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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.
