The tendons flexed in the side of Kakashi's neck. For a long moment he did not move, not even to look up at her. Unease prickled up Ryouma's spine. Then Kakashi said levelly to Ginta, "There was more chakra in the seal than I anticipated."

Satomi's fist clenched. The tomoe in her crimson eyes spun into solid rings of black. She turned and walked up the tunnel, over inert, broken rock. Nothing spun itself out of the stone to grab her. In a moment the faint glow of her lightstick disappeared around a bend.

"What the hell was that?" Ryouma demanded.

"Bad blood," Kakashi said shortly. He turned, scooped up his med kit in one hand, and hauled Ryouma to his feet with the other. "Come on, before something eats her."

Bad blood? Ryouma met Ginta's eyes for a fleeting moment, as they picked their way through the debris. The lieutenant shook his head.

Everyone knew the broad sketches of Kakashi's story — well, everyone who'd been sane and sober during the last desperate months of the war, at least. He'd gone out on a mission with an Uchiha and a medic, and come back with the Uchiha's ashes in a box and the Uchiha's eye in his head. Plenty of people guessed at what might have gone wrong, but no one swore to the truth.

Another rockfall, Satomi'd said. And for a moment there, while basalt slivers sliced the air and Satomi tried to pull Ginta out of danger, Kakashi had just...frozen.

A man could lose an eye from flying rock. Ryouma nearly had. A boy could be crushed, killed, and yet just enough of his body left unmangled by rock for one precious eye to be retrieved.

A present from a friend, the Hokage's small son had said. Kakashi wouldn't have scavenged that Sharingan eye from a corpse.

Did Uchiha Satomi know that?

She was waiting for them beyond the bend, at yet another fork in the tunnel: flat-mouthed, crimson-eyed, running a hand over her close-shaven scalp. She said, "Someone passed here. Recently." She pointed her lightstick at the rough, rocky floor.

They were shinobi. All of them recognized the thick, dark spatter of dried blood.

Kakashi crouched, inhaling; the stained mask fluttered briefly against his mouth and nose. His eye narrowed. He raked his fingernails across the crusted splatter and sniffed the black residue. "There were two. Male, young." He tilted his head back, eye squeezing closed. The mask clung to his features, shaping the press of his lips, the flared wing of a nostril. Then he opened his eye again, and stood. "Decay. Something died ahead."

Ginta's hands rose into the Hare seal. "Tousaki, clone. Uchiha, you and Tousaki take point on this, but send the clone in first in case this is another trap. I'll mask your presence. Hatake, you and I follow the the blood trail back."

Splitting up wasn't Ryouma's favorite idea, but of all of them, he was probably best equipped to deal with dead things. He gave his kage bunshin a little extra jolt of chakra to the eyes, and focused a stronger thread to his own. The eerie glow of bioluminescent fungi strengthened, and the lightsticks cast sharper shadows. The kage bunshin blinked, nodded, and trotted down the tunnel after the trail of blood.