Chapter 1: The Wrong Kind of Attention
The dust motes danced in the thin blade of sunlight cutting through a crack in the wall. Kaia watched them, a daily ritual. With a slow exhale, she focused on the stubborn weed by her cot. A faint tremor, a silent sigh from the plant, and a new leaf unfurled, reaching for the light she offered. This small, secret act was the only thing that felt truly hers.
To everyone else, she was nobody. Kaia, the orphan. A scribe for a cabbage merchant. Quiet, forgettable, a ghost in the vast, grinding machine of Ba Sing Se's Lower Ring. It was a mask she wore perfectly. Behind it was a truth that would get her killed: she remembered another life. A life of screens and stories, where this world was a tale called The Legend of Korra. And the power in her veins—the whisper to growing things—wasn't earthbending. It was something else entirely.
A sharp, official rap on the door shattered the silence.
Her heart slammed against her ribs. No one came here. Ever.
"Kaia? Open up. It's Bao from the warehouse."
Her blood went cold. Bao's voice was too tight, too formal. She crept to the door, peering through a hairline crack. Bao stood there, pale and sweating. Flanking him were two men in the dun-colored robes and wide-brimmed hats of the Dai Li.
The world narrowed to a pinprick. The Dai Li. The thought was pure ice. They were the bogeymen, the silent enforcers. They didn't visit scribes.
Her mind raced. What had she done? She'd been so careful. A lifetime of hiding, undone in an instant.
"Kaia?" Bao called again, a desperate edge to his voice.
She had seconds. Open the door and pray it was a mistake, or… what? Run? Where? The window led to a three-story drop onto hard-packed earth.
Swallowing a throat full of sand, she slid the bolt back. The door creaked open. "Bao? What's this about?"
The Dai Li agent on the left spoke, his voice a flat, emotionless thing. "We have questions regarding the agricultural blight. You will come with us."
The blight. The strange sickness withering crops near the inner wall. She'd felt it, a wrongness in the city's green life that made her own bending feel oily. "I just file shipping manifests for komodo rhino feed. I don't know anything about that."
The agent's eyes, cold and assessing, scanned her tiny room. They lingered on the floor by her cot, where the boards were less cracked, where life stubbornly persisted. "Witnesses disagree. They speak of a girl who can… encourage growth. In a place where nothing grows."
The bottom dropped out of her stomach. Witnesses. A child seeing her through a window? A neighbor noticing her single potted plant thrived despite the gloom? A lifetime of caution, erased by a moment of carelessness.
"They're mistaken," she whispered, the lie ash in her mouth.
"The Earth King desires a solution. You will assist us." The words were a command, devoid of any offer. It was not help they wanted. It was compliance. Dissection. A cage.
The second agent moved. A flick of his wrist, and a band of earth shot from the hallway floor, snapping around her ankle like a stone shackle. The message was clear: come willingly or come by force.
The touch of the earth, the intent to bind her, triggered something primal. The careful control she'd maintained for sixteen years shattered.
Panic. Not the fluttering kind, but a cold, sharp surge of pure survival instinct. As the stone tightened, she didn't think of bending. She screamed. A silent, internal scream of no that she channeled through her palm slammed flat against the wooden floor.
The old, dry wood of the tenement answered.
It wasn't earthbending. It was a cry for help to the lifeforce sleeping within the timber. The hallway erupted. Thick, gnarled vines, hard as iron and moving with whip-crack speed, exploded from the walls and floor. They smashed into the Dai Li agents, throwing them back against the far wall with brutal force, pinning them in a tangled, thrashing web of vegetation.
Bao shrieked, a high-pitched sound of pure terror, and fell on his backside, scrambling away like a crab on hot sand.
The stone coil around her ankle crumbled into inert dust.
For one heartbeat, there was only sound. The groaning of stressed wood. The ragged, shocked breaths of the pinned agents. The frantic thumping of her own heart. Kaia stood in her doorway, chest heaving, her hand stinging from the impact. She looked from the trapped agents to her own hand, then back again. The look on their faces—the initial shock rapidly transforming into a terrifying, avid curiosity—seared itself into her brain. They hadn't just heard rumors; they had seen it. They had felt it. And now they would tear the city apart, stone by stone, to find her and possess what she could do.
Her life, her carefully constructed anonymity, was over. It had ended in five seconds of glorious, terrifying violence.
She didn't look back. She turned and lunged for the small, high window, clambering out onto the precarious network of laundry lines and rickety fire escapes that webbed the back of the tenement. The immense, unscaleable wall of Ba Sing Se loomed in the distance, a mocking symbol of the prison she now had to escape. The game was over. The hunt had begun.