Shadow Work

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Get comfortable. The village is watching.

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Kakashi had said tomorrow would be D-ranks. Sasuke had heard the word as a threat. By the time the others left Training Ground Three, he had been handed the sort of work that made the threat credible.

The target lane needed resetting. Four posts leaned at different angles, their cords slack from too many feet cutting across them. Kakashi had shown him the spacing with sixteen measured paces, then pointed to a shed with replacement cord and a box of wooden pegs.

"An exercise," Kakashi had called it.

"In what?"

"Doing a small thing correctly while you want to be somewhere else."

Sasuke had no useful answer to that. Naruto, on his way out, had offered several. Sakura had taken him away before any of them became Sasuke's problem.

Now the ground belonged to the ordinary afternoon. Academy students practiced at the far targets. The groundskeeper from the morning pushed his branch cart toward the path beyond the fence. Someone in the neighboring lane argued over a missed throw. Sasuke set the first peg, stretched the cord to the second post, and counted the distance back to the third.

At eleven paces, a sandal scraped against stone behind the fence.

He finished the count. There was a public footpath there. A scrape meant somebody had used it, not that somebody had come for him.

At sixteen, he planted the next peg. He pulled the line taut and checked the angle against the old chalk mark. The scrape came again, followed by a pause long enough to make him aware that he had stopped moving too.

Sasuke looked up.

The fence was made of narrow slats with gaps between them. Through one gap he could see the edge of a straw shopping basket and a strip of dark trouser leg. The person behind it moved on before he could see a face. An academy boy crossed the path in the other direction carrying a stack of practice targets. A woman called after him to keep the painted side dry.

The gap showed nothing by the time Sasuke reached it.

He stood with one hand on the cord. A basket, a leg, a pause. His mind wanted to make those three things into a person with a reason. It had no evidence for either.

The academy boy had the right of way on a public path. The basket might belong to anyone buying food. Sasuke turned back to the lane.

The line he had tightened now cut across the chalk mark by the width of two fingers.

He loosened it, shifted the peg, and drove it into the dirt again. The second blow from the mallet landed too hard. The peg split along the grain.

"Excellent," he said to no one.

He carried the broken piece to the scrap box by the shed. The groundskeeper was there, unloading branches. His cart blocked half the view of the path.

"Need a new one?" the man asked.

"I have them."

"That one broke because the ground's packed at the edge. Move it an inch in."

Sasuke looked at the man's boots, then at the dirt beneath the wheel. Mud in the treads, cedar needles on the heel. He had spent the morning dragging branches. None of it told Sasuke who had passed behind the fence. None of it gave him cause to ask.

"An inch," Sasuke said.

"If you want it to last till tomorrow."

The groundskeeper took his cart away. Sasuke chose another peg and moved the mark as directed. Kakashi's sixteen paces were not a command to put wood through stone.

He started again from the first post. One, two, three. Counting should have been easy. At the academy targets, a student missed and knocked a target frame against the wall. Sasuke's attention jumped to the sound before he could stop it. He kept walking, but his next step was longer.

Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen.

He looked back. The first post seemed too close.

He measured again. Seventeen paces, when he took them evenly.

Sasuke pulled the peg up. Dirt held the point for a moment, then released it with a small, irritating sound. He had not lost to an opponent. He had lost to one step.

A shadow crossed the path beyond the slats. Its shape stretched along the ground, broke against the fence posts, and disappeared. There was no reason for it to belong to the basket. The sun was low enough to make anyone crossing look longer than they were.

He could go through the gate and see who was there. He could ask why they had stopped. The question itself would tell them what he suspected, whether or not he had chosen the right person. The academy boy might still be delivering targets. The groundskeeper might be coming back for his rake. If Sasuke went after a stranger because a shadow moved, the accusation would be his, not the shadow's.

He put the peg down where the count actually ended.

"You're measuring from the worn post."

Kakashi had arrived without asking the afternoon to announce him. He stood at the far end of the lane, book closed in one hand. Sasuke had not heard him approach. That was a fact too; it did not explain the sounds behind the fence.

"It's the fixed end," Sasuke said.

"It was fixed before the rain."

Sasuke crossed to the post. A shallow crescent of dirt showed where its base had shifted. He could press it back before setting the cord, or measure a line guaranteed to go wrong tomorrow.

"You could have said that when you assigned it."

"I could have. Did you notice it?"

"Now."

Kakashi waited. Sasuke disliked how much the waiting resembled a question.

"I set the second peg wrong," Sasuke said. "Twice."

"I can see the holes."

The first had been two fingers off. The second was a full pace. Both remained visible. Sasuke pushed the post upright, packed the soil around it, and put his heel against the base while he tightened the cord. His palm stung from the mallet handle.

Kakashi looked toward the fence. "Something else?"

Sasuke could have said someone was watching. If Kakashi chose to take that seriously, the public path might become a search. If he did not, Sasuke would sound like he was explaining a poor job with an invisible opponent. Neither possibility improved what he knew.

"Footsteps on the path," he said. "A basket through the slats. Then a shadow. I didn't see whether it was the same person."

"Did you see anyone enter the ground?"

"No."

"Anyone approach the shed?"

"The groundskeeper. He was moving his cart."

Kakashi's eye rested on him for a beat. "Then finish the lane."

It was not a dismissal of the sounds. It was not confirmation, either. Sasuke would have preferred either one to an ordinary instruction.

He tested the first post with his shoulder. It held. Kakashi watched him straighten the cord, then stepped aside so a pair of academy students could cross to the next target without walking under it. They thanked him and kept going. Sasuke waited for them to pass.

One boy carried a bundle of rolled targets. The other had a basket of blunt practice kunai. From behind the slats, the second basket would have looked much like the first. Sasuke could not tell whether either boy had been on the path earlier. He was glad he had not made them answer for it.

The thought was not relief. It was a narrower kind of restraint.

He marked sixteen even paces from the repaired post. The line met the chalk without a bend. At the last peg he paused, hearing another soft footfall beyond the fence. This time he kept one hand on the cord and looked only after he had fixed it.

An older woman walked past the gate with a covered pot in her arms. She did not glance toward the targets. Farther along the path, somebody turned a corner before Sasuke could see more than the movement of a sleeve. The sounds could have belonged to either of them, or to someone he had missed entirely.

He could not make an account of the afternoon by choosing the most alarming possibility every time a stranger moved.

He checked the four posts. The first held. The next two stood square. The last cord had loosened where the split peg had pulled against it, so he replaced it too. That took longer than the rest of the lane. The sun slid lower while he worked.

When he returned the mallet to the shed, Kakashi was marking a training sheet at the doorway. There were no names from the path on it, no sketch of a face. Just the posts, the replacement cord, and the two mistakes Sasuke had made.

"One split peg," Kakashi said.

"And one extra hole."

"Two extra holes."

Sasuke looked at the lane. Kakashi was right.

"I'll fill them."

"Before someone catches a heel."

Sasuke took the small trowel from the rack. He packed both holes with damp dirt, then walked the lane once at a normal pace. His feet found no drop. The work had taken a piece of the afternoon he had meant to spend on his own training. He had also given it two more holes to fix by letting an uncertain sound borrow his attention.

At the gate, a cloth bundle hung from a passerby's elbow. It might have been the same basket wrapped against dust. The person turned into the crowd without looking back. Sasuke watched only long enough to know the path was still being used by people with places to go.

If there was a pattern, another ordinary day might show it. He could notice time, direction, and distance without selecting a stranger to blame. If there was no pattern, he would have spent an afternoon being careful instead of making someone else pay for his fear.

Kakashi closed the sheet. "Tomorrow will be less interesting."

"You keep saying that like it's a reward."

"For some people, it is."

Sasuke looked down at the dirt under his nails, the cord burn across one finger, and the lane he had finally set straight. Beyond the fence came the sound of another sandal on stone. He did not go after it.

"I'll be here," he said.

"I know."

Sasuke left the target ground by the main gate. He could still feel the misplaced step in his legs. Tomorrow's work would require the same attention he had failed to keep today. He had no name to carry home, no report to turn in, and no proof that anyone had watched him.

He had the two filled holes. They were his.

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