The Fire Nation smells like burnt sugar and old iron. At dawn the smoke tastes like cooking fires; at dusk it tastes like grief. Today it tastes like hunger.
I keep my hood low and my head lower, letting the crowd carry me. Heat presses from the stone underfoot and from the forges that never sleep. Ash settles in the seams of the city like a second skin. People don't look at each other here unless they want something; that makes it easy to pass unnoticed—easy, if you don't look like me.
A gust nudges the hood and I press it back down. White hair catches light even when there isn't any. My eyes have the wrong color too—violet that flickers to blue in certain shadows. Once, a boy tried to touch my hair for luck. His mother slapped his hand so hard he cried. She didn't look at me, only pulled him away like I was a sickness you could catch with your eyes.
I learned not to be seen.
The market yawns open like a furnace, stalls leaning against each other, awnings drooping from old heat. Vendors shout prices over the hiss of oil and the clang of metal—spiced meat skewers, salted fish, sweet buns lacquered in sticky glaze. My stomach knots at the smell. I time my steps to the noise: shout, clang, laugh—reach.
A crust of bread slides from a basket into my palm. Small miracles. I keep moving. Don't run; runners get noticed. I slip past a tower of fruit and a woman selling knives as long as my arm. The bread is hard enough to scrape my fingers. I don't care. It's food. It's today.
"Thief!"
The shout splits the noise cleanly. No one looks at the vendor; they look for me. I move. Muscle memory takes over. My feet know this pattern better than any lane in this city—left past the copper-smith, under the sagging red banner, around the barrel that always leaks. The trick is to become crowd, not cut through it. I slide, pivot, vanish between two workers arguing about pay. Hands snatch at my cloak and catch only air.
"Stop her!"
I duck behind a stack of crates, then vault, palms slapping wood, legs scissoring over. The world narrows to breath and heat. Sandals slap stone behind me—one, two, three pairs. Too close.
The street ahead clogs. A cart tilts, its wheel stuck in a rut, and bodies bottleneck around it. No way through.
Only over.
I don't think; thinking slows you down. The cloak ahead of me is black, stitched with gold that catches like sparks. Its owner stands very still while the rest of the street roils. I plant one foot on the cart's rim, push, and vault. For one suspended heartbeat I'm weightless. My boot brushes cloth and the air changes—charged, like the breath before lightning.
Silver eyes tip up and meet mine.
A low hum rakes across my skin. Not sound. Pressure, like a storm waiting for permission. I land, stumble, and recover into a run.
The bread is gone.
Pain pricks my palm where the crust scraped it. I don't look back. The chase noise is wrong now—quieter. The market swallows shouts and spits them out as laughter. I take the narrow passage that splits the fish-sellers from the pottery lane, then cut right into the alley that stinks of dye and old water. Three turns and I'm in my place: a seam of shadow between a crumbling wall and a shuttered workshop where even rats don't bother to sleep.
I press my forehead to the stone and breathe. The wall is cool. My heart is not.
The bread would have lasted the day. I tell myself I'll do better at dusk when the guards are lazy and the butchers drink. I tell myself a hundred things. It doesn't matter. I'm empty and the emptiness is loud.
Footsteps scrape at the mouth of the alley. Slow, deliberate. Not guards—their armor talks when they walk. This is softer. A shadow spills across the dirt. Something small rests in the palm of it, and for a ridiculous second I think it's a bird.
It's the bread.
"Lost something, little thief?" The voice is calm, almost amused. The kind of voice that doesn't worry about being heard.
I don't look up. My chin stays tucked, hood low. "What's it to you?"
"To me? Very little." A rustle of fabric. "To you, perhaps the difference between today and tomorrow."
He crouches, setting the bread on the ground between us like an offering. I see only boots—polished black, dust clinging to the seams—and a brief flare of gold thread when his cloak settles.
"Eat," he says. Not unkind. Not kind, either.
I wait. Sometimes kindness has hooks you don't see until they're in you. Silence stretches, and the alley's small sounds push forward—the drip from a cracked pipe, a cart wheel squealing somewhere, someone singing off-key in a second-floor window. The city breathes through us both.
"Not hungry?" he asks.
"Not stupid," I say.
A thread of laughter. "We agree on one thing."
I risk it. A glance up—to his hand, to the bread, then higher. His face is the kind you don't forget by accident: angles made to throw light back at itself, a mouth that looks like it could smile or cut. But it's his eyes that hold—silver, or blue that forgot to be blue, watching me without blinking. Not disgust. Not pity. Study.
The alley feels smaller.
He straightens, still holding my gaze. The market sound behind him frames him like a painting: the sway of bodies, flashes of color, smoke lifting and smearing the light. It should swallow him. It doesn't.
"Take it," he says.
I don't move. My hands stay tucked in my sleeves because that's how you keep them. He waits. Someone drops a pot in the street and curses. A dog barks twice, incorrectly confident. When I finally bend, the movement is small, slow, a snake uncoiling. My fingers brush the crust and—stupid, stupid—I look up again.
A breeze nosedives into the alley, playful and cruel, and flicks my hood back.
His gaze flickers, not much, but enough. Recognition isn't the right word; recognition requires memory. This is something else—an alertness, a brightness behind the eyes, as if the world just gave him an answer to a question he hadn't said out loud.
Cold drops into my stomach like a stone.
"No," I say, softly, to no one.
I yank the hood down and move before the word fully leaves. The bread skids, forgotten. I slip past him at a tangent, shoulder brushing stone, breath braided with the alley's stink. His hand doesn't grab me. That's worse. Hands are predictable. Stillness is not.
I'm out of the alley and swallowed by the market again, lungs burning. The crowd accepts me on reflex; the crowd always does. Behind me, maybe, a laugh. Or maybe the memory of one. I don't turn to check. I take the long way, the way that winds through steam and smoke and voices I don't know, past the knife woman and the fruit cart and the copper-smith with his steady rhythm. Only when the market thins into broken streets and the heat dulls under the shade of taller buildings do I let myself slow.
The slums are a maze built from forgotten choices. Narrow lanes, leaning walls, laundry strung like prayer flags between windows too tired to close. You can hide here until you're part of the place that hides you. You can vanish and still be underfoot.
My tent slumps where I left it, stitched from scraps, one edge tucked against a fallen wall whose exposed bricks look like teeth. I duck inside and sit on the woven mat that used to be a sack. The air smells like smoke and whatever rain failed to reach down this far last season. The shaking starts when I stop moving. I press my hands to my knees until it passes.
I should have taken the bread.
A clank interrupts the thought. Not a pot, not a cart. Armor. That sound lives in bone if you've heard it enough.
I blow out the candle with a whisper I don't remember lighting and slide out the back slit I cut for exactly this. The lane behind the wall holds its breath. I sprint.
"Stop!" a voice shouts, distant. The command rolls wrong through the streets, bouncing off corners in the lazy way official orders do. They're not close yet. That doesn't matter.
Left past the cracked stair, up the pipe, palms on the windowsill—pull. My body remembers. I swing onto the roof and keep low, running with the rooftops' rhythm: dip, leap, land, repeat. Clay tiles shift underfoot. Laundry snaps at my face like flags trying to scold me.
A guard misjudges a wall behind me and hits it with a hollow thud and a curse so heartfelt I almost laugh. The next guard learns nothing and does the same. Their metal is a song I can outpace.
I angle for higher ground, where the roofs peak and the gaps shrink. The city looks different from here, almost beautiful—a grid of heat and shadow, the veins of molten rock threading between districts like someone decided to draw the streets twice. The smokestacks cough their offerings into a sky already gray with old gifts.
I risk a glance back. Two guards, red-faced, losing distance. Relief skims me—and shatters when a shadow keeps pace at the edge of my vision.
He doesn't clank.
He moves like streets were built for him, like gravity made a polite agreement not to interfere. Black cloak. The suggestion of armor, but it doesn't announce itself. He doesn't shout. Doesn't waste breath. His stride eats the distance I bought with panic.
No.
I cut left onto a narrow ridge, leap a gap so wide my stomach drops out of me, and roll. Pain blooms along my hip; I'll feel it tomorrow if there is a tomorrow. The ridge ends in a low beam bridging to the next roof. I duck, slide under, pop up—
—and almost run nose-first into him.
He's there, as if the space arranged itself to accommodate him. The world shrinks to a heartbeat and the hiss of my breath.
"Hello again," he says, like we are old friends in a place neither of us meant to be. Up here, the wind musses his hair and makes the cloak breathe. The silver of his eyes is brighter in the light, dangerous not because it threatens but because it promises.
I stop because there is nowhere to go. The roof behind me is a slope slick with dust; the beam under my heels is a suggestion of wood. The street below is a suggestion of mercy.
"Move," I say, and it's bravado stretched thin over fear.
He studies me, expression unreadable. "You run well."
"I practice."
"So I see."
We stare at each other over the city's heart. The guard shouts are far away now, unimportant. The wind smells like heat and iron and something sharper, ozone-bright.
His gaze drops to the shadow at my jaw, the place where my hood doesn't quite hide. "You dropped your bread," he says.
"I noticed."
A corner of his mouth lifts. "I thought so."
I shift my weight. The beam creaks a warning. He notices; his eyes flick to my foot and back. If he wanted to, he could close the distance in one step. He doesn't.
"What do you want?" I ask.
"An answer," he says.
"To what question?"
"Who you are."
I snort. "No one."
"Untrue," he says softly, like he's correcting a child's math. "You are not no one."
The wind lifts the edge of my hood, nosy as ever. I press it down and hate that my hand shakes.
"Let me pass," I say.
"You'll fall," he answers, not unkind. "And I have no desire to scrape you off the street."
"Then move," I say, and when he doesn't, I step anyway because not stepping is surrender and I don't do that.
His hand does not catch my wrist. It finds the beam, steadying it, barely a touch. The courtesy makes my throat tighten with something that isn't gratitude and isn't anger.
"Careful," he says.
I bare my teeth. "Don't."
We hover there, two breaths and a lifetime apart. The city mutters to itself below us. The guards are choosing a different street to be loud on. The heat presses in. I can hear his breathing. It's steady. Mine isn't.
"Go," he says at last, and steps aside.
It's not victory. It's worse. Permission. My body moves before my pride can argue. I slide past him, feeling the brief warmth of him in the wind, and then I'm running again, not because I think I can lose him but because running is all I have ever done that worked.
I don't look back until the roofs give way to a narrow stair that takes me to ground. When I risk a glance then, he's not where I left him.
He's closer.
I bolt into a lane that should end at the dye-yard and doesn't, not today; someone has stacked barrels in a new geometry that turns my path into a dead end with ideas above its station. I pivot for the wall, ready to scramble, but a shadow falls across the stones, large and calm.
"Enough," he says.
I don't think. I fling grit into his face and go for the gap between barrels and wall. A hand closes on the air where my arm was. I twist, slip, and scrape skin I was using, and then I'm through, heart tearing at my ribs.
"Little thief," he calls, voice low, amused, and utterly sure, "you're only making it interesting."
Don't look back. Don't give him the dignity of your eyes.
I take three turns I don't remember choosing and burst into a lane bright with the shimmer of heat off black rock. The city opens like a mouth to swallow me again.
It doesn't.
The alley ahead darkens with the weight of a presence that arrives without sound. He's there, not even breathing hard, his shadow cutting the heat like shade you pay for.
I stop because there is nowhere else to go that isn't through him.
Up close, the silver in his eyes is not color but a kind of focus that makes color irrelevant. My hood has slipped back again. I don't fix it.
"Who are you?" I ask, because sometimes the wrong question is all you have left.
His answer is not a title, and that scares me more than any title would.
"Someone who sees you," he says.
The word lands like a hand on a door I have kept barred my whole life.
I run anyway—because seeing is not saving, and because the only thing I know for certain is that I am not safe.
I tear past him, and this time he lets me, or maybe he simply chooses to be somewhere else by the time I arrive at where he was. Either way, the city swallows me again, and the last thing I feel as I vanish into its heat is a certainty I haven't felt in years.
For the first time since I learned how to disappear, I am being hunted—
not by hunger, not by guards, but by someone who will not let me vanish.