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But as her eyes wandered up to his, she saw that he seemed almost as taxed. His shoulders were trembling, like hers.
“I do need to give your—” he said before cutting himself short. He was likely going to say he needed to give Kyoshi’s new friends his compliments. But he couldn’t manage talking under the strain.
He noticed her noticing his little moment of weakness. With a surge of anger, he pointed his leg to the side and tried to blow out the supporting wall. Kyoshi made a silent scream as the effort to keep it intact tore a muscle within her body along her ribcage.
She fought through the pain and managed to keep the destruction down to a single crack running from floor to ceiling. The wall held.
Jianzhu’s jaw flexed. He bared his teeth. He and Kyoshi warred in stillness, their whole beings locked in opposition, a perversion of neutral jing where they only appeared to be doing nothing. Vibrations began to grow through the building again, the slight rattle of cups against saucers. The patrons on the ground floor nearby might have suspected this girl and this man were to blame, but their hesitance to move kept them within the reach of danger.
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.
