When we get to the yard, it's in chaos. A prison riot chaos.
"Who let these prisoner into the yard?" I hear the Warden roar. "This is supposed to be a lockdown!"
I spot the rest of our group by one of the smokestacks in the yard. Zuko throws me on his back piggy-back style and runs straight toward them. At the last second, someone tried to attack us, but I get in a kick to his shoulder as I slide to the ground while Zuko flips him over—similar to the way I flipped him yesterday. Sokka quickly introduces us to his father, Hakota.
"Zuko, Starr," Sokka sighs in relief. "Good you're here. Now all we need to do is grab the Warden and get to the gondolas." Sokka points to where the Warden is standing.
"And how do we do that?" Zuko points out. The Warden is across the yard and up on the third floor balcony.
Sokka thinks for a moment. "I'm not sure," he admits.
"I thought you thought this through!"
"I thought you told me it's okay not to think everything through!"
"Maybe not everything," Zuko exclaims, "but this is important!"
The rest of his plan falls into place in my head. We're escaping on the gondolas, but to prevent them from cutting the line, we need a hostage—a valuable hostage like the Warden. No way would the guards cut the line while we have the Warden with us.
"Not a problem," I interrupt their arguing. I raise my arms as the energy wells up in my body; all the anger, worry, and stress of the past few days explodes out of my fingertips into the dreamy purple mist. Everyone but our group freezes, more solidly than I've ever stopped time before.
Suki and Hakota glance around in wonder, but don't stop to ask questions. Suki leaps and bounds towards the Warden's balcony and climbs her way up. I use my minimal Air bending to throw us up there as well. By that point, Suki already has the Warden bound and gagged.
"Sorry, Warden," she taunts. "You're my prisoner now."
"We've got the Warden!" I cheer.
"Now let's get out of here," Zuko reminds me.
We make a break for the gondolas, only a little ways away. As everybody climbs aboard, Zuko flips the switch and breaks the mechanism. The gondola starts moving away from the dock, and for a second I think that Zuko's not going to make it. He leaps off of the railing, sailing through the air. I instinctively reach out a hand, and he barely catches it.
Once he's safe, I release the string of moments we ran through.
"Hey why's the gondola moving?" one of the guards stupidly asks.
"There's prisoners!" another guard shouts.
"And the Warden," I shout back at them. We show the still frozen Warden through the window. The guards are dumbfounded, just as we thought they would. With us safe, I release the Warden from his frozen trip through time.
He immediately starts kicking around and making a fuss. He tries to yell for my help—since I'm still wearing the guard uniform—but I quickly take it off to reveal my normal clothes of cut-off sweatpants and a fitted t-shirt underneath.
"Can't you do something to shut him up, Starr?" Zuko gestures to the guard.
I stifle a yawn and tie my hair into a loose bun. "No, I used most of my energy to freeze everything down there."
"We're on our way," Suki sighs in relief.
"Wait," Hakota halts our semi-celebration. "Who's that?" He points to two girls, both dressed in the Fire Nation's signature color—red.
"That's a problem," Zuko gulps. "It's my sister and her friend."
As soon as he says that, the two girls leap into action. The one dressed in pink with a braid jumps onto the gondola cable and tight-rope-walks across it to us. The other girl—Zuko's sister, Azula—uses a nearby guard's handcuffs to latch onto the cable, then uses Lightning to propel herself down the line.
"This is a rematch I've been waiting for," Suki smiles wickedly.
"Me too," Zuko agrees.
Suki, Zuko, Sokka, and I pull ourselves to the roof of the gondola, leaving Hakota to watch over our prisoner. The girls soon join us. Sokka and Suki take Ty Lee, while Zuko and I deal with Azula.
Azula throws a burst of Lightning across the roof of the gondola, which Zuko counters with his Fire. I throw a bundle of energy at her head, which she dodges. Azula keeps throwing her Lightning, but Zuko stops her every time. Every so often, I toss in a blow of Air, Fire, or a bundle of my own purple mist, but it always misses the princess by mere millimeters. Zuko and are the perfect team together, but Azula is almost better.
For a second, we think we have her as she precariously teeters on her hands on the edge, but Azula flips herself over with a burst of white Lightning.
Suddenly, I hear the Warden's voice shout to the island, "Cut the line!"
The gondola jerks to a stop and swings on its pendulum. I lose my footing and slip to the edge, screaming.
My feet go over, and I'm looking at the boiling water face-to-face. Well, face to bubbles.
"Starr!"
All of a sudden, I can feel Zuko's warm, strong hands pulling me back up. I hurry to stand, glad to see that Azula and Ty Lee had lost their stances as well. Azula glances back at the station and sees the guards bring out a huge saw. Her friend scrambles up to the device holding the gondola to the cable.
"They're about to cut the line!" Ty Lee screams.
Azula wickedly smiles as she sees another gondola coming into the prison from the other cable. "Then it's time for us to leave." She throws her hands to her sides, sparking a bolt of lightning. She looks a little like Buzz Lightyear from the Toy Story movie. Ty Lee flips through the air, both of them landing on the moving gondola at the same time.
"Good-bye, brother!" Azula calls out from her new domain.
Zuko, Suki, Sokka, and I climb back through the windows into our own gondola, which is about sixty seconds from taking the plunge into the boiling water.
"They're cutting the line," Sokka unnecessarily informs everyone.
"The gondola's about to go," I whisper, horror-struck.
"I hope this thing floats," Hakota prays.
Zuko and I look back to the prison. Out of nowhere, the guards with the saw are thrown against the outside walls, followed by the rest. I can barely make out a girl stepping from the shadows with knife-like weapons in her hand. Apparently, she's the one who pinned the guards to the wall. She easily incapacitates the rest of the guards, and kicks the crowbar stopping the cable out of the way. The gondola begins to move again.
"Who's that?" Sokka asks as the rest of our group joins us at the back of the gondola.
The answer pops into my mind a split second before Zuko responds, sounding shocked.
"It's Mai."
Before I can even process what had happened, the gondola is at the outside station. We leap into the freedom, but not before we retie the Warden. I use my Girl Scout training to make sure that those knots won't come undone for anything except a knife.
"Sorry, Warden," I tease. "Looks like your record of no escapees is officially broken."
Zuko slams the door shut and Hakota flips the switch to send the gondola back to where it came from.
"We made it!" Suki shrieks as we run down the volcano. We're all kind of whooping with the excitement.
"Now what?" Sokka realizes.
I turn back to look at the crest of the volcano and see Zuko looking into the bubbling lake.
"Zuko, what are you doing?"
"My sister was on that island," he says slowly.
"Yeah and she's probably right behind us! So let's not stop!"
"What I mean is, she must've come here somehow." He runs at a right angle to where we were running down the slope.
"There!" he calls out, pointing to the cool water. We see Azula's own personal war balloon boat bobbing at the dock. "That's our way out of here."
After some slipping and sliding down the slope, we commandeer Azula's boat. There were only two guards, which Zuko easily took care of, and soon we were on our way. Of course, we chose to exit the way we left—by flying through the air. This time, Zuko and I took turns throwing Fire into the heater to raise the balloon. My bursts of flame are nearly as big as his.
After the volcano disappears over the horizon, I ask Zuko, "Are you okay?" The rest of our group is below decks getting some sleep in the real beds.
Zuko's silent for a moment. "I guess," he responds. "It was kind of a shock to see Mai and my sister again, though."
"Hmm," I sigh. I stop pouring my flame into the hatch.
"But I'm okay now," he turns to face me, cupping my chin to look me in the eyes. "And you're the one I want to be with." He kisses me in the glow of the coals. It's much warmer and deeper than the kiss by the cooler. More passionate.
"Thank you," he says to me in a ragged voice.
"For what?"
"For inviting yourself along; for not taking 'no' for an answer; for saving my life; for just being there." He kisses me once after each example.
An idea pops into my head and I slowly pull away.
"I have maybe one more thing to add to the list," I whisper. "Just how do you feel about that scar of yours?"
Zuko's hand goes to his eye. "What do you mean?" He looks worried.
"I mean, do you really want it on your face?"
Now he looks confused. He thinks for a moment, rubbing the temple that his scar extends to.
"To be honest, I don't," Zuko admits. "It's a mark of a mistake the Fire Nation thinks I made; not a mark of what I believe is a mistake."
I remove his hand from his face and concentrate. I can feel the power coursing through my veins as what my mother said comes back to me.
…and with Time Bending, you can also heal. You can fast-forward the time on the skin of new wounds, helping them to heal faster. You can reverse the cells of old scars to restore them to their former glory. You can even change the time of a whole body to age or lower the appearance—the best disguises possible! But you must be careful, for every time you do this, you will lose more energy than simply freezing time. This is because you are focusing on a small area with many parts, the many cells. I recommend a chant to concentrate, something repetitive to help you focus…
I think back my own time—it seems so long ago—and my music class. My friends thought I was crazy to take Music Creation as my Fine Arts credit, but it comes in handy now. I hum one of my creations to myself as I work my purple mist over Zuko's left side of his face.
When I step back, his face looks perfectly symmetrical, as if there had never been anything wrong with it in the first place. I lean down to my backpack and pull out a mirror. Wordlessly, I hand it to him.
He stares at his reflection for a solid minute before feeling his new skin. He gazes at me in wonder, then wraps me into a suffocating hug.
"Starr," he quietly says, and says no more. His silence speaks volumes anyway.