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“I know, I know,” he said. “You’re not my secretary. But there has to be a Fire Nation stamp on this message.”
“Fine. Who’s it to?”
“Professor Shaw, Head of Zoology at Ba Sing Se University. Tell him you’re interested in borrowing some specimens he brought back from his latest expedition. You want to display them in the Fire Nation, because they’re so very adorable and cuddly, as part of a goodwill tour between our countries.”
Jianzhu eyed the piece of art behind him, a painting of the Northern Lights on vellum by a master Water Tribe artist. He grabbed its wide frame with his outstretched hands and ripped it off its moorings. “Send him this as well, to butter him up. It’s worth more than what he makes in a year.”
Hei-Ran seemed slightly disgusted by his reliance on bribery, but that was an Earth Kingdom cultural quirk that people from the other three nations often had trouble getting used to. “Which adorable and cuddly animals are we talking about?” she said.
Jianzhu twisted his lips and sniffed. “The shirshus.?
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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.
