by F. C. Yee
After she collected her thoughts, she joined in on looking. To Kyoshi the mass of buildings was indistinguishable, a curving scab around the bay that should have been picked off long ago. There was only one location that she was interested in, the one that matched the description in her journal.
“There,” she said, pointing at one of the few structures that rose above a single story. The yellow roof stood out among its green neighbors like a diseased leaf. “That should be Madam Qiji’s teahouse.”
They pulled up, retracing their route through the sky. There was no place to land Pengpeng within the town limits, and a sky bison with no Airbender on it was surely one of the first signs Jianzhu would order his network to search for. The reconnaissance sweep itself had risks.
The small copse they found on the outskirts felt like a dose of luck. Perhaps their reserves of good fortune would be drained by the simple act of hiding Pengpeng in the trees.
“We’ll be back, girl,” Kyoshi said to her, stroking the beast’s nose. Pengpeng gently bumped her with her skull, telling her they’d better.
Kyoshi and Rangi set out on foot, the pressure of firm ground against their soles a welcome sensation after so much flying. As they followed a dirt path into Port Chameleon Bay, they were treated to a ground-level view of the town in all its glory.
It was a miserable sight.
For the past nine years, Kyoshi had never laid eyes on open flatland going to waste without some attempt to grow food on it. But the dusty, hard-packed fields they passed through made it clear it wasn’t worth trying. The ground here was rawhide, impenetrable.
The port sustained life, in the barest sense. They encountered a surrounding band of slums, wooden lean-tos and moth-eaten tents. The inhabitants stared at them with glassed eyes, not bothering to adjust their bodies from where they sprawled. The few who stood up, in wariness that they might be hostile, were hunched by malnutrition and sickness.
“People shouldn’t live like this,” Rangi said.
Kyoshi felt her sinews tying into knots. “They can and they do,” she said as casually as she could.
“That’s not what I mean.” Rangi rubbed her own elbow, considering the pros and cons of what she was about to say. “I know about the time you spent in Yokoya on your own, before Jian—before Master Kelsang took you in. Even though you tried to hide it from me.”
Kyoshi’s stride faltered, but she gathered herself and kept going. They couldn’t stop here simply because her friend wanted to have a heart-to-heart about one of the oldest, deepest scars running through her soul.
“Auntie Mui told me,” Rangi said. “Kyoshi, you should never have been put through that experience. The thought of the other villagers ignoring you when you needed them, it makes me sick. That’s why I was always pushing you to fight back.”
Kyoshi laughed bitterly. She’d long laid the blame for those years on a different party than the Yokoyans. “What was I supposed to do, drop the mountain on them? Smack around a bunch of children half my size? Anything I did would have been completely disproportionate.”
She shook her head, wanting to change the subject. “Anyway, is the Fire Nation so perfect that prosperity gets shared with every citizen?”
“No,” Rangi said. Her lips scrunched to the side. “But maybe one day it could be.”
They entered the town proper, the edges marked by a change to brick and clay shanties, some of them earthbent into being and others laid by hand. The streets twisted and angled like they’d been set over animal paths instead of following human needs. If it hadn’t been for the landmark of the teahouse jutting above the roofline, Kyoshi would have been lost after a few steps.
The merchants who’d closed up shop for the night had done so with vigor, coating their storefronts in so many locks and iron bars that she wondered how some of them afforded the expense. A number of deer dogs, hidden behind walls and fences, set off barking as they passed.
No one bothered them. Thankfully. Reaching the teahouse felt like making it through a field of trip wires. Madam Qiji’s was an island in the haphazard layout of the town, ringed by the broadest avenue of open space they’d seen so far. It was as if someone had aggressively claimed the public square and plunked down the wooden building in the center.
Light flickered through the paper windows. They stepped onto the large, creaking porch, approaching cautiously. There was an old man sprawled across the doorway, wrapped in canvas blankets, blocking their entry. His loud snores caused his wispy white beard to flutter like cobwebs in the breeze.
Kyoshi was debating whether to prod him gently or try leaping over him when he woke up with a start, grumbling at the impact his shoulder made with the doorframe. He blinked at her and frowned.
“Who’re you?” he mumbled.
She noticed his hands shaking as they poked out from his cocoon. From hunger, no doubt. She hadn’t given enough thought to money as she made her getaway from the mansion, but there were a few coppers in the pockets she’d sewn into her dress long ago. She fished the coins out and placed them on the porch in front of him. If the instructions in her journal were correct, she and Rangi wouldn’t have any need for money once they were inside.
“Get yourself something to eat, Grandfather,” she said.
The old man smiled at her, his wrinkles clawing over his face. But his happy expression turned to outright shock when Rangi added a silver piece to the pile.
Kyoshi glanced back at her.
“What?” Rangi said. “Weren’t we just talking about this kind of thing?”
The inside of Madam Qiji’s was only halfway finished.
The ground level was dedicated to serving food and drink. Tables for visitors were arranged over a layer of straw and sand. But where there should have been a second floor with rooms for overnight guests and weary travelers, there was no floor. Doors floated in the walls twelve feet off the ground with no way to reach them. No mezzanine, no stairs.
The handful of hooded figures sitting in the corners didn’t seem to think that was unusual. Nor did they look up as Kyoshi and Rangi came in. If anything, they leaned farther into their cups of tea, trying to remain inconspicuous.
Kyoshi and Rangi took seats in the middle. Near them was an exquisite, heavily constructed Pai Sho table, by far the nicest object in the room. It sat on four sturdy legs, surrounded by ratty floor cushions, a jewel nestled in the petals of a wilted flower.
They were in the right place. And they were in the right chairs. It was supposed to be only a matter of time before someone came over and said the phrase she was waiting for.
For Kyoshi it was an eternity. The Pai Sho table was an agonizing reminder of Yun. And she didn’t need a visual aid to feel the raw wound of losing Kelsang. That pain was a bleeding trail leading back to Yokoya. It would never wash away.
Rangi kicked her chair. A man made his way over to them. A young man, really. A boy. Each step he took into the better-lit center of the room regressed how old he looked. His sleeves were bound with thin strands of leather, and he wore headwraps in the style of the Si Wong tribes. They hung loose around his face and neck, framing his barely contained fury. Kyoshi could sense Rangi getting ready for the worst, gathering and storing up violence to unleash if things went wrong.
“What would you like to drink?” the boy said through his teeth.
Here it was. The moment of truth. If the instructions in the journal were wrong, then her vaunted single path forward would be cut off at the first step.
“Jasmine picked in fall, scented at noon, and steeped at a boil,” Kyoshi said. Such a combination didn’t exist. Or if it did, it would have tasted like liquid disaster.
The reply came out of his mouth like it needed to be dragged by komodo rhinos, but it was the reply she was looking for. “We have every color blossom known to man and spirit,” he said.
“Red and white will suffice,” she replied.
He clearly had been hoping for any response but that one. “Lao Ge!” the boy
suddenly shouted toward the door. “You were supposed to keep watch, you useless piece of dung!”
The old man who’d been lying across the porch leaned halfway inside. He was suddenly much less infirm than when they’d first met.
“I was standing guard, but then those two lovely young women gave me enough money to buy a drink or ten,” he said with a big, toothy grin. “They must have slipped by me while I stepped out to the wineshop. Quite the tricksters, those two.” He tilted a liquor bottle to his lips and drank deeply, his ragged sleeve falling down his arm to reveal sheaves of corded muscle under papery skin.
The boy ground the heel of his hand into one of his eyes. He stormed away to the kitchen, muttering expletives at the old man the whole way. Kyoshi could sympathize.
Rangi leaned on the table. Though her pose was relaxed, her eyes fluttered around the room, sizing the occupants up, including and especially Lao Ge, who was busy finding the bottom of his second bottle of drink.
“You know,” she whispered to Kyoshi. “You told me we were going to a daofei hideout; you told me you were going to get access to help through daofei code; here we are, I heard you speak it, and yet I still can’t believe this is happening.”
“It’s still not too late for you to get out of here and save your honor,” Kyoshi said.
“It’s not my honor I’m worried about,” Rangi hissed.
Before they could get further into the matter, the boy returned with a tray of steaming cups. He placed one in front of Kyoshi, Rangi, and then himself, taking a seat across from them. He was much calmer now. It may have had less to do with the tea than with the backup that slowly filed in behind him.
A huge man in his thirties, as tall as Kelsang and half again as thick, blotted out the lamplight coming from the kitchen. He had a smooth, clean-shaven face over a body that threatened to burst from expensive robes, his clothes having been chosen for flash over fit. Kyoshi saw Rangi’s eyes dart to the man’s feet instead of his scarred knuckles or protruding gut, and realized why. As big as he was, he hadn’t made the floorboards creak.
One of the doors suspended in the wall above the ground flew open. A young woman stepped out of the room, not caring about the drop that awaited her.
She was dressed in an Earth Kingdom tunic, but with a fur skirt over her trousers. Kyoshi had seen pelts like that worn by visitors from the poles. The stronger indication of the woman’s Water Tribe heritage was her piercing, sapphire-blue eyes that no amount of spidersnake formula could possibly hide.
She landed on the ground with her toes pointed like a dancer’s. Kyoshi could have sworn she’d fallen slower than normal, a feather’s descent. It was the only way to explain how she made the journey from the second story to the table without breaking stride or the bones in her foot. She stood behind the other shoulder of the boy, her wolflike features unreadable as she assessed Kyoshi and Rangi.
I’m not afraid, Kyoshi told herself, finding to her surprise that it was true. She’d tussled with the Lord of the Eastern Sea. A single street-level daofei crew wasn’t going to intimidate her.
The boy in the desert hat tented his fingers. “You come in here, total strangers, unannounced,” he said.
“I have the right,” Kyoshi said. “I gave the passwords. You are obligated to provide me and my partner succor, by the oaths of blood you have taken. Lest you suffer the punishments of many knives.”
“You see, that’s just it.” The boy slouched back in his chair. “You’re using these big, old-timey words like you’ve got these grand ideas of how this is supposed to work. You rattle off a senior code that we haven’t heard in years like you’re pulling rank on us. You did it like you were reading from an instruction manual.”
Kyoshi swallowed involuntarily. The boy noticed and smiled.
He tilted his head at Rangi. “Coupled with the fact that Gorgeous over here practically screams ‘army brat,’ it makes me think the two of you are lawmen.”
“We’re not,” Kyoshi said, swearing silently inside her head at how badly this was going. “We’re not abiders.”
There were three men scattered around the teahouse who were not part of their little confrontation. They all hastily plunked down coins and beat it out the door, eyes wide with fright.
The boy placed a small, hard object on the table with a click. Kyoshi thought it was a Pai Sho tile at first, but he withdrew his hand to reveal an oblong stone, polished smooth by a river or a grinder.
“I’m pretty good at spotting an undercover,” the boy said. “And I think this is your story. Your daddy bought you an officer’s commission from a crooked governor, and the first thing you decided to do with it is play detective and come knocking on our door.” He thumbed at Rangi. “She was assigned to watch your back, but she didn’t do a very good job, because you’re here now, and you’re going to die. The cause will be recorded as acute terminal stupidity.”
Kyoshi could almost hear Rangi’s thought process, counting the limbs of the three people across from them, calculating out the sequence of damage she’d inflict. “I’m telling you, we’re not lawmen.”
The boy angrily kneed the underside of the table hard, knocking over the teacups and spilling the liquid across the surface.
Kyoshi acted before she thought. But in retrospect, it was more about stopping Rangi than anything else. She kicked upward as well. The entire foundation of the teahouse, the patch of earth it was built on, jumped by half an inch.
The boy nearly fell out of his chair. His two bodyguards wobbled. The shocked looks on their faces said that didn’t happen very often, not with the large man’s stability and the Water Tribe girl’s impeccable balance.
Kyoshi spoke over the groans of resettling wood and the dust drifting in clouds around them. “You’re right,” she said. “I don’t belong here.”
They didn’t bum-rush her immediately, deciding that she needed to be attacked with caution. That bought her time to speak.
“The truth is that I despise daofei,” Kyoshi said. “I hate your kind. It makes me sick to be in your presence. You’re worse than animals.”
“Uh, Kyoshi?” Rangi said as the big guy and the woman sidled into better flanking positions. “Not sure where you’re going with this.”
The boy remained where he was. Kyoshi could tell he wanted to put up a brave front. So did she. “But that doesn’t matter right now,” Kyoshi said, staring through the hardening layer of rage in his eyes. “You are going to give me everything I demand, because you are bound by your outlaw code. You will do as I say because of your idiotic, clownish, make-believe traditions.”
Her blood sang in her ears. Her hand went to her belt. The man and woman would certainly interpret that as the signal to attack. She was aware of Rangi leaving her seat.
Only by moving faster did Kyoshi prevent complete disaster. She slammed one of the war fans on the table, its ribs spread wide to reveal the golden leaf. The Waterbender and the big guy stopped in their tracks. The boy looked like someone had reached into his chest and seized his heart.
“Spirits above!” Lao Ge said. “That’s Jesa’s fan!”
The sudden appearance of the old man at the table startled both sides equally. He’d managed to squeeze in between Rangi and Kyoshi without them noticing, and he leaned inward, giddily examining the details of the weapon.
The boy leaped out of his seat. “Where did you get that?” he shouted.
“I inherited it,” Kyoshi said, her pulse racing. “From my parents.”
The Water Tribe girl looked at her with wonder. “You’re Jesa’s daughter?” she said. “Jesa and Hark were your mother and father?”
Kyoshi didn’t know why she was getting more worked up over simple facts than the prospect of a brawl earlier. “That’s right,” she said. It felt like her mouth had become her stomach, unwieldy and sour. “My parents founded this group. They’re your bosses.”
“Our baby has come home!” Lao Ge crowed. “This calls for a drink.” He stepped back so
he could have room to pour a third bottle into his gullet.
The boy was still angry, but in a different flavor now. “We need to confer for a minute.” He snatched up his rock from the table and pointed accusingly at Kyoshi. “In the meantime, I suggest you get your story straight, because you have a lot of explaining to do.”
“Yes,” Rangi said. “She does.”
Lao Ge perched on a table off to the side with his containers of booze, like a strange bird arranging shiny objects in its nest. The rest of the gang filed back to the kitchen without him. Given that they seemed to treat him like background furniture, Kyoshi could only do the same. She turned to Rangi and found the Firebender giving her a critical stare.
“What?” Kyoshi said. “This happened exactly the way I said it would. We’re in. This is the first step to gain access to this world.”
Rangi remained unmoved.
“I told you everything before we landed,” Kyoshi said. “The truth about my parents being daofei smugglers who abandoned me in Yokoya. Rangi, you came in here with me knowing this.”
The words poured out of her in a churning waterfall. Her knee was jogging rapidly up and down. The motion did not escape Rangi’s notice.
“As bizarre as it is for me to say this, your secret family history is not the issue,” Rangi said. “Don’t you think you played that situation a little . . . aggressively?”
That was news to Kyoshi, coming from her “burn it first and ask questions later” friend. “It’s the kind of behavior these people respect,” she said. “Tagaka knew we were calm and rational, and look what she tried to do to us.”
Rangi’s teeth clicked. “You didn’t see yourself back there. It was like you were begging them to attack you. There’s being brave, and then there’s having a death wish.”
She reached out and clamped her hand on Kyoshi’s leg to still the shaking. “We’re not in our element,” Rangi said. “You might have the keys to certain doors, but this is not our house. You have to be more careful.”
