What was it the dog had said? You're a lying ninja, I can smell it? How much of a lie was it, Ginta wondered, to say no, he didn't think Ryouma was dead? He turned a grim face to the pug, stepping closer in the waning light. "If we thought there was no chance we'd find him alive, we wouldn't be out here trying desperately to find him," he said. His voice came out low and gravelly, underlain with everything he'd been riding since he'd first realized Ryouma was missing.

"I'm not in the habit of going AWOL or contravening Arakaki's orders, or running hundreds of miles at top speed on an injury just for the fun of it. I'm certainly not going to risk my career for a hopeless case."

He realized his voice had risen to a shout only when he felt the anxious eyes of Kakashi's other dogs on him. There was whining tension rolling from the big shepherd, and soft, nervous growls came from the hounds. Pakkun, too, was looking at him with something like concern, and Kakashi...

He flinched away from Kakashi's gaze, and lowered his voice. "We're wasting light. From what I can tell, there was an ice storm recently, and it's been cold here. Ryouma and I used to take these trails a lot, we were both stationed up here. He wouldn't have taken the Falls road in bad conditions."

Kakashi shot a meaningful look at his tracking dogs. Three canine heads snapped to attention, and then the dogs wheeled and took off down the trail, running fast and low to the ground. Pakkun glared hard at Ginta as he ran by.

I wasn't lying, Ginta thought fiercely.

Kakashi turned his blank, ANBU-masked face to Ginta, and still somehow managed to convey murderous rage. Maybe it was the set of his shoulders, or the tension in his neck. When he spoke, it was flat-voiced, very calm. Too calm. "What's after the Bluffs trail — Snow Country, or are we going through to Lightning? I need to know how to pace the run."

Ginta could see where this was going. Could see Kakashi's anger rising and rising, fueled by desperate fear, because Ryouma was Kakashi's lover, and Ginta was the one who — too many times, over and over, in too many ways over the course of their whole relationship — was standing in Kakashi's way.

With Ginta standing in for the unknown element that had taken Ryouma from Kakashi, this couldn't go anywhere good.

"Snow Country. There's a village called Yukihana, near Himawara Pass at Lightning's border. There're three different ways to get there from here that he might have taken, but he never met his contact there, and all three search teams got all the way there without finding anything. If you want to go ahead, leave me signs so I'll know which forks you've taken."