Chapter 17 part 2

	Plains Village was a small and unassuming dusty town to the South West of the Si Wong Desert. Population, 2,642 people. It was an unremarkable place, if not for Fire Lord Zuko having briefly visited it 150 years ago during his travels while banished by the cruel Phoenix King Ozai. Of course, Plains Village had seen much change since then. The town had grown much larger since then, though was still poor by even the most modest of Air Sovereignty, United Republic of Nations, or Fire Nation standards. However, Plains Village had a big problem.

	The Remnants were not by any means unique to Plains Village or the rest of the surrounding province. They were, in fact, an embarrassment to all of the EKPDR. But this province stuck out to the Party like a sore thumb; far from the dominance of the central government, those that could had concentrated in the area for decades following the purges in Ba Sing Sae a century and a half prior.

	The Remnants remained an embarrassment to the Air Sovereignty, too. Despite their rhetoric, Avatar Aang was not the Last Airbender. Thousands, in fact, survived the genocide, and a great portion of them escaped the war by living in the massive walls of Ba Sing Sae. After all, what were mere walls to an Air Nomad? But when the walls were breached by General Iroh and his son Lu Ten was slain, the cost of the ceasefire was the expulsion of Nomads from the city. And When Azula finally conquered the city, the streets were stained in the blood of innocent airbender men, women, children, and infants.

	Still, the Nomad people persisted. But it had cost them their identity and their culture. Those that could, still practiced their culture in the home, though did not ever learn to airbend for fear of discovery. As they intermingled with the peoples of the Earth Kingdom, entire generations lost the ability to airbend all together, though they still kept the faith. After the Hundred Year War, many followed in the footsteps of Guru Pathik and returned to the temples to keep the faith and as a people, formed the first and the most of Air Acolytes. At long last, it seemed, that harmony had been restored.

	When Harmonic Convergence opened up the door between the mortal and spiritual world, it created a divine explosion that rippled across the fabric of the universe. For the first time in 10,000 years, a new echelon of men and women were bestowed the sacred art of airbending. Many of the new airbenders were descendants of the Remnants. Many more were not. A great deal of these newfound airbenders were Fire Nation and Earth Kingdom citizens with no connections to Air Nomad culture at all. Soon, the nu airbenders claimed the Air Sovereignty as their birthright, and the remnants -- the relatives and descendants of Aang and Yangchen -- found themselves uprooted once more.

	Little Tzu-zi was only thirteen, and like many of the citizens of Plains Village she, too, was a Remnant. Little Tzu-zi didn’t take kindly to her nickname. She was, after all, the youngest of two daughters in her family, though her big sister lived in Omashu now, married off to a non-Remnant Party member by Party decree at the age of 16. Still, Little Tzu-zi was a late bloomer. She was scared of not catching up to her classmates and it was only in the last year that she had been visited by the dark waters of menstruation. The changes over the next year at first frightened her, but now they excited her. Every morning checked her figure in the mirror for changes, whether it was to her delight, puzzlement, or occasional disgust. Tzu-zi would soon be Little Tzu-zi no longer. Some times, she worried now that she would be too tall, having started to already overshoot some of the boys her age, but she beamed with pride at the thought of being an adult like her mother and sister, and hoped it would be pleasing one day to the man she wanted to call ‘husband.’

	LIttle Tzu-zi hoped that would be a boy named Ryu. It was only in that last year that Tzu-zi had begun to notice Ryu in a new light that brought stirrings within her, though they had known each other since the age of ten.

	That day was a pleasant summer day that not even the sweltering sun could ruin. School and the summer vacation for grade schoolers wouldn’t begin for another week. Still, Ryu and the other boys made entertainment for themselves in any way they could -- to the abandonment of homework or studying for the upcoming exams. Tzu-Zi’s mother, Jun, came across Ryu and a handful of schoolboys standing on the sidewalk, staring at something in the middle of the street. It was the middle of town, but there was nothing but single story buildings -- stores and barbershops and the like -- with none of the chaos one would get from the more modern, less ‘backward’ Earth Kingdom cities.  Jun paused in her tracks to look past the boys to see what had their attention. In the middle of the road lay a dead cat. She sighed and thought to herself. Oh, those poor young boys. She hoped it was a feral stray and hadn’t belonged to any of them.

	“Oh cool! Here comes a car!” one of the boys exclaimed.

	As the vehicle veered away and sped past another boy said, “Ah, man! It missed!”

     Jun was mortified, but then she suppressed a giggle and shook her head. Boys will be boys, she guessed. Then she remembered how people lived in the cities. She had seen all the satomobile and industrial accidents, and the way bystanders stood around did nothing to help them. Not, not here. She had to teach them a lesson. It took a village.

    “Hey!” she shouted to the boys as she approached them after making sure no more cars were coming.

	Those that saw her could see her intentions from a mile away and scattered. Jun set her sights on her target, the one boy too preoccupied poking the hapless body with a stick to get a good head start. That boy was Ryu. And Jun bent him over her knee and give him a vicious spanking with that same stick right in the middle of public. That was just how things were done in old Plains Village.

	Ryu clutched his stinging bottom afterwards as Jun lowered herself to his level and did her best to teach him why what he did was wrong, why life was sacred. She hoped to instill a good moral virtue in him that would guide him through the rest of his life. Unfortunately for Ryu, she succeeded, for in the Earth Kingdom, no milk of human kindness went unpunished by the Party. But for now, Ryu was a crying mess. Jun wiped the tears and snot from his face before leading him by the hand back to his parents' house. It was on their way back that Jun lead Ryu to meet her daughter and husband.

	Life got harder for all of them not long after that. That was the year that the police came and took Tzu-zi’s father away. He was only going to be there as long as it took to re-educate him, they had said. He’d be well fed, and receive job retraining for free, they also said. Now he was paying back his debt to society working in a not to distant labor, spending most of his day on the production line making satomobiles for a Fire Nation corporation -- the cost of labor was just too low for them not move production overseas. Every couple months he’d send a short letter back telling them that he was OK, and was never abused or mistreated. They never did find out exactly what his crime was…

	Jun had to be strong for her daughters. Little Tzu-zi spent the first week crying every night and day. Ryu came by every chance after school and tried to help her, but more hardships were on the horizon. Shortly after that her big sister, Ha-Yoon, had agreed to move to Omashu and marry a non-Remnant, as police officials had told them that this would increase their family’s social credit score and maybe they’d see their father again sooner. This was becoming the fate of many young Remnant girls in the village.

	Ryu could not escape loss, either. All of his friends who managed to escape the gentle wrath of Jun that day could not escape the Party. They were all Remnants, too, and found themselves sent involuntarily to culture-focused boarding school and adopted by foster parents as wards of the state. They were shipped off to the cities away from the other Remnants before he could Ryu could say goodbye, and he watched as their parents grieved as if their children were dead.

	Now they were both older. She was thirteen, and he was fourteen. They could never forget what had been done to them, yet it was beginning to feel like so long ago. Ryu had made new friends, and Tzu-zi began to wonder if she really could remember what her father looked like, or if they would recognize each other now.

	It was late spring now. The weather was hot but only enough to feel comfortable in shorts and short sleeves. The summers could be stifling but for now, the high schoolers were enjoying the weather and their relative lack of responsibility. They would at least have one or two hours after school to themselves before their parents got out of work.

	“Tzu-zi!s Tzu-zi! Wait up,” Ryu shouted after her.

    The pace of Ryu’s step quicked as he hurried ahead of his friends to catch up to her.

	“Hey, Tzu-zi,” He said. “Let me, uh, lemme carry those books for you.”

	“It’s OK,” she said. “You don’t have to do that.”

	“Sure I do. You don’t have a backpack. I can at least put your books in mine, it’s really no burden,” Ryu said as he presented his open palms towards her.

	Little Tzu-zi waited till his gaze was turned away from her, and then she began to grin ear to ear. As Ryu’s friend caught up to them they began to talk about school, and fun, and what they hoped to do for their next break. Then they went silent as they walked past the local Party chapter’s headquarters.

	At one point it had been a temple dedicated to the veneration of Avatar Aang. Built by Remnant Acolytes (no tautology intended, for they were not one and the same despite what the Party wanted foreigners to believe) following the end of the Hundred Year War. There were many such temples in the province, dedicated to the ‘cult of Aang’ as the government claimed it. Then one day a Remnant man walked into a restaurant where several gendarmeries where eating at a table and slammed a mortar shell nose first into it. None of the soldiers were killed. The man lost his arm but survived in critical condition. He was never seen again. After that, the government began bulldozing temples and building Party chapters on top of them.

    But after walking by, the talking resumed. Unfortunately, the subject was math homework, and Tzu-zi was the only one with a decent chance of passing the test the teacher had planned.

    “I’m going over to Wong’s house,” said Ryu’s friend Zhou “you coming?”

    “Why Wong’s house?’ asked Ryu.

    “You didn’t hear?” asked Ryu’s other friend, Cixi. “Wong’s family just got a color telescreen. First one in the whole village!”

    “That’s OK,” Ryu said, glancing back at Tzu-zi. “I really gotta study for this quiz.”

	Each pair separated and went their own way. For Tzu-zi and Ryu they went to the edge of town, only a few miles away. They walked out into the field of sunflowers. It was one of the only places in the village where the government had not found a place to install security cameras -- there were more and more surveillance cameras in the town with each passing year. Ryu’s eyes darted back and forth to make sure no one else was around before he stopped and reached into his backpack.

	“Here,” He said. “I want to show you something.”

	“What is it,” Tzu-zi asked.

	Ryu produced a book from his backpack and opened it, “This is what Sifu Li and I have been practicing. This is the Dhamma Chakra.”

	Tzu-zi took the book from him and studied its pages. It was a photocopy of an ancient scroll, written in the traditional characters they didn’t teach in school anymore. Its pages were decorated with calligraphy and numerous detailed pictures of men and women performing various forms of the bending arts.

“Li is teaching me all he knows,” Ryu said. Settling into a horse stance and then gracefully transitioning to a fighting crane.

	He struck quickly with a snap kick and then performed his Kata before transitioning back to the sedated and methodical motions of waterbending. Each one of his motions, perfect. With wide eyes and trembling hands, Tzu-zi continued to flip through the pages of the book.

	“You shouldn’t do this,” Tzu-zi said. “It’s dangerous.”

	“No, it’s OK. We’ve taken a vow of nonviolence.”

	“I meant it’s dangerous for you.”

	“Li and I practice in secret, where there are no cameras. It’s not like we’re Air Acolytes, though. We don’t practice only one type of martial art.”

	Master Li, Ryu, and Li’s other students were indeed careful. Li was a guru, in the nonbending spiritual tradition of Guru Pathik. They were not Remnants, and unlike the Air Acolytes who tried to maintain the culture of the Aang and his forefathers, practitioners of Dhamma Chakra taught meditation as well as all styles and forms of bending. While Air Acolytes practiced veganism, Dhamma Chakra practitioners took this one step farther and practiced absolute nonviolence for the sake of relieving suffering. This included violence against themselves as well. There was no greater sin than suicide. Drinking to excess, using drugs, and smoking was forbidden. Even eating unhealthily was against their faith. Exercising and practicing the forms of bending arts was itself a form of spiritual worship.

	As harmless as it would seem, they all knew if they were caught meditating they would see the inside of a jail cell for causing a public disturbance. This never dissuaded them. They would often practice in their basements now. In the past, Li and Ryu had practiced together at night out in this very sunflower field. It was the same spot that over a century ago Prince Zuko had taught Lee -- the very Lee for which Li was both named and descended from -- the martial art of dual broadswords. There were likely too many police now for Li and his students to practice outside at night ever again.

	As a child, Ryu had trouble in school. He wanted to be strong for Little Tzu-Zi. But each year, more and more of his classmates were sent away to orphanages or boarding schools to the north. Meanwhile, more and more non-Remnants from the cities were being moved into the province by the government. They were almost starting to outnumber the kids in the younger grades now. Soon, Ryu found himself an outsider in his own school. He wasn’t a remnant himself, but the new kids still bullied him like he was. He went to Li to learn how to fight. Li taught Ryu how to find inner strength and inner peace instead.

    “But what about the government! You could get into a lot of trouble doing this. What if they take you away?”

    “It’s fine. I know you can get in trouble,” said Ryu. “I’ll be careful, I promise. There’s a lot of things that can make you end up in prison. I can’t let stop me now.”

    “But what if the government’s right and it should be banned, Ryu?. What if it’s illegal for a good reason?”

    “How can you say that? I know it was before we were born, but don’t you remember not too long ago? How the government ran PSAs encouraging people to practice it? There were millions of people in the Earth Kingdom practicing it. How can the government be right that it’s dangerous when they were the ones promoting it for over ten years? Just like the Acolytes, it’s part of our culture! It’s a traditional part of who we are!”

    Tzu-zi knew all this to be true, but she was terrified. Terrified for Ryu and what might happen to him.

    “Then why does the government say that this is a dangerous cult? Isn’t it exactly this sort of spirituality that led to Tarlok trying to bring the Age of Raava? I never saw the PSAs that Li might have lied to you about, but I’ve seen plenty of former practitioners confess on the telescreen that they’d been brainwashed and that Dhamma Chakra is evil!”

    “Oh,” Exclaimed Ryu, “You mean just like how the Acolytes like your father should be locked up to treat them for their dangerous delusions, or feeblemindedness and mental illness?”

    Ryu hadn’t yet learned that inner peace after all. He hadn’t meant to, but at that moment his words cut Tzu-zi’s heart like a knife. Ryu tried to apologize to her, but with tears in her eyes, she dropped Ryu’s book and started to run back to her house.

    Ryu clutched his hair and cursed at himself. How could he be so thoughtless! After picking up his book he began to walk back to Master Li’s house. He would have to apologize to Master Li for his failure as a student, and then ask Li for his guidance on how to apologize to Tzu-zi as well. On reaching Li’s home, he knocked on the door. After five minutes he no one answered. This was strange; he should have been home. Ryu announced his presence and let himself in. Several chairs in the living room had been knocked over, and Master Li was nowhere to be found…

    Tzu-zi did whatever she could to wipe the tears from her eyes when she got home. She was going to be a woman, not Little Tzu-zi any more. She took a big breath and stepped thru the front door. Her mother and Mr. Yongkang were sitting down to eat dinner.

    “Ah, good evening, Tzu-Tzu,” said Yongkong

    “Hello, mister Yongkang,” Said Tzu-zi

    “Please,” Yongkang insisted. “You can call me ‘uncle’ now.”

    Truth be told, Yongkang couldn’t have given a damn what they called him. The Party, seeing a family without its stable source of income and the oldest working-age child both moved out of the house, took pity on them and so moved Party member Mr. Yongkang into their house to live with them as their surrogate father. It wasn’t a glamorous assignment, but if it went well he’d probably get that promotion he was working for. It wasn’t all bad, really. The beds were still separate, but that’d probably change soon if hey wanted their father back from job retraining camp this year…

    “Your mother made dinner for you,” he said. “We’ve saved some. Did you want any? Say, why don’t you tell me what you’re other classmates are up to? Anything… unusual?”

    “I’m not hungry right now,” Tzu-zi said.

    Jun, who had waited for Tzu-zi to come home to eat, now produced a pair of chopsticks from her purse. Yongkang stood up and walked around the table to where Jun sat, then gingerly plucked the chopsticks from her hands and dropped them into the garbage can. Passing her a fork, as was common to use now in the cities, he filled her bowl with pork from one of the several prepared dishes. Jun was, of course, an Acolyte. And as she brought the meat to her mouth and began to chew, Yongkang studied her face intently for any signs of disloyalty.

    About to break again, Tzu-zi stormed off to her room, with her mother calling after her.

    “Tzu-zi? What’s wrong?” Jun asked as she got up and followed after her.

    Yongkang couldn’t care less about this and stayed behind to finish his bowl of rice and shrimp. Jun found Tzu-zi tearing through her belongings from her closet when her mother found her.

    “Tzu-zi,” she asked. “Tell me what’s going on”

    “I hate him!” she said. “I hate that man!”

    Like swatting a fly, Jun had rushed Tzu-zi and slapped her hand over Tzu-zi’s mouth.

    “Shut up!” she spat through clenched teeth. “Do you want to see your father again? If you do you need to control yourself right now.”

    “But it’s true… I do. I can’t stand much more of this,” Tzu-zi said as she began crying again

    “Now you listen here. I’ve done so much to protect you and keep you safe. Why do you think I even named you an Earth Kingdom name like Tzu-zi and not a proper Remnant name like dad chose? Why do you think I never raised you as an Acolyte either? They could have taken you before you were old enough to even remember me! You would have grown up not even knowing you were a descendant of the Nomads either. Did you know they just took our neighbor down the street, mister Li?”

    “No… what will happen him?” Tzu-zi asked as her eyes grew wide and her hands started to shake.

    “If you don’t want it to happen to you too, you had better learn to start saying, ‘that’s not my business.’ Do you understand?”

    Jun could now hear the approach of Mr. Yonkang’s footsteps and said, “Now please, Tzu-zi, think of all the good things that the government has done for us instead, OK? There used to be illiteracy and it was more dangerous back then. Now people are wealthier and we have things like access to modern hospitals and Telescreens for everyone.”

    Sometimes Jun wondered why all military-run hospitals were built so close to the prisons. But it wasn’t her business. How could a hospital with five beds in the transplant ward show that they did less than that number in an entire? But it wasn’t her business…

    Meanwhile, the news of Li’s disappearance had spread throughout the town, and quickly beyond to the neighboring towns in the province as if the whole community of Dhamma Chakra practitioners was a singular organism. Dhamma Chakra practitioners here were nowhere as numerous as they had been in the cities, as they had been driven underground and Air Acolytes remained the only open form of spirituality despite the efforts of the Party. After all, the Party cracked down on all Remnants, Acolytes and non Acolytes alike. As the dusk began to settle, the crowd had gathered around the Party chapter headquarters. It was only fifty at first, within hours there were hundreds.

    Ryu, of course, heard about this right away and would join them. But first, he had to go to Tzu-zi’s house and apologize, or at the very least give Tzu-zi her school books back. He knocked on the door and asked for Tzu-zi when Jun answered. came outside a few moments later.

    “Hey, Tzu-zi,” he said, squirming in place “I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I should have never said that”

    “Ryu, you don’t have to --”

    “Yes, I do! But if you’re still mad at me that’s OK. I just wanted to give this back,” he said as he returned the books

    “Ryu, I didn’t mean what I said back there either. I heard about Li. I’m sorry.”

    “It’s OK, Tzu-zi. A lot of people have heard about it, too. Don’t worry about though I can handle it,” he said

    “Promise me!” Tzu-zi shouted, “Promise me you aren’t going to the protest!”

    “What? There’s not a protest. We’re not doing anything like that.”

    “I don’t care! Don’t go.”

    “I, uh, I can’t. I mean, I have to. I know it’s dangerous. I have to be brave; if there’s even a chance we can stop it, It’s my duty to try!”

    Before Tzu-zi could say anything else, Jun had called to her and Ryu began running off towards the Party headquarters.

    At the Party chapter office, some three hundred people had assembled and lined the sidewalks in neat little rows. The police, armed like soldiers or carrying riot gear, had started to cordon off the area but it was too late. The assemblage of practitioners was silent, sudden, and without warning as none carried any signs or chanted any slogans, and their gathering was spontaneous. Ryu had pushed his way past onlookers to join the others on the sidewalk before the police could completely surround the block.

    With no leader present, the Dhamma Chakra practitioners simply began to do what they had always done and started to meditate in tranquil silence as the squeak of tank treads began to draw nearer. They slowly stretched in unison, performing the slow and gentle dance-like motions that thousands had practiced for thousands of years before. Once they finished they either stood there or sat with closed eyes in the sacred form of lotus padmasana. After the military back up had finished assembling, a Party representative walked out and confronted a balding grey haired elder near the front of the building.

    “Tell me the meaning of this. What are your demands?” He asked.

    “Demands? No, sir, you misunderstand,” the old man said. “We’re not here to make any demands of you. We just want to know why our sifu, Li, has been taken, if the news is true. Surely, there must be a mistake. He was only every practicing in private and not causing disharmonious disruption.”

    “Oh, like you are causing now?” the Party officer asked.

	He walked back inside the building. He had decided what should be done about this and radioed to the soldiers outside. He only needed a few minutes to get everyone on the same page.

	Ryu -- and most other practitioners gathered here -- had never heard the sound of a real-life machine gun before. While the loudness of the noise caused him to jump reflexively, he only had the presence of mind to look around the crowd for its cause. It was only after he saw people collapsing in waves did he realize what was happening. Ryu and the others got up and started to run. The deafening chattering sound and bright flashes came from all sides. As the panicking crowd pushed forward, the pressure was enough that the police barricades gave way and the crowd funneled through at the path of least resistance.

Ryu nearly tripped several times, there were so many people pushing him from all sides. Over the sound of the gunshots, over the sound of hundreds of screams, He could hear the bleat of the tank’s engines behind him. He ran faster now before he slipped on the blood. He tried to get back up and was at once pushed back down by the mass of people around him. Eventually he succeeded, only to be struck through his legs by bullets. He kept crawling and crawling on his belly, ignoring all pain, until the tank ran over and crushed his skull.

    Having cleared out the square, the Party officials guessed that maybe they’d gotten only seventy or so of the cultists. It wasn’t worth actually counting the number of dead. Ah, if only they had the time and resources to get all of them. The officials would have like for more manpower, but they had to clean up the protest for nosey people from outside the province with cameras showed up. They couldn’t repeat the mistakes they had made thirty or so years prior with how they handled the student protests in Ba Sing Sae. This massacre would be just another Tuesday in the greater Earth Kingdom.

    Still, something had to be done about all the bodies. Ryu and the others were thrown into a pile and then the tanks drove back and forth across them until they ground into jelly. Once they had finished, the fire department came and hosed them down the drains into the sewers that the government had so graciously built for the people of Plains Village under the guiding principles of the Party.

    Little Tzu-zi was worried about Ryu. She was scared that something could happen to him, or that he might be arrested and taken away. It was dark now, the sun had just set. Tzu-zi opened her window and snuck out of the house, determined to find him and make sure he was safe.

    As she made her way down the street she suddenly heard a distant sound like fireworks and chattering teeth, followed by a cacophony of noise of all kinds. She had no idea what she was hearing until a few moments later she saw a stampede of men and women rounding the corner of the intersection and rushing toward. She tried to turn around and run away. Quickly, she was overtaken and thrown to the ground. She landed hard and screamed after seeing her forearm bend in half like a twig. She tried to protect her broken arm while fleeing victims struck into it again and again. A man bolted past her, and she struck her head into the concrete side of the of a storefront.

    She lay there, dazed, for almost an hour. She was lucky not to have been trampled to death then and there. The police found her soon, and an ambulance came to take her to the local hospital, a small clinic with a freestanding emergency department. It was another hour more before she came out of the narcotic-induced stupor and, created by absolute pandemonium, in the clinic, began to ask what had happened.

    “You were at the protest, weren’t you?” asked a police officer

    “No,” she said. “I’m just trying to find my friend.”

    “Was he or she at the protest?”

    “Please,” she begged, “his name is Ryu. have you seen a boy my age named Ryu?”

    The officer ignored her while the nurse came and started to draw blood from her.

    It took several hours more for Butcher Huang to arrive. He had to come by ground vehicle from the nearest military hospital. It wasn’t often that they found a compatible donor that met all the criteria.

    “We’re taking you to the military hospital. They need the ER beds here to triage more gunshot victims,” The nurse told her as she was being transferred to the ambulance.

    The layman likely would not have understood that a doctor -- let alone a surgeon -- would ever be wasted riding in the back of an interfacility ambulance, the medical equivalent of a garbage truck. The layman, also would likely not understand that none of the equipment or tools or medicines in the back of the ambulance was of the appropriate type for the prehospital or transport arena. Though to someone like another doctor, it would have stood out immediately.

    After driving for the first two hours, Butcher Huang signaled for the ambulance driver to pull off the side of the road. He grabbed the nonrebreather mask and attached it to the ether.

    “What’s going on?” asked Little Tzu-zi. “Why did we stop.”

    “It’s OK,” Butcher Huang said. “You don’t need to worry about it. This will help with the pain.”

    Butcher Huang forced the mask over her face, and Tzu-zi began to thrash about trying to get it off. Screaming ‘no,’ little Tzu-zi grew weaker with every breath.

    “Momma!” she screamed, “Momma! Momma, please help me!”

    Eventually, she slowed down, only mouthing the word momma silently to herself. ‘What an ill-mannered brat!’ thought Butcher Huang ‘How could you involve your mother in this when this is your mess that you should be paying for!’

Little Tzu-zi, of course, was not dead, only sedated, as was necessary to keep her breathing and her heart beating. Once she stopped moving, Butcher Huang and his partners got to work. First, Huang made the incisions down her chest and belly, breaking the ribs and splitting her body open like a cadaver at the morgue.

Huang took Little Tzu-zi’s liver first. It was a long and delicate procedure, Butcher Huang’s scalpels were guided with extraordinary metalbending precision. The liver was the most profitable of the organs followed by the kidneys. Over the course of another hour, he took both of those from Little Tzu-zi as well. Throughout all of this, Butcher Huang’s team took incredible effort with the best of modern medicine to keep Little Tzu-zi’s heart beating on its own. They would keep her alive as long as they possibly could -- the remaining organs had to be kept fresh.

Next, Butcher Huang took to getting every last piece of flesh that he could before Little Tzu-zi expired. There was a nearly endless supply of good on-demand organs from the healthy Dhamma Chakra practitioners, but organs from a child? That was a rare opportunity. Nothing in Little Tzu-zi’s body could go to waste. The spleen, the pancreas, even the islet cells would good for a good price. He knew that one of the kidneys would go to some Party member’s kids, but the liver would go the daughter of a Fire Nation VIP who had spent months on a waiting list in their own country.

Butcher Huang had been part of the transplant team that removed and put organs into the Avatar himself. Otherwise, he would have died long ago.  Huang didn’t mind this seemingly less prestigious assignment though arguably the Fire Nation VIP was a much more important target.
The doctors worked round the clock, suctioning up all the hemorrhage, pumping Little Tzu-zi with drugs to keep blood pressures from bottoming out and her little heart from flatlining. Done with all the internal organs, he scooped out both of Little Tzu-Zi’s eyes next, depositing them into bags that went into coolers with all of the other organs. Finally, nothing else left, Butcher Hung cut out Little Tzu-zi’s heart.

It was only another forty-five-minute drive back to the hospital where recipients were waiting on their surgeries. The sun had already come up, they had been harvesting for so long. The day wasn’t even close to done. Butcher Huang and his team took the service elevator up through the hospital, dragging several coolers and a medical waste bag behind them. One of Butcher Huang’s colleagues at the hospital stepped on to join them.

“What you got in there? Beers?” He said, pointing at the coolers.

“I wish,” Butcher Huang said.

They both shared in a hearty laugh.

It was all in a day’s work. The Dhamma Chakra practitioners were the best source of good organs, but they’d run out soon. Huang was starting to see more and more Remnants on his operating table, ‘oh well,’ he thought there’d always be other criminals. No one really cared about the Dhamma Chakra. It was a cult after all. The Remnants were a bit trickier, as they were actually a distinct people group. With every year the Party was getting better and better at managing its dissidents though. What they learned from the Dhamma Chakra were invaluable lessons that were being used on the Remnants.

Soon, the Water Tribe would follow. It would be a bit more difficult. Even a Fire Nation yuppie could see the difference between brown and yellow skin, so it would be harder to justify active measures. Being of a different race, they’d be a bad stock of organs, too. But there were always other methods. The illicit narcotics that the government ignored in the Water Tribe ghetto was now killing more of them than any other cause of unnatural death, and the Party had yet to start it's Harmony and Order campaign against them. They’d wait till the Remnants were gone first, it wouldn’t be long. After all, the lessons in subduing the Remnant threat would be just as invaluable in tackling the Water Tribe.

As for dealing with the cleanup, there were several options. Butcher Huang found that child-sized body bags would overly distress his nurses. It would be hard to stuff a body into a medical waste bag due to the shape of it; through trial and error, Butcher Huang had a solution. By severing the spine at C7, T12, and L4, Huang found that you could roll the body up into a ball. Little Tzu-zi’s head was stuffed face first into the cavity where her organs used to be, and then her arms and legs wrapped around her before being stuffed into the bag. The bulge was indistinguishable from any other full bag of medical trash. Little Tzu-zi’s body was finally thrown into the incinerator, along with other amputated limbs, dirty needles, and blankets stained with human shit.