Chapter 18

"What's taking you so long?" The biting voice of Yi Tai Tai pierced the girl's thoughts. "Did you hear me? Sakari!"

Sakari jumped at the sound of her name. She hurriedly dabbed at the puddle with her cloth, desperately hoping that appearing busy would keep Yi Tai Tai and the bamboo switch at bay. But what she saw on the floor in front of her made the hand clutching the cloth fall still.

Standing up from the puddle were several lines of water, like slender columns of glass, each one reaching up for the fingers of her other hand that dangled from her knee.

She had heard the stories from her Gran Gran, who died the year before her family fled to Ba Sing Se, and from her father. Stories of waterbenders who commanded the ice and the sea, who the Fire Nation had stolen from their village. Sakari had never seen anyone waterbend before, but she didn't need to. She knew exactly what this was. The water called to her, luring her, enticing her every muscle and every nerve.

"Sakari!"

She jumped again, cringing at the slap of bamboo in the palm of Yi Tai Tai's hand. The tiny columns of water fell back into the puddle, leaving behind silent ripples that soon faded away.

Sakari still trembled, and she was still afraid. Nothing about her circumstances had changed.

But she wasn't helpless. Not anymore.


Aang must have come to the same conclusion as Katara—that Takit was acting no less suspicious than Sakari—because he stepped in front of the opening in the cavern wall. He had been standing by the massive block of ice that they had pushed into the cave, where it had slid to a stop several armlengths away from the opening. Only Aang could make such a move look natural, as if he just happened to drift in the direction of the hole in the cavern wall when he was really blocking the exit.

Her eyes darting between Sakari and the shadows, Katara began to slowly move toward the other girl, trying to act as casually as possible.

"You're the boy who came into the laundry that day," Sakari said.

Takit marched on without looking at Sakari or Katara. "I don't know what you're talking about," he replied stiffly.

"Almost ten years ago," Sakari continued. She started to follow after him. "Yi Shan Laundry House. Just that one time."

Takit glanced over his shoulder again—this time at Sakari, and not the shadows—but he kept his pace steady. "I told you, I have no idea what you're talking about."

"You never came back. And I know why."

He froze in his tracks, a fox antelope going still. A fox antelope on high alert to the faintest sign of danger—and ready to bolt.

"It's because Ling recognized you," Sakari said, her normally timid voice ringing crisp and clear. She pointed her torch straight at Takit. "You were the boy in the courtyard."

The wary fox antelope was now spooked into flight. Takit dashed past Katara for the hole in the cavern wall. Sakari broke into a dead run after him. Takit tried to push past Aang, but Aang clamped his arms around him and hauled him back. Together, the two boys staggered into the cavern wall as Takit tried to wrestle free from Aang's grip.

Katara still wasn't sure of Sakari's role in all this, so she crouched as the other girl came closer, ready to intercept her. To her surprise, however, Sakari thrust her arms out in front of her and grunted, as if she was shoving against an invisible obstacle.

A loud rumble like millstones grinding together made Katara whip her head around. The ice block that had been the door to the cavern was sliding across the ground, picking up speed as it careened toward the opening in the wall.

The rapid pounding of footsteps drew Katara's attention back to Sakari. She veered away from Katara and continued to run toward Aang and Takit with her arms out in front of her. From her rigid posture and her squint of concentration, Sakari was clearly the one bending the ice block, trying to jam it back into the opening to seal off the cave.

The mystery waterbender was Sakari all along.

Then everything happened all at once. Takit, straining against Aang's arms, made a desperate lunge for the opening in the cave wall. The ice block started to spin erratically, now on a collision course with the wall that formed the near edge of the opening. Sakari tripped over a ridge in the floor and lurched forward, her torch flying out of her hand. She instinctively kept her arms outstretched to break her fall, and she fanned out her fingers on impact.

The block of ice exploded.

In an instant, the world transformed into a blast of flying ice chunks and debris. One fragment struck Katara in the shoulder like a lead ball, making her stagger. Another slammed into her leg and knocked her feet out from under her. She fell backward, her head hitting the ground with a sickening crack.

And then it was over.

Katara blinked, trying to clear the blurriness that clouded her vision. The world dipped and spun around her.

What on earth just happened?

Sakari was the one controlling the ice block, that much was clear. She was trying to close off the exit. So why did she make the block explode?

When the ceiling of the cave finally stopped moving, Katara rolled over and pushed herself up with trembling arms.

Sakari was hunched on the ground several paces away, with her arms covering her head.

Maybe Sakari hadn't meant to make the block burst apart. Growing up in Ba Sing Se, she would have had to teach herself how to waterbend. Waterbending responded to movement in the arms, and maybe she didn't know how to unlink the two. After all, the block had only shattered when her hands struck the ground.

On Katara's other side was Takit, who had crumpled into a heap by the cavern wall. The sleeve of his parka was sliced open, the ragged edges of blue-dyed hide soaked dark with blood. His torch was scattered several armlengths away, flickering and sputtering on the ground like a piece of burning debris.

Aang lay face-down a good distance from Takit. The shock of the explosion must have thrown him and Takit apart. Katara quickly looked him over—he seemed to be unhurt. He must have bent the ice fragments away from himself just in time.

A groan escaped from Aang. He shifted on the ground and unfolded his body.

That was when she saw it.

The jagged end of an ice shard sticking out from his midsection.

"Aang!" Katara screamed. She lurched to her feet. She had to get to Aang.

White-hot pain shot up her leg when she planted her foot on the ground. Her knees buckled, and she collapsed to the ground.

She twisted around to look at her leg. Skewered midway through her calf was a wicked spike of ice.

Sakari finally emerged from under her arms and lifted her head. Her face was blank, but her forehead shone with sweat and she was breathing hard. Blood oozed from a gash running over her eyebrow and down the side of her face. She hadn't escaped the explosion unscathed, but she was in better shape than the rest of them.

Then Sakari's gaze fell on Takit. Her eyes blazed to life, and the rage that contorted her face turned her into someone Katara had never seen before.

"You killed my father!" she shrieked.

Sakari sliced her arm through the air. A barrage of ice daggers shot from the cavern ceiling and flew straight at Takit.

Katara slammed her hands down on the frozen cavern floor. A wide sheet of ice burst out of the ground, separating her and the two boys from Sakari. The barrier shielded them from the daggers, which drummed into the ice in a chorus of thunks.

Walking her arms in front of her, one after the other, Katara dragged herself toward Aang. He had rolled onto his side, his face screwed up in wordless agony. She tried to propel herself with her knees to get to him faster, but her injured leg screamed in protest. A sudden shiver made her quake uncontrollably and forced her to halt. Whatever warmth she had left in her body was draining out with the blood leaking from her wound.

She tightened her arms around herself and huddled down. After a few moments, the shivering stopped.

Then Katara saw something that made her gasp. High above her head, a cluster of sharp points began to emerge from the ice wall she had erected. She watched in horror as the points lengthened into spikes with the singular purpose of impaling the boy whom the wall was meant to protect.

She quickly swiped her hand at the growing spikes, her bending crumbling them to pieces. But as soon as that threat was nullified, more points began to appear. Soon the entire face of wall was bristling with growing ice daggers.

Katara slammed the wall back into the ground, shearing off the points of the ice daggers before they could pull free.

How was she supposed to protect herself and her friends with ice, if that very ice could be turned against them?

Now that Katara had lowered the ice wall, Sakari had Takit in her line of sight again. Sakari glared at him, her eyes wide and wild, staring down her prey.

"You killed my father!" she screeched again.

Another flurry of ice daggers hurtled through the air, but Katara was ready this time. With a swing of her arm, she bent them into harmless droplets of water.

"I didn't kill your father!" Takit protested. "All I did was give his name to the Dai Li. I didn't know they were going to take him away!"

Sakari howled and flung another volley of spikes at Takit. Katara had started shivering again, and it was all she could do to bend the deadly projectiles into water once more. But they came so quickly and she moved so slowly that she couldn't get all of them in time. Thankfully, the spikes she missed embedded themselves in the cavern wall a safe distance away.

"I don't believe you," Sakari said, panting from exertion and rage. She jabbed a finger at Takit. "You lived in Ba Sing Se for years. You knew that the Dai Li make people disappear. They wanted your father—" she raised her hands in front of her, as if gathering up her fury "—but you gave them my father instead!"

"I was only ten years old! I was scared out of my mind!"

"Well, I hope you're scared now," she growled. Blood trickled from the slice above her eyebrow, trailing down from the corner of her eye like a single crimson tear. "The way I was scared when the Dai Li took my father away. The way my father was scared when he was executed as a traitor!"

A half-scream, half-sob tore from Sakari's throat, the howl of a vengeful daughter's wrath and the sorrow of a girl whose world had been destroyed with a lie. She drove her hands down toward the ground, and a dark cloud emerged from the shadows behind her. A swarm of ice daggers, whistling through the air and driving straight at Takit.

But not just Takit. The lethal volley was so massive that it bore down on Katara and Aang, as well.

There were too many ice daggers for Katara to melt into water. She swiped her arms to either side in a wide arc, a desperate attempt to deflect as many as she could. But it wasn't enough. The daggers continued to speed toward them like a barrage of lethal rain.

A sudden explosion of air sucked the breath out of her lungs and nearly blinded her.

When Katara opened her eyes again, she saw that Aang had thrust out his arms and blasted away the cloud of ice daggers. Deflected by such a powerful airbending move, most of the shards had landed harmlessly in the ice around them.

Most—but not all.

Takit, who cowered under the shield of his arms, grunted as a stray shard struck his hip. Another shard grazed Katara's cheek, blood welling to the surface in a searing line. Aang escaped being hit this time, but a bloom of red had spread across his abdomen, dyeing the front of his gold-and-saffron robes in blood. His breathing was becoming heavy and labored. He lay with his palms flat and fingers rigid on the frozen ground, as if bracing himself against the pain.

Katara threw up another ice wall between them and Sakari. She knew she was only buying time before the wall itself turned into a deadly source of spikes. But perhaps that little bit of time was all they needed.

She crawled—more like squirmed—her way over to Aang.

"Aang," she said in a raspy croak, "Sakari is totally out of control. We have to stop her. We need your Avatar State."

But Aang only lay on the ground with his eyes shut.

"Aang," she said again, with a growing sense of alarm. He hadn't heard her because he couldn't hear her. He was losing too much blood, he had passed out, he was going to—

"I can't."

The sound of his voice should have reassured her, but her alarm sharpened to a razor's edge. "What do you mean, you can't?"

"I can't do it," he said, panting from the effort of speaking. "I can't go into the Avatar State."

Aang finally opened his eyes, and their gazes met. As they lay on a frozen floor of ice, Katara saw what she had seen a thousand times before. Ever since she had watched him die in the crystal catacombs, panic and stomach-dropping terror stopped her breath every time she found him limping or holding his side. Before they were together, before the war ended, she would fret to him about needing to be more careful as she healed his wounds. She couldn't vent her anxiety any other way—clinging to him and burying her face in his neck was out of the question. After they had started dating, she could be more open with her fears. Aang, in turn, would do his best to soothe her—by touching her cheek or kissing her worries away.

Whenever she was upset over his injuries, whenever she wept over his battered body, his eyes reflected her worry and hurt—for seeing her so distressed grieved him as well. But there was always something more. Something hidden in his soft gray gaze that she could never pin down.

The hint of that something wouldn't leave her alone. She would ruminate on it for days, turn it over and over until she eventually passed it off as her imagination.

But as Aang lay helpless on the ground, with his life seeping out onto the ice, Katara now saw in his eyes what she'd only glimpsed before.

Shame and guilt, laid raw and bare, as if he had been stripped to the bone.

"I can't go into the Avatar State," he said again. Shame ran thick through his voice now, too. "I'm sorry, Katara."

Katara clutched at his words, desperately trying to understand. None of this made any sense.

"Why?" she whispered.

That single word carried the weight of all the questions she wanted to ask. What was his shame, and why did it run so deep? Why couldn't he go into the Avatar State? Why was he apologizing to her?

And why did she have the feeling that this wasn't the first time he had uttered I'm sorry with such heart-wrenching regret?

But she didn't have time to wonder. Points of ice like spearheads were pushing their way through the ice wall that was supposed to protect them.

Instead of slamming the wall back into the ground again, Katara bent the ice into water. The sheet of water crashed down and shot over the ground, engulfing Sakari's feet and twisting up her body before hardening into a solid block.

"This ends now, Sakari," Katara said with as much authority as she could muster. But her voice betrayed her, quivering with the shivers that racked her body. "I can't allow you to hurt Takit or anyone else."

"You don't understand!" Sakari spat. She strained against the ice that encased her up to her shoulders. Thankfully, she hadn't caught on—yet—that she could free herself as easily as Katara had trapped her.

The hardness in Sakari's eyes, the hatred twisting her face, her very words—you don't understand—brought Katara back to a cliffside bordering the Fire Nation and the sharp words she had once exchanged with her brother and Aang.

And the fearful whimpers coming from Takit's huddled form echoed the pleas for mercy from a pathetic old man who had once commanded the Southern Raiders.

"I do understand," Katara said, clenching her teeth to keep her shivering from garbling her words. "I stood in your shoes, once. Two years ago—when I was about to kill the man who murdered my mother."

"Then why don't you understand why I need to do this?" Sakari shot back. "Why don't you understand that this is what my father's killer deserves?"

Takit was curled up behind Katara, leaning against the cavern wall. Through fingers pressed against the icy ground, Katara plumbed the thickness of the wall. If she could find a way to shield Takit and shuttle him through the wall, and do it quickly enough without triggering a counterattack from Sakari, she could bring this crisis to an end.

"I know how angry you must be feeling, Sakari. I've felt that same anger before. But revenge won't make the anger go away," Katara said. If she could talk Sakari down without resorting to waterbending, all the better. "Revenge will only make you feel empty inside. That's why I held back. That's why I didn't kill him—my mother's murderer."

But Katara still had to act, because there was no guarantee she would get through to the other girl. She began to melt the ice of the cavern wall behind Takit—starting from the side facing the tunnel on the outside, and slowly so that Sakari wouldn't notice. The girl may be self-taught, but Katara knew better than to underestimate her skill. Once she had melted the ice all the way through to the cavern, she would quickly shunt the three of them through the newly formed opening and freeze it shut before Sakari could react.

Sakari scoffed, the sound of disbelief laced with derision. "You really don't understand, then, do you?" she said. "You don't understand what my mother and I went through. We were strangers in a foreign land that never wanted us. The other Water Tribers in the city welcomed us at first. But after the Dai Li took my father away, no one wanted anything to do with us anymore. Life was already hard, and it only got harder. We suffered, and we suffered alone."

Her glare was an accusation, but her words carried profound pain within their quiet fury.

"Do you know how much it hurts to be cut off from your tribe?" she demanded. "To be cut off from your own people?"

Katara almost looked back at Aang, but she stopped herself. She couldn't afford to take her eyes off Sakari.

"I won't say that I know how it feels, Sakari," she said. "But I know someone who does. He's the one who gave me the wisdom that kept me from doing something I would regret for the rest of my life. 'Let your anger out,' he said. 'And then let it go.'"

Sakari cried out in frustration. "Letting go of my anger won't bring my father back!"

"Revenge won't bring him back, either!" Katara protested.

Katara had melted through only half of the cavern wall when cracks appeared in the shell of ice surrounding Sakari. The girl's prison was beginning to crumble. But instead of falling away from her body, the ice fragments streaked through the air straight at Takit. Katara scrambled to bend an ice pillar just in time in front of her friend, and the shards clattered harmlessly against the barrier.

But before Katara could breathe out with relief, another flurry of ice daggers from a far wall shot in Takit's direction. As she hastily bent these daggers into water, a third attack of ice daggers flew in from the other side.

Katara batted away volley after volley of ice shards. But they were coming so fast and her body was growing so numb and cold that she could not keep up. Finally, in a move of pure desperation, she raised another ice wall as a barricade against Sakari. The wall would only protect her and her friends for a short while, but Katara needed every second she could get.

She didn't have enough time to keep melting the ice wall behind Takit. This part of her plan had to be executed slowly without catching Sakari's attention, since the other waterbender could easily freeze the water back into the hole she was making. But Katara needed help. She couldn't fend off Sakari's attacks and melt the cavern wall at the same time.

Katara dragged herself closer to where Aang lay. His eyes were closed. A stain of crimson streaked the ice beneath him. His hands clutched the ground, frozen into claws of agony.

"Aang…" she said, trying to shove down a swell of panic. "Aang, can you hear me?"

But Aang didn't respond. He didn't move.

Katara could barely keep Sakari at bay. She could hardly even hold herself together—she could no longer feel her feet or the spear of ice through her leg. But she had to heal Aang. She had to try. If she didn't do something, Aang would never be able to help them escape.

If she didn't do something, Aang was going to die.

But before she could bend ice into water for healing, sharp points appeared in her makeshift ice wall, honing in on Takit.

Katara shattered the ice wall and sent the jagged pieces flying toward Sakari. Not to actually hurt the girl, but in the hope that the unexpected move would throw her off guard.

But to Katara's surprise, Sakari didn't deflect the ice shards or bend them into water. The mass of shards suddenly froze, hanging in the air, suspended by a force pushing back against them.

Sakari had stopped Katara's ice shards mid-flight. As the shards inched back in Takit's direction, as Katara struggled to reclaim control over the projectiles, she realized that the other girl had turned her own attack against her.

Katara gritted her teeth, straining with her arm stretched out in front of her, trying to push the ice shards back toward Sakari. But with her body half-deadened with cold, with her blood draining out of her leg, Katara was no match for the other girl. The ice shards quivered as the two waterbenders pitted their wills against each other.

Finally, inevitably, Sakari broke through Katara's resistance. The ice daggers slipped out of Katara's grasp and spiraled through the air into a tight whirlwind of spikes, one thousand points of death streaking toward Takit's chest.

Takit screamed and flung his arms across his body, a useless shield against the incoming ice daggers. Katara could only watch, her shivering body now also shuddering in horror, utterly helpless to do anything as Sakari stabbed her friend to death.

Then the ground erupted at Takit's feet.

Katara yelped as a wall of rock punched out of the ice in front of Takit. The vortex of ice daggers rammed into the dark stone and shattered into a shower of glassy splinters.

Sakari could only stare, her mouth hanging slack in surprise. The ground quaked again—Katara realized her shivering had masked the same tremors just moments before—and two gigantic pillars of rock burst out of the ground, one on either side of Sakari. A boulder-sized chunk broke off from each pillar and flew toward the girl.

But instead of crushing her between them, each block of stone bulged outward before crashing together, encasing Sakari's body within a cylinder of solid rock. With her hands clamped to her sides and the weight of the rock dragging her down, she dropped to her knees.

At last, she was powerless.

Katara gaped, hardly comprehending what just happened. How was it possible to earthbend when there was no earth to bend? The caverns were carved into solid ice the thickness of the South Pole continent itself.

What was more, only one person among them could earthbend. And that person was—

Aang!

Katara swiveled her head to find Aang lying on the ground with his eyes still closed, his breathing coming in shallow gasps. That was when she understood what he was really doing. The tension between his eyebrows, the stiffness of his body, the rigid arch of his fingers against the ice—they were not expressions of pain, not entirely. They were signs of the intense focus that earthbenders required when preparing to bend a huge mass of rock. She had seen this concentration before in Toph, who would stand as still as a block of marble with feet bare and flat on the ground. Listening, waiting. Neutral jing. The larger the mass of earth that she wanted to bend, the greater the need for waiting and preparing.

While Katara had been pouring everything she had into holding off Sakari, Aang had been preparing to earthbend. When the time was right, when he had full command over the element of substance, he had called up rock from the crust of the earth far below the ice—from the ocean floor itself.

Now that Sakari was no longer a threat, Aang's face softened and his body fully slumped onto the ground. The front of his robes was now drenched in crimson. The jagged spike of ice protruded from his abdomen like a cruel arrow in a gruesome bull's eye. His blood covered the ice beneath him, staining the white ice with red so deep that it was almost black.

Aang fell unconscious, and Katara fell apart.


Author's note: If you enjoyed this chapter, please let me know by leaving some love in the reviews! See you next week ❤️