The Red Shark - Chapter 0008

Chapter 8 — The Second Lesson

The next morning, I found out about muscles I hadn’t known I owned, mostly by trying to use them.

When I tried to roll onto my side, I made a sound I’d have been ashamed of in my first life. My shoulders ached. So did my back, and my hamstrings had turned into hot rope overnight. Even breathing hurt along the ribs. Salve had been rubbed into my arms and legs while I slept; I could smell mint and some bitter root, and under that, the mud still in my hair.

“Arashi.”

My mother was kneeling beside the bed with a tunic folded over her knee. Her hair was tied back for work, which meant she’d been up long before me.

“Your father’s waiting,” she said. “Breakfast first. Then the field.”

I nodded and didn’t move, because moving was the problem. She gave me a little time, and when I still hadn’t budged, she slid an arm behind my back and sat me up, the way she used to when I was learning to walk, and I hated how grateful I was for it.

“It’s worse if you lie there,” she said, pulling the tunic over my head. “The body stiffens. Better to make it work.”

She would know. She’d watched the other mothers’ sons limp through this same morning for years.

The walk to the kitchen took a long time. Every step on the stone floor sent a jolt up my shins. She kept one hand flat between my shoulder blades the whole way, and I let her.

The kitchen was loud and warm and smelled of rice. My brothers were packed along the table, some still half asleep over their bowls, some already on second helpings, and the mothers moved between the stove and the benches without needing to look where they were going. Miyu, Akemi and Nagi, all three due within the month, kept getting up to help, and the others kept steering them back to their seats.

Daigo saw me first. He was sitting at the end of the table in his genin headband, and a slow grin spread across his face.

“Look who came back from the dead.”

The table laughed. Rokuta leaned back on the bench with his arms crossed. “We thought you were dead, little shark. You looked dead when Dad carried you in.”

“You lasted the whole day,” Toma said, sliding over to make room for me. He was looking at me the way he usually looked at Daigo. “We watched from the storehouse roof. You didn’t cry once.”

“Until Dad turned around,” said Rokuta. “Then you all fell off the roof.”

“We climbed down.”

“You fell.”

I sat. My mother put a bowl of rice and grilled fish in front of me, with a cup of tea beside it. “Slowly,” she said. I did not eat slowly. It was the best rice I had tasted in either of my lives, which probably said more about the day before than about the rice.

The talk went on around me. Daigo was describing my laps to anyone who would listen, as though he’d been there. Rokuta was trying to get Kenta to admit how many push-ups he’d managed on his own first day. One of the younger boys wanted to know if Father’s sword was as heavy as it looked. For a while, I forgot about my legs.

After breakfast, the mothers handed out training clothes: dark tunics of heavy cotton, short trousers, cloth wraps for wrists and ankles. Mine fit. It had been sewn to my size weeks ago and kept folded away, waiting.

“Better than training in your sleeping clothes,” my mother said, tying my wraps. “These don’t tear.”

There were no Academy classes that day, so the field that had been empty yesterday was full of my brothers. My father stood at the edge of it, the pocket watch in one hand and a small notebook tucked into his belt. He looked us over once.

“Warm up.”

Daigo led. The rest of us followed his count through the stretches, the push-ups, the laps and the bar. Yesterday I’d done all of it alone; today I had a crowd of brothers groaning around me, and that helped more than I would have guessed. Rokuta complained the entire time and never slowed down. Kenta’s arms gave out on the push-ups, and he got back up and finished them anyway. When my turn at the bar came, I didn’t need to lower it. Daigo had already done it for me, between his own sets, without saying anything.

My father watched all of it and wrote things down. He hardly spoke. Once, when I dropped off the bar, he glanced at the watch, then at me, and wrote for longer than he had for anyone else.

When the last boy came down, he put the watch away.

“Enough. Good.” He pointed at a handful of the younger ones, Haruto and Toma among them, and then at me. “You. Over there with Daigo.” To Daigo, he said, “Teach them to wake their chakra. The rest of you, with me.”

Daigo crouched in front of us. “Sit down. Cross your legs. Close your eyes.” He sounded like our father, only patient. “Look for something warm in your belly. Like when you drink hot soup and feel it go all the way down. Find that.”

Haruto shut his eyes so hard his whole face wrinkled. Toma was already peeking.

I sat there for about as long as it took my father and the older boys to reach the pond. Then I got up and went after them.

I had a speech ready by the time I caught up, and I never got to use it. He heard me coming and turned around, and his eyebrows went up a fraction, which on his face was the same as anyone else shouting.

“You too?”

“I already woke it, Father.”

Nobody else said anything. Rokuta opened his mouth, glanced at our father, and shut it again.

My father crouched until his face was level with mine, or close to it; even crouching, he was taller. “Show me.”

I closed my eyes and let the warmth come up from my belly, as I’d done thousands of times in the dark, then pushed a little of it out toward my hands. I felt his palm settle on my chest, very lightly. He kept it there for three of my breaths.

“Who taught you?”

“Nobody. I found it.”

He studied me without a word and got to his feet. “Few children wake it alone at your age,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or to the others. “Come.”

Up close, the pond was wider and darker than I’d thought. A skin of mist lay on it, and the wind kept tearing it open and smoothing it back down. My father stopped at the edge, and Rokuta, Nao, Shun, Kenta and the rest of the older boys made a loose half-circle behind him. I took the end of the line, where the mud was deepest.

“This is the exercise we use most in the Mist,” he said. “Other villages use leaves, or paper. Ours is better. Water doesn’t sit still. It teaches control and strength together.”

I thought about the two years I’d spent sticking leaves to my forehead and decided to keep that to myself.

He waded in up to his knees and pushed one arm into the water to the shoulder.

For a few seconds, nothing happened. Rings began to spread outward from his arm, slowed, stopped, and started moving the other way, curling in toward him. When he drew his arm out, the water came with it.

It came out in one piece. A sphere wider than he was tall rose on his palm as he straightened, and the whole surface of the pond sagged toward him before it settled. He held it over his head on one hand, like a man holding up a lantern. The edges quivered. Nothing spilled. Inside, three carp swam in slow circles, looking unbothered.

Some useless part of my brain worked out the volume before I could stop it. Eight cubic meters, give or take. Eight tons of water, on one hand.

Shun whispered what was probably a curse. Nao didn’t blink. From the other end of the field, I heard Toma yell, “What is that?” and Daigo tell him to close his eyes.

My father lowered the sphere as carefully as he had raised it, and the pond took it back with barely a splash.

“Two things,” he said. “Suction and shape. You put your hand in and draw the water toward you, like a propeller turning backward. That’s suction. While you pull, you wrap your chakra around what you’ve drawn so it can’t run off. That’s shape. If you only pull, you get a splash. If you only shape, you get a wet hand.” He looked down the line. “The more you can pull and hold, the better your control. One at a time.”

Rokuta went first, full of confidence. He shoved his hand in, yanked it out, and came up with a marble’s worth of water that sat on his palm for a count of three before it fell apart. He stared at his hand as if it had betrayed him.

“Pull harder,” said our father. “Then hold it.”

Nao took his time and brought up a ball about the size of a quail’s egg, and held it for nearly a minute without any expression at all. Shun got a splash. Kenta’s hand came out dripping and empty, and the tips of his ears went dark blue.

That left me.

The water was cold enough to hurt. I put my hand in to the wrist and shut my eyes, and my first thought was that this was nothing like a leaf. A leaf lies still against your skin and lets you hold it. Water slid against my palm from every direction at once. Now I understood what my father had meant. I’d have to do two different things with the same chakra at the same time, and the water wasn’t going to wait while I worked out how.

So I started small. I kept the suction tiny, a slow turn at the center of my palm, and wrapped the shape around it the way I used to hold a pebble against my skin, a thin layer, the same everywhere. When it felt right, I lifted my hand.

On my palm sat a lump of water as big as a hen’s egg, trembling and holding together. It was heavier than it looked. It leaned when my hand shook, and its surface rippled, and it didn’t break.

It had gone very quiet on the bank. My father crouched again to look at it.

“I’ve trained a lot of boys,” he said at last. “I haven’t seen that.”

Behind me, Shun let out a low whistle. “The little shark’s a monster.”

The water slipped off my hand and back into the pond.

“Again,” said my father, and took out his notebook.

We stayed at the pond until the light turned orange. The others improved in small, painful steps. Rokuta’s marble grew into a plum and then shrank back to a marble every time he lost his temper, and Shun cursed at the water so creatively that Nao had to turn around to keep a straight face. Kenta got his first real handful a little after noon and had to look away from everyone for a bit. My father worked his way along the bank, adjusting wrists. “Turn it, don’t yank it.” “You’re squeezing. Hold, don’t squeeze.”

My egg swelled into a ball that covered my palm. It stayed there for minutes at a time, as long as I thought about nothing else. When I lost it, it was always for the same reason. I’d start to feel pleased with myself, and the shape would slip.

By the time my father said, “Enough,” my arm was numb to the elbow, my legs had gone past hurting into not feeling much of anything, and I was so hungry that the mud was beginning to smell like food. My mother was waiting at the door in the wall. She took one look at me and picked me up, and I was too tired to be embarrassed about it.

◆ ◆ ◆

That night, Isamu lit the lamp in his office and went through the notebook, turning the day’s scrawl into clean figures.

Daigo, three seconds faster than last week over the full circuit. Rokuta, fifteen on the bar, up from twelve. Kenta, eight, his arms shaking on every one, though he had stayed up there until the last. He wrote down the numbers for every boy, because a man who only measured the sons he liked was lying to himself.

The boy’s page had more on it than any of the others.

Ten on the bar, the morning after a day that had put Rokuta in bed for two. Laps within a few breaths of boys three and four years older. And underneath, in the cramped hand he used in the field: Woke chakra alone. When? Water, hen’s egg on first try. Covers the palm by evening.

Daigo had needed a week to lift a walnut’s worth. Daigo was the best of them.

He read the page twice before he took a clean sheet and wrote out the month for Kazuo, because a summons from the Mizukage’s office had been waiting for him when he came in from the field, and he would be gone before the week was out. Conditioning at dawn for everyone. Kata. The pond for those who had chakra, and Daigo to keep at the youngest until they had it. At the bottom, after some thought, he added a line: Arashi works at the pond with the older ones.

He blotted the ink and left the sheet under the lamp where he’d see it in the morning. Afterward he stayed at the desk with the notebook open to the boy’s page, not reading it.