Identifying P'Li among the crowd would have been easy even without Mako standing beside her. After all, Korra couldn't imagine there were too many scary, skyscraper-sized women with eyes red as rubies blazing in a fire. She heard Asami gasp behind her.
"Yeah," Korra agreed.
Mako greeted them with hugs and made the introductions. P'Li's grip was misleadingly delicate and she spoke in a voice like a fledgling fire, bright and eager and tinged with smoke. The wind tugged at a cloth wrapped around her head.
"So what do we know?" Asami asked as they walked to the parking lot.
Mako pulled a manila folder from under his jacket and handed it to her. Predictably, he began explaining before she could open it. "Everything we need to know is in there. The layout, shift changes, numbers, weak spots. More than enough to bring the place down for good."
Asami's eyes wandered over the contents. "Very good, Mako. I'm impressed."
The detective rubbed his neck. "Well, um, actually you should think P'Li."
"I knew it," Korra said.
"Hey!"
Korra laughed, and Asami giggled beside her. Even P'Li grinned, a reluctant peek of white in the rearview mirror.
They drove through lunch, stopping only for gas and bags of fire flakes to quiet the grumblings in their stomachs. P'Li detailed some of her efforts to scout the White Lotus. Asami's eyes rarely left the contents of the folder Mako had given her. The cap of a pen poked out of her lips, and her hand scratched beside names on lists, drew over blueprints, scrawled prettily across photographs. Her eyebrows raised, lowered, and furrowed, but never stayed still.
She was still working away when P'Li turned onto a path off-road and told them the White Lotus hideout was an hour away. "Figure out something good, Sami?" Korra asked.
Asami turned towards her lover, pen cap still clenched between her teeth. Korra leaned forward pressed their lips together, and took the cap between her own teeth while Asami pulled away. Once she'd slipped the tip of the pen back into its cover, Asami took it from Korra's mouth and placed it back in her purse. Mako groaned at the habit, as he always did. Korra couldn't even remember when it started. Some late night in some office, the kind that blended together so that no single night could be discerned from the rest.
"Don't ever let me borrow a pen from either of them," P'Li grumbled.
She pulled the car onto a flattened patch of dead grass where a notched cliff blanketed the ground in shadow. "We'll approach on foot from here. I have my own plan, but I saw you drawing up your own. So let's hear it."
Asami opened the folder and spread the contents over the hood of the convertible. "I have two, actually. I'd have a third if my airship was here."
P'Li scowled.
"Getting past the gates is no problem. Korra could earthbend us all beneath it easily. The question is where. Based on all this, the best options to emerge are to the east, where the main building is closest to the gates, or near this tinier square building near the stairs. Either approach gives us adequate cover from patrols and the machinegun nest. The route we choose depends on whether you want to search this tinier building or go straight for the objective. That's the choice for Korra. I'm more engineer than war strategist."
"What do you think it is?" Mako asked.
"Armory," P'Li said without hesitation.
"I think so, too," Korra said. "On a corner away from the front gate, near what looks like a target range and a barracks. Has to be weapons or supplies."
"We have to break in," P'Li fixed everyone with her blazing stare. "We need to know how they are armed."
"That's too risky." Mako crossed his arms petulantly, believing he genuinely had a say.
"You don't put your best equipment on the front lines," Asami said. "You put the expendables on the front line and keep your strength in reserve around who or what you most need to keep intact. The armory would give us a hint as to how the guards inside are armed."
Korra smirked. No war strategist? Yeah right. Asami had exposed her to a world of corporate conflict the Avatar had been blind to, and that conflict often involved armed guards and battlefields. "Okay. We wait until nighttime, tunnel under the fence, and come up here. Then what?"
Asami pointed at the blueprint. "Then comes the simple part. Find the structural weaknesses," Asami had marked them with her pen, "and take them apart. I suppose you could do this with your bending, which would be loud, but maybe we could find charges in this supposed armory." She turned to P'Li. "Unless you have some?"
The combustor shook her head.
"Then we either scavenge some from the armory and try to be quiet, or we blast it apart piece by piece. I know Korra can do that pretty effectively. Not so sure about the rest of us."
P'Li removed the cloth wound around her head, exposing the eye tattoo marking her as a combustion bender. Korra watched as she breathed deep, closed her eyes, twisted her head as if she had been punched, and opened them again. A beam of explosive energy sliced through the air, shimmering like asphalt on a hot day. When it reached a section of the cliff above the combustor, it detonated like a cluster of hand grenades. Fractured rock spun wildly down to the ground. A large piece of debris spun wildly towards the convertible, and Korra hurried to stop it.
"You need something destroyed efficiently?" P'Li bragged. "You won't find much better help than me."
The remainder of the afternoon was spent assigning roles and responsibilities. A cool night had begun to spread along the deepening dark when Korra climbed the nearby cliff to meditate. Asami was predictably soon to follow. The crunch of rock and grass beneath light steps brought a flushed smile to the Avatar's face.
"Do you mind some company?" her lover asked.
"Not when it's you." Korra patted the ground beside her and watched Asami kneel gracefully. She did everything gracefully, with a breeding and class disguising the hard woman beneath. Asami Sato was a mystery in that way. Painted, manicured nails hid the dirt beneath. Mascara and eye shadow hid the brilliance that never stopped turning in her brain. Her lithe frame and soft skin hid her strength. Even as well as Korra knew her, it was hard not to look at Asami Sato and assume her as yet another pretty, entitled rich girl, but the Avatar most certainly knew better than that. "I don't suppose you want to meditate with me?"
"No thanks. You know me, I'd rather drive myself crazy going over the details a thousand times and picking apart every aspect of our plan."
"To each their own." Korra closed her eyes and focused on the world around her. Crickets chirped in the distance. The cool of night spread down her forehead, nearly at her nose. The heat of the day still cooked her clothes beneath her. Asami's wrist bounced nervously atop her knee, and she stared nervously at the ground. "You don't trust P'Li or Zaheer?"
Asami didn't deny it. They knew each other too well, could read each other's emotions too easily, like a familiar book each of them knew every sentence of. "I wouldn't say I don't trust them, more that I'm wary of putting so much trust in them."
"I understand, but their goal is ours. Does it really matter why they want to help?"
"Of course it does! What if the Red Lotus are an even worse enemy than the White Lotus?"
Korra opened her eyes and glared at the ground. "There is no such thing."
"You don't know that."
"I know that the Red Lotus didn't imprison me for my entire childhood. I know the Red Lotus didn't take everyone I love from me. I know they are not the ones who beat me, who tortured me, who broke me. I know who did that."
Asami rubbed her hand soothingly up Korra's arm. "I'm not saying you shouldn't accept their help. I'm just asking you to be careful with them. You don't know what they are."
Neither woman spoke. Asami stood to leave, but Korra gently grabbed her wrist. "Do you mind staying? It helps when you're here. I can relax a little better."
Asami sat back down, smiling. "I don't mind."
Alarms blared throughout the compound, enough to be sure every pair of ears within the White Lotus hideout heard them. It seemed to Korra like every mouth in the hideout was shouting; some gave orders, some tried to wake up their friends, some just to shout, not knowing what else to do. Korra avoided a blast of fire from a tall man with a mustache and airbended him hard into a wall. She was trying her best not to shout as well.
The ground rumbled ahead of an explosion that shook the ground and sent a dust storm down the corridor. Stubborn specks invaded Korra's throat before she could turn her back, choking her and making her cough. P'Li emerged from the dust. The air around her head still shimmered from a recent blast. Loud groans moaned throughout the building as it struggled atop what remained of its supports.
"Go!" Korra shouted. "Make sure Mako and Asami are safe! I'll bring this fucking thing down!"
P'Li didn't object to the order. She nodded, turned, and ran off, leaving Korra alone to collapse the White Lotus hideout on her own. Easy. No matter how she separated herself from the White Lotus's teachings, the many ways they had taught her to destroy were an instruction manual tattooed onto her brain.
The hideout was emptied, a serene calmness at the center of a battlefield. It reminded Korra of the medical tents outside Zaofu when Jianjun attacked. She had never seen large scale war before, and had been entirely confused by the sacredness of that sprawl of tents. Jianjun was a brutal, merciless dictator, a man who showed no hesitance to kill the dying on the battlefield, but had never unleashed his weaponry or benders on the wounded back at the medical tents. Within those tiny squares, stinking of death and fear, the only clue of the war outside was the dying.
Korra thought as she destroyed, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. They had snuck past the gates easily, and broken into the armory, which was an armory. They had found explosive charges. Asami had led them into the main building without a sound. They had split up to plant them, and it all went to shit. An alarm blared, a scream echoed through the corridors, an explosion shook the building, and the fight became unavoidable.
One last stubborn fighter attempted to stop Korra, and she easily dispatched him. Asami's blueprint in mind, she navigated to an intersection where four hallways merged into a circular chamber. Two pillars intricately carved to show vines wrapped around them, lotus petals flowering off of the buds, rose from floor to ceiling, and Korra remembered from the blueprint that they continued all the way up to the roof. Within the decorated stone were steel beams.
Korra reached out, feeling for the metal. She grinned. Easy. Her muscled arms yanked, and the steel bent, collapsing the stone. She stomped the ground, shaking the walls around her, and heaved a spike-tipped pillar through the roof above. Falling debris just missed her head. The building sounded its death and began to collapse. Korra ripped a section of steel from a pillar and crushed holes through the walls to her right, opening a path outside.
She emerged outside in a cloud of dust and nearly ran into Mako. "Get away!" she shouted. Fire roared from the soles of their shoes as they rocketed away. A shockwave of wind and dust spread outwards when the building fell.
Mako grumbled while he brushed the dust off his clothes. "Well that went well."
"I'm sorry, but the quiet approach left the building the second those alarms blared."
"Are you blaming me?"
"I'm not blaming anyone! I'm just telling the truth!" Another explosion shook the earth. "We don't have time for this. Let's hurry and find Asami and P'Li before they get captured."
Korra turned and ran before Mako could respond.
P'Li hid behind the wall of the armory, using her combustion blasts to keep three of the White Lotus at bay while they tried to get shots on her with their pistols. Another two crept over the roof of the armory, fist-sized rocks orbiting their hands. One of them readied to toss their ammunition at P'Li, but a long, lithe leg swept him off his feet. His partner managed to toss three stones before an electric glove shocked him, his body twitching as it fell off the roof.
Korra grinned, and then turned pale as snow. She screamed Asami's name, but too late. The bullet missed, but it sent Asami tumbling, her back cracking against the edge of the armory roof. She tumbled head over heels to the ground behind P'Li and lay motionless. Korra began to run. A group of gunshots sent her back into cover. Asami did not move. The last thing Korra remembered was Mako calling her name, the sound drowned as if she was underwater.
When the Avatar faded away and Korra returned, only wreckage surrounded her. To her right, Mako's eyes were turned away. P'Li panted excitedly, eyes alive with awe. Asami stood, a hand pressed to side and tears in her eyes. Korra wiped at a lock of sweaty-plastered hair stuck to her forehead, and her hand came back crimson. A dying gurgle tickled at her ears.
Blood still bubbled weakly from the throat of the man she had impaled with rock. Cooked flesh crackled and spit. Necks were twisted around. Eyes bulged from gaping faces.
"I think we won," P'Li said gleefully.
Mako and Asami would not meet Korra's eyes.
Come dawn, she meditated alone. She had apologized to Asami for losing control, and they would move on together as always, but it would be days before they were close again. Asami was too good a person to simply forget, but also too good a person not to forgive. Korra understood. This was their way. It had been their way since the first time Asami had seen the Avatar unleashed. She would be there for Korra, but only time could make her comfortable again.
Long, unfamiliar strides crunched heavily towards her. P'Li seemed tall as a mountain, her bloody eyes looking down from the peak. "That was impressive, Avatar Korra. You are truly powerful."
Korra frowned. "I feel sick."
"I noticed, and that's why I've come to talk to you, since those other two don't seem willing to say what should be said. You were not wrong to kill those bastards. Not after what they did to you, and not after they hurt the woman you love. You were protecting her. You protected all of us. There is no shame in protecting those you care about by whatever means necessary."
"Killing them isn't the problem, it's how I did it. I didn't have to slaughter them like that. For spirit's sake, did you see what I did to those people?"
"Yes." P'Li grinned. "Like I said, it was impressive."
"Please, leave me alone. I appreciate you trying to make me feel better, but I don't want to feel better. I must reflect on my actions and accept them."
The towering combustion bender shrugged. "I know you are trying to be a better person, but you must also be realistic. You know this enemy you fight. You, more than anyone, understand their ruthlessness and mercilessness. Maybe you cling to some romantic dream of arresting the leaders of the White Lotus, watching them stand trial for their crimes, and living the rest of your days with them in prison, but I know you're not so naïve. The White Lotus are the rich and powerful. They are generals and presidents. They run the largest businesses in the world. They run the world. You will have to kill them. That is the task you assigned to yourself when you began this war. If you want to win, peace and mercy must wait."
Korra closed her eyes as P'Li walked away, trying to think of some way to prove her wrong and knowing she was right.