The house went quiet early, and Akane left a clone breathing in his bed and went over the back wall the quiet way. The tiles were cool under his hands, and the town below lay dark all the way to the wall.
The forest edge was dark past the training posts, with no rooftop near enough to watch it and no lamp burning anywhere along the path. He checked the rooflines on his way out of habit, and none of them held white. The tail kept market hours and the night was his own. He stopped where the grass grew thick over old roots, crouched, and pressed his palm flat to the earth.
"One of you is near," he murmured. "Come up."
The soil loosened a hand's breadth from his fingers, and a pale face rose out of it to the level of the eyes, smooth and expressionless in the dark.
Akane kept his voice low. "Carry a message down. Tell the black one to sleep tonight. Tell him I will pull him, and to come empty."
The White Zetsu regarded him for a moment, then sank back into the ground without a sound. The soil settled over it as if nothing had ever disturbed it. Akane waited three breaths to be certain the ground kept its secret, then brushed the dirt from his palm.
Akane went home the same quiet way.
His room was as he had left it, the clone breathing slowly in the bed, the peach a pale shape on the altar where the last light had left it. He let the clone go with a thought and took its place under the blanket. The day's dull patience flowed back into him: ink, stamps, the clerk's same praise, nothing watched and nothing learned.
He found Himari first and kept it short. The regular bowl practice with longer counts; her hands shook once near the end but held the water. Then the rest was about the practice, court, letters, and he let her go back to sleep.
Then he reached deeper, past the garden with its swing and its violet, past the island and the white stones, into a dark reach of the dreamspace where nothing grew, and nothing was watched. He thought of Black Zetsu, and the black body rose out of the dream-floor like oil surfacing on water.
"You came quickly," Akane said.
"Madara counts his servants when he cannot sleep," Black Zetsu replied. Its voice was thin here, without walls to carry it. "Ask quickly, and I will go back before he counts again."
Akane nodded once. That was exactly how he wanted this.
"What did Madara conclude from the eyes he put on my group in the Rain?"
Black Zetsu tilted its head. "That the boy runs and hides and spends other men's lives. Clever, he said, but cowardly. Hanzo's ambush confirmed it for him. He has not asked after your group since."
That matched the diet Akane had been feeding him, down to the word cowardly, and that meant this report was clean.
"The patient in the Capital and the groups asking of her. What does he ask now?"
"Nothing," Black Zetsu said. "Three groups still, no name found. Madara calls it a Konoha household matter and yawns. He believes the trail is cold."
This also matched what he had in his mind. Two clean answers out of two asked, and Akane felt the talk settle into its true shape.
"What does Madara think the Senju woman wanted in the Rain? She stood beside the boy through the whole ambush."
"Medicine money and a missing student," Black Zetsu said. "He thinks Tsunade chases coin and strays, and that the boy is her stray. He has never asked after her bloodline."
Three out of three. The diet held everywhere Akane could check it, so Akane let a breath out slowly and moved to what he did not know.
"How long does the old man have? Truly."
Black Zetsu was quiet for a moment. When it spoke, something careful had entered its voice.
"His breath is thinner than it was in the summer. He sleeps past noon and wakes for an hour, takes broth, sleeps again. The pod beside his chair pulses slower than it did when I first carried him word of your group. By my measure, the body fails within a year or two whether anyone lifts a hand or not. No poison in this, no blade. Only the count running out."
"And when it runs out?"
"Then the eyes remain, the statue remains, and the watchers remain. Death solves nothing unless someone is standing nearest when it happens."
Akane absorbed that. It was the answer he had expected, and hearing it plainly still landed heavy.
"Who watches the boy, and how close?"
"One of mine sits in the wall of the empty house across his alley, and it has sat there so long the damp has got into its shoulder. Eyes on the door from first bell to last, never the room, never the boy himself. Madara asks after the boy's health every week. He asks the way a man asks after a storehouse."
"How are the seals on Nagato? His health isn't being affected much, right?"
"Madara thinks his Uzumaki bloodline is quite pure because he looks so well. He has not tried to visit Nagato, so he does not know about them."
"What about countermeasures?"
"If Madara does find it at any moment, the seals will be fully released, and Nagato will be moved away by a Zetsu that keeps watch at all times."
Akane nodded slowly, and he sighed in relief. Mito's tags riding in the supply drops, the boy placing them himself by dream-taught hands, the watcher in the walls ready to carry him. Three layers, none of them visible to an old man who never left his chair.
It had taken three gatherings to teach the placements, with Nagato repeating each position back until Akane was satisfied, and the boy had never once asked why someone so far away would go to such trouble for him.
"What does Madara gather through the network that he actually reads? Not the diet I feed him. What does he ask for himself?"
"Rain patrol strengths on the eastern road," Black Zetsu said at once. "He has asked three times, and each time he counts the numbers himself before I finish speaking. Hanzo's right hand, the masked one, which is Hanzo himself. Where he sleeps, whom he meets and so on."
"He also asks about Konoha's border camp, whether its commander has changed his chair. He reads those reports himself and burns them after, and he never explains what the numbers mean to him."
"Is he moving anything around Hanzo?"
"He hasn't moved, just watched." Black Zetsu paused. "He waits. Waiting is all the body has left."
Akane considered the shape of it. An old man in a chair, counting patrols on a road, asking after a masked aide, burning paper. He was not asking of a war being built, but setting a table for him to eat later.
"Now, my order," Akane said. "There is a beast sleeping in the sea east of the Land of Water. Three tails. Kiri watches it. Find where it sleeps and how close their watch stands. How many boats, how often they change guard, what water they favour."
"Everything a man would need to walk up to it unseen. Carry it all in your head until I pull you again."
Black Zetsu went very still.
"Looking is not sealing," it said.
"I know," Akane replied. "Look."
"And Madara?"
"Madara hears nothing of this. Not a whisper, not a hint, not a question asked in the wrong ear. If he learns of it, you will answer for it the next time you sleep."
Black Zetsu studied him for a long moment, and something almost like approval crossed the black face.
"Then I go down," it said, and sank into the dream-floor without another word, leaving no ripple behind it. Akane stayed a moment in the empty dark to be certain it was truly gone, and nothing had followed it up.
Akane let the dark reach thin around him until there was only his room, the blanket, the river sound beyond the wall. He opened his eyes to darkness. The peach sat on the altar, invisible now, present the way debts are present in the dark.
He lay awake a while and turned it over, and let each part settle before sleep took him.
An old man in a chair, counting patrol strengths on a road he would never march, burning the paper after. A boy behind a watched door, placing his own seals by dream-taught hands while the damp got into its guardian's shoulder across the alley. A beast asleep in a foreign sea, its guard counted by no one who mattered yet.
Three clocks running down at three different speeds, and every one of them set to go off in someone else's hands unless he reached them first.
'How long does it take a dying man to die,' he thought, 'and who gets to be standing nearest when he does?'
--
Support me at ptreon for early chapters and original novels, stories, poems and many more updates. ptreon.com/kaoski