"Yeah!," said Naruto, cheerfully. This was not a cheerful matter, Sasuke thought angrily.

"Think of the enemies of Konoha," he said, sotto voce, like people in the movies did.

"Uh..." Naruto looked faintly puzzled. Had he not paid any attention in history class? "Um...Iwa! Except she doesn't sound like she's from Iwa."

"You can learn to fake accents, you know." Then a terrible thought came upon Sasuke. "Wait. What if...what if she actually is from here, but she's being...mind controlled or blackmailed into working for some other village?"

"Or what if she's willingly working for some other village?" said Naruto, eyes growing larger.

"Or what if her parents were spies for some other village and they raised her to be allegiant to that village and now she's following in their path?"

The two boys looked at each other in horror.

"This is bad," said Naruto. "Real bad."

"Oh, this is more than bad," said Sasuke, trying to warp his voice into that silky tone Shisui used when he was telling you something important but secretive. "Our whole lives could be at stake."

"What are we gonna do?" Naruto asked, his voice wobbly.

"I...I don't know," Sasuke said, even though he didn't like admitting not knowing but he really had no better answer. "I guess first we should find out whatever we can about her. But I'm not sure how to go about that."

"Yeah," said Naruto, looking off into the distance. "Look, everyone's going back inside. We probably should too."

They got up and walked back to the building. There were only two doors into the building from this side, so it took a while to get back in. Soon, though, they were back in the classroom. Just as they were about to sit down Naruto whispered "Thanks for the food, Sasuke," and Sasuke managed a half-smile back at him.

The rest of the day was uneventful. It was all blah, blah, blah, ninja this, honor that, maths this, proper something something something that, and so on. (Sasuke was aware he probably should be paying more attention, but: he really could not bring himself to care. Besides, why should she listen to an EVIL SPY OUT TO GET THEM ALL, right?)

Then finally the bell rang. Freeeeeedooom. He ran, ran so fast he almost knocked someone over but he couldn't take that room, with its childish posters and the faint smell of paint and permanent markers and everyone with their naïveté and ignorance and that woman and why was she wearing perfume if she was a ninja and oh oh that door up there was closed what was he going to do but then some guy opened it for him and screamed "Gotta go fast!" at him and then

he was outside in the fresh afternoon air, and it was beautiful.

Sasuke realized as soon as he had stopped that maybe he should have said something to Naruto after class, but he had to get out of there.

"Oi, kid," said a rather familiar voice. Anko-sensei! What was she doing here?

"Hello," he said, still a bit out of breath." "Where did you come from?"

"I was born in Konoha, surely you know that," she said. What? Oh. That's where she was from. Oh.

She grinned. "Well, I just got back from doing a quick mail run, and then I didn't have anything to do but then I heard some people talking about how they were so glad their little brats were back in school so I figured I'd come over here and wait for you. Anyway, how was your day?"

"Well..." should he tell her the whole ridiculous story? Would she think he was making it up? Chichi-ue would have, wouldn't he have? (Not Chichi-ue. Otou-san. Itachi only called him chichi-ue because he was pretentious and stiff and terrible. Except it didn't matter now, did it?) "Well, I think our teacher is evil."

Anko raised her eyebrows but displayed no other indication of surprise. "Oh?"

"Well, I think she's pretending to be a better teacher than she really is because she's not actually a teacher, she's an enemy spy who's going to make us all into little puppets for Iwa or something and also what do I do with these?" He shoved the forms in her hands.

She stared. "Uh, that's...quite an accusation, Sasuke." And then she looked at the pieces of paper. "What am I supposed to do with these?"

"Well, some adult has to sign them, so..."

Anko sighed. "Sasuke. I am not your guardian. I'm some random lady who occasionally shouts vaguely useful pieces of information at you. I can't sign these."

This angered the boy. "Then who can? Am I supposed to mail these to my brother?"

"Well, uh...you could do that, I guess. I'm not really sure. You could talk to your teacher? Wait, no, if she's, uh, "evil", that probably wouldn't go over very well."

"Hn," said Sasuke, contemplatively. It would be sort of amusing if Itachi showed up one day for some sort of parent teacher conference like thing if only to see Gao Jingmei's face. Hey...

"Let's go to the post office, then, I guess," he said.

So they went.

The Konoha Post Office was a good solid stone building, with its name chiseled in at the top. Sasuke liked it. It felt so...imperious? Hm...well, it was a nice building, anyway. Birds swooped in and out, clutching both letters and thick parcels. How did they train them to do that? How did they transport really large things? Like what if you...ordered furniture out of a catalogue or something?

Anko-sensei opened the door for him. Inside were...a lot of people. And really high ceilings.

"I guess you'll need an envelope," she said. "Hm...I think you can buy those at the front, actually."

Together they walked through the large building. On the right there was a giant row of little boxes – what were those for, anyway? On the left there were giant windows, giving one a vast view of the surrounding buildings through slightly tinted glass. A man walked forth, carrying a stack of boxes. Sasuke hoped they didn't fall over. Distantly, he could hear a woman telling a child not to touch that and more distantly still someone barking out "Next!"

Then, they were at...the front, he supposed, because there was a counter with people wearing uniforms behind it who were taking packages from people. Then he realized the line. It was so long.

"I wish we lived in a town that believed in having more than one post office," muttered Anko. "I'm sure this ridiculous setup worked great, oh, fifty years ago, but we kind of have more than two thousand people now."

"How many people does Konoha have now?" Sasuke asked. Two thousand seemed like a lot, but the way she was talking made it seem like that was nothing compared to the current population.

"Uh...like...I don't know, maybe forty five thousand? Fifty thousand?" Sasuke couldn't believe that. How did they all fit?

"You're lying," he said. Surely she was. Ten thousand he could maybe believe. Fifteen thousand if you assumed a lot of people lived in really small apartments or something.

"I am not," she said, glaring. "And if you don't believe me, the census is a matter of public record and you can go look up the most recent one." Census? What was that? Oh, yeah, that thing where they counted people. "Anyway, fifty thousand isn't even really that many. The capital of Hi no Kuni has a hundred thousand, and I've heard of a city that has nine million."

Nine million. How. How could that be? How could even a hundred thousand be?

"This is madness," he said.

"No, this is...DEMOGRAPHY!"

"What," said Sasuke, who by this point was extremely muddled in all ways.

"Oh, look, the line's moved!" said Anko altogether too cheerfully.

So it had. They were now perhaps a meter closer to the front.

"Why are there so many people here now than there were before?" he asked. "People living in Konoha, I mean."

"The country is hella lame, that's why," she replied. "Like...look at all the stuff we take for granted. How long does is take you to get to school-ten minutes? Fifteen minutes? In the country the only school might be an hour away. Or, like...electricity! I mean, we tend to think that everyone has electricity now, but a lot of people don't. People are tired of that backwater kind of life. And they want something more than what they had for their kids, I guess."

"But we had electricity and a school fifty years ago," he said. (They did have electricity fifty years ago, right?) Oh, good, the line was moving again and that woman who had been screaming about change of address forms or something had shut up.

She shrugged. "I don't know, kid. I'm a ninja, not a sociologist." What was a sociologist?

"Next!," called one of the postal employees, and Sasuke realized that they were next. Finally.

The woman behind the counter was young, maybe twenty seven, and she had really big eyes (black eyes) and hair cut in that weird princess style (black hair) and she looked just like Itachi's ex-girlfriend, and why had his brother been dating his cousin, anyway, who did that, and then he blinked, and the woman's dark hair was shining brown in the light and Sasuke was able to remind himself that his family did not have a monopoly on black hair.

"What can we do for you today?," she asked, smiling in a really fake way.

"We'd like to mail these, but we don't have an envelope, can we buy that up here?," asked Anko, and Sasuke really hoped the answer was yes because he didn't want to have start all over again.

"Of course," she replied, and took out a fairly large dull orange envelope. She put the papers inside. "And I assume you don't have stamps, either?"

Anko and Sasuke looked at each other. "No, sorry," said Sasuke, embarrassed, because come on, who didn't know mail required stamps?

"Well, that's all right. Where will you be sending this?"

"I don't know," said Sasuke, because really, Itachi could be anywhere. (Including right behind him, couldn't he?)

The woman sighed, and then regained her peppy outlook. "Do you know if it'll be going to someone in or outside Konoha?"

"Outside," said Anko. Sasuke really hoped so. "Oh, and we'd like return service, too."

"Ah," the lady said. "That's doable, of course, our birds are the best in Fire Country, but I just want you to know it'll be very costly." Then she pushed the envelope and a pen toward Anko. "Write the name of the recipient and the return address, please. Try to be as legible and big as you can." Anko then pushed it towards him. The return address was easy. But the name of the recipient? Of course he knew what it was, but writing it was hard. His hand was getting shaky. No. Using his left hand to steady his right, he slowly wrote his brother's name on the front and then passed it back across the counter.

She then put it on a...scale? It looked sort of like a scale. And his suspicions were confirmed when he saw small red numbers reading 56.7, which made sense since it was just paper and the envelope.

"That will be 1026 ryo, please," said the woman, and Sasuke had to restrain himself from gaping. That was huge. That was ridiculous. No way he could afford that. But Anko-sensei just pulled out her wallet, which looked like it was made out of zebra print duct tape, and slapped the money down on the counter like it was nothing. Whoa. She must be so rich, he thought.

"Thank you. I can't give you a delivery time because you don't know the location of the recipient, but it should arrive within two weeks. Have a nice day!" And she smiled, again in a really fake way. And Anko-sensei smiled at him in a not fake way.