And Raidou still didn't look around, as though he trusted Ryouma to obey, as though there were never any possibility that Ryouma might not listen. "He's had a long day," he said, and stood, straightening in a long dangerous line of muscle and power. "But he already got your arm, so that'll probably hold him for a while."

He left the cell, kicking the door shut behind him. The automatic lock whirred, and the chakra wards brightened. Raidou clapped Ryouma once on the shoulder and headed across the hall into the kitchen.

There was a folding chair there now, fallen on the floor in a patch of reddish mud, and a creaky-looking wooden crate. The battered pot the clones had left on the extinguished burner now contained a boiled-thick sludge of the oversweetened green tea. Ryouma looked for a drain to tip it out.

The modernized plumbing in the bathroom hadn't extended to the kitchen alcove. There was no sink, but there was a pump over a small concrete drain in the very back corner, and a large flat-bottomed plastic basin with a small tray of yellow bar-soap beside.

His hands were almost steady again, now, though they'd begun to blister across the palms where the chakra limiters had bitten him. He squeezed his fingers into fists, and the pain helped, a little.

"She knows our faces now," he said, finally. "She already knew Kakashi's name. Probably from his stupid hair."

"Maybe we'll stuff him into a hood for the next mission," Raidou said. He crouched by the wooden crate, fitting together the remnants of a well-plundered med kit. It took Ryouma a moment to identify it as Genma's. "Though his jutsu aren't exactly subtle. Sometimes I wonder why they bother trying to make us anonymous."

"I got the impression it was so we wouldn't go glory-hounding." Ryouma leaned on the pump to get water flowing. "Also that whoever put the bathroom in this place didn't bother retrofitting the kitchen. How hard can it be to put in a tap? When they put me in charge of designing safehouses, mine are gonna be a lot better…"

"Stock 'em with doctors, for a start." Raidou dropped the restored kit on a ramshackle steel-sheet counter and leaned against it.

He was near enough to touch, if both of them reached out. Ryouma could hear him breathing.