#korraweek

The flight to the South Pole had been miserable enough for the rest of them—the better part of a week with eleven people and one large polar bear dog crowded onto the back of a sky bison, Tenzin pushing them on by day and night at top speed, with the minimum possible number of stops. But Korra had seemed unaware of anything at all. When she wasn’t curled up asleep with Naga for a pillow, she was sprawled across the edge of Oogi’s saddle like a seasick sailor, staring down at the ocean far below with a blankness in her eyes that made Lin distinctly uneasy. Only with difficulty could she be coaxed to eat, and Lin couldn’t recall her speaking once during the entire trip.

  It was as though Amon had stolen the Avatar’s soul along with three-fourths of her bending ability. Even Lin’s metalbender police officers, enervated as they had been after losing their bending, hadn’t tuned out the world so completely.

  Now that Katara had made it clear that neither of them could expect to bend anything ever again, Lin was beginning to understand how Korra felt. She certainly understood why Korra had turned her back on her parents and friends and taken off on her own.

  The Grand Lotus himself had been present alongside Katara when they arrived, but had quickly made himself insufferable with his barely concealed smugness at Korra’s fate. The man’s tone and manner practically shouted “I told you so,” until Korra’s father finally lost his temper and threatened to throw the man out the door if he didn’t leave.

  With the exception of the terribly crowded front room, the building was deserted. While most the others were still staring after Korra, Lin slipped into the main hallway and found a back room where she could be alone. It appeared to be a sparsely furnished guest room containing little more than a bed, a few decorative wall hangings, and a small trickling fountain in one corner. 

  Lin sat down on the edge of the bed and put her head in her hands. And there she sat for she didn’t know how long, feeling as if she was witnessing not just the end of her own career, but the end of an entire world.

  Republic City was in shambles. For all Amon’s talk about how much better off the world would be without benders, it was hard to see how the city could function without earthbenders to maintain roads, waterbenders to run the waterworks, and firebenders to provide electrical power. They would be lucky, when they got back, if the place hadn’t yet dissolved into the chaos that was surely coming.

  As Tenzin would say, the world had fallen out of balance again. And could it even be said, this time, that there was an Avatar to restore it? Avatar Aang had never quite overcome the sense that he had failed the world by disappearing from it for a hundred years. Now it looked as though the same feeling would dog Korra for the rest of her life.

  Lin didn’t pay attention, at first, to the commotion outside her room. People were speaking with raised voices, though she couldn’t be bothered to decipher what they were saying. Surely no one would come to disturb her so soon; Tenzin, at least, would understand her need to be alone after Katara’s announcement. Whatever the trouble was, the others could sort it out themselves for a change.

  No such luck. The commotion seemed to be heading her way. It resolved itself into the sound of voices and footsteps coming down the hall, quick and purposeful.

  The loudest set of footsteps stopped outside her door. Lin sighed and braced herself for the inevitable knock and demand for false reassurances that she was all right.

  Instead, the wall to the left of the door blew itself apart in an explosion of loose stones and rock dust. Over the resulting pile of rubble stepped a fur-parka-clad figure that Lin took several stunned seconds to recognize as Korra.

  Lin rose from the bed and stared open-mouthed. She hardly recognized the young woman who had disappeared into the tundra a few hours ago. That Korra had been slump-shouldered and dead-eyed, an emotional wreck fleeing the place where she had lost her last hope of regaining her old identity. This Korra radiated confidence and power.

  But not even that—not even the fact that Korra’s eyes were supposed to be ocean blue and not glowing with unearthly golden light—shocked Lin as much the shattered pile of rocks and rubble on the floor.

  Could Korra have done that?

  As though in answer to the question Lin couldn’t bring herself to ask, Korra raised her hands and gestured toward the fountain in the corner of the room, drawing a stream of water to join the lines of fire and bits of stone flying in tightly controlled, crisscrossing orbits around her body. She gave Lin a few second to take it all in, then blew away the three elements with a burst of air that left everything in the small room except Lin licked by fire, drenched with water, and bombarded with pebbles.

  Though she didn’t doubt the fineness of Korra’s control, Lin instinctively stepped back and raised her arms to shield her face. When she looked again, her heart leaped into her throat. A hand was reaching toward her—so like Amon's hand, coming to strip away her earthbending…

  Lin tried to step backward again, stumbled against the edge of the bed, and barely remained upright. With an angry sweep of her arm, she struck Korra’s outstretched hand away.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she snapped, irritated less by Korra’s behavior than by the furious pounding of her heart.

  Korra stepped back as well, her eyes fading to their normal color and meeting Lin’s with an unusually contrite expression. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to freak you out. But… see, I think maybe—”

  Lin impatiently tore her eyes away from the Avatar’s, shaking her head as she looked around the room. “How?”

  “I talked to Aang. Whatever bloodbending thing Amon did to me, Aang fixed it. I can work all four elements now.”

  Talking to spirits was something else Lin knew Korra had never been able to do before, but her surprise was overwhelmed as an emotional dam burst somewhere inside her.

  “Well, that’s wonderful for you,” she said bitterly. “But what about the rest of us—the ones who don’t have hundreds of past lives to draw on for healing, or wisdom, or whatever you got from Aang? Do you think you can run Republic City by yourself? Even if the Avatar is back, Amon was right—the era of bending might as well be over. Too many of us are useless now.” Lin looked down at her hands, fighting the urge to break down and weep for the unfairness of it all.

  Korra waited with uncharacteristic patience for Lin to finish her rant. Then, jarringly, she smiled—her old cocksure grin, the one Lin had been certain none of them would ever see again. Lin had to resist the impulse to wipe that blasted smirk off her face.

  “Chief Beifong… do you remember seeing a big domed building in the middle of a circle of tall stones on the way into the compound—the Avatar temple? I want you to get everyone together and meet me there as soon as you can.” She reached out to grip Lin’s arm briefly. “I’ll show you guys something cool, okay?”

  Without waiting for a reply from the dumbfounded ex-police chief, Korra walked out through the hole in the wall—not toward the front door, but farther down the long hallway to the rear. For the first time, Lin noticed Tenzin, Mako, and the rest of Korra’s teenage friends standing in the hallway.

  “‘Something cool’?” she asked none of them in particular. “What did she mean by that?”

  Mako looked at her calmly. “Not to be rude or anything… but if you’d let Korra get a word in edgewise, she’d have told you that she thinks she can restore your bending, just like Aang restored hers.”

  Before Lin could take in this incredible statement, the sound of more earthbending explosions echoed from down the hall.

  Rubbing the back of his neck, Mako peered after Korra. “She’s sure in the hurry to try it. Looks like she just made the healing hut a new back door.”

  “Or two,” sighed Tenzin.

  “Really?” For the first time in days, Lin began to feel like smiling. “Good for her.”

  *****

  At first the others—Tenzin’s family, Korra’s parents, Mako and the kids—hurried to keep up with Lin as she strode toward the stone circle behind the compound, but they kept back once she reached the steps to the temple platform where Korra waited.

  As she ascended the steps, Lin was overwhelmed by an unpleasant memory: being dragged as a prisoner through the captured Air Temple by Amon’s thugs, to be shoved to her knees at the feet of the monster himself. The man had loved to make his victims kneel, and Lin suspected that it wasn’t just to get a better angle for his bloodbending grip. He was tall enough, compared with most of them, to make height a moot point in any case.

  Korra, on the other hand, was a good few inches shorter than Lin, and could use a little help in the height department. So when Lin reached the top of the steps and faced the Avatar, she dropped smoothly to one knee.

  Lin shut her eyes as Korra stepped forward. There was a warm hand gripping her shoulder, and a warm thumb pressing against her forehead, followed by a slight sense of disorientation, though nothing like as bad as the effects of Amon’s bloodbending. Lin blinked uncertainly as she stood up, and her eyes came to rest on the circle of gigantic stones.

  She raised her hands, and smiled at the blank astonishment on the faces of Tenzin and the others as she effortlessly lifted the stones into the air.

  *****

  Lin’s first inkling of just how different things were going to be for Korra in Republic City came after they had landed Oogi at Air Temple Island taken a ferryboat to town.

  It was just after sunset, and the busy harbor was quieting down for the night. Though they had wired ahead with word of Korra’s new power, Tenzin thought it would be best if they checked in personally at City Hall, and none of Korra’s friends wanted to be left behind.  

  They stepped off the boat and onto the wooden dock, heading for the city building a few blocks away. They hadn’t even reached the first cross-street when a voice from the small customs house at the head of the dock stopped them.

  Lin looked over to see the building’s door held open by Officer Song, one of her former metalbender police officers. The interior of the building behind him was crowded with people, and the hope in their eyes was heartbreaking to see.

  “Chief Beifong! Is the Avatar with you?”

  Korra jostled her way clear of the mostly-taller people surrounding her and raised a hand. “Hey.”

  Song held up one of the city’s yellow telegraph forms, grubby and wrinkled with much handling. “A friend at the city wireless office gave me this message. Is it true?”

  Lin already knew what the message said. Tenzin had written it to convey the most information in the smallest number of words: “AVATAR’S BENDING RESTORED—CURE COMMUNICABLE TO BEIFONG AND SHOULD WORK FOR OTHERS—RETURNING FOURTH EVENING.”

  To answer Song’s question, Lin shot a metal wrist-cable straight upward, where it wound around the cross-tie of a power pole. She retracted the cable and pulled herself upward into a graceful gymnastic flip over the electrical lines and back to the ground, the sort of thing that was basic technique at the police metalbending academy. For effect, she let the pavement crack just a bit under her feet as she landed.

  Her men watched, entranced. As one, they turned to look at Korra.

  Korra looked at Tenzin, who shrugged. “I suppose if anyone deserves to be first in line, it’s them.”

  Lin retracted her cable. “Let’s take this inside.”

  Everyone in the small building—several dozen people at least, with White Lotus guards and a few other types of uniforms mixed in with the police—backed away from the door to admit the Avatar and her friends. The room was packed so full that the occupants had to be careful not to trip over each other as they made way.

  “Sorry about the close quarters,” Song murmured, “but it’s really hard to keep something like this a secret.”

  Korra stared blankly at the crowd, and the crowd stared back at her. Nobody seemed to know quite what to do next.

  Standing a half-step behind Korra’s shoulder, Lin beckoned Song forward and pointed to the ground at the Avatar’s feet. Song, always quick on the uptake, immediately knelt down. To an outside observer, it didn’t look as though Korra actually did anything much—a grip on the shoulder, a light touch on the forehead—though her glowing eyes and hands did elicit a gasp from those watching.

  Song leaped to his feet with a whoop. Lacking a convenient set of monumental stones, he had to content himself with ripping a chunk from of the barren postage-stamp of dirt that was the building’s yard.

  Lin hadn’t thought of that. We’re going to have to be careful where we set up our re-bending operation if we don’t want property damage on a massive scale…

  The crowd began murmuring at this proof of the Avatar’s power, and she heard a few scattered whistles and claps. Song moved out of the way of the officer behind him, almost forgetting Korra in his haste to get outside and back to his element. But at the last moment he stopped, snapped to attention, and raised his hand to salute the Avatar.

  When he was gone out the door, Korra stared after him dazedly. The next ex-metalbender was already kneeling in the spot Song had left. “Korra,” Lin hissed. “Turn around. You’re on!”

  Korra faced the crowd and squared her shoulders. 

  After that, things moved along quickly. It took the better part of an hour to get through everyone in the room, but as most of them were people whose job it was to maintain public order, they knew how to wait their turn. One by one they knelt at Korra’s feet, then headed out the door behind her; most contented themselves with a formal bow or salute as they left, but a few of the more emotional benders couldn’t restrain themselves from trying to hug the startled Avatar.

  When the room was finally empty, Mako turned to Korra and put a hand on her shoulder. “You all right? You look a little freaked out.”

  Korra was watching out the door. Some of the restored benders had already gone home to spread the good news. But most of them, being earthbenders, were gleefully participating in an enormous dirt fight that had turned the building’s yard into a pit several feet deep and covered everything and everyone with what Lin’s mother would have called “a protective coating of earth.” Lin’s metalbenders, in particular, were slinging ever-larger clods at each other with abandon, whooping like kids.

  “That’s the same bunch of cops who chased me down and arrested me the first day I arrived in town.” Korra looked down at her hands wonderingly. "It's just kind of hard to believe I did that.”

  A few of the metalbenders caught sight of Korra and beckoned her outside. The moment she stepped through the door, two of them grabbed her by the arms, ducked down, and hoisted her onto their shoulders. 

"Woah!" she cried, clutching at them as she got her balance... but soon she was grinning with the rest of the earthbenders she had healed, flushing red from their cheers and applause. She put an end to the awkward moment by vaulting to the ground and throwing herself into the dirt fight, knocking half of Lin's force off their feet with one well-placed tidal wave of earth. 

As her men picked themselves up and organized a playful counterattack against the triumphant girl, Lin smiled and shook her head. "Welcome home, Avatar." 

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