Suzu was walking up the steps when the horn started.
She stopped with one sandal on the eleventh step and one on twelve, the mending basket on her hip. There were twenty-two steps up the outside of their building, clay worn smooth in the middle where everybody walked, and eleven was the halfway step, and she'd counted them every day since she was four.
The horn blew long. Once. Twice. Two meant sandstorm. Everybody knew two.
It blew a third time.
Then it started over.
Suzu's teacher had made them practice the three-horn drill once, at the start of the year, and nobody had taken it seriously because three horns never happened. You went to the southern bunkers. You held the hand of whoever was next to you. You didn't stop for anything.
"Mama?"
The door at the top of the stairs banged open. Mama came out onto the landing with a needle still pinched in her fingers and thread trailing from it, her face turned north.
Suzu turned north too.
Something was getting up behind the rooftops.
That was the only way she could think it. A hill was getting up. Pale sand poured off its shoulders as it rose, sheeting down in long curtains, and the shoulders kept going, and then there was a head on top of them, round and huge, with dark lines crawling across it like the cracks in a dry riverbed. Its eyes opened. Black, with yellow in the middle.
It looked at the village. Then it threw its head back and laughed.
The sound came through the clay. Suzu felt it in the step under her feet, in her teeth, in the basket on her hip.
"Suzu." Mama's voice had gone very small and very calm. "Put the basket down. Come up to me. We're going to..."
The ground jumped like a rug yanked out from under them, and the step went up and Suzu went down. Her chin cracked against the twelfth stair and her mouth filled with blood. The mending basket bounced away down the steps, spilling shirts. Above her the whole front wall of their building leaned outward, slowly, and Mama was on the landing in front of it.
"MAMA!"
The wall came down.
The staircase folded in half under the weight. Suzu was in the fold. The stairs above her broke and dropped onto the stairs below her and stopped, jammed together at an angle, and the light went out, and the noise went on and on and on, clay and stone pouring down over the top of everything until it sounded like it was raining rocks.
Then it was quiet.
She couldn't see. Dust packed her nose and her mouth and she coughed until she threw up a little, and then she coughed some more. She was lying on her side in a space no bigger than the cupboard under the washbasin at home. A broken stair pressed against her hip. Another pressed against the back of her head. When she reached out, her fingers found stone in every direction.
"Mama." It came out a croak. She spat dust and tried again. "MAMA!!!"
"Suzu!" Somewhere close. Somewhere above her and to the left, through the rubble. Mama's voice was strained and tearful. "Suzu, baby, I'm here. Are you hurt?"
"I can't see! I can't get out!"
"Don't move. Don't try to dig. Stay still and keep talking to me."
"Mama, are you hurt?"
A long breath through the stone. "My leg's stuck, that's all. Someone will come. Keep talking to me sweetie."
So Suzu talked. She talked about the stairs and the basket and how she'd been on the eleventh step. She talked about the hill with the eyes. She screamed when the ground jumped again and something big settled overhead and dust trickled down onto her face. She listened to the world outside the dark, to people screaming, to a man somewhere down the street shouting a name over and over, Hiro, Hiro, HIRO, until the shouting stopped all at once and didn't start again.
She stopped talking for a while after that. Mama kept talking. Then Mama stopped too, and only made a sound sometimes, a low sound, like when she'd burned her hand on the cookpot.
Suzu didn't know how long it was. Long enough that she stopped crying because there wasn't anything left to cry with.
Then she heard clicking.
Soft. Wooden. Click-click-click, like her grandfather's counting beads, coming closer through the rubble. Stone shifted somewhere near her feet. A thin line of light cut through the dust, and something came through it.
A hand.
It was wooden, pale and smooth, with joints at the knuckles like a doll's. It came through a gap no wider than Suzu's wrist on the end of an arm made of little wooden segments threaded together, and it felt around in the dark, patting stone, patting her sandal, her ankle, her knee.
Suzu screamed.
The hand stopped.
It stayed where it was for a moment. Then it moved up, slowly, slow as anything, and patted the top of her head. Twice. The way Papa did before he left on the caravans.
Then the stone above her began to move.
More hands came. She heard them before she saw them, the clicking multiplying, dozens of them, prying at the broken stairs and pulling chunks of clay away and passing them off somewhere out of sight. The light got bigger. Hot afternoon light, thick with dust. Four of the wooden hands slid under her, one beneath each shoulder and one beneath each knee, and they lifted her out of the dark and into the open air.
And kept lifting.
Suzu went up past the broken stairs, past the second floor where their kitchen used to be, past the roofline. The hands holding her let go and other hands caught her before she could even gasp, and those hands carried her a little further and passed her to more hands, and she understood that she was being handed down a line of them, high above the street.
She looked down.
The street she'd lived on her whole life was gone. Half the buildings had slumped into the road. The other half leaned against each other. And everywhere, all over it, there were arms.
Hundreds of them. Long, segmented, pale wooden arms, bending in every direction at once, threading themselves into the gaps in collapsed walls and coming back out holding people. They poured over the rooftops in ropes and split apart and dove down into houses. They zigzagged through the air above her head, crossing each other, ducking under each other, never once tangling. Some carried stone. Some carried people. A man went by in the opposite direction, high up, cradled in a nest of wooden hands with his arm hanging at a bad angle, staring at the sky with his mouth open.
Below her, a cluster of the arms was lifting the fallen wall off their landing.
Mama was under it.
Her leg came out first and it wasn't right. It was bent and messed up. Something white was sticking out of the side of it through the torn skin. Mama screamed when the arms lifted her. It was the scariest sound Suzu had ever heard. Then the arms had her, too, cradled flat with one hand holding her leg still, and they started passing her south along a line below Suzu's.
Two doors down, she saw Old Man Doi's legs.
They were sticking out from under the wall of his shop, the way they stuck out from under his cart when he fixed the wheel. His sandals were still on. A rope of wooden arms swept over the wall right above him, slowed down, and kept going. They didn't stop for him.
Suzu didn't understand why at the time. Later she did.
She followed the arms with her eyes, back along the ropes of them, to where they were coming from. A rooftop. Three stories up, at the edge of the street, with long racks of dyed cloth flapping beside it. On the edge of that roof stood a row of puppets.
Ten of them. Short and round-shouldered, wrapped in pale strips of linen, each one with four arms spread wide. The arms poured out of their forearms like water out of a broken jar. And every single one of the puppets had the same face carved into its wooden head. Two dots for eyes. One curved line underneath.
They were smiling.
Somewhere behind the drying cloth, someone was working them. Suzu couldn't see who.
A sound like a mountain breaking made her look north.
The sand monster was still there, bigger than anything had a right to be. Above it, in the sky, a man stood on a black cloud. The cloud moved under him like it was alive, and while Suzu watched, it gathered itself up into a point and shot forward at the monster in a spear so big it could have skewered the grain storehouse.
It hit the monster in the belly.
The monster folded around it and left the ground. It flew backward over the northern rooftops, over the wall, tail flailing, and as it went it bellowed something at the man on the cloud in a voice that shook the dust off the arms holding Suzu.
"YOU DAMNED OLD MAAAAN!"
Suzu didn't know why she laughed. She didn't mean to. It came out of her like a hiccup, high and strange, and then she was crying again, and the wooden hands passed her along, and along, and along.
They set her down by the southern plaza.
A genin caught her by the shoulders as the last wooden hand let go, a boy maybe four years older than her with a cut on his forehead and a stretcher pole under his arm. He looked at her for about one second, decided she was walking wounded, and pointed.
"Bunkers are there. Stay in the square if you're waiting on family."
"My mama's coming. On the arms."
"Then wait." And he ran back the way she'd come.
Mama came a few minutes later. The arms laid her down in a row with other hurt people on a spread of somebody's tablecloths, and then they pulled back up into the sky and were gone. Suzu sat down beside her and took her hand. Mama's hand was cold and wet. Her face was pale. Her leg lay there with the bone poking out of it, and Suzu didn't look at it, and then she looked at it, and then she made herself stop.
"Hey, baby…" Mama said. Her lips were cracked. "I'm so glad to see you're okay..."
"The hands got me out." She wondered if her mama was okay. She didn't look okay.
"They got me out too..."
The square was full of people. More came every minute, carried by genin on stretchers, carried by wooden arms dropping out of the sky, walking in on their own with blood down their faces. There were medics too, a few of them, moving from body to body with their hands glowing green. Too few. They went to the people who were screaming the loudest or not screaming at all. A medic knelt by Mama once, looked at the leg, said "Bone's out but she's not bleeding much, she'll be fine for now," and moved on to a man whose stomach was open.
Mama smiled but Suzu didn't know why she was smiling about that, and her smile looked really strange.
Somebody came down the row with a bucket of cactus fruit split open and handed one to Suzu. "Squeeze it into her mouth. Slowly, okay?" Suzu did. The pink juice ran down Mama's chin, and some of the paleness went out of her face, and her breathing got easier.
Around them, people talked. People always talked when they were scared.
A genin dropped off a stretcher two rows over, a girl with sand in her hair and blood on her vest that wasn't hers, and a man with a bandaged head grabbed her sleeve before she could go.
"Those arms. Those wooden things. What are they?"
The genin pulled her sleeve free, but gently. "Millions. They're called Millions. Puppet Brigade's got a lot of them now."
"Whose are they?"
"Karura's. She made them." The genin was already backing away toward the street. "Lady Chiyo's apprentice. She was on Lord Ebizo's genin team before she made chunin."
And she ran.
"Karura?" A big woman sitting on an overturned crate three spaces down from Mama sat up straighter. She had a little boy asleep in her lap and a split cactus fruit in her hand. "Karura with the yellow scarf? It's the cactus girl!"
"The cactus girl made those?"
"She planted the ones behind my well house! My husband's back hasn't hurt in a year!"
"The person who saved me was different from that child, though," said a younger man beside her. His arm was in a sling made from his own shirt.
The big woman squinted at him. "Huh? Whadda you mean?"
"I mean a big ninja pulled me out. A big heavy guy with a beard. He had two of those puppets, the smiling ones. The puppets were hers, maybe. The man wasn't."
"Oh." The woman frowned at the cactus fruit like it had lied to her. "So it wasn't all of her puppets doing it?"
"It could've been, I'm not saying it wasn't. I'm just saying the man who saved me wasn't some little girl."
"There was a woman in my street with two of them," someone said from further down the row. "Grey hair. Never seen her before in my life."
"Do you think it was Lady Chiyo?" The man with the bandaged head again. "She's the only one I know who can work that many."
"No!" The big woman shook her head so hard her cheeks wobbled. "I saw Lady Chiyo running out the entrance toward that thing. With her brother. It couldn't have been her."
"Then who else is there?" The bandaged man looked around at all of them like one of them might know. "I don't know any famous puppeteers besides the puppet girl and Lady Chiyo. Do we even have anyone else?"
Nobody answered him.
An old woman at the end of the row snorted. She had a cut on her scalp that somebody had tied up with a strip of curtain, and she hadn't said a word until now.
"Pfft. Does it matter who saved us?" She jabbed a bony finger at the sky, where the last few wooden arms were still swinging over the rooftops to the north. "We all know who made those smiling four-armed puppets. And they saved our lives. That's enough for me to be grateful to that kind girl."
People went quiet after that. Some of them nodded.
Suzu looked up at the arms in the sky and tried to count them, and lost track somewhere past forty. They were moving too fast and all spindly.
…
The girl came later, when the sun had started to slide.
Suzu didn't know it was her at first. She was just a girl, small, smaller than Suzu's cousin Mei who was ten. She had a forehead protector and a ninja vest that looked a size too big for her, dust all over her sandals and her scarf, and the scarf was yellow. She walked into the square from the east, and she looked around at the rows, and then she knelt down beside the first person nobody had gotten to yet.
Her hands lit up green.
She moved down the row toward them. A man with a crushed arm. A woman with blood all through her hair. A boy Suzu's age with his leg splinted to a broom handle. Each time, the green light, and the person's face changed, and she got up and went to the next one. She didn't stop to talk. She didn't stop to rest.
One of the real medics noticed her, a young woman with circles under her eyes so dark they looked painted on. She opened her mouth like she was about to say something. Then she looked at the yellow scarf, and she closed her mouth and went back to work.
"Mama," Suzu whispered. "Mama, I think that's her."
Then the girl was kneeling beside Mama.
Up close she had a round face and very serious eyes. She looked at Mama's leg for a long moment. Then she looked at Mama's face, and she smiled a little.
"This is going to hurt for a second," she said. "Then it's going to hurt a lot less. Okay?"
Mama nodded.
The girl put one hand above the knee and one below the break, and the green light came up. And the bone moved.
Suzu watched it go. The white end of it slid back in through the torn skin and Mama's whole body arched up off the tablecloth and she screamed through her teeth. Something clicked, deep in the leg. The bone was inside. The torn skin pulled toward itself under the green light like a drawstring bag closing, and the swelling around it went down, and down, and the leg was a leg again, straight, with an angry red line on the side of it where the hole had been.
Mama fell back, gasping. Her face wasn't pale anymore.
"Don't walk on it today," the girl said. "Tomorrow, slowly. Somebody should check it in a week."
"Thank you," Mama said. She was crying. "Thank you, thank you..."
The girl was already turning to the next person in the row. Suzu grabbed her sleeve before she could think about it.
"Were those your hands?" She blurted. "The wooden ones. That got us out."
The girl looked at her with a strange look.
"Some of them." She said.
Then she gently took Suzu's fingers off her sleeve, squeezed them once, and went to the next one.
…
The sky over the north wall changed a little before sundown. Everybody saw it. The whole square went quiet and turned to look. Beyond the rooftops, beyond the wall, sand was piling up into the air. Layer folding over layer, pale and huge, until it had made a shape. A pyramid, tall enough to see from here, rising over the top of the wall where the monster had been.
Then the weight went away.
Suzu hadn't known there was a weight until it was gone. It had been sitting on her chest since the horn, on everyone's chest, and all at once it lifted, and she could breathe all the way down. Around the square people started crying. Someone laughed. Someone cheered, and a few others joined in, ragged and too loud.
The yellow-scarfed girl was still going when the sun went down. Still going when the lamps got lit around the edge of the square, and when a whole crowd of new medics came pouring in from somewhere with bags and stretchers. Suzu watched one of them, a tall older man, crouch down and say something to the girl and put a hand on her shoulder. She nodded at him.
Then she got up and moved to the next row anyway.
Suzu lay down next to Mama on the tablecloth with her head on Mama's arm. All around them the square murmured. Millions, people said. The smiling ones. Lady Chiyo's apprentice. Lord Ebizo's student. Karura. Karura. The cactus girl, the puppet girl, the one with the scarf.
Suzu closed her eyes and saw the arms again, all of them, crossing over each other in the sky.
The girl with a thousand hands, she thought, and fell asleep.
Karura pushed the cart over a broken doorstep and into the northern part of the village in the morning.
Laborers had been at it since first light, hauling stone, shoring up walls that hadn't finished falling. The dust hadn't settled. It hung in the air and turned the morning sun the color of weak tea. Families picked through the wreckage of homes for anything worth keeping, and the ones whose homes were simply gone sat in the cleared streets with nowhere to go and nothing to do but wait.
Karura knew this street. She'd never walked it. A clone had and the clone had stood on that broken lintel and watched a chakra signature go out beneath a bakery while the wooden fingers were still an arm's length of stone away.
The bakery was a mound now. Someone had laid a cloth over the part of it that mattered.
Two puppets. She'd held every clone to two, so no one would look twice. Ten would have reached the woman beneath it. Ten would have reached the pair buried too deep, too. Karura stood in front of the mound with her hands at her sides and knew it.
Then she started filling the cart from her scrolls.
She'd bought it at dawn from a grain seller who hadn't asked questions, then bought out his grain and every jug of water at the stall beside him, and Tenfold had turned each purchase into ten. Nine more carts sat in her subconscious now. She had no idea what she'd do with them.
She walked the street with it, handing out jug after jug of water, sack after sack of grain, bundles of dried meat and fruit. Door to door, where there were still doors. Person to person, where there weren't.
Everyone saw a small girl in a yellow scarf, a ninja vest, with a forehead protector who seemed to have an impossible amount to give, and they were too thirsty and too tired to ask questions about where she got it from.
A woman with a baby took a jug of water and a sack of grain and didn't say anything at all. She just looked at Karura for a long moment and Karura understood that some thanks didn't have words in them.
She was halfway down a street of flattened homes, pressing a water jug into the hands of a man who'd lost his roof and most of one arm to the rubble, when something landed on her shoulder.
A messenger hawk, copper-banded, the village seal stamped on the little scroll case strapped to its leg. It settled its weight against her neck and waited.
Karura set the jug down, freed the scroll, and read it.
Report to the Kazekage's office. Immediately.
She read it. Then she looked down the street, at the cart still half full, at the people still waiting, at the work that didn't end just because she'd been called away from it.
She rolled the scroll back up.
You didn't refuse the Kazekage.
Karura made a shadow clone to continue her work before she turned and ran for the administrative building.
The Third Kazekage had read the report twice by the time he reached the recommendations at the back of it. A jonin he respected had written three lines requesting that the girl's service be recognized. The head of the medical corps had written more than three. There was a note from a Brigade instructor, a veteran of twenty years, that said only: I have nothing I could possibly teach her about puppets. She should be teaching me.
He picked up his brush and began to fill out the form.
Special jonin. Full jonin carried an expectation she hadn't met yet, mastery of two of her elemental natures. That promotion would come. He'd told her himself it would probably come before the year was out, and he was rarely wrong about such things. But the position beneath it was hers already, and had been for some time. The village had simply been too slow, or too unwilling, to admit that a child could stand on it.
He finished the form, stamped it, and waited for her to arrive.
She did, a few minutes later. Dust on her sandals. Dust on her scarf. She'd come straight from the work he'd called her away from, and she hadn't even washed for it.
I'm not surprised, he thought. If she had stopped to freshen up and make herself presentable, he'd have to rethink his previous estimation about her.
"Kazekage-sama." She bowed.
"Karura-chan." He folded his hands on the desk. "Yesterday. Walk me through it. Your account, not the report's."
She told him. The training hall, the horn, the recruits she'd sent into the streets to move people. The rooftop. The Millions in the eastern quarter and the rubble she'd cleared. She told him she'd coordinated her puppets from a high vantage and worked the collapses, and she told it plainly, and it was true as far as it went. She told him she'd made a shadow clone to help with the beast. He listened to all of it and did not ask the questions she was hoping he wouldn't ask. He never did. She'd come to understand that he either couldn't see the shape of what she wasn't saying, or had decided not to look at it. Either way suited her.
When she finished, he was quiet for a moment.
"The casualty count yesterday should have been in the tens of thousands," he said. "It was not. A significant portion of why it was not is sitting in front of me needing a bath."
Karura's face went hot. She lifted her arm an inch, caught a whiff of smoke and sweat and somebody else's dried blood, and put it back down very quickly.
"I came straight from the north," she mumbled. "I didn't want to keep you waiting." Then, because her mouth was still going: "And a lot of people held that thing in place, Kazekage-sama. I just pulled people out of buildings."
"You pulled a hundred people out of buildings while also keeping some of my jonin alive while also healing in the square until you couldn't stand." He let that sit. "Do not be modest with me, girl. It wastes both our time, and I don't have the patience for it that Ebizo apparently does."
Karura apologized.
He slid a small scroll across the desk.
"As of today you hold the rank of special jonin." he said.
Karura looked at him.
"Kazekage-sama, I'm nine."
"I am aware of your age. I find it has very little to do with anything you can actually do." He leaned back. "You teach. The recruits you've had for three weeks are doing things recruits should not be able to do for months. You heal at a level that made the head of the medical corps put your name in a report. You build puppets my Brigade is still modifying and attempting to improve. You led a foreign country out of a coup before your first year as a genin was up, and yesterday you reacted properly to your first village emergency and worked it from two ends at once without anyone telling you how. Judgment. Leadership. The way you keep your head when the village is coming apart. Combat, when combat is called for." He said all of it flatly. "Special jonin recognizes a specialist who has outgrown the rank below. You are a specialist many times over. The promotion is overdue."
"I didn't do any of it for a promotion."
"I know. That's part of why you've earned it." He nodded at the scroll. "Take it. Your protests carry no weight against the scroll on my desk. I have read what you did. Your humility is noted and dismissed."
She took it. It was lighter than she expected and heavier than she could explain.
"Keep up the good work, Karura-chan," the Third said. "Sunagakure is proud of you."
Karura's eyes stung.
She didn't understand it. She stood in the office of the most powerful man in the village, holding a rank most shinobi spent a decade climbing toward, and something pressed up behind her eyes and spilled over before she could stop it. One tear, then another, dragging clean lines through the dust on her cheeks.
It was the speed of it. Not long ago she'd been a baker's daughter who grew cacti on a windowsill. Now she was nine and a special jonin and a name in a hundred mouths, and nobody had given her a single quiet moment to decide how she felt about any of it.
She wiped her face with the back of her hand. "Sorry. I don't know why I'm crying."
"Don't apologize for it. I'd imagine thousands of people would be doing the same in your situation." The Third believed her tears were for another reason. "Now. Since you've taken the promotion, there's a matter of your first assignment at the new rank." He paused. "Consider it a reward."
"Reward?!" Karura looked up, the tears forgotten.
The Third Kazekage smirked. It was a rare look.
"Blame your master for this, by the way. You should have heard the way she was talking to me in this office about your actions last night." He pulled a scroll from beneath the stack of reports and held it out. "She made a very long argument that you deserved more than the village had given you. When she finished, I told her I agreed. I don't believe I've ever seen her lose her footing so quickly." The smirk lingered a moment longer. "So I'm giving you something most jonin twice your age would trade an arm for."
Karura took the scroll and unrolled it.
She read the first lines and felt the floor of the assignment tilt out from under the word reward.
Solo assignment. Special Jonin Karura. Escort and protection detail, duration multiple months. Subject: the heir of the Land of Wind. Operate in coordination with the Daimyo's Five Guardian Shinobi for the length of His Lordship's journey through the country.
She read it again, slower.
"The Wind Daimyo is making a progress through the country," the Third said, before she could ask. "A long one. Town by town, oasis by oasis, the sort of thing a ruler does to remind a country it has a ruler. His son travels with him. The Daimyo's Five Guardians cover the Daimyo himself. You will cover the son."
"Me, by myself?"
"You. The Guardians are not above you and you are not above them. They guard the father, you guard the son, and where the two overlap, you coordinate. They cannot give you orders. Neither can the heir. Your job is to keep him alive, not to fetch his tea. If the Daimyo gives you an order, you follow it as you would follow mine. Otherwise, you handle your client as you see fit." He watched her. "I am told the heir is nineteen, and that he is not an easy young man. You will manage."
Karura looked at the scroll. A progress across the whole of the Land of Wind. Every town. Every oasis. Months of it. Months of roads and the people who lived along them, the thin ones, the forgotten ones, the ones nobody in a palace ever thought about.
The Third saw the change in her face. He had chosen this assignment for several reasons, and only one of them was a reward. The Land of Wind was the poorest of the great countries, and its purse was held by a court that had been growing tighter with Suna's coin for years, a court that looked at his village and saw a cost it would rather not pay. He was sending his most remarkable shinobi to walk beside that court's heir for months. To be seen by them. To put a Suna face on every life she saved in the Land of Wind. A village that produced a child like this was a village worth funding. He could not say that to the Daimyo's face. He could let the Daimyo's son watch it happen and reach the conclusion on his own.
On paper it was an escort detail. In truth it was the most important S-rank mission he would assign this year, and the only shinobi he trusted to complete it was the one who wouldn't know she was on it. A difficult nineteen-year-old did not come to like someone because he was told to. He would have to come to like her on his own. Karura would manage that without even trying.
She did not need to know that part. She would see a road full of people who needed help and a boy to keep alive. That was enough. That was, in fact, exactly why she was the right one to send.
"When do I leave?" She asked.
"When the Daimyo's party reaches the village. I'll send word. Pack for the season." He picked his brush back up, the audience ending the way his audiences always ended, with him turning to the next thing on the desk. "The country is not as safe as it was a month ago, Karura. The world is leaning toward something." He didn't look up. "Keep the heir breathing. Keep yourself breathing."
Karura rolled the scroll closed and held it against her chest.
"Yes, Kazekage-sama."
She bowed, and left, and stepped out of the administrative building into a village that was still digging itself out of the sand. The dust hung in the air. The crews still hauled stone. Somewhere to the north a clone was pushing a cart that never ran empty down a street of broken homes, handing food and water to people who'd lost everything.
She had some time before she had to leave.