When Rei woke, she was drowning. Three successive breaths pulled in only a fraction of the air she needed, and she heaved her body into a sitting position in the pitch blackness, trying to leverage herself to breathe better somehow. She coughed heavily, her chest tightening. Had she forgotten how to do something as instinctual as breathing?
"Rei!" Utakata's frantic shout from somewhere nearby was the best possible thing she could have heard, but it didn't give her her breath back. "You've got to calm down and stop coughing. They've suppressed our chakra; it'll take a minute to get used to. Calm down!"
Calm down, he said. Rei's chest continued to rattle emptily. She couldn't sense anyone or anything. Everything was silent. Utakata continued to say words that she could barely hear, but after several moments, her coughing did indeed ease and she was able to pull in a full, labored breath.
"Good," she heard her friend say. "You're okay."
"The little girl must be very attached to her chakra," an old, raspy voice chimed in off to the left with a quiet, sardonic chuckle. "That's the most I've heard someone cough in ages."
"Shut up, Hideki," someone else said, and Rei blinked furiously, trying to see something, anything. She'd woken on a cold, hard floor, and she could smell only the powerful odor of unwashed bodies and human waste. Quiet chatter was all around her.
"Don't worry, dearie," a woman to her right said. "Having your chakra points stricken for the first time is always quite shocking."
"Utakata?" Rei called out, feeling her panic rise. "Where are we?"
The old man who'd spoken before chortled now. "Only the finest of all prisons in the Hidden Leaf Village! Where only the most hardened criminals have the privilege of living. Darkness, rats, and all the charms that come with no indoor plumbing."
"Where are you two young ones from?" the woman asked warmly. "Your accents aren't familiar."
"The Mist," Utakata muttered as Rei tried to absorb this new bit of information.
The old man whistled through his teeth. "The Blood Mist. No wonder they tossed you in here with us. What are Blood Mist kids doing here in our peaceful little village?" The sarcasm in his voice was scathing.
"We can't tell you." Utakata's voice was growing quieter, and Rei inched forward, trying to touch him. Her fingers met cold iron bars after a foot or so. "Literally."
Her hand didn't hurt as she gripped the bars. "Utakata, how long has it been?"
"I don't know. At least a day."
They'd had healers work on her. Her palms were whole and unscathed, showing no signs of the burns from the Six Tails. She suddenly reached back, pressing her fingers frantically to the spot on her shoulderblade where she'd seen it. She felt only coarse, unfamiliar cloth, and her own completely intact skin. She must have been going absolutely insane on the lake shore. She'd just seen Mangetsu murdered. It was understandable, she told herself as she swallowed the lump in her throat.
"Have they questioned you yet?" the woman asked.
Rei shook her head, remembering after a moment that no one could see her. "No," Utakata said for her.
The woman sighed. "Brace yourselves. The Yamanaka can be cruel."
Rei almost laughed. "It can't be worse than what we've seen."
Hours passed in darkness. Rei came to discover that her cell was littered with straw or hay or something, which she steered clear of. It made her itch. A rickety metal cot was placed against the back wall with a thin blanket over it, and it smelled strongly of the same hay. She'd been stripped of her Mist uniform and been redressed in what she could only assume was a nondescript prisoner's uniform: loose, rough-clothed T-shirt and pants made of the same coarse material. The pants were at least a size too large and hung low on her hips.
Her neighbors talked amongst themselves, but Rei sat silently on the cold floor and let her head thud against the stone wall that separated her from the kindly woman. She hadn't gotten any kind of mental alarm that someone else had attempted to betray the foundation; how had the Mist discovered their plan? What were they going to do without Mangetsu? Had Headmaster Iwa and Niko Sensei and Koichi been found out? Were they even still alive? What if she and Utakata were the only ones left?
Her stomach roiled, reminding her that she'd been on her cycle when she'd last been awake, but a quick assessment proved that she was no longer wearing her sanitary items and she was clean. Her face heated so that she nearly lost her breath again. She supposed prisoners, much like Academy students, didn't get to call their bodies their own.
There was no way to tell what time it was when she'd woken, but as time passed, a single pale white ray of light made its way down to the floor and grew until it was roughly the size of a dinner plate. A skylight in the ceiling high above illuminated the prison interior, if only a little bit. If she squinted, Rei could just barely make out Utakata's form across the way, locked behind his own set of iron bars. His arms were crossed and he was leaning on the wall much the same way that she was, and he stared blankly up at the ceiling.
An indeterminate amount of time later, a door opened somewhere out of Rei's line of sight, suddenly flooding the floor with harsh yellow light. Rei pinched her eyes shut for a moment, nearly seeing stars.
"Block F!" a male voice shouted from someplace that seemed very far away. "Stand against your far wall with your backs to the doors. Anyone who does not comply will not receive their daily ration, and they will not receive their exercise time."
Exercise time? The Leaf Village certainly treated their prisoners better than the Mist was purported to. There were plenty of rumors of people being imprisoned and dying quickly simply because the jailors forgot about them.
"Which block are we?" Utakata asked no one in particular.
"You are Block A, on that side," the woman said. "On this side, we're Block D."
Utakata and Rei met eyes across the aisle. They wouldn't be going out together.
No one spoke as cell doors rattled and prisoners were escorted outdoors into what Rei could only assume was still a snowy landscape. The door to the outside remained open as a few wardens in green official-looking garb slid trays of mush through the two-inch gaps that separated each door from the floor.
But when one Shinobi warden got to Rei's cell, he looked at her with the strangest, most expressionless white eyes, then looked over at Utakata. "You first, boy. Stand against the far wall with your back to the door and your hands on your head." Rei could almost feel the resentment, the thoughts of rebelling wafting off her friend, but after a long, dramatic pause, he finally did as he was told. The warden entered his cell and fell into a loose jutsu stance that Rei had never seen before, leaning forward with one arm stretched upwards over his head and the other nearly touching the floor. Then, with a speed that Rei couldn't follow in the least, the warden struck Utakata over and over and over, all over his body.
When it was finished, Utakata had all but collapsed against the wall, and he had to be hauled out of the cell, unable to walk under his own power. His eyes were open, but they might as well have been blind. The whole thing was so fast, so horrific, that not a sound escaped from Rei as he was taken out of the prison.
"Damn," Hideki muttered to her left. "He was just blocked yesterday. They didn't have to do that."
"How long do they usually go between…?" Rei didn't know what to call it.
"A week for most of us. Less for those with greater chakra reserves."
Utakata was not brought back before another warden came for Rei. The tall brunette woman didn't have to speak; Rei got up and strode the couple of steps to the back wall, hands on her head. She had no idea how to prepare herself for this attack; she'd been unconscious the first time. When the woman began to strike her, she didn't feel pain, not at first. It was a dull pressure that fell on her neck, her back, her hips, her arms. But over the course of the agonizingly slow seconds, each touch carried more weight. The woman seemed to be punching chakra into Rei's body, and by the time that last blow fell, it felt like she'd been stabbed a hundred times.
No longer able to hold up her arms, Rei leaned against the wall, willing it to keep her on her feet. If she coughed now, she was sure it would bring up blood. Her feet left the ground as the woman picked her up and carried her away, and the bite of the freezing outdoors air shocked her back into some kind of awareness.
She wasn't really outside after all. The woman was carrying her from one building to another; they were connected by a crosswalk bridge with open (but barred) windows. Another warden, Shinobi, whatever was waiting on the other side of the crosswalk, and this one tossed Rei carelessly onto his shoulder, letting her legs dangle down over his chest and her arms behind his back. He carried her down a long grey hallway, down a flight of stairs, and into a nondescript grey room full of people.
"Put her there," a man with a long blonde ponytail ordered, and her temporary captor laid her down flat on some kind of medical gurney. She couldn't move if she tried, all of her energy sapped, but she could see. The room was lit dimly, probably so the screens flashing numbers and graphs could be seen more easily on the walls. Machines were set on desks every few feet along every wall, and a person was seated at each, printing out what looked like miles of intricately coded papers.
And in the very center of the room was a metal dome, probably ten feet in diameter. The blonde man, the one obviously in charge, seemed to be calibrating it on a computer screen. "Tenzo, update me on her medical status."
"Based on the blood collected from her at the scene, she's approximately thirteen years of age." Rei used every particle of energy in her body to turn her head to the voice. It was the same one that had spoken in the forest on that day. The boy was probably Utakata's age, so only a few years older than she was. He was reading from a paper with large dark eyes, and long brown hair fell far past his shoulders. His grey Anbu garb was spotless, and his Leaf forehead protector framed his face, reaching down nearly to his chin. "The report is fuzzy on specifics, sir."
"Just tell me what it says. We'll tease out the rest in the exploratory session."
"Of course." The boy, Tenzo, turned back to the paper. "Intelligence Capability: 85%. Physical Conformation: 80%. Parent One: Undocumented. Parent Two: Undocumented. Bloodline Limit: Confirmed." The boy paused. "There's an ellipsis after confirmed, sir. Then it goes on to list blood type and probability—."
The man stopped typing. "What?"
Tenzo held the paper out to him. "The ellipsis?"
The man came toward him, snatched the paper, then looked to Rei. A strange smile turned on his lips. Typically, when men smiled at her, it was a sign of bad things to come. "An ellipsis like that means that there was more to be revealed than the machine could put to text. She likely has more than one kekkei genkai."
Tenzo looked at her then, too, open wonder on his face. "Has that ever happened before?"
The man shrugged noncommittally. "Not often at all. It's most common in the Land of Water, where bloodline limits are being interbred and hunted to extinction, but still, if there are others, they are hiding well."
"Master Inoichi," someone called from the metal dome's computer. "It's ready for her."
"Alright, then." The man lifted Rei's limp form in his arms and carried her to the machine. "Let's see who you are, little girl."