13

Like the burning of my village, the destruction of the Academy, leaving Zuko without an advisor as his dissenters planned his downfall, I wondered often, too, how things might have been different if I hadn't lashed out that night. Perhaps if I had accepted my father's ply for my acceptance, I might have had more freedom. Instead, I remained locked in that steel cage full with empty luxuries.

Months passed. Hui continued to guard my door, and, once desperate, I returned his conversation.

"Are you his legitimate son, then?" I asked one day or night. I had no sense of time then, sunlight unable to reach me, the tides unable to tell me whether I was to sleep or sit awake and ponder my isolation.

"I am now," Hui responded, his voice unusually strained. We sat with our backs to the steel door, and after a time, I felt his body heat reach past the metal. "I grew up in a village called Gaipan."

"So your mother was," I said, but stopped short. "Your village was raided."

"Yes, but nearly thirty years ago. It has been under Fire Nation control since."

"Thirty years?"

"Zhu Ri commanded the army there for many years, and he took my mother on as his second wife. Unofficially."

"I'm sorry," I said, feeling that gnawing pain, that primal wrong sewn into my muscles, bone, heart. Only there was nothing primal about it. It was an evil of the mind, desirous of power, depraved in its resort to the cruelest seizure of that power.

I knew before I ever met him, that I did and would hate my father for all my life. Meeting him hadn't changed that.

"Don't apologize," Hui said. "I had a good childhood." That troubled tremor lifted from his voice. "Zhu Ri provided my mother with a home, and when I was born, he treated me like any of his other sons."

I pushed off from the door, sick, hot, growing uncomfortable. A happy childhood. A loving father. Hui, I began to realize, was no brother of mine except in blood. I suppressed a flame, as I had become more careless to produce in my solitary confinement. My comforter, the small desk, the black walls growing more charred by the day.

"Leave me be."

Hui stood then and faced the door, opened the metal slit and looked in, singeing my patience.

"I said I had a good childhood, but I'm not a child anymore."

"I gave you a warning," I said, tossing a ball of flames toward him. He backed off, returned, ignoring my raised fists, itching to fire again.

"I know it. You hate our father. I do, too." He leaned in, looked me dead in the eye. "He left me and my mother when I was six for a better assignment. Commander of a naval ship. When he came back, ten years later, he didn't give me a choice. He took me from my mother and my home. We're not his children," he said, gripping the metal frame until his knuckles waxed white. "We're his play things."

"Why has he taken us?" I asked Hui now, fists lowered. I approached him, inhaled the almost-fresh air of the hallway.

Before Hui could respond, a shadow appeared behind him. He backed off, a hand unlocked the latch, and for the first time in months, the door to my palatial cell swung open. Zhu Ri, my father, didn't even look at me as he stepped in. He took me by the arm.

Down the hallway, I couldn't speak. Round a corner, toward another door, another door.

A last door. A breath of true fresh air.

It was late afternoon.

For the first time in months, my eyes met the sky, my lungs breathed salt air. My body remembered that it was a living, vibrating, insurgent thing.

"Are you ready to be a proper lady?" my father asked, loosing my arm.

I faced the sun in its blinding glory. I stretched my arms to grasp its warmth.

And because I lived, I nodded. Because I breathed, I said yes, I am. Because I rebelled through existence, I accepted that to be free I had first to suspend my defiance. I assured him in all my words that I was ready to be whatever he wanted of me.