The last thing I remember is the headlights.
I was crossing the street with my phone in my hand, thumb hovering over a trailer for the new Avatar movie, and I never even heard the engine. There was a flash of white, a sound like a door slamming inside my skull, and then nothing. No tunnel, no life flashing before my eyes. Just a clean, quiet cut, like someone had hit pause on me.
Then the pause ended.
I woke up on my back, staring at a ceiling I'd never seen before. It was smooth stone, warm gray, with a faint curl of carved wind-lines running along the edges. The air smelled like cold mountain and incense. Somewhere far below me, wind was whistling through hollow spaces, and it sounded almost like singing.
Okay, I thought. This is not a hospital.
I sat up, and the whole world tilted in a way that felt wrong. My body was too light. My arms were too short. When I looked down at my hands, they were small, with thin fingers and the soft, unscarred skin of a kid. I was sitting on a low, hard bed in a tiny round room. There was a window cut into the wall, a wooden chest at the foot of the bed, and a folded orange-and-yellow bundle of clothes sitting on top of it.
Orange and yellow.
My heart started hammering. I swung my legs off the bed and my bare feet hit cool stone. The room spun for a second, and I grabbed the edge of the mattress. Outside the window, there was nothing but sky. Clouds drifted below me, lit gold by the morning sun, and out past them I could see jagged peaks poking through the white like islands.
I was somewhere very, very high up.
"No way," I whispered. My voice came out high and cracked. A kid's voice. "No way. No way."
That was when I saw the mirror.
It was leaning against the wall in the corner, a tall oval of polished bronze, a little warped and spotted at the edges. I walked toward it on legs that didn't feel like mine, and the closer I got, the more my stomach twisted. When I finally stood in front of it, I stopped breathing.
A boy stared back at me. He was maybe twelve years old, with big gray eyes, a round face, and a smooth, bald head. His ears stuck out a little. His expression was wide-eyed and terrified, which made sense, because I was the one making it.
I raised my hand and so did he. I touched my cheek and he touched his.
"I'm Aang," I said out loud, and the words felt like swallowing a stone. "I'm Aang."
I didn't know whether to laugh or throw up. I'd watched this show a dozen times. I'd defended it in arguments. I'd cried at the finale, and I'd read every comic and watched the sequel series, and I'd even been excited about the new movie. And now I was standing in the body of the kid who'd carried the weight of the entire world on his shoulders, in the middle of a monastery that, if I remembered right, didn't have much time left.
I made myself breathe. In, out. Panic wasn't going to help me. I needed to think.
I leaned closer to the mirror and studied my forehead. Smooth skin. No arrow. I tugged my sleeve up and checked my hands and the backs of my arms, my wrists, anywhere the tattoos could have been. Nothing.
No tattoos.
That meant one of two things. Either I hadn't mastered airbending yet, or the ceremony was coming up soon. In the show, Aang got his arrows at twelve, right around the time he found out he was the Avatar, which meant the clock was already ticking. I was standing at the very start of the story, right before everything fell apart.
I started pacing the room in small circles, which felt strangely natural for these legs.
Okay. First problem. What do I actually have?
I closed my eyes and reached for anything inside me, any trace of what this body knew. Aang had been a prodigy. He could ride the air like it was nothing, and he'd glided, spun, and floated without effort. If I'd inherited even a fraction of that, I could get a head start on everything.
I tried to remember how to bend the wind, and nothing happened.
I waved my hand and pushed out with my arm. I tried to copy the motions I'd seen on screen, the sweeping circles and the sharp, snapping thrusts. The air in the room didn't so much as stir.
I tried again. Still nothing. I stomped, spun, and flung my hands around like an idiot, and the only thing I accomplished was making myself dizzy and stubbing my toe on the chest.
"Ow!" I hopped on one foot, swearing under my breath. When the pain faded, the truth settled over me like a cold blanket. This body had the muscles, but it didn't have the memories. Whatever Aang had learned in twelve years, the lessons, the forms, the instinct, none of it had come with me. It was gone, like someone had wiped a hard drive and left the hardware.
I had Aang's body, and none of Aang's skill.
I sank down onto the bed and stared at my hands. I'd have to start from the very beginning, and I'd have to learn airbending the way a total stranger would, because that was what I was.
For a moment, I felt a flash of despair. Then I thought it through, and something warmer replaced it, a slow, steady kind of hope.
Wait. Why am I only thinking about airbending?
I was the Avatar. Or I would be, officially, in a few months, when the monks figured it out. The Avatar was supposed to master all four elements, and the show had made it look like a nightmare race against time, with Aang barely scraping through each element on the run, learning water in a few weeks, earth in a few days, fire on the fly.
But I didn't have to do it like that. I knew what was coming. I had a hundred-year head start on a war that hadn't started yet. I could begin learning the other elements now, not after the temple burned and the world fell apart. If I trained earth, water, and fire alongside air, then by the time the Fire Nation came, I wouldn't be a scared kid running away. I'd be something much stronger.
And the Avatar had help. Every Avatar before me lived on in a way, in the Avatar State, in the spirit world, in the long chain of past lives. Aang had barely used them, and he'd been afraid of them half the time. But if I could reach them early, if I could actually sit down with Roku and Kyoshi and the others and learn from the people who had mastered these arts…
I stopped. That was a big idea. It might be the biggest one I'd had so far.
My thoughts kept racing. Training under the past Avatars could cut years off the process. But then the other question, the one that had been sitting in my chest like a lead weight, crawled to the front of my mind.
Do I even try to save the airbenders?
I stared at the window, at the clouds, and thought of all the monks who must be somewhere in this temple right now, laughing, eating breakfast, tending their sky bison. I thought about how the fall of this place had shaped the entire rest of the story, how every plan I had would go through the Fire Nation's invasion. Could I really stop it? I was a twelve-year-old with no bending, no army, and no plan.
I almost gave up on the thought, and then I remembered the trailer.
It hit me so suddenly that I actually gasped. The new Avatar movie, the one I'd been watching right before I died. I'd only seen the early footage, but I'd read enough about it to remember the big reveal. There was an Avatar I'd never heard of in the old series, Avatar Sonam, and she had a staff. A staff that could create airbenders. It could call new ones into the world, people who had never had the gift before.
My breath caught.
And I knew where it was. I couldn't explain how, exactly. It was something from the trailer, the lore, the little details they'd shown on screen, but I remembered the location clearly. I could find it.
If I master all four elements first. If I'm strong enough to reach it.
That was the catch. I couldn't just run off and grab it with this tiny, untrained body. I'd need to be the Avatar in full, and I'd need every element behind me. Otherwise I'd just be a kid wandering into danger with no way to protect what I found.
But it meant there was a chance. A real chance. If the Fire Nation killed every airbender, and if I could still get that staff in time, I might be able to bring them back.
I pressed my hands against my face and let out a shaky laugh. It was the kind of laugh you let out when you've been crying and don't know it yet.
"Okay," I whispered. "Okay. That's the plan. That's the plan."
Master the elements early. Train with the past Avatars. Find the staff. Save everyone I could.
And maybe, just maybe, fix the mistakes that had cost the original Aang so much.
I thought about that for a long moment, and my mind went to the places I didn't love to look at. The show had a kind of gentle honesty about it, but I'd always noticed the cracks. Aang had hesitated when hesitation cost lives. He'd run from his responsibilities, and he'd frozen himself in ice for a hundred years while the world burned. He'd let a lot of things slide because he wanted to be kind.
I didn't want to be cruel. But I didn't want to be soft, either. Not this time. Whatever it took, I'd do it.
Footsteps sounded in the hallway outside, and they were slow and unhurried, a soft pat, pat, pat against the stone. I froze, still sitting on the bed, my hands in my lap and my heart pounding.
Then came three light knocks on the door.
"Aang?" a warm, familiar voice called. "Are you awake?"
I knew that voice. I'd heard it in a hundred flashbacks, and it was old, kind, and gravelly with a laugh buried underneath it. My throat tightened so fast I couldn't answer.
The door swung open.
Monk Gyatso stood in the doorway, wearing his orange robes, his gray mustache neatly trimmed, his eyes crinkled with a smile. He looked real. In the show he'd been a memory, a flashback, a ghost. Now he was standing in front of me, solid, breathing, alive, and about to lose everything.
I felt my eyes sting and blinked hard.
"Good morning, Aang!" he said brightly, stepping inside. "I see you're already awake. Good, good. I have wonderful news for you."
I forced my mouth into a smile, because I couldn't have said anything else if I'd tried.
"We've finally scheduled your airbending tattoos," Gyatso went on, beaming at me like a proud grandfather. "Four months from now! The council has agreed that your progress warrants it. Isn't that exciting?"
Four months.
I almost laughed again. Four months was a very short time and a very long one. It was long enough to learn something, and short enough that I could already feel the Fire Nation's shadow creeping closer. In the show, Aang had run away right around the time he learned he was the Avatar. If I didn't change things, I'd lose this place before I ever got the chance to earn those arrows.
I looked at Gyatso, at the gentle old face of a man who had loved me like a son, and I made a decision.
I couldn't do this alone. I didn't have the knowledge, the skill, or the training, and I didn't have time to fumble around and hope. If I wanted to master airbending fast, I needed a teacher. A real one. Someone who knew everything about the art, and who cared enough about me to listen, even if what I was about to say sounded crazy.
I needed an Airbender master on my side.
And there was only one man in this entire temple I trusted to be that person.
I let out a slow sigh, stood up, and squared my small shoulders. My legs were shaking, but my voice, when it came, was steadier than I expected.
"Monk Gyatso," I said. "We need to talk."