My second birthday was a small affair. The mothers made a little cake from what flour they could spare, topped it with bits of imported fruit and set a single lantern in front of me so I could blow out the flame. I couldn't, so a crowd of half-siblings blew it out for me and then clapped as if I'd done it.
It was a nice day. That night, though, I lay awake doing arithmetic I didn't like.
Kirigakure is a dangerous place. I'd known that from the start, but I had been thinking of it the way you think of a bad neighborhood you only drive through. A year of listening to the adults had changed that. Missions that came back one man short. Names nobody said anymore. The way the mothers checked the gate before they went to bed. People who can't defend themselves don't last here, and I was a toddler who still fell over when he turned around too fast.
I was also a man who'd spent two years in the desert and five at MIT, and who had raised himself in a house where nobody was paying attention. I knew what the start of a war looked like. If one came, or if someone came for my father through us, I wanted to be more than something that had to be carried out.
My mother had sung me to sleep an hour earlier. She always sang the same song, in that language nobody else knew. The lantern was out now. I lay under my blanket, stared at the wet stone ceiling and went through my options.
My body was useless for now. A two-year-old can't hold a sword or throw a punch that matters. That would come, but I couldn't speed it up much.
Chakra was another matter.
I'd felt something since I was very small. A low hum somewhere in my middle, like a machine left running in another room. People here grow up with it, so to them it's like a heartbeat, always there and easy to ignore. I had lived twenty-something years without anything like it. To me it felt like an extra limb that had shown up overnight, and that's hard to ignore.
I closed my eyes and breathed slowly, the way the characters always did on the show. I tried to tune out the water dripping inside the walls and my mother's breathing in the next room. For a long time there was nothing to find. My heart, my ribs going up and down, my own impatience.
Then a warmth started below my navel. It spread outward slowly, like the first mouthful of something hot on a cold night. I pushed at it with my mind, and a tingle ran up my spine.
That was it. My chakra.
It moved through me like a slow river with no banks, wide and lazy, going wherever it pleased. I'd expected to spend weeks just finding it. I think the strangeness helped: it stood out to me because I'd lived a whole life without it. The Hoshigaki blood probably helped too, and maybe something from my mother.
Finding it was the easy part. Now I had to learn to control it.
I needed an exercise I could do in bed, in the dark, without anyone noticing. The answer was obvious once I thought of it: the leaf. Hold a leaf to your forehead with chakra and nothing else. Academy students do it in their first year. It needs no equipment, only focus, and if anyone caught me with a leaf, they'd think I was playing.
The problem was getting leaves. The compound is mostly stone. The only green inside the walls is Yori's garden, where she grows herbs, a few tough vegetables and some low bushes for shade. I couldn't ask for leaves without someone asking why.
So I stole them.
The next afternoon the mothers were sitting in their usual circle in the courtyard, trading gossip and complaining about the damp. I wandered toward the garden, chasing a bug that wasn't there, wobbling more than I needed to. When Kaho got to the funny part of her story and everyone laughed, I pulled a leaf off a bush and stuffed it into my tunic. My heart was pounding. I'd gone through real checkpoints in my old life with less adrenaline, which was embarrassing.
That night I took it out. It was cool and a little damp, and it smelled like dirt and green things. For a second I thought of the yard behind my house in California, and my mother there. My other mother.
I put the leaf on my forehead and pushed chakra up to it.
It fell off right away.
I tried again, slower this time, building the warmth in my belly and moving it up through my neck. My forehead tingled. The leaf fell anyway.
I picked it up a third time, careful not to crease it, and lost it a third time. I knew the feeling from the robotics lab: the circuit that should work and doesn't, the code that throws the same error no matter what you change. I'd assumed an adult mind would give me an edge. Naruto struggled with this stuff because he couldn't sit still, and I could sit still for hours. My chakra didn't care. It came out in surges, too much and then too little, like a hose with the tap turned all the way open.
I tucked the leaf under my pillow and went to sleep angry.
The next two months went the same way. Every night I waited until my mother was asleep and the guard's footsteps had passed, and then I tried. Sometimes the edges of the leaf lifted a little, as if it wanted to stay, and then it dropped. I swore at it in my head in three languages.
I kept a small stash of leaves under my mattress and swapped them out as they wilted. Getting rid of the old ones took some planning. During the day I crumbled them up and pushed the pieces into the garden dirt while "helping" Yori. She'd smile and rub my head with a rough hand. "Such a good boy, Arashi. You like helping, don't you?" I did like it. I was also burying evidence.
What finally worked was going backward. The leaf was too advanced for me, and I needed the basics first.
So I stopped trying to stick anything to anything. I lay still and moved the warmth through my body on purpose: up into my chest, out along my arms and legs, into my fingers and toes, and back to the center. It was what I used to do with a new circuit, running current through the whole loop before adding anything to it. It wore me out. I'd sweat in the cold, my head would pound, and in the morning I felt like I'd run a marathon in my sleep. After a week, though, I could send it into my hand and keep it there. My fingers buzzed, and they buzzed when I told them to.
I moved the leaf to my palm, which was closer to the center and easier to reach. I imagined the chakra pulling inward, like a small vacuum. At first nothing happened at all. Then, one night, the edges curled up as if a breeze had caught them, and my heart nearly jumped out of my chest.
A few nights later it stuck for one second. Then two. By the end of the month I could hold it on my palm for ten.
The forehead was harder. It's farther from the center, and the chakra has to climb up through the neck and stay put. I kept at it. The first time the leaf held there, five full seconds, I almost laughed out loud. A small squeak got out before I clamped my mouth shut. Nobody woke up. I lay there grinning in the dark with a leaf on my face, and the world felt a little less dangerous than it had a few months before.
Things got easier after that, slowly. My chakra still surged sometimes, but more often it came out the way I asked, a trickle for fine work and more when I needed it. I got good at stealing leaves: a quick pull while the mothers watched the older kids train, into the sleeve, back to my room. I started sticking them to other places, my arm, my cheek, my knee, to see whether the skill carried over. Some nights I was too tired from the day and the leaf wouldn't stay anywhere. On those nights I reminded myself that I'd once spent three days on a single bug in a navigation script. This was the same kind of problem in a different kind of system.
By the time my third birthday came around, I could hold two or three leaves on my forehead for several minutes. That was a long way from mastering anything. But it was mine, and nobody knew about it.
The birthday was loud, which made a nice change from my nights. The mothers made a real feast this time. The cake was bigger, covered in berries from Yori's garden and some cream Rina had found at the market, and nobody asked where. Hanae led the singing. Miyu made me a crown out of fresh leaves and set it on my head, and I had to stare at the floor so nobody would see my face. Kaho told a story about a brave little storm that crossed the whole ocean. Daigo put me on his shoulders and ran a lap around the hall while the younger kids chased us.
My father was away on a mission. Nobody seemed surprised.
Rokuta gave me a wooden sword. Nao gave me a smooth gray stone he'd found on the beach. I sat on the floor between them, swinging the sword at nothing, and thought about the warmth below my navel and how much more of it there was than I'd first believed.
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Author's Note
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