Chapter Text
Katara woke up to something standing on top of her.
“Get off me, you giant cockroach,” she muttered as she sat up.
Toto the isopod-cat did not move, instead shoving a mouse-roach into Katara’s face.
“Eat it yourself.”
Toto dropped her prey and rolled over, demanding to be petted. Katara obligingly ran her hands over the arthropod’s soft belly. That was the only part of Toto that wasn’t clad in armour.
“Look, I’m leaving tomorrow. You’ll have to pester Dad instead. Go pester Dad.”
Toto only wiggled her fourteen legs. Katara checked her alarm clock - 6:52. She had to be up at seven today for her work. She reluctantly climbed to her feet, abandoning Toto, and stepped out of her room. Dad wasn’t up yet. Katara put on her sandals and headed for the toilets at the end of the corridor. As a disabled veteran, Dad had received this apartment, second floor with some modern amenities, but the amenities were limited to running water. The toilets were shared with the entire corridor and the sun would rise at night before they got electricity. The apartment was illuminated with kerosene lamps.
At least the building council kept the toilets clean. Even the floors looked to be freshly washed. That was the job of another disabled veteran who lived in the building. Dad’s knees made it impossible for him to work a steady job. Katara washed her hands in the sink before using her waterbending to clean herself all over, running a bit of soapy water over her body, rinsing off, and drawing all of the water away, leaving her and her nightdress dry. The others didn’t even glance at her now. After eight years, they were used to it.
Back in the apartment, Dad was up and putting together breakfast.
“Toto caught a mouse-roach,” Katara said.
Dad sighed. “Great. I’ll deal with it.”
“How’s Mom?”
“The same.”
Mom had been sick for Katara’s entire life. Some people said that she, being from the Water Tribes, simply could not handle the temperatures and humidity of the equatorial Fire Nation. But Katara didn’t think that was the case - Mom had been healthier when Katara had been very small. She vaguely recalled how when Dad was still in the army and they had been living in a village woman’s house, Mom had worked in exchange for their lodgings. But then she became unwell. Katara remembered how when she had started waterbending at the age of six, she had happily demonstrated her ability to Mom, hoping that it would cheer her up, but Mom had barely smiled.
Dad thought that maybe Mom just missed her home. He had originally meant for Mom to visit the Southern Continent, but she had only cried and turned away from him. But then she had suggested that Katara could go instead. Dad had wanted Katara to spend a year working before starting secondary school in any case, so the trip had been planned. And she was leaving tomorrow! Katara was so excited. She had never left the prefecture before this year, and now, first she spent a month in Caldera City at an invitational program for the best benders graduating primary school, and tomorrow, she was going all the way to the Southern Continent!
Katara ate her breakfast quickly. She didn’t want to be late to her shift at the hospital. Since she was out of school for now, she could work sixty hours a week, on account of her not being sixteen yet. For the past two years, she had only worked twenty hours a week, the maximum for schoolchildren over the age of twelve.
After eating, Katara headed off to work. They lived in a town of 3,500 people, most of whom were involved in the rubber industry. The town drew workers from outlying villages and farms to work in its factories, making hoses and gaskets and all sorts of rubber parts needed for machinery. It wasn’t an industrial hub, but it definitely wasn’t the village it had used to be. It even had its own hospital now, opened the year before Katara was born.
Katara had gotten used over these months to working ten hours a day six days a week. In the hospital, she changed into her uniform and took up her post near the entrance. She had a small stack of books and magazines to distract herself when she wasn’t needed. Five minutes after she had sat down-
“Waterbender!” the nurse called.
Katara belonged to that small minority, one in twenty waterbenders, who learned to heal spontaneously, without any training. Ever since that day when she was seven and healed her own burn, which she had gotten from touching the stove, she had been treated like a precious gem. In an instant people stopped muttering about her mixed background, calling Mom a savage or Katara a half-breed. Instead, they cherished her abilities.
It was an insane pressure. Especially when Katara was little and could barely heal a fracture or a large cut, she had often cried from the inability to help people. But she had practised and practised, and once she turned twelve, the hospital gladly took her on to handle acute injuries. Even now, illnesses and chronic conditions were generally beyond her abilities. She had been healing Dad’s legs ever since he got out of the army and he still walked with a cane.
Katara rushed to the sound of the voice. It was an old man who had broken his hip in a fall. She sat down by him and applied the water from the basin. By now, she could tell how long it would take to heal an injury.
“Half an hour,” she said. She could feel the way the bones had shifted, the fragility, the diminished capacity to heal. All she could do was hurry the body’s natural processes, and if the injury could not be healed by definition, she could do nothing. She couldn’t regrow a missing limb and the bruises and cuts of the hemophiliac boy who lived next door to the hospital often took hours to handle.
After the old man was healed, Katara got half an hour before the doctor called for her. “Abdomen. Diagnosis?”
It was a semi-comatose woman, still young but worn, and her husband was sitting by her side. Katara vaguely recognised the man but not the woman, he was a factory worker and the wife must have been a farmer. Going by the bleeding, she was probably having a miscarriage, and seemed to be suffering from an infection. Katara applied the water and sought out the chi pathways. Yes, a miscarriage. “Retained tissue,” she diagnosed. “Perforated bowel.”
Dr. Xiang glared at the man, who fell to his knees. “Please don’t tell anyone!” he begged. “Look, Doctor, we have three under five, we can’t afford another one, please don’t send me to a penal battalion, I have an exemption, I work in a military industry-”
Katara listened with one ear as she healed the perforated bowel. Whatever tool the man had used had pierced the intestine and allowed the waste to leak out, causing infection. She healed the damage and washed away the dirt. Hopefully the woman would be able to fight off her fever now that the thing causing the infection was gone.
“Then stay off of her,” Dr. Xiang said.
“We count the days and I always pull out!” The man wrung his hands.
“Is that how you got the three you already have? Waterbender, how many weeks postpartum did conception occur?”
By now, Katara could read a uterus like an open book, with all the births and miscarriages and abortions (both doctor-mandated and illegal) she had to deal with. She could tell how recently the woman had given birth and how recently she had become pregnant again. “Five.”
Dr. Xiang slapped the man. “Five weeks, and you won’t leave her alone?”
“She said it was alright!”
Katara went about the process of curettage. It was a nasty undertaking. Pregnancy was just like a tumour, it took over the body’s chi and convinced it that it was a part of it now. Even a dead fetus could not be expelled with waterbending alone. Katara had to reach in with water, scoop out the tissue, and then heal the uterus. She had once tried something similar when she first got her period, it was horrifically painful. Thankfully the woman was unconscious.
“So I should just stop being with her forever?” the man asked miserably.
“Do something that won’t get her pregnant,” Dr. Xiang said.
“But Doctor, as a man to a man, I can’t live like that!”
“Can you live without her?” Dr. Xiang snapped. “As a widower with three small children?”
Once Katara was finished healing, she had to go back to her station in case there was another patient, so she didn’t see the end of the conversation. She had seen similar situations many times. She didn’t understand why some men were stupid enough to risk killing their wives and ending up alone with multiple children to raise. Dad hadn’t even slept in the same room as Mom ever since she became unwell, and he wasn’t complaining.
Katara was called over four more times before lunch break. The last one, the old woman with a stroke, she could do very little about. The brain was like an infinite spiderweb of infinitely tiny strands of chi, Katara often couldn’t even diagnose the issue, let alone heal it. Katara was at least capable of dissolving the blood clot, but the damage had been done. She hated it when she could do nothing. People acted like she was all-powerful and were upset when she couldn’t help them. Even when she had first bent a splash of water, people had said that she was blessed by the ocean and would one day be a great healer, and it got even worse when she spontaneously began healing.
Even stepping away for lunch, Katara worried that someone would come in and she wouldn’t be there to treat them. She had been reluctant to go on the trip - she told everyone it was to the colonies - and Dr. Xiang had to personally convince her that it would make her a better healer in the end.
The hospital was a few steps away from the market. Katara brought her food containers with her, filling her bowl with war noodles and a small square box with barley, vegetables, and shredded tofu. The sellers often charged her less because she had healed them or their relatives. It was awful having everyone constantly thank her because that just reminded her of how many people she had failed to save. Katara then went over to where a group of people, mostly middle-aged men, were still sitting, hoping to be hired for the day.
“Hey Dad,” Katara called out.
Dad looked up from his newspaper. He was hired maybe one or two days a week. Usually, he stayed until around midday and then went back home and worked in their allotment garden. “Ready to head back?”
Katara wanted to slap her forehead. She had forgotten that she had agreed to work a half-day today and go fishing in the afternoon. “Maybe I should work instead,” she said. “What if there’s a patient-”
Dad raised his eyebrows. “But what will we eat when you’re gone?” he asked in a tone of mock horror.
Katara sat down next to him and ate her lunch. “I’ll go pick up my pay after eating.”
Back at the hospital, everyone wished her well for the trip. “How long will you be away?” the woman from Accounting asked as she wrote something down in her ledger.
“I don’t know. It depends on how the ships are running. Hopefully a month or so, maybe two.”
“I’m sure you’ll be an even better healer when you return.”
It was actually Dad who was the most enthusiastic about the idea. What better place to learn waterbending than in the Water Tribes themselves? Katara had first met another waterbender earlier in the year in Caldera City, but even the healer had been unable to teach her anything new.
Katara collected her pay and met up with Dad, who was waiting outside the hospital. They went home, picked up their fishing things, and walked half an hour to the river. Dad was leaning heavily on his cane by the time they were there, but he did not complain. He never did. Katara wasn’t sure what exactly was wrong with his knees. Most likely, they had simply worn down after taking too many loads.
Dad tossed in his line, set it down, and read the newspaper under his umbrella. It was pouring rain, but Katara didn’t mind the rainy season, since she could keep herself dry if she had to. Katara fished with waterbending alone. She sat with her fingers touching the water, feeling for the fish. They usually caught mud carp here.
Katara noticed that Dad was reading the last page of the newspaper. “What does the horoscope say?” she asked.
“Astrologers declare the week before elections, the amount of promises doubles.”
Katara laughed. Astrologers made predictions for every part of the calendar cycle, days and weeks and months. Sceptics like Dad made jokes about it - ‘astrologers declare the year of the rat, the amount of BIS agents doubles’.
Granted, Katara had been born in the year of the water dragon, so maybe there was something to it.
“Are you going to vote?” The Council of Representatives was elected by all citizen men twenty-five and up and women thirty and up. Mom wasn’t a citizen because she had never gotten around to sitting the exam for it.
“Of course. Social Democrats all the way. They’re the only ones who say it like it really is.”
The Council of Representatives was only advisory, but it was still important to elect people who would be honest about the situation. The Social Democrats (who were in fact banned again, but ran as independents) wanted to stop this war before it devoured even more people. People said it was unpatriotic, but Katara thought it was perfectly patriotic to not want the Fire Nation to collapse under the endless deaths and economic strain.
Dad didn’t like the war at all. He said it was horrible and senseless and they were just attacking people who wanted to be left alone. Sometimes Dad wanted an armistice, other times he muttered that only a crushing defeat in the field would teach the generals that enough was enough. He believed that Captain Chon, the colonial officer found guilty of treason several years ago, was innocent and that the commanders were incompetent.
Katara felt a fish and yanked it out of the water. She dropped it in the bucket.
“Not fair,” Dad said.
Katara laughed and put her hand back in the water.
Once they had a good amount of fish, they went to the farm of Dad’s old army buddy who would dry it for them. Dad was actually from these parts, he had grown up in the orphanage in town before it had moved to a bigger city. Most of the kids at school had big families, but Katara liked only having a mom and a dad just fine. It seemed easier.
Of course, she did have relatives out there. She wasn’t sure what she thought about meeting them.
“Fishing with waterbending is cheating,” Uncle Keito complained, looking at how much fish they had caught.
Katara dried off Dad with a wave of her hand, tossing the water aside. The two men laughed.
They took back one fish with them, packed in ice. They had an icebox at home that Katara maintained. It was extremely useful, and she felt bad that she wouldn’t be there for a month and they’d have to live like everyone else. On the way back, the rain paused for a moment. They went into the allotment to grab a few vegetables. Dad grew nearly all of the fruits and vegetables that they ate. He had gotten the patch of land together with the apartment when the old owner died, and it had still had the old owner’s crops growing. As always, Dad hugged the giant hemp plant.
“Dad, it’s not that kind of hemp.” Katara rolled her eyes.
Katara dried off the vegetables and they went home. Since Mom was unwell, Dad and Katara made fish soup together and put the leftovers in the icebox for tomorrow.
Katara went to her room, where her rucksack had been packed for days. It was Dad’s old army rucksack, filled with things she’d need for the trip and gifts for her relatives. Since it was currently summer on the Southern Continent, she only needed a winter coat, not a mountain coat meant for the coldest temperatures in the inhabited world. The calf-length garment was rolled up and attached to the top of the rucksack with belts, ready to be put on when necessary or used as a blanket.
Katara double-checked her pouch with documents. Dad had withdrawn large sums of money for her trip, casually giving her bills of denominations she had hardly ever seen before and never held in her hands. She also needed to bring her passport to enter Kyoshi Island. From there, she would buy passage to the Earth Kingdom and then to the Southern Continent. There were plenty of vessels going back and forth this time of year, so it wouldn’t take too long to find one who could take her to the vicinity of Wolf Cove.
Speaking of…
The next morning, Katara entered Mom’s room as Mom half-heartedly ate breakfast.
“Mom? I have a question.”
Mom fiddled with the disc number around her neck. Katara also had one, but where Mom always tried to hide hers even in the apartment, Katara wore hers proudly visible over her clothes, so that everyone knew who she was. Being of mixed ancestry, she had only been issued it when she began to waterbend, making it a mark of her abilities.
“You said your band lives in Wolf Cove during the summer?”
Mom nodded.
“And I have a half-brother named Sokka?”
Another nod.
Katara had always felt uncomfortable asking her parents about their backgrounds. At least with Dad, he often mentioned things in conversation, but the only thing she knew about Mom’s homeland was that they lived in Wolf Cove during the summer, her half-brother was named Sokka, and they used cottongrass as wicks for lamps.
Mom left her room to see Katara off. Katara put on her pouch under her top layer of clothes and heaved the rucksack onto her back.
“Don’t forget to send a telegram when you reach Kyoshi Island,” Dad said.
“I’ll definitely forget.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Good luck,” Mom said. “Be careful.”
“Of course.”
Katara went out the door and made her way towards the train station.
Katara had to change trains at Caldera City, and because of a delay, she ended up running across the entire station to get to the train before it left. Then it turned out too many tickets had been sold and she had to sit by the door next to the toilet, her rucksack between her legs as people kept on stepping over her and the man sitting next to her beat all challengers at dominoes. By the time she arrived in Hoa Da, it was 13:48 and she was hungry. Katara bought some food and went to the ticket office. The next boat to Kyoshi Island was at 16:30.
Katara checked her wallet - she had enough money in there for the ticket, but what if she needed to buy something else? She pushed aside some of the folds of her clothing to reach her pouch and take out a large bill. The seller must have been used to young people travelling to visit family and did not react to the amount of money Katara was throwing around. Katara headed over to the waiting area, where she spent two and a half hours reading old newspapers and magazines.
Since all the ships were being used by the armed forces, Katara and the other passengers were crammed into an extremely old vessel that hardly looked seaworthy. Katara was very glad that if it came to it, she could swim almost indefinitely. She sat on the floor on an upper deck with the ocean spray hitting her because she had bought the cheapest ticket. The temperature dropped rapidly, but Katara found that she didn’t mind it, and neither did she struggle to fall asleep when night fell. She had known for a long time that she had an affinity for the ocean, but it was so strange and yet so familiar to fully feel it.
It was mid-morning when they finally arrived. Katara stepped onto Kyoshi Island, where people called to each other in Fire language and official-speak and the local dialect. Now came the time of the trickiest part of the operation - she had to acquire Earth Kingdom documents. Dad and all of his buddies said they were easy to purchase if you had the money, so Katara, after easily getting through customs, headed for a kiosk that handled identification papers.
“I need an Earth Kingdom passport,” Katara said, offering her bender’s licence. The palm-sized book consisted of two flaps of leather with lined paper glued to the inside bearing stamps and details of her qualifications. The woman manning the kiosk looked oddly at her. Katara knew what she was thinking - Katara at fourteen was a fifth-category bender and had her basic healer’s diploma.
It wasn’t just healing she was good at. She had always done well at school - it had always been known that she would attend medical school and become a doctor, no other options possible for the one who could heal simply by focusing. She was a good combat waterbender despite being taught only by firebenders, but perish the thought of her serving on the front lines, far too valuable to waste in battle. Katara had methodically racked up qualifications despite the ones she really wanted being far in the future. The advanced healing diploma required either attending medical school or an equivalent amount of knowledge, and if she had her master’s diploma by thirty, allowing her to teach, that would be noteworthy. Which Katara planned on doing. After all, people had said that it would take her until she was twenty to reach the fifth category.
“Heal my wrist,” the clerk said.
Katara obeyed.
“The purpose of your visit?”
“To visit the Southern Continent and study with the elders.”
The clerk looked suspiciously at her. Katara knew that because of Kyoshi Island’s location and neutral status, it was the international centre of espionage. Maybe this clerk was a Fire Nation spy who would inform the Bureau of Internal Security that Katara was going to an enemy location. Dad had checked with the local BIS branch and they said it was alright for Katara to go study abroad and issued her a certificate of ideological reliability.
“I can pay for the papers.”
The clerk’s face went blank and she named a staggering sum which Katara paid without complaint. The passport was issued bare minutes later.
“Is my bender’s licence valid in the Earth Kingdom?”
“It is, there’s people constantly going back and forth in the borderlands.”
Katara went to the currency exchange and changed most of her large-denomination bills for the official Earth Kingdom currency, which could be exchanged anywhere on the continent. She also exchanged a smaller sum for Kyoshi Island money and went to buy a ticket. The clerk had to pull out a map to see where exactly she wanted to go. This was the most nerve-wracking part of the trip; while Earth ships did go to the Southern Continent with some regularity in the summer there was no guarantee there would be one going to Wolf Cove any time soon.
“I would advise you to go to Daqing, that is where most ships depart from when going to that area.” The clerk folded up a map. “There is a ship going directly there tomorrow morning, 8:30.”
Thank the heavens. Katara bought a ticket, hid it in her pouch, and went to send her parents a telegram with the good news. Since she had an entire afternoon to kill, she headed for the newspaper stand. Much to her surprise, one of the newspapers was obviously downright socialist. Why did the Kyoshi Island government tolerate this? She eagerly bought the newspaper and sat down to read it. It was so different from any other newspaper she had ever read! It openly talked about the Fire Nation losing.
Katara then bought herself some food and went to a bookstore. Good thing everyone wrote in official-speak, otherwise travelling would have been a nightmare. She looked around the shelves in awe. Back home, Dad hid his copy of The Republic of Omashu, which detailed how over a century ago the people of that city-state had overthrown their monarchy, in the walls, but here it was just lying on the shelves! But then again the people of Kyoshi had a president, not a monarch.
There were books detailing the heroics of the Kyoshi Legion - despite the island’s official neutrality, tens of thousands of men fought in the Earth armies - and extremely radical books. Curious more than anything, Katara bought a book about nihilism. Back home, if you complained, you got called a nihilist, and Katara wondered what that actually was.
Katara bought the book and sat down on a bench to read, taking advantage of the total lack of rain. It turned out that nihilism was an old ideology dating to the last century of Avatar Kyoshi. It originated after the Avatar’s suppression of a peasant rebellion in the environs of Ba Sing Se. Katara supposed it made sense. It was bad enough to know that you were powerless in the face of people causing untold suffering, but to be told by the Avatar that the existing order would endure? It must have felt like being told that the universe hated you. Katara was a little bit glad that the current Avatar wasn’t involved with world affairs.
It was really weird that this book could be sold on Kyoshi Island.
By the time Katara was done reading, it was getting close to evening. She went to the telegraph office, where a message had arrived for her. It was a simple ‘Good luck.’ Katara smiled and went to find an inn. She paid for a place in a crowded room and spent the night with her arms wrapped around her rucksack.
The next morning, Katara boarded the ship. It would be a two-night trip. She was beginning to feel exhausted from the journey but she found herself drawing strength from the ocean, as if its soul was consoling her. The food, however, was awful.
In Daqing, the customs agents confiscated her book for being revolutionary and searched her things thoroughly. They looked suspiciously at the stamp in her Earth Kingdom passport and questioned her about her accent. Katara’s official-speak was fluent but not perfect.
“Why do you sound like a Fire person?”
“I was raised by one.”
There was no denying that some Fire Nation people lived permanently on Kyoshi Island, so the agents had to let her through.
Now came the time for the biggest pain in the ass. Katara had to ask around about any scientific or trade vessels going to the Southern Continent. People at least took her seriously when she demonstrated her waterbending, but they passed her from office to office in search of someone who had any information at all. Katara desperately wished for Dad to be there and handle all of the exhausting conversations. She had never tried to handle bureaucracy on her own before.
“There aren’t very many ships heading south,” a clerk said apologetically. “With the Fire Nation harassing our shipping, fewer crews dare to make the voyage every year.”
Katara was used to always agreeing with people no matter what they said. “Awful, isn’t it?”
Late at night, someone finally came up with something. “A ship heads out of Mashan next week to pick up researchers from Wolf Cove.”
Katara felt a thrill of excitement. “That’s exactly where I’m going!”
“You’ll have to take the train there. I’ll telegraph them asking to wait for you.”
“Oh, thank you so much!” Katara bowed deeply. She got directions to the train station and had to sleep on a bench because the next train was coming the next morning. If the system was so bad, no wonder the clerk had worried she might not be able to make the trip in five days.
The train was archaic and uncomfortable, and the entire place was a good two decades behind. They were trying to play catch-up while also waging a war, which couldn’t be easy. The trip took three days instead of the twelve hours it would have taken back home. Katara spent her time healing people and earned a good amount of money.
Mashan’s train station was twenty kilometres away from the port. Katara, not wanting to pay any more than she had to, walked the distance, relying on the locals for directions. The directions were essentially to walk directly south, which made it easier. At the port, Katara went to the offices, and thankfully they had received the message and were waiting for her. She was introduced to the captain of the small boat, who offered her an empty cabin.
“Wolf Cove is a good location,” he said. “There’s ships heading in and out every month in summer, with all the geologists looking for natural resources. I’ll actually be back myself in six weeks.”
“That’s an excellent time for me,” Katara said.
It didn’t take that long to reach the Southern Continent. The boat sped over the waves, nobody wanting to be in the open water for any longer than necessary, and soon it was cold enough for Katara to put on her coat, though she didn’t need to fasten it.
In these parts, the sun never set for several weeks in summer. The sun stubbornly remained in the sky even as Katara’s watch showed the onset of evening.
“What timezone are we in?” she asked one of the crewmembers.
“Same as Ba Sing Se.”
Katara adjusted her watch. As she looked up, she noticed land up ahead, and then people.
She had finally arrived in Wolf Cove.