Chapter 16

Counting time from the evening her father was taken by the Dai Li was how the girl measured her days.

Three months after her father was arrested, she worked at the Yi Shan Laundry House every day after school, scrubbing linens in scalding hot water until the streets grew dark. Seven months after her father disappeared, her mother took on a tenant to help pay the rent, a gossipy Earth Kingdom refugee who took over the girl's bedroom and wouldn't stop chattering away. One year after her father was imprisoned, an unexpected visitor breezed his way into the laundry.

The sleeveless tunic he wore, dyed in the gray-green of juniper, looked no different from the attire of the other patrons who stepped out of the Middle Ring into this run-down district of Ba Sing Se. Despite being nestled on the third floor of a shabby tenement building, Yi Shan Laundry House was clean and ran neatly and efficiently. The establishment attracted more prosperous citizens with its stellar service, low prices, and location near the stop for the train that ran to and from the Middle Ring.

Much of the laundry's success was due to Yi Tai Tai's meticulous sense for business and organization. Her sharp tongue and rigid expectations played no small role, either.

The girl learned to speak softly and step quickly around Yi Tai Tai. If the old washerwoman found that the girl had folded wrinkles into a pair of clean trousers, she would force the girl to undo all her work and re-fold the garments until she was satisfied. Spilling water or wasting alkali or taking too long to scrub was punishable by a tongue-lashing or a bamboo switch to her legs. The girl could never seem to do anything to make Yi Tai Tai happy—she was either too quiet or too loud, too timid or too bold, too slow and clumsy or too hasty and sloppy.

But Yi Tai Tai wasn't the only person who made the girl shrink back into herself. The older girls pitied her at first, but soon began to treat her like a nuisance who was always underfoot. Her plaited hair loops and glossy braids were the subject of stares and whispers. Offhand comments comparing her skin to the dark color of cacao drinks brought an uncomfortable flush to her cheeks.

So when the new patron entered the laundry one year after the girl's father disappeared, her heart leaped. Even though the boy sported the smart dress of the Earth Kingdom merchant class, he had a face not so different from hers. The kind of face she used to see in her village back home, and now among the shanties in her neighborhood. This must be the Water Tribe boy whose family had moved to the Middle Ring.

He looked up as Ling used a hooked pole to retrieve several sets of tunics and trousers from a clothesline near the ceiling. It was then, when he tilted his head up, that the girl saw him—the boy from a year ago who had huddled in the courtyard, staring up at the Dai Li. His wolf tail was gone, and his hair was now closely cropped and parted to the side, but he was that same boy.

"Tch! Why do you keep spilling water?" Yi Tai Tai snapped.

The girl whipped her head around.

Yi Tai Tai frowned, a familiar expression on her thin lips that struck fear into the girl's heart. "What kind of Water Triber are you if you can't even handle water properly?"

A puddle at the base of the girl's tub trickled toward her feet. There was no way the girl could have splashed water onto the floor—she wasn't even touching the tub. But Yi Tai Tai didn't seem to care. The washerwoman whipped out the bamboo switch and pointed the rod straight at the girl.

"Stop daydreaming and clean up that mess!"

The girl cowered before the rod of bamboo. But thankfully, instead of striking her right away, Yi Tai Tai turned to address the Water Tribe boy.

The boy who had traded her father for his own father's safety with a lie.


"Avatar Aang!" Takit called breathlessly as he approached, tromping through the snow. "Avatar Aang, we found the spirit in the caves!"

Takit's words yanked Aang fully into the present. For the first time that day, he noticed the deep sapphire sky that lay beyond the edge of the clouds. The wind burning his skin whenever icy gusts penetrated his shell of warm air. He took in the world in vivid color and detail, including the girl at Takit's side.

The girl was nearly a head shorter than her companion. She wore a fur-lined cloak over a simple blue parka adorned with a worn fur trim with two small white tufts dangling from the collar. One hand clutched a long length of wood with a pitch-soaked wad of cloth wrapped around the end, the twin of the torch that Takit wielded. Like Katara, she wore hair loops around her face, only her loops were thicker and braided more closely against her head. Her heavy, glossy hair was woven into two stout braids that rested on her shoulders. What caught Aang's attention, however, was her eyes—they darted about as if she expected the spirit to jump out at her out of nowhere.

Aang didn't blame her for feeling anxious. Dealing with spirits may be a regular part of his life, but most people had never encountered a spirit before. Crossing paths with a spirit for the first time could be an unnerving experience.

"You saw the spirit just now?" Katara asked, her lower lip jutting out in a little frown of doubt. "But you were walking from the direction of the village, not the ice caves."

"That's right," Takit said, still huffing and trying to catch his breath. He was wearing over his parka a fur cloak just like the girl's. "Sakari saw the spirit in her dreams."

Everyone's focus swiveled to the girl—Sakari—and Aang waited for her to speak. But instead of explaining Takit's cryptic words, she shrank back from the sudden onslaught of attention.

"You saw the spirit in your dreams, right? The spirit in the ice caves," Takit said with an edge of impatience. "You said you could hear it, but you couldn't see it. Not really."

Sakari bobbed her head up and down nervously. "I dreamed that I saw a really big shadow in the caves…"

She faltered and trailed off.

"And then what happened?" Aang said, prompting her gently.

Hearing his voice made Sakari look up. When their eyes met, he glimpsed blue irises darkened with terror, before she turned her head back down again.

Aang knew that terror. He had felt that terror before. He couldn't say when or how, but he had felt it before in his bones.

Just when he thought he had somehow frightened Sakari out of telling her story, she went on. "It looked like the shadow of a person, but it was…slithering from side to side. Like a big snake. Every time I tried to look at it, the shadow would disappear. But I could hear whispers. Sometimes I heard it laughing." Sakari hugged her arms together, as if trying to shield herself from something none of them could see. "There were these banging sounds, too. Really loud banging. Like someone was beating a huge drum."

"You see?" Takit said, hopping from one foot to the other with excitement. "The booming noises. The footprints. The spirit in the ice caves has got to be the spirit she saw in her dreams!"

"Spirits can definitely show themselves in dreams," Aang said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "But how do we know the spirit is even in the caves right this moment?"

Sakari's story was intriguing, but he had already searched the spirit world high and low for the ice cave spirit and had come up empty. He wasn't keen on going on a wild mongoose chase on the morning he was supposed to leave. Not when he was still so raw, his insides numb and his own spirit hollow.

Takit shrugged. "I don't know. But this is the first lead we've gotten. Sakari said she can still feel the spirit's presence, even now that she's awake. Right, Sakari?"

The girl nodded, shrinking even further into herself. She seemed to be content to let Takit do the talking, and Takit was more than happy to oblige.

"I wanted to find you, Avatar Aang, so you could help us communicate with the spirit," Takit continued. "But Sakari was afraid we would lose the spirit if we took too long. I don't have a lot of time, either, since Minister Shi's ship is leaving for Ba Sing Se in one hour from now. So we decided to go to the ice caves by ourselves to see what we can find." Then he grinned, his eyes afire with the anticipation of discovery. "But fortune must be smiling on us, because we happened to run into you!"

So that explained the cloaks that Takit and Sakari were wearing—those were the same type of cloaks that he and Katara had donned the previous day to insulate themselves against the frigid temperatures of the ice caves.

Aang shot a glance at Katara and found her already looking at him. The bond between them may be shattered, but they still turned to each other out of habit. Even though the love between them was gone, they were still the Avatar and the master waterbender.

He and Katara had fought side by side, defended each other, trusted each other with their lives. They could read each other's steps, predict the other person's moves. Nothing could erase that history, that part of themselves that they still shared with each other. Not even a devastated heart.

Which is a good thing, Aang thought, as Takit beckoned the others to follow him, when we're about to face a spirit.


The four of them set off with Takit in the lead. Sakari hung back so that she was always off to the side and a step or two behind Takit. Aang followed behind them, and Katara kept pace next to him—too distant to be considered close, but beside him nonetheless. It was almost as though she was seeking comfort in being on the same level with him as they marched off to meet the unknown.

He was glad for her presence because a sense of unease gnawed at his stomach. Dealing with spirits was always a tricky business, but this one seemed trickier than most. From the sound of Sakari's description, this spirit hid in the shadows or, perhaps, was a shadow. Add to that the absence of any sign of the spirit in the spirit world and the strange footprints Takit had mentioned. Aang did not know what they were about to face in the ice caves, and it was his responsibility to keep everyone safe—especially the two nonbenders—if things went sideways.

Katara studied the ground in front of her as she walked, seemingly lost in thought. Aang wondered if she was thinking the same thing he was. Or maybe she had something else on her mind. Such as their…conversation…from earlier.

When they reached the caves, they continued their trek in silence. The eerie feeling that they had entered another world, one that completely swallowed them in cold blue light and frozen ripples of ice, pressed upon them a hushed sense of awe.

Awe, and no small amount of trepidation.

Beside him, Katara surveyed the walls of the passageway with the watchful eye of someone who knew what danger looked like. Up ahead, Takit's square shoulders projected nonchalance and confidence, but the faint scuff-scuff as he dragged his feet betrayed his apprehension. Sakari remained closed off, her hunched posture reminding Aang of an armadillo pill bug curling up to protect herself from predators.

After passing through the first cave—the one where Aang had nearly frozen to death—and then through a second cave even deeper below the surface, their group marched down yet another tunnel and came to a halt at a crossroads.

The passageway split into two branches. Each bifurcation disappeared into gaping holes so dark that the faint glow from the cave behind them was swallowed up in the inky black. The ground continued to slope downward, which meant that both branches would bring them even deeper into the ice. The cave they had just left was still close enough to the surface that sunlight leaked in through the cracks in the ceiling. But they had reached the point where the network of caves ran far below the surface and could no longer be touched by the rays of the sun.

Sakari motioned that they should take the passage on the right. With a flick of his hand, Aang lit her torch, and then Takit's. The flickering orange flames revealed a turn in the right-hand tunnel that curved out of sight. After a brief hesitation, he bent a small fire into his own palm, making sure to keep it well away from Katara. Unsurprisingly, Katara averted her gaze from his flame, but not before placing a hand on the sealskin pouch at her waist—the pouch containing her ribbon.

The fire in his hand. Her ribbon. They were connected, somehow.

"So you didn't burn my ribbon?" she had asked him earlier.

Why had she asked him that? Her question didn't make any sense.

As he puzzled over her question, something tugged at him, a whisper at the edge of his memory. But trying to grasp that tantalizing wisp was like trying to trap a bubble in the water—the harder he tried to hold on, the more it slipped out of his hands.

Then he noticed his companions watching him, like they were waiting for something.

Oh. Right. He was the Avatar. The bridge between the human world and the spirit world. They were waiting for him to make the next call.

Aang took the lead, with Katara flanking him on his right and the other two Water Tribers following behind. The passageway opened into a large cavern with a high, domed ceiling and walls that stood straight and smooth, almost as if this space had been constructed—waterbent, perhaps—instead of being part of a natural formation.

But even more striking than the man-made appearance of the cave were the drawings—petroglyphs, Takit had called them—etched into the ice. The walls were filled with swirls and shapes and intricate patterns. The carvings were so numerous that the walls of this place rivaled even the most elaborately embroidered robes of the Earth King himself. Aang stepped up to one panel and laid a finger on a shallow groove in the ice, taking care to keep his touch light as he marveled at this sacred relic of the past. He gingerly traced the sinuous shape of a large serpent that encircled a stick-like figure with protruding ribs and outstretched arms—a human skeleton, probably. Below the snake and skeleton were a row of figures, humanoid silhouettes who trained spears on the massive hulk of a whale-walrus.

Entranced, he gazed up the wall to find that the carvings blanketed even the dome of the ceiling, too far away and too small for the eye to see in any detail. He turned to Takit, hardly able to contain his awe. But before Aang could express his amazement, the other boy gestured for him to take the lead again.

Takit had already seen these drawings many times over, so the starry-eyed wonder had worn off by now. The carvings were probably nothing new to Katara either, from the disinterested tilt of her head. And Sakari—well, she was Sakari. Eyes on the ground, feet shifting restlessly. Aang didn't know what she was like under normal circumstances, but he suspected she wasn't much different.

They moved on, exiting the cavern of carvings and down another tunnel. Into another cave—this one with rows of petroglyphs running along a narrow section of wall, etched into a flat strip of ice at shoulder height.

Their group marched deeper and deeper into the caves. The further they went, the colder it became. Even though Aang heated the air around him, he could still feel the frigid temperatures as if the ice itself was sucking away his warmth. Takit and Sakari were wrapped in thick polar leopard cloaks over their parkas, so they were protected from the cold. But neither he nor Katara had brought fur cloaks with them on this unplanned trip into the ice caves. With his airbending and firebending, Aang would be fine. But he worried about Katara.

Sure enough, Katara had drawn her arms together, huddling against the cold. But her efforts to conserve heat clearly weren't enough. Her body quaked with shivers, and her face wore the unseeing mask of someone who was fighting to stay warm.

Aang stopped walking, and she halted alongside him. Using his free hand, he unfastened his carmine-red cloak—the one he wore as part of his winter weather ensemble—and draped it around her shoulders. Katara looked up in surprise as the heavy fabric settled over her body. But she didn't pull away. She may have fallen out of love with him, but she didn't seem to hate him. Besides, surviving the unforgiving cold of the caverns trumped even the most devastating heartbreak.

He released the fire in his palm, leaving the ball of flame to hover in the air—off to the side, away from Katara. Her arms were still folded with her mittened hands jammed into the crooks of her elbows, so he had to close the clasp of the cloak for her. Her breath quivered over his fingers as he slipped the two small hooks into their eyelets in the collar at the base of her throat. He could feel her watching his every move.

When Aang was finished, when he withdrew his hands, his knuckle brushed the underside of her chin. This sudden, accidental touch left a searing tingle in his skin that spread up his arm and prickled down his spine. Katara's gasp was a whisper of air, soft as down floating in the wind. They stood, frozen, with her eyes on his face and his hands hovering below her chin.

The empty ache in his chest hadn't gone away. But the unexpected contact between them electrified Aang, even through the numbness in his heart. He tugged together the two halves of the shawl-like collar to make sure the cloak covered as much of Katara's body as possible. Then, almost moving of their own accord, his hands glided up and hung above her shoulders, as if he was poised to take her into his arms.

You've already set down the past, he reminded himself.

You've already let her go.

Before she could jerk back from him, before he could do anything rash, he let his hands fall back down to his sides.

But Katara still didn't move. She kept looking up at him. In the fitful light of his meager fire, her eyes were as dark as the shadows. He knew she must be thinking something, feeling something. But he couldn't figure out what. This was not so different from the time when they were trapped in the Cave of the Two Lovers with no way out.

Only this time, he was certain that kissing him was the last thing on her mind.

"Thank you," she said hoarsely, as if her throat was coated with frost.

Aang knew he should step back from her, but he didn't. Something held him there, a gravity he couldn't defy. He was so close to Katara that the warm shell of air he wove around his body enveloped her as well. She wasn't shivering as much as before, and she no longer held her shoulders in a rigid brace.

But he couldn't keep her warm this way forever. The moment he stepped away, she would once again be at the mercy of the bone-freezing cold.

That left him with only one choice.

"Katara," he said, "I think we should head back."

"What?" Katara pinched her eyebrows together in dismay. "But we haven't even found the spirit."

Aang shook his head. "It doesn't matter. We need to get you back to the surface. You're not dressed for these conditions."

"But you're leaving today, and so is Takit," she protested. "We're on the verge of finally tracking down the spirit. Who knows when we'll get another chance?"

"It's not worth it, Katara. If we stay down here any longer, you're going to freeze."

She hugged herself even more tightly, as if trying to shore up every bit of extra warmth. "I can hang on a little longer. We'll find the spirit, and if it's not causing any problems, we'll just leave."

Aang stifled a sigh. Why was Katara so set on finding the spirit? "Takit and the professor have been working down here for weeks, and the spirit hasn't bothered them," he pointed out. "If the spirit was going to cause problems, we would have seen it by now."

"But we're so close, Aang! You're the Avatar, and I know how important spirits are to you—"

"Katara, I don't care about the spirit!" he said, his voice rising in frustration. "I care about—"

you.

The unspoken word hung between them. Invisible like breath, yet heavier than a mountain. Katara flinched—he hadn't meant to shout at her—and stepped back from him. But somehow, through instinct or impulse, his hands found her shoulders.

Aang remembered, then, what holding Katara used to feel like. It felt like this. Her shoulders softening beneath his hands. His whole world, living and breathing between his palms. The trust, the baring of her spirit, that came with letting him in.

And now he had betrayed that trust. He had touched her when she didn't want his touch.

Aang yanked his hands back from her shoulders as if he had been burned. Katara's eyes glistened even in the dim firelight, and her lips were parted in shock.

Just like the time when he had kissed her on Ember Island. And the time when he had firebent a flame into life right in her face.

It seemed that he never learned from his mistakes.

At least she didn't run away from him this time. But then again, there was nowhere for her to go.

"I'm sorry," Aang said in a rush. "I didn't mean to—"

What didn't he mean to do? Did he not mean to almost say I care about you? Because he did, and he meant it with every fiber of his being. He could let go of Katara and be concerned for her well-being at the same time, couldn't he?

But he didn't mean to put his hands on her shoulders. Or did he? Did his hands go to her shoulders from his habit of wanting to protect her? Or did he take hold of her out of some lingering desire?

Katara was looking at him again. Her lower lip quivered, and a sound like a small sob escaped her. Then she bent her head and shuddered, huddling down into herself.

Aang needed to stop running headlong into blunders like a flying bison in a glassmaker's shop. The sooner he got Katara out of the caves, the sooner he could stop entangling her in his confusion. And the sooner he could extricate himself from her life for both of their sakes.

"We really should head back," he said quietly.

At first, he was afraid that Katara was going to argue with him again. But she nodded her head, still hunched over and avoiding his gaze.

Belatedly, Aang remembered that they had an audience. As he turned to tell Takit and Sakari about their decision to go back, the words froze on his tongue.

There was no one behind him. He and Katara were alone.

Katara noticed, too. "Where did they go?" she asked, alarm lining her voice. "How did we lose them?"

Aang surveyed the path they had taken to enter the cave. Even though the network of caverns and tunnels was carved into solid ice, a light dusting of frost covered the ground. Two rows of scuff marks disturbed the layer of powder when there should have been four.

"I don't know," he said. "But we must have lost them before we got to this cave."

As his eyes followed the line of footprints back to the dark mouth of the tunnel, a growing sense of dread pressed against him from all sides. Suddenly, the cave they stood in turned sinister. The wall, with its glassy ripples and ridges, glistened like the inside of a boa's throat. And in the places where the light couldn't reach, the cave was swallowed up in unending darkness.

In the inky silence, Aang couldn't shake the feeling that he was standing in the middle of a tomb.

And then came the booming sounds.

One after another they came, in the cadence of nails being hammered into a casket. Faint at first, like a distant roll of thunder. Then closer and closer, louder and louder, until they were an ominous drumbeat that made the ice itself tremble.

The mouth of the cave exploded. A pillar of ice burst from the ground and slammed into the roof of the cave, sending frozen shards flying in every direction.

After the dust settled, Aang lowered his arms from his face. The mouth of the cave was gone, obliterated by a massive barricade of rugged ice that had shot up from the ground, a frozen geyser blocking the only way back to the surface.

He trotted over to the newly formed ice wall. Its surface was rough and craggy, in stark contrast to the smooth ripples of the cavern walls. Katara shuffled up behind him as he summoned the floating ball of fire back into his hand to take a closer look.

In the golden pool of firelight, he now saw what he had missed before. His flame was too small to reveal anything except for what was immediately around him, and he had been so focused on spotting the spirit earlier that he could see why he had missed it. But now that he stopped to look, the glow of the fire in his hand revealed what had been there all along.

Covering the ceiling and the walls around the cave entrance were dozens and dozens of craters the size of his palm.

"Katara," Aang said, craning his head back in awe, "I think we found the spirit! The booming noises were probably made by ice crashing into the ceiling. And look—these little craters. They must be the footprints that Takit was talking about.

"We can break through the ice blocking this cave and follow these footprints and any other disturbances in the ice. That should take us to the spirit. But I'm worried that the spirit took Takit and Sakari. Once we make sure they're safe, we can—"

Aang turned to Katara as he spoke, but he trailed off when he saw her face. She was staring at something, her eyes wide and lips pale. He followed her gaze to the cavern wall. Just like the cave entrance, the wall was pockmarked with clusters of fist-sized craters.

"These craters aren't footprints, Aang," she said, her voice quiet with dread. "The craters were made by a waterbender."

When Katara looked up at him, her face mirrored the anxiety that spiked in his own heart. "They're here," she whispered. "The mystery waterbender is in the caverns with us right now."


Author's note: First of all, I want to shout out a big THANK YOU to my beta reader, itsmoonpeaches ❤️ I don't acknowledge her nearly as much as she deserves, and this story wouldn't be what it is without her amazing feedback.

I'm moving to *weekly* updates from now on! I'm also changing the total chapter count to 24. I'm in the middle of writing the second-to-last chapter, so I'm 99% certain that 24 is the final chapter count.

And last but not least, if you enjoyed this chapter, I'd love to hear your thoughts!