by F. C. Yee
The sounds of conversation blurred and slowed, as if the air itself had frozen over. Men and women in Kyoshi’s peripheral vision turned their heads at a snail’s pace. Their sentences drew out like moans.
Kyoshi might have been pushing against Jianzhu so hard that she no longer knew what was real. She heard a footstep echoing in her ear, and then another.
A cloaked figure walked with purpose toward their table. Neither she nor Jianzhu could move. It was as if a third presence had joined their struggle, clasping its hands over their interlocked bending, squeezing them together.
The person who stood over them with all the familiarity in the world threw his hood back.
It was Yun.
Had she the ability to breathe, Kyoshi would have choked. Sobbed. This was a dream and a nightmare, her highest hopes and cruelest torment poured together in some horrific concoction and flung in her face. How had he survived? How had he found them? Why had he come back, now of all times?
Jianzhu’s shock at seeing Yun nearly broke the volatile hold he had on the stone around them. Kyoshi could no longer tell who was in control of what, with their bending commingled together, only certain that if she released the tension by moving or speaking or blinking, the whole enterprise would come tumbling down. The three of them were locked in a private delirium, a prison of their own making.
Yun said nothing. He looked at them with a faint, beatific smile. His skin had the glow of a healthy adventurer back from a successful trip, neat stubble lining his jaw. His eyes twinkled with the same warm mischief that Kyoshi remembered so well.
None of this kept a blinding, nauseating sense of wrongness from pouring out of his body. People had always been drawn to Yun like metal to a lodestone, and Kyoshi had been no exception. But he’d changed. There was something essential missing from the otherworldly being in front of her. Something human.
The boy she’d loved had been replaced by a hollow scaffolding, wind blowing through its gaps. The nearby customers who’d so far tolerated her strangeness recoiled away from Yun like he was a rotting corpse, scraping chairs over the floor in their haste to create distance. They couldn’t bear to be near him.
Yun noticed the bullet on the table. Its presence filled him with delight and his face lit up as if he’d seen the object before. He reached over and slowly plucked the stone free while Kyoshi and Jianzhu were still fighting for control of it, tearing the rock from the combined bending grip of a great master and the Earth Avatar. To Kyoshi it felt like he’d ripped a hole in the empty space, removed the moon from the sky itself. She could almost hear a sucking noise as the bullet left her and Jianzhu’s grasp.
Still without words, Yun held the rock out, making sure Kyoshi and Jianzhu could both see it. Then he cupped that hand to Jianzhu’s chest.
Jianzhu’s eyes bulged. Kyoshi felt his earthbending flare outward and was forced to compensate. Yun gently put his other hand, still stained with black ink, to Jianzhu’s back. After another second passed, he showed them what had traveled between his palms.
The stone, now covered in blood.
Yun didn’t wait for Jianzhu to finish dying. He winked at Kyoshi and turned to leave. Jianzhu teetered in his seat, gagging on blood, a dark red patch spreading from the tunnel in his chest. The waiters screamed.
It was everything Kyoshi could do to contain Jianzhu’s earthbending death throes. More cracks raced along the walls, big and loud enough to draw the notice of the patrons. At the door Yun paused and looked back at Kyoshi, seeing her duress, how she was barely holding the teahouse together. He grinned.
And then he bumped the table.
The foundations of the building rose and fell at his command. The impact knocked people to the floor. Kyoshi lost her grip on too much of the stone, and the roof began to crumble. Yun vanished.
A sheet of rock the size of a window crashed to the first floor, narrowly missing a waiter. She could feel the makings of a stampede beginning to form. There were too many pieces collapsing around her. The world was falling apart before her eyes.
Lao Ge had insisted.
Despite her protests that she didn’t need to unlock the secrets of immortality, he’d made her join him in his daily longevity exercises. She’d told him flat out that she considered the concept bunk.
“This isn’t spiritualism,” he said. “You don’t have to believe. You simply have to practice.”
He’d taken her to the same spots that a guru would meditate in, the curves of flowing rivers, the stumps of once-massive trees, caves bored into the cliffside. But he’d also filled her ear with counterintuitive nonsense.
“Instead of blocking everything out like how you would normally meditate, take it all in,” he said while they rested in a meadow on their way to Taihua. “Notice each blade of grass in the same moment you would notice a single one.”
“I would have to have a thousand eyes to do that!” she’d snapped.
He shrugged. “Or an infinite amount of time. Either would work.”
The riddles never ceased while they prepared for Te’s assassination.
“Divide your body in two,” he said, while she practiced heating and breaking a piece of scrap metal. “Then divide it again, and then again, and again. What would you have left?”
“A bloody mess.” She burned her hand and yelped.
“Exactly!” Lao Ge said. “Put the pieces back, and put them back again, and again, and again one more time, and you’re whole once more.”
“A human being isn’t a block of stone,” she said, showing him her reddening thumb for emphasis.
“That’s where you’re wrong. The illusion that the self is separate from the rest of the world is the driving factor that limits our potential. Once you realize there’s nothing special about the self, it becomes easier to manipulate.”
To Kyoshi that had been the easiest lesson to take in. She was nothing special. She had never been anything special. That was a mantra she believed in.
Her eyes glowed, but only in a brief pulse. She didn’t need to express her mastery over multiple elements like she had during her duel with Xu. Just one. The stone was her, and she was the stone.
Her mind was everywhere, dancing along the tips of her fingers. She’d let go of her fans, but for now, it didn’t matter. Kyoshi felt the shape of each piece and how one fit into the next, making it so easy to put them back together. She wouldn’t have been able to say whether she meant the teahouse or her own being. According to Lao Ge, there was no difference.
There was a stumble of disruption, almost like ants crawling over her arm. The customers on each floor scrambled for the exits. She watched them run along shattered tiles held up by nothing but her earthbending. Each step the panicking crowd took was its own distinct little thump, another weight to catalog. It was no great trouble to her.
When the last of the occupants had fled, Kyoshi got up, maintaining the form of Crowding Bridge with one raised hand while she stuck her fans back into her belt with the other. She looked at Jianzhu, slumped over. Her revenge encompassed within a single body.
It seemed so bounded and finite. How could such a container have held the volume of her anguish, her wrath? If any feeling at all pressed through the numbness of her unity with the earth around her, it was the ire of a hoodwinked child who’d been promised the end of her bedtime story only to see the candle-lights snuffed and the door slam shut. She was a girl alone in the dark.
She decided to leave Jianzhu where he was, not out of any remaining spite. The path that led her to him had simply ended.
She exited into the square. There was a half ring of people around her, giving plenty of berth, staring in horror. They didn’t know who she was or how she’d saved their lives. She didn’t care.
Kyoshi let go of her focus, and the building groaned behind her. The crowd shrieked as the teahouse collapsed, sending a wave of dust over their heads.
The civilian residents of Qinchao began to flee. At the same time, she heard the clash of
gongs and saw lawmen shoving their way through the masses. The officers drew their swords as they closed in.
“Don’t move!” the captain shouted. “Drop your weapons and get on the ground!”
She looked at the red-faced, nervous men clinging to their steel. Without saying anything, she dust-stepped higher and higher, ignoring their threats and shouts of astonishment, until she flew over their heads, onto the nearest rooftop, and into the sky.
There was a tree at the crossroads leading into Qinchao. It had a single dominant limb that extended sideways, with a length of rusted, forgotten chain that looped around the branch. Kyoshi wondered what had hung from the end of the chain before it snapped.
Pengpeng rolled in the grass while the Flying Opera Company sat in a circle, back from the mission Kyoshi had sent them on. A short-haired figure leaped to her feet and ran over.
Rangi buried her face in Kyoshi’s chest. She shuddered and wept, but she was otherwise unharmed.
Kyoshi cheated on the test Jianzhu had put to her. He hadn’t counted on a mere servant girl having such steadfast allies so well versed in breaking and entering. While Kyoshi faced Jianzhu in Qinchao, the rest of the Flying Opera Company raided his manor in Yokoya, using the detailed plans she’d given them to rescue Rangi.
But there was one extra body lying in the shade of the tree. She recognized Hei-Ran, wrapped in blankets. The older woman had a ghostly pallor to her face that was hard to look at. With their family resemblance, Kyoshi couldn’t think of anything but Rangi in a similar state of helplessness.
“Kyoshi, my mother,” Rangi whispered, trembling in her grasp. “We found her in the infirmary like this. I don’t know what happened to her. I abandoned my mother! I left her, and this happened!”
“She’ll be all right,” Kyoshi said, trying to pass conviction from her body to Rangi’s. “I swear she’ll be all right. We’ll do whatever it takes to fix her.” She let Rangi recover in her embrace, her sobs slowing down until they became a second heartbeat.
Kyoshi stroked the crop of fuzz left behind by the severed topknot. The Firebender flinched as if she’d grazed an open wound. “I should be wearing a sack over my head so you can’t see me like this,” she said.
There wasn’t a good way to explain that Kyoshi didn’t care one bit about her hair or her honor, so long as she was alive. In fact, it was easier for Kyoshi to rest her cheek on Rangi’s head now, without all the sharp pins in the way.
After giving the two of them time, Kirima, Wong, and Lao Ge came over.
“The operation succeeded, obviously,” Kirima said. “Once you’ve rescued one person from the bowels of a powerful Earth Kingdom official’s personal dungeon, you’ve rescued them all. You were right. Jianzhu didn’t seem to expect that you’d have us on your side. Made things a bit easier.”
“I may have helped myself to some valuables on the way out,” Wong said. His thick fingers were covered in new gold rings and jade seals, including one that allowed him direct, private correspondence with the Earth King.
Kyoshi saw no issue with that. But his knuckles were busted open and bloody. “Was there a struggle?” she asked.
“No one’s dead,” Wong said quickly. “But I had to get information the old-fashioned way from some mercenaries dressed in guards’ clothing. I may have gone a little overboard. I don’t regret it.”
He looked at Rangi in Kyoshi’s arms and gave a rare smile. “The Gravedigger took one of ours. I wasn’t going to let him take another.”
“Speaking of which, where is he?” Kirima said. “Is it . . . is it over?”
Jianzhu was dead. But Yun was alive, an uncontrollable strike of lightning. Kyoshi had no idea what had felled Rangi’s mother, nor what would happen to Yokoya in the future without its guiding sage.
And despite her best attempts to sully the position, her dedication to committing every possible outrage and act of disqualification, she was still the Avatar.
Was it over? Kyoshi found she had no answer to that question at all.
HAUNTINGS
The Southern Air Temple was unlike any place Kyoshi had ever seen. White towers extended past the tops of swirling strands of mist. Long paths wound like meditation mazes up the slopes to the earthbound entrances. Bison calves frolicked in the air, adorable, grunting little clouds of fur and horn. She didn’t understand how a people could wish to be nomads when they had a home so full of beauty and peace.
Kyoshi waited in a garden distinguished by its simplicity and open spaces rather than density and expensive details, like the mansions she was accustomed to. The breeze, unhindered by the grass and raked sand, was a crisp bite against her skin. The garden abutted a temple wall with large wooden doors. Each entrance was covered by metal tubing that spiraled into knots and terminated in a wide, open end that resembled a tsungi horn.
She was alone.
Her friends had gone their separate ways. Kirima and Wong wanted to take a break from smuggling and lie low for a while, living off the injection of loot they’d pilfered from Jianzhu’s mansion. They promised to keep in touch and show their faces once Kyoshi had established herself. They were the Avatar’s companions, after all. No doubt she could pardon them for whatever trouble they got up to.
Lao Ge declined to go with them, claiming he needed to rest his weary bones. In private, he told Kyoshi that as the Avatar and an important world leader, she was now on his watch list. He was only half joking. But she didn’t mind. She was pretty sure she could take the old man in a fight to the death now.
Hei-Ran had woken up. Rangi, fighting through each word, told Kyoshi that she needed to take her mother to the North Pole, where the best healers in the world lived. If there was a chance for her to recover fully, it would be found among the experts of the Water Tribe.
That meant saying goodbye for who knew how long. They could and would find each other again in the future. But as Lao Ge had foreboded, they wouldn’t be the same people when it happened. As much as Kyoshi wanted to stay with her, in a single, frozen pool of moments, the current carrying them forward was too strong.
Kyoshi had waited until her friends left before making her move, wanting to spare them of the chaos that would ensue after her unveiling. The Air Nomads often accepted pilgrims from the other nations, letting them stay at the monasteries and nunneries on a temporary basis. With Jianzhu no longer darkening her life, she simply joined a group of ragged travelers hiking up the mountain to the Southern Air Temple.
During the orientation for her fellow laypeople, she’d introduced herself by asking everyone to stand back. In front of the monks, she’d summoned a tornado of fire and air. The blazing, dual-element vortex proved her identity beyond a shadow of a doubt—though the fact that she’d nearly burned down a sacred tree reminded her it was still a good idea to rely on her fans for a bit longer.
As she’d expected, there was a commotion. Many of the senior abbots had known Jianzhu and met Yun. Her existence caused an overturning of the agreed-upon order. She was not the vaunted prodigy of the Earth Kingdom, the boy who’d publicly been credited with destroying the menace of the Fifth Nation pirates.
But there was a reason why she’d gone to the Airbenders instead of a sage from her homeland. The isolation and sanctity of the temple provided a measure of protection as the storm of her arrival howled outside its walls. Though she was a native Earthbender, the Air Nomads took her outrageous account of events as simple truth, told by the Avatar. They bore the anger and blustering of Earth sages who saw her as illegitimate, like she’d somehow usurped her position by being born, and relayed messages to her with calmness and grace.
The council of elders at the Southern Air Temple were not interested in profiting from her presence, nor in dictating what she should do next. They seemed content to listen to her and fulfill what requests they could.
Plus, Pengpeng enjoyed being back with a herd. Kyoshi owed the girl some time off with her own kind.
“Avatar Kyoshi!” someone shouted, br
eaking her reverie. She looked up.
High above her on a balcony, a tall young monk waved. She stepped back to give him space to land, and he vaulted over the railing. A gust of wind slowed his descent, billowing his orange-and-yellow robes. He touched down beside her as lightly as Kirima had in Madam Qiji’s, long ago.
“Apologies, Avatar,” Monk Jinpa said. “The tower stairs take forever.”
“I’ve used my fair share of architectural shortcuts,” Kyoshi said. She and Jinpa began to walk around the garden as they talked. “What’s the latest?”
Monk Jinpa had been assigned to her as a chamberlain of sorts. He was the leader of the temple’s administrative group, handling logistics and finance when the Air Nomads were forced to deal with the material world. Even monks needed someone to look after what little money ended up in their possession.
“The latest is . . . well, still a mess,” Jinpa said. “The tragedy at Yokoya is worse than we feared. Two score of the Earth Kingdom’s elite murdered by poison. And some of the household as well.”
Kyoshi closed her eyes against the deep ache. She’d only found out by proxy what had happened at the mansion. “Are there more details?”
“The investigators sent by the Earth King believe that it was an act of revenge by a daofei group. Somehow they found out about an important gathering of sages and decided to strike with a level of brazenness that has never been seen before.”
Rangi’s mother had to have fallen by the same means. And Kyoshi didn’t know who among her former coworkers was still alive. She didn’t know if Auntie Mui was alive. She had to go back to Yokoya as soon as possible.
“What have you heard from Qinchao?” she asked.
Jinpa scrunched his face. The poor monk was taxed by having so much bad news pass through his ears. As a pacifist, he wasn’t used to this level of death and mayhem. “The officers found Master Jianzhu’s body. A couple of witnesses have corroborated your story, that a young man killed him in cold blood. But many of the townsfolk aren’t convinced of your innocence. Nearly all of them maintain that you destroyed the teahouse.”
