VI: Serious Reservations

"We'll figure it out. It'll be OK."

Over the next few days, Rhian Lewis was to privately reconsider that blithe assurance a few times. Her innate optimism and goodwill ultimately kept her from changing her conclusion, but it was a firm test of those qualities, because Azula proved to be a difficult patient.

She took a turn for the worse in the afternoon of the first day, developing a high fever. This was a not-uncommon complication of hibernation syndrome, and the incidence of post-revival fevers did tend to increase with the length of suspension. No medical literature Rhian could dig up online mentioned any case studies of durations anything like what the "glacier girl" had experienced, though - the record, as far as she could determine, was 34 years - so she was entirely playing it by ear as far as treating the condition, or even knowing whether it would resolve.

Several times they considered giving up their determination to keep the matter private and summoning a doctor from Otomari, the nearest city, but in each case the proximate crisis did resolve itself before they could put the plan into action. In the end, Rhian - with the willing support of her fellow Guides and Mrs. Arata, and the calm and steady hand of Sir Victor Creed always figuratively on her shoulder to reassure her - managed to steer her patient through the rocks; but always it was difficult, and doubly so on the occasions when Azula was at least partially awake.

Part of that was because, though she turned out to speak two languages, neither was one Rhian understood. The other, Laura reported when it appeared in fevered ravings on Thursday night, was Japanese, of an archaic quality similar to her Mandarin. Mrs. Arata and Sir Victor, at least, could also understand her when she spoke so, but Mairwen and Rhian were still in the dark.

The rest was because - language barrier or not - the patient often seemed to go out of her way to be unpleasant. When not rambling semiconsciously about matters even Laura, who at least understood the words, claimed to be able to make little sense of, she alternated between bitingly sarcastic passive resistance (and if the words couldn't find their mark, the attitude still stung) and semicoherent, raging hostility. By Friday afternoon, she had regained enough of her strength that the latter posed a real threat, as she would lash out unpredictably and generally try to make things as difficult as possible.

Through it all, while Mairwen stewed in increasing frustration and Rhian grimly reminded herself of Article Three of the Guide Law ("A Guide faces challenges and learns from her experiences"), Laura applied the same implacable patience she had shown in their first conversation, absorbing all the insults and attempted cruelties without comment and firmly, quietly insisting on what was to be done. This approach generally did succeed, and though it was always an ordeal, she never raised her voice or spoke sharply in response, no matter how she might be provoked.

It was Mairwen, finally, who decided that enough was enough. On Saturday morning, when Rhian tried to change the bacta dressing on Azula's well-healing wound, Azula let her get close enough to do the job, then seized her arm and dragged her upright, snarling something through her teeth that neither Neo-Snowdonian girl could understand, but which was plainly hostile.

"Ow!" Rhian cried. She tried to pull herself away, but Azula had recovered much of her strength by this point, and her fingers dug painfully into the flesh of Rhian's upper arm. "Stop it! I'm only trying to change your bandage. You're hurting me!"

Laura sprang up from the cot Mrs. Arata had erected in the corner of the room after the first night, awakening instantly from a nap at the sound of her friend's protest, but before she could do anything else, Mairwen had crossed the room and delivered a full-power backhanded slap to the patient's face.

<God damn your eyes, that's enough!> Mairwen thundered in full-throated Welsh, standing over the bed with her face flushed almost to a match for her flaming red hair. <Is this how you treat someone who wishes only to help you? Is this how you repay the kindness of strangers? You wretched, ungrateful hag! Take your hand off her this instant, or by God I shall wring your miserable neck, carry your carcass back up to the glacier, and leave it for the crows!>

Azula, the right side of her face crimson and the left sheet-pale, released Rhian's arm and stared, blank-eyed, in the direction of the furious redhead's voice. She was clearly as unable to follow these remarks as Mairwen was any of hers, but the intent behind them was plain in any language. She seemed stunned, not physically but mentally, as if unable to believe that

a) Someone would do that;
b) Someone could do that;
c) Someone did do that.

Laura stepped up beside her seething friend and put a hand on her shoulder. "Mairwen," she said quietly. "Enough. You have made your point."

Mairwen glared down at the patient for a moment longer, then turned away with a disgusted noise. "If she hurts Rhian again," she muttered in Laura's ear before storming off to the other side of the room, "I'll kill her."

"Rhian, are you all right?" Laura inquired. Rhian - who seemed more startled now by Mairwen's reaction than Azula's provocation in the first place - rubbed her arm and nodded. "Carry on, then," Laura told her. "I will deal with this."

<No one has ever done that to me before,> said Azula, sounding somewhere between astonished and sullen, as she lay quiet and let Rhian work. <Never. I have suffered many indignities, but no one has ever dared strike me in the face.>

<You earned it,> said Laura flatly. <I would not provoke Mairwen again if I were you. Rhian's compassion is virtually limitless. Mairwen's is not.>

<And what of yours?> asked Azula archly, regaining some of her faintly mocking aplomb as the scarlet patch on her right cheek began to fade.

<I am not motivated by compassion,> Laura replied.

<What, then?>

<My reasons are my own. I will merely tell you this: You are free to abuse me in any way you feel you must. I do not mind it, I have endured far worse. But you will not treat my friends in this manner any longer. They wish only to help you, and they are not accustomed to cruelty. I will not have it inflicted upon them needlessly.>

Azula remained silent and looked thoughtful while Rhian completed her work. "It's fine," the little blonde reported to Laura once she had replaced the treated bandage with a fresh one. "She's responding well to the bacta. One more day should do the job."

<What's she saying?> Azula wondered.

<She is saying that you will be fine, no thanks to yourself,> Laura said a bit coldly.

<I still can't see.>

<That is a separate issue. You will regain your sight naturally in time. Rhian is treating the wound in your side. Rest now,> Laura told her. <Let the medicine do its work. Think about what I have said,> but her last remark went unheard as Azula drifted off again.

"I'm beginning to have serious reservations about this project," said Mairwen half-sardonically as the three Guides regrouped in a far corner. "Are you OK, Rhian?"

"I'm fine, it's just a bruise," Rhian told her. "I was more surprised than anything else. She's really strong!" Then, turning a faintly scornful look to her friend, she added, "And you should be ashamed of yourself, Mairwen Porter! Hitting a person in her sickbed like that."

Mairwen blinked at her. "Excuse me, I did it because she was hurting you," she pointed out. "If she's well enough to do that, she's well enough to take a smack in the face."

"And I appreciate the thought," Rhian replied, then folded her arms and declared with an arch little smile, "But it's still a clear Article Five violation."

Mairwen rolled her eyes. "That needs a qualification on it, like the First Law of Robotics. 'A Guide is polite and considerate' - "

" - 'or, through inaction, allow a sapient being to come to harm'? That doesn't make any sense," Rhian objected.

Mairwen snorted and gave up with an ill-suppressed smile. "Forget it," she said. "I'm going to get some lunch."

Azula had her worst fever episode yet that evening, drenching the bedclothes in sweat as she thrashed and clawed at the mattress in her anguish. Staring blindly about her, she raved throughout in her antique Japanese, a lurid, disjointed, rather disturbing narrative of blood, war, fire, ice, murder, revenge, and - weirdly - boomerangs. Laura, who sat at her bedside the entire time, took mental note of it all, reflecting as she did so that it had a strangely poetic quality, like a passage from Beowulf, the Kutune Shirka, or the Cheltariad. She wondered whether Azula was, in fact, reciting some memorized piece of epic folk literature, or if she had actually experienced - or at least believed she had experienced - the dreadful, world-shaking events of which she spoke.

At three o'clock on Friday morning, the fever broke at last, and Azula lapsed into a sleep so profound that Mairwen momentarily thought she had died. Exhausted from her efforts to bring the attack under control, Rhian replaced her patient's dressing one last time, oversaw the installation of fresh, dry bedding and nightclothes, and then allowed Mairwen to take her next door and put her to bed. Sir Victor and Mrs. Arata withdrew as well, leaving Laura to maintain a silent, solitary vigil.

VII: Regimental Retreat

Azula woke quietly at noon, opened her eyes, and looked around the bedroom, squinting against the painful brightness of the bar of light falling from the gap in the drapes across the foot of the bed. Observing this, Laura advised her quietly to take care, then asked,

<How much of last night do you remember?>

<Nothing. Or everything. It depends,> Azula replied. <It's all a blur, but at the same time, I felt every moment. Like balancing on the edge of eternity. I must have come quite near to falling off.>

Then, slowly, she put the covers aside and rose unsteadily from the bed. Laura stood up from her chair, but made no move toward her, letting her find her feet by herself. Moving like an old woman, Azula shuffled to the curtains and opened them, hissing slightly as daylight filled the room through the French doors beyond. She shaded her eyes against it for a few moments, then gradually straightened up and regarded the view beyond it: the streets and roofs of Shikuka village, and the great blue-grey bulk of Shikukayama beyond, rising into an azure summer sky.

<Where are we?> she wondered. <The eastern colonies? Shu Jing? Or somewhere in the Earth Kingdom?> She looked back over her shoulder with a faintly sardonic little smile. <Where does the Avatar keep his toys these days? You look like you could be from the Earth Kingdom, though I can't say I've ever seen the like of those clothes before.> She looked down at the black-striped red pajamas Mrs. Arata had put her in the night before. <Or these, come to that. Colors are right, though, at least there's that.> She turned back to Laura. <Well?>

<We are not in the Earth Kingdom,> Laura told her. <I do not think we are in the world you remember at all. This is the planet Karafuto. It has never had any nations in it like the ones you spoke of last night.>

Azula scowled at her. <This again!> she said in exasperation. <Is this some kind of preposterous brainwashing scheme? You'll never convince me I'm on some other planet. Look at this town!> she said, gesturing out the French doors. <It's clearly somewhere in the hinterlands of the Earth Kingdom or the Fire Nation. I've had little choice but to play along while helpless and blind, but now that I'm back on my feet, you'll find the case has altered, my friend. Now, I don't know who you're working for or how much he's paying you, but I promise you, holding me captive is going to be far more trouble than it's worth now that you've been so foolish as to let me regain my health.>

So saying, she let the drapes fall, turned fully to face Laura, and took up what the ex-assassin instantly recognized as a (slightly modified) kung fu starting stance.

<My name is Azula,> she said, the pupils of her amber eyes shrinking to cruel points. <I am the rightful Lord of the Fire Nation and the 53rd Monarch of the Earth Kingdom. No - more than that. With my father fallen, I am the Phoenix Queen. Now you will release me, and you will tell me where to find your masters, or you will face my full wrath yourself!>

Laura remained unmoved. <I am not your enemy,> she said. <My friends and I have only tried to help you. We would help you still, if you would let us. You are not our prisoner.>

<No more of your lies!> Azula spat. <You die - here and now!>

She took a step toward Laura, firing the kind of sharp, percussive punch that could knock a hole in a solid door. Since she was a good ten feet away, this did nothing, but that fact - self-evident to Laura - seemed to take Azula by surprise. She pulled up short and looked at her fist, first in shock, then dismay. She tried again with the other hand, similarly accomplishing nothing, then again. By this time she was near enough that she might actually have connected, but Laura merely put up a palm and blocked the blow.

<... no,> Azula whispered. She stumbled back a step and then fell to her knees, looking in horror at her hands. <he's done it to me too.>

Then, looking up at Laura with tears in the corners of her furious eyes, she sprang to her feet and snarled, <No matter! I'll crush you with my bare hands!>

She was good - well-trained, a talented athlete and martial artist. She had recovered much of her physical strength, and with the return of her eyesight, her physical confidence as well. Even handicapped by... whatever seemed to be the problem... Azula was a very able and dangerous combatant. Her timing was off, though, her agility damaged, her endurance diminished, and her wound, though no longer a threat to her life, remained painful; besides which her extreme fury made her careless. Laura was able to fend her off for a minute without either of them sustaining any significant injury. Then the spark of sudden rage seemed to burn out, and without warning she crashed into a pit of black despair, abandoning the fight to crumple to her knees and weep. She offered no resistance as Laura raised her from the floor and put her back to bed.

Once Azula was back under the covers, gazing bleakly at the ceiling, Laura sat down on the edge of the bed next to her, regarding her with steady, calm, slightly sad eyes - touched in a place she did not entirely understand by this strange, violent girl's grief.

"I think you had better tell me about it," she said quietly.

Without really understanding why, Azula did.

It was the same story she had told in her ravings the night before, only delivered in a flat, calm, almost mechanical voice, like a court reporter reading back the stenographic record. She was, she said, crown princess of a place called the Fire Nation, the daughter of its cunning and cruel monarch, born like all their royal line with an elemental gift Laura gathered was akin to pyrokinesis, and which Azula called "firebending". Raised from infancy to carry on the family business (which was evidently murder and tyranny, for the most part), groomed as her father's heir when her elder brother had proven disappointingly willing to acknowledge principles of basic human decency, she had driven herself relentlessly all her life to live up to her father's terrifying ideals.

In the end, it had availed her nothing. If anything, she had proven even more cunning and cruel than he was, surpassing the very exemplar she had used as the model for her aspirations. Her father had rewarded her for this achievement by marginalizing her, pushing her aside on the eve of a triumph she felt she had largely engineered. When that triumph failed to materialize for him and he had gone down to ignominious defeat, it was no fault of hers, but by then, she was in a madhouse anyway.

The next part of the story made little sense even internally - something about being removed from the asylum by her brother, who had usurped the throne that was rightfully hers in the wake of their father's fall, to help him look for their missing mother. The expedition had gone horribly wrong in a way so confusing and uncontextual that Laura could make no sense of it, and the next thing Azula knew, she was in a metal room, fighting men whom Laura recognized from her descriptions as spacers of a particularly unsavory strain. Then the gunshot - she hadn't recognized the weapon, such things were unknown in her world - and she knew no more until waking in this bed on Wednesday.

Her story told, she drifted off to sleep again, spent. Laura sat looking at her for a long time, then rose and went next door to consult with the others.

It became obvious to all concerned that Laura, Mairwen, Rhian, and Sir Victor were not going to be able to leave Karafuto at the end of June, as they had planned. There was no way Azula could be made ready to face interstellar travel in that amount of time; she didn't even believe that there were inhabited planets other than the one she still thought she was on, much less that the technology existed to travel between them.

Sir Victor put it to them on Saturday that, with the girl having recovered from hibernation syndrome and her gunshot wound well on the way to healing, the honor of the Regiment was satisfied, and they could hand her over to Karafuto's civil authorities and put the matter behind them with a clear conscience.

He was not surprised when none of the three would hear of it. Nor dismayed, come to that. In fact, he would have been disappointed if they'd been willing to consider it. It would have made his life easier, certainly, and he was technically right that, having manifestly saved the girl's life, they were under no further moral obligation to her... but handing off a difficult case to the professionals just because it was difficult had never been Victor Creed's way, and it wasn't Laura's either.

They did agree, though, that staying in the village was not the best plan now that Azula was well enough to at least travel locally. Not only would that be presuming on Mrs. Arata's already-well-tried hospitality, there was still the possibility that Lefty Szoroda, or his employers, would come looking for her. Victor had certain inquiries of his own in progress regarding the Zregdan slaver and his interest in the Maiden in the Ice, but as yet they hadn't turned up anything, and so the question remained open.

Mrs. Arata herself was just as reluctant to wash her hands of the matter as the three Guides. Finally they arrived at a compromise; which was how Laura, Mairwen, Rhian, and Azula found themselves installed in the late Mr. Arata's old hunting-and-fishing cabin, halfway up a mountain a short walk outside the village proper. Here, the Guides could look after their curious patient without interruption or distraction, free from the possibility of endangering the townsfolk. Mrs. Arata visited daily, bringing up supplies and doing whatever she could to help. Sir Victor, too, was a frequent presence, stopping by to check in and update Laura on his inquiries. For the most part, though, the Guides were left to their own devices, as if on a Regimental retreat.

Rhian, her medical duties for the most part discharged, took it upon herself to take point on her erstwhile patient's orientation to her new reality. This, if anything, was a bigger challenge than seeing her through hibernation syndrome and repairing her gunshot wound had been, but the little blonde soldiered on with grace and goodwill, Laura's doggedly patient assistance, and Mairwen's reassuring presence to fall back on when things got to be too much.

For her part, after her failed attempt to do battle with Laura, Azula seemed to have lost some of her combative spirit. She was still sarcastic, often cuttingly so, and still very suspicious of her companions' motives, but it appeared she had decided that there was nothing for it but to play along and see where the game eventually led her. Once she chose to apply herself to what Rhian was trying to teach her, she revealed a new facet of her character: though unstable, quick to anger, and very possibly delusional, she was also brilliant, possessed of an intellect so quick and retentive she almost seemed, like Laura, to have been engineered for the shortest possible learning curve.

Under Rhian's tutelage, with the aid of modern teaching technologies whose very nature seemed to astonish her, she achieved functional spoken fluency in the Standard language in two weeks. This was both a blessing and a curse to Rhian and Mairwen, in that they could now speak to her and expect to be understood, but on the other hand, they now had no defense against her casual verbal cruelty or her biting sardony. She relied less and less on either as June yielded to July, though; Rhian's relentless good cheer seemed to be penetrating her shell, and Mairwen, though just as suspicious of her as vice versa, was almost unfailingly civil in a way that her own high-bred manners responded to.

As she recovered her strength, Azula began sparring regularly with Laura, remarking that even if her enemies had stripped her of her true power, she might as well at least keep in shape. These conflicts invariably ended poorly for her, but she persisted anyway, as if punishing herself for each failure.

"How did I defeat you?" Laura asked her after one such fall, while Azula knelt in the grass of the little meadow by the cabin and panted.

"You're... so fast," Azula gasped.

"Nonsense," Laura replied. "Our physical reaction speeds are roughly comparable, as are our builds and general fitness levels. We should be much more evenly matched." She shook her head. "Your weakness is not your technique."

Azula said nothing to that; merely nodded as if she already knew it, dragged herself to her feet, and squared herself to try again.

With language studies well along, Rhian started introducing basic galactic orientation materials into her lesson plans. There was some debate among the three Guides whether their curious charge was from the distant past (Laura's theory), a parallel universe (Rhian's), or simply out of her mind (Mairwen's). They flipped a coin to see whether they would start with So You Just Arrived from a Parallel Dimension or So You Became Unstuck in Time (there being, as Mairwen sarcastically pointed out, no So You're Batshit in the Bacon Publications library as yet). Laura won the coin toss. Azula maintained that she was reading the book only to humor them, but she did at least read it.

"Fine," she said when Rhian chided her for maintaining her skepticism in the face of all she had seen. "Prove it to me, then." She flipped to a page in the middle of the book and held it up, tapping the illustration in the middle with one elegantly manicured fingertip. "If we are on one planet among many, this one must have one of these 'spaceport' things. Take me there and show me. Let me see these 'starships' for myself."

"I don't think that's a good idea," Mairwen said. "You're not ready for - "

"Am I not? Or are you not ready for your lies to be exposed?" Azula put the book down and gave the redhead a cool little smirk. "I'm calling your bluff, ladies. Let's see your tiles."

Laura gazed silently at her for a few seconds. Then, a little to her surprise (and to a shared glance of mingled dismay and delight between Mairwen and Rhian), she smiled, very slightly.

"Remember," she said, "you asked for this."

VIII: The Deep End

The next day, dressed in the most nondescript traveling clothes they could rustle up, the four of them walked into Shikuka village and caught the daily bus to the nearby town of Otomari, and from there rode a train to the prefecture capital, Toyohara.

The first crack in Azula's façade of smirking disbelief was the train. The way of life and typical mode of dress on Karafuto might be deliberately backward-looking, but there was nothing antiquated about its transportation infrastructure, and it was fairly plain from her stories of life in the Fire Nation - told with increasing relish as she grew more comfortable with the people she still claimed to regard as her captors - that something like a shinkansen would be entirely outside Azula's experience. She contained her astonishment with a stonefaced effort of will, not wanting to give the Guides the satisfaction of seeing it, but she was not entirely successful...

... and the task became more or less impossible when they reached Toyohara itself. As great metropolises went, it was not much - population a mere 180,000 - but it did have all the usual furniture of a modern galactic city: skyscrapers, aircar traffic, a maglev monorail, an interstellar spaceport.

"I... is this real?" Azula demanded, standing on the central train station's forecourt and looking up at the stately grid of the aircar lanes high above the streets.

"Hey, you wanted to jump in at the deep end," said Mairwen, not entirely unsympathetically. "C'mon. Monorail's this way. Let's go watch the starships take off."

By the time they reached the spaceport, Azula had lost all of her calmly mocking I-am-humoring-you air. She was just looking around in blank-faced shock, unable to muster even token sarcasm in response to Mairwen's gentle needling, until eventually the redhead took pity on her and stopped trying.

They stood by the perimeter fence for half an hour, in an area thoughtfully designated by the spaceport authorities for just this activity, and watched freighters and starliners come and go. Azula had seen aircraft before, but only stately lighter-than-air vessels, more like sailing ships of the air than these alloy-and-nuclear-fire monsters. Nothing in her experience could just rise up, turn around, boom away into the sky, and disappear in seconds like an ion-driven stock freighter. The complex of hangars and terminals and tarmac sprawled away out of sight, covering an area larger than the whole Capital City, and this was supposed to be a modest facility.

In the main terminal building, her confusion only deepened, as she found herself confronted by the gleaming technology of the modern age: towering holopanels with animated advertisements for travel destinations, vending machines, the baggage handling machinery. Rhian's little personal computer, which she had used during her language instruction, Azula could write off as a parlor trick or some advancement that had come along during her time out of circulation. These things... not so much.

And then there were the people. Very few looked like anyone Azula had ever seen, more obviously foreigners than even these three girls... and some were manifestly, undeniably not human. Across the concourse, for instance, she saw a massive, barrel-shaped purple creature with three mouths, three tentacles in place of arms, and three short, stumpy legs. She might have assumed this was a hallucination, except that a couple of spaceport employees were standing around having a conversation with it, consulting clipboards and generally seeming to be conducting perfectly ordinary business.

"What in the world... ?" she murmured, unable to tear her eyes from the sight.

"Huh? Oh, that's a Rigellian," Rhian told her. "A native of Rigel IV."

Azula resisted an urge to rub her eyes and see if it was still there, saying slowly, "At home... that would be a spirit manifestation of some kind. The ordinary people in this place would be fleeing in terror."

Mairwen snorted. "From a Rigellian? They're harmless. Bit chatty. The only danger a Rigellian would ever pose is that he might talk you to death."

Azula didn't reply. At length, the Rigellian completed his business and shambled off down a side passage. Only then could she recall herself to business, following the others as they delved deeper into the facility.

They ate lunch at a restaurant on the upper concourse. The staff weren't human either, though much less obviously so than the Rigellian; they had little furry ears on top of their heads, peeking out through perfectly ordinary-looking hair, like the mischievous monkeyfox spirits in folktales Azula had heard in childhood. She ate robotically, too distracted by all that was running through her head to really notice what she was eating, then excused herself to use the restroom.

This, at least, was normal enough, the fixtures sleek and weirdly styled, but recognizable. She completed her business, washed her hands, and was on her way back to the table when she noticed something standing in an alcove off the hallway: a short silver pedestal with a glowing holographic field above it. A sign on the wall behind it said PUBLIC HOLONET TERMINAL.

Knowing that she only had a few minutes before someone would come looking for her, Azula slipped into the alcove and took a moment to figure out how to operate the device. It was easy, having been designed specifically to be quick and intuitive to operate, and within moments she had it doing more or less what she wanted it to do... except for the lack of meaningful results. She kept at it, growing more and more frustrated, for as long as she dared, then pulled herself away and returned to the table. Rhian was just rising to go in search of her when she returned.

She was pale and subdued for the rest of the expedition, responding only with quiet yesses and nos to the increasingly infrequent comments and queries of her companions. On the train back to Otomari she was entirely silent, sitting withdrawn by a window and gazing expressionlessly out at the speeding scenery.

"I'm afraid we might have pushed her a little too far," Rhian murmured to her friends across the aisle.

"Hey, I told her she wasn't ready," said Mairwen, unmoved.

"She will be all right," Laura said. "It is a great deal of information to process, now that she has accepted it is real."

Rhian frowned. "I'm not sure," she said. "She looks sad about something, not shellshocked. Like she knows something and it's breaking her heart."

"Assuming she has one," Mairwen muttered.

"Don't be mean," Rhian said. "I'm going to see if she'll tell me what's wrong."

Mairwen rolled her eyes. "Well, if she attacks you again, don't come crying to me."

Rhian gave her an oh-stop-it look, then glanced at Laura, but the dark-haired girl only nodded, saying nothing; so the blonde rose and went across the aisle, slipping into the seat next to Azula.

"Hey," she said quietly. "What's the matter?"

Azula glanced at her, and for a second Rhian assumed she was going to say something biting and then ignore her, as was more or less customary at such moments.

Instead, though, she sighed, looked back out the window, and said matter-of-factly, "I think I may be going mad."

Rhian was glad Mairwen hadn't heard her say that, as it would surely have produced a bark of sardonic laughter. She didn't laugh, but said, "Why would you say that? You've been doing so much better."

Azula kept looking out the window in silence for long enough that Rhian decided she wasn't going to talk, but just before the blonde could get up and leave her to her funk, she said, as if to no one in particular,

"At the restaurant, I found something called a... 'public holonet terminal'. I figured out how to use it. Some kind of galactic library. I'm sure it's very familiar technology to you." Rhian nodded. "I tried to find out what became of my world. It shouldn't have been that hard. Someone - those people I remember fighting, the old man who shot me - must have gone there to take me away in the first place. If that was a hundred years ago or more... there should be some record. But there's nothing. Not a trace, nothing even slightly recognizable. It's as if the entire world simply never existed."

She turned to Rhian, who was shocked to see unshed tears glittering in her amber eyes, and said very quietly, "This leaves me with a choice of two conclusions. Either some catastrophe has happened, and Dìqiú is no more... or it never existed in the first place, and Mairwen is right - I've simply imagined what I know as my entire life." She closed her eyes, the tears slipping down her cheeks. "You'll excuse me if neither choice delights me."

IX: Vandal Carondan's Last Score

They got back to Shikuka in the late afternoon. Azula was still withdrawn and silent as they disembarked from the bus in the village square. She responded with a noncommittal grunt when asked what she wanted to do for dinner.

"Why don't we go see Mrs. Arata?" Rhian suggested. "I'm sure she'd like to see you out and about," she said.

"If you like," said Azula dully.

"I dunno, I kind of like her this way," Mairwen muttered in Rhian's ear as they followed Laura toward the inn.

"Stop it," Rhian grumbled.

They entered the lobby of the Arata Inn, Rhian mustering all the personal light she could manage, but her cheery greeting died on her lips as they passed the threshold. There was a man standing there already, a tall and burly Zregdan, looming over the diminutive landlady in an obviously threatening manner.

"Look, lady," Lefty Szoroda growled. "I know they were here, half this stinking town saw them. All you gotta do is - "

Without hesitation, Laura stepped up behind him and seized his wrist on the side where he wore his holstered blaster, yanking the hand up behind him and driving his face into the counter so quickly that it happened before he even realized she was there.

"Leave her alone," she hissed in his ear.

"Aw, crap," he said, and then Laura went two-for-two in breaking his right arm. He didn't have long to reflect on the irony, since her next action was to haul him upright again, turn him around, and propel his forehead into her knee, putting him out like a pinched candle.

"Are you all right, Mrs. Arata?" she asked the innkeeper, who looked startled, but not afraid.

"I am now," Mrs. Arata replied. "I take it you're acquainted with this gentleman."

"He was the leader of the people who took Azula from the glacier," Laura confirmed. "Which means - "

"Uh, Laura? We may have a problem," said Mairwen from the door.

Laura wheeled and went to the door, stepping over Lefty Szoroda's sprawled bulk. In the street outside the inn, a more substantial group of armed riffraff than Lefty's crew on the glacier had gathered, perhaps two dozen strong. Beyond them, the street was deserted, the only locals in evidence peeping fearfully around doorways and corners. Laura was reminded of the showdown scenes in those Western movies Mairwen enjoyed so much, when the gang rides into town to call out the sheriff.

She supposed that made her the sheriff. The image did not displease her. Some tiny, unfledged impulse toward humor, stirring deep within her, regretted that she didn't have a badge to pin to her black leather jacket as she pushed open the door and went out onto the porch.

Behind her, Mairwen looked from Rhian to Azula to Mrs. Arata, then murmured, "Stay here," turned, and raced upstairs.

"What do you want?" Laura asked calmly.

The person in the middle of the armed formation, a tall, severe-looking woman with short-cropped iron-grey hair and a mechanical hand showing at the cuff of her duster coat's right sleeve, gave her a puzzled look.

"Who are you supposed to be?"

Laura looked coolly back at her, then smiled almost imperceptibly and replied, "Kinney, Laura. Senior Guide Sergeant-at-Arms, Llanfair Regiment. 3C45932."

The woman stared at her. "Are you fucking kidding me?" she said.

"Do I look like I am joking?" Laura replied flatly.

"You're the one who took out Lefty and his crew? Jesus. I didn't believe them when they told me what happened to them." The woman rolled her eyes. "What the hell are you, some kind of ninja Girl Scout?"

"I asked you what you want," Laura said. "This is private property."

"Yeah, well, speaking of property, you've got some of mine," the woman shot back. "The name's Carondan. Vandi Carondan. Ring any bells?"

"No," said Laura, unperturbed.

"My great-great-great-grandfather was Vandal Carondan. You musta heard of him."

"No," Laura repeated in exactly the same tone.

Vandi rolled her eyes again. "Jesus," she said, throwing up her hands. "Kids these days. Vandal Carondan was the greatest pirate in the Terminus in his day. I'd list some of his jobs for you, but you'd just gimme that blank look again, so the hell with it. Point is, I tracked down his last score. Somewhere out in Enigma, he bagged something big. So big the United Galactica secret police wasted him and took it for themselves, then lost it in some internal power struggle. Somehow it ended up here. Or to be more precise, up there," she said, jerking a thumb over her shoulder at the looming shape of Shikukayama on the horizon.

"My father, his father, and his father spent their whole lives lookin' for that score," she said. "I found out it was here. The locals were worshipping it as some kind of frozen idol on the mountain or some goddam thing." She shook her head. "Farmers. What're you gonna do, right? Anyway, I hired Lefty to come get it. And what does he bring me instead? Some story about how he and his boys dug it out of the glacier, and then a Girl Scout comes along, kicks all their asses, and takes it away from them. Now I gotta round up all these guys, come here myself, and get back my property. That doesn't make me happy."

"I am uninterested in your emotional state," said Laura. "You came for nothing. Turn around and leave this place, and nothing more will be said."

Vandi gave her a look of utter disbelief.

"Seriously? Seriously?" she demanded. "I got two dozen armed bastards here and you're gonna face me off? Maybe you don't understand what's going on here. I am taking what's mine. You are asking to become part of the package, and at this point I'm pretty sure I'm gonna oblige you."

"She's not yours," Rhian burst out, pushing through the door to stand next to Laura. "She's a human being, not some kind of lost property. Your ancestor had no right to her in the first place, much less you." She folded her arms. "Slavery was illegal than and it's illegal now."

Vandi gave her the same incredulous look she'd been giving Laura, then shook her head with a wry, resigned smile.

"You know what, you're absolutely right," she said; then she nodded to one of her men, who - without any warning at all - shot her down with a phaser set to stun. "Remember that when you're dancing for Gorgo the Hutt," Vandi advised her. "Boys - take 'em."

Laura's fists clenched, the corner of her right eye twitching slightly. Those were the only outward signs that she was about to explode, willingly - perhaps even joyously - unleashing all of the carefully restrained talent for mayhem that had been drilled into her by her inhumane but very efficient makers in the Facility back on Omega.

About five milliseconds before she could do so, however, another figure swept past her, chin high, amber eyes flashing, elegant mouth set in a grim, flat line.

"That's quite enough," said Azula.

Vandi blinked. "You're awake?" she said. "Huh. That complicates things, but OK. Are you gonna come quietly," she asked with a sardonic grin, "or do we get to find out what makes you so special?"

Azula met her eyes and smiled, very slightly, very coldly.

"Watch carefully," she said, and then moved.

X: The Phoenix Queen

/* Fall Out Boy
"The Phoenix"
Save Rock and Roll (2013) */

She came down off the porch like a striking hawk, making straight for the member of Vandi's crew who had stunned Rhian. He fired at her, but she was too fast for him, closing and knocking the weapon from his grasp with an open-handed slap. He drew a vibroknife and tried to switch to close-combat techniques, but Azula was all over him. She dealt him a kick in the midsection that folded him up like a cheap chair, then swept his feet from under him, punched him unconscious on his way down, and whirled to confront the nearest of his fellows.

Across the way, a woman in scraps of what looked like they'd once been Atlas Corporation Crimson Lance armor raised a combat rifle and drew a bead. Automatically, without thinking, Azula changed her focus, sidestepping in a tight circular motion and launching one of those percussive punches she'd tried on Laura at their first clash, despite the fact that the woman with the rifle was a good twenty feet away -

- and a bolt of fire, the brilliant blue of a gas flame, shot from her fist and blew the woman off her feet, knocking her out of the combat as surely as if Azula had shot her with a blaster.

Everyone froze, staring in astonishment, as she spun out of the follow-through, blue flames crackling around her fists, and her tiny, cold smile became a rather larger, crueler one.

"... back in business," she murmured with an air of great satisfaction, and then the real mayhem began.

Laura was only seconds behind her, taking the left flank as Azula took the right. Two teenage girls against a small army of heavily armed, experienced mercenaries, neither side offering or expecting any quarter. By rights, it should have been an outright bloodbath, vicious, appalling, and brief...

... and so, indeed, it was.

The people of Shikuka would tell the story to their children for centuries to come. Within two generations it had become legend, the stuff of epic campfire tales: the day that the outlanders trifled with the Witch of Shikuka and her wolf-spirit guide, and a righteous doom engulfed them in a storm of blue flames, flashing blades, terror and blood. In reality, it was not an absolute massacre. The vast majority survived, albeit some seriously wounded and all so terrorized they would never speak of the experience again. In the memories and imaginations of later Shikukan lorekeepers, though, their annihilation became absolute, the just fate of anyone who would taunt the spirits of the mountain.

The diciest moment came when one of Vandi's men hauled out a plasmacaster. With that, he could have vaporized half the street, including several of his fellows; but he never got the chance to use it. Before Laura could reach him or Azula blast him, he stiffened, then dropped to the ground, twitching, while smoke poured from the vents of his weapon's instrument pod. Jutting from the top of that pod was the black shaft of an arrow.

Laura glanced up and back along its flight path and saw Mairwen crouching on the inn's porch roof, her bow held sideways in front of her, smiling a sardonic little smile of her own.

"Llanfair am byth, sucker," she murmured, then drew another taser arrow from her quiver and nocked it, her eyes scanning the melee for another likely target.

In the end, the mercenaries fell one by one, all their weapons and tactics availing them nothing, and only Vandi Carondan remained. Her lip curled back in a sneer, she abandoned her empty blaster and drew a vibrosword from her back, twirling it in a practiced sort of way in her flesh-and-blood left hand.

"So hard to get good help these days," she said, advancing.

"Some things never change," Azula replied with a mock-sympathetic nod.

"I'll give you this, I know why you were worth so much now," Vandi said. "I just hope a lab will be able to pull something useful out of your corpse, 'cause you're way too dangerous for me to leave alive."

Azula smirked coldly. "You haven't even seen the best part yet."

"Right," said Vandi. She broke into a trot, then a run, sweeping in with her blade held low. Laura's preternaturally sharp ears caught the strobe-light whine of a charging capacitor - some weapon concealed in the woman's robotic hand, powering up for a surprise strike.

Azula changed her stance slightly, her hands closing into half-fists, first two fingers extended. Her eyes narrowed as she watched the pirate leader approach.

An instant before Vandi would have feinted with the blade and then discharged her hidden plasma smasher, Azula struck - but not with fire, which would have taken long enough to reach her opponent that it would have been, at best, a mutual takedown. When she swept her hand forward, what emerged from her stiffly pointed fingers was not flame, but a brilliant, jagged bolt of lightning. It took Vandi square in the chest, blasting her coat to rags, and raced down her bionic arm. The metal hand exploded like a grenade as the energy reached it, then earthed from it, carving a blackened scar in the street.

The pirate screamed, flung down in a ragged heap; the smoking remains of her vibrosword flew from her remaining hand, coming to rest at Laura's feet.

Grinning in vicious triumph, Azula strode forward, used her foot to turn Vandi onto her back, and raised a crackling hand, cocking it to strike the final blow - but Laura sprang between them and took hold of it with her own hand, heedless of the shock that action earned her.

"Azula," she said. "Azula! Enough."

Azula stared at her, eyes wide, pupils contracting. "You'd put yourself in my way to protect the likes of her?" she snarled, gesturing to the sprawled and half-conscious pirate leader. "Why?" She leaned forward, her face an inch from Laura's, and repeated the question in a voice just short of a scream. "WHY?"

Laura looked her straight in the eye and replied calmly, "I am not protecting her."

Azula blinked in shock at her, the fury draining away from her face. Then she backed away, whirled, and fled.

Laura hesitated, turning toward the inn, but Mairwen and Mrs. Arata were already there, helping Rhian up.

"I'm fine! Go!" Rhian called to her, blinking away the lingering effects of the stun.

Laura went.

She caught up to Azula at a precipice outside of town, where the highlands on which the village was built sloped sharply away into a valley. She, Mairwen, and Rhian had come here before, early in June, before encountering Azula. With the Little Shikuka River plunging spectacularly into the gorge off to one side, it was a popular beauty spot in the area.

"Azula - " Laura began, but Azula spun toward her and cried,

"What am I? What am I? Granddaughter and namesake of a man so despised that history has forgotten him? Daughter and heir of a man so hated his whole world has been struck from memory? Fit only to rule a land that no longer exists, that may never have existed?! What am I?"

Laura seemed to have no answer for that, but Azula wasn't expecting one, anyway. She paced up and down, gesticulating, pushing her hands back through her hair over and over, as she carried on ranting.

"Is this your revenge, Aang?" she asked. "Did you decide that the world was so broken, so corrupted, by its century under my forefathers' rule that the only way you could 'balance' it was to destroy it? To wipe it away so completely that its very name would be forgotten?" She turned and looked out over the valley, as if the person she was addressing might be over there, and continued, "And can even you have hated me so much that you would leave me - only me - behind to dream of its vanished glories?"

Azula met Laura's eyes, her face stricken, and demanded plaintively, "Am I all that's left? The last firebender, all that remains of lost, forgotten Dìqiú?"

Again leaving Laura no chance to answer her rhetorical question, she turned back to the valley again, tears rolling unchecked down her cheeks, and whispered,

"Well played." Her voice broke in a choking sob. "Oh, well played, Avatar. Even in my ruin I can only stand in awe of the elegance, the totality, of your cruelty. All that time I flattered myself that I was your true nemesis in the great game." She shook her head miserably. "I wasn't even a player."

Gathering her dignity, she dashed at her tears and squared herself up. Still addressing someone who wasn't there, she bowed her head with exquisite cordiality and said, as if conceding a diplomatic point, "Your victory is complete. I resign."

Then, taking one step forward, she held her hands away from her sides and let herself fall.

"Laura Kinney and the Maiden in the Ice" - an Exile Mini-Serial by Benjamin D. Hutchins
special to the Eyrie Productions Discussion Forum
© 2013 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited

Epilogue: Discarded Weapons

"No," said Laura - not a shout of dismay, but a quiet refusal, as if to say, "This is unacceptable."

Leaping, she caught Azula around the waist; for a moment it seemed that this would only take them both over the edge, but then, with a supreme athletic effort, she twisted herself in the air, driving the claws of her free hand and both feet into the cliff face. Metal shrieked on stone; she felt her right shoulder dislocate as her weight and Azula's bore almost totally upon it with a sharp jerk. Teeth gritted, she hung grimly on, levering herself upward with her toes, and heaved her limp, unprotesting burden back up onto level ground, then climbed up after to sprawl panting on the grass alongside her.

Azula lay where she'd been put, looking blankly up at the sky, for a moment. Then she turned her head and asked simply,

"Why?"

Laura didn't answer her for a moment, busy gathering herself back together. Then she rose, re-seated her shoulder with a crack, and took Azula's hand, pulling her upright again with her good arm so that she could look her in the eye.

"You and I are the same," said Laura. "Discarded weapons. Manufactured monsters who outlived our makers' use for us. Each of us convinced at that point that our only remaining purpose was to die." She shook her head. "I received another chance from the hand of a perfect stranger. Now it is my turn to pay it forward."

Azula gave her a skeptical look. "Why waste it on me? I'm nothing. Useless. I have no purpose. I have nothing."

"You have your life," Laura told her, seizing her shoulder. "In the end, our lives are all we have. The past is behind us. The dead are gone. We owe them nothing. Your father, my creator - the only power they have over us now, we give to them ourselves. Perhaps they gave us our lives, but they are ours now," she insisted, her green eyes shining with an intensity Azula had never seen in them before.

"... Laura," she said, startled.

"Maybe the world you remember is gone," Laura continued. "Maybe it never even existed." She raised her other hand, wincing slightly as the still-damaged joint protested, and took Azula's other shoulder, gripping both firmly. "But you are here now. So live, Azula." She shook the other girl slightly for emphasis and said, "Grab your life with both hands. Never let anyone say you don't have the right to. Not even yourself. Especially not yourself."

Azula gazed back at her, utterly dumbfounded.

"I... " She looked away, bowing her head, and then raised her eyes again, a firmer conviction coming into them. "Yes," she said.

Mairwen and Rhian arrived then, both at a dead run. "Laura! Azula!" Rhian cried as she approached. "Are you all right?"

The two girls regarded each other for a moment longer, as if weighing the question together, then turned to face their friends with small, slightly weary smiles.

"No," said Azula, "but I think it's possible we may be one day."