[OP: "Pale White Horse"--The Oh Hellos]

The others had been waiting for about an hour--and had been on pins and needles the whole time.

Some had been praying, while others had just paced or leaned on the rocks.

Hinata was fiddling with her hair in her thumbs nervously.

Momo patted her shoulder, trying to reassure her.

Karin was still trying to sense what was going on.

"I'm sure they've separated," she murmured. "Why?"

"I see Hanabi's chakra signature." Hinata strained her eyes. "But Suigetsu's seems to be behind some other people's, and his isn't as bright as hers...or maybe it's because I know her better."

"Well, if he gets in trouble, he should signal me to bring him back," Shine remarked in a low voice.

Unless he couldn't, of course.

But then finally they got Hanabi's message, and Shine made sure she stood clear of the rocks before she opened her portal.

Hanabi fell through ungracefully and landed on her bad leg again and hissed in pain.

"Hanabi!" Hinata rushed to her and grabbed her shoulders in a hug. "You're all right."

"Ow..." Hanabi muttered. "Careful...I busted my ankle in there."

"What?" Hinata stepped back. "What did you do?"

"I...fell into a greenhouse," Hanabi said.

"Our greenhouse?" Ino asked.

"Yeah...the roof snapped," Hanabi said.

But she didn't want to tell them it was already broken; she didn't have the heart.

"Anyway, I got away okay, but there were these guys chasing me 'cause they thought I was starting trouble."

"I guess they knew you pretty well," Dabi said, because he was relieved.

Hanabi just made a face at him, but then she said, "And you're never guess who it was who helped me get away from them."

"Who was it?" Camie asked readily.

"I bet it was that brat from the kickball game," Bakugo said.

Hanabi stared at him. "How...how did you guess?"

"I dunno, just made sense." Bakugo shrugged. "He seems like he tried to warn us, and didn't you see him later, too?"

"I didn't know you knew about that." Hanabi felt as if he'd exposed her for some reason. She reddened a little. 

"Wait, you were seeing a boy?" Dabi said.

"No! He just popped up at the medical center once, and we talked," Hanabi said. "Well ,also he was there when Shine almost got stoned."

"Someone should really tell her what that means in slang," Wally said.

"No, Babe, don't," Shine shushed him.

"I've got your ankle." Ino held out her hand. "It's not bad. I can fix it up so you can walk again, but it might be a little tender for a while. I don't know if we have time to repair it completely."

"And where is Suigetsu?" Karin demanded.

"Oh...right." Hanabi's face fell. "We split up because I didn't want to go into the medical center and get stuck in there. He said he could escape it, so I thought he'd be right behind me, but he never followed me, and I thought I shouldn't wait too much longer, since Eichi said they would follow us."

"I'm sorry, who is Eichi?" Shine asked. 

"He's the little punk who hung out with the thieves," Bakugo said. "I bet he's mixed up with this bandit crap now too. I bet they all were."

Hanabi stared at him. "How...how did you know that too?"

"Whoa, was he on point?" Camie said. "Babe, I didn't know you had two quirks! You're like a mind reader."

Shine looked at Bakugo with interest. "Katsuki, what do you think Eichi's reason for being with bandits would be?"

"I'd say he didn't have much choice about it," Bakugo rattled off right away, without any hesitation. "Because the way he acted, and it just makes sense. I dunno--it's my gut instinct though."

"How is he doing that?" Hanabi asked.

"Bakugo has always been fairly good at reading people," Momo said, trying to help her get into a more comfortable position. "Did anyone recognize you?"

"Only Eichi did--come to think of it, how did he recognize me with this disguise?" Hanabi pulled off her mask. "And the masks won't help, by the way. He said people who wore them still got infected."

"Oh...that's horrible," Momo said.

"But, as I thought," Shine said, "it's not airborne. Bakugo, do you think Eichi knows how they got it?"

"Nah," Bakugo said. "I think he's probably not really in the know. A kid like that, they wouldn't trust him."

"That's really starting to freak me out," Hanabi said.

"Well, I thought so, but I think I confirmed it," Shine said to Wally.

"Great... What did you confirm?" Wally said.

"Yeah, what?" Bakugo said.

"The part where you were just basically reeling off what happened," Shoto said. "Was that all correct, Hanabi?"

"All of it." Hanabi frowned. "How did he know? Is he Shine now?"

"Well, usually I'm not quite like that," Shine said. "Sometimes I am, when the moment strikes me. Well, there's a silver lining to all this, Katsuki--I think we know what your gift is. One of them, anyway."

"We do?" Sakura said. "I don't get it... Is he mind reading?"

"We don't do that," Shine said. "But the Spirit can feed new information into our brains without us knowing where it comes from. We call it having the gift of knowledge, in church language, but I've always called it Insight to make more sense to other people, also known as the gift of prophecy. But it can be knowledge or prophecy. I've known people who use them interchangeably, but prophesy is more about the future, while knowledge is about the person in the present."

"And you think Bakugo has this gift?" Shoto was skeptical.

"Bakugo always has been fairly good at reading people's intentions," Shine shrugged. "I had long suspected that gift might be one of his, but I didn't want to say so till we knew. And he's pretty good at predicting outcomes too, when he tries. To me, it makes perfect sense that his gift would be knowledge or prophecy."

"Wait, so can he tell us if we'll win?" Naruto asked.

Bakugo looked kind of embarrassed anyway.

"Probably not," Shine said. "That's usually only the most strong gifts of prophecy, and that is only sometimes anyway. Prophecy mostly just tells people truth about God's will for their lives and who they are--their calling, etc. And knowledge is usually used to show someone that God knows about them. Jesus used Knowledge when He called His disciples. For example, He said He saw someone under the fig tree. And with the woman at the well, He knew she'd had five husbands and one not-husband she was living with. It's kind of the 'gotcha' moment of the Spirit gifts."

"I wasn't really seeing it before," Dabi said. "But that's something Bakugo would want to have, so, yeah, makes sense. Great, now he'll be a braggart and a known-it-all."

"Shut up," Bakugo said. "I don't know that all this is a gift. I just see people's bulls--t."

"I guess that's one way you could put it," Shine snorted. "Would calling it 'discernment' help? Often we call it that too."

"Sounds less weird," Bakugo conceded.

"Though that's kind of what Camie has, actually," Shine said. "Though we haven't used that word for it much."

"Oh, cool," Camie said.

"So he just turns it on?" Sakura said. "But how did you do it without knowing it? How do all of you do it without knowing it? Most people have to work years to perfect a jutsu enough to use it with hand shapes in the first place, but they can't use it by accident."

"Well, Sakura, Sasuke can use his Sharingan without really trying that hard," Shine said. "At least the basic parts of it, and it's unlocked without him having to choose it. That's a dark power, but dark powers are just twisted light powers, so why can't ours be the same way? Often people get things without knowing how to use them, and how would they? But after you find out what it is, you can train it. I can turn mine off and on at will now, but other times God just gives us a nudge. I assume it's much the same with your jutsus, only yours are more primitive and unhealthy for you to use."

"Hey!" Sakura said.

"You really want to argue with that?" Dabi said. "Most of yours hurt your body if you use them for longer than a few minutes."

Sakura had no answer for that and frowned.

"Well, maybe Bakugo can just tell us the reason for what Hanabi learned and the rest of what this is about," Shikamaru said, "and then we won't need spies."

"Shikamaru, these gifts do not replace our actual work," Shine said reproachfully. "They help. It won't be that simple for him, usually. Trust me. But it may give us an edge, so it's true that if you do get an idea, Bakugo, feel free to share it. I've been trying for the past hour myself...but it was supposed to be you."

"I dunno." Bakugo shrugged. He wasn't super comfortable with it.

[I actually foreshadowed Bakugo's gift a few times in the story, like when they left Stone, if you want to go back and read that, and also many times when he's known what people were thinking in conversation. So if you happen to reread the story after this and want to look out for those moments, there you go.]

"Dang, this means all of us have our gifts except for Dabi," Camie said.

They all looked at Dabi.

Dabi shrugged. "I probably won't get one anyway. I'm too new to all this 'good doing' stuff."

"That has nothing to do with it," Shine said. "You know that King Saul prophesied naked when he was out looking to kill David, or something like that. God doesn't really care too much about how good we are when it comes to gifts."

"Well, that's terrifying," Dabi said.

"Actually, it only shows how good God is," Shine said. "If a person was to only give people power based on if they were going to serve him or not, he would be a tyrant and a fascist. I love how people actually complain that evil people have so much going for them, but if God didn't give them a sporting chance to fight back, we'd really have no agency at all, and God would just be a bully. There's really no war you can fight against God that He doesn't let you fight, and the Bible is pretty clear about that."

[And for anyone who wonders why people who do evil are so talented in the real world, that's the reason. Everyone has gifts, just like most people have hands. What you do with them is up to you--that's the freedom of being a human being.]

"The way you talk," Sasuke said sourly, "it is as if this is all one big game to God."

"Sasuke, if you were all-powerful and all-knowing and all-present, wouldn't all of the life on this tiny, little planet look like a game to you?" Shine shrugged. "But a game can be real, can't it? The only difference between a game and real life for us is that in a game we make the rules, and in real life we don't get to do that. So for God, life is a game because He made the rules for it, but just like you can get hurt and die doing sports, you can lose in life also. I really don't see the problem with it."

"He could have made the rules a little easier for us to win by," Tenten complained.

"Oh, that's His fault?" Shine said. "The game is supposed to be simple for us to win by following the rules, and we're the ones who let the cheater come and set traps on the board. And we are the ones who fight dirty. Why blame the game designer for the way people misuse it? That's like blaming the person who made chess because kids like to play with the pieces and try to eat them. It's not their fault."

"It just means He might stop all this mess," Tenten said.  And then we wouldn't have to worry about it."

"Yes...and then you'd have no purpose in your life," Shine said flatly.

Tenten went silent.

"Yeah, not sure you want that as badly as you think you do," Shine shrugged. "Now, if we're done talking about why this is not fair, how about we start working on a solution? Hanabi, did Bakugo miss anything?"

"He might get it if he tried," Hanabi said wryly. "But it might be faster if I just told you."

So she told them what she'd learned, but she felt it wasn't much now that she said it.

Unfortunately, they seemed to think so also.

"It doesn't help us fight them to know all that," Sakura said.

"I do feel sorry for Eichi though," Hinata said. "It's like his mother is being kept from him. It's like they're using them as hostages to keep them both in line."

"That's exactly what they're doing," Shine said. "But to hear the bandits themselves are also being infected adds to my suspicion that it's their higher-ups doing it because of their lighter numbers. But the spread seems too fast, given that."

"Something about it's still bothering you, huh?" Wally said.

"Yeah..." Shine said. "But I still don't know what."

Pause.

Then Bakugo said, "Wait...we figured it's the water, right? Or the food?"

"Yes." Shine turned to him expectantly.

"I was just thinking," Bakugo said, real sullen for all that, "that there was a time we all were fighting these bandit people by water."

"Oh, yeah, that's true," Wally said. "And they fought with Stone, and that one guy had that sword that was hurting people because it was poisoned and..." He trailed off.

"What?" Shine asked him.

"I just realized," Wally said, in a ghostly voice, "that after I broke that thing, it fell into the water."

"Right!" Momo cried. "I forgot about that... Oh...no, you don't think..?"

"I don't know, but I don't like that that coincidence lines up with our suspicions," Wally said, looking a bit wan. "Oh no..."

"Honey," Shine said, "before you assume the worst...think, poison from one blade wouldn't be nearly enough to dilute into the water system here to poison a whole Village. There's something wrong with that."

"That's true." Wally brightened a little. "No way that could happen."

"Ahem," Sakura said. "I hate to break it to you, but if there was chakra in it, it's not going to work just like any poison... I still think it's too small to infect the whole Village, but maybe there's more to it than that."

Wally looked deflated all over again.

"We need to take a look at the stream right now," Shine said. "But not all of us, just in case they have some kind of trap. Wally and I will go. You all wait and see if Suigetsu comes back after all...  Though come to think of it, if he chose to run, he may have found the water pipe. We need to be there before he is to stop him. But can't you send a warning to him?"

"But what if someone else sees it?" Momo asked.

"Send it to his pocket or something," Wally said.

"You want us to wait here?" Sakura said. "What about Tsunade?"

"Sakura, she's the least likely to have died by now. Please try to keep your nerve," Shine said a bit shortly. "One thing at a time."

She and Wally vanished from sight.

"Ouch," Dabi said.

"Oh, shut up." Sakura sat down and looked angry. 

Karin looked ill. "If it is in the water, then isn't Suigetsu the most susceptible to it?"

"It would be likely." Jugo was also worried, though he was of a calmer temperament than Karin was, now that he no longer had his cursed chakra, and wasn't likely to show it the same way.

"As long as he doesn't touch the water I think he'll be okay." Ino tried to cheer them up.

"Sai," Hanabi said, "that reminds me, you need to make it to Eichi's mom... I don't know what she looks like, but your rats are smart, right?"

"They are supposed to be able to find people even if I haven't met them, just by process of elimination," Sai said. "But it might help if you had anything they could go by."

"Well, here is a note," Hanabi said. "Would his mom and him having a secret code be something that your rats could use?"

"I think they might," Sai said. "It's worth trying. Why are we sending this to his mom?"

"She just said to help her," Tenten said.

"Yes, but how are we going to do that?" Sai asked.

"We should at least let her know we're trying," Ino said.

"Oh, and what if she runs straight to the tribe to get in good with them?" Sakura said. "It's a stupid plan, and Hanabi shouldn't have told that boy all that anyway."

"Eichi wouldn't betray us!" Hanabi said. "He's a nice boy. It's not his fault, Sakura."

"That's what he told you. How do you know it was true?" Sakura shot back.

"Much as I really hate to agree with her," Dabi said, "and trust me, I really hate it--I think she has a point that he could have lied to you."

"He. Wasn't. Lying," Hanabi said through gritted teeth. "Okay?"

Silence.

The ninja didn't really believe that she knew, save maybe for Sai and Naruto.

The heroes weren't sure. And Dabi remained skeptical.

* * *

Meanwhile, Suigetsu's time had gone quite differently than Hanabi's.

The medic had taken him inside right off and to what appeared to be the room for triage.

There were other people there, and they were groaning with pain.

Suigetsu wasn't the type to get too sentimental or sympathetic, but even he didn't like to see that some of them were very young kids, who looked frightened and didn't seem to be with their parents.

Others were older. There seemed to be no age limit to the illness.

The medic put Suigetsu in a corner. There was an empty cot left.

Then she scanned him, grimly.

"No sign of it," she said.

Suigetsu wondered if she'd blow his secret, but then she tilted her head. "Did you have cramping or searing pains?"

"Yeah," he lied.

"Maybe you got food poisoning or the flu. You don't have the plague, not yet, but you might soon," she said.

"Hey, how do you know you don't?" Suigetsu asked. "You're not even wearing a mask."

"Masking doesn't help," the medic said. "Nothing so far helps to slow it save for chakra...which takes a lot of direct energy, and there's not enough of us to do it, and we can't eradicate it, just slow it down. Most of the people who took it first died within 3 days."

"I...uh, haven't had the nerve to get out of the house and find out what's going on since the invasion," Suigetsu lied easily enough. "How does the plague work?"

"You're d--n lucky if you haven't found that out yet," the medic said, washing her hands, without it seeming likely to do much good. "We still don't know how people contract it. We think it's not respiratory because the masks didn't work, so maybe it's bacterial...but we wiped every surface we can think of, and it's still going around. There's only one pattern so far in who's getting afflicted the fastest."

"What is that?" Suigetsu asked.

The medic lowered her voice. "Are you the type to get hysterical?"

"Not in the least," Suigetsu said.

"Fine, but don't tell anyone this," the medic said. "The only connection between who's lasting longer seems to be chakra levels."

Suigetsu frowned. "It's not uncommon for people with high chakra to survive sickness, according to my...friend."

Was Karin a friend at this point? It sounded better than saying "the person who used to work for my slave master/psychotic doctor".

"Yes, we've thought that," the medic said. "But it's not that they're weathering it better, it's that it's spreading slower through them to begin with. The plague is some kind of growth in the person's body that is like cancer, only it's much faster. It seems to work through their chakra network, but we can't figure out why. Maybe it just is drawn to their chakra, some Villages have been able to use weapons that feed off chakra. The plague drains chakra till they die, then it blocks up their blood circulation."

"That sounds completely disgusting," Suigetsu said. "And slightly cool, if it wasn't lethal, but more disgusting."

"It's not cool," the medic said. "People who regenerate chakra fastest are actually dying sooner. That's the weirdest part. The slow regenerators are lasting longer, but if they still have a large amount they die sooner."

"That doesn't make sense," Suigetsu said. "How can you regenerate faster and still have lower chakra?"

"Chakra is produced in your body like blood is," the medic said, and he could just see her pulling out a chart. "But some people pump blood faster than others, don't they? But if they have more or less blood to begin with because of injuries or just what their body produces, if it pumps faster or slower, there'll be a difference with them, won't there? Some people have a naturally higher white blood cell count than others. It's like that. Chakra is produced by your soul, but it's pumped by your body's network, so everyone's interaction of those two things works a little differently. But, yes, it's common that if you have more chakra, you'll pump it fast to your body, though in some people the sheer amount of chakra makes it work slower, and that can make ninja with more chakra have worse control. It's like a muscle--you've got to learn to summon it quickly."

"I have heard that part before."

[If you'll recall, that was actually the explanation the show gave, way back in the beginning, with how Sakura was better at picking up chakra control than Naruto and Sasuke. Naruto and Sasuke both have way more than her, Naruto most of all, but Naruto has the worst control because it's like having a wild bull inside you, while Sakura's is more Iike having a dog. It's easier to train a dog than a bull. Which is why Sakura naturally has more talent than Naruto for executing complex jutsus. And she did have more than Ino did, as shown later. So the amount of chakra does help, but having less is almost better for some people. 

This is not unlike the way our respiratory system works. People who are all larger actually have a harder time breathing well because their hearts have to do more work and so do their lungs. But it varies and depends on your race and health also.

I always think the most interesting part of the chakra system was how it resembled real life physiology.]

"Then what was your question?" the medic asked crossly.

"I'm still trying to wrap my head around it," Suigetsu said. "So you're saying the people who have it best are both those who regenerate slower and have more chakra to begin with...?"

"Think of it like having a big bucket and a little bucket," the medic said wearily. "And you put them both under a big waterfall and then under a little spigot. The big waterfall is going to fill both of them really fast, even if one is bigger than the other, and it's going to take a lot to fill either of them, but more the big one. Normally people who have a chakra 'waterfall' source in their core are the ones who heal the best from sickness, whether they have a big bucket or a little one of chakra. But this time, the people with the spigot and the big bucket are the ones doing better," the medic said.

"Okay, I've got it now." Suigetsu found the water analogy helpful more than the blood one. "But I still don't get why."

"There's only a small amount of people with that combination," the medic said. "Normally it's one or the other. And they're still getting sick--it's just that most people seem to take 3 days to die, like I said, but most of them have taken 5 or 6 days, and some are still alive now who got it just last week. But they're getting worse."

"And I bet that you're one of the people with that combo." Suigetsu nodded at her.

She nodded. 

"So you don't have it?" Suigetsu said.

"So far, no," she said. "I've been working around the clock, and I don't know how I haven't gotten it yet. Some of the medics did already, and they don't seem to be doing any better than anyone else. But I have a high chakra with low refueling. Basically, once I get tired, I can stay tired for a long time, but once I'm rested up, I can go for nearly 24 hours as a medic."

[It's common for doctors to have to work that long, so having one like her would make a lot of sense for a hospital to want in the ninja world.]

"Couldn't you use food pills to recharge faster though?" Suigetsu asked, interested. After all, Kabuto had done things like that.

"When we're really swamped, I do," she said. "But we're running low, and I can't be off long enough to recharge. Why are you so interested anyway?"

"Oh, my friend who's a medic would just want me to know about this. If I get out of here, she'll pump me for info."

"I hate to break it to you, but your girlfriend won't be asking you anything," the medic said, flatly. "We're not letting anyone leave who's been admitted because they might spread it. Some of them have begged to die at home, but we can't risk it. It sounds cold, I know, but it's all we can do to try to help the Village."

"But I'm not infected." Suigetsu started to worry now. He didn't want to fight his way out of this place.

"But there's no way to be sure you won't be when you leave, or you could carry it," she said. "I thought you had it that clear when they brought you from the outside. You seemed to have symptoms, but as I said, it's not the same on the inside."

Suigetsu realized his plan has been foolish once he heard that.

However, escaping from this place shouldn't be hard. How well guarded could it really be?

Remembering Shine's instructions to update them right away just in case, he asked if he could use the "facilities".

"Yeah...there's bars over the windows though," the medic said.

"I wasn't gonna try to leave," Suigetsu said. Yet, he added mentally. "Just have to go."

"The one for patients is pretty dirty, but I can let you use the staff one, since you're not infected," she shrugged. "Might as well prolong the inevitable."

Suigetsu went into that room...which was clean but small, and used the sink in there to write out a note.

He hoped it would make sense to the doctors on the team, though he couldn't for the life of him figure out what the connection with the plague and the chakra differences was. Didn't sound like any disease he'd heard of, even the unnatural ones of Orochimaru's minions.

He sent the note and then thought he'd better flush the toilet in case the medic had stood outside and listened to him. She might think he was going to escape.

Which he could easily enough have done, but if she was waiting for it, he figured she'd alert the guards as soon as he tried, and he had to find a different way to sneak off without her seeing him do it.

So he flushed the toilet, feeling real smart for thinking of that at all, and then washed his hands for good measure.

The water felt good. He was getting a little dehydrated.

He thought to pull out his flask and drink a bunch, since he wouldn't get another chance for a while, probably.

After that he went out, and the medic was waiting for him, sure enough.

"I didn't catch your name." Suigetsu figured it might be good to know which one she was later.

"Akari," she said. 

Red...like the Stone Village signature color. That tracked.

Good name for a medic to have. [Like the Red Cross, get it?]

Suigetsu was anxious to find a way to get out of her sight and escape the dump, but she seemed to sense he was going to try that and followed him when he went back into the waiting room.

"Sorry, but you can't leave," she said. "Someone will have to watch you."

"Lucky me..." Suigetsu grumbled.

But soon enough someone called Akari to tell her that there were other people coming in, and she left.

Suigetsu got up at once and went for the back of the center where he could slip outside, disguised as a puddle, without anyone noticing him doing it.

On his way there, however, suddenly he felt this shooting pain in the upper side of his left arm.

His shoulder locked up.

Surprised, he stopped short and tried to move it, and it felt like he had sand or gravel in his skin...only not in his skin...under his skin.

It felt like the pit dropped out of his stomach.

"No..." he said. "No way, it's not even been 2 hours since I came into the Village..."

"Hey, sir--" Akari suddenly came after him. "I said not to run away! I'll have to tie you down now. You've left me no choice."

That wouldn't have helped her if he was fine anyway, but Suigetsu was past noticing that part.

"You won't have to," he said, feeling as if he'd gone grey--which he had. "Check me again."

Akari's eyes widened.

But she put up her hand and scanned, and then it stopped over his left shoulder, and she shook her head. "I'm sorry... I don't understand it, though... It's been less than an hour. How could you already be this infected? I swear, it's like you absorbed it, not just by breathing or... Is there something you ate?"

"No, I didn't eat anything--" Suigetsu suddenly stopped.

Absorbed it...

Don't drink the water, Shine had said.

 But Suigetsu could absorb water through his skin like a bug--part of the joys of being his mutated self.

[Actually, we can do it too, but not nearly as much as is usually needed for us to be contaminated by touching it, but that's why you should never bathe in water that has parasites in it.]

When he'd washed his hands!

What a fool he was!

He felt sick...

But then he got a grip. This might be good thing, in a way.

"Well," he said, "I think I know how I got it. Good news: I can tell you how to stop it. Bad news, you'll all die of thirst almost as fast as you'll die of the plague."

"What? Do you mean the water?" Akari said. "How did you know that?"

Suigetsu turned his hand into water in front of her.

Surprised, she stepped back. "You...you were in the Kazekage's party! I remember that one of them could use water like that. I thought you all left."

"Shut up." Suigetsu covered her mouth quickly and glanced around, but no one else was there. "Listen to me, if you tell anyone that, I'll kill you."

Akari's eyes widened, and she struggled, but Suigetsu was way stronger than some random medic, and it was pointless. "Now, as long as you cooperate," he said, "no one gets hurt. I'm trying to help you, you nitwit, but it has to be a secret, or our people are gonna get real mad, so don't say a thing, and we won't have a problem. You got that?"

She made a sound of protest.

"By all means, keep arguing about it," Suigetsu said. "I'm not going anywhere in a hurry right now."

Akari subsided, and finally she nodded.

Suigetsu let her go. "Don't scream."

She didn't, though she did wipe off her face like she'd touched something disgusting...

Were all medics like this?

"All right," Suigetsu said, sullenly. "No need for the theatrics. You need to tell everyone not to drink anything from your pipes. Got it? And I need a minute to let this sink in. Don't worry I'm not going anywhere. I wouldn't get far anyway, probably. You don't tell them you figured out who I am, 'cause if I hear you did, I don't care how sick I am, you're dead. I can do it quickly."

She flinched.

"Okay?" Suigetsu said.

"Okay," she said in a small voice. "I'll do it...but don't...hurt anyone."

What was wrong with those people? Why did she think he would do that anyway?

[Gee, I wonder.]

"Just go," he said testily.

She ran for it.