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She gripped the bolt with both hands. It began to glow beneath her firebending. She yanked back and forth rhythmically as the metal grew hotter and hotter. Between her and Lao Ge, they’d come up with the three parts needed for this to work. Sufficient heat to ruin the temper of the iron. Oscillating motions to create fatigue in the structure, weakening it. And last, sheer brute force. Her specialty.
With each successive tug, the metal gave way a little more. Once, Rangi had warned her that heating an object like this without injury took much, much more skill than preventing your own flames from singeing your skin, which was an act so instinctive to Firebenders it didn’t need to be taught. This trick with the iron was prolonged, dangerous contact with a hot surface. Kyoshi felt her hands start to burn.
“You’re almost there,” Lao Ge said with a hint of admiration. “Honestly, I wasn’t completely sure this was possible.”
The metal angled farther and farther off its bearings until, right before the pain became too much to bear, it snapped. The severed ends of the bolt jutted out like red-hot pokers. The heavy door groaned on its hinges.
Kyoshi wrung the heat from her fingers and shouldered the vault open. It was brighter inside than in the hallway. She blinked as she took in her surroundings.
The interior of the large room was not what she expected. Lao Ge had described it as an emergency survival measure. She expected water stores, preserved food, weapons.
It had been redecorated. Someone had removed the necessities for lasting out a siege and replaced them with luxurious carpets, silken pillows. One wall was racked with jugs of wine, not water. Any fool who locked himself inside would have died within a few days.
There was a single figure standing against the far wall. A boy in his nightclothes. Kyoshi made the deduction that Te’s son had converted this room, made for war, into a clubhouse.
“Where is your father?” she said, the words coming out a harsh growl. “Where is Governor Te?”
The boy stared at her with a round, soft face full of defiance. “I’m Te Sihung,” he said. “I’m the Governor.”
Kyoshi looked at Lao Ge. He smiled at her knowingly. This was the test. Whether she was cold-blooded enough to help him kill a boy who didn’t look old enough to shave. She cursed the old man, cursed the stupid youth in front of her, cursed the corruption and incompetence of her nation that allowed such a mistake of authority to occur.
“How old are you?” she asked Te.
“I don’t owe daofei an answer,” he sneered.
She rushed forward, grabbed him by the back of the neck and tossed him out the door of the vault. He bounced on the floor and skidded down the hall. Kyoshi walked around to his head and nudged his jaw with her boot. “How old are you?” she asked again.
“Fifteen, soon,” he whimpered. His attitude had changed dramatically midflight, and the painful landing sealed the deal. “Please don’t kill me!”
“He’s Lek’s age,” Lao Ge said to Kyoshi. “Old enough to know right and wrong. Old enough to shirk his responsibilities, to mismanage, to steal. You saw the state of Zigan. I can still guarantee that you’ll save many lives by taking his.” He noticed Te trying to crawl away and placed his foot on the boy’s ankle, not hard enough to break it, but enough to make it clear he could.
Te gave up on trying to move. “Please,” he said. “My father was governor before me. I just acted in accordance with what he taught me. Please!”
That was all anyone in this world did. What they saw their predecessors and teachers do. The Avatar was not the only being who was part of an unbroken chain.
“You’re not much older than him,” she heard Lao Ge say. “Are you immune to consequence?”
No. She wasn’t. She picked up Te by his lapels. He blubbered incoherently, tears streaming down his face. “Sorry,” she said. “But this is something I decided on, long before I laid eyes on you.”
Kyoshi thrust
an arm behind her and blasted Lao Ge down the tunnel with a ball of wind.
“Rangi, I can’t airbend. You’re not an airbending teacher.”
It was the day before Kyoshi was scheduled to begin training with Kirima, to see if they could lift an entire pond’s worth of water together. Rangi and Kyoshi were off by themselves in a small clearing under a lonely, gnarled mountain tree that had sprinkled its dried leaves over the ground. The two of them walked around in circles, their arms extended, nearly meeting in the center. There was no way they were doing this right.
“I’m not trying to teach you airbending,” Rangi said. “I only want you to create wind, once, before you start waterbending in earnest. It doesn’t have to be perfect.” She spun around and traded the position of her hands. “I think you’re supposed to . . . spiral? Feel your energy spiraling?”
Kyoshi had to pivot awkwardly to go the other way before Rangi collided with her. “How are you okay with amateur, self-taught airbending?”
“I’m not. I just—I just have this irrational fear that if you get too good at waterbending before ever airbending once, you’ll damage the elemental cycle. Back when you used your fans to waterbend, I was ecstatic at first, but then I panicked. I started having nightmares that you permanently locked out your firebending and airbending. I was afraid you’d become a broken Avatar.”
Rangi plunked down on the ground and put her head in her hands. “I know it doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Nothing makes sense anymore. We’re doing everything wrong. Up is down, left is right.”
Kyoshi knelt down and wrapped her arms around Rangi from behind. “But the center doesn’t change.”
Rangi made a little snort. “You know I miss him too?” she murmured. “Master Kelsang. He was so kind and funny. Sometimes when I find myself missing him, I feel guilty that I’m not thinking about my father instead. I wish they were both here. I wish everyone we’ve lost could be here with us, one last time.”
