Twelve days.

That was the time Soma spent observing before he acted.

Not twelve days of passive waiting — each day he went into Kamino by a different route at a different time, moved through a different section of the market district, and read. He was mapping the pattern of movement around the eastern warehouse quarter where he had overheard the three sentences. Not following specific people — following the rhythm of the space, the way certain areas became active at certain times, the way certain faces recurred in configurations that had meaning.

By day ten he had enough to see the outline.

The merchant — the man whose voice he believed he had heard through the door — moved through the northern market every Thursday morning before entering the warehouse district. Pattern was consistent across three observed Thursdays. He used a specific tea stall near the north gate before heading south.

The trained person who had sometimes accompanied him to the warehouse — he appeared less regularly, not in a fixed pattern. But he had a consistent position he used for observation: a stone pillar at the south corner of the market that gave sight lines to both main entry directions to the warehouse quarter.

Soma spent the twelfth day sitting on the hillside above the hut, looking at what he had collected.

The plan organized itself in three steps.

Not complex — complexity had more failure points than simplicity. Simple enough that each step could be executed cleanly and evaluated independently.

Step one: place information in the merchant's awareness about Hayashi surveillance of the warehouse district. Step two: allow the merchant's concern about that surveillance to create pressure on the trained operative — who would become a liability if he was already visible to Hayashi's intelligence. Step three: with the operative removed or withdrawn from active involvement in the operation, the plan's execution became incomplete. An incomplete plan was harder to execute without detection than an unknown plan.

Soma did not know what the plan was. He did not need to know the specific content of a plan to disrupt the conditions required for it.

He walked down to the hut and told Ginjiro what he intended to do.

---

Ginjiro listened to all three steps.

"Step one," he said. "How do you place information about Hayashi surveillance without tracing it back to a source that creates questions?"

"I plant it in a conversation that the merchant can overhear rather than a conversation directed at the merchant," Soma said. "The tea stall near the north gate where he stops every Thursday. I sit at an adjacent table and mention to the person next to me that I overheard people saying Hayashi has been watching the river landing district. Child's casual gossip — unverifiable, low-credibility source, but the kind of thing that sticks regardless because the cost of ignoring it if it turns out to be true is high."

"And the person next to you at the tea stall."

"Whoever happens to be there. The information is aimed at the air, not at the merchant. If the merchant hears it, it enters his awareness without a traceable specific source. If he doesn't hear it, nothing is lost."

Ginjiro was quiet for a moment. "And you know the merchant will be at that stall next Thursday."

"Three consecutive Thursdays. Pattern is reliable enough."

"Three is a pattern," Ginjiro said. "Not a certainty."

"Not a certainty," Soma agreed. "If he isn't there, I don't execute step one and I reassess."

"Step two depends on step one working and on the merchant's internal response going in the direction you expect."

"Yes. That's the variable I can't control. I'm making a prediction about how the merchant will respond to concern about surveillance. The prediction is based on the behavioral pattern I've observed — he's a careful person, consistent in his routines, the kind of person who has thought about risk. Careful people with consistent routines who think about risk respond to unexpected surveillance information by removing visible liabilities."

"And if he doesn't."

"Then step two doesn't happen and step three isn't available from this approach." Soma looked at him. "This is an attempt to create conditions, not a guaranteed outcome. I'm setting things in motion that may or may not move in the right direction."

Ginjiro was quiet for a long moment.

"You're not intervening directly," he said finally. "You're creating conditions for the people involved to make decisions that produce the outcome you need. Without appearing in the picture at all."

"Yes."

"That's—" He stopped. "That is a way of working that almost no one in this trade learns, because the training systems don't know how to teach it. Direct action is teachable. This is not."

Soma said nothing.

"You're sure you want to try this," Ginjiro said. Not a question.

"I'm not sure it will work," Soma said. "I'm sure it's the right approach for what I'm trying to do and what I'm not trying to do."

"What you're not trying to do."

"I'm not trying to expose myself as someone who knows what I know. I'm not trying to create a direct conflict between the interests I'm trying to protect and the people who are currently planning against them. I'm trying to delay and disrupt without becoming a visible element." He looked at Ginjiro. "If I become visible, everything I'm building becomes a target. If I don't become visible, what I'm building continues to build."

Ginjiro looked at him for a long time.

"Do it," he said. "And tell me what happens."

---

Thursday morning.

Soma arrived at the tea stall near the north gate before the merchant's usual time. Ordered tea. Sat at a table adjacent to the one the merchant typically used — not at it, which would force either a confrontation or a route change, but adjacent, with a natural conversational proximity.

He waited.

The merchant arrived within ten minutes of the expected time. Sat at his usual table. Ordered tea without looking at Soma — who was a child at the next table, unremarkable, non-threatening, one of the visual wallpaper of the morning market.

The person already sitting at the table on Soma's other side was a middle-aged man who appeared to be reviewing a written account of something — a vendor of some kind, going over his morning figures before the market opened fully.

Soma turned to the man beside him — not the merchant, the vendor on the other side — and said, in the tone of a child casually reporting something he'd heard: "Someone at the market yesterday was saying Hayashi has people watching the river landing. I didn't understand why. Do you know?"

The vendor looked up from his figures. "I haven't heard that."

"Maybe I misheard," Soma said, and turned back to his tea.

Four seconds. The information had been placed in the air.

He did not look at the merchant.

He drank his tea and then left when a child would leave — without ceremony, without looking back.

---

He did not return to that part of Kamino for two days.

When he did, on the second day, he observed from a distance. The stone pillar at the south corner of the market — the trained operative's observation position. He watched it for ninety minutes.

The operative was not there.

This was not confirmation. The operative might simply not have come that day for unrelated reasons. Soma noted it and returned the following day.

The operative was not there again.

Third day. The same.

Ginjiro listened to the three-day observation report and was quiet.

"The operative stopped appearing at the observation point after the information was placed," Soma said. "This is consistent with the merchant having raised a concern about the operative's visibility, which led to the operative being withdrawn from the most exposed element of the preparation. It is not proof of this sequence — correlation, not causation."

"But consistent."

"Consistent with the hypothesis."

Ginjiro looked at his hands. "And the delivery."

"I don't know whether the overall plan has been disrupted or merely adjusted. Removing one visible element could mean abandoning the approach or could mean shifting to a different execution that I'm not currently able to see." Soma paused. "I've disrupted at least one component. What the larger effect is, I can't determine yet."

"You've made the system adjust," Ginjiro said. "Without appearing in the system."

"Yes."

Ginjiro was quiet for a moment.

"The jonin — Mikage Daichi — will receive information through his network that the operative withdrew from the area," he said. "That's a data point for him without it being explained. He'll investigate."

"That's what I hoped for," Soma said. "Not an explanation delivered to him — a change in his environment that he would investigate himself. His investigation is more reliable than my delivery."

Ginjiro made the sound that was close to a laugh — low and brief.

"You did well," he said. Not effusively — the way Ginjiro said anything that was simply accurate.

Soma filed it without attaching more weight to it than it carried.

And noted, on the private list under the floorboard at home, that the floorboard was beginning to run out of space. He would need a second board soon.

He was filling it up faster than he had expected.