“I find myself concerned,” Anna repeated patiently. Ordinarily, Shin had great respect for her powers of prediction, but he had been on tenterhooks since the end of the event, and clearly all the fidgeting had expended energy vital to the function of his brain.

“Chill, Spider-girl,” Kiri drawled lazily, lounging back with the padding on her barrel as a peculiar pillow. Anna found herself once again attempting to calculate how many people would need to die before the nickname was finally forgotten.

“We’re well ahead of the game here, and we ain't got a scratch on us. You hear what happened to Team Kanon?”

Anna shuddered involuntarily.

“My concern,” she said after banishing the mental images, “is that we may not be playing the game we believe we are. Did you see the figurative cartload of seals Team Gōketsu delivered to the proctor?”

“Point,” Shin conceded. Now they were here, he was once again practicing sitting still as a statue, his spine as upright as the tree behind him. One of these days, somebody needed to explain to him that a stance with no tells was a tell in itself, especially to anyone who knew him and his actual habitual body language.

“I’m a little worried about the Gōketsu trio too. Kiri, I know you’re raring to get back in action”—he looked pointedly at her supine position—“but Anna’s right—this is a good time to take stock before we work out our objectives for the next twenty-four hours. It’s not like anyone’s going to double back to the swamp to spy on us, which is more than I can say for the village proper, and you'll sense them even if they do. Anna, tell us what you’re thinking.”

“I find myself unable to reconcile Team Gōketsu’s performance with their reputation as incompetents who fled the village rather than face a real challenge for the first time in their careers. Consider the audacity and the extraordinary success of Hidden Fortress.”

“Not you too… It wasn’t hidden—I mean, they actually made an effort to give away their location—and it wasn’t a fortress either. I bet they just threw up some Earth Walls and called it a day. Remember when Instructor Ogawa raised that maze for our stalking exam? That is how you do on-the-spot construction.”

“A moot point,” Anna said coolly. She had not fared well In the Labyrinth of a Thousand Traps, and the instructors had jostled her paralysed body quite severely on the way out. “The fact is that the Mori Keiko I know could not have manipulated her way into the position of a Kage’s daughter. Indeed, she should have dragged down any team with her in it. I suspect the same can be said of the other two.”

“And you think that means they’re hiding some kind of special power,” Shin concluded. “A hidden advantage that is going to royally screw us over if we follow the original plan and try to take them out.”

“Pull back the messenger bird,” Kiri said suddenly. “You know the girl? This is intel, Anna. You know, the thing you lecture us about every other week?”

“I could hardly be unaware of her past existence,” Anna said reluctantly, “clanswomen as we once were.”

“Nuh-uh,” Kiri said with that damnable intuition of hers. “You know something. Fess up, Spider-girl. It’s for the good of the team.”

“It’s nothing important,” Anna said. “We were friends once. That is all.”

Kiri gave a meaningful whistle. “Ladies and gentlemen, if I can call Shin that without cracking up laughing, we have ourselves an in.”

Anna suppressed a scowl. “Allow me to revise that statement. I thought we were friends once. I learned of my error. There is no connection that one could remotely describe as an ‘in’. Can we drop this subject now?”

Kiri gave an evil grin. “Ooh, Big Sis is sensing a story. Sorry, Spider-girl, you ain’t getting out of this one now.”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to, Anna,” Shin said peaceably. “Kiri will probably hound you for the rest of your days if you decide to withhold this information that could help out our team in the Chūnin Exam, as well as help us understand you better, but for my part I’m not going to press you.”

Stupid best friends and their stupid knowledge of her emotional levers. Still, Shin was good at keeping secrets because he believed it made him more like the Seven Shinobi Swordsmen, and Kiri was good at keeping secrets because she was convinced that being the only person to know something made her special. And after everything they'd been through together, what was one cripplingly humiliating admission more or less?

“I had no meaningful knowledge of her until I encountered her at the Academy,” Anna began. “She was a withdrawn individual. She did not socialise with others, but spent all of her time alone. In my past self’s terms, she ‘kept her own counsel’ and it made her ‘the coolest person ever’. That she was the sister of the clan hero did not harm her position either.”

Anna cringed a little as she remembered her younger self. Childish. Naïve. Possessed of a lamentable tendency to babble when excited, and inclined to overuse words such as “awesome”, “badass” and “supercool” in favour of an actual vocabulary.

“I admired Keiko,” she said bitterly. “I made every effort to befriend her, and while in retrospect I believe she likely tolerated me at best, she did not refuse when I invited her to spend time together.” She had the attention of her object of adoration, and they had been some of the happiest days of her childhood.

“However, all of that ended with a single incident. She had grudgingly condescended to be dragged along to a game played with several other girls. There was a dare.”

“What kind of dare?” Shin asked, intrigued.

Through pure force of will, Anna did not blush. “That is immaterial.”

It was, of course, not immaterial at all. Even knowing all along that they were only playing and it didn’t mean anything, there was still a special sense of trust in that moment. Something that, she found with the wisdom of age, she might now label as intimacy.

“And then she pushed me away,” Anna said, wilfully skipping over the crucial part of the narrative. If nothing else, there was a boy present. “She screamed and pushed me away, as if I was something disgusting, and she ran. And when I came back, the others asked me how I could have been so impossibly bad at it.”

Keiko had never apologised. Never said a word about the incident. As if it had been natural to react that way. A matter of course.

“That was when I understood that her aloofness was not a trait to be admired. It was the primary manifestation of her being a freak. And once I was in possession of that knowledge, I found it essential to share it with others. I developed new friends quickly once I parted ways with Keiko, and together we made sure to teach her her place.

“She never fought back,” Anna added, “if you desire tactical information. She only hid like a coward.”

Shin was giving her a horrified look. But there had been nothing wrong with her actions. It had been necessary to enforce the natural consequences of Keiko’s behaviour. It had been the right thing to do. Freaks were not to be tolerated. Anyone in her position would have done the same.

“Anna,” Shin said slowly, “that’s… that wasn’t right.”

“Chill, dude,” Kiri said. “That’s just what the Academy is like when you’re a girl. Not everybody can be top of the heap like I was, but everybody’s got to play their part. If you don’t socialise, if you push everybody away”—Anna didn’t flinch—“then you’re dragging the whole group down. You can’t hurt everyone around you like that and expect nobody to hurt you back.”

“I don’t like it,” Shin said. “There’s a word for doing what Anna did, and it’s ‘bullying’. I’m sorry, but that’s just… not right.”

“Get off her case, Shin,” Kiri said, rising to prop herself on her elbows. “Nobody forced this Keiko kid to spit on the community the rest of Anna’s year was building. Nobody forced her not to fight back either. If she had, she might at least have earned some respect. Look at how Anna didn’t have any trouble fitting in once she started making the right choices.”

“Regardless,” Anna said sharply, “my point is that Keiko is weak. She lacks the social skills necessary to cooperate with others. She could not have engineered whatever master plan earned her a place at the Hokage’s side, nor an exam strategy designed around large-scale teamwork. There is somebody else standing behind her success, and for as long as they go unidentified, I find myself unwilling to challenge Team Gōketsu.”

Shin nodded. “Yeah, that’s fair. We’re not done talking about the bullying thing, but you’re right that not failing the exam is more important right now.”

He paused to think, unconsciously moving out of his statue position. “If we eliminate the girl, that leaves one of the other two. Kiri, do you know anything about Gōketsu Noburi?”

Kiri shrugged. “Boring. A bit fat. Not ugly, but you could take one look at him and tell he was a loser with no future, which I guess is ironic now. He followed me around like a lovesick puppy for a bit. I tried to let him down gently, but I didn’t try that hard, if you know what I mean. The moron confessed to me in public, and I had a rep to maintain.

“Before you ask, that ain’t an ‘in’ either. I have my dignity, and sucking up to the likes of him is so far beneath me you couldn’t dig to it with Hiding Like a Mole.”

“Wasn’t about to suggest it,” Shin said with that light voice he used when he was blatantly lying. “But the general upshot is that he’s not the team genius either, right?”

“Ha!” Kiri snorted. “Not on your life. But are you sure Spider-girl ain't overthinking it? I mean, their big super-team’s got Nara Shikamaru. Ain’t that enough?”

Mmm, Nara Shikamaru…

Anna snapped out of it before Kiri’s intuition could kick in.

“I find it doubtful that this is a Nara plan. The Nara are all about the Ino-Shika-Chō. They’re supposed to be strongest that way, and adding additional members would only dilute a dynamic refined over centuries. Hidden Fortress was too risky to be their style, and the same can be said of the inefficiency involved in dividing seals across such an extraordinary number of individuals. I am confident that Nara’s team would have fared better were they to forgo the alliance, or at least cut it down to the most valuable members.

“What of Kurosawa?” she looked at Shin. “That one is definitely yours to analyse.”

“A traitor born of a traitor,” Shin narrowed his eyes. “His mother turned her back on all of us when the clan needed her most. She had everything—all of the wealth and power of the heir to the clan—and she gave it up for no better reason than to marry some commoner she happened to fall in love with.”

“How appalling,” Anna agreed. It might have been the most romantic thing she’d ever heard.

“Then when she had a son, she betrayed us again. A child of the primary line, descended directly from Kurosawa Nozomu himself. The clan was ready to welcome him back with open arms—and she taught him to say no.”

“Why’d you want him anyway?” Kiri asked. “It’s not like there aren’t enough of you already.”

Shin didn’t take the bait. Instead, he looked around them, and then lowered his voice.

“Because Lady Ren is single, and has always been single, and has shown about as much interest in men as Anna here.”

“Hey!”

“Unless and until she has a child of her own, Gōketsu Hazō has the purest Kurosawa blood, and if Hana hadn’t made him turn down our invitation, he’d have been next in line to rule the clan. Instead, things get complicated.”

“You sure you should be spilling the beans like this, Shin? This sounds like some serious shit.”

Shin shrugged. “I promise you anything that your clan heads already know all this. I bet it’s why they had such an easy time supporting Lady Ren’s candidacy for Mizukage—they’re gambling that when it comes, the transition of power will take up all our resources long enough for somebody else to grab the hat without a struggle.”

“Serious shit,” Kiri repeated. “Also irrelevant shit. Gōketsu Hazō can have the blood of the Sage of Six Paths flowing through his veins for all I care. What do you know about him?”

“Honestly, probably not much more than Anna would. Bright guy, crap at keeping his mouth shut. The way the Kurosawa are taught to learn is that we take the best of everything around us and we make it our own. We find the best sources of knowledge, and we copy that knowledge so fully that it becomes part of who we are. Instead, Hazō was constantly correcting the teachers, coming up with his own ideas and trying to teach them to all these experts with decades of experience. And then of course the teachers got pissed off with him, and once they were in a bad mood they were that much worse at teaching the rest of us. Hazō was too self-centred to ever notice.

“And you know what the worst thing was?” Shin asked. “Sometimes he was right. If he’d just been a little smoother about it, found a way to share his ideas without challenging the teachers’ authority, I reckon our whole year would have been better for it, and maybe others too. I don’t mind admitting that I still use a few moves that I copied off him. But Hazō never got that having clever ideas isn’t as important as being able to persuade people to use them. Instead, most of the time he just disrupted our learning. Some would even say he brought shame to the name of the Kurosawa, but the stick up my ass isn’t quite that big just yet.”

Kiri opened her mouth, but Anna sensed the direction the conversation was about to go, and decided to pre-empt her.

“In other words, Shin, you would identify him as the mastermind behind the current scenario.”

Shin was quiet for a few seconds.

“Yeah, Anna, I think I would. ‘Mastermind’ might be pushing it, but I can see Hazō coming up with some genius idea that, if he lucked into being in just the right place at just the right time, could buy his way into Leaf—assuming Leaf was in the market for recruiting traitorous missing-nin in the first place.”

“Which is what this comes down to,” Anna concluded. “Conventional wisdom, as well as heavy hints from our superiors, suggest that Team Gōketsu are vile traitors who must be punished for the injury they have dealt our respective clans. And it seems we have now established that Gōketsu Hazō is our primary target. Eliminate him, and the other two will be helpless.”

“You’re right,” Shin nodded slowly. “But now I look back, I can’t help but wonder. Did Keiko strike you as a potential traitor, Anna?”

Keiko. She was a traitor, here and now. There was no point doubting facts. But looking back, looking at everything… Anna found herself wondering why. There must have been some compelling reason, like greed or cowardice or even ideology. It would be absurd to suggest that Anna’s own behaviour had driven Keiko to betrayal. What she’d done… it had been necessary, and right, and in any case what kind of weakling would run away from their village over a little thing like that?

The thought caught on some jagged edge of her mind. If Keiko had died out there in the wilderness, if she’d been eaten by a chakra beast or stabbed in the back by her fellow traitors or beheaded by Captain Zabuza, would it have been Anna’s fault? If Keiko had survived by some strange chance and was now in a position any shinobi would envy, was that in spite of Anna’s actions? Where did that leave Anna now?

“I don’t know,” Anna finally said. “The point is moot, and there is nothing to be gained in pondering hypotheticals.”

“Hmph,” Kiri snorted. “I can tell you now that Noburi was no traitor in waiting. Not enough initiative, not enough imagination. I bet somebody else pulled him in, and he decided to betray the village through peer pressure. Sounds spineless enough for him.”

“Somebody pulled him in,” Shin repeated. “Was that somebody Hazō? Was turning traitor his latest bright idea?

“Anna,” he said with a dose of urgency, “what else do we know about the Gōketsu? Are there other traitors?”

Anna tapped into the Frozen Skein briefly, just that light touch necessary to clear her mind from wondering about paths not taken and replace them with cold, hard data.

“Two,” she said a moment later, unfolding her hands from her lap where they inevitably went when she used her Bloodline Limit. “Inoue Mari, a Mist jōnin, and Kagome, past affiliation unknown. Inoue is now married to the Hokage and stepmother to Team Gōketsu, and Kagome has been presented as the Hokage’s cousin, details missing.”

“A traitorous jōnin and a mysterious foreign shinobi,” Shin said thoughtfully. “It could be coincidence, missing-nin banding together, or maybe…”

“Shin, my boy,” Kiri said pushing herself into a sitting position now. “Is this the part where I remind you that they’re all filthy traitors whose very existence is a great big ‘fuck you’ to our clans? Who cares about their background?”

“I know they’re traitors, Kiri. At any time, they could have chosen to come back to Mist and face justice for their crimes. Or they could’ve done what other missing-nin do, and not join our greatest enemy who’s constantly looking for ways to wipe this village off the face of the earth. I’m not a sympathiser.

“But Hazō was a mummy’s boy through and through. It was public knowledge. It would have taken something big for him to leave her behind, and something even bigger to make him sign up with the people who want her dead along with the rest of us. Is it so wrong to be curious about what that is?”

“Aw, hell no,” Kiri groaned. “You want us to go and talk to them.”

“Vetoed,” Anna said instantly.

“Veto overruled,” Shin smoothly replied.

“Who died and made you team leader?” Anna snapped.

“Ahem,” Shin cleared his throat. “’I would rather perform oral sex on Captain Ayanami and every one of his horde of catamites—sorry, I mean fanboys—than let that insufferable Wakahisa bitch order me around.’ Sound familiar?”

“Ah, the good old days,” Kiri sighed. “Me, I’m glad we put Shin in charge. I think I’d drown myself in my barrel if I was the one stuck doing Retsu-sensei’s paperwork for her.”

“But there’s no hurry, right?” Anna asked desperately. “Surely it is more of a priority to secure our lead over the other teams than to indulge random whims of unproductive curiosity?”

“Chill, Spider-girl. If it comes down to you facing off with your ex, Shin and I have your back all the way. Let him do his diplomacy shtick for a while, and once he’s had enough we can crush Team Gōketsu like the dishonourable bastards they are. Bam! Closure for your childhood trauma, victory in the exams and massive brownie points with you-know-who all in one go.”

“She is not my ex, O insufferable Wakahisa bitch, and the only childhood trauma here is the blunt force that must have been applied repeatedly to your cranium as a baby. Now can we please set aside this tomfoolery in favour of practical concerns?” Anna might not have been a Kurosawa, but deadpan snark was one skill which she was proud to have made her own.

“All right,” Shin said. “Motion tabled. Let’s talk word halves and proctor signatures.”

“Let’s.” Perhaps if Anna could keep their team sufficiently busy, somebody else might eliminate the Gōketsu before they had a chance to meet.