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There was a grinding noise as they rose into view. Wong had bent them a shelter to hide in below the surface, the same way Jianzhu had survived when she’d first lost control and entered the Avatar State. She wanted to tell them that this time, she hadn’t gone berserk. She’d been fully aware of her powers heightening with whatever vast reserves of energy the Avatar had access to.
She’d been fully aware of killing Xu.
If Rangi wanted to embrace her, she restrained herself well. She and the others stood before Kyoshi, stiff and hesitant. They’d known her, had gotten accustomed to the idea that their inexperienced friend could bend all four elements, but they hadn’t really seen the Avatar before, until now.
“Don’t do this,” Kyoshi said. “Please. If you act like this, I won’t be able to . . .” Her knees buckled.
Not this time, she thought to herself. Stay awake. Be present for what you have done. Look at your actions instead of turning away.
“Kyoshi, your hands,” Rangi said, aghast.
She held them in front of her face. They were riddled with burns from where the lightning had struck her fans.
“We have to get her to a healer!” Kirima shouted, her sharp face already losing its edges as Kyoshi’s vision blurred.
“Kyoshi!” Lek said, suddenly close to her, propping her up as best he could from underneath her arm, the last person among them who should have tried to hold her up physically. “Kyoshi!”
/> She lasted less than two minutes before succumbing to the pain.
MEMORIES
They brought her back to Zigan. The other details were less clear.
At first Kyoshi had tried to refuse the medication thrust upon her while she writhed on a wooden bed in some dark building. She remembered the heady sweet state that Jianzhu had put her in before summoning a horror from the deep, before murdering Yun, and she resisted any attempts to cloud her awareness.
But then her hands betrayed her by sending waves of blanketing, enveloping agony into the rest of her body. Her resolve broke, and she gulped bitter concoctions from wooden bowls without questioning their source. The medicine split her mind from the pain like she’d cut off Te’s palace from the daofei. The injury was still there, gnashing its teeth, but she could watch it from a distance.
The images after that came in the acts of a play. Wong fussing over the sunlight and furniture in her room, unable to do anything else. Rangi curled up into a miserable ball. Many times there was an old Earth Kingdom woman Kyoshi didn’t recognize, her wrinkled head floating atop a cloud of voluminous skirts. She guided Kirima in her amateurish water healing by referring to medical charts, pointing out where over Kyoshi’s scorched hands the cooling water should be directed. The lack of confidence, the worry in Kirima’s face, during these sessions was endearing.
After some time had passed, she felt the most recent dose of medicine fade away without feeling the screaming need for more. Clarity infiltrated her skull again. Her thoughts were able to focus on the only person in the room now, the rest of the group taking a rest shift. The wheel had spun and landed on Lek.
“You’re here?” she said. Her tongue was fuzzy in her mouth.
“Good to see you too, you giant jerk.” He sat in a nice chair that didn’t belong. By her best guess, this room was in the abandoned part of town and had been set up as a makeshift hospital. An herbalist’s cabinet with many small drawers had been lugged in, drawing tracks of dust on the floor.
“How long as it been?”
“Only three days or so.” Lek flipped through a textbook of acupuncture points. Kyoshi had the suspicion he was looking for anatomical illustrations. “You’re recovering fast. We got lucky. Mistress Song is one of the best burn doctors in the Earth Kingdom. She lives down the street a couple of blocks.”
That must have been the old woman who popped in and out of Kyoshi’s waking dreams. “Then what’s she doing in a place like Zigan?” Skilled doctors were in high demand, more likely to be held inside the walls of manors like Te’s.
It seemed like Kyoshi would never be able to get more than a handful of sentences out without making Lek angry. “Trying to make a home,” he said, misinterpreting her surprise as disdain. “Getting caught in place while her village changes and decays around her.” He got up in a huff. “I’ll go get Rangi. You can have someone worth talking to.”
“Lek, wait.” They’d gone on too long as misguided rivals. She’d decided not to let her parents have any more hold over her life, and that started by being civil with the boy they’d chosen to spend their last years with instead of her.
He actually listened this time, crossing his arms and waiting.
Wasn’t expecting that. Kyoshi found herself at a loss for words. They had nothing to formally apologize to each other over. She ran through a list of things to say.
“You’re . . . really good at throwing rocks,” she blurted out.
How articulate. If her hands weren’t mittened in bandages, she would have bit her nails. She had no choice but to invest further. “What I mean is, you saved me back at Te’s palace, and I never had the chance to thank you. You were incredible back then. How did you learn to shoot like that?”
She hoped the flattery, which was completely genuine and deserved as far as she was concerned, would make him smile. Instead his face grew old before her eyes. He tossed the book aside.
“Do you know what a gibbet is?” he said after a hefty pause.
Kyoshi shook her head.
