by F. C. Yee
And if I back down from a few daofei, 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.”
ESCAPE
The sound of marching boots hitting the road filled the air. “You stupid old man!” Lek shouted. “I’m never putting you on watch again!”
“Finally,” Lao Ge said. He winked at Kyoshi.
Officers wearing constabulary green hustled into the teahouse. They fanned out along the sides to accommodate their numbers, reaching to the corners. Twenty or so, wearing quilted armor with single dao broadswords on their backs.
At the head of their formation, still in plainclothes but now wearing the same headband adorned with the prefectural badge of the law as the others, were the same three men who’d been in the teahouse earlier.
“Remind me again who’s good at spotting undercovers, Lek?” Kirima snarled.
In a moment of panic Kyoshi thought the officers had come for her on behalf of Jianzhu, but that couldn’t have been the case. If he’d sent out messengers immediately, they still wouldn’t have beaten a bison.
No, she thought with a grimace. They were here for the girl who’d walked into an outlaw hideout and started making demands with outlaw codes. She’d incriminated herself in public, like a fool.
“In the name of Governor Deng, you are under arrest!” the captain said. Instead of a sword, he pointed a ceremonial truncheon topped with the Earth King’s seal at them, but it looked heavy enough to break bones regardless. “Put down your weapons!”
Deng. The name brought more terror to Kyoshi’s heart than a charging saber-tooth moose lion. Stout, red-nosed Governor Deng was a frequent visitor to Jianzhu’s house and one of his closest allies. Kyoshi glanced at Rangi. The Firebender’s worried headshake confirmed her fear. If they got caught here, tonight, the whole operation was over. They’d be back in Jianzhu’s grasp before his breakfast got cold.
The captain did not like the eye contact between her and Rangi. “I said put down your weapons!” he shouted, bristling for a fight.
The daofei looked at their empty hands in confusion. Kyoshi realized that unless the man felt particularly threatened by Lao Ge’s bottles, the only armed one was she. The glinting war fan was still in her hand, its mate stuck in her belt. She stood up so that she could have room to yank the other fan out.
The captain took a step back in astonishment. He’d interpreted her unfurling to her full height as a hostile act. He wasn’t the first. “Take them!” he shouted to his men.
There were so many of them. Crammed in the dark confines of the teahouse, the police force seemed larger in number than Tagaka’s marauders. Five of the officers made a beeline for Kyoshi, the obvious target.
They were knocked down by a blast of fire. Kyoshi glanced back at Rangi again. She had her fist extended, her skin smoking. Her face was upset but unrepentant. If they were in, they were in full-measure. Rangi didn’t do things by halves.
Inspired by her decisiveness, Wong picked up Lao Ge and threw the drunkard bodily at the captain like a rag doll. Lao Ge’s warlike screech as he flew through the air was the only sign that he’d agreed to the act. The two of them must have done it before. The element of surprise worked strongly in their favor as Lao Ge’s wiry arms wrapped around the captain’s neck and his legs scissored around the waist of his subordinate, becoming a human net.
Another blast from Rangi sizzled past Kyoshi’s ear. She no longer knew what was going on. Men closed in on her with swords drawn. She picked up the nearest, heaviest object, the Pai Sho board, by one of its legs and swung it in an arc.
The policemen were bowled over like wheatstalks by the dense wooden bludgeon. The ones who tried to block her wild
strikes with their dao had their swords bent and crushed against their torsos for their trouble.
Fresh officers ran in through the door only to slip on a sheet of ice that Kirima laid down using nothing but the remaining wine from Lao Ge’s stash. Kyoshi jolted in surprise at the reserved, minimalist twirl of her wrists and fingers. For a moment it looked like Tagaka of the Fifth Nation was fighting on her side.
“Girl!” Lao Ge said, clamping swords inside their scabbards wherever his bony fingers and toes could reach. “Bump the table!”
She didn’t have the same previous working relationship with him as Wong, but Kyoshi caught his drift. She raised her foot high and stomped the floor.
The teahouse jumped into the air again, this time tilted higher from the back. Lao Ge and several of the policemen fell through the door. The others were knocked prone, scrambling on the straw and frozen wine.
Kyoshi’s new compatriots managed to stay upright, having seen the trick before. “Out the other side!” Lek yelled.
“What about Lao Ge?” She hadn’t meant to dump him into the thick of the enemy.
“He can handle himself! Move!”
She flung the Pai Sho board at the nearest officers and followed the others through the kitchen. It was empty, just a little room with a clay stove that smoldered from the one attempt Lek had made at tea. Another door gave way, and they were in the town square behind the building.
The passage had been disguised, painted over without a frame, and there were no windows, so it was the side of the house that was least well-guarded by the police. Only two men held positions there. Kyoshi heard a zzip-zzip noise, and they crumpled to the ground before they could wave their swords.
Lek tucked something back into his pocket. “Where’s your ride?”
Rangi answered, which was good because Kyoshi had lost her bearings and had no idea. “Southwest corner of town,” she said. “If everyone follows me, I can get us there.”