Dues
Her spine nearly snapped itself in two. Each drop of her blood had been stung by a viper bat. Her hands felt numb and tacky. The skin had been burned off them.
There was a thump and a jolt through her body. An eternity later, she realized it was her knees hitting the ground as she collapsed. The rest of her torso followed. Her headdress went tumbling as her jaw impacted against the platform.
With the side of her face pressed against the dirt, sounds were amplified. She heard more than one person screaming. Rangi, for certain. Would the others be that saddened? It was hard to say. She caught a glimpse of them and saw only sheer bewildered horror on their faces, the inability to comprehend what kind of element she’d been struck with.
Xu walked over to the side her face was pointing, blocking her view. She had never heard of bending lightning, never been struck by it, but that was the only explanation for what she’d seen, cold-blue crackling zigzags running from his fingers into her body. She tried to get to her hands and knees but collapsed, her chest flat against the ground.
“Remember,” Wong said from the distant past, a blur of hazy recollection. “It’s over when the winner says it’s over.”
Xu planted his feet and shot another bolt of lightning straight into her back.
“It didn’t have to be this way,” he shouted. He punctuated his sentence by sending a third and a fourth blast of lightning pulsing into her body. He intended to cook her corpse beyond recognition. “You had the greatest gift in the world. My respect. And you threw it away. For what?”
He kicked her in the shoulder, a meaningless act other than to show his disdain. “Don’t think I didn’t notice how you’ve looked at me since last night,” he said. “Staring at me with condemnation in your eyes. What you don’t understand is that men like me are beyond judgment! I do as I will, and the world must bear my discretions with submission and gratitude!” A fifth bolt, for emphasis.
What Xu didn’t seem to know was that none of the lightning strikes beyond the first had hurt to the same degree. Kyoshi played dead while she came to her senses. There was still a searing heat that enveloped her upper half, separated by a layer of fabric. Her survival could have had something to do with the chainmail in her jacket, exposed by the tears and scrapes from last night’s raid. Better to stay pressed against the ground until she saw an opening.
Xu breathed in again and shot a continuous stream of lightning at a target he thought was surely dead. Kyoshi smelled her clothes smoking as it washed over her body. He was desecrating her.
“Stop!” she heard Rangi cry from far away. “Please stop!”
It was the hopelessness in her voice that set Kyoshi over the edge, the complete surrender of a girl who would have been invincible if not for her love. Kyoshi had put that weakness in Rangi, and Xu had torn it open. He was torturing the person Kyoshi cared about most in the world.
And by every spirit of every star in the night sky, he would pay for that.
She reached out and grabbed Xu’s ankle. The sudden course of lightning into his own body made him squeal, an undignified, high-pitched noise that was music to her ears. He stopped the flow in time to be dumped on his back, Kyoshi completely upending him.
Her eyes felt like they were leaking. Not with tears but light. She thought briefly about swinging Xu overhead and dashing him against the ground or twisting him like a wet rag between her bare hands. He was surely more fragile than a solid iron bar.
No. He needed to be shown what a true force of nature looked like. His men had to see him beaten not by strength but by retribution from the elements themselves. She switched her grip on him from his foot to his collar.
She rose into the air, not with dust-stepping but a whirling vortex that sucked her higher into the sky. Xu screamed and dangled from her grip. The tornado she rode blew the daofei back. From this distance they were so tiny and pathetic and human.
Kyoshi extended her free hand, palm upward, and the stalks of rice around Xu’s men set ablaze. She curled her fingers closer together, and the flames, accelerated by her winds, hemmed them in. Many of the outlaws shrieked and threw themselves on the ground, rolling to put out the fires that had caught on their clothes.
Kyoshi looked down the length of her arm at Xu. He shielded his eyes from hers, her inner light too harsh to take in. His mouth gaped open and shut like a fish. The air was moving too fast for him to breathe.
“You forget, Xu,”she said, and a legion of voices synchronized in the eye of the storm. “There is always someone who stands above you in judgment.”
It was possible that other, more powerful people spoke through her in this moment. There was a chance she was simply a puppet beholden to their collective will. But an unassailable feeling of control told her that wasn’t true. The voices could lend her insight, eloquence, but they couldn’t take over. Many of them seemed to disapprove of what she was doing.
Let them,Kyoshi thought. She was in command. She brought Xu’s face closer to hers.
“What will you do now?”she said. “Knowing that your every step will have consequences?”
She needn’t have asked. Behind the terror in Xu’s eyes there was a stronger, deeper outrage. His soul lacked any porousness, and the chance she so generously provided had washed off like rain on lacquer. How dare she? was the only thought running through his head. How dare she? Consequences were for his victims! He was a man who did whatever his power let him!
Xu mistook her analyzing frown for a lapse in her guard and spat a gout of flame in her face.
So he’s a Firebender, she thought as she diverted the flames off to the side with a tilt of her head. A shame for him that he’d given away his intentions so clearly and that dragon’s breath was the first act of firebending Kyoshi had ever performed. She wasn’t as surprised as he’d expected her to be.
The lightning generation was unique though. A refinement of the art? A singular talent? She had so many questions for Xu about that. Too bad she would never get the chance to ask them.
Both Lao Ge and Jianzhu were right in some measure. Shortsighted men like Te and Xu were parasites who gnawed at the very structures they exploited for power and survival. They were blind to the fact that they existed not through their own merits but due to the warped form of charity the world had decided to give them.
And Xu had exhausted his. Kyoshi was the only thing holding him up. She opened her hand and watched him fall.
By the time she touched back down to the earth, the wall of fire that surrounded the daofei had burned itself out. Most of the swordsmen had taken the chance to scatter. Judging by the trails trampled through the crops, they’d fled in every direction, a routed army without a leader. Mok was gone. He and a few others had dragged off Xu’s body before disappearing into the rice stalks.
Surprisingly, Wai still remained. He stared at Kyoshi, transfixed, his jaw agape. Reverent. Kyoshi didn’t know what to make of the cruel, unusual man. He seemed to constantly need a powerful figure to tell him what to do.
“Begone,”she said with the last of the echoes in her throat.
Wai made the fist-over-hand gesture and bowed deeply to her. He and the remaining daofei, mostly survivors of the massacred Kang Shens, faded away into the fields.
Kyoshi looked around for her friends and couldn’t see them. “Are you, uh, still possessed?” she heard Lek say, his voice muffled as if speaking through a porthole. “Or are you you again?”
“Will you please just show yourselves?” she snapped.
There was a grinding noise as they rose into view. Wong had bent them a shelter to hide in below the surface, the same way Jianzhu had survived when she’d first lost control and entered the Avatar State. She wanted to tell them that this time, she hadn’t gone berserk. She’d been fully aware of her powers heightening with whatever vast reserves of energy the Avatar had access to.
She’d been fully aware of killing Xu.
If Rangi wanted to embrace her, she restrained herself well. She and the others stood before Kyoshi, stiff and hesitant. They’d known her, had gotten accustomed to the idea that their inexperienced friend could bend all four elements, but they hadn’t really seen the Avatar before, until now.
“Don’t do this,” Kyoshi said. “Please. If you act like this, I won’t be able to ...” Her knees buckled.
Not this time,she thought to herself. Stay awake. Be present for what you have done. Look at your actions instead of turning away.
“Kyoshi, your hands,” Rangi said, aghast.
She held them in front of her face. They were riddled with burns from where the lightning had struck her fans.
“We have to get her to a healer!” Kirima shouted, her sharp face already losing its edges as Kyoshi’s vision blurred.
“Kyoshi!” Lek said, suddenly close to her, propping her up as best he could from underneath her arm, the last person among them who should have tried to hold her up physically. “Kyoshi!”
She lasted less than two minutes before succumbing to the pain.