Chapter Text
Yakone's left sock was wet.
His right sock was also wet, but his left sock was wetter, and it was the left one he kept thinking about as he stood on the terrace with nineteen other boys and tried not to move. The boots were hand-me-downs from a kid named Hasook. Kaya had stuffed the toes with dried moss. The moss had soaked through before he'd even reached the top of the city, and now he could feel individual threads of wet moss between his toes, and each one was a personal insult.
Master Pakku had told them to stand still. Then he'd left. That was forty minutes ago.
Yakone was eight. He was also thirty-four, if you counted the first time around, which he did, though not out loud, because explaining to your mother that you're actually a dead software developer from Portland would go over poorly in a culture that didn't have software or Portland.
The terrace was carved into the ice wall below the palace. Twenty boys in a line, bundled in parkas, breath fogging. The wind came off the ocean and went straight for the collar. A boy near the front was crying. He kept wiping his face and pretending he wasn't. The boy next to him was pretending not to notice.
Pakku had a face like an ice shelf. He'd said fourteen words — "stand, feet apart, weight centred, arms at your sides, you will stand until I return" — and each word had landed like it cost money. Then he'd walked off the terrace and hadn't come back.
Yakone stood still. Not because he was disciplined. Because in his other life, his first life, the one with the truck and the oranges and the apartment in Southeast Portland with the shower that took four minutes to get hot, he'd sat through a six-hour code review where his manager, a man named Greg who wore fleece vests and had opinions about variable naming conventions, had gone through a pull request line by line. Line. By. Line. If Greg's code review hadn't broken him, Pakku's ice terrace wasn't going to.
His left sock squelched.
He thought about Greg. He hadn't thought about Greg in months. The memories came like that now, in random bursts, disconnected from anything useful. Greg's fleece vest. The taste of the coffee from the break room, which was always burnt because nobody cleaned the pot. The way the parking garage smelled after rain. His brain served it up anyway, like leftovers nobody had asked for.
David Chen was dying. Not physically. That had already happened, under a truck, on a Tuesday, holding oranges. David Chen was dying the way a photograph dies: slowly, the colours going first, then the faces, then the names. His mother's laugh was gone. He remembered that it started somewhere in her stomach and climbed, but the sound itself had corrupted. His father was hands. Long fingers. A callus on the right thumb from something his dad never explained.
The TV show was the only thing that hadn't faded. Every episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, preserved in perfect detail, down to the background music and the episode titles and the specific shade of blue in Katara's eyes during the finale. His brain had lost his parents' faces and kept a Nickelodeon cartoon.
Forty-five minutes. A gull had landed on the railing and was staring at them. Judging, possibly. Three boys had broken — shuffled, scratched, one kid sat down and shot back up so fast he almost fell off the terrace. Pakku would dismiss them when he came back. Yakone knew this because he knew Pakku, not personally, but from the show, and also from three years of hearing older kids talk about the academy like it was something that happened to you.
His nose was running. He'd wiped it on his sleeve four times. The sleeve was approaching a texture he didn't want to think about.
Fifty minutes. His attention drifted. The water-sense spread outward from his feet the way it did when he wasn't holding it back. He could feel the ice beneath his boots. The terrace, the wall it was carved from, the canal maybe thirty feet below, dark water flowing through the city's guts. He could feel the vapour in the air, the mist that Agna Qel'a breathed out like a living thing.
Close water. That was his range. Forty feet, give or take. Everything inside that bubble was detailed and alive — he could feel the grain of the ice, the speed of the canal current, the temperature of the mist. Beyond forty feet, nothing. The ocean was out there, he could hear it, but he couldn't feel it any more than he could feel the moon. Just sound and salt and the knowledge that something enormous was moving.
On full moon nights, the bubble stretched. Warmer things crept in at the edges. But that wasn't today. Today was wet socks and a runny nose and a gull with an attitude problem.
Pakku came back.
He walked down the line. Dismissed the three movers without raising his voice. Stopped in front of Yakone.
"Name."
"Yakone, Master."
"Your parents are fishers."
"Yes, Master."
"Non-benders."
"Yes, Master."
Pakku looked at him for three seconds. It was not a comfortable three seconds.
Then he moved on.
***
The training pool was shallow, maybe knee-deep on an adult, carved into the terrace floor and refilled every morning by a couple of senior students who looked like they'd rather be anywhere else. The water was cold. Everything was cold. Yakone was beginning to think "cold" was less a temperature and more a personality trait of the Northern Water Tribe.
"Pull," Pakku said.
Twenty boys reached for the water. Yakone reached. The water came up — a wobbly column, two feet, maybe two and a half. He held it. Five seconds. Ten. An itch on his ankle screamed for attention. He ignored it. Fifteen. The column trembled. He set it down.
Pakku's eyebrow didn't move. Maybe it couldn't. Maybe it had frozen along with the traditions, the gender roles, and Master Pakku's expression.
"Again."
Two spots down, a boy named Toklo held his column for twenty seconds. Clean, steady, no wobble. Toklo was going to be handsome at sixteen and smug at thirty. You could already see it forming. His water work was textbook, and Pakku loved textbook the way Greg loved variable naming conventions, with a devotion that bordered on spiritual.
Yakone pulled again. The water rose. And this time his attention split — half on the column, half on the canal below, the vapour in the air, the ice under his feet, his water-sense expanding outward because it wanted to and he couldn't always stop it and the column collapsed.
"Concentrate," Pakku said.
"Yes, Master."
He pulled again. Held it. Twenty seconds. Twenty-five. His arms burned. His shoulders would hurt tomorrow. His left sock squelched when he shifted his weight and he lost focus for a half-second and the column wobbled and he caught it and held it and Pakku moved on to the next boy.
Bending was physical. Nobody warned you about that part. David Chen had understood waterbending theory — fluid dynamics, tai chi principles, push and pull — and none of that mattered when your arms were eight and your chi pathways were still developing and your body had its own opinions about how long it could hold a column of water in the air. His brain could be ten years ahead. His arms didn't care. His arms were eight and they hurt and they were going to catch up on their own schedule.
Pakku noticed the gap. Of course he did. The old man wasn't stupid.
"Your comprehension exceeds your ability," he said, three weeks in.
Yakone waited.
"That will change. Or you will leave."
"It'll change."
"We'll see."
***
On the second day, a boy pulled a dead fish out of his coat and offered Yakone half.
"I caught it this morning," the boy said. He was nine, built like a barrel, gap-toothed, with a rip in his parka elbow that someone had mended with the wrong colour thread. "It's dead now."
"I can see that."
"It was bigger when it was alive."
"They usually are."
The boy thought about this for a while. "Do you want half?"
His name was Kalluk. They sat on the terrace edge, legs dangling over a thirty-foot drop, and ate raw fish while Pakku lectured the other boys about something. The fish was cold and firm and tasted like salt. In his previous life, David Chen had paid forty dollars for sashimi at a restaurant in the Pearl District that had exposed brick and a menu that used the word "sustainable" three times. Kalluk's fish tasted better. He'd caught it himself. That mattered, though Yakone couldn't have said why.
"You're not bad at the water stuff," Kalluk said. Mouth full.
"Thanks."
"I'm terrible."
"I noticed."
"That's all right, though." Kalluk wiped his hands on his parka. "My dad says the sea doesn't care if you're good. It just cares if you're there."
Yakone looked at him. Swallowed.
"Your dad sounds smart."
"He's all right. Smells like fish, though."
Kalluk was terrible at waterbending. He could pull a stream from the training pool — a foot high, wobbly, lasting maybe two seconds — and every time he did, he grinned. The grin was enormous. Fully committed. As if bending two seconds of wobbly water was the most satisfying thing a person could do with their morning.
Yakone had spent twenty-six years in a world where ability was currency. You were what you could do. Kalluk couldn't do much. Kalluk was the happiest person he'd ever met.
They walked home together after lessons, most days. Down through the tiers, the city changing around them — smooth ice and straight canals near the palace giving way to rougher architecture below, buildings that leaned into each other, canals that curved for no reason anybody remembered. The fishing quarter smelled like grilled fish and rendered blubber and pickled kelp and ice that had been walked on all day.
People moved around them. Women with water jars on their hips. Fishermen hauling baskets of the day's catch. Kids playing some game with a frozen seal bladder that seemed to require a lot of screaming. An old man on a doorstep was teaching a girl to bend water from a bucket. She pulled it up — an inch, two inches, wobbling — and it fell back. The old man clapped. She tried again.
There was a crack in the canal bridge they crossed every day. It wasn't getting bigger. Yakone checked every time anyway.
Kalluk talked. He talked about fish, about his dad's boat, about the nets that needed mending, about a girl named Nivi who worked in the healing huts and had, according to Kalluk, really nice eyes.
"Should I talk to her?" Kalluk asked.
"Yes."
"What should I say?"
"Something other than 'want to see my fish.'"
"My dad proposed to my mum with a halibut."
"He did not."
"He did. He caught it with his bare hands during a storm, walked up to her father's house, held it up, and said 'I want to marry your daughter and this is why.'"
"The fish was the reason?"
"The fish was the proof. My dad says any man can make promises. A man who'll fight a halibut in a storm? That's commitment."
"That's insane."
"It's romantic. She kept the skeleton. It's on the wall."
"Your family is deeply strange, Kalluk."
"My family is great. You should come for dinner. My mum makes this thing with sea prunes—"
"I'm not eating sea prunes."
"Everyone says that. Then they eat the sea prunes. Then they want more sea prunes." He paused. "Also I think I left my glove on your dad's boat."
"You don't fish with my dad."
"No, the other boat. The blue one."
"All the boats are blue, Kalluk."
"The bluer one."
Yakone didn't answer that. They walked.
Yakone laughed. The sound came out of him weird, raw and sudden, like a cough that turned into something else. Kalluk looked at him. Grinned.
"You should do that more."
"Do what?"
"Laugh. Yours is weird, but it's good."
They split at the fish market. Kalluk went left, toward his dad's house. Yakone went right, past the scale-slick ice and the gulls fighting over scraps. Lanterns were coming on behind ice walls, casting blue-white light. Someone, somewhere, was playing a stringed instrument. Badly. With feeling.
***
Home was a sealskin curtain and a wall of warm air that hit him when he pushed through. Blubber lamps and salt meat and the faint smoky smell that lived in the walls.
"Boots off," Kaya said, without turning from the cooking pit.
He pulled off Hasook's boots. The moss was ruined. His socks left wet prints on the pelts.
"Did you eat?"
"Kalluk had a fish."
"A whole fish?"
"Half a fish."
"That boy." She shook her head. Kaya was small and quick and had opinions about everything and expressed them while stirring. "His mother feeds him perfectly well."
"I think the coat fish is separate from the dinner fish."
"There should not be a coat fish, Yakone."
Tuluk came through the back curtain carrying a fishing net with a tear in it. He was big enough that the doorway was more of a suggestion than a boundary. He looked at Yakone. At the boots. At the socks steaming by the fire pit.
"The boy is fine," he said. To Kaya. About Yakone. Like Yakone wasn't right there.
Tuluk was a quiet man. He spoke maybe four sentences a day, and each one arrived like he'd been building it all morning. He mended nets with hands the size of dinner plates, each stitch patient and exact, and he came home every evening smelling like salt and fish blood, and he always — every single time, even now, even when Yakone was getting too big — picked the boy up first. One arm, one second, chest to chest, before setting him down and sitting at the table.
Yakone held still for it every time.
Dinner was stew. Seal meat and root vegetables, the burned bits stuck to the bottom of the pot because Kaya forgot to stir when she was singing, and Kaya was always singing. Off-key, the same three songs, the ones her mother taught her. She had a system for the house that nobody else understood — nets on Tuesdays, water jars on Thursdays, Tuluk's coat on the ice line every other day.
"Did Pakku say anything nice?" she asked.
"He told me my comprehension exceeds my ability."
She frowned. "Is that nice?"
"It means I'm smarter than my arms."
"Your arms are fine."
Tuluk looked up from his net. "You just need to grow up a bit," he said, and went back to his stitching.
Yakone ate his stew. The burned part at the bottom tasted like this kitchen and nowhere else.
After dinner, Kaya mended something. Tuluk mended something else. Yakone sat at the table with his hands in his lap and didn't do anything. The blubber lamps flickered. The water hummed in the walls. His mother sang, barely audible, one of the three songs.
He thought about telling them. Just opening his mouth and saying it: I'm not who you think I am. I died in another world and I remember all of it and the name you gave me belongs to a man who destroys everything he touches and I'm scared, I'm so scared that I'll become him, and I love you, and you deserve a real son instead of whatever I am.
He ate his stew. He didn't say anything. Kaya cupped his face when she said goodnight, her palm was warm, slightly rough and he held very still.
***
The spar happened in their second year.
Toklo. Top of the class, sharp-faced, good at everything, and lately developing a grudge that he wore like a badge. He didn't like that Yakone was near the front of the line. He didn't understand how a fisherman's son with no pedigree and sloppy footwork could keep up with him, and the not-understanding had turned into a grudge.
He challenged Yakone. Public, in front of everyone. Pakku allowed it.
Yakone didn't want to fight. He really, deeply did not want to fight a ten-year-old. It was grotesque. He was thirty-six years old inside and the boy across the ring was ten and angry and had no idea what he was picking a fight with.
But saying no was worse. So he stepped in.
Toklo threw a water whip. Fast, clean, aimed at his legs. Good form. Pakku would approve.
Yakone felt the water coming before he saw it — the hum, the water-sense in his feet and skin. He stepped sideways. The whip went through air.
Toklo sent a stream at his chest. Yakone raised his hand, let the water hit his palm, and turned with it. The momentum carried the stream around his body and dumped it on the ice behind him. He'd meant to redirect it back to the pool. His footwork was late. The turn was sloppy. It splashed.
But Toklo's force had gone nowhere.
Toklo stared.
Yakone pulled a wave. Too much — his arms shook, the wave came out lopsided and ugly. But Toklo was still standing there staring, and the wave hit him in the stomach and he went down and slid out of the ring on his back and the other boys cheered.
"Unconventional," Pakku said. His eyes stayed on Yakone for the rest of the lesson.
***
At night he went to the sea.
Down the steps in the outer wall, past the last guard post, to a platform where the ocean pressed against the ice and the spray froze on everything and the sound was so big there was no room for anything else.
He'd been coming here since he was six. His parents knew. Kaya worried about the cold, the slipping, the falling in. Tuluk said nothing. Yakone took that as trust.
Feet on the ice. Arms down.
The water was right there. Beneath him, around him, in the air. His forty feet of hum. Waves in, arms up, waves out, arms down. Not a technique. A conversation. The ocean said things and he answered, and sometimes he was wrong and the water ignored him and went where it wanted, and that was fine.
Some nights the water came up when he asked. Shapes formed. A spiral, a disc, a rope that trailed his hand like it wanted to follow him home. Pakku wouldn't have recognised any of it.
Arms getting stronger. The gap between what he understood and what he could do was closing, slowly, the way ice forms — too gradual to watch, impossible to deny.
And on full moon nights, the hum changed.
Warmer. Things at the edges of his bubble that weren't ice or water or vapour. A polar bear dog, sleeping near the wall, its body a warm smudge against the cold. A gull nesting in a crack. Warm things, alive, their heat bleeding into his awareness.
Once, after scraping his knee, Yagoda had fixed it while explaining how the body's water carried chi — energy, life force — and how healers guided that water to mend injuries. Chi rode the water, she said. Like a leaf rides a stream.
That kept him up for a long time.
Because if chi rode the water, and he could feel the water in living things on full moon nights, then he wasn't just feeling water. He was feeling chi. He was feeling what connected a bender to their element.
Eleven years old. Sitting at the sea wall. Forty feet away, through ice and air, a polar bear dog breathed, and Yakone could feel its heartbeat.
His arms stayed at his sides. The moon climbed. He went home.
He didn't sleep well.