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She was. And they were.
“It’s exactly what it looks like,” Kyoshi said. “You have a problem?”
Kirima shrugged and waved her fingers, dipping into a moment of quiet seriousness. “I’m not the type to give you grief over whom you love,” she said. Her mirth returned immediately. “I am, however, going to give you tremendous amounts of grief about romancing within your own brotherhood. That’s like doing laundry in the outhouse. It never ends clean.”
Kyoshi got up. “First off, we knew each other before we met you. Second, my parents founded this stupid gang, and they were obviously a pair!”
“Good to see you carrying on the family tradition,” Kirima said. “Jesa and Hark were mad about each other.”
Nothing could douse the moment for Kyoshi like a reminder of her parents. She wondered if they still kissed, made eyes, whispered jokes after they’d dropped her in Yokoya. Perhaps unburdening themselves had made their relationship all the sweeter. She didn’t want to ask.
The darkness of her abandonment must have boiled to her surface as the three of them trudged uphill back toward town, because Rangi ran the back of her nails down Kyoshi’s hand, a playful and teasing distraction that held more meaning now than a hundred volumes of history. Kyoshi nearly tripped and fell on her face.
If this was what being true to herself felt like, she could never go back. Her heart was nestled somewhere above her in the nearest cloud. She wanted to scoop up Rangi in her arms and run, stepping higher and higher using that technique she still had to learn, until they found it.
Kyoshi was so happy that Hujiang itself looked prettier in the new light of day. Splotches of color caught her eye that weren’t visible in the torchlight of the previous evening, blues
and reds from beyond the Earth Kingdom. The longhouses, she could see now, had individual touches like carved shrine alcoves and Fire Nation rugs hung over doors. It reminded her of the way ships would get personalities imprinted on them by their sailors. Dust had yet to be kicked up by the day’s business, and the air was cleaner, easier to breathe without the dingy haze.
They strolled through town—when was the last time Kyoshi had a stroll? Had she ever?—and sidestepped the strewn bodies of men who slept off hangovers, or beatings, or both. Kirima led them to one of the larger establishments, where she ducked through a door with one of its posts destroyed, like someone had been thrown out but not very accurately. She returned moments later, bending a large blob of water that she had to have found inside. It rolled down the steps like a slug.
Wong floated inside the reverse bubble, his head poking out the top. He snored comfortably.
“Wake up!” Kirima shouted. With a flick of her arms, the water froze. The big man jolted awake from the cold. He resembled a small iceberg with his face poking out of the summit.
“Ugh, leave me in this for a while,” he said, bleary-eyed.
Kirima liquified the water again, dropping him to his feet, and bent it away from his body, leaving him dry as a bone. She hurled the water back inside the building, where it landed with a giant splash. Someone inside screamed and sputtered.
“We’ve had enough of this town,” she said. Then she grinned at Kyoshi and Rangi, without any attempt to hide the meaning in her stare. “Or at least I have.”
Wong didn’t get the chance to interpret her stage gestures. A loud crashing noise from somewhere near the bazaar punctured the silence of the morning. It sounded like a house might have collapsed. Birds rose into the sky, fluttering in distress.
Rangi frowned and leaned her ear toward the disturbance. “Was that a landslide?”
“I don’t know,” Kirima said cautiously. “But the birds have the right idea.”
Now the clamor of men shouting in horror could be heard over the rooflines. “Never wait to find out what the trouble is,” Wong said, already jogging away from the source. “By then, you’re already too close.”
If that wasn’t ancient wisdom, it should have been. They followed him briskly back toward the inn. Hopefully Lek and Lao Ge were both there, ready to fly. Judging by how fast the ruckus was catching up, they wouldn’t have time to search the town on Pengpeng.
A horrendous snorting, choking sound rolled through the streets. Back in her mansion days, Kyoshi had once seen an ambassador bring a pet poodle monkey that was so inbred in the name of “cuteness” that it had trouble breathing through its miniaturized snout. That was what she heard now, on a scale a thousand times larger. The exhortations of a creature that would never get its fill of air.
Two men ran screaming out of a longhouse, right on their heels. An instant later, the building front exploded, planks and beams torn to shreds by a dark, wiry mass that writhed with fury. A rope or a whip flung out with the speed of a cable under tension and lashed the men across the back. They fell to the ground, skidding on their faces, momentum making their legs scorpion over their heads.
“Tui’s gills!” Kirima shouted. “What is that thing!?”
Behind them was a beast that Kyoshi had never seen the likes of before, a black-and-brown four-legged monstrosity that stood higher at the shoulder than some of the huts. It managed to be hulking with muscle and yet lissome as a serpent at the same time. Claws as long and sharp as sickle blades reaped at the ground, opening damp wounds under the dusty surface.
But the most hideous part of the creature was its dark void of a face. The furry, elongated skull had no eyes, only a flowering pink snout that wriggled with its own fleshy protuberances. It was as if a parasite from another world had attached itself to the nose of an earthly beast and taken control over the entire animal. Two large dark holes, nostrils, sucked air in all directions until they pointed straight at Kyoshi.
She backed away slowly, ineffectually, surprised she could manage that. The nausea of terror chained her, robbed her of survival instinct. Her skin felt wet and cold.
Again, was the only thought running through her mind. Again, Jianzhu had loosed a nightmare on her, an inhuman specter that would drag her away into the darkness, screaming. It had to be him. There was no one else who could have scraped the depths of her fear like this. Somehow, she knew in her bones it was he who taunted her with this living aberration.
A wall of earth shot up between her and the animal. She hadn’t bent it.
“What are you doing?” Wong roared as he followed through on his attack. “Either fight or run! Don’t stand there where we can’t help you!”
