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"I know what happens to cities that don’t want to hand over control to you."
Something else comes over her, then. A flash of hope in her mind: an idea as far from what is going to happen as the moon from the black north sea. It, too, exerts tidal force.
—She wants to push Suyin against the wall. She would fist her hand in Suyin’s metal chest piece like it was fine-spun cloth. Suyin’s breath, scratching softly in her lungs, like a prisoner marking the days; Suyin’s look purely surprised, and not (as now) one of hard acceptance. Kuvira can picture that. She’s seen the leader of Zaofu surprised before. It doesn’t happen as often as you might expect from a woman who prides herself on her spontaneity, and her interest in modern ideas. She is still Toph Beifong’s daughter, and she has a streak of despotism barely covered by her grace. The assumed wry casualness, the green eyes light with laughter—the positioning of herself as first among community organizers, hardly a head of state at all, hardly a patrician autocrat—all that only goes to show that she’s a little better at control than her sibling. The kind of woman who, on allowing herself to be looped into a heist, would insist on driving the getaway car.
But Kuvira remembers. When she herself was sixteen, the dancing troupe’s least adept understudy—a girl too heavily built for acrobatics on wires, but too proud, too undeniably driven, for a place in the ground chorus—she watched Suyin constantly; she caught whatever was rare. The weariness—the flashes of cold anger at too-minor obstacles—the calculation that went into her interactions with her youngest, shyest children, those perhaps most alien to her, as the ones most frail; Kuvira had a place in her developing worldview for every treacherous expression. A little niche, as you would put aside for a household god. She was not, despite what their respective adult reputations might suggest, as unimaginative as Su. She was capable of exploring this world by means aside from her reasoning senses; she could reach out, with dead iron in hand, and infer the white heart of a star. And she saw how Suyin looked when she, Kuvira, strode onstage.
She was performing that night because a troupe member, with no warning, hadn’t shown up. She felt good, strong, confident, although those were words it only seemed reasonable to apply with hindsight—at the time, she simply felt like herself. The bandages around her wrists gripped her firmly, coarsely; a different kind of dancer might have drawn a comparison to another person’s hands, but Kuvira pictured herself holding her own wrist, and holding it back. The conscious, constant business of trapped power. Like a light under glass. Like earth, mounded over a body. She turned in the dazzle of distant lamps and found Suyin staring up at her, as she had known she would. Suyin always sat in the front row for the spring equinox. She was caught off-guard, perhaps, by the change in line-up—but no; Suyin was watching her hands.
It was then that Kuvira realized she had forgotten to wash—
Mud under fingernails. An earthbender should never have to dig, but the air holes, at least, had been delicate work.
Now, twenty years and an empire later, she’s wearing fine gloves. She’s not touching Suyin. If she did, she knows, it would be because Suyin had let her. That’s the problem with the fantasy, the faint molten creak in her ears—metal pooling in rings round her knuckles, fingers sunk in Suyin’s armor up to the second joint? Suyin could throw her out the window before Kuvira was close enough to propose it. And while Suyin wouldn’t necessarily choose to react so violently—the girl from the dance troupe reappeared a day later, woozy but unharmed, with no memories beyond darkness; Suyin has always behaved protectively toward Kuvira, as toward all Zaofu citizens who go on to make an impression on the world, and enhance her legacy—Kuvira doesn’t want to be permitted.
She doesn’t even want ineffectual resistance. Suyin isn’t a firebending thief. Kuvira wants surprise, but for a different reason; she thinks clearly of the hotel itself falling apart, rafters collapsing—her hand outthrust to scaffold scaffoldry. Debris like stardust in the air, or scattered, burning cities. Her hand to raise them up from chaos: Suyin, finally saved.
There’s a stillness locked in the older woman’s gaze. Fear, or hunger.
"Then you know what’s coming for Zaofu," Kuvira decides to say.