Adopted: Book 1 Refracted Sand [REWRITING]

Adopted Ch. 61 A Proffered Opportunity

While Suzume sat staring at the note Akira had given her on her bed, she tried to jog the memory of the tree in the black market.

She was alone in the house. Her siblings and Baki had gotten even busier after the trial, tying loose ends and securing their victories. They had even asked her to do some paperwork for them which she'd already finished and had waiting for them in neat piles in each of their rooms.

After three hours of concentrating with no results, Suzume got up from her bed to try out a theory she had. Leaving her room and entering the hall, she headed to the backyard. The sun was rising? No, it was setting, and quickly. By the time she got to the tree, the sun was gone, only a couple of its rays struggling to stay afloat in the sky. She saw Hisoka's grave had been cleaned, the grass trimmed, the gravestone polished.

With the note still gripped tight in her hand, she stared up at her tree, gigantic and comforting. Akira had said the tree in the black market had popped up out of nowhere and grew big enough to fill multiple buildings in its trunk. He'd said it reminded him of her tree. She stepped closer, and lifted a deliberate hand to its trunk.

For a second nothing happened.

And then, like a burst, everything flooded back to her.

The tree appearing and saving them from the rogues. That day when she'd overheard her siblings and Baki calling her a weakness, she ran away, but then she couldn't remember what happened after. Then when Sakyu had told her her siblings were using her, she realized that she had tails on her... Both times she had collapsed, waking up without these realizations.

Her senses expanded. Those same shadowy tails she'd recognized that day were just beyond the tree's boundary once again. Chakra filled humans, not unidentifiable energy that she had been convinced were ghosts.

She remembered. Finally. But it still wasn't everything.

She slowly turned, suddenly not feeling as alone as she had felt in the empty house, and more than ever wanting her siblings home.

She was being watched. She was being followed. And from what she knew now, it had been this way ever since she started living with the Sand Siblings.

There were a dozen of them from what she could tell. Were they the cause of her missing memory?

In one hand was Akira's note, while the other hand stayed on the tree like a lifeline. She slowly shifted herself so that her shoulder and hand were touching the tree so that one part of her was touching it at all times until she managed to have her back leaned against it and her hands free. She pulled out her brush set and started to write more on the paper, everything she had just managed to discover. They weren't going to have her forget any of this again. Not anymore.

Her writing stopped abruptly. Something else had clicked.

Just that evening she had attended a demonstration of the different fighting styles between the shinobi villages and watched intently as each one was shown.

Her mouth gaped as she watched the demonstration in her mind's eye.

The Konoha style demonstrator had moved similarly to her. Immensely similar.

But she had not made the connection then. No... actually she had, but it was then swiftly buried in her mind. Like her thoughts were going through a sifter.

That must be why she's being tailed! The anbu thinks she's a Konoha shinobi because of her fighting style. They would definitely consider her a spy.

"But I'm not...?" Suzume said aloud and hearing the dubiousness of her own voice made her repeat it defiantly. "I'm not."

She started to doubt herself. All of the evidence was there. She was an orphan, a good way to hide the fact that she had no relatives in the village, her chakra had been suppressed so that no suspicion could fall on her, her fighting style had always focused on agility and never stamina like the Sand, her memory was being monitored, there were gaps in it in which she could've been doing anything in. Not to mention she had found a way to the very center of the Sand's operations, the heirs to the Kazekage title. If she intended on targeting them as they were the best way to acquire information about the intricacies of the Sand, she was a damn good spy. Just by being alive... she could be their deaths.