The Wind That Won

I got down on my hands and knees to make myself smaller and listen with what my elders called the golden hearing. Really, it's just my magic nudging my eardrums to stretch so more sound gets through, but "golden hearing" sounds a lot better than that.

I couldn't recognize the language, but I knew he was there.

The longer I waited, the more anxious I got that someone would find me. They can't, I kept telling myself. My magic was nowhere near as good as theirs, but I'd picked up a trick or two during my years as an intern for the darkest society around, or as they love to call themselves, Keep Dreaming LLC. A scam, basically. Get people to enroll, promise them powers beyond measure, and then turn them into—

BANG.

The door came down on top of me, and my cover was blown. Well, shit. Didn't see that coming. So much for the golden hearing. Thanks for nothing, Amara, our protective goddess. Supposedly. I can never get her help when I actually need it.

With the door on my back and smoke pouring in, I scrambled out from under it as fast as I could while keeping my cloaking spell in place. Apparently my mental connections were stronger than last time, because now I could hold a spell even with my life in danger.

I couldn't see anything, but I could hear.

"Nobody's here, Khan. Chill out, man," a raspy voice said, way too close for comfort.

"I'm telling you, I can sense it. Something is in that room."

Well, shit. I'd forgotten about this part. His kind has powers beyond anything we can comprehend, and I must have fallen asleep during that part of the lecture on the Somnari. Oops. What I did remember: they don't find you by sight or sound. They find you by what you feel. Fear most of all. Our lecturer said fear was the loudest thing in any room to them.

I tried to stay focused while inching toward the open window. Air helps in situations like this, and not just because it gives me the oxygen I need to cast. I'm the greatest airbender in my town. I took a small breath, gathered up every emotion I had, and pushed it all out toward the window in one long exhale. Everything about me went out through that small opening. Everything they could sense, at least. I still hadn't learned their trick of turning themselves (or at least their hearing) into pure air so they could be in a room without physically being in it, if you get my drift. I'm still learning, okay?

I exhaled for as long as I could, then went still. I didn't move a muscle. I didn't even blink.

He came in and took a closer look around. Probably with his night vision, or whatever it's called. They have too many powers, and I'm still trying to understand them, or at least memorize them. He stared painfully straight ahead, like he was looking right into my soul.

He couldn't. He definitely didn't see me.

Right?

Right?

"Let's go. This meeting is over, and so are they," he said, turning his back. In a split second, every person in that room with him was dead.

Well. That went well.

"Get to the Cove and have them erase everything from their memories," he told the raspy-voiced guy, who stood a good seven feet tall.

"Wait, even the mission? We're so close to having them ready. Two more harvests and the Sleepers wake on command."

"Yes, even the mission. We're not safe here. We regroup in Alaia."

Alaia. I knew Alaia. I'd only read about it in books and grimoires: a town that supposedly went extinct eons ago and was sealed away in a parallel universe because of whatever happened there. Nobody wanted anything to do with it. If they made it there, we'd lose them forever. Including my best friend.

I wasn't going to let that happen. I just had no idea what I was supposed to do.

I needed to find Maliana. She could get me into their Cove. At least that was one thing I could totally do.

I stayed frozen in that spot for a few minutes after they left the building, in case they sensed me again and came back. Then I cast a tracking frequency on the no-brain, all-muscle guy. I'd never get close enough to tag Khan, but I didn't need to. Khan had just sent his muscle straight to the Cove, and now he'd lead me right to it.

Then I got myself out of that room, because I was about to be sick. Headless bodies were splayed everywhere. Did he really have to take their heads off? Couldn't he have just snapped their necks and been done with it? Unless that was the point. Unless a body that still has its head is still something that can be used.

I'm starting to hate this guy more and more every day.

Maliana didn't ask questions when I showed up at her door smelling like smoke and someone else's blood. She just handed me tea, listened, and went very quiet when I said the word Cove.

"You know what they do in there, right?" she said. "They don't erase memories. They take them. Every dream you ever had, bottled up and fed to whatever those things are."

She pulled an old map from under her bed, the kind that shifts when you're not looking at it. My tracking frequency hummed in my ears, pulling east, toward the water.

"If your friend's in there," Maliana said, "we have until the next tide. After that, she won't remember your name. And she won't want to."

I put my tea down. "Then why are we still sitting here?"

The map took us through three streets that didn't exist in daylight and a forest that definitely wasn't there last week. Maliana walked like she'd done this a hundred times. I walked like someone who had just watched a man remove heads without touching them, which is to say, badly.

The hum in my ears got louder the closer we got. Dorn, which was what I'd decided to call the seven-foot slab of muscle since nobody had bothered to introduce us, was definitely at the Cove. He was also definitely not alone.

The Cove was a sea cave, black rock slick with salt, with a mouth so wide the moon went in with us. Inside, it was the quietest place I've ever been. Hundreds of stone beds were lined up in rows that went deeper than I could see, and on every bed was a person, asleep. They were breathing slow and even, all in the same rhythm, like one enormous thing breathing through hundreds of mouths.

Above each bed hung a glass jar. Inside every jar, something glowed.

"Dreams," Maliana whispered. "Memories. Whatever's left of them."

Some jars were almost empty. Some were full and bright, swirling like a storm in a bottle. Hooded figures moved between the rows, tapping the glass and checking the levels like farmers checking crops.

Two more harvests, the raspy voice had said. Now I knew what he meant.

"Okay," I breathed. "Okay. Plan. You distract them, I find Noa, we leave, nobody dies. Especially us."

"That's not a plan. That's a wish."

"Keep Dreaming, right?"

She glared at me, but she went.

I did the thing again. Small inhale, gather everything, push it all out. My fear, my anger, the image of those bodies I couldn't unsee. I sent it all out of the cave on one long breath and let the sea wind carry it away. I felt empty and light and very, very thin, like I might blow away myself.

Then I started walking the rows.

It's a horrible thing, looking for someone you love among hundreds of sleeping faces. Every face was somebody's Noa. Every jar was somebody's whole life, draining away.

I found her near the back.

She looked peaceful, which somehow made it worse. Her hair was a mess like always, and her mouth was a little open like always. The jar above her was maybe a quarter full. As I watched, a thread of light slipped up out of her chest and into the glass, and for a second I saw it: two little girls on a rooftop, trying to catch the wind with a bedsheet. Us. That was us. The wind had won, and we'd laughed so hard we cried.

The memory went into the jar and stayed there.

"No, no, no," I whispered, and grabbed her hand.

"Don't pull her!" Maliana hissed from somewhere behind me. "Not while she's still tied to it. You'll tear her in half."

"Then what do I do?"

"I don't know! You're the airbender!"

Right. I was.

The Sleepers all breathed together, the same rhythm, one breath. That was the leash. So I did the only thing I could think of: I leaned down and breathed for her. It wasn't their rhythm, it was mine, fast and messy and scared, everything I'd just pushed out of myself pulled right back in and given to her. I pushed air into her lungs out of time, against the tide of all those other breaths, and I didn't stop.

Noa gasped.

Every hooded head in the cave turned toward us at once.

Well, shit.

"There she is," said a raspy voice. Dorn stepped out from between the rows, cracking his knuckles like a cartoon villain. "Khan said you'd come."

I didn't have time to be offended by how predictable I apparently was. I threw everything I had at him, one hard blast of air straight to the chest. It knocked him back into a pillar hard enough to crack it. The hooded figures rushed toward us, and Maliana did something with her hands that made the torches roar and blind half of them. I grabbed Noa, who was awake now, sort of, blinking at me like I was a stranger, and started to run.

We made it about four steps.

The air in front of us thickened. It went cold, then heavy, then it had a shape, and then it was Khan. He didn't walk in. He just arrived out of the breeze, like he'd been there the whole time and had only now decided to let us see him.

So that was the trick I hadn't learned yet. Great. Wonderful.

Everything stopped. The hooded figures froze. Even Dorn, halfway to his feet, went still.

Khan looked at me, and this time I knew he saw me. There was nothing left to hide. I'd given it all to Noa.

"You breathed it out," he said, almost curious. "Back in that room. All of it, out the window. I stood right in front of you and felt nothing." He tilted his head. "Do you know how many airbenders can do that?"

I didn't answer. My mouth had stopped working.

"None," he said. "Not one. We can."

The cave was so quiet I could hear the tide coming in.

Then he smiled, and it was worse than anything he'd done with his hands.

"I'm going to let you have this one," he said. "This one's on me."

He lifted two fingers, lazy, like someone calling a waiter. Every Sleeper in the cave sat up at the same time. Hundreds of them. They swung their legs off the stone beds, stood, and started walking in perfect rows toward the back of the cave, where the dark was bending into something that wasn't dark anymore. It was a doorway, and on the other side I could see a sky the wrong color and the roofs of a town that shouldn't exist.

Alaia.

"No," I said. "No, wait, those people—"

"Aren't yours," Khan said. "She is. Take her. Take the witch too. Consider it a gift."

Then he reached up, casually, and unhooked Noa's jar from its chain.

My whole body went cold. "Put that down."

"Oh, I'll keep this safe." He turned it in the light. Inside, two little girls were chasing the wind with a bedsheet. "It's the only thing that'll bring you to me. And you'll come. Not because of her." He stepped backward into the air, and it started taking him apart, gently. "Because you'll finally want to know what you are. And when you find out, you won't want to leave."

Then he was wind. Then he was nothing.