Raidou paused at the door, sharply enough that Genma almost walked into his back. “Do I want to know?”

All three of his baby minions were too well-practiced in deceit to look guilty, but Katsuko’s expression of crafted innocence wouldn’t have fooled an infant. “Team bonding, taichou,” she said.

“Uh huh,” said Raidou.

Ryouma’s head tipped back on the couch. Dark, dancing eyes flickered over Raidou, and a smile slanted up the corner of Ryouma’s mouth—which was pretty much Ryouma’s normal expression, if you didn’t count the faintest edge of red cresting on his cheekbones. “Come to rescue us?” he drawled.

Raidou had bitten him on the ass once.

More than once, actually, if he remembered right. Maybe Ryouma was thinking of teeth.

“Considering it,” Raidou said dryly.

Katsuko glanced from Ryouma’s maybe-a-blush to Raidou’s probably-too-thoughtful expression, arching her eyebrows, and sweet baby Buddha, he didn’t want to have this same conversation three times in one week. Yondaime-sama and Genma had been bad enough.

“Excuse me,” Genma said, ducking under Raidou’s arm and past the duo on the couch, to tack a map up on the blackboard by Kakashi’s elbow.

“Isagewa Province?” Kakashi said, frowning. “Our first mission is in Fire Country?”

“Last I looked, that was the country under the protection of our Daimyou,” Genma said.

“That’d be our employer on this particular mission,” Raidou said, crossing the room to drop a file on his desk. He and Genma had taken ten minutes to get a quick briefing, thumb through the file, and sketch a game plan together before coming down—apparently at the cost of ‘team bonding’. “One of the lesser lords, actually. Villages in his region are reporting disappearances.”

Ryouma lounged up and paced over to study the map. Katsuko stretched out like an armored queen on the abandoned couch, propping an elbow on the arm and resting her chin in her cupped hand.

“Go on,” she said grandly.

Raidou crossed back and whacked her booted feet. “Move,” he said, and sat down on the arm of the couch when she did, ignoring her heavy sigh. “The villages think it’s bandits, but it doesn’t look like any bandit attack we’ve seen before—no deaths, no raids, and it’s not just young women going missing.”

“Over the last three weeks, there have been thirty-two disappearances from this cluster of five villages,” Genma said, drawing a broad circle in red pen on the map, which he began to fill in with small red X’s. He picked up the file once for reference, but Raidou was impressed by how many he pulled from memory. “It’s a whole range of ages, though none younger than ten. At least three were older than sixty, both men and women.”

“So,” Raidou said, throwing it to the rookies. “Thoughts?”