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“Leave us,” Mai snaps, making sure that her tone is flat enough to mask how her heart hammers.
The guard manages only a “Ma’am”—ma’am, as though she were an actual woman—before she flicks a sai out of nowhere and aims it at the door. She kicks it shut after him, for good measure.
When she pulls out Zuko’s letter, which she’s ashamed to say she’s been carrying with her these past few weeks, she hopes her gloves hide most of the trembling in her fingers.
“This isn’t about you,” he protests almost at once. Even while he hunches in his seat, his irate gaze follows her heatedly around the cell. “This is about the Fire Nation.”
“Isn’t everything?” The resentment in Mai’s voice unsettles her.
“Mai,” he says again, her name heavy on his lips. When Zuko rises, she lets him. Her heart is racing again, at the warmth of his presence and the familiarity of his scent; she folds her arms to quash the giddy feeling. “I never wanted to hurt you, but I have to do this to save my country.”
“Save it?” This is where she cracks. The weeks after Omashu: an endless pursuit across the plains with her childhood friends, the frustration of the defeat at the outer wall of Ba Sing Se, the month in painted guise, and serving, always serving. “No, I’m trying to save my country. You’re betraying it.”
Something must show in Mai, despite her best efforts, because Zuko’s expression goes a little softer; and at that sight, the rest of her planned recrimination falls apart. Everything she’s been practising in her head, the speech she recited on the ride to this hellhole, turns into a torrent she can’t control.
“I don’t understand,” she cries, plaintive and frustrated. “Everything was going so well. We were going so well. Your father let you into his council meeting, and it didn’t—it didn’t—”
She stops. He finishes the thought. Just days ago, she would have found that perfect; now she hates it.
“It didn’t go like last time,” Zuko says, with an unbearable gentleness that clutches at her. “That’s why I left. Because I didn’t speak up, when I should have, about”—a falter—“about Azula’s plan.”
There is sandpaper in her throat. The words escape anyway.
“What plan?”
He tells her.
Bile crawls up her gorge. If she speaks, she will throw up. Can he tell?
Azula is my friend, Azula is the princess, your father is Agni’s will on earth.
I am loyal to the empire. I could be loyal to you.
Mai know what she wants to say. She doesn’t know what to say.
She could never beg, but she almost does, to make him stop. He would obey, she knows.
Instead she stands frozen, as Zuko says softly, “You lived in Omashu.”
He spares her the reminder of what she already knows and doesn’t say: Your father was the colonial governor of Omashu; he doesn’t say: Your family sold you to mine for that seat.
A city the size of Omashu, she thinks, and closes her eyes.
If he were merciful, he would not go on. He goes on.
“On the day of the comet, our troops will reduce Omashu to ashes. There will be no survivors.
“Two hundred thousand men, women and children, gone in a matter of seconds. For each act of rebellion committed against the empire, another Earth Kingdom city will be destroyed.”
Mai is falling; she is sinking; she can barely even keep the tremble out of her voice.
“Show me you trust me,” she says, and it is a plea this time. She begs, where she was so sure she wouldn’t.
The smile that flashes briefly across Zuko’s ruined face is a wistful one. His hand comes up to her cheek, so for one sick moment she is reminded of that day when they were both children.
(The thought that they are still children does not occur to her, not yet.)
That was the first time she had to school her face into blankness, that terrible morning—she had to sit on her hands, so she wouldn’t stuff them in her mouth to keep from screaming. Azula’s nails digging into her forearm, Azula’s hiss against her ear: Watch this, Mai. It’s going to be good.
But Zuko’s palm, dry and warm, stops inches from her skin, and she realises that he won’t move until she does. They are of matching height—it would be easy to step forward, but her limbs are heavy when she does. It’s like she is underwater, and when she presses her mouth to his, she is drowning.
When he finally steps out of the cell, she’s quiet as the door swings shut.
She counts to five minutes before the alarms go off.
***
On the gondola platform, Mai’s hands move faster than she can think, the hot metal of her knife hilts searing. She does not care whether they land in cables or fabric or flesh.
It’s only when she sees Zuko’s cable car rock against the opposite cliff that she lets out a ragged breath and raises her palms—not in surrender, but maybe resignation—to be dragged before Azula.
It was too far to tell, of course, but Mai lets herself believe that Zuko caught her glance. It will end soon, and she wants to hold on to a good thought, a best thought, here on this platform.
She does her best not to flinch when Azula dismisses the guards.
“I have to admit,” Azula says, with unmistakeable reluctance, “I never expected this from you. The thing I don’t understand is why. Why would you do it? You know the consequences.”
The truth is: Mai is fifteen years old, and she does not want to die. Not yet, not ever, and especially not like this, coursing with fear and adrenaline, under the hot bright sun, in a volcano.
She struggles for words, but says at last, “I guess you don’t know people as well as you think”—and she doesn’t even mean for it to be smug. “You miscalculated. I trust Zuko more than I trust you.”
Watch the hands, always watch the hands. Mai reaches for her last stiletto at Azula’s roar of rage, and wonders in the back of her mind how Zuko steeled himself, all those years ago, for the ruthless burst of flame. Unlike him, she’s determined to wound as deeply as she can before she burns.
Then: She doesn’t have to, she realises with belated disbelief. While what Zuko revealed of the war plan had shocked her, Ty Lee has had a preternaturally unerring grasp of the truth. She must have known it before Mai. She may have known it even before the germ was formed in Azula’s mind.
And, as impassive as Mai is, Ty Lee is by far the better actress. She spent the last few months with filthy hands and a laughing face, when she must have been screaming inside at what they’re doing.
Even so, Mai’s heartbeat stutters because for an instant she cannot tell if Ty Lee will let her die.
All three of them, calculating, always calculating. She will never find out how near a miss it was. Fingers jab and twist, and Azula collapses on the ground, even as Ty Lee calls, “Let’s go!”
The knife is still in Mai’s grip, and the guards are still half a dozen paces away. With absolutely no plan at all in her head, she drops to a crouch, grabs at Azula, and watches the prison staff back off.
***
They gag Azula with Mai’s sash, because if there’s one thing that Mai has learnt by now, it’s to wear only fireproof clothing. The ride across the caldera is all the more uneasy for the royal silence.
“What’s gotten into you?” Ty Lee asks, a note of bitterness peeking through for just a second. But, as expected, she doesn’t look at all astonished when Mai tells her what will come with the comet.
Weariness replacing the reflexes of battle, Mai cannot temper her outrage.
“You knew what we were doing was wrong,” she says accusingly. “You didn’t stop me.”
“I’d have to stop Azula first,” Ty Lee replies; “and I waited for you to stop yourself.”
Stop myself? she’d retort, if she could move her parched tongue. The highest value that they were raised with is unquestioning loyalty, so Ty Lee would have waited a long time for nothing.
But Ty Lee isn’t stupid, Mai realises giddily. Something about the acrobat even reminds her of General Iroh. Has this Ty Lee always been there, under the flourishes and pink frippery?
Then her gaze flicks from the drapes of her sleeves to Azula’s crumpled form, and she wonders, have they all always been the people they are now?
Because she knows that she and Azula are not dissimilar, Mai thinks about the sharp slash of a blade across a pale throat, the hot blood and what follows. Both of them would do anything to protect their interests; the court has stamped out any moral restraint they might have had in this regard.
But Zuko is her interest, always, and if she moved now, he would never forgive her, she tells herself.
Mai also remembers—dispassionately, because something inside her breaks when she allows passion to creep in—she is fifteen, and Azula is fourteen, and they are children who without noticing became soldiers in a war that will never end.
Ty Lee, snapping wicked fingers, jolts Mai out of her daze. “What do we do now?”
“He’ll kill her,” Mai whispers. “All of us, but his own daughter too.”
“Yes,” says Ty Lee placidly, as though she has known this forever.
“Then,” Mai says, holding herself as still as she can, “we cannot let the Fire Lord get his hands on her”; and on the dusty floor of the gondola Azula only whimpers.
***
More familiar with the terrain, they get to the little airship dock before Zuko does—though they still wait for him because neither can bend and they’re not about to enquire if Azula might be so kind.
When he does show up, crashing through the grass like a clumsy hippolephant, Mai allots herself one small inward sigh of relief that his burly firebending accomplice has escaped in some other direction. The blimp has a maximum weight, after all, and there is an extra passenger.
Zuko startles magnificently, as Mai was sure he would. But even before any of his companions notice, he flushes with anger when he sees the princess-shaped bundle that Ty Lee is sitting on.
“We couldn’t leave her,” Ty Lee squeals defensively.
“Your father will burn her alive,” Mai adds, as though it needs adding.
The Water Tribe boy who accompanies the Avatar groans at this comment, muttering darkly about how all Fire Nation teenagers are such dramatic liars, but Zuko interrupts.
“They’re right,” he says, and as usual he betrays himself, fingers inching towards his face by instinct. “My sister is older than I was, when—I mean, the mercy he might have shown a child is long gone.”
Ty Lee’s head bobs furiously in agreement. Mai notes out of the corner of her eye, and files carefully in her memory, the grim line of Suki’s mouth and the southern chieftain’s drawn-in breath.
It doesn’t feel like a victory to haul the princess in after her.
Mai watches the Boiling Rock turn to a speck beneath them, feels the air chill as the evening comes and the clouds rise up around them. If she upturned her life because she does not want her brother to burn in Omashu, she realises, she may have condemned them to that fate in the capital instead.
Her arms ache, her head hurts, and she’s tired of family and nation and anything besides one stupid boy. She picks her way across the cabin to where Zuko glares at the burner and fiddles with controls.
“Hey,” Mai murmurs, nudging with her shoulder.
He turns in surprise, but leans into her spare frame nonetheless, and she floods again with warmth.