Four years before the comet. Southern Air Temple.
The monks woke at the fifth bell. I woke at the fourth. Nobody checked the novice dormitory in that hour, so I had it to myself, lying on my mat in the dark with my eyes open and my head running through things I couldn't say out loud.
The fifth bell rang. Twenty boys stirred in the dormitory around me, and I stirred with them, because that was the part I played.
"Sonam." Jamyang was already talking. He was always already talking. The kid opened his eyes and words came out and I don't think there was a conscious step in between. "Did you hear the third bell yesterday? It was late. Dawa thinks a lemur got stuck in the mechanism again."
"That happened last month," I said, sitting up and rubbing my face.
"Dawa says it's the same lemur."
From across the aisle, Dawa coughed his morning cough. He did this every day. It sounded like something terminal and was always gone by breakfast. "I said it goes in there to sleep," Dawa managed between heaves. "The bell wakes it up and it panics."
"It keeps going back though," Jamyang said. "If it hated the bell it would find somewhere else."
"Maybe it's stupid. Have you considered that."
Aang dropped off his mat three beds down and hit the floor with his feet already moving. He grinned at the boy next to him and said something I couldn't hear that made the boy laugh. I'd been watching Aang wake up every morning for two years. He had never once done it in a bad mood. He had never once not had something to say to whoever was closest. He moved through the dormitory like the room had been built around him, ducking under a robe someone was pulling on, sidestepping a sandal that had been kicked into the aisle, all of it without breaking stride or losing the grin.
He was eight years old. He was the Avatar. But he didn't know it yet.
Twenty boys filed out through the stone corridors in the gray light before sunrise. The meditation hall sat on the temple's eastern face, a circular room open to the sky through carved stone arches. When the sun came up the light hit the floor in long bars of gold and pink. Four years of sitting in that room three times a day and it was still one of the most beautiful things I'd seen in either of my lives. The beauty didn't help me with anything. It just sat there being beautiful while I ran logistics.
Gyatso led the morning session. He sat at the front of the room, crossed his legs, and breathed. That was the whole technique. Within a few minutes every boy in the room was breathing at his pace. He never told anyone to match him. He never said anything at all. He just breathed and you found yourself breathing with him, and for most of the boys that was when the thinking stopped and the spiritual part supposedly began.
For me it was planning time with good posture. Today's project was evacuation routes from the main courtyard to the bison stables. I had three primary paths and two secondary ones mapped out, and I'd been working on how many kids you could fit in a standard saddle if comfort wasn't a priority. One route went through the kitchens past a storeroom that was usually locked, and getting that storeroom left unlocked without raising questions was the kind of problem I solved during meditation.
The monks would have been horrified.
Training came after the morning meal. Twelve boys stood on the main courtyard, bare feet on stone that had been warming since first light, supervised by a junior monk named Tsoknyi. The temple organized its airbending curriculum into six categories called the Breaths, six tiers in each one, thirty-six tiers total from the basics up through mastery. I was in the Second Breath, rated at Tier 12, competent but unremarkable. Nobody gave Tier 12 students extra attention or rearranged their schedules for advanced instruction. I'd been sandbagging since I was six because the last thing I needed was a senior monk deciding I was gifted and filling my free hours with mentoring sessions.
Being mediocre on purpose took more effort than anyone who hadn't tried it would believe.
"Sonam, you're dropping your left shoulder on the release." Tsoknyi called it from the front of the line. "Keep it level. The arc should come from your center."
"Sorry, Monk Tsoknyi." I adjusted the form and pushed the air out in a smooth arc, standard Second Breath release. He was right. I'd been muscling the release instead of letting it flow, a habit I'd picked up from spending too much time in my own head working on the opposite of what these forms were designed to do.
The thirty-six tiers were all defensive. Every single one. Redirect the attack. Evade the strike. Circle away. Become the eye of the storm and let everything pass through you. It was elegant, and it was beautiful, but it assumed that the worst thing that could ever happen to you was a fistfight.
I'd been redesigning forms in my head for three years, taking the standard techniques apart and rebuilding them into something that could stop an attack instead of just getting out of its way. I had ideas for how to force the air into a focused line instead of an arc, and for how to pull the air away from a space until there was nothing left to carry flame. I'd given them working names and sketched out mechanics in my head, but I hadn't found the right place to practice and I didn't know yet if any of it was possible.
Tsoknyi nodded at my correction and moved on. He was patient, and thorough, and convinced that every student could learn at their own pace. He'd been teaching at this temple for eleven years and every technique he'd ever mastered ended with getting out of the way.
After me, Aang went through the same sequence. Watching him was like watching a different species do the exercise. The rest of us learned the forms. Aang just moved and the air moved with him because it wanted to. The technique happened as a byproduct of being the Avatar. His body and the air had some kind of arrangement that the rest of us weren't invited to.
"Show-off," the kid next to me muttered. He didn't mean it. Nobody ever meant it when they said that about Aang. Not yet. That would come later, after the monks told him what he was, and his friends started finding reasons not to play with him anymore.
In two years his life at this temple would come apart. I needed him to run. If Aang was still here when the comet came, the Avatar died with everyone else and the cycle broke and it was all over. So I kept my distance. I played in his airball games and ate at his table and never once started a conversation with him, because if I got close to Aang I'd want to change his path, and his path was the one thing in this world I could not afford to touch.
The morning meal was in the communal hall, a low room with long wooden tables that generations of monks had worn smooth with their elbows. Rice porridge with dried fruit on most days. On good days Gyatso brought fruit pies, because Gyatso believed pie was a reasonable breakfast food and nobody at this temple was going to tell him otherwise. Today was a good day. The pies were still warm and they smelled like cinnamon and cooked apples.
Jamyang sat down next to me. He always sat down next to me. I never asked him to. He just showed up, every meal, every day, like a stray cat you fed once and now owned.
"Are you going to play airball later?" he asked through a mouthful of porridge.
"Probably."
"Aang's been working on this new serve all week. The ball goes over your head and comes back from behind you."
"That sounds like it breaks at least two rules."
"That's what I told him. He says it doesn't count because the ball never actually touches the ground." Jamyang grinned. "I think he just likes inventing new moves and then arguing that they're legal."
Across the hall, Aang was laughing with a group of boys, making big circular gestures with both hands to demonstrate something. Whatever it was, two of the kids tried to copy it and one of them knocked over his water cup. Aang caught the cup with a puff of air before it hit the table. He didn't even stop talking.
I ate my porridge. It was good. It was always good. The numbers started running in my head before I finished the first bowl, the usual ones about stores and headcount. The habit had stopped bothering me around the time I turned seven. It was just how I ate now.
We played airball after the fourth bell. The court was an open-air arena built into a shelf of rock on the temple's west face, with tall wooden poles set into stone bases at irregular intervals across the field. The game was fast, loud, and exclusively played by airbenders, because the entire point was to keep the ball off the ground using bending. There were rules. I'd read them. Most of the kids hadn't.
I played adequately. Adequate was all the role required. Most of my attention went to the other players. I was watching for fast reflexes, strong instincts, and bending that had some edge to it, anything that might be worth developing in a few years when I had something to teach.
"Sonam, heads up!"
I redirected a shot that would have scored on me while I was watching a ten-year-old named Dorje do something interesting. He'd squeezed the air around the ball to change its direction mid-flight, a compression move that he definitely hadn't learned in any class and probably didn't know he'd done. The ball had changed course like it hit an invisible wall and Dorje was already moving on to the next play. Nobody else noticed. Nobody was looking for it.
I was.
Scouting children at a ball game. This is my life now.
The temple went quiet after the fourth bell. Kids scattered. Most of them headed for the bison stables, because bison were warm, large, and didn't ask you to meditate. I went to the stables too, but not to stay. Dolma lifted her head when she heard me coming down the stone steps and pressed her nose into my palm. One slow breath against my fingers.
"Brought you something," I said, and gave her the apple I'd saved from breakfast. Dolma took it and chewed with her eyes half-closed, content in a way that I envied on the bad days and studied on the worse ones. A boy from the year below me was in the next stall over, trying to scratch his bison behind the ear while the animal chewed on the wooden divider between the stalls.
"Yours is so calm," he said. "Mine won't stop eating the furniture."
"Dolma's just tired. She flew this morning."
"Lucky. Mine won't even fly with me yet. She keeps banking left and I end up in the terrace garden." He looked at Dolma for a second. "Dolma. That's a good name. How'd you pick it?"
I ran my hand along Dolma's neck and she leaned into it. "It just fit," I said. That was the version I gave people. The real answer was that Dolma meant she who saves. I'd given her the name when I was seven, about a week after I started the evacuation planning. She didn't know any of that. She just liked the attention.
I stayed for a few minutes. Dolma put her head against my side and breathed, and I stood there with my hand on the bridge of her nose and felt her heartbeat through the bone of her skull, slow, big, and steady, like it always was. She didn't care about any of it. She cared about the apple and the hand and the fact that I showed up.
Her hay was fresh. Someone had restocked the stalls that morning. I scratched the base of her ear once and headed for the archive.