The hands were wrong again.
I'd been staring at them on and off for six years and they still caught me at bad moments. Like right now, gripping the riding harness inside a sky bison's saddle while the animal banked hard enough to make my stomach roll. The fingers were too short. The knuckles were smooth where there should have been a ridge on the middle one from holding a pen for fifteen years. The calluses were wrong too, sitting at the base of the ring finger and the thumb pad from staff drills instead of where they used to be. Six years I'd had these hands and they still felt borrowed.
That was the thing nobody tells you about reincarnation. Everyone imagines the memories would be the hard part, or the knowledge gap, or waking up as a baby with a full adult's worth of experience crammed behind eyes that can't focus past six inches. The actual hard part is that the body never quite stops being someone else's. You get used to it. You learn to use it. But every so often you look down and expect the other hands and they're just not there.
The bison dipped and a kid behind me screamed with what sounded like equal parts joy and terror. I tightened my grip and kept my eyes on my knees. We were somewhere over a mountain range I couldn't name yet, flying east toward the Eastern Air Temple for Bonding Day. Every six-year-old Air Nomad from all four temples, gathered in one place to meet the bison that would carry them for the rest of their lives. I'd watched the show. I knew how this was supposed to go. The bison chooses you, not the other way around.
Saren, the young monk chaperoning our group from the Southern Temple, was leaning so far over the saddle's leading edge that I was mildly concerned he'd fall out. He was maybe twenty, and he loved being in the air with a kind of physical commitment that was hard to look away from. His whole body leaned into every turn.
"Those are the Kuolan Peaks down there, boys. We'll see the temple right after the next ridge." He pointed at something below us and all eleven boys immediately rushed to the left side of the saddle to look. The bison tilted. Three of them went down in a pile. Saren laughed and pushed a gust of air under the saddle to straighten us out without even turning around.
I stayed where I was.
The ridge passed under us and then there it was.
I'd known it would be three separate mountains. I'd seen it in the show. But knowing something from a screen and seeing it from the back of a flying animal at six thousand feet are different experiences. Three peaks rose out of a layer of low cloud, and each one carried its own cluster of green-roofed pagodas and hanging gardens. Bridges connected the peaks at three different heights. The widest one looked broad enough for bison to cross. The other two were narrow, footpaths strung between the mountains with nothing underneath them but a long fall into white cloud. Waterfalls dropped from caves in the rock and disappeared into the mist below. Bison circled between the peaks, dozens of them, white and brown against the gray stone.
The boys made a sound that I don't think had any actual language in it. Jamyang, the kid next to me who talked to everyone about everything, had both hands pressed flat on the railing and his mouth open.
I looked at the bridges. I counted them. I noted the construction, stone and timber, and I estimated how long it would take to bring each one down. The center bridge could be collapsed from either end by a decent earthbender. The upper two would take one person and maybe ten minutes each. Once the bridges were gone, each peak would be its own island. Nothing reaches you unless it can fly.
I caught myself doing this and made myself stop. I was six years old and I was going to meet a bison and I did not need to be running a defensive assessment on someone else's temple right now.
We landed on a wide stone platform on the center mountain's east face. The stone was dark and polished smooth from centuries of bison landings. A row of nuns waited for us at the platform's edge. They wore saffron and orange robes, their hair was cropped close, and they were smiling with the patience of women who had welcomed eleven groups of six-year-olds before lunch. We poured out of the saddle in a graceless heap. A boy named Dorren caught his foot on the saddle lip and a nun grabbed his collar one-handed without pausing her conversation with the nun beside her. She was holding a clay pot in her other hand and she didn't spill a drop.
That was impressive. That kind of reflexive precision came from serious training, Tier 15 at minimum. I made a mental note. The nuns at this temple were good.
They fed us on a terrace that looked out over the space between the peaks. Rice and spiced lentils and a green fruit with pink flesh inside that tasted like absolutely nothing I had a reference for from my previous life. Bison drifted overhead, their shadows crossing the food. A group from the Northern Temple had gotten there before us and their boys were louder than ours, which was saying something, because one of them was currently standing on top of a railing that definitely wasn't rated for that.
"You see that kid up there?" Jamyang said through a mouthful of rice. "That's Karma. He rode a wild hog-monkey down the north face of his temple last year."
"On purpose?"
"He grabbed it coming out of the kitchens and it just took off running. He couldn't let go because the thing was biting him every time he tried, so he held on all the way down to the tree line." Jamyang was grinning so hard it looked like it hurt. "The monks found him in a snowbank an hour later with bite marks all up his arms and the first thing he said was can I do it again."
As if on cue, Karma dropped from the railing, landed on a cushion he'd apparently set up underneath himself in advance, and bounced to his feet looking pleased. He was missing a front tooth. He had a scabbed-over razor nick on the left side of his scalp where someone had gotten a little aggressive with the morning shave. He looked like exactly the kind of kid who would ride a hog-monkey down a mountain on purpose and then ask to do it again.
After the meal the nuns led us down into the mountain. The path spiraled inward and the air changed as we went, going from thin and cold to thick and warm, picking up the smell of hay and animal heat. The smell got denser the deeper we went until it was less a smell and more a physical presence, the accumulated animal warmth of a space that had housed bison for a thousand years. Then the path opened out and we were in the stables.
The chamber was carved from the mountain's interior and it was enormous. One full wall was open to the sky through a gap wide enough for an adult bison to fly through. Stalls lined both sides, separated by low stone dividers. And in the stalls, the calves.
They were about the size of large carts, each one. Six legs folded under them, flat tails, wet brown eyes. They watched us come in with an absolute stillness that had nothing to do with being afraid and everything to do with sizing us up. These animals already knew what was happening. They'd been waiting.
Sister Iio stood in the center of the chamber. She was tall and her robes were a shade darker than the other nuns, and she held a basket of red apples against her hip with the ease of someone who had run this ceremony more times than most of these kids had been alive.
"Take one apple," she said. She waited while forty-six small hands reached into the basket. "Hold it out. Stand still. Let them come to you. Don't chase." Her eyes found the kid from the Northern Temple who was already leaning toward the nearest stall. "That means you, young man."
Karma was already gone.
He went straight for the biggest calf in the chamber, a brown-and-white bull with shoulders wider than Karma's full armspan. He planted his feet and held the apple out at the end of a perfectly straight arm and stood completely still for about four seconds, which I suspected was some kind of personal best. The calf leaned forward, took the apple, and then sneezed directly on Karma's face. It was a real sneeze, a full bison sneeze with everything that implies, and Karma just stood there dripping with his grin still fully operational.
"Thunderguts," he announced. He still hadn't wiped his face. "His name is Thunderguts."
Sister Iio looked at him. She looked up at the ceiling for a moment. She looked back at him. "Traditionally we wait until the bonding is confirmed before we name them."
"Oh it's confirmed," Karma said. "Look at him. He loves me already."
The calf ate Karma's sleeve.
I took my apple and walked. I didn't head for the nearest stall or the farthest or the biggest animal. I just moved through the chamber and tried to get the part of my brain that was counting exits and estimating ceiling load capacity to shut up for five minutes. I told myself the bison was a practical asset. A flying mount, fast, strong, loyal to one rider. I told myself it was a resource, like anything else in this world. I told myself none of this was real and none of it mattered and the apple in my hand was a prop in a story I was reading from inside.
She was in a middle stall on the left side of the chamber. She was smaller than the others, gray-brown with a white arrow on her forehead that matched the tattoos I would earn someday if I lived long enough. She was lying down with her legs tucked under her and her tail curled around her body, and she was already looking at me when I got there. Her eyes were brown and very still. I couldn't tell you how I knew she'd been watching me since I walked in. I just knew.
I knelt down next to the stall's low wall. The stone was warm from her body. She smelled like hay and clean fur and the cold thin air of high places, even here inside the mountain.
I held out the apple. She leaned right past it and pressed her nose into my palm, into the skin underneath the apple, and she breathed in. Just one long, slow breath that pulled across my hand and up my wrist, and the warmth of it traveled up my arm and into the center of my chest and just stayed there.
The apple rolled out of my hand. I didn't pick it up. I reached over and put my fingers on the bridge of her nose and she let me. Her fur was coarser than I'd expected and very warm. I could feel her heartbeat through the bone of her skull, slow and big and steady.
I knelt there on the warm stone in the dark belly of a mountain with my hand on a living animal's face and her heartbeat under my fingers and for the first time in six years I could not make this world feel like fiction. I couldn't do it. I tried. I told myself she was an animal in a cartoon world and the cartoon world wasn't real and I wasn't really here and none of it counted. And it just didn't take. The heartbeat was too steady. The breath was too warm. She was looking at me and I was looking at her and whatever was happening between us was not something I had a framework for dismissing.
Mine.
She ate the apple off the ground eventually and then put her head across my legs and closed her eyes. Her head weighed about as much as the rest of me. I sat there under the weight of it and felt her ribs moving against my knee as she breathed, in and out, in and out, and I didn't think about bridge engineering or troop movement timelines or how many years were left before a comet turned the sky the wrong color.
I just sat there.
Karma found me about twenty minutes later. His robes were soaked through with bison saliva and he was holding a second apple.
"Did you give her a name yet?"
"Not yet."
"Do you want to feed them together? I've got a spare." He held the apple up. "Thunderguts already had three of them. I'm pretty sure he's going to be the biggest bison that's ever lived."
"She's not hungry. She just ate."
Karma sat down next to me without asking if the space was available. That was apparently just how Karma worked. He offered my bison his apple and she cracked one eye open to take it and then closed the eye again.
"I'm from the Northern Temple," he said. "I'm Karma. What's your name?"
"Sonam. I'm from the Southern Temple."
"Is it true that your airball court doesn't have a floor? Like if you miss the goal the ball just falls off the mountain?"
"It has a floor. It's about three hundred feet down."
His whole face lit up. Both eyes went wide, his mouth dropped open, even the scab on his scalp shifted. "That is the single greatest thing anyone has ever told me," he said. He sounded like he meant it completely.
He reached over and scratched behind my bison's ear and started humming something tuneless and happy to himself. My bison's tail thumped once against the stone floor.
We sat there for a while. Karma told me about a lemur at his temple that stole a whole melon from the kitchens and ate it on the roof and nobody could get it down because every time someone got close it threw melon rind at them. He told me about his friend Tenpa who could hold his breath for four minutes and how they'd tested this in the communal bath and Tenpa passed out underwater and Karma had to grab him by the hair and drag him up and they both got cleanup duty for a month. He just talked. He filled whatever silence was available with whatever was in his head and he did it without any apparent effort or self-consciousness. I let him. It cost me nothing and it was close to pleasant.
The nuns collected us at dusk. Boys and bison calves walked together back up the spiral path, the calves stumbling on the stairs because the stairs were built for human feet, the boys sending little puffs of air beneath the calves' bellies to help them balance. Karma walked beside me. Thunderguts tried to eat his collar the entire way up.
On the landing platform, while we waited for our riding bison to be saddled, I walked to the stone railing at the edge. The sun had gone behind the western peak and the bridges between the mountains had turned into dark lines against the cloud layer, which was glowing orange and gold from below. The first stars were showing above the pagodas.
Three peaks and three bridges. I noticed myself thinking it again. If you cut the bridges, each mountain becomes its own fortress. I noticed it and I let it pass.
My bison had followed me to the railing. Her head came up to about my shoulder. She was looking out at the same view, or whatever it is a bison sees when the light is going and the air is cooling down and the day is ending.
I put my hand on her neck and felt her pulse under my fingers.
"Come on," I said. "We're going home."
She followed me to the saddle without needing an apple.