...

In this dark hour before moonrise it took Xinfei longer than he had expected to find his way around the school. It should have been safe to assume that a fancy place like this would be well lit but apparently he had no such luck. By the time he finished his blind trek around the main building he was covered in scratches from a bush and had stubbed his toes at least twice. Xinfei grumbled a quietly cursed litany against his need to follow any direction Ayika gave him. It was, by this point in his life, a familiar speech. Then, mercifully, he stumbled out into an open space at the heart of the walled compound.

This inner courtyard was only lit by the stars above and the diffuse glow drifting up from the streets outside the school. That was strange. None of the school's windows showed any lamps lit inside, despite the fact that Xinfei had just seen the place shining a minute ago. He walked up onto a decorative pavilion and felt his way towards the garden door Ayika had designated as their meeting place. His hand met space; the door was ajar. Inside there was only darkness.

Xinfei was very conscious of the fact that he was not strictly allowed to be here but he chanced a whisper anyway. "Ayika? You back?"

He'd seen Ayika here a few minutes ago but now it was dark and silent. Xinfei stood awkwardly in the doorway. He wondered why the school staff would have snuffed out the lamps all at once.

Then a scream tore through the building from somewhere up above. Xinfei hunched down in a reflexive crouch that his brother would have told him only served make him easier to knock down. He was blind here, without even the light of the stars from outside. Then a flash of brilliance struck and he shuffled through his pockets for one of the little wax-paper boxes. With a grin, he struck the match against a bit of stone flagging.

The little light bloomed on the stick, and then continued blooming distressingly. Xinfei's fingers were almost scorched by a sudden fist-sized ball of fire that hungrily ate down the small twig of wood at an almost impossible speed. Xinfei froze, staring at the roaring match in open mouthed astonishment and confusion, so it came as a further surprise when something large shot out of the black hallway and crashed into him.

A person all in black dashed around the corner of the hall and hit Xinfei like a stampeding horse. Together they went skidding across the floor, coming to a rest with a decisive "Krnk" on each side of the open doorway. Blurrily, Xinfei lifted his aching head to see a black human figure flip itself upright and turn towards him, white tusks gleaming and wide empty eyes staring out of the twisted white face. It was a mask. A sudden lunge made Xinfei jerk his arms up in front of his face, only to find himself suddenly alone in the entry-hall now lit by flickering orange light.

Xinfei scrambled forward into the doorway in time to see the man-shadow reach the garden wall in three incredible strides and silently leap high into the sky like a bird taking flight. Xinfei didn't see any bender flashiness to vault someone up like that. Not a stone had moved or a breath of air but still the man shot up into the night and disappeared. Who was that? Then Xinfei was alone with the growing light behind him. Wait, what light?

He turned with panic to see the hallway's rug being consumed in hungry flames racing out from his match, smoke rising up to blacken the ceiling. The fire was at least behaving normally now, or as normal as a fire currently destroying a rug could behave. But the question of what had happened with that weird match could be put on hold for now because Xinfei had accidentally committed arson.

Panicking, Xinfei grabbed his pack and raised it to beat out the flames, only stop just short and reflect on the wisdom of adding ten full packages of incendiary merchandise to the problem. From somewhere on the second floor, he could hear a woman screaming for help as he frantically looked for something to use against the now alarmingly large fire. Pleading with the flame, Xinfei gingerly picked up an unburnt edge of the rug to smother the object within itself. It was a very clever idea that unfortunately only served to make the fire brighter and more compact, ensuring that no scrap of this rug would escape.

So it was that a crowd of rushing school servants skidded into the room to see Xinfei trying to tug this conflagration towards the open door by holding a single uncomfortably toasty corner. The fire continued to enjoy a merry and unhindered existence.

Blackened with smoke and hunched in his labor, Xinfei could only blankly meet the eyes of the assembled servant girls. Grinning this near the fire toasted his gums, so he grimaced instead. "Don't mind me, I've got this under control, someone upstairs needs help!" This provoked no movement.

At that point an immense female figure puffed into the room, trailed by several men in scruffy porters' uniforms. Sparing a bare glance at Xinfei navigating his fiery burden out onto the porch pavilion, she continued on, uttering a single command in his direction. "Two of you grab that one and hold him down. We'll go deal with what's upstairs."

The two porters kindly waited until Xinfei finally managed to get the rug safely out onto to the stone courtyard floor before smashing him down face-first into the same. Xinfei twisted until his nose was no longer crushed against the flagstones and settled down into the familiar 'you've been knicked' wait with someone sitting on his back. As he glimpsed more flickering firelight up in a second floor window he could only muster a feeble prayer for whatever Ayika had gotten herself into, and after a thought, for himself too.

...

Ayika sat on a low stool in the corner of Wen's office. Her hands repeatedly wrapped around the singed edges of her dress, fingers gripping and releasing in their own unconscious cycle. Most of the staff girls were still clustered in the hallway outside the door, taking turns to steal glances into the smoke-blackened room. Every time Mrs Jiangsu's pacing orbit took her near the entrance she swatted the girls back but they returned as soon as she moved away. Mrs Jiangsu moved continuously, having never stopped from the moment she oversaw smothering the remaining fires, and dispatched the porter boys to get help about the crumpled shape on the floor. To do something about him, about…

Ayika's fingernails bit into her leg. Why couldn't she have…? Why didn't she…? Her eyes were locked on a patch of air somewhere above the floorboards, just to the side of where the blanket lay covering the still shape of… Her thoughts were jumbled and skipped around, avoiding the pain like a hand jerking back from a hot stove.

When Jiangsu and the others first reached the office, after completing the job Ayika had begun of extinguishing the flaming piles of paper and books with heavy soaked hangings and rugs, they had beaten out the bits of her uniform that persisted in burning and then tried to force her out of the room. One of the porter boys who'd spearheaded that effort was still lying down in the next room groaning at what she'd inflicted across certain vulnerable areas of his anatomy. It was Jiangsu who'd caught hold of Ayika's flailing arms and held her firmly as she thrashed in silent rabid growls. It was only when the tears finally broke through that the aging matron gently shoved Ayika's now inexplicably weak frame over to a small stool in the back corner of the office.

They were waiting for the guards. Someone had sent for the headmaster and for someone else that Ayika did not hear the name of. There was nothing more they could do until then.

Professor Lizhen lay on the floor, crumpled in the corner of the room under the windows. The dark shape had flung him there. Discarded. Ayika could still feel the throbbing bruise on her chest from where the figure in black had struck her, felt it in the same intermittent way the burns on her hands flared into pain from time to time and then vanished as her mind stayed numb. That man had been so strong, so fast that she could only remember a flash of a white grinning face with shadows writhing behind. If only she had…

Ayika blinked and time jumped forward. The building was now full of noise, the sounds of many people shuffling around. The other staff girls were gone from the doorway which instead was now occupied by the back of someone dressed in a dark green uniform. Ayika just had time to realize that Mrs Jiangsu was no longer in the room before the head of staff re-entered, now accompanied by several other men in varying cuts of dark green city guard uniforms. One of them kneeled beside the carefully draped blanket in the corner and lifted up the edge. Ayika looked away as he pulled it back. The other guards were talking.

"Zhang and the boys got them trussed up in the other rooms?"

Another guard spoke up. "Yeah, we've got 'em both. 'Corse the girly's just a student here too late so no trussing, and the other one isn't a knife man. I'd say a sneaker or a gutter-rat picked up as a lookout. I ain't talked to him yet so I don't have a proper feel, but one look at a bit like him usually tells. Try and figure what's it they took. There's one little dooda missing from that shelf but the staff said none of those foreign deelys were particularly valuable. Just some sort of collection." He looked around the room with a mild glare, seemingly irked that no true villains raised their hands in surrender from behind the bookcase.

The guard then grabbed up some miraculously unburnt papers from the professor's desk. "Huh, looks like this is might be what he was writing right before he bought it. Says something like 'Steps to pacify a foreign incursion in the domestic spirit'. What do you make of that?"

The other guard shrugged, "Some kind of counter-spell to drive off dark spirits?"

The leader shook his head, "Nah, that's priest stuff. This guy here was a teacher. Maybe metaphorical, complaining about all those Islander foreigners, not that I can blame him. And then some random thief bumbles in on him expecting everyone to have gone home already."

"This incident might be more intricate than you hope, sergeant." A new figure swept his way into the room, his body hidden in dark heavy robes. A notorious sigil stood emblazoned across his breast in dull gold thread. "It has the markings of that most dreaded quality. Our subject here had a publishing record."

The guard sergeant was looking out the window instead of at his new fellow and made as if to spit before reconsidering. "Damn, this case is political? That's just great."

Then he turned to face the new speaker and froze, terror sweeping across his face. "Inspector! I...attention!." The other guards, who had been at parade-ground attention since the moment they first saw the inspector, endeavored to somehow increase their posture.

"No need, officer." The Public Safety Agent waved a hand concealed inside his long robe sleeve. He swept into the center of the room and looked down at the poor figure under the sheet. A robe that long ought to have spent half of its time tripping up the wearer, but under the Inspector's steady motions the folds and swaths flowed with his movements like the seams were a part of his body. He made no noise, and his expression betrayed no thought, but an imagined sound like mental clockwork floated in the air. As he completed a half circuit around the floor his eyes jumped up to meet Ayika's. With a silent air of puzzled interest he regarded her, and Ayika stared back.

Without breaking his gaze the Inspector addressed the room. "She is the witness?"

"Um, yes sir." Mrs Jiangsu bobbed nervously outside the threshold. "She'd gone up to bring Mister Lizhen his dinner when we heard the screaming. Like I said, when I got up here the room was going up with lamp oil and she was trying to put out. She hasn't said much yet, but fought like the dickins when we tried to take her downstairs so we just left her there. I can shift her if it pleases you, your honor, sir." As she continued, the normally unflappable servant-master of the school was speaking faster and faster until the words all tumbled out together.

The Inspector didn't bother looking at Jiangsu. He spoke very slowly and methodically. "No need for honor, just Inspector will suffice."

People were frequently nervous around Public Safety Agents. Every one of them was an expert earth bender with well-honed power. The stories about what they were able do were as myriad as they were unsettling. The explanation of what they were allowed to do was simpler; anything.

The agents existed under direct control of the Earth King and operated as the enforcers of his personal will in the city. Everyone in the city loved the King. Nevertheless, there was a great deal of nervousness regarding how frequently his personal will involved people being swallowed by the earth during the night.

This was the man who stood a few feet away from Ayika, but now, in this place, she could not bring herself to be afraid. So she met his eyes and stilled her trembling hands.

"Now, girl," His voice was calm and polite, but there was little warmth. "Could you please tell us what you saw? Was there anyone in the room when you arrived?"

"Yes, I..." Here Ayika stopped. Something strange happened when she tried to remember the white-faced figure. In her memory the form shifted and twisted and brought her to doubt her own mind. But she had seen something real. "When I got up on the landing the lamps were behaving weird. Flames dancing on the wicks. And when I opened the door here the lights all went out, all in an instant." She swallowed, "There was...it was dark, but there was a man, or a person, all dressed in black. Or just black. They hit me, pushed me back into the wall, hard, and ran. I called out but they'd thrown a lamp and I was trying to put out the fire and trying to help him and… I mean I wasn't sure yet that he was…" Ayika cursed herself for choking here but the Inspector ignored her shame.

"Could you provide a description of this man? Did you see a face?"

"No, I… I mean I only saw for a second and in the dark. It was white, with tusks and twisted eyes, like a mask but I swore it moved. And he was strong, so strong, not a bender but like it was something other than human." This last was said in a trailing whisper. Why couldn't she think straight? Her head pounded and the fabric of the world seemed thin and taught under her feet.

The inspector turned away from Ayika for a moment, looking once again at the soot-stained room. The leading guard appeared to take this as an invitation, ignoring most of Ayika's statement.

"Masks again, huh?" he said. "I mean I've been hearing about those guys doing lots of-"

"Too many people hear too many things," the inspector crisply interjected. "We will continue our interviews starting with the detained student. Sargent, during that interval you will inspect the body and inform us if there are any flash-burn marks in addition to the blunt trauma." He swept out towards the door.

The sergeant was confused. "Flash burns...? You mean like something from a damn fire bender or..." Suddenly he realized he was speaking to a particularly powerful and dangerous bender so he corrected. "Er, I mean yes I will, look I mean, sir. Or knife wounds, since those are usually what do in cases like..." he muttered, still hoping for his initial theory of a robbery gone wrong now that he was faced with a political assassination.

The departing inspector stopped in a weary halt. "Officer, the victim has been here for over an hour and there is not a single drop of blood on the floor of this room. Fatal puncture wounds tend to bleed. That document you read on the desk supports other theories. The man had previously been a vocal supporter of the Fire Nation and it sounds like he was in the process of revising his position tonight. 'Pacify a foreign incursion' were his new words. Check the body." He breathed in. "Come Mrs Jiangsu, we will need you to confirm the student's information."

The Public Safety agent left with Jiangsu and Ayika hurried out into the hall after them. She didn't trust herself to witness the forthcoming examinations. Driven by a need to do something, anything, Ayika numbly made her way after the departing inspector. She didn't trust him; he spoke in plural. No one appeared to remember that Ayika even existed so she quietly slid up to the next open door unhindered.

The Inspector and the rest of his crew of guards were inside. He addressed a girl sitting slumped in a chair in the middle of the classroom. She was wearing the school's embroidered student's uniform and her shoulders trembled slightly. "We will need your name, miss."

Black bangs tinged with copper lifted up to reveal a golden face, and the lips parted in an accented reply barely above a whisper. "Mizumi Miohuito."

Near the doorway one of the guards gave a low whistle in recognition of that name, but was cut off by a shove to the kidneys as Ayika rushed in past him.

"You!" Ayika yelled, thrusting an accusatorial finger at the girl in the chair. "What are you doing here? You were spying on the professor this afternoon! What did you do? Tell me!" Ayika had caught her in that classroom. But she but let her go. If Mizumi had something to do with tonight then it was Ayika's fault that...

The Islander girl gaped in shock at this sudden finger of denunciation a few centimeters away from her face. Her mouth worked a few times before she managed to say, "I only needed to obtain something of mine from the school. That is why you found me."

Ayika continued, in her fury ignorant of the confusion among the professionals behind her. "But you never left, did you? Xinfei saw someone moving in this same room right before the attack!"

"Who is Xinfei?" Mizumi blurted, irritation beginning to overcome shock. She was putting on a convincing display of having no idea why Ayika was screaming at her. "I was only-"

"Shut up! Did you let the white faced man in? Why'd you do it? He...He was on your people's blasted side!" The room was growing blurry and wet at the edges, and Ayika's voice hurt. The thought that her own carelessness could have let this girl help kill... She drew her hand back to slap the seated girl as hard as she could but before that her wrist suddenly jerked back in an iron grip.

"That is quite enough."

The Inspector wore stone coated gloves and resisting his grasp was like pushing against a brick wall. Defeated, Aykia sagged and was led to the back of the room, where a guard kept a secure hold on her. As soon as his hand left her wrist, Ayika seemed to vanish from the Public Safety agent's mind and he turned back to the Islander girl as if no interruption had intruded.

"Miss Miohuito, did you witness anything concerning the occurrence tonight?"

Mizumi looked back and forth in disbelief. She pointed at Ayika. "She tried to strike me!"

"Miss." There was no patience in his voice.

She swallowed. "Yes. I was here to obtain something I left behind at the school, as I said. I have not seen anything. That is, I was up here when the lamps went out and when I heard the screaming I hid in case it was something dangerous. Then those porters arrived and would not allow me to leave this room." As she spoke she became more confident. "Now I believe I have caught you up to the time you arrived, so may I be leaving? You have searched and know I stole nothing. My father, Tetzamatl Miohuito, will not be happy that I have been kept this long." She gave the smile of gambler laying down her highest card.

Ayika opened her mouth to express her rage but was surprised when another voice snapped in her place.

"You show some respect, girl! How dare you speak like with a man dead in the next room!" Ayika stared at the huge quivering frame of Mrs Jiangsu. Ayika watched in wonder as the woman's beady eyes glistened with tears, she had never seen Jiangsu show any emotion other than simple anger.

"Dead? What are you…? Oh my god!" Mizumi clapped her hand over her mouth in sudden horror.

The guard sergeant stepped forward. "Sir, this is becoming a circus. Permission to take these girls downstairs?"

The inspector appeared to have lost interest again, and was now looking out the window, his hands held in front of him, palm down at waist level. His breathing was slow and steady and he seemed to be concentrating on something.

Finally, he spoke. "Do so. And collect all the papers from the office, even those damaged by fire. We will inspect them shortly." His eyes opened. "We will leave the initial questioning of the young man to your experienced hands."

Ayika's head whipped around. The young man. The guards had Xinfei.

...