Avatar: The Book Of The Phoenix

Xanadu

They lost track of the days in the dark.

The ship moved. Stopped. Moved again. Meals came at irregular hours: hard bread, water that tasted of rust, silence from the men who shoved it through the grate. Toph counted footsteps. Sokka counted hours and then gave up. Katara watched Aang's face in the gloom and said little. There was nothing useful to say.

When the hull finally shuddered against a dock, the sound was different. Not Republic City's timber quays. Stone. Heavy stone.

A Nomad unbarred the door.

"Get up," he said. "We're here."

The light hit like a blow.

They were marched up onto the deck in their chains, blinking against a white coastal sun. Below them stretched a fortress of crimson brick, massive and squat, rising from the cliffs of the southern Earth Kingdom like a wound in the coastline.

War banners snapped along the battlements. At the base of the walls sprawled a camp large enough to be a city of its own: tents, forges, holding pens, cookfires, rows of captured wagons. The air smelled of salt, smoke, and too many people packed too close.

Sokka let out a low breath. "Well. That's not ominous at all."

Toph turned her head toward the walls. "Big. Deep foundations. Whoever built that wanted it to last."

"And they wanted everyone to see it," Katara said.

They were taken down the gangplank.

The docks of Xanadu were not just for warships.

They were a market.

Cages lined the stone in uneven rows. Men and women from Earth Kingdom towns stood inside them, wrists bound, clothes torn, faces emptied out by exhaustion. Some were laborers. Some were soldiers still in scraps of uniform. A few were children clinging to adults who no longer had the strength to hide their fear. Nomads moved between the pens with the bored efficiency of people at work. Goods changed hands.

Coin. Weapons. Grain. People.

Sokka stopped walking until a sword-butt shoved him forward.

"They're selling them," he said, stunned out of sarcasm. "They're actually selling them."

Aang's voice was hoarse. "The Fire Nation never did something this abhorrent."

"No," Sokka said. "They didn't. They thought they were better than everyone. They colonized. They conscripted. They burned. But they didn't put people on blocks and price them." He looked at Aang. "That's new. That's worse."

Aang watched a woman pulled from one cage and pushed toward another. His chains felt tighter.

"This isn't a nation," he said. "It's a raid that learned how to stay."

The Nomads did not take them straight to the fortress.

They took them to the center of the dock, where a raised platform had been built from scavenged timber. A man in a stained red coat stood there with a ledger and a voice like a market crier. When he saw the four of them, his face lit with professional delight.

"Well now," he called. "The prizes from Republic City. Didn't think the rumors were true."

The crowd thickened. Nomads. Camp followers. Traders who had learned there was money in the empire's leftovers. Eyes moved over Aang first, then Toph, then Katara, then Sokka, measuring them the way people measured horses.

Katara stepped closer to Aang, as much as the chains allowed. "Don't give them a reason."

"They already have one," Toph muttered. "We're standing here."

The auction boss walked a slow circle around them.

"Avatar," he announced, tapping Aang's chest with the ledger. "Waterbender. Earthbender. And—" he stopped in front of Sokka, smiling, "—a non-bender. Good teeth. Strong back. No spark to worry about."

Sokka bared those teeth. "Say that again. I dare you."

A Nomad struck him across the back of the legs and dropped him to one knee.

Bids started anyway.

They were not bids for all four. Not really. The boss took offers the way a man took weather: nodding, noting, waving some away. A commander wanted the benders held. Another voice wanted Toph for the mines. Someone laughed and named a price for Katara that made Aang surge against his chains until two men wrenched him back.

The boss raised a hand.

"Enough. The Avatar and the benders are not for private sale. Khan Rokkun wants them in the fortress as political cargo." He looked down at Sokka with the faint disappointment of a merchant losing a better deal. "The Water Tribe boy, though. He's inventory."

Sokka's head snapped up. "I'm what?"

A thick-shouldered slaver near the front lifted two fingers. The boss pointed at him, then at Sokka.

"Sold."

Katara shouted his name. Toph threw herself sideways and nearly took a guard down with her. Aang's chains screamed against the ring as he lunged.

"No!" Aang said. "You don't get to do this. He is not—"

The slaver's men were already hauling Sokka off the platform.

Sokka twisted, heels dragging on the stone, and found Aang's eyes for one raw second.

"Don't you dare start a war on a dock for me," he said, voice shaking with fury more than fear. "You hear me? You stay alive. I'll figure this out."

Then he was gone, swallowed by the crowd moving toward the holding ships.

The auction boss shut his ledger.

"The rest of you," he said, almost politely, "belong to the Nomads now. Take them to the prisons."

The fortress gates opened on crimson walls and a long, descending stair.

Aang did not look away from the docks until the stone closed behind them.

Republic City had been a warning.

Xanadu was the system.

And one of them was already missing.