He stopped. He stood with his back to me for about two seconds and then turned around. Up close he was taller than I'd expected. His eyes moved over me once, quick.
"I'm sorry?" he said.
"You've been taking scrolls out of the restricted archive. Twenty-four of them so far. I've been watching you for months."
His hand on the satchel strap tightened maybe a quarter inch. His face didn't change.
"I think you have the wrong person," he said.
"Your name is Norri. It's in the checkout ledger. Every entry for the last five years has your name on it." I could hear the edge in my own voice. "I need to know where those scrolls are going."
He looked at me for a while. Adults usually give kids a quick glance and go back to whatever they were doing. He was actually looking. I could see him trying to figure out how a child had gotten into the restricted archive and found the ledger.
"How do you have access to the restricted archive?" he said.
"I can hold a Tier 15 current."
"But you're a novice."
"And?"
He looked at the satchel, then at me. "You should come with me. There is someone who can explain this better than I can."
That was all he gave me.
I followed him.
Youdron's chambers were in the oldest section of the temple, past the dormitories, down a corridor where the stone had been worn smooth by centuries of bare feet. The door was plain wood. Norri knocked twice, waited, and knocked once more. Someone spoke from inside. Norri opened the door.
The smell hit me first. Ink, paper, and scroll sealant, strong enough that it must have been soaking into the walls for years. The room was mostly desk, covered in scrolls, ink stones, and brushes in a wooden holder. The shutters were half-closed. Then I saw the wall behind the desk.
Finished scrolls were stacked from the floor to about shoulder height. There were dozens of them, way more than twenty-four. Some were wrapped in cloth, some loose. All of them were labeled in the same small careful hand.
Youdron was sitting at the desk writing. His brush made careful strokes in a script I didn't recognize. I could read Air script well enough to work an archive in the dark, and whatever this was, it wasn't that.
He looked up. He was very old, older than anyone I'd seen at this temple. His eyes were clear and sharp. They went straight to me.
"Elder Youdron," Norri said from behind me. "This is Sonam. He's a novice. He found the ledger and he's been tracking my visits to the archive."
Youdron set the brush down on its holder, careful not to let the wet end touch the desk. He folded his hands over the scroll.
"Close the door," he said to Norri. Then to me, "Sit down."
There was a cushion near the desk. I sat.
"How long have you been visiting our archive?" Youdron said.
"Two years, Elder Youdron."
"And what did you find that brought you here?"
"There are twenty-four scrolls missing from the collection. Your name is on every checkout entry, and none of them ever came back." I kept my voice level. "When I first found the empty shelves I figured someone was getting rid of the material."
"And that we were responsible," he said.
I looked at the desk. The scroll was open under his hands with the ink still wet on the brush. The stacks of copies lined the wall behind him, each one wrapped and labeled in his script.
"No," I said. "I was wrong."
Youdron didn't confirm it. He watched me.
"You're copying them in code. The originals come here so you can work from them, and the coded copies..." I looked at the wall, then back at Youdron, then over my shoulder at Norri and the satchel he was still holding against his chest. The satchel that came in flat and left full every time I'd watched him. "Norri takes the copies somewhere. That's what's in the satchel. The empty shelves are because you have more checked out than you've finished putting back."
"You worked that out very quickly," Youdron said.
"I've been watching Norri go in and out of that archive for months. The room filled in the rest."
His eyebrows moved about a quarter inch.
"I have a question for you, child." He unfolded his hands and set them flat on the desk. His fingers were stained darker than Norri's, the ink so old and deep I didn't think it would ever wash out. "A boy who can open a Tier 15 door and watch an archive for months must have a reason. What is it?"
I had lies ready. I always had lies ready, like curiosity or boredom or just wanting to see what was on the other side of the door. Any of those would work on a training monk. None of them would work on a man sitting in a room full of evidence that he thought the Air Nomads might not survive. So I gave him the version I'd been rehearsing in my head since I was eight, the one I'd been saving for somebody who might actually listen.
"I've been paying attention to the Fire Nation," I said. "You have too, or you wouldn't be doing any of this. Avatar Roku kept Sozin in check for decades, but Roku's been dead since before I was born. Nobody is keeping Sozin in check now, and he hasn't been sitting still."
Youdron's hands stayed flat on the desk.
"You think these texts might be lost if, spirits forbid, we were colonized. I think you're right about that. But what about the people who wrote them? What would happen to them?"
The room went quiet. Through the half-closed shutters a bison called from somewhere down in the valley, a long sound that faded into the evening air.
"You are very certain of this," Youdron said. "Where does a ten-year-old boy learn to read a Fire Lord's intentions?"
"People talk at the festivals. Monks who travel bring things back. You can learn a lot if you're paying attention." I shrugged. "Unfortunately for us, most people at this temple never do."
That was about a third of the truth. The other two thirds I couldn't explain to anyone.
Youdron picked up the brush. He turned it between his fingers, the wet tip catching the light from the shutters. His hands had a tremor that didn't stop when he held the brush still. The characters on the scroll in front of him were clean and even. The tremor didn't reach the page.
"We have been at this work for seven years," he said. "Norri has placed copies at eleven locations across the Earth Kingdom and the Water Tribes. With scholars we trust, mostly. The coded texts can only be read by someone trained in our notation, which means only an Air Nomad. If something were to happen to the temples, the texts would survive even if no one could read them for a generation. The knowledge would wait."
He set the brush down.
"We began this because it would be irresponsible to leave our traditions unprotected against things we cannot predict. That is what we told ourselves." He looked at me. "In seven years, between the two of us, it never occurred to either of us to think beyond the texts."
"Well I have," I said. "And I think there's something we can do about it."
"What would you have us do?"
"Norri is already going to every temple. He's already carrying things. What if he also carried a set of coordinates? Places people could get to if they ever had to leave in a hurry. He could share them the same way he shares your texts, quietly, with people he trusts."
Youdron's eyes moved to Norri and back to me.
Nobody spoke for a while.
"Come back tomorrow evening," Youdron said. "Bring your coordinates."
"I will."
He nodded. Norri opened the door. I walked back down the corridor toward the dormitories. The stone was cold under my bare feet and the halls were empty.
I came back the next night with everything I'd been carrying in my head for four years. I brought evacuation routes, rendezvous coordinates, and the rough distances I'd been working out from geography texts cross-referenced with what I remembered of the show. I spread it all out on Youdron's desk.
Norri picked up a brush and started taking notes before I'd finished my second sentence. His questions were specific and practical, the kind that told me he'd already been thinking about this stuff on his own. He filled a sheet of paper with lines so tight they could have been printed.
At one point he stopped writing and looked up. "You mentioned a swamp. Have you been there?"
"No."
"Then how would you know it's habitable?"
I told him what I'd learned from the geography texts about water sources and vegetation in the area, and how far it was from any major trade route. I left out the part where I'd watched cartoon characters walk through it on a television screen in another life. He went back to writing.
Youdron asked fewer questions. The ones he asked were bigger. "And how do you propose we do that without causing the panic the Council fears?" I told him the next Yangchen's Festival was a year away and every Air Nomad in the world would be there. He looked at me for a long time after I said that.
We talked until the second bell. Norri would add the coordinates to his existing routes, sharing them quietly with people he already trusted at each temple. The coordinates would move through the same network that carried Youdron's coded texts, slowly, person by person.
I left Youdron's chambers and walked back through the dark corridor toward the dormitories.
Norri walked with me as far as the dormitory corridor. He stopped at the junction with his satchel over his shoulder.
"Be honest. How long have you been planning this?" he said.
"Since I was six."
He stood there for a second. Then he turned and headed back toward the visitors' quarters.
The dormitory was full of sleeping boys. Dawa was breathing with the wet rasp he got in the cold months, three beds over. Jamyang was curled on his side with his blanket pulled over his head, which meant he'd been talking to himself before he fell asleep again. He did that. You could hear him working through whatever had been on his mind that day, a low murmur that went on for ten or fifteen minutes, and then silence. Aang's mat was empty. He was probably on the roof feeding lemurs. Aang slept when Aang felt like sleeping and not a minute before.
I lay down and looked at the ceiling. The coordinates were out of my head and into Norri's handwriting. Tomorrow they'd be in his satchel. After that they'd be in the world.
The dormitory was dark. Dawa's breathing rattled on. Somewhere outside a bison shifted in the paddock and the sound carried through the stone walls, a deep settling that went quiet as the bison found its spot for the night.
I closed my eyes. Norri was leaving in two days. I needed the Foggy Swamp route finalized before he left.