Chapter 17 part 1

	The next several hours were spent waiting for dawn, sitting around the edge of one of the craters. Chang’s flask of baijiu had made an appearance, and it was eagerly passed in rotation between the three of us. Each of mumbling our thoughts on the present situation after our sip. “Yep,” was all I said after mine.

I passed it on to Koko. She tilted the flask upside down to take a small sip, then handed it back to Chang. “Uh huh,” she mumbled. Chang tried to sip any last drop, and then held the flask upside down and gave it a quick shake to prove that it had been emptied.

“Are we still enforcing ‘if you take the last of it, you get bruises’” he said, glaring at Koko.

“Who cares anymore,” Koko said.

“Well,” I asked, “what are else are we supposed to do now?”

“That’s a good question,” Koko said.

“Find a way out of here, for starters,” Chang said. “My family’s evacuated to Shenwa mountain. I need to get to them.”

“You’ll have to head north for that, and you’ll have to cut across the path of EKA.”

“Maybe we can surrender to them?” Koko asked, spitting her random thoughts into the dirt

“And spend our next twenty years in a labor camp?” I answered. “Well a Nomad and firebender could never make it through. But Chang could still slip through as a civilian! he is a native, after all.”

“No, Hiro. It won’t work,” Chang responded. “The Party has its eyes on my son. They’ll find out who I am after they detain me and they’ll come after all of us as collaborators. I have to get to them first so we can go into hiding.”

“So what’ll we do then?” asked Koko. “I suppose I could find a glider and just try to fly away back to the Sovereignty?”

“I have a few underworld contacts back in the Fire Nation still. The Shimada brothers. I could get us all forged papers and a place to lay low for a while.”

“It won’t work either, Hiro. We have to get out of here first.” Koko answered.

“And go where? Back to Capital City?" Asked Chang.

“Well, we could try to make it there and escape by sea, if they haven’t blockaded the inlet of the strait.” Damn! That would be no way out either. It could take a whole battlefleet to keep the fjord open and only one frigate, sub, or mine laying bomber to close it.

“Or we could go southwest to one of the villages there, and wait this thing out till it’s safe to get out of here again?”

“Hiro, you fought in Gao Ling and Si Wong and other places for the Earth Kingdom Army,”  Chang said. “What happens in those places after the Earth Kingdom and the Party takes over?”

I couldn’t bear to give him an answer.

After a minute of silence Koko asked, “so what do we do? Wait here till they spot us air, or just banzai charge into their tanks?”

“Maybe fighting isn’t such a bad option,” I said.

“I don’t want to go down with the sinking ship.”

“That’s not what I mean. Maybe we ought to follow Hei Bai back the capital, see how things shake out.”

“Don’t tell me you’re agreeing him, are you?” Koko asked.

“No,” I said, “But I mean, we’ve made it this far. What else is there to do? At least this feels like we have any sense of control over it.”

“Hiro’s right,” said Chang. “But it’s still crazy.”

“Yeah…” I admitted.

“And it’s still suicide,” said Koko. “At least it’s better than the firing squad, even if you die the same way. It’s still too crazy.”

	“Yeah,” we sighed together. We all sat around that circle thinking about our lack of options in silence. After about a minute, I thought about something Buno had once told, me. Something about how to lead, and how to follow. I stood up, and began to march off for the motor pool...

	Koko and Chang had caught up to me by the time that the sun was starting to rise. Not much left intact. We eventually found a running vehicle -- an open top all terrain satomobile -- and had to siphon gas from the others. And then the wheel fell off. The three of us spent an hour working to arc weld the axle back together with my fingers. This was made more difficult as I had to keep a hand over my face so as not to blind myself. The shifting forks were damaged, too, forcing me to redline the engine so that I could drop the clutch on fifth gear. Fifth and neutral were the only positions it would go to. The lack of working synchros made this an all around unpleasant experience. We chugged out from the motor pool with shattered or crooked mirrors and doors that would not shut. Very soon I found myself turning the heater to max settings to keep the engine from overheating.

	We raced along as fast as we could, picking up speed with the rising sun. Out of sight, traveling parallel to us, was the EKA. Large armies were cumbersome and unwieldy. Our only hope was that to maintain security and supply lines they’d be traveling much slower than full speed. At least slower than we were going at any rate.

	As the sun began to scorch us, I turned on the radio. I had hoped to hear messages from the Jian government or military. I had also hoped for something, anything, to pass the agonizingly tense journey back to the capital. Or, any sign of life from Jian defensive forces. Instead, there was nothing but EKA propaganda being blasted over the airways.

	“Yellow man! Why do you fight for your oppressor? Why do you fight for the Water Tribe? Yellow man! Can you not see how the Water Tribe is racist against your people? Can you not see how the Water Tribe has mistreated you? Come! Lay down your arms, brothers. You may have been separated from us, but you are part of the Earth Kingdom. In the Earth Kingdom’s People’s Democratic Republic there is no racism! You will all be treated as equals. Oppressors will pay for their crimes: the conviction rate in the Earth Kingdom is ninety nine percent. Justice and peace, with Earth Kingdom characteristics. Yellow man! come and see --”

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

And then a series of expletives

“What was that for, Chang? You can’t just shoot the shoot the radio!”

“I’m sorry, Koko. OK? I’m sorry! I told Hiro at least four times to turn that filth off.”

“No you didn’t.” I said.

“Yes, I did!”

“What?”

“Yeah,” said Koko, “he did. You weren’t paying attention.”

“Not true!”

And that’s when I swerved at the last second to avoid the cat.

It didn’t work. I felt the thump as it went under the tires and cursed as I saw it laying on the ground in the rearview mirror. It wasn’t moving. I can only hope it was an instant death.

	Rando wasn’t so lucky. The day he died was a day like any other. I was only eighteen and had come back to my apartment after a day at work. I made myself dinner, and some for Rando too. Shrimp, of course, was his favorite dish. He tore into it with great enthusiasm as usual. Afterwards he nuzzled up to me, purring, happy and content.

	And then Rando began to scream. I had never heard a sound like it before. I tried to see what was wrong or console him. He immediately bit me and clawed at me before hissing and running thru the room as if he were set afire. Then he began rolling around on the floor writhing in pain, clawing at himself, screamed some more before he died, violently rejecting all my attempts to hold him.

	It was an aneurysm, the veterinarians said. Somewhere in his brain an artery had burst. Somehow, Rando had known that he was in mortal danger, and responded the only way he could. Fight or flight. So he spent his last minutes trying to fight or flee from an unseen enemy. He died while feeling both incredible pain and hopeless fear. I had tried so hard to love that cat and give him a good life. To give him something that could possibly, just maybe, make up for all the terrible years he had spent living as a stray. All of that was undone in only a minute.

	On we drove. Our greatest fear was air interdiction. All it would take would be a single greedy attack aircraft to spot our little satomobile and the dust it was kicking up. That would be the end of it right there! But none came. Instead, we looked up and saw the contrails of planes at high altitude racing westward toward the Earth Kingdom convoy. Jia’s last squadron. We saw the contrails of Earth Kingdom fighters turn to meet them, and knew there was nothing the Jian’s could do.

	It was noon by now and the sun was well out of faces, yet I found myself blinded by glare in the distance. As we approached it, I realized what it was. The solar fields, or what was left of them. The start of this war, all the suffering and dying over this. Now, driving thru it, I could see that it had been smashed to pieces by bombing. The entire ground to the left and right of the road was covered in broken pipes and parabolic shards of mirrors, reflecting light in every direction. What a waste.

Squinting past the light and shapes reflected all around us, I could make out another twinkle of light a few hundred yards distant. I felt the thuds of the bullets raking our vehicle a few moments later.

	I swerved as I felt the tire beneath me shred to pieces. I tried to maintain control of the vehicle as I braked and stalled almost immediately, losing power steering. Beside me, I could hear Chang yelp, “I’ve been hit!” The vehicle crawled to a halt in the field of glass. Hearing no more bullets I stuck both my hands outside the vehicle and waved them back and forth. We all did, and I could see now that Chang had been shot clean thru his right forearm. The three of us exited the vehicle with our hands above our heads. We walked down the road towards the source of the gunfire. The sound of the blasts was unmistakably from Jian small arms.

A pair of riflemen emerged from the sand and ran up to us. “We’re friendly, you idiot,” said Koko.

“I’m sorry! We didn’t know,” One of them said. “Didn’t you hear our instructions on the radio?”

	The three of us were huddled over to the small encampment in an abandoned hamlet and treated. Chang was stuck clean through his right forearm, which was wrapped in gauze and carried in sling. He had a few wounds from blown out debris on his legs as well, but nothing major. Still, they insisted on taking him back to Capital City via ambulance. Koko and I followed in a truck with the other native and Water Tribe soldiers who were eager to retreat from the checkpoint.

	We found out soon that we were some of the only people that had escaped from the Wolf’s Teeth defensive line. Shirshu cavalry tanks had exploited the breach in defense and had hooked both north and south. They caused havoc and encircled reinforcements in the forts that were not killed by the Earth Kingdom’s new weapon of mass-death. Many of the garrisons had already surrendered. Others hadn’t yet, but were effectively removed from the fight. Hei Bai, along with some others had passed through this checkpoint not long ago. Anyone who could was fleeing to the Capital ahead of the coming Earth Kingdom Army.

	When we made it to the city, you could smell the fear. Every street was devoid of normal life. Every building boarded up and stacked with sandbags. Everything felt still and quiet despite the noise of trucks and marching soldiers or clank of lumbering mecha. Chang was dropped off at the ‘walking wounded’ triage point -- a tent infirmary bustling with nurses and the less wounded casualties. “Wait here with Chang,” I told Koko. “I need to find Hei Bai.”

	After about thirty minutes of searching I was pointed to the direction of a nearby hotel on the corner of one of the city blocks. The entire building had been repurposed with garrisoned troops and not a single civvie in sight. While the foyer was quite busy, I was able to brush my thru to the elevator and took it up to the seventh floor. On the upper floors it was quite abandoned, though carts full of supplies and construction materials littered the hallway. I walked down the hall until I found the room and knocked on the door.

“Come in, Hou Yi,” Hei Bai said.

I opened the door, hesitantly. I took a deep breath and then stepped across the threshold, closing the door behind me. Hei Bai was waiting for me.

“Hei Bai,” I choked, “We have all changed our minds. Koko, Chang, and I have decided to follow you, though Chang is wounded. I am sorry, Hei Bai. I’m so sorry…”

	“Why do you apologize?” Hei Bai asked me. “If I had only carried out my duties, then you could never have transgressed. Instead, I had made myself into a beast, so it is natural that you would try to wound me. You acted reasonably, so what crime have you committed, Hou Yi?”

“Please, Hei Bai,” I pleaded. “Please don’t call me that.”

Hei Bai let out a long, thready, and exasperated sigh as he averted his eyes from and shook his head from side to side to side.

The water hit me like a freight train.

  Every faucet, every pipe, every tap in the room burst forth in a tumult bowling me over, blinding me, knocking the the wind from me. I tried to gasp but choked on water. It threw me to the ground and then rolled me over, back up into the air and onto my feet before flash freezing around me. My face exposed, I sputtered as i tried to gasp from the cold and cough water out at the same time.

Hei Bai bellowed, “The Chairman of the party has invited you to Lake Laogai!”

    “P-p-please, Hei Bai,” I tried to gasp and cough out water at the same time, “I’m s-sorry! It hurts! You’re going to kill me!”

	“Ah! Good!” Hei Bai said. “You need to hurt. So I can sear this lesson into your mind. So that you will never forget what I’m going to teach you. So that you can stop pretending to be numb or hide behind the memory of some stupid cat and that you’re not part of this or that you’re not complicit. You are not innocent. None of us are innocent. But do you know what people say when I show them the truth? It’s not ‘how awful that such a thing takes place.’ It’s not ‘how good, for I support.’ They say, ‘oh, why would you tell me such a thing? It’s not my business. I don’t mind it, I just don’t want to know about it.’ But I will show you the truth, and the truth will make you fear.”

“Hei Bai, please! You’re not making sense. What are you talking about?”

    “No, my little Hou Yi. That is not my name. For most of my life I was a dog of the Party. Not just any intelligence officer, but a spook of the Laogai system.  My real name is HeBo. Like you, I was born with another name. That name was Feng Yi. Like how you’ve had other names. Like the Oni of Si Wong.”

“That’s not who I am!”

	Hou Yi, who killed fifty men in an instant. Hou Yi, who stopped a fleet of nine Sovereignty airships. Hou Yi, that has slain countless by himself in the Si Wong desert. That you are the Oni of Si Wong would only surprise a fool. Do you really think it was all just some sort of coincidence that I know who you are and invited you to this land for our little band of mischief makers? No, Hou Yi. I have known you for nearly a decade. I made the Oni of Si Wong. Your massacre in that forsaken desert was just the propaganda piece that the Earth Kingdom Army needed at the time. So I made your tragedy into a legend.”

“Those rebels that died that day… they weren’t burned. The legend says no one knows what kind of bender it was. I’m not that kind of person, Hei Bai, I’m not a monster!”

Hei Bai placed his palm upon the surface of the ice, and then pressed it through, giving way for him as if it were flowing water. He placed his hand over my breast and said, “So you still have a heart. It’s trembling.”

	He then reached through for my right hand, freeing from the ice and pulling it towards him. He placed it upon his breast in turn, “Do you feel my heart? It only takes a fraction of an amp to kill a man. You could kill me right now if you wanted. You wouldn’t leave a single sign or evidence of cause on my body. Like the dead in Si Wong”

“I can’t.”

	“I am growing desperate, Hou Yi. I will do anything to my people and culture from the Party and that is why I put my faith in you. Those meetings with Du Lin? Do you really think she cared about your opinion? She wanted to know if you could be trusted to betray the Party.

The Party demands that you love it with the unconditional love of your father. But you  could not love your father. The Party demands perfect harmony, but you are the consummation of two peoples and could never really belong.  That is how I knew I could turn you.”

“Shut up! You don’t know that!””

“It started when you were four. Your mother was eight months pregnant. You were going to have a sister, before the Party Birth Control Officer decided she would need an abortion after all.”

“I told you to shut up!”

“But you committed the greatest taboo in the Earth Kingdom, the only tradition the Party has not yet eradicated. You abandoned your parents.”

“She begged me to! She wanted me to stay away from him!”

	“When you came into my quarters in the fort and you saw that manuscript, you couldn’t read it, could you? That’s because it’s in traditional script. The Party banned has banned that and now only teaches simplified writing so that you may never read traditional literature. What you saw me performing was traditional bending. Bending like Avatar Aang and all the other Avatars and masters before him did.”

“But that was like dancing? Why would they ban something like that? It’s harmless, of no use to anything.”

	Hei Bai’s mouth went agape and his shoulders drooped. I was some dumb lost child. “You see, Hou Yi. You punch and you kick and do your silly little judo chops and you call it bending. But when presented with Heaven itself manifesting inside you, you dismiss it and ask 'how is it of use to me? How do I hurt people with it?' Do you know who taught me how to bend? It was a guru. Like the sacred guru Pathik who enlightened Avatar Aang. He too was a Remnant and practitioner of the Dhamma Chakra. He was arrested for practicing it. I was to be his torturer. But he taught me.. He was no member of the Water Tribe, but he taught me all I know about how to truly bend. You see, Nonbenders are the best benders because they bend all four elements equally.”

I stared deep into his eyes in bewilderment, thinking he must have been joking. He was dead serious.

“Please Hei Bai, I am freezing! I can’t breath! Stop this…”

    He grabbed my arm by the wrist and the ice shattered. I began to collapse but before I could fall to the ground, he had applied pressure to the top of my hand as he held it aloft. Sharp, stabbing pain. It raced down my arm like electricity with every beat of my heart. I flailed and begged but he would not release it.

    “I am not getting through to you. I am not only a waterbender. I can bend Chi. I can bend blood. This is what all that silly little dancing can do. Now ask yourself. Is the world right today? Is the world in balance? Is this future that Avatar Aang and Avatar Korra had for the world? Perhaps you haven’t put all the pieces together yet. You know that the Party was behind the rebels that started this war. You know that this was all about taking control of the farms back into the hands of the Party. And yet the Air Sovereignty takes credit? Why? This was all a setup. You must know that the Party and Sovereignty conspired together!”

“But Why, Hei Bai? Why would they do such a thing?”

    “So that they Earth Kingdom may save the world with the Avatar’s blessing. The Sovereignty, they get to destroy their greatest potential threat -- an army not under control of the Party and next to their borders. For the Earth Kingdom, the Party must make sure there is never starvation again, or else risk a second revolution. You see, the Sovereignty has been corrupted by the Party quite some time ago.”

“But how? How can such a thing be true? What are the Remnants? How can the Avatar not put a stop to this?”

    Because the Party is nowhere. The Party is everywhere. The Party is pernicious as it is vile. The government of the Earth Kingdom’s People’s Democratic Republic? Well, that’s not actually the Party. It’s the government. It only so happens that the Party is the only party in the government that can hold office. You all vote for them, after all. Yet the Earth Kingdom Army swears loyalty to the Party and Kuvira, does it not? And when the Party supports terrorists in Jia or countless other little Earth Kingdom countries… well, that’s not Earth Kingdom government after all -- it’s the Party. Or it’s a rogue sect of the Party, and how can you ban freedom of speech? The Party is a set of ideals, after all. Once the Party has created chaos, in comes the Earth Kingdom for peace and order.”

“This can’t be true. The Avatar! The Avatar would put a stop to this and bring balance back to the world!”

    “Ah, the Avatar. The last great thorn in the Party’s side. The Order of the White Lotus is the Party, just as the Party is the Order of the White Lotus. They’ve gotten to the Avatar quite some time ago. But the Party must act now, while the Avatar is still an earthbender. When he dies, they will do what they can to speed the cycle of reincarnation along until he is in their clutches, and enough time has passed to dispel their one last superstition. By the time of the next earthbender, he will be reduced to no more than a circus freak to gawk at, not hold with reverence. Yet the Party cloaks itself in the guise of all the tradition and history that it has destroyed!”

    “Then who? Then who can stop this? Even if the Air Sovereignty had a common enemy in Jia, even if the Fire Nation is embarrassed to speak out against its former victims, there is still the Council of Republic City. The other nations of the world cannot be blind to the Earth Kingdom and the Party at all times!”

    “They say War is politics by other mean. But to the Party, politics is war by other means. Did you know there are five hundred protests in the Earth Kingdom per day? This is no secret to the Fire Nation or Air Sovereignty. Nor is anything else I’ve told you, or will tell you. It is simply ignored. It is simply perceived as not important. Not my business. Perception, not deception. Both those nations thought they could tame the Party. Tell me, Hou Yi, if you lay with a prostitute enough times will she eventually contract your healthiness? My time in the Party was spent to great effect reverse engineering the systems meant to co opt us. The Air Nomads are blinded by their pride and supposed infallibility. Dealing with the Remnants made it easy to bring them to heel. The Fire Nation thought they could open up markets and bring us into the fold of the global community. We are the global community. We, the Party, buy influence over them one business deal at a time.”

    “Please tell me this isn’t true! Who are the remnants? What you’re saying cannot be true! This is another one of your lies and tricks!” Hei Bai dropped me to floor. I gasped again. He squatted beside me, and then as I tried to look up at him he embraced my face with the palm of his hands.

“Oh, little Hou Yi,” he said, staring pitifully into my eyes. “You are blind. But I will show you the truth. I will sink my teeth into your scalp and I will bite your Third Eye open. Come and see: