"There it is!" Zuko exclaims the next night. I tried to catch up on sleep the way there. Trying to get the two boys who were once enemies to have a normal conversation proved to be almost impossible. So was finding a comfortable sleeping spot; I finally settled on just behind the heater. It was warm and protected from the wind.
Sokka and I leap to the front of the balloon.
"There's plenty of steam to keep us covered," Zuko says. "As long as we keep quiet, we should be able to navigate through it without being caught."
He's right. It's almost as if the volcano's smoking, but the smoke is white instead of gray.
"Wait," I exclaim as we enter the hot steam, "Steam is hot. How is the balloon supposed to stay up?"
"We're going down!" Zuko pumps more fire into the inflated balloon. "What are we supposed to do?"
I rack my brains, trying to think of something, anything. Another chemistry lesson comes back to me. At 0 Kelvin, everything stops moving—meaning no heat. It's also theorized that that is when time stops. Time.
I quickly move my arms in an effort to conjure the purple mist. I'm almost too late. The basket of the balloon stops not even an inch from the water, and I can feel the heat of it through my sneakers.
Sokka looks around—I was careful to freeze everything but our group. "Nice," he comments. "But how are we supposed to get to the shore? It's still way over there!"
"Calm down, ponytail," I snap. "Just be glad you're not burning up in the lake!"
"Starr," Zuko touches my shoulder. "Is there any way you can move the balloon?"
I think back to the chemistry lesson. "I can slow the time of the air around the balloon," I say slowly, "which would make it colder. So we could slowly fly into the lake."
"Are you sure you can do it?" After all, I've never tried directing my bending at a specific place.
I take a deep breath and nod my head.
I carefully move my arms, remembering what my mother said. Slowly, the steam around us begins to move again, but at only a quarter of the speed as before. Zuko directs the balloon to shore, while Sokka chomps on his fingernails.
Suddenly, I lose my grip on the steam, and it comes back full force. We're only a few feet from the shore, so we leap. The balloon, unfortunately, doesn't make it. It's half in the water, half out when we turn to look at it.
"How are we going to get off the island now?" Zuko asks.
"We'll figure something out," I reassure him.
"I suspected it might be a one way ticket anyway," Sokka gets up and moves toward the balloon.
"What?" I exclaim.
"You knew this would happen and you wanted to come anyway?" Zuko questions.
"My dad might be here!" Sokka lifts the now empty balloon. "I had to come and see."
"Uncle always said I never thought things through, but this is rid—ugh this is crazy!"
"Hey, I never wanted you to come along in the first place! And for the record, I always think things through., but my plans haven't exactly worked, so this time I'm playing it by ear. So there."
Sokka puts his hands on the metal basket to give it a push into the lake, but it burns his hands on contact. Seeing his motivation, I get up to join him in kicking it in.
"What are you doing?" Zuko asks us.
"It doesn't work anyway," I remind him.
"And we don't want anyone to find it," Sokka adds.
We turn to face the enormous prison.
"I hope you know what you're doing, Sokka," Zuko warns. "There's no turning back now."