I woke up a couple hours after sunrise. I still had like three different worries in the back of my mind: Asami, Dark Korra, and Izumi, but I felt better than I did the night before. I rolled over hoping to snuggle with Asami for a few minutes before I got up, but she wasn't there. That was disappointing, but I wasn't really surprised. When we slept together, she almost always woke up before me. I usually found her primping in the bathroom or making breakfast or something. I groaned into my pillow, then rolled out of bed to go find her.

She wasn't in the bathroom that was connected to the guest room we'd slept in. Her pajamas were there though, she must have already gotten ready for the day. I took a minute to brush my teeth and get dressed before heading out into the rest of the palace. I wandered for a few minutes before I found a staff member to direct me to the kitchens. Hopefully Asami hadn't insisted on cooking breakfast herself, she wasn't a bad cook, but she'd have to be crazy to turn down professional chefs. Also, she was kind of a bad cook. She'd always had people cooking for her, so she'd only started learning when she started staying over at my place. She was pretty good at what she knew how to make, but she didn't know how to make much.

The chefs told me they hadn't seen her though. I wasn't sure what else she could have been doing. Maybe checking the palace out? I thought she'd want to do that with me, though. A bunch of other ideas popped up. Yoga? Up on the roof where she found me? Went to check on Izumi? Just ran out to get something and was already back at the room? My Asami worry crept to the front. I grabbed a roll and started heading back toward our room.

As I made my way up a set of stairs, someone called me back down. "Avatar Korra! We've been looking for you!" I stopped and turned back to the attendant on the floor below. "The Fire Lord's condition has started slipping. A team of healers is working to keep her stable, but Lord Zuko is adamant that she requires your assistance at once!"

The Izumi worry took over. I nodded and leaped back down the stairs, cushioning my landing with airbending. "Take me to her." I followed him to what felt like the opposite end of the palace and down another floor before he stopped at the door to an interior room. I guessed they wanted to avoid windows after the last attack. I stepped inside and found seven people huddled around the examination table that Izumi was on: four waterbenders, two firebenders, and Lord Zuko. "What's her status?"

One of the waterbenders spoke up first. "Her heart rate's become erratic."

"And her energy's started to fade. What she has left is concentrating near her center," a firebender added.

"Everybody needed to keep her going right now, keep doing what you're doing. Everybody else, give me some space to work." I stepped up next to the table as the other benders shifted around and to the sides of the room. Zuko took a step back, but didn't let go of his daughter's hand.

I centered my energy and reached out to Raava again. Energy flowed into my limbs and my eyes lit up as I took hold of the elements, trying to feel Izumi's energy through them. I was prepared to try to bend her energy directly if I needed to, but doing that could be dangerous to both of us, especially if I wasn't positive that what I was doing would heal her. The firebender was right though, her energy was seriously fading. The only really active area was in her stomach. I focused my energy there and started examining her spirit more closely.

The first thing I noticed was how out of balance her fire chakra was. Its core seemed to be holding up okay, but its energy was completely chaotic. I dug in a little deeper and quickly found out why. I knew that the stomach was where most of a person's chi rested, but her chi wasn't at rest at all. There was so much negative energy there, it was almost ripping itself apart without enough positive energy to balance it.

I pulled up some extra water from the basin below the table and formed a helix around us. As I began trying to purify the spiritual energy in her chakra through the waterbending, I monitored my connection to her closely. Light flowed up the streams of water, but it didn't seem to be having any major effect on her chi. I shifted my focus back to the physical world and saw the same light making its way up her body. I immediately let the bending drop. Purifying her entire spirit would throw her just as out of balance as she already was, just in the opposite direction. She might not survive that either. Apparently that waterbending technique wasn't precise enough. I was going to have to try the only other way I knew to fix her energy imbalance.

The Avatar State faded and I looked up to Lord Zuko. I noticed that everyone else was staring at me and had taken an additional step or two back. Zuko's face fell. "It… didn't work."

"No. The technique I learned from my uncle can't focus as tightly as I need it to. There's a lot of negative energy stuck in her fire chakra and it's stopping the rest of her energy from flowing."

"I was afraid so. To redirect lightning, it's crucial to channel the energy through the stomach to give it a strong chi base and help it avoid the heart. She must have held the energy there too long and couldn't direct all of it out."

"But I think I know another way. With Raava's help, I can bend spiritual energy directly, sort of like what Avatar Aang did to your father. If I can connect with her chakra, I can bend the excess energy out and she should stabilize. I'm willing to try it, but it's dangerous. If her spirit resists while she's unconscious, it would turn into a battle of willpower. I know I'm stubborn, but this is her fire chakra we're talking about, it's all about willpower." I didn't mention that I'd also been dealing with quite a bit of shame just the night before. "If I'm not strong enough, it could tear her up even more, or I could lose control of the energy. Anything could happen at that point. What do you think?"

Zuko put his hand to his chin and closed his eyes. He knew Aang, so he knew that this was dangerous for me too, not just Izumi. After a long moment, he sighed and opened his eyes. "I can't think of another way to remove the energy. Another lightning strike might force it through, but it could just as easily add more to the block, or cause other damage. And if her energy doesn't start flowing again soon, she won't be with us long. Choosing to not have you try is choosing to watch my daughter die. I couldn't ask you to risk yourself, but if you're willing to, it would mean the world to me."

"Okay. Let's do this." I pulled on Raava's energy again and put my hand on Izumi's stomach. I could feel her spirit and I could see the pools of energy inside, her chakras. They were all so dim, except for the one in her stomach. It was swirling and pulsing like a storm. I reached out with my spirit and touched hers, but she didn't respond. Raava's light surged through me and I tapped into our chi as I started to bend Izumi's energy.

That was when I finally got a response. Her spirit lashed out and locked onto mine, and I felt it pushing against me, trying to force me out. It caught me off guard and I faltered, but I caught myself and pushed back. I dug in harder, trying to get a more complete connection to her spirit. Her will was incredible. She was fighting to survive and as far as she knew, I was a threat to that. I lost ground bit by bit until her spirit started pushing into mine instead. I tried to focus on the fact that I was here to save her life, that if I lost my spirit could be ripped apart, anything to strengthen my will. But she was still winning.

This wasn't going to work. She was running off of instinct, rational thought wasn't going to beat it. I could still back out now and be safe, but Izumi would be lost. Then I got an idea. I wasn't sure I'd be able to back out if I tried it. It was a terrible idea, but it felt right. I took a deep breath to steady myself, pushed back one last time, then opened my spirit wide.

Izumi's immediately came darting in, pushing straight for my core. I was hoping she'd stop when she didn't meet resistance, that I could connect with her in peace instead of fighting for control, but her spirit barreled ahead like a train. I was terrified now. I started to pull back, hoping I could still duck out and escape. But then she stopped. Her spirit reached out, not to push against mine, but to feel it. Being immersed in my spirit like that, she felt Raava's light. She connected with my spirit and slowly pulled back, back into herself, and took me with her. I found myself surrounded by the energy in her chakra. She was helping me.

I reached out and focused on my bending. The energy flowed into my spirit, and I watched as her chi slowly returned to normal. I'd never taken energy from someone else before. It felt like it was made of all the elements: grasping it took the precision of metalbending, but it flowed like water, was hot and alive like fire, but also felt like an extension of myself, which was the only real way to bend air. I felt it flow through my own chakras, and when the last of it was pulled from Izumi, I disconnected from her spirit and returned to the physical world.

I felt a surge of energy flowing through my hand from Izumi's body. It made my whole body feel electric, and it connected to the energy spread through every corner of me. I concentrated my chi and the energy followed it, shifting through my limbs as I directed it out my other arm. A small bolt of lightning shot out of my fingertips and into the wall, leaving a large scorch mark but no other damage. The glow in my eyes faded and I let my arms fall to my sides.

My heart was racing as I grinned. "That should do it," I told the healers and Zuko. "Her chakra's all cleared up. It'll still take her a while to build her energy back up, and it won't help whatever physical damage the lightning did to her, but she should be able to pull through and start recovering now."

I suddenly found myself in a tight hug from Zuko. I hugged him back. "Thank you so much, Avatar Korra. You've saved my daughter's life. The Fire Nation is in your debt."

I pulled back from the hug and smirked at the old master. "Just glad I could help." He bowed to me and I returned it before heading for the door. The healers needed to work and I need to... right! I turned back as the worries in my head switched places again. "Hey, real quick, have any of you seen Asami? She wasn't in the room when I woke up, and the chefs hadn't seen her."

"No, I'm sorry, we've all been attending to Izumi since early this morning. Surely she can't have gone far."

"Does the palace have a gym? Or a training room? That's my next guess."

"In the basement. Take the stairs at the end of the hall, it'll be the first on your left."

"Thanks."

I followed his directions down and found the training room easily enough. I pulled the door open to a room full of mats and training dummies, even a couple of firebenders sparring, but no Asami. I wondered if I'd missed her while I was working on Izumi. I made my way back up to our room, asking every staff member I passed on the way if they'd seen her, but none of them had. How could nobody have even seen her? The Asami worry was growing.

She wasn't in the room when I got there, and nothing had even been moved so I knew she hadn't come back to it and left again. She wasn't on the roof either. I was running out of ideas. I finally ran into a guard who said he'd seen her in workout clothes with a towel over her shoulder headed down to the basement early this morning, but hadn't seen her since. I headed back down there as fast as I could and interrupted the firebenders who were training.

"Excuse me, I'm looking for someone. Did either of you two see a woman in here earlier? A little taller than me, long black hair, green eyes?"

"Yeah, she was in here pretty early doing some yoga when I came down for my morning weightlifting," the shorter of the two said. "She was only here for like 15 minutes after I got here though. A guy came in and interrupted her, gave her some kind of message all hush-hush, and they ducked outta here pretty quick."

This was starting to get pretty suspicious. "Who was the messenger? What did he look like?"

"I think he's on the Fire Lord's advisory board. Tall guy, forties, real buff. He's in here dang near every day, but I never asked him his name. Has a pretty distinctive mustache though, connects straight to his sideburns but he keeps his beard shaved."

"Thanks. If you see her again, could you tell her the Avatar's looking for her?"

"Yeah, sure thing."

I headed for the exit and heard the taller guy whisper, "The Avatar? Was that her?" As I got closer to the door, I metalbent the handle and pushed it open with airbending, just to give them something more to talk about. Then I ran up the stairs. I had to find Zuko again and figure out who this mustache guy was. Maybe he'd have some idea why the advisory board would want Asami.

I didn't even make it to the second floor before another staff member stopped me. "Avatar Korra! There's a radio for you!"

"What do you mean it's for me? Nobody's even supposed to know I'm here. You told them I wasn't here, right?"

"I tried, but the caller insisted that they knew you were. They said that one 'Asami Sato' needed to speak with you immediately."

I wasn't sure whether to feel relieved or panicked. After the previous day, panic was the default. "Take me to the radio."