A storm flooded out their beach. Katara kept the water off the men while they took their equipment to higher ground and disassembled the tents to be moved. Aang, eager to be helpful, carried more than anyone else with the assistance of airbending and won himself commendations. The bay raged like open ocean. All at once the water pulled further back than normal, and Katara braced as a singular large wave reared up. If it crashed as it was, their equipment would be washed into the harbor, so she dug her heels into the swamped beachsand and shielded their area. To either side the water impacted the cliffs—such storms were the origin of those high perpendicular cliffs—and eroded out chunks of stone, but from her as center a demi-circle of beach was protected. Ahead she could see the water pressed as if against glass, dark murky teal strewn with debris and seagrass, and grit her teeth to hold the immense power back from the encampment. The peak lasted only a moment. As with every wave, the baywater retreated back again and alleviated her burden. Panting, she waited and held watch. The next waves lessened. By that time the evacuation was complete and she was called up to higher ground.

"What about the ships?"

"They're designed for this."

With the tents repitched above on the grassy overlook, Katara helped everyone dry off, and a number of the men joined them and her father in his tent, which was the largest and designed to hold meetings. They waited while Aang prepared tea. With the storm had come an awful, unseasonal chill, and everyone was desperate for warmth. "It's early in the season for this. The worst storms come in late summer and autumn." It was late spring, a time which should have been mild and pleasant. "This might harm harvests."

"Let's hope not. Food is precious enough as it is. A famine would ruin us."

"Well, thank the spirits for your daughter, Hakoda," said one of the men. "I've never had the chance to see such magnificent waterbending. Those firedevils have taken too much from us."

When the storm relented they were still hesitant to move the tents and equipment back to the beach, realizing that the small number of sandbags they had prepared was pitifully insufficient for what the bay could hurl at them. Around their encampment they constructed vine panels for camouflage, which both Sokka and Aang enjoyed helping with. The latter was good with his hands and made the best configurations in truly organic patterns. Sokka, meanwhile, had to be scolded that vines did not grow in squares and geometric shapes, and he pouted while undoing hours of his handiwork.

In a few days the trio stood with her father as they bade farewell to the rest of the group. They took one of the ships, knowing her father and brother were brilliant sailors and could manage by themselves. The larger warships were more difficult to maneuever than a canoe, but even with only the two they managed to sail perpendicular to the tide north up the bay, then entered the river delta to proceed upstream. The two men made minute adjustments to the sail and were able to catch the wind and assist their climb against the current, but without oarsmen they wouldn't have made good time without Katara's waterbending to help them along. Aang, watching her and taking advice, was able to mimic her movements so they could switch off for breaks. The banks were lined with reeds, and in the shallows lived colonies of frogs and dragonflies. Momo zipped around the deck chasing bayflies to snack on, to which Aang pulled a face and stuck his tongue out in disapproval. Sokka teased that his 'fruititarian' lemur turned out to be an omnivore.

They reached Full Moon Bay in three days and docked next to a ferry being used for refugees. It was built of medium-stained wood framed with black lacquer beams, while the ship's superstructure was a golden-roofed pagoda. It looked nothing like the all-metal Fire Nation ships, with their sharply jutting prow and prominent turrets, nor the comfortable, softly-curving Water Tribe vessels. The shore was barren rock and a large stone wall had been built up to the edge in pale stone, perfectly smooth, and rising to the height of a mountain. That was the outer wall of the city. The shadow it cast was enough to cover the entire settlement at the South Pole.

They were greeted by a security guard and Hakoda explained who they were and their intention, not mentioning the Avatar. Her father had been through there before and was known as an allied leader, so with little delay the group was led to a depot with tracks set into a long, straight groove in the stone floor. "We have to wait for the next train. They just took the last group of travelers in at noon."

Arched columns held up the vaulted roof. Instead of windows, they had green lanterns atop pillars which formed seating clusters at their base. Momo flew up and tapped against the glass encasement. "They're filled with luminescent crystals," explained Katara to her brother who was curious. "It's common in the region—they have caves filled with these crystals which they mine."

"I prefer sunlight," said Aang.

Cart vendors brought them tea served in cups formed by hardened, glazed leaves, and bowls of hot noodles with simmered vegetables and grated ginger. The tiled floor ended at the far wall, which was a marquee-decorated archway into which the tracks led through a long, pitch-dark tunnel. Her brother had pulled a deck of cards from somewhere, possibly gained from a vendor in the side aisles when she hadn't been looking, and he, Aang, and her father were playing a game with them spread across the floor. Just as Sokka was getting excited about an upcoming win, Momo came down to see what they were doing and landed in the center of the cards, scattering them all. "You!" screamed her brother, and the lemur fled to a column, clung to the side, and watched her brother shout and wave his boomerang at him menacingly. Aang gave the lemur a thumbs up.

People began to filter in from the entrance, indicating another ferry had arrived. Strangers began to marvel at the flying lemur, who climbed atop the crystal lamp with his tail curled up shyly, and Katara reminded Aang to keep his arrows hidden. With his hair grown in to a short crop all that was left was a bandana to cover his forehead and a high collar to protect his neck from view. After a few hours of relaxation the ground began to vibrate and they heard a sound like two stones gliding against each other. The stone traincars arrived and came to rest at the end of the line. They watched passengers deboard until they were given the clear to enter by the staff. Aang and Sokka both marveled at it and pestered the worker about how the technology worked, to which they were told, "Earthbending," and their faces fell in disappointment—one would never earthbend and the other couldn't move so much as a pebble yet.

"Stop embarrassing me and act civilized," Katara told the pair as she took her seat. "You can't hound random workers about every question you have. They have a schedule to keep and jobs to do."

Sokka replied, "It's customer service. I'm the customer, and answering my questions is a service."

"You didn't even pay for your ticket."

Upon departure the earthbenders at the back platform propelled the train along the track. At the other end of the tunnel they broke into evening sunlight on a high elevated track above farmland. "This is all inside the walls?" asked Aang.

"Yes. This farmland is what enabled them to survive the siege. About a decade ago the Fire Nation sat outside their walls for six hundred days, unable to break through but unwilling to be pushed back. If not for the outer wall they would have starved and been forced to surrender."

He pulled his knees up in what Katara had learned meant he was struggling with regret. Hakoda, seated next to him, put a hand on his shoulder and told him it was alright, like her father saw Aang as his own son that quickly.

#

'Your own father burned you and cast you out. He doesn't even want you.'

'I do want you to come home. Who can I trust more than family, after all?'

'Remember who you are. Everything I've done I've done to protect you.'

The explosion tore the ship apart; he was burning again and he was drowning.

Zuko woke up with his stomach in a knot, staggered to the corner of the dormitory room, and vomited out a coarse stream of the fruit and fish that had constituted supper. He coughed and spat and wiped the sweat from his brow. This was the third night in such a state.

The washroom still had flowing water, fed from a mountain stream, and he had never been more thankful for good engineering. Swishing the water through his teeth to get rid of the taste, he felt like throwing up a second time. Outside in fresh air it was still pitch black, and in a temple built on top of a mountain it was too easy to misjudge the darkness and plummet with a misstep. This wasn't his home and he couldn't stay there forever, but the problem was he didn't know what could be considered home for him now. The ship, his for six years, was gone. His banishment had somehow turned to attempted assassination and he couldn't return to anywhere he would be recognized. Zhao wanted to kill him and Azula would.

If the airbender had fled Gao Ling, Zuko had thought he would go to the eastern temple but had evidently been wrong. He smoothed a hand over his mostly-healed injuries, finding sore spots and new scars but nothing that would limit travel.

He returned to bed but didn't sleep, and passed the time until morning trying to think. His breakfast papaya was sickly sweet. He made a face and washed it down with water, then wondered if he'd be better off grabbing a monkey to roast. A troop of them had taken over the orchard and assaulted him every time he went to gather fruit. Prodding with his chopsticks, he flicked aside a clump of stringy innards laced with seeds and dug out the next chunk of coral-pink fruit. The air bison was enjoying his much more and ate it seeds and all, skin and all, by the half-dozen.

By noon he had a travel kit put together from items scavenged at the temple. Enough fabric had survived moth and flame to form a rucksack large enough to fit basic cooking equipment and one well-preserved blanket. Beside it he'd used netting to gather a large amount of fruit, though no quantity would ever suffice for the air bison's appetite. He stood in the washroom in front of a damaged mirror and tugged at his hair. When up it was a mess, but, down, the phoenix tail had grown ratty and out of place. Memory of Azula's last words to him burned through as he lifted the knife, lowered his head, and grabbed the long section of hair. At first he hadn't known if he could go through with it, but the knife was sharp—it was the pearl dagger his uncle had given him, which had survived the explosion with him—and it cut through smoothly. The black locks lay across his palm before he let them fall to the floor. Uniformly short, choppy, and untended, his hairstyle looked awkward and peasant-like. His mother had loved his hair. Fond memories surfaced of her brushing it out by her own hand, tying it up with such gentleness that not one pull or snag could he recall. He turned from the mirror and went to the bison. With the luggage secured at the saddle with a tarp and cords, he went to the front and sat holding the reins. "Find your owner, bison. Find the Avatar."

In the past days the animal, seeing what vacant desolation his home had become, had grown lethargic and remorseful. Even without words Zuko could still understand by how the animal called for its friends and went unanswered, searched for Air Nomads and found no one alive, and the bison, too, was ready to leave. They kicked off.

The bison chose north without his aid. Zuko wondered if it was just a whim, or if he really could know where his owner was. Within an hour they left the coast of the island and sailed across a stretch of sea, a bay forming to their west and open ocean to the east.

#

Aang glared at the fist-sized rock in front of him, thinking of all the things he would like to do to it—hurl it over the wall with airbending, cut it into pieces with water slices and smash all the little pieces with ice blocks, throw it at the teacher and nail him in the forehead—but what he did was widen his horse stance yet again when barked at. His face was red from exertion and the posture was uncouth and humiliating. The earthbending students in Gao Ling had made it look easy, but it had been three days and Aang couldn't get a pebble to wobble. As he was concentrating he almost felt the stone in his mind's eye as he prayed to his past lives for their assistance; Momo, at that moment, landed on his head. He sighed, stood up straight, and took the lemur up in his hands. "Are you bored, buddy?" He went to the refreshment table and poured himself a cup of water, then stared at it in the tin cup. "Why is waterbending so easy but I can't even push a rock?"

In evening training concluded for the day and he was escorted by carriage to a restaurant they'd been recommended. The steamed bun on his plate looked just like his new nemesis, the training rock. While the siblings both seemed to be enjoying themselves, he'd had nothing but disappointment. Sokka was offering a bite of chili-oil fish to Momo trying to prompt the lemur to eat it while his sister glared in disapproval. Aang set his chopsticks down and turned to her. "Hey, Katara? I was wondering about something."

At that moment their father entered the restaurant and Katara stood up to wave and get his attention. "Katara!" he said and smiled as he sat down. "I heard my clever daughter saw some patients today."

She poured a cup of tea for him and recounted her day, which was spent healing clients. Sokka could barely bite his tongue long enough for her to finish before telling his father what he'd learned in lecture—he'd been sitting in on classes at the university with special permission. Aang ate glumly while listening, hoping he could avoid being noticed, but finally Sokka ran out of steam and Hakoda turned to him. "Aang, what about your day? Have you made progress on earthbending with the military trainers?"

"Well, maybe," he muttered.

"It might take a while, but keep at it. No one masters anything in one day."

In the evening he sat with a scrap paper and brush in front of him. His last recommendation from the teacher had been to draw landscapes and find the lines and forms of the earth in them to solidify his attachment. He had been raised with the monks to eschew attachments. He fidgeted back and forth, staring at the blank paper, trying to remember some kind of scenery to draw. The brush felt clumsy in his fingers as he dipped it in the inkwell and took it up to hold over the paper with intention. He began trying to draw a mountain, had difficulty compressing his memories of a vivid, three dimensional place into just a few lines, and smeared it around trying to get the impression right. He'd drawn the air temple, and his brush hovered over the courtyard the sky bison were always shepherded in. When he tried drawing one, the ink soaked through the fibers of the paper too far, and his bison became an indistinct blob.

"Aang?" she called at the doorway. He wanted to tell her not to come in but couldn't speak in time. "Is something wrong?" Katara walked over to him as he hid his face, trying to suppress his expression and blink away tears. "What are you drawing?"

"The earthbending teacher told me to draw a landscape."

"This is the Southern Air Temple, isn't it?" She lifted the paper to look. "Listen, I've asked the guide to check around for us. If anyone has seen a sky bison in a zoo or market or anything else, they'll tell us. Those firebenders might have just left him behind, too. That ship wasn't very big."

"Appa would have found me."

"The world is a big place." She tried changing the subject by asking about his lessons, which he didn't want to speak about either. "Do you want some tea?"

"No. I want to leave this city. I hate it here, and I hate earthbending."

"You are an earthbender already. All of your past lives have mastered it. It's only been a few days, just give it time."

"Okay," he said, unable to reply with anything else. She let him be alone and went back to her family. Aang tried the exercise again with a new paper, but couldn't picture any other landscape as clearly, and after an hour holding the brush against the inkwell he gave up and crumpled the paper.

#

The two passed a mountainous strip of land separating Chameleon Bay from the ocean and the bison still pulled northward. The eastern coast of the continent was bare plains and high, weather-worn cliffs with no major settlement other than the great city which housed the majority of their population. Zuko wondered if the bison could really be headed for Ba Sing Se. They had a long distance until then, and he didn't want to face that possibility—if the Avatar was sheltering in the city, he had no easy way to get to him. In afternoon he directed the bison towards the shore of the bay, where a port settlement held the chance of food, though he would need to land out of sight to not draw attention. In the bay were ships of different makes in passage, including a fishing boat and a wooden trading vessel which merchants used. He had no money and nothing to trade, but could fashion a line and borrow their dock to fish from, at least. Groggy and hungry, he left the bison in the woods and entered the village on foot. There were only a few houses, a warehouse, and the pier. In the time he'd taken to land the bison, the same wooden vessel had pulled up to dock and was now anchored in the water quietly. With a rudimentary fishing rod cobbled together from things he had found at the air temple, he took a seat at the edge of the dock where he wouldn't be bothered and tossed an earthworm-baited hook into the water. His stomach growled fifteen minutes in with not so much as a nibble.

A voice behind him spoke. "What a sight. To think royalty could be reduced to fishing like a peasant." Ice in his veins, he leapt up already feeling a chill of anticipation of blue flames. His sister was a few paces away leaning against a crate with her arms folded. "Hungry, Zuzu? Shall I treat you to dinner?"

"Azula!" Feeling crazy, he scanned the bay wondering if he could have been so obtuse as to overlook a Fire Nation vessel at dock, but there was only the wooden merchant's ship. "Where the hell did you crawl out from and what do you want?"

"Such language." She smirked at him. The flame decoration was removed from her hair, and in its place was a red-lacquered ornament with silver filigree. Her usual outfit had been replaced by an Earth Kingdom style informal dress. To his question she gestured to the wooden ship. "What else would I have arrived on? I certainly didn't walk here."

"You tried to kill me!"

"I've been watching you fish for a quarter hour. If I wanted you dead, I had plenty of time. Yet, here you are, unharmed."

"How did you find me?"

"Let's have dinner if we're going into a long conversation. Look, it's made of wood—I'm certainly not going to firebend at you on a wooden ship, now am I? Stop being prickly and come inside." He still hesitated, and she paused, looked back, and stated, "My husband isn't here. I came alone." Leaving the fishing rod on the dock, he followed her up the gangway against the urge in his stomach telling him to run. There were no soldiers onboard, only a typical sailing crew and