Avatar: The New World

Chapter 13: A Lesson in Volatility Part I

Lula

Lula waited in Dr. Whynn's office. It was the first, and possibly only, time she'd ever find herself alone in the room so she took advantage by flipping through folder after folder of intelligence reports. She looked at the faces staring back at her from each report and shook her head. How could these people be terrorists? They looked just fine to her. Of course, each report had a brief description of the circumstance in which each person had discovered their bending and some of them were truly horrific, but many of them seemed like simple mistakes that were easily fixed.

She looked nervously around the room, as if Mariella was poised to come out of the shadows at any time, then removed a small spy camera from her bag. Vince had given it to her. He said it came from the journalist he'd recruited to help her break her story, though he still wouldn't give her the person's name.
"I'm telling you, Lu," he said, "It's better if you don't know for now. When it's time to break the news, then you'll know."

She reminded him that he thought everything was big these days and he just laughed and assured her it was true. Something big was happening, bigger than Dr. Whynn, bigger than ToCo, bigger than Capital City even, and Lula was sitting right in the middle of it all. "We play this right," Vince said, "We'll be set for life. For life, Lu!"

So she did play, and she played well. She listened to everything Mariella told her, combing through the information for clues about what was really happening at ToCo. She smiled at the people on her campaign stops and waved as they begged for her attention. She even prepared for hours before every debate, not that she needed it. She could have stood up there silently batting her lashes and the people still would have announced her the winner. There was nothing she could do that would tarnish her image in the eyes of the voters. She was their mayor, their hero, and she had to tell herself everyday that heroes took risks for the greater good. Otherwise she'd run away from Toro Corporation Headquarters and never look back. She'd go to her lake house, but obviously ToCo knew where that was. Maybe she could just ask Jing to drive her somewhere, anywhere. They could just drive and drive and never stop. Or maybe she could go home.

Would Whynn find her there? She never talked about her home life to anyone, nobody knew about the farm, or her family. As far as the citizens of Capital City knew, Lula had grown up home schooled in the mountains. People were so easy to convince. Of course, she could have told them about the mud hole she'd been raised in--it wasn't the place she wanted to hide, it was the people.

As she reached the bottom of the pile of reports, she recognized one of the faces peering up at her. Rorrick Lahaye, the terrorist who had burned Capital City. She snapped a picture of his file and gritted her teeth. The two parts inside her were battling again. Help people, gain power, fix the world, own the world! She hated Rorrick for what he did to her city, but she loved him for what he did to her career.

She flipped to the last report and her heart stopped. She felt herself put the camera back in her bag but she was on autopilot now. She walked away from the desk, taking the last report with her. She sat down in Whynn's chair and stared at the face of Jeera Yang, the nurse who saved her life. His file said he was a water bender with the ability to heal people. Her hand moved to her chest, there was a faint scar there from Lee's second attack at her lake house but it was because of Jeera that there was only one. Someone else may have been able to save her life, but she would have been left with dozens of reminders of the man who wanted to kill her. She read his file and learned about the night Jeera saved her, about how his co-worker had turned him in after he healed her, how ToCo Security chased him onto the train where TWL intervened and took him away.

TWL? What was TWL? Lula tried to find another reference to it somewhere else in the file but there was nothing. She went back to the others and realized that every one of them mentioned TWL had prevented Security from doing their job.