"You wished to speak about the safety of the temple," Pasang said.
"Yes, Elder Pasang. I want to propose that we practice moving the novices from the temple to the bison caves. Just a set route that everyone learns, so if there's an emergency they already know where to go."
Tashi's arms unfolded. "What emergency."
"If we had a fire in the kitchens, or a rock slide on the eastern face, or a bad enough storm, we don't have a plan for getting everyone out. The bison caves are our only exit and most of the novices have been down there twice in their lives. Half of them would get lost before they reached the lower corridors."
Wada's thumbs stopped moving. "We have managed three fires in the past century. None required an evacuation."
"The Fire Nation put colonies in the Earth Kingdom," I said. "Avatar Roku made them pull back, but he's dead now, and Fire Lord Sozin hasn't slowed down." I kept my voice even. I'd practiced this part. "We should at least know where to run."
The room got quiet. Morioka looked into his tea.
Tashi turned to Pasang. "The boy is right. The novices should know these routes. Once a season at minimum."
Wada looked at Morioka. Morioka turned his cup in his hands for a moment, then said, "It would do them no harm. And the young ones could use the exercise."
Gyatso still hadn't spoken. He was still watching me. I could feel his eyes like a draft from a door you can't see.
"Monk Gyatso," Pasang said. "We have not heard from you."
Gyatso held my eyes for another beat. Then he looked at Pasang, and his voice came out warm and easy, nothing in it matching what his eyes had been doing. "It would be good for the children to know the paths of their own home. I would include the bison handlers. If we are practicing, we should practice the whole of it."
Pasang stroked his beard once. His hand settled back to his knee.
"We will allow it," he said. "Once a season, during training days." He looked at me. "We are glad you care for the safety of this temple, Sonam. But we must be careful that preparation does not become fear."
"I understand, Elder Pasang. Thank you."
I bowed and left.
My legs were fine on the stairs. My hands were damp. I wiped them on my robes and kept walking.
The Council thought they'd approved a fire drill. What they'd actually approved was the skeleton of an evacuation plan. The drills would require mapping every route from every section of the temple to the bison caves. The novices would learn those routes. They'd practice loading bison. They'd get used to the idea that leaving the temple fast was a skill worth having.
Gyatso's expression was still sitting in my head. He'd watched me the whole time like a man who knows a card trick and wants to see how you perform it. I'd given the Council a nine-year-old's pitch for a sensible precaution, and Gyatso had heard something else underneath it.
I didn't know what he'd do with what he'd heard. I couldn't control it. I went back to the terrace.
Dorje was already there, sitting on the railing with his legs over the drop and his feet swinging. He hopped down when he saw me.
"You're late."
"I had a thing with the Council."
"About what?"
"I talked to the Council about doing evacuation drills. Like, having the novices practice running to the bison caves if something goes wrong."
He was pulling cushions out from behind the bench before I finished the sentence. "Did they go for it?"
"Once a season. With a monk watching."
"Better than nothing." He set the cushion against the wall and stepped back, squaring his feet. "Come on, I've been waiting."
He set up with his feet at hip-width and his hands positioned. I circled behind him and watched.
"Drop the right elbow. Two inches."
He dropped it.
"Pull."
He pulled. The air tightened between his hands for four seconds, five, and then he pushed. The current traveled ten feet, held its shape for most of the distance, and hit the cushion square. It dented three fingers wide. The cushion rocked back against the stone.
He shook his hands out like they were tingling. "That felt right. That one actually felt right."
"That was clean. Do three more."
He did it again. The second one drifted left and clipped the edge of the cushion. He did it a third time and it went straight. A fourth time and it fell apart at eight feet.
"That last one you leaned forward," I said. "You're putting your weight on your front foot and your whole body opens up. Just stay over your center."
"I didn't even feel it." He looked down at his feet like they'd done something behind his back.
"That's why there's two of us."
He nodded and reset. He was breathing harder now, arms starting to tire. His compression was shortening, four seconds instead of five, three instead of four. I let him do two more, then told him to sit.
He sat against the wall and drank from a water skin he'd started bringing on the third day. Nobody told him to bring water. He'd just shown up with it.
I worked on my own form while he rested. I was trying to keep the current tight past twenty feet. The edges wanted to spread at about eighteen, the compressed air losing its shape like a rope fraying at the ends. The scrolls described something called a trailing seal, a second compression that locked the back end of the current while the front end traveled forward. I couldn't make it work. My hands couldn't hold two compressions at once. The air slipped out of one when I focused on the other.
"Hey, Sonam?"
"Yeah."
"You know you stopped doing that thing? With your breath. You used to hold it right when you pushed and now you don't. I think that's why you're hitting harder."
I turned around. He was watching me from the wall, water skin in his lap, head tilted the same way it had been the first day. He'd been tracking my form while I tracked his.
"Yeah, I think you're right," I said.
"Good." He stood up, shaking out his arms. "My turn."
We practiced until the shadows on the terrace wall reached the bench. I stowed the cushions. He helped. We walked back through the corridor. At the junction he went left without stopping and I went right.
The drills started the following week. Tsoknyi ran the first one on a cold morning when the bison were sluggish and the novices' breath made little clouds in the air. Twelve boys lined up in the main courtyard. Tsoknyi blew a whistle and they ran.
The first time took four minutes and twelve seconds. Aang reached the caves first, which surprised nobody.
I ran in the middle of the pack and counted. There were twenty-seven stairs from the courtyard to the lower corridor, and the younger kids took them two at a time without trouble. The storeroom corner was tight enough that three boys couldn't pass it at once, which backed everyone up. One kid went right instead of left at the junction and ended up in the laundry alcove. The cave entrance was wide, at least, and I could see four bison stalls from the threshold. The handlers had two animals saddled by the time the last boy came through. That wasn't fast enough.
Tsoknyi called it a success. I wrote down the time and started planning the second run.
We ran again. Three minutes and forty seconds. Better. The kid who'd gone right went right again, caught himself, swore under his breath, and corrected. I added a mental note to mark the junction with chalk before the next drill.
By the third drill, a month later, the novices could do it in two minutes and fifty seconds. Tsoknyi started adding variations like different starting points or a "blocked" corridor that forced the secondary route through the kitchens. The kids turned it into a competition. They argued about which route was faster. Two boys had a real fight over whether cutting through the herb garden saved time.
I let them fight about it. If they were arguing about routes, the routes were in their heads. That was the whole point.
Dorje ran the drills with the older novices. He was fast, loud, and bad with directions. During the third drill he took a wrong turn, ended up in a storage room, and had to be pointed back by a bewildered monk who'd been folding robes.
He told me about it on the terrace that afternoon, laughing between compression attempts.
"The monk just looked at me. I had six kids behind me all piled up in the doorway, and he's standing there holding a robe, and he says, young man, the bison caves are to your left. And I said, are you sure? And he said he's been walking this temple for thirty years."
"What did you say?"
"I said maybe he's been going the wrong way."
He was grinning. I was adjusting his elbow, the same correction I made every session because his default form kept pulling his left arm up about two inches. My hand had moved to his arm before I'd thought about it, because my hands had done it enough times to remember on their own.
"Your elbow," I said.
"I know." He dropped it. He pulled, compressed, pushed. The current hit the cushion from eleven feet, dead center, four fingers wide.
"Getting there," he said.
He was. His compression had a snap to it that mine still didn't, a tightness in the core that came from whatever instinct had let him squeeze the air around an airball a year ago without knowing he'd done it. Another month and his currents would leave marks.
He's useful. He sees things I miss. He's the first piece of a training group that I need. That's what this is.
I believed that. I'd been telling myself that version for weeks, and the words had gone smooth from repetition. They fit together neatly. They made sense.
But I kept showing up on the terrace the next afternoon, and the one after that. I kept fixing his elbow before he asked me to. I still knew exactly how many days he'd been coming, but somewhere along the way I'd stopped minding the lost practice time. I didn't know what to do with that, so I just kept showing up.
The light was going. We put the cushions away. At the junction he went left and I went right.
I walked back to the dormitory alone. The evening meditation crowd was filling the corridors and I fell in with the other boys, sat on my mat, breathed when they breathed. The whole session I was thinking about the festival. It was three weeks out. Every temple would send people, and among a thousand airbenders there had to be kids like Dorje, kids who were curious about the wrong things, fast in the wrong direction, or willing to stand on a terrace after the fourth bell and throw air at a cushion until their arms gave out. I just had to figure out how to find them without looking like I was looking.
My hands were on my knees. The other boys had their eyes closed. I closed mine too, but behind my eyelids I was already at the festival, watching the crowd, listening for clues about who might be worth talking to.
Dorje could hold the air for six seconds now. In three weeks he'd be better. In three months he might be good. I needed more like him, and three years was not as long as it sounded when you said it out loud.