The morning came with a report through the earth.
Akane felt it before he opened his eyes. The pressure at the foot of his bed, small and patient, the way the White Zetsu always announced itself when it had something to carry and did not want to be seen. He sat up and pressed his palm to the floor.
The impression came clean and whole, the way Zetsu reports did when the distance was not too great, and the matter was simple.
The blood was taken. A few drops, no more. The girl had not cried out, and no maid had seen. The traveller was already past the white stones and moving through sand toward the buried city. The small slug rode with it, damp and quiet.
Akane lifted his hand. The floor was cool against his skin.
'If I tell them I will get a beating, and if something goes wrong, the beating will be deadly,' he thought. The conditions from the summit were clear: do not touch the Vein until we understand it. He was about to touch it to understand it, which was exactly what they had told him not to do. He would go and look, and he would tell them after he knew what there was to tell.
He stamped his morning slips, walked the fourth street, and at midday went to the Academy.
The gate was open, and the yard was loud. Kushina was on the low wall with a rice ball still in its paper. Mikoto sat beside her, already finished, folding the empty oil paper into a neat square. Nawaki was not there yet, and the space where he would have been looked too tidy without him.
"Did you bring pears?" Kushina asked.
"No," Akane said. "The herbalist was not there today."
"Then what did you bring?"
"News that the north road is dry."
"That's not news."
"It is if you have to carry a crate down it."
Mikoto smoothed the paper and placed it in her bag. She looked at Akane the way she always did, not quite a question, not quite a check.
"You are thinking about something," she said.
"I am thinking about two things," Akane replied instantly, making Kushina prompt, "And the first one is not for us."
"No."
She punched his arm, softer this time, and went back to the rice ball. Nawaki arrived late, his hair stuck to his forehead, and he talked about a lecture on chakra natures that he had not understood. Kushina corrected him twice, and Mikoto corrected her once, and Nawaki sighed and said that he would rather learn wire threads.
The break lasted twenty minutes. When it ended, Kushina said, "Same place this evening?" and Akane said, "Same place." Mikoto nodded once, which was her way of agreeing and also of noting that he had said yes.
He walked back to the mission desk, stamped three more slips for others, and ate standing up while the clerk praised his stamp work again with the same words as yesterday.
The rest of the afternoon was ordinary and necessary.
That night he made a shadow clone and left it breathing in his bed, the way he had left clones on the island to cover his absence. The clone would turn over if someone knocked, and it would not be asked to do more than that. Then he pressed his palm to the small home altar where the traveller had left its mark, and the mark answered.
The desert was the colour of cold ash.
Katsuyu's reverse summoning did not feel like flying. It felt like being folded and then unfolded, a small, patient pressure at the back of his neck and then the wind was different. The air was dry enough to pull at his lips. The sand under his feet was cool. Above him, the buried city showed its edge, a dark stone line against a sky that held no moon.
The White Zetsu waited where the sand met the stone. It had taken Himari's shape with the blood, and the shape was good. The hair was right, the small tilt of the head was right, the way she held her hands was right.
It was not perfect, and in daylight anyone who knew her would have seen the seams. At night, in the desert, it was enough.
The slug piece sat on a flat rock, no bigger than his palm, damp and still. It blinked when it saw him.
"You came quickly," Akane said.
The slug tilted its head.
"I remembered some old roads," it said, in the small voice Katsuyu used when she was being careful.
Akane did not understand what she meant completely, but he didn't pursue it. He knelt at the seal frame to have a good look.
The stone was warm against the cold air, a low, even warmth that did not belong to the desert night. The seal lines were the same as the one used for Creation Rebirth, the same symbol Mito had shown him on a scroll when she taught him to think about storage and release. The lines were cut deep and filled with dust.
He did not touch them. He held out his hand to the Zetsu-Himari.
"Come closer," he said.
The copy stepped to the edge of the frame. Its bare feet made no sound on the stone. It stopped a hand's breadth from the lines, as he had told it to do.
Nothing happened at first.
Then the stone changed.
It was not a sound, though there was a sound in it, a low hum that moved through rock the way water moved through a pipe.
It was not light, though a faint, pale light gathered in the lines and ran a short way before stopping, as if it had met a hand. The Zetsu-Himari's skin rippled, a slow wave from wrist to shoulder, and its hands tightened without the copy meaning to tighten them.
Akane watched the lines. He watched the hands. He watched the sand at the edge of the frame, where small grains lifted a finger's breadth and fell again.
'It answers the blood, even in a copy,' he thought. 'Even through Zetsu's skin, it remembers the blood.'
The hum grew a fraction stronger, and the light in the lines steadied. For a moment Akane felt the scale of what was sleeping beneath him, not as chakra but as pressure, older than the village system, older than the bijuu, the way Mito had said, the way Kaguya had warned.
It was not a toy.
He lifted his hand.
"Enough," he said. "Step back."
The copy stepped back. The light in the lines thinned and went out. The hum faded until the desert was only wind and sand again. The Zetsu-Himari's skin smoothed. It looked at its own hands as if it did not understand what the hands had done.
'It answered, but it did not open,' he thought. 'The copy was enough to wake it, not enough to hold it. The blood remembered, but the will did not.'
He turned to the copy.
"You will keep this shape until I tell you otherwise," he said. "Stay near the stone. Do not touch it again unless I am here."
The Zetsu-Himari nodded, the small tilt of the head that was Himari's and not quite.
Akane placed his palm on the small Katsuyu. The slug was cool and damp.
"Take me back," he said.
The folding happened again, softer this time, and the desert was gone. The air was wet. The river beyond the Senju compound wall was a low, even sound. He was on the edge of his bed, the floor warm against his feet, and the moon had not moved far.
He sat for a while, letting the last of the desert cold leave his shoulders, and he went over the exchange the way he always did.
The Vein had answered the blood, even copied, even at a distance. That meant the power did remember. It also meant the copy was not enough to carry it. The real girl would need to be stronger, not just present.
'If the copy can wake it for a breath, the girl can hold it for longer,' he thought. 'But she is not ready. She keeps her teeth, but she has not learned how to bite.'
He reached for the dreamspace, not to pull Himari again, but to find the garden where the swing hung from the tree that had no season. He would need to tell Kaguya that the road was laid and the Vein had moved.
He would need to tell her that the next work was not with stone, but with a girl who now slept without waiting for footsteps, and who did not yet know how to turn a copy into a hand that could hold a desert.
The violet sky opened above him, and the garden appeared, and the swing moved in wind that did not exist.
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You guys can support me at my ptreon.com/kaoski (˵◝ ⩊ ◜˵マ Chapter 120 is out there, plus various original one-shot stories. Exams are over btw! Hehehehehehehe!