sideways—out of the priest's stance and into something far more dangerous in rooms like these: honesty.
"I knew her," he said. No flourish. No coyness. "We were lovers. It was not simple. It isn't now. I've healed some who followed her. Some still do. They sit at my table and learn how to live with what they became. She would prefer I sat at hers and stopped meddling with her story." He glanced at the tanks, then back. "She probably still loves me. I probably still love pieces of the person under the legend. That is not the same as agreeing with what she's built."
Dreams are funny things. You can pour poison into them through accusation. Or you can pour antidote through recognition. Amachi's shoulders settled by a degree you don't measure with rulers. The room stopped bristling at the edges.
"You were allowed to love her," he said, the first hint of incredulity not aimed at defense. "And you admit it."
"I prefer to start from the stupid true thing," Malik said. "It saves time."
"Time," Amachi said, with a scientist's hunger. "We don't have much."
"In here?" Malik smiled without teeth. "We have enough."
The project, without the sermon
They walked the lab's perimeter slowly, and Amachi allowed memory to narrate for himself instead of waiting for a courtroom to cross-examine him.
"The Kaima enzyme was always a lie," he said, stopping at a case full of vials the color of old seawater. "A spell to let land mammals pretend they were born to pressure they can't imagine. It works—for minutes, hours, at cost."
"Isaribi?" Malik asked, letting the name out like a drawn thread.
He didn't turn toward the tank where a girl-shaped shadow might have been. "She was ideal," he said, and even in the dream he heard the cruelty in that word. "Light frame. Determined. Agreeable because need makes saints of children. I told her we could reverse it once the data was complete." He looked at his hands. "And then my calculus changed."
"Because the data was complete?"
"Because Orochimaru's calculus changed," he snapped, then caught himself. "She lost interest. The doctrine moved to a different front. We were to archive, destroy what we couldn't carry, and… pivot."
Toward what, the room almost asked. Malik didn't. He already had enough for the map.
"Names?" Malik said instead, gentle. "You weren't alone."
Amachi exhaled. On a side bench, a ledger opened itself, pages flipping to a spread written in tidy columns.
"Yoroi Akadō," he said. "Grip specialist. Grew an appetite for siphon techniques. Useful with restraints, impatient with theory."
"Misumi Tsurugi," Malik murmured, reading upside down. "Joint dislocation jutsu. Liked to… fold people."
Amachi nodded. "Both competent. Both temporary solves to structural loneliness."
He paged forward. The dream complied. A rough map of the Land of the Sea coast appeared, dotted with red wax. "Hidden caches," he said. "Numbers, not prayers. Here—" he tapped a cliffline symbol, a tiny fox-tail of rock jutting into stylized waves "—sub-basement under the old fish-salting warehouse on Tōri Pier. Lead-lined chest under the eastmost pillar; three seal-scrolls, two corrupted, one intact. The intact one is my pressure-hum array. She took the newer copy when she left; this is the one I copied before the purge."
Another tap. "Freshwater cistern two kilometers inland at Shio Village. False bottom. Data shards in wax pucks. If you break the wax without warming it first, the shards fracture."
Another. "Umibōzu summoning schema. I didn't devise it—I found it in a coastal shrine text and adapted the chakra math. The draught for that is etched into the back of a prayer board I left at the shrine of Ebisu-by-the-Sea, under rope number three. No one checks behind sacred things unless they're looking for blasphemy."
He waited for the accusation. Malik didn't make it.
"Personnel?" Malik asked instead. "Not just shinobi. Acquired talent. Healers. Glassblowers. People who made this mess possible and might want out."
A row of index cards revealed itself in their wakes, bobbing slightly in brine like drift leaves. Malik didn't reach. He let Amachi pluck the ones he could stomach reading aloud:
"Kagari," he said. "Local seal-weaver. In debt to the wrong fishermen. Worked nights, brought her child to the hallway to sleep. Good hands. She'll run if she sees leaf headbands."
"Old man Daiji," he went on. "Glassworker. One eye. Heard everything. He hated me less than he hated bad craftsmanship. If you pay him to consult, he'll pretend not to know you and save your life anyway."
He hesitated on another card. "Ruri. The nurse who brought broth. I don't know if she chose any of it. If she's still alive, she keeps coins in her left boot and fear in her right."
A drip somewhere changed tempo; the lab was crying into its sink.
Malik kept his voice steady. "You summoned Umibōzu," he said. "Why?"
"Because fear is a resource," Amachi answered at once—the sort of answer you only choose when no one has called you monstrous yet. "Sailors fear the sea less when they fear something in the sea. If I pointed at a shadow larger than the violence inside this room, the room could—" He stopped. "It was an excuse to keep going."
"And revenge," Malik said, softer still.
A muscle ticked in Amachi's jaw. "If she left me with a theater and told me the audience had moved on, I would build a ghost that made them look back."
The monitors in the waking room above registered a small, clean spike. Inoichi marked it without comment. Ibiki's mouth compressed; Tsunade's eyes went colder.
The bargain he never gets to make
"You brought me here to take," Amachi said, not angrily—almost gratefully, the way an academic lights up when a clever student finally starts asking the right questions. "So take the maps. Take the names. Take the recorder hidden in the vent above tank three. It hums because I couldn't quite tune the seal to silence."
Malik didn't move. "You also brought me where you don't have to make a bargain to be heard."
Amachi frowned. "What would you offer?"
"Not freedom," Malik said, because dreams should never be used to counterfeit reality. "Not absolution. Use. You will be used. By my Hokage, by her knife, by her needle, by me. We can use you to stop versions of this room from being built. We can use you to pull the living out of the water you threw them into. You want revenge on Orochimaru? This is how you hurt a legend: you make her doctrine expensive and her habits predictable. And you help repair what she decided was a rounding error."
For the first time, something that wasn't pride or calculation moved behind Amachi's eyes. A memory came unbidden: a girl on a cot in the hallway, hair damp with sweat, clutching a bowl with both hands while Ruri blew on a spoonful to cool it. There were no tanks in that frame. No diagrams. Just the terrible, defiant ordinariness of a child eating soup while monsters took notes.
"Ino—" Malik almost said aloud, the reflex to call for someone who wasn't there. He stopped, let the quiet carry the image back into the dark.
The ledger he couldn't keep
"Anko," Malik said, when the room steadied. "What do you know that isn't a story you tell yourself to feel bigger? No adjectives. Just facts."
Amachi's mouth pinched, then obeyed the constraint gratefully—as if someone had finally given him the right-sized box to put this in.
"She was loyal," he said. "To being chosen. When she realized she had been chosen as a container, not a colleague, she set herself on fire rather than be a lantern. She bit through her own kindness like a trap jaw. I admired that. I named it hysteria so I didn't have to admire it."
Under the glass in the waking world, Ibiki's knuckles whitened once, then relaxed. Tsunade's jaw unclenched—not forgiveness, not even approval, just the acknowledgment of a truth cut cleanly.
The map
"Again," Malik said, gently relentless now, and the lab complied. The coast bloomed with tiny wax-red markers. He paused them only to add the kinds of details Inoichi would need to turn dream-cartography into fieldwork: angles of stairs, the smell of kelp at a side door, a cracked tile shaped like a crescent moon, third rope at the shrine, eastern pillar, lead lining, three knocks that made a hollow sound and one that didn't.
He didn't seize. He never said give me. He said show me where you remember breathing easier, and memory obliged, because even monsters keep track of their exits.
The leaving
Time—real, external, petty—thumped the glass from the other side. Malik felt Shisui's voice thread down the tether, warm against the back of his neck.
Come home.
He nodded in the dream and the lab understood it was not personal. Doors began to shut themselves, gently, like a hospital at visiting-hours' end.
"One thing," Amachi said, sudden, almost urgent. "If you find the child—I don't—" His jaw worked. "Tell her someone kept her broth warm."
Malik bowed. Not absolution. Witness.
When he lifted his head, the tanks were only light. The diagrams were only paper. The humming was only a machine cooling itself because the day was almost over.
He stepped back through the sideways seam of the world, into the thin air and seal-bright hum of the chamber above the interrogation room.
From outside, it had taken less than four minutes.
Malik opened his eyes to Tsunade's stillness, Ibiki's stony attention, Inoichi's bright, organized quiet, and Shisui's gaze—a home you could fall through and land standing.
He exhaled once.
"Caches?" Ibiki asked immediately.
"Tōri Pier, eastmost pillar, lead-lined chest," Malik said, voice husky, already transferring the dream's images into the shared language of work. "Shio Village cistern, wax pucks—warm before opening. Ebisu-by-the-Sea shrine, prayer board, third rope, schema etched on the back. Recorder in a vent above tank three, tuned wrong. Names: Yoroi, Misumi, Kagari, Daiji, Ruri." He looked at Inoichi. "He'll spook if we send uniforms for Kagari. Send a customer who pays in advance and asks about school fees."
Inoichi's pen was already moving. "Angles?"
"Counting marks on stair risers: thirteen down at Tōri, last two uneven. Crescent moon crack at the sixth tile from the door."
Shisui's mouth curved the smallest fraction. "Of course you noticed tiles."
Tsunade had not moved. "Did he bargain?"
"He tried to," Malik said. "I gave him work instead."
"Good," Ibiki said. It was the kind of approval you put in a drawer with medals because you don't know what else to do with it.
Inoichi closed his ledger. "Phase two: confirm with classical interview. We won't contradict his dream narrative. We'll let him repeat the useful parts until he believes them."
Tsunade finally let out a breath she'd been holding for more years than she would admit. "Then we move," she said. "ANBU with Analysis to the shrine and the pier. Medical to Shio with quiet hands." Her eyes cut to Malik. "And you—eat something that isn't a cracker."
Malik, who suddenly felt the weight of the tanks he hadn't touched, nodded. "And then?"
Ibiki answered, because this was his house. "Then I'll ask him what he remembers about the people he calls failures," he said, voice even. "And he will tell me, because you've already taught him the difference between being seen and being forgiven."
Malik didn't say good luck. He didn't need to. Inoichi's hand brushed the tether from Malik's wrist; the silk thread curled back into a reel with a soft sound like a sigh.
Below the glass, Amachi blinked awake to a chair, a room, and a future narrowed down to the size of a proper confession.
Above the glass, Konoha's needle and knife aligned, and the work—ugly, necessary, careful—went on.