"I can't believe you," Sokka said. "Aunt Wu didn't notice a volcano going off right next door, and you still think she knows anything about anything except cold reading?"

They were slouched on Appa's back, gliding along fifty feet above the treeline of a forest. The land was broken up by rocky outcroppings that were gradually building up to a full mountain range. The sun was high in the sky, to Zuko's annoyance: his concussion finally seemed to have got better, so he'd been up at first light going over his kata again and again to get back in shape, whereas the others had slept well past sunrise, done some fishing or waterbending and had a spot of breakfast, before finally deciding to set off. It did at least explain why he'd been able to run them down so often, even with his endless delays with engine troubles or Uncle's ridiculous diversions.

"She told me and Aang some really interesting stuff," Katara said, winking at Aang, who twisted round in his seat on Appa's head to smile back. "And the villagers were right, the town wasn't destroyed. We handled it just fine."

"That's the stupidest prediction of all!" Sokka exclaimed. "There's no way to prove it if it's wrong. If the town had been destroyed, nobody would be left to call her out! I, the great prognosticator Sokka of the Southern Water Tribe, predict we won't all be killed today!"

"Watch out!" shrieked Katara, who had long experience of the universe's grudge against her brother, but she was too late: a swarm of arrows zipped out of the trees below and into the feet of Appa, who roared in pain.

"Appa!" Aang shouted. "Yip yip! Go up! As high as you can!"

It was all Katara, Sokka, Momo, and Zuko could do to hold onto the saddle as Appa pitched upward sixty degrees and climbed. Aang flipped overboard, snapping out his glider and kicking air blasts out and around, as more arrows flew out of the trees. The hidden archers switched to targeting Aang, but their arrows corkscrewed away from him as he bent the air into crazy eddies. Aang covered Appa just long enough for him to ascend, then bent more air currents to lift himself out of range, and he flew forward and landed on Appa's head.

"Yuyan archers," Zuko shouted over the wind, as Appa levelled off. "Zhao's caught up to us."

"How can you tell?" Aang asked. "I didn't see anything."

"Exactly."

Aang made to glide down and pull the arrows out of Appa's feet; in unison, Zuko and Katara both yelled, "Don't do that!" They glared at each other on reflex; Zuko sat back, and Katara continued. "Arrows bleed worse when you pull them out. Wait until we can wash and bandage them right away."

Aang frowned but returned to his perch atop Appa's head. "Hold on, buddy. We'll land and get those arrows out soon, okay?"

Appa replied he really would have preferred them out now, but he could go a little longer this one time.

"Where do we go?" Sokka asked. "There could be more of them hiding anywhere."

They looked around. The area below was mostly unpopulated, a mass of wooded wilderness, with mountains stretching up into the sky on their left. Empty, innocent, sinister woodlands that suddenly could be hiding entire divisions of Yuyan.

Run, hide, or rearguard fight? The bison's slower than even my crummy old steamer, and challenging the Yuyan to hide and seek is not a winning game.

Even if it was, they only need to play for time. They'll have reinforcements right behind them.

"I know this area," Aang said. "There's a place we should be able to hide awhile. Remember the way, Appa?"

Appa rumbled assent.

"Hey, Zuko," Sokka said. "Do you know anything about where the Fire Nation army is? Is there another division waiting right ahead of us?"

Note to self: never tell anyone 'You personally must capture the Avatar'. The next time I get to give orders, it'll be 'The Avatar must be captured, but you'll be allowed to come home or at least get a replacement mission, even if it's by someone who hates you or whom you've never even heard of and who's on the other side of the world'.

"There might be," he said. "There are colonies nearby; Admiral Zhao could have requisitioned their garrisons, set them to spread out and try to intercept us. The fleet's probably blockading the North Pole."

"What makes you think that?" Sokka asked.

Zuko shrugged irritably. "The Avatar's been heading steadily north, and he's only been reported bending air. Zhao's smart enough to guess you need a waterbending teacher, and where you're going to go to look for one. He's probably sent every ship in the theatre to try to block you."

Probably mine, too. I wonder where Uncle is now? If he wants to look for us, he might've asked to join Zhao … probably not, and Zhao wouldn't even want him. He's probably just gone home.

Damn his timing: we could really use a talk with him right about now.

"I wish we had a map," Sokka mused. "If we're going to have to dodge Fire Nation patrols the entire way, it'd be nice to know about, I don't know, secret tunnels, or terrain they can't guard as easily."

Secret secret secret secret tunnel –

He gave a full-body twitch. He'd been doing so well at repressing that memory.

Secret secret tunnel, yeah!

"I don't know anything about secret tunnels," Aang said, "but I know all about flying, and the Fire Nation doesn't. If we stick to the mountains as long as we can, the ships won't matter at all, and Appa's faster than anyone moving by foot. I'd actually wanted to stop by here anyway so I could show you around. We should be able to see it any moment now. This was practically my second home: the Northern Air Temple!"

"Ooh, is it different from the Southern Air Temple?" Katara asked, either delighted to be seeing something spiritual or feigning it to distract Aang from his bison being shot.

"A lot of it's the same, or similar but laid out differently. The Eastern and Western ones were much different, those are where the girls lived when they weren't travelling, so I didn't see them much. But every temple has a ton of stuff the others don't, and this'll be the first one Zuko sees."

"Hooray," Katara undertoned.

"It was my fourth," Zuko said.

"You've already been here?" Aang asked, surprised.

"I spent two and a half years searching for you. Where did you think I went first?"

"We met you when you were looking for an airbender in the South Pole," Sokka said. "I've been assuming you navigated by throwing darts at a map of the world, and also that you aren't very good at darts. On an unrelated note, after we get away from Zhao again, want to play darts? As in, for money?"

"No," Zuko said.

"Maybe he asked a fortune teller," Katara suggested innocently.

"No," Zuko snapped.

"Of course not," Sokka said, "if he had, she would've told him to go after some stupid flower instead."

"I should be so lucky," Katara said wistfully.

"I wasn't looking for an airbender in the South Pole," Zuko said, about to launch into a tirade, but at that moment, Katara got up and pointed.

"Look!" she said. "Are those airbenders?"

The views were much better from the air than when he'd scaled the mountain on foot. He could see the tops of the clouds, the mountains and forests stretching out to the horizon, veined with streams. He wasn't the type to dwell on natural beauty, though, and he looked toward the Northern Air Temple, where he could make out the Mechanist's people flitting around on their gliders.

"No," Zuko and Aang said together, then they glanced at each other in surprise.

"I know an airbender when I see one," Aang explained. "We're a spiritual people. The way those people over there fly lacks spirit."

"I met them the first time I was here," Zuko said. "They're Earth Kingdom settlers with flying machines."

"Flying machines?" Aang asked sceptically.

"Are they friendly?" Sokka asked.

"Well …" Zuko replied, reminiscing.

"Get out and never darken our doorstep again!"

"… They'll like you," he told Aang. "They worship the Air Nomads."

Aang frowned, an odd expression for him.

Appa cruised forward. When they got near the Temple, a couple of gliders broke off from their flock to join them. Aang snapped his staff into glider form and leapt off to fly with them.

"Sokka," Katara said quietly, "I'll take care of Appa, but I'm worried that a flying bison might get noisy when I pull arrows out of his feet. Can you make sure Aang's somewhere else?"

"Right," Sokka said. "Give me a minute to think of some good jokes to distract him."

"Um," she said apprehensively. "I don't think you have to do that."

"'When you say that Air Nomads are a spiritual people, do you just mean they always have their head in the clouds?'"

Zuko's eye twitched.

"Maybe you could just ask him to show you around inside the temple?" Katara suggested.

"Sure sure but I need icebreakers, just in case. 'Man, this is a nice Air Temple you got here. Where are clouds one through eight?' Get it? Because we're on Cloud Nine?"

"Just ask him to show you around," she said firmly.

"No, wait, I've got it," Sokka said, brightening. "This one's perfect, get a load of this. 'Man, I'm freezing up here! All this wind really blows!'" He giggled at his own joke.

"Ask him to show you around," Katara practically snarled, as Appa came in to land.

There was a complicated manoeuvre wherein Appa had to flip over in mid-air and land on his back so as to avoid putting weight on the arrows and pushing them further in, so they had to jump out of the saddle. Zuko, who had trained for years in acrobatics, did a combat roll into a perfect three-point landing; Katara, who was an expert yogi, seemed to bounce without any problems; and Sokka faceplanted.

The settlers were crowding around, initially looking delighted at the flying bison, but their faces fell when they saw Zuko.

"What are you doing back here?" asked one.

"None of your business," Zuko snapped.

"I kind of think it is! The last time you were here, you –"

"Get out of my way," Zuko growled. He shoved the man aside and stormed off; the man flew back thirty feet, and it was probably a good thing there were two more behind him to catch him, or he could easily have fallen off the edge.

Zuko paid no attention to any of them, he just had to get away. He marched through the halls, occasionally running into a worker and shooting them death glares until they scurried out of his way, and finally came to a dark cul de sec with a neat little hiding spot surrounded by pipes. He plomped down and scowled at the ceiling.

Why are you so mad now? Nothing here has been particularly surprising.

You know why, I know why, now shut up, I'm not talking to you.

He didn't have any plans for how long he meant to sit there. He figured he'd wait until Katara came looking for him, and he could yell at her and feel better. He'd so taken it for granted that she'd come to find him that it never occurred to him that they might take the opportunity to leave him behind, and he definitely didn't expect it when Aang suddenly rounded the corner.

He's quieter than I realised. Is that an airbender trick, cushioning his footfalls?

Like that time when Ty Lee was surprised that Azula and I couldn't support our entire body weight on two fingers?

His heart skipped a beat, as it always did when he thought about his old friends.

"Are you okay?" Aang asked.

"I'm fine," Zuko snapped on reflex.

Aang walked over and sat next to him. "I'm not having a great day either," he said. "Appa, and all. Katara kicked me out, and then Sokka started trying to tell jokes …" He shuddered. "But Katara and the colonists are taking care of Appa, and I trust them."

Zuko didn't care about Appa.

"One of the settlers told me what happened the last time you were here," Aang went on. "I guess you were probably having a bad day then, too. Want to talk about it?"

"You wouldn't understand."

"I guess not. They said you threatened to throw Teo off a cliff. I don't really get why you'd say that."

Zuko glared at a pipe. "Well, what was I supposed to do?"

"Could you try not threatening to throw him off a cliff?" Aang said, trying and failing not to sound sarcastic.

Zuko rounded on him. "You know what happened the last time I visited a village and didn't threaten anyone, before I joined you? A gang of girls ambushed me and knocked out most of my men. At Kyoshi."

"You had war rhinos and a bunch of soldiers," Aang said. "That counts as threatening."

Hey, Zuko, remember that time you decided your bodyguards were too threatening, so you just walked into a village alone?

Zuko quashed the memory and scowled at the ceiling. "I told you you wouldn't understand," he said. "Trust me, bad things happen when you're Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom militias think you're a soft target."

"That's," Aang began, then cut himself off. "… You wouldn't happen to have met an Earth Kingdom fighter called Jet, would you? Tall, has these weird hooked swords, likes chewing grass?"

Zuko gave him a look.

"Just some guy we met a while back," Aang said. "Maybe you're right; if he ever ran into you, he would have attacked you." He looked straight ahead. "I don't get it. I mean, I get it, but I don't get it. Do you get it?"

"No."

"Just a few months ago from my perspective, the Fire Nation was great. Everywhere I went, I told people about my friends from there, and it was just normal. You know what I want most, when the war ends? For it to be like that again. When I first met Katara and Sokka, I wanted to introduce them to my Fire Nation friends. That was, you know, before I realised I'd been frozen for a hundred years and they were all dead, but still. I want to take them to see the real Fire Nation. The crazy festivals where you have bonfires and fireworks, and have the wildest dancing and singing and food …"

Zuko blinked at the phrase 'when the war ends'. Everyone back home talked about it ending when the comet arrived, of course, but it had been going on for generations, and everything was connected to the war somehow; he couldn't imagine it just stopping. He wsn't really sure what he thought would happen after the comet. They'd use it to conquer Ba Sing Se, and then, what, move onto the Northern Water Tribe? Just do peacekeeping? There were so many top generals and troops; would they all just decide to stop being soldiers?

"We don't dance any more," he said. "Well, girls like it, but boys don't really. Except Uncle."

"Well, then at least the thing I have to do after ending the war will be a lot more fun." Aang glanced over at Zuko, hoping for a smile, but he was still frowning. "Do you want a hug?"

"No."

"You look like you want a hug."

"I don't want a hug."

They sat in awkward silence for a moment.

"Screw it," said Aang, and he hugged Zuko.

Zuko went rigid. A moment later, Aang got the hint and pulled back.

"Do you feel better?" he asked.

Zuko narrowed his eyes.

"We'll work on it."

"Don't," Zuko said.

7