Where Embers Meet the Tide

The city-to-be rose from mud and scaffolding like a rough sketch, all lines and guesses, wind snapping canvas over unfinished frames. Katara stepped off the ferry with the brine still clinging to her hair and the crisp, salted cold of the South replaced by damp heat that smelled like sawdust, coal, and river water. The docks were a chaos of crates, shouted orders, steam-puffing tugs. Wooden pilings met iron bolts, and everything creaked with the promise of something larger.

She adjusted the blue sash at her waist and clutched the tube of rolled plans against her ribs. Aang had called it an experiment. A new city, shared, neutral, rising where the river split the hills and marshes, fed by every nation’s labor. An experiment needed careful hands. It needed water that moved the right way.

“Ambassador Katara?” A harried Earth Kingdom runner skidded to a halt, face shiny with sweat. “The council office is waiting. And the sponsor from the Fire Nation is already inside.”

She nodded. Ambassador. It still felt too formal, but she wore it for her tribe, for the fishers who wanted safer docks, for the builders who ignored the pull of tides and the way a flood remembered old paths. The runner weaved her through carts and bending crews. Water Tribe workers hauled timber onto drybeds, while across a muddy lane a Fire Nation foreman gestured, scribbling figures into a ledger while steam hissed from a copper contraption none of her elders would have trusted.

The administrative building was only half a building: pillars in place, beams overhead, one side open to the river. Inside, a temporary table had been set up on a plank floor that still showed the saw marks. Maps covered the walls in a patchwork of ink and charcoal. She exhaled, schooling her face into a calm she didn’t fully feel, and stepped into the shade.

He was there.

He didn’t wear a crown. He didn’t need to. Fire Lord Zuko stood with his back to her, hair tied simply, the red of his tunic deep against the warm wood. He was studying a map angled under the sunlight like it owed him an answer. A faint scarred line ran from thumb to wrist on his right hand, a newer mark against older ones she knew better than she wanted to. The room’s hum flattened into something taut.

He turned at the scuff of her boot. Their eyes caught. A slice of memory burned through—steel catwalks, a boy begging for something he could not name, the bloom of heat against ice—and was gone.

“Katara.” Neutral, even. His posture shifted, formal without stiffness.

“Fire Lord.” She kept her tone cool and polite. The runner ducked out. A cough from an Earth Kingdom clerk at a corner desk didn’t break the line between them.

“I thought they would send… someone else,” he said, and the faintest curl of dry humor, or maybe resignation, touched his mouth.

“You and me both,” she said. She slid her plans onto the table, next to his neat stack. Ink bled faintly where damp from the river had kissed the edges. “But the Southern Tribe decided I could make sure the river doesn’t get strangled by pipes and bad guesses.”

“Pipes and guesses built Ba Sing Se’s new baths in half the time anyone thought possible,” he said. He bent, tapping a point on the map with two fingers. “This channel. If we widen here and reinforce with steel pilings, we can feed three turbines and provide power to—”

“It’ll choke the wetland,” she interrupted. “You’ll flood the eastern shanties every spring. The river won’t care about your turbines. It remembers where it was.”

He straightened. “We’ve got engineers who—”

“And I have the river,” she said, sharper than she meant. The vulnerability of it—of claiming something she could feel in her bones—hung between them, and she smoothed it with practicality. “Traditional waterbending can cut new channels without tearing the banks to shreds. It’s cheaper. It’s kinder. It lasts.”

He braced his palms on the table, the scar on his left cheek glowing a little in the light. “Traditional is a word people use when they’re afraid of better. Steel doesn’t tire. Fire drives machines at a scale you can’t get with bending alone.”

“Machines break. Rivers break back,” she said. “We use what the world gives. We don’t force it.”

His jaw flexed. She watched it and hated that she did. “This city can’t be a museum of the way things used to be.”

“It won’t survive if you ignore what got us here.”

A clerk tried to shuffle papers loudly and then froze when both their heads turned. Zuko exhaled through his nose and looked back to the map. “Aang wants us to co-sponsor the eastern canal. Joint oversight.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here.” She unrolled her own plans. Blue arcs traced the river’s seasonal moods in meticulous layers. She had stayed up late week after week calculating flows, sketching platforms that rose and fell, sluice gates that breathed. She pointed. “If we shift your turbines to the western spur and install a series of adjustable baffles here, we can have power without risking the floodplain. It’s a compromise.”

He studied it. His eyes flicked over her notes, over the notations in a Water Tribe hand that would have looked like scratches to someone without patience. He looked up. “And the output?”

“Lower than your fantasy for the first year.” She met his gaze. “Stable by the third. With room to grow. With the water still alive.”

He didn’t snap back. He weighed. It occurred to her that this—this patient measuring—was new. He hadn’t had it, once. Or if he had, he’d buried it under shame and fire.

Bootsteps approached. An Air Acolyte in pale saffron appeared in the doorway, bowing. “A message from Avatar Aang. He asked me to deliver it personally to both of you.”

Zuko took it, eyes scanning. His mouth flattened. He passed it to her. The neat, hurried hand said: New policy for all visiting delegations—joint quarters for co-leads to facilitate cooperation. Hope you understand. Trust you both. A.

She felt heat crawl up her neck despite the draft. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

He had the audacity to almost smile without humor. “He would.”

“There must be a mistake.” She folded the note sharply, edges biting her skin. “We don’t need—”

“The housing is tight,” the acolyte said apologetically. “We can set screens.”

Screens. In a single room. She pictured his boots by a bed that wasn’t hers. The smell of smoke clinging to fabric. His voice in the dark. Her whole body tightened on the memory of how easily rage could slide into something else if she wasn’t careful.

“Fine,” she said, and it tasted like surrender. “We’ll survive a room.”

“Good,” he said, and it didn’t sound like triumph. It sounded like a man keeping a dozen plates spinning and not wanting to drop one. He gathered his plans. “We’ll meet again after lunch. I’ll bring my engineers. You bring your benders.”

“I’ll bring people who listen to water,” she said.

He nodded once and stepped aside for her as they left the half-room into the glare. The river flashed, throwing light like a dare. Workers shouted. Somewhere, a hammer rang like a heartbeat. She adjusted the strap of her satchel and walked toward whatever version of cooperation the world was going to make them learn.

He caught up with her under the scaffolding, where the shade broke the heat into strips across the dirt. They were supposed to be colleagues now, ambassadors and sponsors, but the way his gaze flicked down and up was the old measure—enemy, ally, something else if the wind shifted.

“All right,” he said, crisp, businesslike. “Let’s stop speaking in generalities. Show me exactly where you intend to bend the channel.”

She moved to the long table that had been dragged to the edge where the floor ended and the river view took over. Her fingers smoothed her own plan and she weighed the corners with small stones. “Here.” She tapped the line of a tributary like a vein beneath skin. “We widen along the natural braid and let the river choose which branch it prefers in flood. We shore the banks with woven root mats and clay. My team can bend the cut in a day—narrow at first, then encouraging the flow with baffles of ice. Once it learns the path, we remove the ice. It remembers.”

He leaned in, and the heat of him was a tangible thing; not flare-hot, but anchored warmth. “And we tie power generation to the mercy of memory,” he said. He unrolled his schematic beside hers, precise inked teeth and numbers. “Turbines here, here, and here. Steel pilings sunk deep with earthbenders. Stone cofferdams. We can regulate through gates. We don’t beg a river to be kind—we build for it to be contained.”

“Contained until a spring like two years ago,” she said. “The ice broke late in the mountains. The surge would tear your gates off like reeds. These banks were made to flood. If we force them not to, it will find somewhere else, and that somewhere else will be the houses you just promised safe.”

“You’re ignoring capacity,” he said. “With the right venting and overflow, a gate can—”

“You’re ignoring that water is alive,” she bit out. “It moves because it must. It doesn’t love your math.”

His eyes flashed. “My math keeps children warm in winter. Engineering is not arrogance—”

“Engineering without listening is,” she said. She realized her palm had flattened over the paper, fingers splayed as if she could press her plan into the world by touch alone. She pulled her hand back and drew a slow breath. “We can use your turbines. I’m not saying no. But we place them where the river already accelerates—narrow, rocky beds where fish know to fight. The baffles can be adjusted like your gates, but they’re alive, too. My benders can tend them seasonally. You can have power without choking the marsh.”

He watched her, the little muscle in his cheek jumping again. He didn’t look away, didn’t pace, didn’t do any of the restless things he used to. “And what about maintenance when your benders are elsewhere? When your tribe is halfway across the world and a gear seizes in a storm?”

“Teach our methods,” she said. “We’ll teach yours. That’s the point of this city, isn’t it? Not a Fire Nation machine with Water Tribe decoration. Not a Water Tribe delta with Fire Nation toys. Something that blends because it has to.”

He looked down at the overlapping plans. The lines of his were clean, confident. Hers were layered, iterative, little notes in the margins where she’d adjusted for drought years and one-off floods. He set his index finger to his turbine notation at the western spur. “If we move this assembly here, the output drops by eight percent. The council will hate that.”

“The council will hate a lawsuit when their new market is under a foot of silt every monsoon,” she said, then modulated. “Eight percent is a first-year difference. It recovers as we add capacity upstream to the mountainous segments. We can—”

“—carve a high-channel with a combination of blasting and controlled flow,” he finished, reluctantly acknowledging she’d not ignored power. “We’d need signoff from the earthbender guild.”

“We’ll get it,” she said. “If you stop treating this river like a nail for your hammer.”

He actually huffed a breath, something like a laugh ironed flat. “And you stop treating steel like a slur.”

She felt a tug at the corner of her mouth, unwelcome and small. They were both too close to smiling, and that made it more dangerous. “Fine. Show me your gate plan again.”

He slid the paper closer. He explained, and she listened, not just for flaws but for possibility. He talked about venturi effects and cavitation, things she’d only heard secondhand, and she mapped them onto the feeling she got when a current pinched beneath a low bridge. She countered with the way silt built in eddies and how ice would form in certain shadows. It became a rhythm: statement, rebuttal, adjust, test. A foreman drifted to the doorway, pretending not to eavesdrop. The clerk in the corner stopped shuffling his papers and watched with his mouth slightly open.

“Your adjustable baffles,” Zuko said, tapping her marginal sketch. “You’re assuming a labor force dedicated to this section every season.”

“We can design the supports so they slide,” she said. “Counterweights. Simple levers. It doesn’t have to be a bending-only solution.”

“So we use steel,” he said, and there was a twinge of victory in it, a boyish glint he probably didn’t mean to show.

“We use steel where it belongs,” she said, and let him have his glint. “Not where it will poison the water or cut the fish. We sheath it in wood below the line. We think beyond numbers.”

“We think about people,” he said. “Power matters.”

“So does food.” She leaned over, their heads briefly nearly touching as she circled a section with charcoal. “This inlet stays shallow. Nets. Boats. You don’t get to squeeze every drop from it.”

He didn’t pull away. “You realize compromise means you lose things, too.”

“I know,” she said, and it landed heavier than she meant, because they both carried a ledger of losses no city could balance.

They stood like that for a breath, the river chuckling below as if amused by their plans. He straightened first. “I’ll bring my engineers after lunch. We’ll run this through with the numbers.”

“And I’ll bring my benders,” she echoed. “We’ll run it through with the water.”

“Katara,” he said, stopping her as she began to roll the plans. She met his gaze. Something like respect flickered and darted away before it could be named. “Don’t sandbag the reports with… dogma. Give me data on flow rates with your methods.”

“I’ll give you flow rates. You give me failure modes on your gates,” she returned. “Not the brochure version. The real one.”

He inclined his head. “Deal.”

The clerk exhaled audibly, as if permission to breathe had been returned. They both ignored him. She slid her plans into their tube. He clipped his together with a brass clamp, movements neat, almost compulsive. He had changed. Or maybe they both had and it was only jarring to see it in each other.

They stepped to the edge of the open wall, where the city unraveled into mud and ambition. Down below, waterbenders pushed a raft against the current with long, sure poles. On the opposite bank, sparks flew where a firebender welder stitched a seam.

“This place will eat us if we let it,” she said, not entirely meaning to speak it aloud.

He didn’t look at her. “Then we don’t let it.”

Old animosities didn’t vanish. They shifted shape, learned new arguments. She let the ragged edge of irritation settle in her and be acknowledged. “After lunch, then.”

“After lunch,” he agreed, and when he glanced at her, the afternoon light caught the rough plane of his scar and softened nothing. He turned away first, but he didn’t retreat. He moved with purpose, a man who believed his numbers could save a city. She watched him go a second too long, then forced herself back into motion. There was work. There was always work.

The housing clerk bowed too many times as he handed over the keys. “Avatar Aang asked that you both be placed in the diplomat’s wing, as… as a sign.” He smiled, hopeful. “For harmony.”

Her stomach sank even before Zuko’s brows knit. “Both?” he asked. The clerk’s eyes darted between them. The word together hung in the air like a dare.

They walked the corridor in silence, past fresh plaster that still smelled wet and beams still scabbed with bark. Lanterns burned low along the walls, a compromise of Fire Nation glass chimneys and Southern whale-oil wicks. The clerk stopped at a door in the middle of the hall, fumbling the key. He pushed it open with the pomp of someone presenting a royal suite.

It was not a suite. It was an elongated room with a low ceiling and two paper-screened windows that let in a thin slice of river glitter. A sitting area occupied the front: a short couch, a narrow table, two mismatched chairs. Beyond a waist-high screen carved with a generic mountain motif stood a sleeping area. Two bedroll platforms flanked a central chest. There was no second door. There was a small washroom tucked behind another screen: a basin, a pump that would cough up cold water if the reservoir was full, a shelf of folded towels. The air in the room had the static of recent sweeping.

For a moment no one said anything. Zuko’s gaze swept the space once, cataloguing and calculating. Katara took in the chipped blue glaze on a vase, the Fire Nation-style calligraphy scroll of an anonymous proverb, a set of hooks by the door with no pegs enough for two people’s traveling gear. The clerk recited something about rationed coal for the small brazier in the corner and the hours the kitchen kept.

“Aang requested this specifically?” Katara asked, keeping her voice even.

The clerk wilted under it, then rallied. “He… wanted to encourage… cooperation.” The last word squeaked.

Zuko gave a tight smile that was not friendly. “We’re aware of the theme.”

“Of course, Fire Lord.” Another bow. “Ambassador.” The clerk backed out, closing the door with the care of someone abandoning a dangerous animal.

They stood in the little silence that followed. It was immediately too loud—the soft give of the floorboards under her weight, the faint hiss from the brazier, the distant slap of water against pilings. Katara put her satchel on the table with more force than necessary. “He thinks this is funny.”

“He thinks this is efficient,” Zuko said, voice dry. He stepped further in, then stopped as if wary of crossing some invisible boundary. “Or both.”

She crossed to the windows and pushed the shutters open a fraction. The river’s light cut a brighter stripe across the floor. The view framed scaffolding and cranes, a lattice of ambition and rough labor. She forced a breath through her teeth and turned. “There are two beds,” she said. “That’s… something.”

His mouth twitched. “We’ve been in worse arrangements.” He set his own case on the opposite platform, as if staking territory. He was careful not to look at the washroom screen too long.

She busied herself with the familiar anchor of unpacking: drawing out her comb and setting it on the chest, laying her folded tunics at the foot of her bedroll. She unrolled a small cloth and placed her water skin, her bone needles, her herbs—tools that had traveled with her for years. The little ritual kept her hands moving while her mind replayed old fights and Aang’s earnest face insisting this would help. The room smelled faintly of rice powder and new straw.

Zuko shrugged off his outer robe and folded it too neatly over the back of a chair. Without the formal layer, he looked younger and older at once—less armor, more bone. He checked the brazier and, with a small, controlled exhale, fed it enough heat to lift it from sullen to usable. “I’ll… keep to my side,” he said, as if the declaration could make the problem simple. “We can set a schedule for the washroom.”

“I’m not a child,” she said, then softened it. “But yes. Mornings and nights are when it gets crowded in here.”

His jaw moved once, unamused. “I’ll take mornings. Training before dawn anyway.”

She nodded. “Evenings, then.” The ordinary logistics steadied something. She glanced at the table. There were only two chairs, one of which wobbled when she touched it. “We can bring in another chair from the hall for the engineers. And a map stand. Otherwise we’ll be spreading things on the floor.”

“We will be spreading things on the floor,” he repeated, deadpan, and realized how it sounded at the same time she did. Color rose, quick and mortifying, under his scar and down her throat. He looked away, a hard swallow. “Plans. Maps.”

“Obviously,” she said, picking up a towel just to have something to hold. She crossed to the washroom and peered in. The pump handle was stiff. She put her weight on it until a cough of water gushed into the basin, splashing her fingers. Coolness shocked her skin. She lingered over the excuse of washing her hands, listening to the sound of him moving in the room—boots thumped down by the door, the click of a clasp, the scrape of a chair leg.

When she came back out, he’d set his swords—ceremonial now, but still real—on the hooks where coats should go. The hilts hung like punctuation marks. He met her gaze, then looked at the bedrolls again, as if reassuring himself there were two. “If this is Aang’s idea of a joke,” he said, low, “it’s a bad one.”

“He thinks if we trip over each other enough, we’ll learn to stop kicking,” she said. “He thinks proximity solves everything.”

“He’s not entirely wrong.” He looked at the couch and seemed to measure it against his height, as if planning to exile himself there. “But he’s not the one who has to… manage the rumors.”

She grimaced. The thought of council aides tallying who slept where made her skin itch. “We’ll keep the door open when we can,” she said. “Let people see there are two chairs at the table, two leaders, not…” She trailed off, unwilling to give the gossip a shape with her mouth.

“Not that,” he agreed.

She sank onto her bedroll and tested its give. It was thin, but she’d slept on bare ice, on boats, on prison floors. She could sleep here. She looked back at him. The afternoon light had shifted, cutting across his face and leaving the scar in shadow. He was very present in this small room—too much heat, too much old history condensed into a narrow space.

“We make rules,” she said, brisk. “Work stays on the table. No… ambushes about the past after midnight. If I need quiet, I’ll say so.”

He listened, weighing each word like a contract. “If I need to train, I’ll take it outside. If you need the room… to heal someone, you tell me.” He glanced at her water skin and the neat array of her tools. “I won’t… interfere.”

She nodded. It was almost a truce. “And we don’t let the staff think we’re at each other’s throats. That’s for private.”

“Obviously,” he echoed, and there was the faintest wry edge to it. He moved to the window and adjusted the shutters so that the glare softened. “You’re on the left. I’ll be on the right.”

“Fine.” She watched his hands on the latch, the clean, competent way he aligned things. In the silence, the closeness pressed on her again, not entirely unpleasant and that made it worse. “After lunch,” she said, because the day still existed. “Your engineers, my benders.”

He turned from the window, and for a heartbeat their eyes caught, nothing to deflect the fact of being two bodies in one room that was supposed to hold ideas instead of ghosts. He nodded once. “After lunch.” He reached for his case, pulled out a roll of maps, and set them carefully on the table between the two chairs, an offering to the only thing that might make this bearable. The brazier ticked. The river went on. The thin walls held.

By late afternoon the river stank of churned mud and hot metal. The canal worksite was a serrated line across the floodplain, earth mounded in raw ribs where shovels and bending had already carved a path. Katara arrived to the sound of shouted orders in Fire Nation accents and the steady thump of pile drivers. A foreman in red lacquered pauldrons bowed and then flinched when she didn’t return it.

“Where’s the site lead?” she asked.

“Lord Zuko’s on the embankment,” the man said, already gesturing. “We’ve begun the diversion cut as directed.”

“As directed by who?”

He blanched. “By the Fire Lord.”

She followed the pointing hand, boots sinking an inch in slurry as she strode along the edge of the works. The new cut veered north, slicing toward higher ground where the soil baked dry in the sun. It was wrong. It might shave days off transport time, might appease impatient investors, but it ignored the way spring melt swelled invisible veins under the surface. It ignored the new city’s low quarter, just beyond the ridge.

Zuko stood with a clutch of engineers, hair tied back, sleeves rolled, sweat pearled at his throat in the heat. A runner handed him a slate; he frowned, sketched a correction, and handed it back. When he saw her he straightened, bracing for impact.

“What did you do?” she demanded, not bothering to temper it.

“Rerouted the west canal to a more direct line,” he said, calm by force. “The grade is within tolerance. We can spare materials on supports and finish the link before the next shipment cycle.”

“You didn’t consult me.”

“We’ve consulted for days,” he said, too even. “We’re losing time. This will work.”

“It will work until it rains,” she snapped. She jabbed a finger toward the cut. “You’re pulling the river toward a natural spillway. One storm and you’ll scour the banks and drown half the tent city.”

He didn’t flinch. “We’ve calculated retention basins.”

“You’ve calculated what your slide rule can see,” she said. “Not what the water will do.”

Her hands were already tingling. She dropped her satchel and walked down the packed clay slope to the crude dam where they’d braced timbers and sandbags to hold the current back until the new channel connected. Men glanced up, uncertain. She listened under the noise—the muted push of weight against the makeshift barrier, the surging impatience of a confined thing that remembered old paths.

“Katara,” Zuko called, descending after her. “Don’t—”

She lifted her arms, and the surface broke as if answering a name. A ribbon of the river arced, silver and heavy, crossing the air to slap down into the mouth of the new cut. Workmen scrambled back as water found gravity and began to run, greedy as it always was.

“You want to see efficient?” she shouted over the rush. “Watch.”

With a hook of her wrist she deepened the pour. The thin stream became a flood, eating the fresh dirt, undermining the outer edge. The channel took the gift and demanded more. She obliged, pulling from the main body until it roared, until the banks sheered and collapsed in brown slabs. Men shouted, stumbling away from the crumbling lip.

Zuko reached her, heat beating off him in the sun and from under his skin. “Stop,” he said, voice low, urgent. “You’ll destroy the work.”

“I’m showing you the work you’re not seeing,” she threw back, and then—when the sheer dictated speed—she arrested it. Her fingers closed and the torrent froze in a smooth wall across the cut, ice squealing as it set under summer light. Water backed up against it like a trapped breath.

The sudden silence was shocking. Mud dripped. A foreman swore softly. Everyone looked at the impossible dam shining like a blade.

Katara raised her other hand. She shifted, her feet finding the slight slide of slippery clay. “Now pretend it rained,” she said to him, not moving her eyes from the glossy face of the ice. She flexed. The ice bulged, spiderwebbed, and then ruptured in a controlled seam. Water punched through. She guided it toward the low ground beyond the ridge, and in a heartbeat a sheet of brown water was racing, fast and wide, exactly where the temporary market stalls would be in a week. She thinned it before it could sweep a stack of crates, but the point was made in the sick, collective inhale around them.

Zuko stepped closer, jaw tight. “You’ve made it look dramatic,” he said, eyes on the rushing sheet, “but we can—”

She snapped her palm and the water responded, surging up in a twisting column that snapped a staked survey flag in half with a crack. The pieces went spinning. She let the column fall and then drew everything back with a drag of her arms, pulling the flood into herself, into the river. It resisted, wild and wanting, until her shoulders burned. Then it obeyed, smoothing into a slick sheen over the raw cut.

“You can’t control that with basins,” she said, chest heaving. “Not with your manpower, not with your schedule. The floodplain is telling you where it wants the canal. You thought you could force a line through it because it was cleaner on a chart.”

An engineer tried, timid, to protest. “We modeled—”

“On paper,” she bit out. “On a generous day. This isn’t a generous place.”

Zuko’s eyes flicked over the devastation she’d created and then undone. He knew theater when he saw it; his mouth pressed flat anyway. “You didn’t have to do this in front of my crews.”

“Your crews started digging a death sentence.” She bent, scooped up a fallen survey stake, and jabbed it into the mud on a lower contour, tracing with the butt as if drawing in wet sand. “Here,” she said, stabbing marked points in a sinuous path that hugged the safer elevation. “Here, and here, and here we reinforce. We let the overflow collect where it already wants to pool. We brace with river stones, not lumber, so it doesn’t rot out in a season.”

He crouched with her without thinking, eyes following her line. His shoulder was a hand’s breadth from hers; their heat mixed, prickling. He swallowed. “It adds distance,” he said, softer, looking at the path instead of her.

“It adds years,” she said. She looked up at him. “And it adds lives.”

They were too close and too public. The foreman hovered, waiting to see which order counted. Zuko straightened first and glanced at the men, then at the wall of ice slowly weeping in the sun. He blew out a breath, frustration and something like reluctant respect warring in his face.

“Stop the diversion,” he called, projecting command. “We’re pausing the cut. Move the materials to the new markers.” He didn’t look at her when he said it, but the choice was hers in the dirt at their feet and everyone knew it.

There was a murmur, then motion as orders snapped down the line. Katara flicked a wrist, and the ice dam sighed and slumped, water easing back into a normal course. She guided it with the gentlest touch until the river’s skin lay flat again. When she let her hands fall, they trembled from effort.

Zuko noticed and didn’t comment. He reached for the slate a runner offered and scribbled adjustments, voice clipped as he relayed the revised plan. When he finished he turned back to her. The set of his mouth dared her to take a victory.

“You don’t get to do this again without me,” she said instead, low. “You don’t get to decide the shape of the river on your own.”

His gaze held hers a beat too long. Something like apology flickered and was quenched. “You don’t get to bring a river down on my workers to make a point.”

“They were never in danger,” she said, heat sparking in her chest. “But your pride is not the price I’m willing to pay for their safety.”

He glanced at the churned mess, at the recalibrating teams, at the sun glinting off the damp banks. When he looked back his voice was stripped to something simple. “Next time,” he said, “we argue before we dig.”

She nodded, jaw tight. “Next time,” she said, and turned to the crews, already calling out the safer line like it had always been the plan. The river slid past, indifferent, and the mud sucked at her boots as she moved, the shape of what almost happened wet and heavy in the air.

By the time the last of the ice bled back into the channel, the far bank was crowded. Investors in silk and lacquered sandals had drifted down from their carriage road, drawn by the commotion. City officials in mixed robes—Air Temple neutrals, Earth Kingdom accountants, Water Tribe delegates in blue—clustered like gulls, whispering. Aang wasn’t there, but his seal was, stamped on the arm-bands of two clerks who stared like they had stumbled into a storm with a ledger for an umbrella.

Katara’s braids clung to her neck, dripping. Mud spattered her leggings to the knee. Her pulse hadn’t found a normal rhythm yet. She could feel him beside her without looking, his heat a steady pressure against the damp.

“Is there a problem?” a magistrate asked, voice too bright. His eyes darted between them and the raw gash of the disrupted cut.

“Resolved,” Zuko said. He lifted his chin, water trailing from his jaw to his collar. The top layers of his robes were soaked and glued to the planes of his chest; a dark V clung to his sternum. He didn’t move to wipe it away. “An adjustment to the plan.”

“An adjustment?” an Earth Kingdom official echoed, incredulous. “We were told the western channel was set.”

“It was set wrong,” Katara said, even and clear. She kept her hands still at her sides, flexed her fingers once to stop the numbness from the cooling water. “It would have put the marketplace at risk during heavy rain. We’re moving the line to safer elevation.”

Zuko’s eye cut to her, warning, and then back to the waiting faces. “We’re optimizing for longevity,” he said, bland as a report. “My engineers will update the timetable.”

“Does this affect costs?” someone in Fire Nation crimson asked, pointed.

“Yes,” Zuko said.

“No,” Katara said.

They said it together, and the splash of laughter from the onlookers was a little too quick, the kind of sound people make when they smell blood and want to pretend it’s wine. She turned toward him, water streaming off the fringe of her sleeves, and met his stare head-on. His mouth tightened. He was counting what he owed to the truth against what he owed to the room.

She beat him to it. “Materials shift, not increase,” she said, eyes never leaving his. “We reinforce with stone and local clay. Fewer imports. Longer life. The cost evens out.”

Zuko held her gaze a beat, then angled his face back to the crowd. “That,” he said, flat, “is what I meant.”

The magistrate nodded as if that made sense, though his attention kept snagging on their clothes, on the slick muddle that marked where water had surged and then stilled. “We appreciate decisive leadership,” he said, oily. “But in the future perhaps communicate adjustments before—”

“Before the river teaches your charts a lesson?” Katara said, unable to blunt it. She felt the ache in her shoulders like a bruise. “We’ll send a full brief tonight.”

Zuko’s jaw worked once. If they’d been alone, he would have let the fight rise. Here, with a semicircle of power watching, he put a lid on it and it burned bright underneath. “We will,” he echoed, with a crisp bow he might have given an enemy general.

A runner slipped in, pressing towels into their hands with the careful urgency of someone who didn’t want to be noticed doing a kindness. Katara used hers to push water from her braids. Zuko didn’t touch his. He stood anchored, the towel limp in his fist, shoulders squared like a wall.

“Lord Zuko,” the Fire Nation investor said, voice all sharp politeness, “your unilateral changes—”

“Were a mistake,” Katara said, cutting in. The circle breathed in. She heard the collective lean of people hungry for cracks. “This is a joint project. We argue before we dig.” She glanced at Zuko, dared him to contradict, to pull rank and look small. “We’re aligned now.”

The words cost her. She pushed them out anyway because he wouldn’t, because someone had to put a seal on the mess. His eyes flickered, something like anger and gratitude mixed, and then shuttered.

“Aligned,” he said to the officials, to the workers lining the slope, to the whisperers at the edge. “You’ll have the revised grade and risk assessment by dusk.”

Aang’s clerks bowed. The magistrate nodded, satisfied with the ritual if not the reality. One of the Water Tribe delegates, a woman with a braided crown and a scar across her cheek, met Katara’s eyes and gave a small, hard smile—not friendly, exactly; approving of the fight, maybe. The Fire Nation investor’s mouth pinched. People began to drift, their questions packed away with the certainty that there would be more to watch tomorrow.

The crews kept moving, reshouldering timbers, slogging through the churn Katara had made. Orders rippled down from Zuko’s foremen; her own people stepped in to mark the new path. The machine groaned back to life, but quieter, expectant, like everyone knew something had shifted underneath the noise.

They were left standing a little apart, close enough to feel each other’s body heat despite the wet. He turned to her finally. Up close, the storm of what he wasn’t saying was obvious: that she’d humiliated him in front of his men; that he’d risked lives without meaning to; that they didn’t trust each other but had to fake it for a city with too many eyes.

“You think you saved them,” he said softly, teeth barely parting.

“I know I did,” she said. Her voice was steady now, steadier than her pulse. She could smell river silt on his skin, the faint char that clung to him no matter how much he scrubbed it off. “You think you saved time.”

He didn’t deny it. His fingers tightened once around the towel and then loosened, as if he remembered he was holding it. “We can’t look like we’re fighting.”

“We are fighting,” she said under her breath, with a small, humorless smile he didn’t mirror. “Everyone just got a front row seat.”

His gaze slid past her to the ridge where people had stood and whispered. The new city would collect there every day, bankers and nobles and builders, with nothing better to do than read meaning in the way she and he stood—hands, distance, wet hair, clipped answers. Their disagreement wasn’t just about a ditch in the ground. It was about who got to draw lines, in mud and in policy, in a place that wasn’t built yet and would remember the first shape you gave it.

“We’ll fix it tonight,” he said. “The brief.”

“We’ll fix a lot of things tonight,” she said, and he flinched a fraction, as if the promise sounded like a threat. She took a breath, tasted silt. “Next time, you bring it to me first.”

“Next time,” he said. He didn’t offer his hand. She didn’t either. There was no gesture clean enough to make in front of this many witnesses.

They stood there a heartbeat longer, water ticking from their clothes into the mud, the air thick with all the eyes that had just watched them set the tone. The river slid by at their feet, indifferent. Above, the half-finished skyline of the city waited, ribs of scaffolding like a chest held between breaths. When they finally turned away from each other, it was to opposite sides of the same job, the distance between them measured in more than feet and watched by everyone who mattered.

The pounding on her door came before dawn. It wasn’t the polite rap of an aide; it was a frantic, desperate drumming that jolted Katara from a shallow, restless sleep. She was in her tunic and leggings before the second volley of knocks began, her heart hammering against her ribs with a sick premonition.

“What is it?” she called, pulling the door open to find one of her senior waterbenders, a man named Kustaa, his face pale and grim in the pre-dawn light.

“It’s the aqueduct,” he said, his voice strained. “The third support arch. It’s gone.”

The air was cold on the ride to the site, but not as cold as the dread solidifying in her stomach. From a distance, she could see it—a jagged gap in the rising silhouette of the construction project, a missing tooth in what was supposed to be a triumphant grin. Up close, it was chaos.

A massive section of the aqueduct, a structure of Fire Nation steel and Earth Kingdom stone they had spent weeks raising, lay in a heap of ruin. Twisted metal girders, like the bones of some great fallen beast, jutted from a mountain of shattered concrete and earth. Dust, thick and gray, still hung in the air, coating everything in a fine, gritty film. The air smelled of pulverized stone and wet clay.

Men were shouting. Foremen barked orders that were lost in the confusion. Healers—hers and his—moved through the wreckage, their bending a gentle counterpoint to the sharp, ugly angles of the debris. She saw at least a dozen workers being tended to, their faces streaked with dust and blood. Most injuries looked minor—cuts, bruises, a few broken bones—but the sight sent a fresh wave of nausea through her. This was what she had feared yesterday. This was what happened when speed was valued over sense.

And then she saw him. Zuko was already there, standing near the edge of the collapse, his back rigid. His fists were clenched at his sides, his formal robes already smudged with dust. Even from twenty paces, she could feel the fury radiating from him like heat from asphalt. His people were gathered behind him, a phalanx of soot-stained engineers and workers, their expressions a mixture of shock and sullen anger. Her own people were clustered on the opposite side of the chasm of debris, their faces hard with suspicion. The truce of the previous evening had not just been broken; it had been pulverized along with the concrete.

“What happened?” she demanded, her voice cutting through the noise as she strode toward him. She didn't wait for an answer from him, instead turning to Kustaa.

“The night shift said they heard a groaning sound, then it just… fell,” Kustaa reported, his eyes darting toward the Fire Nation crew. “The steel supports gave way. Snapped clean through.”

A Fire Nation engineer overheard, his face livid. “The supports were sound! We tested every single one. It was the foundation! Your people insisted on using that water-softening technique to set the pylons. You weakened the bedrock!”

“That’s a lie!” one of Katara’s benders shot back, stepping forward. “Our foundations are solid! Your welds are what failed! Rushed work, all of it! Too much heat, not enough care. The metal was brittle as glass!”

The accusation hung in the air, sharp and pointed. Katara’s eyes snapped to Zuko’s. The memory of their fight yesterday—her warning, his dismissal—was a fresh, open wound between them. His jaw was so tight a muscle jumped along the scarred side of his face.

“My welders are the best in the world,” Zuko said, his voice dangerously low. He took a step toward her, his golden eyes burning with a cold fire. “They don’t make mistakes.”

“Everyone makes mistakes,” Katara countered, her voice just as quiet, just as venomous. “Especially when they’re pushed to meet an impossible deadline by a Fire Lord who cares more about schedules than safety.”

His face hardened into a mask of pure fury. The insult landed, direct and unforgiving. He looked from her to the wreckage, at the injured men, and a flicker of something—pain, guilt—crossed his features before being consumed by anger.

“This has nothing to do with the schedule,” he bit out. “This was a structural failure at the base. Your benders were working on the canal diversion less than fifty yards from here all night. Did one of them get careless? Did they saturate the ground until it turned to soup?”

The accusation was so outrageous, so insulting to the precision of her art, that she could only stare at him for a second, breathless with rage. “You think we did this? You think we would endanger our own people, destroy our own work, out of carelessness?”

“I think your methods are untested on this scale,” he shot back, gesturing at the ruin. “And I think you were so determined to prove me wrong yesterday that you’ve become reckless.”

They stood there, separated by a few feet of trampled earth but divided by a chasm of history and mistrust. The shouts of their crews faded into a tense backdrop. All that mattered was the bitter certainty in his eyes and the rising tide of fury in her chest. Yesterday, they had stood soaked in river water, a public spectacle of disagreement. Today, they stood in the dust of a disaster, their animosity now laced with the real-world consequences of failure and the poison of blame. The project was in ruins, and so were they.

A city official, a portly man named Kuan whose robes were already covered in a layer of grime, scurried between them, his hands held up in a placating gesture. “Fire Lord Zuko, Master Katara, please. We must have order. You are the leaders here. You must conduct the investigation. Together.”

The word hung between them, ugly and unavoidable. Together.

Zuko gave a stiff, formal nod, not looking at her. He turned and strode toward the heart of the wreckage, expecting her to follow. The arrogance of it made her teeth ache. With a sharp exhale, Katara followed him, picking her way over splintered timbers and slabs of broken earth. The air was thick with the smell of wet stone and something metallic and sharp, like ozone.

He moved with a predator’s grace, even here, his boots sure on the unstable ground. She watched the line of his back, the tension in his shoulders. He stopped at a massive, twisted girder, a steel beam bent into a grotesque hairpin. It was scorched black in places.

“The main support,” he said, his voice flat. He ran a gloved hand over the surface, his touch surprisingly light. “Rated to hold three times the weight.”

Katara ignored him, her eyes scanning the debris field. Her gaze caught on a smaller piece of fractured metal nearby, a support strut no thicker than her arm. Something about the break was wrong. It wasn't a clean snap, nor was it bent. It was shattered, the edges crystalline and sharp. She knelt, gesturing for a small amount of water from a nearby puddle. It coiled around her fingers before she directed it to wash the dust from the break.

The clean metal underneath told a story. A rainbow sheen of discoloration fanned out from the fracture, the tell-tale sign of metal that had been subjected to extreme, localized heat. Just beyond it, the steel was covered in a network of fine, web-like cracks. It had been heated to near-melting and then cooled too quickly, making it fragile.

“It wasn’t the foundation,” she said, her voice ringing with cold certainty. She looked up at him, her eyes locking with his. “It was the steel. It was made brittle.”

Zuko came over, his shadow falling over her. He crouched down, his thigh almost brushing her shoulder, and she could feel the warmth of his body through her clothes. He picked up the strut, turning it over in his hands. His golden eyes narrowed as he examined the fracture she had cleaned.

“This is one strut out of hundreds,” he dismissed, though a flicker of something unsettled crossed his face. He tossed the metal piece aside; it clattered against the stones with a sound of finality. “A single flaw doesn't bring down an entire arch. It’s not possible.”

“Unless it wasn’t just one,” she retorted, standing up to face him. “Unless it was a pattern. A deliberate weakness introduced into the supports.”

“By who? My engineers?” he scoffed, his lip curling in a faint sneer. “To what end? To see their own work destroyed? To injure their own men?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, her frustration mounting. “But this kind of fracture… it takes a precise application of intense heat.”

The implication was clear. Firebending.

His face went rigid. “You are accusing my people.”

“I am observing the evidence,” she said, her voice rising.

He turned from her abruptly, his anger a palpable force. He stalked toward the base of what was once the main pylon, the place where the arch met the earth. He knelt again, scraping away loose rubble and dirt with his bare hands, his gloves now discarded.

“Look,” he commanded. She walked over reluctantly, peering down at what he had uncovered. It was the bedrock, the stone upon which the entire structure had rested. It was crumbling, porous and weak. He scraped at it with a fingernail, and small granules of stone flaked away, turning to dust.

“This is water erosion,” he said, his voice a low growl. He grabbed her wrist, forcing her to look, his grip surprisingly strong. Her pulse jumped at the contact. “This is what your ‘softening technique’ did. You leached the minerals from the stone. You turned the foundation of this aqueduct into sand. The entire structure was resting on a lie.”

She snatched her hand back, the skin where he’d held her tingling with heat and indignation. “That’s impossible. Our technique strengthens the surrounding earth. It doesn’t dissolve it.”

“The evidence says otherwise,” he countered, standing to his full height, looming over her. He gestured from the crumbling rock at their feet to the devastation around them. “You wanted to prove your traditional ways were superior. Instead, you destroyed the most important part of this project.”

They stood there, surrounded by the ruin they had both helped create, each holding a piece of the puzzle that fit their own narrative of blame. In his eyes, she saw the unshakeable conviction that her water had eroded his foundation. In her heart, she knew that his fire had shattered her steel. The chasm between them was wider and deeper than the wreckage at their feet, and the truth felt just as buried.

The official, Kuan, wrung his hands, his face pale and sweaty under the midday sun. “Please, a proper inquiry must be held. In the site office.”

He gestured toward a large, drab tent that served as their administrative hub. Zuko gave a curt nod, turning without a word and heading for it. Every line of his body screamed with rigid control. Katara followed, her own anger a cold, hard knot in her stomach. The tent was stuffy, smelling of canvas and damp earth. A single long table and a few rickety chairs filled the space, forcing them into an intimacy that felt abrasive. Zuko took a seat at one end, and she deliberately chose the other, the length of the table a paltry buffer between them.

Their foremen were brought in one by one. Kustaa came first, his weathered face set in grim lines. He stood before the table, his gaze fixed on Katara, pointedly ignoring the Fire Lord.

“Tell us what your crew observed last night, Kustaa,” Katara began, her voice even and professional.

“We worked the late shift on the canal diversion, just as planned,” he said, his tone heavy with implication. “Kept to our side of the site. Not like some.” He cut his eyes toward Zuko. “About two hours before dawn, we heard it. A deep groan. Metal. Sounded like it was in pain.”

Zuko leaned forward, his hands clasped on the table. The movement was slow, deliberate. “What did you see?”

Kustaa’s jaw tightened. He finally looked at Zuko, his expression one of pure contempt. “I saw your men. Two of them. Near the base of the aqueduct, where they shouldn’t have been. Said they were checking the welds one last time.” He almost spat the word. “Looked more like they were admiring their poor craftsmanship before it came down.”

“My men are meticulous,” Zuko stated, his voice flat and cold as stone. “If they were checking welds, it was because they were being diligent.”

“Diligent?” Kustaa’s voice rose. “That structure was built with Fire Nation steel, by Fire Nation hands. It failed. That’s diligence, is it? Or was it something else? A little extra heat in the right spot, maybe? To make a point?”

Katara felt a flush of shame. Kustaa’s accusation was so blatant, so fueled by decades of ingrained hatred. “That’s enough, Kustaa,” she said sharply. He looked at her, his expression wounded, but he fell silent. Zuko’s golden eyes were fixed on her, unreadable but intense, and she felt a sudden, infuriating need to defend her foreman’s prejudice, even as it appalled her. He had lived through the war. He had lost people. His hatred was earned. She dismissed him with a nod, unable to look at Zuko as he left.

Next came the Fire Nation foreman, a burly man named Borin with soot permanently etched into the lines on his face. He bowed crisply to Zuko, then shot Katara a look of undisguised disdain.

“Report,” Zuko commanded.

“The structure was perfect, my Lord,” Borin said, his voice rough. “Every beam, every joint. We finished ahead of schedule, a testament to Fire Nation efficiency.” He paused, letting the barb land. “But the ground beneath it… that’s another story. All night, we could feel it. A softness. A give. The earth was weeping.”

Katara’s hands curled into fists under the table.

“We saw them,” Borin continued, nodding in the direction Kustaa had gone. “The waterbenders. Playing in the mud like children. They were supposed to be diverting the canal, but they were all around the aqueduct’s foundation, pushing and pulling the water through the bedrock. It’s unnatural. Bending the very earth. They turned solid rock into a swamp.”

“That is a gross mischaracterization of a precise and ancient art,” Katara snapped, her control finally breaking. “My benders were strengthening the foundation, not weakening it.”

Borin smirked at her, a cruel twist of his lips. “Is that what you call it? Because from where I stood, it looked like you were drowning the project in your ambition. You couldn’t stand that our engineering was superior, so you washed it all away.”

“Get out,” Zuko said suddenly. His voice was quiet, but it cut through the thick air like a blade. Borin’s smirk vanished, replaced by confusion. “You are dismissed, Foreman.”

The big man looked from Zuko to Katara and back again, then bowed stiffly and left the tent, his resentment radiating from him.

The silence he left behind was heavy and suffocating. The interviews had yielded nothing but ugliness. They had stared into the faces of their own people and seen the war staring back, raw and unhealed. The prejudices they harbored personally were magnified a hundred times in their subordinates, a distorted, hateful reflection.

Katara finally looked at Zuko. His head was bowed, his scarred eye hidden from her. He was rubbing the bridge of his nose, a gesture of profound weariness. For the first time, she saw him not as a prince or a Fire Lord, but as a man burdened by a legacy he couldn’t escape. His people’s blind loyalty was just as venomous as her people’s ingrained hatred. They were trapped, both of them, in a conflict that was supposed to be over.

The silence in the tent stretched, thick and stifling. Katara stared at the empty chair where her foreman had stood, the man’s bitter words still echoing in the canvas enclosure. She felt a deep, weary ache settle into her bones. It wasn't just about a collapsed aqueduct anymore. It was about the war that refused to end, the poison that still seeped from its wounds.

Zuko pushed his chair back with a grating scrape. “There’s nothing more to be learned here.” His voice was devoid of its earlier heat, leaving behind something hollow and tired. He didn’t look at her as he walked out of the tent, leaving her to follow in his wake.

The walk back to their shared quarters was wordless. The sun was beginning to set, casting long, distorted shadows that seemed to claw at the edges of the construction site. Each step felt heavy, an admission of their shared failure. They had been sent here to build a symbol of unity, and in less than a week, they had managed to build a monument to their enduring division.

The neutral space of their diplomatic apartment felt different now. It was no longer just an awkward imposition; it was a container for their mutual resentment. He went straight to a large chest in the corner, the one that held the master copies of the architectural plans. Katara watched him, her arms crossed over her chest. She should have gone to her room, shut the door, and tried to forget the look in Kustaa’s eyes, the sneer on Borin’s face. But she couldn’t. The problem was here, between them, and hiding from it felt like cowardice.

Zuko heaved a thick, heavy roll of parchment onto the low table in the center of the room. He knelt and untied the silk cords, and the scroll unfurled with a dry whisper, covering the entire surface of the dark wood. It was a beautiful, complex document, a fusion of two worlds. The sharp, precise lines of Fire Nation engineering were overlaid with the flowing, spiraling notations of Water Tribe bending forms.

“We’re going over it all,” he said. It wasn’t a question or a request. It was a statement of fact. “From the beginning.”

Katara hesitated for only a second before kneeling on the opposite side of the table. The lantern cast a warm, golden glow over the scroll, illuminating the fine ink work. The space was small. If she leaned forward, her hair would brush his arm. She could feel the heat radiating from him, a steady, physical presence that was impossible to ignore. For hours, they worked in silence, a strange, focused truce settling over them. He would point to a structural load calculation, and she would trace the corresponding water-flow pattern meant to reinforce it. Their arguments from the first day seemed like a distant memory, replaced by this grim, shared task.

It was well past midnight when her eyes caught on something. A small detail in the foundation plans, in a section she had approved herself. It was a pattern for circulating water through the bedrock during the curing process. She’d glanced at it before, assuming it was a standard Fire Nation variant on her own tribe’s techniques. But looking at it now, really looking, it felt wrong.

“This,” she said, her voice quiet. She pointed a finger at a series of interconnected spirals right at the pylon’s base. “This water-flow matrix. It’s inefficient. It diverts nearly twenty percent of the hardening effect away from the central load-bearing point.”

Zuko leaned closer, his head bent next to hers. She could smell the faint scent of smoke and ozone that always clung to him. His good eye narrowed, studying the diagram. “It’s a standard thermal diffusion pattern. It prevents the stone from cracking as it settles.”

“No, it doesn’t,” she insisted, her certainty growing. “Our way, the Water Tribe way, would be to use a single, deep-sinking pulse to temper the core. This… this is just churning the water. It weakens the aggregate. It’s the kind of mistake a first-year student would make.” She looked at him, expecting a defensive retort.

But he was silent, his gaze fixed on the scroll. He was utterly still. Then, slowly, he reached out and slid a different section of the long scroll toward them—the metallurgical annex. His finger traced a line of dense, technical script.

“Alloy composition for the steel support struts,” he read aloud, his voice barely a whisper. “Iron, carbon, chromium… and a trace of copper.” He looked from the script to the water pattern she had indicated, then back again. A muscle in his jaw clenched. “The water here,” he said, tapping the foundation plan, “it’s not just being churned. This specific hydraulic motion, at this specific temperature, would leach the copper salts out of the bedrock.”

Katara’s blood ran cold. She stared at him, understanding dawning in her mind even before he finished the thought.

“Copper salts,” Zuko continued, his voice flat with a terrible discovery, “are highly corrosive to chromium steel. It wouldn’t happen overnight. It would be a slow process. The water would soften the foundation from below, while simultaneously poisoning the steel struts from within. The entire structure was designed to fail.”

He finally lifted his head and looked at her. The animosity was gone from his eyes. The blame, the anger, all of it had been burned away, replaced by the same cold dread she felt pooling in her stomach. This wasn't her mistake. And it wasn't his. It was both, woven together with a malicious, terrifying intelligence. Someone had used their own expertise, their own cultures, as a weapon against them, designing a flaw so perfectly balanced that they would have no choice but to blame each other when it all came crashing down.

The silence that fell was different from the one that had preceded it. The earlier quiet had been thick with blame and resentment. This was a sharp, cold silence, the kind that follows the snap of a trap. The beautiful scroll on the table between them was no longer a blueprint; it was a confession.

Katara felt a wave of nausea. She stared at the elegant, flowing symbols of her own language, twisted into a blueprint for decay. Someone had taken the sacred art of her people, the deep knowledge of water’s properties, and weaponized it. They had turned a technique of reinforcement into a slow-acting poison. It was a profound violation, a desecration that made her skin crawl. Her hand, which had been pointing at the diagram, trembled slightly. She pulled it back as if the parchment were venomous.

Zuko’s stillness was absolute, but she could feel the rage building in him. It wasn’t the explosive, uncontrolled fire she was used to. This was a low, contained burn, the kind that melts steel. He pushed himself to his feet in one fluid motion, turning his back to her and the table. He paced the length of the small room, his boots silent on the woven mats.

“It’s brilliant,” he said, his voice a low growl. “It’s sick, and it’s brilliant.” He stopped and faced her, his golden eye burning with a terrifying intensity. “Whoever did this has access to the highest levels of Fire Nation engineering theory. And they have an academic knowledge of waterbending.”

Katara rose slowly, her legs feeling unsteady. “No,” she countered, her voice shaking with a cold fury of her own. “Not academic. You can’t learn this from a scroll. To know how to corrupt the technique, you have to understand it intimately. You have to know how it feels.”

The implication hung in the air between them. A Fire Nation engineer and a Water Tribe master. Or someone who was both. Or someone who had access to both. The list of potential suspects was impossibly small and frighteningly large at the same time.

“Your foreman was right,” Zuko said, the words sounding like shards of glass in his mouth. “And so was mine. They saw what they were conditioned to see. What the saboteur wanted them to see. Water Tribe ‘magic’ undermining Fire Nation strength.” He ran a hand over his face, the gesture sharp with frustration. “They played us. They used our own history, our own prejudices, against us.”

He looked at her then, truly looked at her, and for the first time since she had arrived, she felt like he wasn't seeing a Water Tribe peasant or a political obstacle. He was seeing an equal. A fellow victim of a meticulously planned attack. The animosity that had been a constant, oppressive weight between them had not vanished, but it had shifted, its focus turning outward.

“This entire investigation,” Katara said, the pieces clicking into place with a sickening finality, “was a performance. We were meant to find nothing. We were meant to fight, to escalate things until the council recalled us both in disgrace. The project would collapse, and the Fire Nation and the Southern Water Tribe would be at each other’s throats again.”

“It’s more than the project,” Zuko stated, his voice dropping. “This is a message. To me. That any attempt at unity is doomed. That cooperation with the other nations is a weakness that will be exploited.”

He was right. The collapsed aqueduct was just the opening salvo. This was an attempt to unravel the fragile peace Aang had fought so hard to build. A chill traced its way down Katara’s spine that had nothing to do with the night air. They were standing on the edge of a chasm, and someone had just tried to shove them in.

The two of them stood on opposite sides of the room, the damning scroll laid out between them like a body. The shared quarters no longer felt like a punishment, but a fortress. Outside these walls, every Fire Nation worker was a potential suspect to her people. Every waterbender was a potential saboteur to his. But in here, for this moment, there was only the cold, hard truth and the two of them against it.

An unspoken agreement passed between them in the charged silence. The fight was no longer Zuko versus Katara. It was them versus the shadow that moved between their people, a ghost of the war they thought they had won. It was a truce born not of forgiveness or understanding, but of a shared and immediate danger. An alliance of necessity. And as they stood there, shrouded in the lantern light, they both knew it was the most fragile, and most vital, alliance of their lives.