The Dawn of Yangchen, page 18
The exercise had failed her. She faced the ocean, and she screamed. Clenched-fist, eyes-shut, doubled-over screams of frustrations so great as to rack the form of the Avatar herself.
The waves drowned her out completely. No human could make themselves heard against the unyielding elements. Yangchen screamed again, a meaningless contortion of her lungs, and flung a slice of wind out to sea, tearing a channel in the waves that quickly closed up like a stitched wound. She did it over and over, and despite the unimaginable power she was exerting, opening the sea like the center of a book, the waters sealed to leave no trace of her acts behind.
She exhausted herself and dropped to her knees in the sand, panting. Then she looked up, her long hair whipped into strands across her face, wild and uncomposed. She saw Kavik.
She didn’t seem surprised he’d found her, nor ashamed that he’d witnessed her outburst. She stood up, and while her sides twitched with exertion and her eyes were red, his presence had turned her back to business. Yangchen beckoned him deeper into the stone recess under the cliff.
Kavik followed her. There was room enough for them to stand. She made him come closer and closer, and then when they were at arm’s length, she slammed her feet into a low, powerful earthbending stance.
The movement of her lower body alone caused sand to shoot up, forming walls and baffles around them that muted the roar of the waves. Kavik was awed. The sheer amount of earth moved, the sophistication of the idea, the quickness of the act. It was easy to forget the girl standing before him was the most powerful bender in the world.
She opened her hand and held a flame for light. “You said there was another body, besides your friend’s,” she said. He could hear her now.
“An Earth Kingdom sage with a long Nanyan-style beard,” Kavik said. He snapped his fingers as it dawned on him. “That was the guy who turned on you. Sidao?”
“Sidao.” Yangchen wiped one side of her face, and then the other. “That means I got him killed too. I have two deaths on my hands.”
If she screamed in here, she’d deafen them both. “Do you know what makes an Air Nomad?” she asked.
Was she giving him a koan? Kavik had always assumed it was the freedom to go anywhere in the world. He shook his head.
“It’s the ability to sit down quietly, wherever you are, be it dark room or empty field, and just . . . sit,” Yangchen said. The firelight danced in her eyes. “To sit with yourself, without causing problems or hurting anyone else. That’s it. That’s all it is. The airbending pales in comparison.”
He knew she was exaggerating, but not by much. Human desires were responsible for the position they were in. “I’m sorry,” Yangchen said. Her lips wavered. “I’m sorry about your friend. What happened to him was my fault.”
A few minutes ago, Kavik might have agreed wholeheartedly, pointed out that he was guilty as well, the stain covering them both. But the salt air had cleared the stench of panic and rotting flesh from his nose, after he’d been so certain he’d never smell anything else again. Someone had made the conscious decision to end Qiu’s life. Treating his killers like a feature of the landscape took the blame away from people who deserved to hold it longer.
“We’re pulling out,” Yangchen said. “I can’t keep you in harm’s way. We’ll get you back to your parents and I’ll find you exit passes. You held up your end of the deal as much as you could.”
“No.”
The flame wavered. To their mutual surprise, Kavik had taken hold of her wrist, like she’d done to him in Bin-Er to gauge his honesty. He wasn’t gripping her anywhere near as tightly, but he could still feel her pulse, fluttering and warm.
How could he explain it? There had to be a point beyond the deal, he wanted to say. The world needed the strength of people like Yangchen, who gave without counting. And the deeper he became entrenched with her, the more it felt like he was finding the bits and pieces of himself he’d thought had been scraped off since leaving the North.
“This is an opportunity,” he said instead. “They think they’ve caught the Avatar’s spies. They’ll let their guards down. We have to keep going.”
She shook her head. “You heard Tayagum. The chance you’ve been made is too high.”
“If they wanted to do me in, they would have already.” This morning had been the perfect opportunity to get rid of Kavik were there any suspicions hanging over him. They’d had the setup right there. Jujinta with his knives, the two of them on a boat by themselves. “I think I’m in the clear.”
“You’re talking about a double beat that cost two lives to set up,” she said. “Our path forward would be laid over the backs of the dead. I can’t even seek justice for Sidao and Qiu while you’re undercover because they only way I could have found out about them was through you.”
Yangchen took a deep breath, and the makeshift candle in the makeshift cave rose and fell with her exhalation. “I don’t think I could handle it if something happened to you. I—I can’t lose any more friends.”
Kavik didn’t know how to respond. He waited until the perfect answer came to him. “Let’s sleep on it.”
Dropping the sand barriers and stepping back out onto the beach meant they had to shout in each other’s ears to be heard. “We have to get out of here before the waters rise,” Yangchen said, her heavier clothes in a bundle over her shoulder. “Unless you want to get flung out to sea or into the cliff, I need you to maintain your balance like you’re treading water. You want to stay vertical, not flop on your stomach or back. Now hold your arms up.”
Kavik did as he was told. Yangchen swung her free hand and air began to rush around his midsection. His clothes puffed up like fried dough. His heels left the ground, then his toes.
She had formed an air spout under him. He knew the technique since it was a common way to depict Avatars in paintings, symbolically elevated in power, but he had never heard of an Airbender wrapping a controlled cyclone around someone else. “This, uh, feels dangerous.”
“Only if you get scared.” Yangchen twirled to form a vortex of her own. The two of them rose into the air, wobbling in the eyes of the miniature storms. Her instability looked like the motion of a bough in the breeze, his, the thrashing of a hooked fish.
They reached the height where a fall would break his legs. He made the mistake of looking down and got caught on the inner wall of wind. Kavik circled around and around like a ship in a whirlpool. “I messed up!” he shouted. “I’m scared!”
Yangchen grabbed his hand and merged their spouts. The air pressed them together and she hugged him around the waist. With only one mass for her to worry about, they rose faster, shooting upward and over the edge of the cliff.
The landing was gentler. All their feet touched down at the same time. Kavik’s heart pounded in his chest. “You can let go of me now,” Yangchen said.
When Kavik realized he was embracing the Avatar tightly he flushed with heat and jerked backward. She made no effort to tease him and put her outer robes back on, adjusting the high collar and smoothing the orange sleeves as if she needed to look presentable.
She didn’t follow immediately with the plain cloak that had served as her disguise. “Guard me,” she said, before Kavik could point out the danger of someone identifying her. “Look out for anyone coming.”
Avatar Yangchen stood on the cliff, out in the open, and began to perform her duties. Chanting in remembrance of the dead.
Kavik kept watch as she spoke to the sea. The Water Tribe had their own spiritual customs for the deceased, but he’d seen an Air Nomad lead a funeral procession through the streets of Bin-Er once before. He recognized the way her single voice split into many, nose accompanying throat harmonizing with tongue to say the rites. After a few repetitions, she made a marked shift into lilting, high-pitched notes, a beautiful, wordless song he didn’t know.
Yangchen’s rich voice gave the melody a powerful foundation, until she let it trail away into the wind. “A Nanyan mourning lament at the end, for Sidao,” she explained. “The best I could do for Sidao. Where was Qiu from?”
“I don’t know.” Kavik blinked and found there were tears in his eyes. “Someplace warm. He didn’t want to be cold anymore; that’s why he left Bin-Er.”
His sniffling became a shudder. “I didn’t even know him that well. He was just . . . he was just some guy, right? No one important. But he had to have had parents. Maybe brothers and sisters. And I made him disappear.”
He felt a steadying hand on his shoulder. “I saw him with you,” Yangchen said gently. “And that means he hasn’t disappeared. If he’s part of my memories, then as strange as it is to think, there’s a slim chance an Avatar of future generations will understand who Qiu was, through me.”
Kavik was comforted by the fact that the lowly could at least have this one place in history beside the exalted. “I don’t know why I’m acting like this.” He wiped his face with the back of his wrist. “We weren’t that close.”
“You don’t have to be close to someone to know they deserve better,” Yangchen said. “That’s what being the Avatar is about. That’s what being a companion of the Avatar is about. We fight for people we’ve never met and never will.”
The weight of her words was a comfort where it could have been a burden. “Am I one of your companions?” Kavik said. He knew what they’d told his parents, but it wasn’t the same thing. “I mean, am I really?”
Yangchen smiled. “Most of the world thinks I dictate who serves me and who doesn’t, when nothing could be further from the truth. You’re asking me if you’re my companion? The choice is yours, Kavik. And it always has been.”
It had taken a while, but Kavik finally understood. “I know what I choose,” he said to the Avatar.
THE NUMBERS GAME
In Kavik’s opinion, having to drink tea with someone you didn’t like was one of life’s sharpest little unpleasantries. The rituals, the waiting, the pouring for your partner, all hinged around patterns of polite conversation or meditative, cooperative silence. When you didn’t want the company, it got awkward.
He and Jujinta sat at a table laid out in front of a tea stall that faced the main warehouse row of Jonduri. In the last vestiges of daylight, the outlines of the city were black on a pink sky. They’d ordered the cheapest tea and the largest jug of hot water, so they weren’t close to finishing yet.
Pppppphpphp.
To add to Kavik’s suffering, Jujinta was the type of monster who drank with pursed lips, sucking in air along with the liquid, making noises like a clogged straw. Kavik tried following each sip of Jujinta’s with one of his own in the hopes that the Fire National would have an epiphany and realize you didn’t need to be loud when drinking, but it was futile.
Phpphpppppphppp.
They’d managed not to talk to each other the whole time until now, but Kavik broke and decided words were a lesser evil than the slurping. “What’s your deal?” he asked.
Jujinta finally put his cup down, thank the spirits. “What do you mean?”
Why do you work for the association? Why don’t you have a topknot? What’s up with the rituals you perform at the safe house? “Just making conversation.”
“I don’t have much of a story,” Jujinta said, staring across the street. His manner of speaking was the opposite of a Jonduri intonation: slow, flat, evenly paced where it might have been more natural to change tempo. “After committing a crime, I left my family behind to go seek forgiveness from the spirits. Jonduri is where I ended up. The association keeps me fed, but that’s it. I have no great love for our employers, or our compatriots.”
That much was obvious. “What did you do that was so bad?”
Jujinta raised his teacup back to his lips. “I murdered my brother.”
Kavik couldn’t find anything to say after that.
The sun finished setting behind the mountains. There wasn’t time for him to decide how he felt about partnering with a kinslayer, if Jujinta was indeed telling the truth. Over by the vendor selling grilled meats, four men, association members all, tossed aside their bamboo skewers and got up from their bench. Another three men walking around the corner merged with them to form a single group. Jujinta plunked down a few coins for the tea and got up to follow them.
He’d overpaid, but that was okay, because Kavik needed to steal the jug. He plucked the large clay vessel off the table and tucked it under his arm. It turned out the rules in Jonduri didn’t let people walk around with massive quantities of water without a good reason, which Kavik found blatantly unfair when Firebenders could produce their element and Earthbenders were nearly always walking on it.
Then again, constantly lugging around enough liquid for combat got tiring quickly. Better Waterbenders could make do with less, a single drinking skin’s worth maybe, but if Kavik knew he was heading toward trouble, he liked to have as much as he could carry.
People should know the weight of water, the Avatar had said. Kavik was intimately familiar with it, thank you very much. He cooled the pitcher down to lukewarm—he wasn’t a monster, after all—and fell in at the rear of the group. The raid had begun.
“I don’t like this,” Kavik said. “I’m not a headkicker.”
A few days before, he and Jujinta had gotten their next job from Tael. A simple task. They were to go inside a certain warehouse near the docks at a certain time with a few other association members and “emphatically vacate” anyone they found inside. If folks got roughed up in the process, all the better.
That was about as much detail as low-level runners tended to get. But Kavik had followed the older members around the association safe house, learned how to play Sparrowbones and intentionally lost to them the money that Akuudan and Tayagum reluctantly provided, wheedled out of them the details of their own tasks for that night. The information he brought back to Yangchen formed a much more complete picture when combined with her knowledge.
“You’re going to have to do it,” Yangchen said. “Based on what we know, your group is hitting the primary storage facility for goods going from Jonduri to Bin-Er. Unanimity is most likely inside that very warehouse.”
“Do you remember what we said about the city’s loading crews being unhappy?” Akuudan said, leaning over a rough map of the city he’d drawn himself. “Matters have come to a head. They’ve staged lockdowns of the warehouses used for sorting and rearranging shipments coming in and out of the harbor. The queues inside are growing and growing, the cargo just sitting there. Shipments that should have gone out days ago, shipments that aren’t scheduled to go out for weeks. All there.”
“Outbound shipments are inspected by harbormasters before they’re allowed to leave port, and harbormasters report to their local head of state,” Yangchen said. “To get past the checks, goods must come from their appointed storage spaces and go through their scheduled docks to get loaded onto certain ships. Sometimes they even have to be escorted by specific crew members during the voyage, named in advance. Chaisee follows the post–Platinum Affair security agreements down to the brushstroke and does not let anyone play around with side shipments.”
Kavik stared at her. She caught him doing it and blushed. “What?”
“I don’t understand how an Air Nomad is this familiar with the rules of commerce.”
Yangchen shrugged. “I was an accountant in a past life.”
Funny, Kavik had been one too. The Avatar went on with the plan. “Once you’re inside, your goal is going to be the logbook,” she said. “It contains all of the warehouse information I just mentioned: ship names, handler names, cargo contents, provenance, weights, buyer names, destinations. With that level of information in our possession, we’ll be able to identify Unanimity and intercept it in transit. Without the book, we won’t have any way to tell what’s inside those crates, barring a guided tour from Chaisee herself.”
“I wish we had some clue, any clue, to help us narrow the possibilities down,” Kavik grumbled. Unanimity remained a frustrating blank, a complete void in their knowledge.
Yangchen looked like she’d been saving her retort since dinner with his parents. “It’s nice to want things,” she said, batting her eyelashes at him, fanning pure sarcasm in his direction.
He deserved that.
“You’ll want to move fast,” Tayagum added. “If a fight breaks out, everyone’s going to be trying to secure that logbook. Since the goods can’t move without the records, whoever’s holding them at the end of the night will have all the negotiating power.”
Yangchen pressed a small wooden cylinder with a lanyard into Kavik’s hand. “To keep you safe.”
“Is this a spiritual token?” Kavik asked as he looped it around his neck.
“It’s a bison whistle,” Yangchen said. “Keyed to Nujian. Blow on it if you get into trouble and he’ll hear it; the range should be effective for most of the island. He and I will come to your exact location.”
“But if I do that, it’s mission over,” Kavik said. “Not just for the raid tonight, but the whole thing. Jonduri. Unanimity.” The Avatar flying in to rescue him on her bison would be the most spectacular way to blow his cover in the world, but it would still be blown cover.
“I’m not sending you in without an extraction plan. What did I tell you about losing friends?”
Right. But as touched as he was, his safety wasn’t the issue. “I know I have to do this,” he said. “But it still feels wrong. I’d be going in there to scrap with a work crew. We’re talking about ordinary folks who just want a better deal. These are—”
“These are the exact people I should be helping,” Yangchen said bitterly. “I know. And I can’t. If I make contact with them, Chaisee will suspect we’re circling around that warehouse, and she’ll take extra precautions. And I’m also supposed to be reeling from having my two ‘spies’ taken away from me. For this double beat to work, Chaisee has to believe the Avatar’s been beaten.”
This was costing her, Kavik thought as she hung her head over the planning table they’d set up in the inn. When they’d first met, he thought she rather enjoyed deception. But now that he knew her better, he could see the daylight widening through her seams.
