A/N: Um. Yeah. I DID miss a chapter. Went right over it and posted chapter 11 in place of chapter 10. Head, meet desk. Desk, head. So, after all the confusion and startled reviews – meet the REAL chapter 10. Sigh.

"You must always look underneath the underneath."

Hatake Kakashi (had to put it in sooner or later).

Chapter 10
Rising Gale

Sakura stopped outside the entrance to the Hidden Sand village, and waited. She stood in the open, with her sun-hood pulled back so that the last rays of the sunset could catch her pink hair. She kept her face up and her eyes open so that anyone who was watching could see that her eyes were green, that she wore a Konoha forehead protector around her head, and that she had absolutely no intention of leaving. No one who saw her could fail to deliver a very accurate description of her to their superior, and that was exactly what she intended for the shinobi who guarded the city limits to do.

But no one hailed her, and though she stood there for a long time, no one came rushing out to attack her either. I've only been gone three weeks, she thought sourly to herself, in a vain attempt to cover her nervousness with irritability. Don't tell me they've forgotten what I look like already.

She chucked an exploding note into the air, watching the sheer stony walls of the pathway into Sunagakure carefully. Nothing moved as the minor thunder caused by the explosion rolled over the desert.

Well, he has to know I'm coming by now, she thought at last, and started slowly into the city.

She knew something was wrong long before she made it past the first few empty streets. The place was utterly deserted, nothing moved except the wind as it wailed through the narrow streets, catching at doors and shutters that had been left hanging half open. The only time she'd ever seen everything look so abandoned - as if everyone had picked up and vanished in a great hurry - had been the night of the festival, when all her troubles had begun.

Sakura picked up her pace, hunting for some clue of where the battle might now be taking place, but she could see nothing. There were no vibrations in the ground when she put her ear to it, no smell of blood or the faint burnt smell of chakra being discharged in large amounts. She could feel, once or twice, the frightened energies of people hiding below her in the secret holes like the one she had hid in with the child that night. But she didn't stop to look in on them. They were safe where they were, and no one who knew what was really going on was likely to be among them.

A prepared battle, she realized. The shinobi must have seen an enemy coming, raised an alarm, and gone out to meet the enemy somewhere that wasn't in the middle of their village. They sent the civilians underground to hide, and wait out the storm.

But where then could they be? She had seen nothing as she came up, and a battle large enough to involve all the shinobi, even Gaara –

The other side of the mountains, she realized, looking up at the towering red stone cliffs. She had come from the south side of the mountain range that encircled the village. The only thing she couldn't have seen was on the other side.

I won't be left behind this time, she thought fiercely, and took off into the deepening twilight.

She could hear it long before she could see anything. The mountain rumbled, boulders would occasionally loosen and go crashing down nearby her, once almost right out from under her feet. She was breathing hard – jumping through mountains was a little different from jumping through trees. For one thing, the dry air chaffed at her mouth and throat, and for another, there was only a smattering of slowly appearing stars tonight to offer any light. It was difficult to see what was real rock and what was only shadow.

But she could hear the battle raging closer and closer, and the urgency of it swept her along too fast to worry about anything other than her destination.

The moon was only just beginning to peer over the sandy horizon when she heard the first sounds of battle. A Sand shinobi was locked in a deadly struggle with a ninja wearing no sign of his origins. The Sand ninja was pinned to a rock with a gooey yellow chakra that oozed over his body. Sakura dove into the fight in time to knock away a blade that otherwise would have gone through the pinned Sand nin's heart. The enemy that had thrown the knife next threw himself at her, swinging for her face. The hit missed, but she felt a shock wave of air slam into her head moments after the fist passed by. Sound trick, she thought, remembering the Sound ninja from her first chunin exam.

She felt her guts roil, but before she could vomit, her hands flew into a series of seals. She watched with some relief as the Sound shinobi dropped to his knees, hurling. "Mirror Genjutsu," she explained quietly to the Sand ninja as she cut through the gooey chakra net with her chakra-scalpels. "His attack has the mental effect of making you very dizzy and sick, and the mirror genjutsu makes the user of a mental attack feel the effects himself instead of you."

"Watch out!" he cut her off. Sakura whirled in time to catch the fist that came flying out of the darkness behind her. The Sand shinobi shrugged out of the rest of the sticky trap, and together they converged on the second enemy ninja that had appeared too late to back up his partner.

"There's a bunch of these unmarked shinobi," her companion told her as they moved off through the rocky terrain, leaving the bodies behind. "They were being led by a -" His face contorted bitterly, "A traitor Sand shinobi. I didn't get a good look at him. I think he's been acting as some no-name genin or chunin, but it seems he's the real mastermind behind the whole insurgency."

Sakura felt her guts twist again, but this time no genjutsu could shake away the feeling. A traitor Sand nin? Something about this felt all too familiar. Was he really a Sand shinobi or was he Sound in disguise? Could it even be…

Sasuke?

He might have come to fight Gaara, she thought desperately as the Sand nin lead her down a ravine towards the sound of more fighting. Maybe he has to prove that his earlier defeat at Gaara's hand was a fluke. She felt a surge of something that she couldn't quite describe in her chest.

"We're being followed," the Sand ninja that she had rescued said suddenly, in her ear. "Four, maybe five, I think." He shrugged one shoulder off to the left. "Too far for them to see us, but they're catching up. I tried to throw an illusionary technique over our track, but they went right through it."

"Let me try," she whispered back, and made a few hand seals that she had picked up from hours of researching the archives in the Hokage's office. The Sand shinobi put his ear to the ground, concentrating for several moments before standing up and nodding. Sakura returned the nod curtly, but couldn't resist the satisfaction that flushed through her at the look of respect on his face.

"That ought to keep them busy," he murmured, and then they were off, down into the ravine. Down towards the crashing and the screaming.

It was chaos at the foot of the mountains. They arrived as the sky was beginning to turn a murky grey, signaling the incoming heat of day. The semi-gloom was highlighted by flashes of light, by pale and dark shapes dodging, jumping, and screaming around each other. Sprays of sand surged up and fell back like waves crashing into the cliffs as the fighters struggled. A huge gust of wind nearly threw Sakura back into the rock wall and drove sand into her face, but she managed to hold her ground long enough for the attack to abate. She followed the unnatural wind back to its source – Temari.

"Watch your back!" Her Sand shinobi companion bellowed to her, and with a blood-curling war-cry he plunged into the melee. The Leaf kunoichi had no time for such theatrics. She maneuvered her way through the battle, avoiding puddles of blood and resisting the temptation to run to some of the downed fighters.

"Where is he?" she bellowed over the roar, dodging to avoid what appeared to be a large cat made of sand that pounced on an enemy ninja with outstretched claws. Temari leaped out of the way too, and they landed almost simultaneously several feet to the right. The blonde threw an arm up to point, but by then Sakura had already caught sight of the tsunami-sized wave of sand as it shattered into the mountain side, raining boulders down on the shinobi war below. The combatants burst into view a second later, and Sakura bit her lip to keep from screaming.

Gaara was standing on a raised tongue of sand, face contorted in rage, body partially morphed into the sand demon that had haunted her nightmares for months when she was twelve years old. Opposite him, amidst the newly-broken rocks of the cliff face, crouched the traitor Sand ninja. He was panting, but his face was calm, even pleased.

Sakura stared, and felt a whole new form of betrayal wash through her.