Yashamaru's kick was better today.
His leg came up with his hip turning into it the way she'd shown him, his weight staying centered over the balls of his feet instead of dumping backward. The foot snapped out, caught air where Karura's ribs had been a half second ago, and whipped back before his balance broke.
He didn't stop moving. That was the difference. A week ago, every strike was a full stop, a planted foot, a loaded punch, then the scramble to start over. Now his feet kept their rhythm even when the rest of him was swinging. Step, shift, step. The continuous pattern she'd drilled into him every afternoon since she started teaching him, woven into his legs like a second heartbeat.
Karura swayed back from the kick and swept low, her palms hitting the packed earth of the courtyard, her body inverting. Her legs scissored through the air in a spinning arc that Yashamaru ducked under with a yelp, dropping to all fours to let it pass over him.
"Good," she giggled, still upside down. She pushed off one hand and rotated, her feet touching down in a crouch. "You saw it this time."
"You almost took my head off!" He was grinning though. Pink-cheeked, sweaty, sand in his hair.
"You ducked. That's the point."
He came at her again. Hands on the ground, legs swinging, his body mimicking the inverted movements she'd been feeding him for the past few sessions. Dust Devil was what she decided to name it. The focus was to be able to use it while controlling her puppets. Since her hands were controlling her puppets, she would use her body and legs to avoid and attack anyone who got passed her puppets.
Yashamaru's version was sloppy, his transitions too slow, his limbs not quite sure where they were supposed to go when the world was upside down. But the instinct was there. He understood that the ground wasn't just something you stood on. It was another surface to fight from.
Karura let him come. She matched his pace, staying just ahead, her body flowing through the spinning, sweeping, ground-based exchanges like water around stones. Her feet barely touched between movements. Every dodge was a setup for the next, every evasion flowing into a position that gave her three options and left him with none.
Yashamaru's foot hooked behind her ankle. Intentional. She felt the pressure and almost smiled, because he'd never tried that before.
She let the hook take her front foot, dropped her weight into it, and converted the fall into a spinning sweep that took both his legs out from under him. He hit the sand on his back with a thud and a wheeze.
She stood over him.
"That hook was new."
He stared up at her with the breathless, sweat-soaked adoration of a six-year-old who had just been beaten for the hundredth time in a row and loved every second of it. "I saw you do it to the training post yesterday."
"You were watching me train?"
"I watch you do everything."
She laughed at that and offered her hand and pulled him up. He wobbled on his feet, his legs burning from the hour of footwork and ground transitions.
"Fruit?" she asked.
He nodded fast. She pulled a cactus fruit from the basket by the courtyard wall and tossed it to him. He caught it with both hands, broke it open, and bit into the pink flesh. The juice ran down his chin and dripped onto his already ruined shirt. His eyes closed.
Thirty seconds later, the wobble was gone. His breathing steadied. The fatigue drained out of his legs like someone had pulled a plug.
"Again?" he asked, already bouncing.
Karura shook her head. "We have guests."
Yashamaru blinked. "Huh? Who?"
Karura saw them arrive three minutes ago.
"Come inside. Wash your face first."
"But who is it?"
"You'll see."
Chiyo was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea that Karura's mother had poured. Her father stood by the counter, his face caught between pride and the quiet bewilderment of a man whose world had suddenly expanded beyond the walls of his bakery.
Sasori stood beside Chiyo's chair. He hadn't sat down. He hadn't touched the tea that had been poured for him. His hands were at his sides, one of them holding a rolled scroll, and his brown eyes moved across the small kitchen.
He was smaller than Karura expected. Five years old and slight, with red hair cut short that was already growing out at odd angles. His face still held the roundness of early childhood, but his eyes weren't as lively as a normal child's.
"Karura-chan!" Her mother turned when she entered, relief flooding her face. The relief of a woman who was honored to host a famous shinobi in her kitchen but deeply grateful to hand the responsibility to someone else. "Chiyo-sama came to see you. She brought her grandson."
"I know, kaa-chan." Karura bowed to Chiyo. "Chiyo-sama. Thank you for coming."
"Don't make it sound like I'm doing you a favor. I'm here because I want to see your workspace." Chiyo sipped the tea. "Your mother makes excellent tea, by the way."
Her mother flushed scarlet. "It's nothing special, Chiyo-sama, really, it's just common leaves from the market, I would have prepared something better if I'd known you were coming..."
"Common leaves brewed well beat expensive leaves brewed poorly. I mean it." Chiyo set the cup down. "Your daughter. She gets her steadiness from somewhere. Now I know where."
Karura's father cleared his throat. He was a big man, soft-spoken, with hands that were gentle despite their size. "Chiyo-sama, we're grateful. Truly. That someone like you would take an interest in our Karura..." He paused, searching for words that felt big enough. "We don't fully understand the world she's part of. The missions, the puppets, all of it. But we trust her. And if she's in your care, we trust you too."
Chiyo looked at him.
"She's in good hands," Chiyo said. "I'll make sure of it."
A crash from the hallway. Yashamaru burst through the doorway, his face scrubbed, his hair still dripping, his eyes already scanning the room. He spotted Chiyo.
Time stopped.
His mouth fell open. His eyes went so wide the violet of his irises was surrounded by white on all sides. His body went rigid, locked in the doorway, vibrating with an energy that had nowhere to go.
Then it went somewhere.
"YOU'RE LADY CHIYO! THE LADY CHIYO! THE STRONGEST PUPPETEER IN THE WHOLE VILLAGE! THE GREATEST POISON MASTER IN THE ENTIRE LAND OF WIND! YOU FOUGHT IN THE FIRST SHINOBI WORLD WAR AND YOU'RE A LEGEND AND YOU'RE IN OUR KITCHEN! NEE-CHAN! LADY CHIYO IS IN OUR KITCHEN! HOW IS LADY CHIYO IN OUR KITCHEN?! IS THIS BECAUSE OF YOU?! ARE YOU TRAINING WITH LADY CHIYO?! THAT'S SO COOL! THAT'S THE COOLEST THING EVER! NEE-CHAN YOU'RE EVEN MORE AMAZING THAN I THOUGHT AND I ALREADY THOUGHT YOU WERE THE MOST AMAZING PERSON IN THE WHOLE ENTIRE..."
Karura's hand clamped over his mouth.
Her cheeks were burning. Her ears were burning. Parts of her face she didn't know could burn were burning.
Yashamaru kept talking behind her palm. The words were muffled but the volume was not.
Sasori stared at the scene as he picked at his damaged ears. His eyes flicked from Yashamaru to Karura and stayed there, watching the way she held her brother, the way her face colored, the way her composure cracked entirely.
Chiyo was smiling. She hid it behind her teacup, but it was there.
"Puppet stuff," Karura said, her voice tight. "We're here for puppet stuff. Come to my warehouse and we can talk there."
She started pushing Yashamaru toward the hallway. He was still talking, still trying to form words around her hand, his arms gesturing wildly at Chiyo.
"YOU CAN TALK TO HER LATER! WAIT TILL WE'RE DONE!"
"Mmf mmf MMFMF!"
"NO!"
Her parents intervened. Her father caught Yashamaru by the shoulders as Karura pried him loose, and her mother herded him toward the living room.
"Come on, Yasha-kun. Let your sister work."
"BUT MOM! LADY CHIYO IS..."
"I know, sweetheart. You can talk to her later."
"She PROMISED?"
Karura was already heading for the back door. She didn't look back.
The warehouse sat behind the courtyard, built into the base of the low clay wall that bordered the property. It was larger than it looked from outside. Karura had expanded it twice since she started, knocking through an adjoining storage room and reinforcing the walls with layered clay and timber to keep the interior cool and dry. A heavy door with a lock that she'd bought from a metalworker in the eastern quarter. No windows.
She'd never let her parents inside. Never let Yashamaru past the door. She told them it was because the materials were dangerous, which was true. Poisons that could kill on contact. Explosive tags stacked in sealed containers. Bladed components with edges that could easily cut skin. A workspace for a puppeteer was a workspace full of things that could hurt someone who didn't know what they were touching.
She unlocked the door and pushed it open. Cool air rolled out, tinged with the smell of cut wood, machine oil, adhesive, and underneath it the faint chemical bite of stored poisons.
"After you, Chiyo-sama."
Chiyo entered. Sasori followed, his scroll tucked under one arm, his eyes already moving.
The main room was rectangular, roughly twenty feet by thirty. The ceiling was low but not cramped, and four oil lamps hung from iron hooks, filling the space with warm, steady light. The walls were lined with shelving built from the same ironwood Karura used for her puppets, sanded smooth, each shelf labeled with tags written in her small, precise handwriting.
The left wall was tools and materials. Carving knives of various sizes, each in its own slot. Saws. Files. Sanding blocks. Pliers. Wire cutters. Spools of high-tensile wire in different gauges. Jars of adhesive, sealed and labeled by type and curing time. Bolts of linen for wrapping. Bars of iron stock for reinforcement strips. Stacks of wood in different species, separated by density and grain, each stack marked.
The right wall was weapons and consumables. Kunai in bundles of ten, wrapped in oiled cloth. Senbon in sealed wooden boxes, each box marked with quantity. Explosive tags in metal containers with latching lids, sorted by yield. Flash bombs. Smoke bombs. Rolls of binding wire. And the poisons, a separate shelf with a locked glass-fronted cabinet. Jars and vials in neat rows, each one labeled with the compound name, concentration, onset time, and antidote reference. Paralytic. Blood-thinning. Neurotoxic. Contact. Inhalation.
The back wall was puppets.
Two scrolls on stands, labeled MILLION and REAPER. Copies. The originals were sealed on her person at all times. Behind the scrolls, on a wide workbench that took up the entire back wall, sat the partially complete frame of Moon.
She was tall, even unfinished. Long-armed, with articulated shoulder joints built for maximum swing arc. The composite wood body was layered and polished, the grain lines visible in the lamplight. Her face had been carved with a prideful expression, chin slightly raised, eyes half-lidded. One arm was fully assembled, the other was skeletal, joints and segments laid out on the bench beside it in order of assembly. The war fan leaned against the wall behind her, human-sized, iron-ribbed, with three empty circles on its surface where the purple markings would go.
Chiyo stopped in the center of the room. She turned slowly, taking in the walls, the shelves, the organization. Her eyes moved from the labeled poisons to the sorted tools to the sealed explosive tags to the stacked wood to the workshop bench.
"How long have you been building this?" she asked.
"Since I started making puppets. A few months."
"A few months." Chiyo repeated it because it didn't make sense to her. She walked to the poison cabinet and leaned close to read the labels. "Onset times. Antidote references. Cross-reaction warnings." She straightened. "Most jonin in the Brigade don't label their poisons this thoroughly."
"If I can't find what I need in the dark, it's not organized well enough."
Chiyo looked at her. Then she looked at the room again, this time not at the contents but at the logic of it. The flow. Tools near the workbench. Materials near the tools. Weapons near the door for quick access. Poisons locked and separated. Nothing where an elbow could knock it over. Nothing where a stumble could cause a spill.
"You built this quite well. Very safe." Chiyo said.
Karura nodded.
"Good."
Sasori hadn't said a word. He stood near the entrance, his eyes tracking across the shelves with a hunger he wasn't bothering to hide. His gaze lingered on the wood stocks, on the wire spools, on the joint assemblies visible through the gaps in Moon's unfinished frame. His fingers twitched around his scroll.
Then he saw the workbench. Saw Moon.
He walked toward it without asking. Without looking at Chiyo. Without looking at Karura. He just walked, drawn to it, and stopped two feet from the bench with his chin tilted up to look at the puppet's face.
"What is this?" His voice was quiet.
"Moon," Karura said. She came to stand beside him, and the height difference was something. He barely reached her shoulder. "She's not finished yet."
"Long arms. Extended reach. The shoulder joints are reinforced for rotational torque." His eyes traced the assembled arm, following the grain of the wood, the iron strips at the stress points, the channels carved into the forearm segments. "She's built to swing something heavy."
"A war fan."
His eyes snapped to the fan leaning against the wall. Iron-ribbed. Wide-surfaced. The three empty circles.
"Wind attacks," he said.
"Among other things." Karura reached past him and picked up a sheaf of papers from the corner of the bench. Her notes. Sketches. Measurements. She spread them out on the only clear section of the table. "The fan is the core weapon, but I'm building her to be more than a fan user. Suna has wind release specialists who use fans already. I wanted to ask what they could do if they weren't limited by their own bodies."
Chiyo leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. Watching.
Karura pointed to the sketch of Moon's back. "Six scroll mounts. Ammunition scrolls. Each one holds a different supply that can be deployed with a swing of the fan."
"What kind of supplies?" Sasori asked. He was leaning over the sketches now, his scroll forgotten under his arm, his small hands braced on the edge of the bench.
"Poison mist in one. A swing spreads it across a wide area, farther than any handheld delivery could manage. Fire in another, something combustible that the wind feeds on contact. Sand for a localized sandstorm, enough to blind and choke. Poisoned kunai that the wind accelerates. Smoke. Oil."
"The oil and fire scrolls together," Sasori said immediately. "Oil first. Coat the area. Then switch scrolls and hit the same zone with the fire. The wind carries both."
Karura kindly smiled at him.
"That's one of the combinations I had in mind."
"The sand scroll." His finger tapped the sketch. "If the sand accumulates on surfaces, it changes footing. Anyone standing on a tree branch or a wall or a rooftop loses traction. You're not just blinding them, they can't even move like normal."
"That's the idea but only for if we're not in the desert. I don't see that one being used often."
"And the fan itself." He looked up at her, brown eyes sharp. "It's big enough to block. You're using it as a shield between attacks. And if the puppet can channel wind chakra through the fan's surface, it can deflect incoming projectiles without swinging."
"I don't know how to channel wind chakra yet," Karura admitted. "I'm gonna do something different for how it'll produce wind."
Something shifted in Sasori's expression.
"You said you had two combat puppets," he said. "Million and Reaper."
"I do." Karura gestured to the two scrolls on their stands. "Those are copies. The originals stay with me."
"Tell me about them."
Karura leaned against the workbench and folded her arms. Where to start.
"Million is my taijutsu specialist. Stocky frame, four arms. Composite wood, ironwood and cedar, layered and pressure-bonded. Each arm has an oversized forearm housing that contains a summoning scroll. Each scroll holds segmented extending arms, dozens of them, flexible, linked segments on wire joints. They bend in any direction and can pursue a target that dodges the initial grab."
"How many extending arms per housing?"
"Currently? Thousands per scroll. About half a million total."
Sasori's eyes widened.
"The extending arms have triple-function launchers at the wrist," Karura continued. "Rotating mechanism with three positions. Poison gas, spring-loaded kunai with binding wire, and senbon."
"Every arm?"
"Every arm."
He looked at the MILLION scroll on its stand. He wanted to take it apart. "And Reaper?"
"Kenjutsu. Lean frame, long limbs, hooded cloak over the body. Two arms that convert into oversized segmented scythes, same linked-segment construction as Million's extending arms. The scythes switch between rigid and flexible mid-swing. Rigid for cleaving, flexible for whipping and chasing around guards. The waist joint spins 360 degrees for area-denial sweeps, and the cloak hides the joint positions so opponents can't read the attacks."
Sasori's fingers had tightened around his scroll again.
"The cloak hides whether the scythes are locked or loose," he said. It wasn't a question.
"Until the swing commits, yes."
"And during the spin, the cloak flares outward. It hides how far the blade can reach."
"That's the idea."
He exhaled.
Chiyo hadn't moved from the doorframe. Her arms were still crossed. Her face was calm. But she was watching Sasori with an attention that went beyond supervision. She was watching him talk. Watching him engage. Watching a boy who ate cold fish alone in a dark kitchen stand in a stranger's workshop and speak more words in ten minutes than he'd spoken to anyone besides her in a month.
"I brought something," Sasori said.
He said it abruptly. He unrolled the scroll on the workbench. Not a storage scroll. Paper. Covered in sketches and notes in handwriting that was small and tight and far too neat for a five-year-old.
It was a puppet design.
The main figure was a humanoid frame, roughly human-sized, drawn from multiple angles. Three eyes arranged in a triangular pattern on the head. Four arms. Jagged teeth carved into the mouth. A spiky hairstyle rendered in sharp pencil strokes that suggested brown hair standing out in wild directions.
"Crow," he said. "That's what I'm calling it."
Karura leaned over the sketches. The proportions were good. The joint placements showed someone who understood how a puppet needed to move, where the stress points would be, which connections needed reinforcement. The three-eye design wasn't decoration; notes in the margin indicated that the center eye could house some sort of mechanism and the flanking eyes contained senbon launchers.
"Four arms," she said. "Like Million."
"Not like Million." His voice carried the faintest edge. "Million's extra arms are in the standard position with extended housings. Crow's extra arms are mounted differently. The upper pair is conventional. The lower pair is set closer to the torso, shorter reach, faster action. For hidden weapons."
He pointed to the lower arms on the sketch. Annotations surrounded them. Wrist knives. Hidden scythe blades on the torso joints. A large poisoned needle concealed in the mouth.
"Everything is a weapon," Karura said.
"Everything should be a weapon. A puppet that only does one thing is a puppet that dies when the opponent figures out that one thing."
Karura looked at him for a moment. Five years old, and every line he'd drawn was an edge, or a launcher, or a thing that opened to hurt.
"Is this your first puppet?" she asked.
"No." The answer came knife-quick. He didn't look up from the scroll. "My first two were Mother and Father."
"What do they do?"
"Nothing." He smoothed a crease in the paper that didn't need smoothing. "They don't have weapons. They don't have anything. Granny taught me the threads and I made two puppets and they stand in my room." A pause, exactly one beat too long. "One looks like my mother. One looks like my father. I got the faces right. I worked very hard on the faces."
He said it analytically. He still wasn't looking at her.
Karura did not say she was sorry. She'd learned, in a year of putting food into the hands of people who had lost things, that sorry was a word that asked the hurt person to turn around and comfort you for being uncomfortable about their pain. So she didn't say it. She looked at the boy who had carved his dead parents out of cedar, gotten two faces that couldn't look back at him, and then sat down and started drawing something that was nothing but teeth.
The first two he'd built to be loved by. They'd given him nothing.
So this one he was building to fight, and he was not going to make the mistake of asking it for anything else.
"Then Crow's different," she said, gently, and let it stay only about the puppet, because that was the kindness he could take. "Crow earns its keep."
"Crow earns its keep," Sasori agreed. Something in him eased by a fraction. He turned to the next page.
She looked at the next page. Smoke bomb launchers in the upper arms. Senbon projectors. Spring-loaded kunai. A blade that folded out from the abdomen. And a note at the bottom, circled twice in heavy pencil:
All body parts detachable for independent attacks.
"Detachable limbs," Karura said. She tapped the note. "You want every section of the body to function as a separate weapon when disconnected."
"If an arm gets cut off in a fight, it shouldn't be a loss. It should be a new attack option. The severed arm flies at the enemy, blade-first, while the rest of the body keeps fighting." He paused. Considered. "I haven't solved the thread management for it yet. Controlling detached sections while maintaining the main body requires something that I can't do with my current skill."
"How many threads can you manage?"
"Three."
"Three is good for your age."
"Three isn't enough for Crow." The frustration in his voice was thin but real. "Crow needs at least six for full operation. Eight for the detachment sequences. I've read everything my grandmother has on chakra threads and I understand the principles, but my chakra control isn't there yet."
Karura looked at the designs again. The depth of thought. The layered weapon systems. The philosophy of redundancy, of every part serving multiple purposes, of a puppet that became more dangerous the more you damaged it.
He was five years old.
"The detachable concept is pretty smart," she said. "None of my puppets have anything like that. If they lose a limb, they're screwed."
Sasori looked at her. Directly. For the first time since they'd entered the warehouse, he met her eyes and held them, searching for something.
Whatever he found, it satisfied him.
"I want it to fly," he said. "Eventually. A mechanism in the body that lets it take to the air and bomb targets from above."
"That's ambitious."
"Is it possible?"
Karura thought about it. Thought about Moon's fan, about wind displacement, about the relationship between weight and lift and chakra expenditure. "With a light enough frame, yes. It's possible. Mechanical systems add weight."
"Then it needs to be light," Sasori said. "Lighter than anything currently in the Brigade's inventory. Minimal armor. No heavy reinforcement. Speed instead of durability."
Chiyo pushed off the doorframe. She walked to the bench and looked down at Sasori's sketches, then at Moon's unfinished frame, then at the two children standing side by side with their heads bent over blueprints.
"I'll leave you two to it," she said.
Sasori looked up. "You're leaving?"
"I'll be in the kitchen drinking more of that excellent tea. You don't need me hovering."
"Okay, Grandmother." Sasori said.
She turned to Karura. "I'm trusting you with him. Don't let him touch anything poisonous."
"Yes, Chiyo-sama."
"I'm not stupid. Why would I touch anything poisonous…" Sasori muttered.
Chiyo left. Her footsteps faded down the corridor and back into the house, where the faint sound of Yashamaru's voice rose immediately to greet her, a barrage of questions that was audible even through the walls.
Karura winced. Sasori glanced toward the noise.
"That's your brother?" he asked.
"That's my brother."
"He's loud."
"He's cute."
Sasori looked at the doorway Chiyo had disappeared through. His expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes shifted.
"He seems like a lot," Sasori said.
Karura watched him. Watched the way he said it.
"He is," she said. "Most of the time he's annoying, but I wouldn't ask for another brother besides him."
Sasori looked back at the blueprints. At Crow's three-eyed face staring up from the paper.
"The hidden scythe blades on the torso," he said, and just like that, he was back. "I've been trying to figure out the folding mechanism. The blade needs to deploy fast enough that the opponent doesn't see it coming, but the housing has to be flush with the body so it doesn't show. I've tried three different hinge designs and none of them are fast enough."
"Show me."
He pulled a smaller piece of paper from inside the scroll. Three sketches of hinge mechanisms, each one crossed out with notes explaining the failure. Too slow. Too visible. Jams under lateral pressure.
Karura studied them. The problem was clear. He was trying to hide a blade inside a flat surface and deploy it at combat speed, which meant the mechanism needed to go from flush to extended in a fraction of a second without any external tells.
"Spring-loaded," she said. "Compressed coil inside the housing, held by a pin. The pin connects to a chakra thread. Pull the thread, the pin releases, the spring fires the blade out. Reset by pushing it back in manually between engagements."
"The spring would need to be strong enough to deploy through resistance. If the blade catches on something mid-extension..."
"Then you angle the housing. Five degrees off perpendicular. The blade exits at a slight outward angle, which clears the body's surface faster and reduces the chance of a snag."
Sasori stared at her. Then he pulled the pencil from behind his ear and started drawing.
They worked. For an hour, then two. Crow's blueprints expanded across the bench, new pages pulled from Sasori's scroll and covered with sketches that were half his and half hers. The spring-loaded torso blades. A revised mouth mechanism for the poisoned needle that could fire and retract three times before the reservoir emptied. An improved joint design for the detachable limbs that maintained thread connectivity even after separation, using a thin trailing wire as a backup channel.
Sasori drew with unparalleled focus. His lines were clean. His annotations were thorough. When he made a mistake, he didn't erase it; he crossed it out with a single line and noted why it was wrong so he wouldn't repeat it.
Karura smiled as she helped him build his puppet.
"The detachable arms," she said, tapping the latest revision. "If each one trails a wire after separation, you could rig them with explosive tags. Sever the arm, send it at the enemy, detonate on arrival. The wire gives you directional control during flight."
He made a short exhale through his nose, a twitch at the corner of his mouth.
"When I can control more threads," he said, "I want to build it."
"You will."
"You don't know that."
"You designed all of this." She gestured at the spread of blueprints. "The only thing between you and a finished puppet is time and practice. That's not nothing."
He looked at her again.
"My grandmother said you might understand," he said. "She was right."
Before Karura could respond, a knock on the warehouse door. Chiyo's voice.
"It's been two hours. I need to take the boy home before he forgets to eat again."
Sasori's face tightened.
"I don't forget to eat." he defended himself. He gathered his blueprints and rolled the scroll with care, every page aligned before he secured it. But Karura could tell that Sasori didn't want to leave.
Karura opened the door. Chiyo stood outside, the evening sky behind her, orange and deepening.
"Did he behave?" Chiyo asked.
"He was an angel," Karura said.
Sasori's hands paused on his scroll. Just for a second. Then he finished rolling it and tucked it under his arm.
"I have more designs at home," he said, not looking at her. "Other ideas. Things that aren't finished."
"Bring them next time."
He looked at her then. "Next time?"
"Whenever Chiyo-sama brings you. Or whenever you want. The warehouse is mine. You're welcome in it."
His face did something strange again. Like he didn't know how to smile, but felt the emotions for it.
"Okay," he said.
Chiyo put her hand on his shoulder. A gentle pressure. He didn't flinch, but he didn't lean into it either.
They walked back through the house. In the kitchen, Yashamaru was at the table with a plate of cactus fruit, his chin stained pink, his eyes going wide the instant Sasori appeared.
"HEY! You're that lady's grandson, right?! I'm Yashamaru! I'm six! Do you like puppets too?! My sister makes the BEST puppets! She's teaching me how to fight and I'm going to be a ninja just like her and..."
Sasori looked at Yashamaru the way he might look at a loud animal he'd never seen before. Curiosity. Wariness. A reluctant flicker of interest buried under layers of practiced indifference.
"I know who your sister is," Sasori said. "That's why I'm here."
"Do you want some fruit? It's delicious! But it's super sour though! One time I ate one after training and I felt like I could run around the whole village twice!"
Sasori looked at the fruit. At Yashamaru. At the pink juice on his chin and his hands and somehow in his hair.
"No thank you." Sasori refused.
"Your loss! More for me!" Yashamaru shoved another piece into his mouth.
Chiyo steered Sasori toward the door. Karura's parents bowed, her father's hand on Yashamaru's shoulder to keep him from following.
At the threshold, Chiyo turned back.
"Training starts tomorrow," she said to Karura. "My workshop. Dawn. Bring your stuff."
"Yes, Chiyo-sama."
"And eat a full meal before you come. I don't stop for breaks."
The door closed behind them. The house settled into the quiet rustle of evening. Her father went back to the bakery to finish the next morning's prep. Her mother began cleaning the kitchen. Yashamaru followed Karura to the courtyard, still talking, asking about the red-haired boy and Lady Chiyo and how his sister was going to be the greatest puppeteer ever.
Karura watered her cacti. One cup each. The tenfold notification pulsed in the corner of her vision and she let it fade without reading it.