Three years before the comet. Southern Air Temple.
"What are you doing?"
I almost put a current through the terrace wall. My hands jerked sideways and the compressed air that had been building between my palms blew out in a sloppy gust that caught the cushion at a bad angle and knocked it spinning off the stone bench I'd propped it against. It skidded across the terrace floor and stopped at the feet of a round-faced boy in robes a size too big, standing at the corridor entrance with his head tilted like a dog that's heard a new sound.
Dorje. He was a year older than me, eleven now, with robes a size too big for him. The kid who'd squeezed the air around an airball during a game last year without knowing he'd done it. He was looking at the cushion, then at the scuff marks on the wall behind where the cushion had been sitting, then at my hands, which were still up.
I lowered them. My heart was going hard enough that I could feel it in my teeth.
"How long have you been standing there?" I said.
"A little while." He picked up the cushion and turned it over. His thumb found the wear marks in the fabric, the flat spots where three weeks of focused air had been pressing the same threads into the same dents. "This is from the lower meditation hall. I sit on one just like it every morning." He looked at me. "Why is it out here?"
The terrace was empty behind him. Nobody came out here after the fourth bell because the wind shifted east toward the meditation gardens where the air was calmer and the monks liked to sit. I'd been practicing alone on this terrace for three weeks. I'd timed the foot traffic. I'd left a robe on the corridor railing as a tripwire. I'd moved cushions through the temple in a supply chain that would have made a quartermaster proud.
And an eleven-year-old had walked right in.
I had lies ready. I kept them organized in my head, ranked by how long each one would hold. The quick ones went like this, found it here, must be someone else's. The medium ones went, I use it to sit on, the stone is cold. The ones that sounded like me went, Monk Tsoknyi asked me to test fabric wear for a supply requisition.
Any of them would buy me a day, maybe two. Then Dorje would come back because Dorje was the kind of kid who came back to things. I'd seen him at the training courtyard, repeating the same release form after Tsoknyi corrected him, six times, seven times, grinning each time like the correction was a gift. He'd come back to this terrace. He'd find the cushions again. He'd ask again.
"I'm trying to make the air go in a line," I said.
He looked at me. He looked at the cushion. He looked at the wall.
"Did it work?"
"Sometimes. I can hit it from about fifteen feet but the dent just puffs back out. It's not strong enough to do anything."
He walked to the wall and set the cushion against it, right where I'd been propping it, in the exact spot where the stone had scuff marks. He did this without being told. Then he stepped back.
"Can I try?"
Two seconds. That's how long the whole decision took. Dorje was a risk. He could talk in the dormitory and mention it to Jamyang, who would mention it to the entire temple before lunch because Jamyang couldn't hold information like a cracked pot can't hold water. One conversation and I'd be exposed.
He was also a second set of eyes on my form. Someone who could tell me if my stance was drifting, if the current was actually going straight. Someone with a natural feel for compression who didn't even know he had it. And he was standing here asking to learn instead of running to tell a monk.
"Stand here," I said. "Feet apart. Wider. Yeah, like that."
He stood where I put him. His feet were too wide, elbows were too high, and he was grinning the entire time. I pushed his right elbow down about two inches.
"So you know how in class everything is about letting the air go? Releasing it, working with it, all that?" I said. "This is the opposite. You're going to pull the air toward you, hold it between your hands, and then push it forward. Just try to keep it tight."
He pulled. The air went everywhere. A gust hit the back wall, another one went straight up, and a third caught his own robes and flapped them into his face.
He laughed, quick and real, like a cough. He thought it was funny that the air had hit him in the face, and that was the whole of his reaction.
"Again?" He was already resetting his feet.
"Again. Elbows in."
He pulled again. The air scattered again. His right foot shifted forward on the third try and more of the current went forward this time, spreading into a wide fan that barely touched the cushion from ten feet.
"I felt something," he said. "Just for a second. Right between my hands. Like holding something round."
"That's the part that matters. You just need to hold it longer before you let go."
"How long do you hold it?"
"I don't know, maybe two or three seconds? It's hard to tell. Just hold it as long as you can before it slips."
He tried again. The round thing lasted about a heartbeat before it burst. The cushion didn't move. He tried five more times and the best one was a puff that shifted the fabric from eight feet.
"I'm terrible at this," he said, like he'd just told me the sky was blue. He was already setting his feet for another try.
"Well, yeah," I said. "I was terrible too when I started."
"How long did it take you to hit the cushion?"
"About two weeks before I could hit it most of the time. Three weeks to actually dent it."
"All right." He set his feet again. "I'll just keep going then." He pulled. The air went wide. He laughed.
We practiced until the light turned orange and the shadows on the terrace wall stretched past the bench. I showed him the pull three more times, adjusted his elbow twice, and watched him fail at close range while I worked on my own form at fifteen feet. My best shot of the day knocked the cushion flat against the wall from eighteen feet. The current held its shape the whole way. I felt it snap out of my hands clean and tight, and the impact left a dent three fingers wide that took a full second to puff back out.
Dorje was sitting against the wall resting his arms, but he sat up when it hit. "How did you do that? That was way harder than your other ones."
"I don't know yet. I think my hands were in a different position on the release." I looked at my palms. My fingers were tingling. "I need to figure out what I did differently."
I stowed the cushions behind the bench, in the gap between the stone and the wall. Dorje helped without being asked. We walked back through the corridor together, and at the junction where his path split toward the older novices' wing and mine went the other direction, he stopped.
"I'll come back tomorrow," he said. "After the fourth bell, same as today?"
"I'll be here."
He left before I could say anything else. He just turned and went, already planning to come back.
He came back. Every day for a week, he was on the terrace before me, setting up the cushions, shifting his weight from foot to foot while he waited. By the third day he could hold the compression for two seconds. By the fifth day he could hold it for four. His accuracy was still terrible, three hits out of ten from eight feet on a good afternoon, but the hold was getting longer each session.
I was getting better too. The current was holding its shape to eighteen feet now, and my best shots left dents that lasted. The air still fought me at the start of every session, my training reflexes saying release while the compression required hold. The first three attempts were always the worst. By the fourth my hands remembered what they were supposed to be doing.
On the sixth day Dorje held a compression for five seconds, pushed it forward, and the current traveled nine feet before it hit the cushion hard enough to scoot it an inch across the stone.
He stared at his hands. He stared at the cushion. He looked at me with his mouth open and the gap where he'd lost a molar showing.
"It moved. Did you see that? I actually moved it."
"Yeah. You did."
"I want to go again."
He went again. The second one flew wide. He laughed.
I was standing behind him, watching, and I reached over and pushed his left elbow down two inches without thinking about it, like straightening a picture on a wall. His next attempt was cleaner. The air went straighter.
I caught myself having done that. The adjustment had been automatic, my hands moving before my head approved the action. I noted it. I moved on.
On the seventh day I was working on extending my range past twenty feet, trying to keep the edges of the current from spreading, when Dorje said from behind me, "You're holding your breath."
I stopped. "What?"
"When you push. Right at the end. Your chest stops moving. You hold your breath every time."
I stood there. He was right. I'd been doing it on every release, a hitch in my breathing at the moment of the push, like my lungs were trying to help my hands hold the air by refusing to let any more go. It was a reflex I hadn't noticed. The Hollow Wind scrolls had a margin note about maintaining airflow during release that I'd read once and filed under breathing mechanics. I'd assumed it meant the technique's airflow. But it meant mine.
"Thanks," I said.
"Sure." He was already on his feet, shaking out his arms. "My turn?"
I let him take the cushion. I had somewhere else to be that afternoon.
The Council chamber was a circular room on the temple's upper level with five stone seats arranged in a half-moon. Light came through vents in the ceiling that tracked the sun, so the bars on the floor shifted while you stood there. I stood in the center of the room because that was where you stood, and the bars of light crossed between me and the five monks in their chairs.
I'd asked to address the Council about temple safety. The request had gone through Monk Tsoknyi, who'd passed it to Gyatso, who'd told me I could have ten minutes at the start of the monthly session. I'd been rehearsing for two weeks. I'd adjusted the language four times, testing the framing against what I knew about each elder.
Tashi was on the far left, thin and sharp-jawed with his arms folded across his chest. He was already standing, because Tashi stood when others sat. He was the hardliner, the monk who saw every problem as a discipline failure, and he was the easiest to reach because what I was about to propose sounded exactly like his kind of solution.
Pasang was in the center, the oldest monk at the temple. His hands were on his knees, his back was straight, and he wasn't going to say a word until everyone else was done talking, because that was how Pasang worked. He decided once and he decided last.
Gyatso sat to Pasang's right. He was watching me with an expression I couldn't read. Gyatso was usually the most readable person in any room. He smiled when amused, went still when thinking, and asked questions when curious. Right now he was doing none of those things. He was just watching.
Wada sat next to Tashi with heavy eyebrows and his fingers laced in his lap, thumbs moving against each other in a small rhythm.
Morioka sat next to Gyatso, holding a clay tea cup with both hands even though there was no table. He looked like someone's gentle uncle, which I'd stopped trusting after I watched him dismantle a senior monk's argument about trade routes with three quiet questions over lunch one afternoon.
"Thank you for hearing me, elders," I said.