The Rise of Kyoshi

The Introduction

Kyoshi struggled to open the small metal box. She’d opened the visible latch, yes, but no matter how hard she gripped and twisted the container, the false bottom that concealed the true contents wouldn’t budge.

“You can’t force it,” a gentle voice said. “Use too much strength, and it’s liable to break. The goods would spill everywhere. You don’t want to leave a trail behind, do you?”

Kyoshi looked up from the floor to see a tall, beautiful woman with freckles splashed across the tops of her cheeks and serpent tattoos running down her arms. Next to her was a man, stocky and strong, his face bedecked in red-and-white makeup. The streaks of crimson met each other to form a wild, animalistic pattern, but his expression underneath was warm and mirthful.

The metal box suddenly grew hot, singeing Kyoshi’s flesh, and she dropped it. She tried to shout and found her teeth loose and swimming in her mouth. The painted man wiped his face, and in the streaks between the colors, his features had turned into Jianzhu’s.

Kyoshi surged forward with rage but couldn’t close the distance. The woman found her helplessness amusing and winked at her with a green glowing eye. Her eyeball swelled and swelled, growing so large that it burst out of its socket and kept expanding until it consumed her other eye and then the entirety of her face and then the four corners of the world. Kyoshi flailed in terror inside the cavernous darkness of its pupil, trying to reach solid ground.

We’ll never leave you,Jianzhu whispered. You will always have us, in the distance, behind you, right next to you, watching you. The two of us will always be there for you.

At the height of her panic a hand gripped Kyoshi by the shoulder. The warmth and solidness of it told her not to flinch, not to worry. She sat up slowly and blinked in the fading daylight.

“Wake up,” Rangi said. “We’re here.”

Rangi insisted on making a single pass over Chameleon Bay before landing. She leaned off Pengpeng’s side, drawing in the layout of the ramshackle port town with the single-mindedness of a buzzard wasp, as if every trash-strewn alley and patchy roof were vitally important. Kyoshi let Rangi take her time. She needed a moment to make sure she’d fully climbed out of the depths of her nightmare.

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.”

And if I back down from a fewdaofei, I have no chance of standing up to Jianzhu. “I’m sorry, all right?” Kyoshi said. This argument wasn’t going to resolve anytime soon, and the gang was coming back. The last thing they needed was to show a fractured front to the criminals they were trying to coerce.

Rangi let it go, seeing the same value in unity. The Si Wong boy, Water Tribe woman, and bulky man arranged themselves in front of Kyoshi with great formality. She had often stood that way to greet important guests, always in the back of the group due to her height.

The man made a gesture with one open palm down, and the other hand clenched into a fist on top. It was unlike any other greeting Kyoshi had witnessed and made it seem like his right side was smashing the left for trying to steal food off a table.

“Flitting Sparrowkeet Wong,” he said, bowing slightly. If he seemed embarrassed by having such a delicate-sounding nickname, he didn’t show it.

The lithe Waterbender stepped forward and made the same pose, though in a slouchy way to let everyone know she thought the concept of professional names silly. “Kirima,” she said. “Just Kirima.”

“Bullet Lek,” the boy snapped with great pride. He had rearranged his headwraps behind his ears to a more dignified, indoor style. “Though some call me Skullcrusher Lek, or Lek of the Whistling Death.”

Kyoshi made sure not to mirror the faces that Wong and Kirima made behind Lek’s back, or the boy would have certainly been insulted. “Kyoshi,” she said. “This is my associate, Rangi.”

Rangi made a little snort of disapproval that Kyoshi took to mean: Oh, so we’re giving them our real names now?

“How did you come to us tonight?” Kirima asked. “Start as far back as you can.”

That far, huh?“I don’t remember much from when I was little,” Kyoshi said. Though her legs had settled down, the front of her neck now ached with tension. “Only that my parents and I never stayed in one place very long, and they never told me where. You could say I grew up in ‘the Earth Kingdom.’”

“That would have been before any of you joined,” Lao Ge said to the others. “Jesa and Hark slowed down considerably for several years and barely ran any jobs. They never told me why they stopped gathering the old crew for so long. I thought maybe they’d quit the game.”

The old man’s memory helped Kyoshi fit pieces together into a completed puzzle. The result was uglier than she’d imagined.

“Well, they must have wanted back in very badly, because they abandoned me in a farming village when I was five or six,” she said. “I can’t be sure exactly when. I never saw them after that.” Or forgave them.

“That can’t be,” Lek said. “Jesa and Hark would never do that to family. They were the most loyal bosses anyone could ask for. You must be mistaken.”

Kyoshi wondered what it would be like to pick him up, like she did to that pirate, and shake him until he saw spots. Kirima intervened before she could explore the idea.

“Are you telling their own daughter what happened to her?” the Waterbender snapped at Lek. “Shut up and let her finish.”

“There’s not much more to tell,” Kyoshi said. “I nearly died of neglect in that village before I was taken in by the household of a rich and powerful man. A sage. The only possessions I had to my name were my mother’s gear and her journal, which had information about my parents’ daofei customs, obligations I could call on. It was an instruction manual. Like you said.”

She glanced at Rangi. “I kept my parents’ past a secret from the village the whole time. Given how I was treated as an outsider, I don’t think I would have fared well if the townsfolk knew I was also the spawn of criminals.”

Rangi clenched her jaw. Kyoshi could tell she was thinking about the what-ifs, how their relationship might have been different had she known Kyoshi was a tainted child from the start. Would she have looked past that and befriended Kyoshi all the same? Or would she have condemned her to the rubbish heap like she’d done to Aoma and Jae and the others?

“And one day you just decided to leave and come here?” Lek said. He was still incredulous, like a sequence of events that started with Kyoshi’s parents being anything but perfect was not possible.

“I did not just decide,” Kyoshi snarled, turning her attention back on him. “The man whose house I lived in decided, when he murdered two people dear to me. I swore by the spirits that turn this world on its axis that I would make him pay for it.

“That’s why I’m here,” she said, pounding her fist on the table for emphasis. “He’s too powerful and influential to be brought down by the law. So I need the opposite side of the coin. I need my parents’ resources. If they can give me one gift at all in this life, then let it be revenge for those I’ve lost.”

Her face was red. Kyoshi felt ready to explode. She didn’t know what she’d do if another door in the wall opened and her mother and father stepped out. It would have been as volatile and uncharted as her encounter with the cave spirit.

Lek solemnly took his headwraps off and wrung them between his hands. His hair was sandy and cropped underneath. “You came all this way to find Jesa and Hark,” he said in a mournful mutter. “Kyoshi, I’m so sorry. I don’t know how to break this to you, but ... but ...”

Relief came like a monsoon. She did not have to meet them. She didn’t have to discover what kind of person she was when the past unearthed itself and took solid form.

“What, are they dead or something?” Kyoshi said, waving her hand at him flippantly. “I don’t care.”

A lie. Had they appeared in front of her, she might have had to run screaming from this room.

Lek’s grief was replaced by outrage, a funeral guest who caught her stealing the altar offerings. “We’re talking about your mother and father! They were taken by a fever three years ago!”

She found it so easy to be cruel now that she knew for certain they couldn’t defend themselves. “Wow,” Kyoshi said. “I guess there’re some things you can’t outrun, huh?”

His eyes goggled out of his head. “How can you be so vile? No one in the Four Nations disrespects their own kin like that!”

“They left me behind because I took up too much cargo space,” Kyoshi said. “So I would say it’s a family tradition.”

She snapped the war fan closed, intending to punctuate her sentence in an intimidating way. Instead the arms fell out of alignment and the leaf folded the wrong way, ruining the effect. She would need to learn how to use it properly at some point.

“I’m not here to confront my parents, or their ghosts,” Kyoshi said. The raw nervous energy coursing through her bones had slowed. “I’m here to seek what’s owed me by blood ties.”

She counted off on her fingers. “I want access to safehouses in the bigger cities where I can stay hidden at length. I want introductions with the rest of the network, starting with the strongest benders. And, most of all, I want training. Training until I’m strong enough to take down my enemy personally.”

A silence fell over the group.

Kirima made an awkward little choke. Kyoshi thought maybe she’d gotten some saliva down the wrong pipe, but then the Waterbender burst out laughing.

“Other cities!” she guffawed. “Let me guess. Your journal mentioned secret bases in Ba Sing Se, Omashu? Gaoling maybe? Filled with a brotherhood of bandits who honor the old ways?”

“I’ll blow my trumpet,” Wong said. “I’m sure they’ll come running.”

Kyoshi frowned. “What’s so funny?”

Kirima spread her arm. “This is our one and only base of operations. This is the network. Us. Whatever assistance you thought you could personally demand outside the law ends here, within these walls.”

Kyoshi remembered the most tired she’d ever been in her life. It was not long after she’d been dropped in Yokoya, when she still saw the journal and chest as her birthright treasures and not as incriminating evidence her parents wanted to ditch alongside her.

She’d been chased away from every door, forced to drag the heavy trunk with her. It was a lot for a child to carry back then, even one as outsized as her. As the day wore on, the exhaustion had seeped into her fingernails and teeth. Her thoughts had turned gray. There had been no room in her body for hunger and thirst. It was all given over to fatigue.

Kyoshi felt the same fragments of weariness threatening to undo her now. They drove into her joints like nails, beckoning her to give up. Looking at the daofei before her, she saw it clearly now. They weren’t the vanguard of some shadow army she could use to march upon Jianzhu. They were haggard, hunted people. Like her.

“We’ve fallen on hard times,” Wong said. She gathered he didn’t speak much, so when he did, it was likely true and to the point. “Crackdowns on smuggling across the Earth Kingdom have been pretty severe in recent years. We’ve been cut off from gangs in other cities without much news or any jobs to speak of.”

“Your journal must be at least a decade old, with entries that go back further,” Lek said. “In those days, groups like ours had real influence.” He stared at his hands like a deposed king longing for the grip of his scepter. “We had territory. The governors asked us for permission to do business.”

“Lek, you would have been three years old during our heyday,” Kirima said. “We hadn’t even picked you up yet.”

He wheeled on her furiously. “That means the rest of you should be more upset than me!”

“We understand,” Rangi interrupted. “It’s painful to know what should have been.”

Kyoshi detected a streak of satisfaction in her voice at the way things had turned out. The hole went no deeper than a dilapidated teahouse and a few cutpurses. As far as Rangi was concerned, they could still extricate themselves.

“Kyoshi, we tried,” she said. “You did what you could. But this isn’t what we came for.” She glanced at the room doors and their unusual placement. “We could stay here overnight, perhaps, but it’d be no safer than camping. We should get back to Pengpeng and fly to the nearest—”

Lek slammed his hands on the table. “Fly?” His voice broke with excitement. “You flew here?”

The rest of the group perked up. “Are you telling me you have a sky bison?” Kirima said. There was an interested gleam in her eye.

Rangi cursed at her slipup. “Why?” Kyoshi said. “What difference would it make?”

“Because now you have something we want,” Kirima said while Lek bounced off the walls. “Being Jesa and Hark’s kid means we’re obliged to keep you safe from harm. It doesn’t mean we’ll follow your orders or help you on some personal quest for vengeance. You want that level of commitment, then you make us an offer.”

“No,” Rangi snapped. “Forget it. We’re not giving you our bison. We’re not giving you anything of the sort.”

“Simmer down, Topknot,” Kirima said. “I’m merely suggesting a partnership. We need to get out of this dried-up town to where the prospects are better. Kyoshi wants training. We should travel together for a while. It’s her best shot at finding earthbending teachers of ill repute.”

Hearing her, Kyoshi suddenly realized she’d made a critical mistake. She’d shown her earthbending. While she greatly needed improvement in her native element, there wasn’t a straightforward way to get training in the others without revealing she was the Avatar.

Rangi was still opposed to the idea. “We didn’t come here to revive a two-bit smuggling operation,” she said to Kyoshi. “We’d just be taking on more risk than we need.”

“First of all, our operation was top-notch!” Lek said, full of umbrage. “And second, you two are the baggage here. You wouldn’t last a day moving in our circles without a guide. For crying out loud, we almost killed you.”

Rangi narrowed her eyes. “Is that your impression of what happened?” She sounded perfectly willing to test his theory.

Kyoshi buried her face in her hands while they argued. Ideas that had been so clear in her mind before were becoming trampled and muddy. Her singular path turned out to be full of brambles and false turns.

Lao Ge interrupted her wallowing by slamming an empty bottle on the table. He’d been forgotten until now, and his smile folded in on itself like he was bursting with the world’s best secret.

“I know it’s a tough decision, my dear girl,” he said, cocking his ear toward the door. “But don’t take too long. The police are coming.”