It wasn't a comforting picture.
Drop her into the Leaf Village academy today and Iruka-sensei would not sign her graduation papers. Drop her onto the battlefield of the Second or Third Ninja War and she'd be dead inside a week — maybe she'd take one lower genin down with her if she moved fast enough, but that was a generous estimate. The gap between where she was and where she needed to be was not small.
She thought about the influence points problem. Last year's citywide mathematics olympiad. Second place overall. And those results had rippled through a fairly narrow professional circuit — educators, a few parents, a handful of students who actually followed competition results. Ask someone on this block who Maya Hansen was and they'd probably know she was the student council president. The math olympiad? Blank stare.
It was a simple enough principle. The reach of the action determined the return. Academic achievement operated in a small world. Something like Tony Stark — if a man like that had access to this system, he'd probably be adding thousands of points every day just from existing publicly. That wasn't Maya's situation yet.
Fine, she told herself. Cultivate chakra. Strengthen the body. Worry about influence scale later.
In old wuxia stories, the principle was consistent: once your fundamentals were deep enough, the techniques would follow. Naruto himself was basically the proof of concept — chakra plentiful enough to work with, one reliable jutsu to lean on. Though, she reminded herself, Naruto's chakra abundance had never actually translated into any particular expansion of his jutsu repertoire. The number of techniques he knew remained fairly fixed at a low number for most of his career.
Worst case, Maya thought, I'm Naruto. One jutsu, enough chakra to make it count. If the Rasengan is big enough, it solves the problem. If it isn't big enough, I make it bigger.
She was reasonably confident she could hit harder than Thanos if the sphere was the right size. Reasonably.
Jimmy's hand moved.
Maya snapped her full attention to the thread she'd left anchored on him. Finally. He was setting his pen down and turning in his chair. His face had gone carefully composed — the particular stillness of someone about to handle something important. He moved the folder to one side. He reached for the phone with the precision of a man who's made sure nobody was watching.
She sharpened her hearing to the absolute maximum and held her breath.
Gold-rimmed glasses. Face solemn. The voice of a man conducting serious business.
"—how's the broth coming along? I've told you how many times now. Get the tube bones, blanch them twice in boiling water first, skim all the white foam off completely. Why are you putting curry in? I said Chinese-style. Where's the recipe I brought back from Chinatown last time? Just put more water in, add the Sichuan peppercorn and the star anise — yes, exactly like that — hold on the scallion until—"
Maya came very close to coughing up blood.
It is two in the morning, she thought, staring at the lit window. This man telephoned his wife at two in the morning. With that expression on his face. With that voice. To give her instructions about bone broth.
She was three seconds from pulling her hood up and going back to bed.
Then her perception drifted — not to Jimmy's voice, but to the folder lying open on the desk in front of him.
She stilled.
The pages moved through her awareness one by one.
Photographs. Faces, male and female, mostly in their twenties and thirties. Below each face: blood type. And then a grid of organ compatibility assessments — liver, kidney, heart — each cell filled with a letter grade.
The second document was a list of names. Medical histories. Each name had a bracketed notation: a wealthy individual somewhere along the American eastern seaboard, and their relationship to the photographed person.
Maya's biology marks were unremarkable. Her pattern recognition was not.
Organ trafficking.
Frank Gardes — Bloody Rose, the man the mayor of New York City declined to antagonize directly — was running an organ trafficking operation. This was how he'd built his protections. Not just money, not just favors: he provided organs to people who needed them and couldn't wait for the legal channels. People with the right money and the right connections. People who could make problems disappear in return. The city contacts. The wealthy clients who needed transplants and couldn't wait for legitimate channels. The immunity from prosecution. The mayor who didn't look too hard at the details.
He's been doing this for years, she thought. How many years? How many people?
She stopped that line of thought before it could go further.
A significant portion of the faces in those photographs had black hair and the particular skin tone she'd spent her whole childhood seeing in the mirror and in the faces of her neighbors in Chinatown. She looked at them.
She didn't let herself calculate. She stopped herself from doing the arithmetic on how many years Frank had been operating, how many shipments, how many faces.
She suppressed the impulse to put a kunai through Jimmy's skull at range. It was a close thing.
Move. More important things. Right now.
She checked the timestamp on the transfer document. Two hours. After that, the people in those photographs would be dispersed — split across holding locations up and down the eastern seaboard. Once they were scattered, they'd be functionally unreachable. She had two hours.
She scanned for the address.
Hudson River. Pier 7. Ship Nine.
Maya frowned.
She'd walked the length of the Manhattan waterfront in both directions, dozens of times, back and forth over the years. She did not remember a Pier 7. She went back through the mental map she'd built from those walks, checking carefully.
Nothing. No Pier 7.
Not much time. She exhaled. Pick a direction and gamble.
She made her decision in about three seconds. It wasn't a hard one.
She gathered chakra through her soles and launched herself off the rooftop toward the Hudson.
The speed felt right. The distance was closing fast. She pushed harder—
Her left foot hit the pavement wrong.
She went down hard, knee catching the asphalt, and made a sound she'd rather not have made. She looked down.
The bottom of her left shoe was dark with blood.
Too much force. Too fast. She could feel the damage clearly through her own perception — muscle fibers torn in the plantar, capillaries ruptured, blood pooling in a compressed space. Rookie mistake. Wanting to go fast and now I can't go at all.
She pressed her knee into the asphalt and thought about her options.
One option. Only one that works in the time I have.
She crossed to the riverbank and dropped to sit on the concrete embankment. She opened the small pouch at her waist and drew out a kunai.
The injury was real and it mattered. Pooled blood in compressed tissue meant reduced flexibility — every step on the foot would be limited, and the damage would compound as she moved. Drain it, and the tissue would regain enough mobility for a short window. She'd pay for it later. The damage tomorrow would be worse than the damage now.
She worked quickly. A shallow incision at the edge of the swelling, with her foot tilted out over the river's edge. The blood that ran was nearly black at first. She held still and watched it. Slowly, it brightened.
When it ran clear red, she stopped. She stripped away the ruined part of the sock from her left foot, folded the cleaner material into a tight pad over the wound, and bound it with the remaining fabric. Then she peeled the sock from her uninjured right foot and worked it carefully over the left, holding the dressing in place.
She stood up. Tested the foot. Not good. Functional.
She stepped to the edge of the river, gathered chakra through her soles, and stepped out onto the water.
Her stance was off — her weight compensating instinctively as her body tried to protect the damaged side. She made herself walk through it. Two careful steps. Three. The rhythm came back, uneven but stable.
She was at the center of Manhattan. Two choices: upstream or downstream.
She chose upstream without hesitation.
The upper west side — the stretch of Manhattan running from Hell's Kitchen north through the neighborhoods clustered along the western edge — was where the minority communities lived, where immigrants clustered, where people who came to this city with nothing much tried to build something. Downtown was Wall Street, finance, the world that produced Jimmy's wealthy clients.
If the people in those photographs had been taken from somewhere in this city, the odds pointed north.
She ran.