![]() “There are more tracks going north along the river,” she said, locating them. ![]() She wasn’t especially upset by what had happened-Saph was still alive, as far as she knew-and was already pushing the memory into a hidden corner of her mind, where it would live with countless other horrors.īut she knew the pain Valen was likely feeling, and she knew that the best cure for it was action. Neither spoke on the way back to the campsite. Koko glanced back to see a mound of disturbed earth where the body had been moments before. ![]() He shifted his feet into an earthbending stance and the ground trembled faintly with his gestures. There was nothing left to see here.īut Valen wasn’t done. She must’ve escaped somehow.” Satisfied with that conclusion, Koko turned to go back to the camp. The fading bruise on his cheek where she’d hit him stood out in stark contrast. “But why would they kill her?” He seemed to have regained control of himself, though his face was a deathly pale. “I’m thinking she must’ve been a plague carrier.” Had the blue sages turned on each other? “She doesn’t have a tattoo,” Koko said, trying to work through it. “Please, please tell me-” Valen cut off with a ragged noise and fell to his knees, head bowed. It wouldn’t be right to leave her like that. Even so, her stomach churned as she climbed partway up the tree to cut the vines that held the unfortunate woman. Koko herself wasn’t entirely unaffected, but she was more desensitized to this kind of brutality. Valen’s heavy footsteps behind her stopped suddenly and he started retching. Please, please don’t be her… Spirits, please…īut the bloated, rotting corpse was unfamiliar-a woman, she was sure, but not Saph. She knew exactly what it was and was filled with a moment of horrified panic that made her throw caution to the wind and fling herself forward. Koko crept closer to investigate, but the stench hit her first. The movement ahead was vaguely rhythmic, like something hanging from a tree branch and swaying in the breeze. But practically necessitated such things. “Can you sense any people up ahead?” she asked as softly as she could, right in his ear. She put her hand up in warning and crouched down behind a bush. Valen followed silently as they made their way through the forest until Koko spotted movement up ahead. It was a much greater challenge than identifying the deep tracks of eel hound feet. Someone had gone southwest and she began to carefully follow the subtle evidence of faint boot imprints, broken twigs, and displaced leaves. There was evidence of three separate sets of tracks leading away. Koko was barely listening to him, too busy trying to make heads or tails of what she was seeing. “And are there tracks leading out of camp? Or did the hounds go into the river? It doesn’t look deep enough for them to swim…” “The ground isn’t soft enough for me to know how many of them there were, but there were only two hounds, so there couldn’t be more than two, maybe three adults in total.” “This…is odd.” She stood up and scratched the back of her neck, confused. Look, here–” Buried under some dead leaves was a pile of metal chains. They capture them and use them like a weapon. ![]() “What? Why would they do that? It would affect the blue sages, too.” “They might have a plague carrier with them.” Instead, she voiced the theory she’d been stewing on all morning the tracks she was seeing now seemed to support it. Koko refrained from verbally speculating that she might be badly injured-or worse. There hasn’t been a single sign of her bending.” “They must’ve drugged Zenya…” Valen murmured. Her head believed those things her heart did not. It seemed far more likely now that Zenya was the Avatar, and it made more logical sense to put her first. For the first time in a long while, her personal feelings clashed with her sense of duty. She wanted Saph to be her first priority. Entering that facility would be incredibly reckless it would be virtually impossible to get all three of them out together. There was a good chance now that she’d be recognized. Maybe.” She knew he was probably thinking about that wanted sign in Makapu. “Will you be able to get them out?” Valen asked hopefully. There’s a large blue sage stronghold upriver. “They stopped here,” she said while carefully examining the area. After five long days of painstaking tracking, steadily eastward, Koko found a campsite next to a river-or rather, what was once a river.
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