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The rain hadn’t stopped since dawn. It came down in long sheets that blurred the canyon walls into a single streak of grey. Kai tightened the strap on his pauldron and squinted into the storm. “This is insane,” he muttered, mostly to himself, though Jay was close enough to hear.
“Insane,” Jay agreed, yelling over the wind. “But also AWESOME! You ever seen lightning hit this close before?”
A flash cracked across the clouds. The echo rolled down the canyon, rattling stones loose. Kai grimaced.
Cole’s voice crackled through the comm: “Focus, you two. We’re here for the villagers’ shipment, not sightseeing.”
“Yeah, yeah” Kai replied. He adjusted the hood of his soaked gi and started down the narrow trail, departing from the team. Beneath them, a river surged with the day’s rain, swollen and frothing. The mission had sounded simple when Sensei Wu explained it that morning—help recover supplies lost when a bridge collapsed during a storm. The team had split up to cover more ground: Cole and Zane upstream, Jay and Lloyd in the lower basin, Kai on his own section along the mid-canyon ridge.
Fire against water. He’d laughed when they planned it. Seemed funny at the time.
Now it wasn’t.
The wind howled through the ravine. He could taste the metal tang of lightning on the air and smell mud turning to clay beneath his boots. It reminded him of training with Jay and Cole. Somewhere far below, boulders were carried away by the torrent.
“Kai, whats your status?” Lloyd’s voice came through the comm, distorted but steady.
“Fine,” Kai said, though he had to press the transmitter against his mouth to make himself heard. “Nothing but rain. How are you and Lightning Rod?”
Jay’s laugh fizzed in his ear. “Still better than you, Hothead!”
Kai smirked despite the cold. “Funny.” He was about to add another jab when the ground trembled under his feet. A dull roar grew behind him. He turned just in time to see a wall of muddy water bursting through the canyon bend, ripping out trees and debris as it came.
“Uh—guys—” he started, but the rest of the sentence drowned in the sound.
The flood hit him like a truck.
It was not a single wave but a beast of many claws. The world turned upside down. His body pinwheeled through freezing, mucky water, smashing against rocks. He tried to draw heat to his hands—an instinctive defense—but the current spun him too violently.
I can’t swim. I CAN’T SWIM.
When he clawed his way to the surface, he was coughing up half the river. The current dragged him another few yards before throwing him against the roots of a fallen tree. He clung to them until his arms shook and his nails tore against bark. For a moment he simply hung there, gasping, while rain continued to pour down and the world tilted sickly around him.
His ankle throbbed. Had he hit it against something in the water? When he tried to pull himself up, pain shot like a wire from heel to knee. He gritted his teeth and hauled himself onto the riverbank.
He lay on his back, water pooling around him, rain still coming down, every breath burning his lungs.
His communicator blinked once…then fizzed into silence.
“Great,” he muttered. “Perfect.”
He forced himself to sit. The canyon floor stretched on in both directions, slick and desolate. The cliffs rose so high the storm looked trapped between them. Somewhere up there, the others were searching. They’d come back for him. They always did.
He believed that—for the first hour.
By evening, the light was little more than a dull smear behind the clouds. Kai had managed to limp inland toward higher ground, favoring his left leg. Every step sent his stomach twisting from pain and cold. His clothes clung to his skin; even the hood at his neck felt like a noose of ice.
He tried to build a fire on the leeward side of a boulder, sheltered from the wind and rain. Everything was soaked. The twigs hissed mockingly whenever he sparked his flint.
“Come on,” he growled.
He concentrated, drawing the faint warmth still left inside him to his palms. A tiny flame flickered, then sputtered out. The rain immediately swallowed it.
Frustration hit like another blow. He slammed a fist into the dirt, instantly regretted it when pain shot up his wrist. He hissed through his teeth.
He wrapped his arms around his knees and hunched closer to the pathetic ember that finally caught in a half-dry branch.
He had never realized how loud the world could be when no one was talking. Just water, wind, and the occasional crack of falling stone. It felt like something Sensei would spin into a lesson.
“Team Kai,” he whispered hoarsely, the name a joke now. “Guess it’s a solo mission.”
Night brought colder rain. His ankle had swollen grotesquely; even shifting it made him nauseous. He used a torn sleeve of his gi to wrap it tight, then tried to rest. But each time he closed his eyes, the river returned. The tumbling dark, the sensation of drowning, the helpless panic.
When he at last drifted into a doze, voices chased him through the storm.
“We were counting on you, Kai.” Lloyd’s voice, faint and warped by memory.
“You always have to run ahead, don’t you?” Jay.
“One day we won’t be there to bail you out.” Cole, stern and disappointed.
He jolted awake. The fire had gone out. His hands trembled as he tried to reignite it. The flames wavered, painting the canyon walls in orange ghosts.
“That was a dream. Not real,” he told himself. “They’re fine. They’re looking for you right now.”
But the guilt sat heavy on his chest. Because what if they weren’t fine? What if they’d abandoned the mission for him, wading through floodwater and wreckage, wasting time while villagers waited for help?
He was so tired of disappointing people.
By the second day under the rock, fatigue blurred everything into a feverish haze. His ankle refused to support him, so he used a broken branch as a crutch. Every breath scraped like sandpaper. Sometimes he thought he heard his name on the wind; sometimes he actually answered.
“Over here!” he called once, voice cracking. No one replied. He had imagined a rescue.
His body burned with fever—too cold on the outside, too hot within. Steam curled faintly from his shoulders when he tried to summon a flame. The irony wasn’t lost on him: the master of fire shivering himself to death.
At midday he ventured out to a slope where debris had piled up—splintered wood, tangled rope, what looked like a piece of one of the Ninja’s gliders. Hope spiked through him so sharply it hurt.
“They were here,” he breathed. “They were here.”
He searched the wreckage frantically, ignoring the pain. A fragment of Jay’s gear, maybe, or just a scrap of blue fabric—but it was enough to convince him. They’d been close. Maybe they’d found the supplies and gone back.
Or maybe they’d decided Kai wasn’t worth delaying the mission.
The thought rooted itself so deep it made him dizzy.
He sat there for a long time, rain drumming on his bowed head.
“Figures,” he rasped. “They needed to finish the job, save the day, and I’m just the moron who got himself washed away.”
He pushed to his feet, ignoring the scream of his ankle.
But the slope gave way under his next step. The world lurched, and he fell hard, rolling through mud and rock until pain exploded across his ribs. He lay there, breathless, staring at the grey sky that seemed to stretch forever.
Something inside him cracked then—not a bone, but resolve.
That night he didn’t even try to light a fire. He sat in the dark, soaked through, watching the river glow faintly with reflected lightning. His breath wheezed shallowly, each exhale misting in the cold air.
He thought of Nya, small and fierce, waiting for him to come home when they were kids. He used to tell her stories about their parents to keep her from worrying. Lies, mostly, but comforting ones.
Maybe she was the reason he hated being alone. He’d spent too much of his life pretending he wasn’t.
His eyelids drooped. Rain drummed a lullaby on the stones. He imagined he heard Nya’s voice now, gentle but exasperated: “You always overdo it, Kai.”
“Yeah,” he whispered. “Guess I do.”
He didn’t notice the search lights until the canyon walls began to shimmer faintly around him.
At first he thought it was another dream. White beams cut through the rain, with shapes moving on the ridge. He blinked hard, but they didn’t vanish. Voices echoed distantly.
“Cole, I’ve got heat signatures!”
That was Zane—clear, sharp.
“Kai! Where are you?!” Lloyd’s shout, desperate and close.
He tried to answer, but his voice was hoarse. “Down…here…”
He coughed violently, pain tearing through his chest. The lights swept past, then doubled back. Someone shouted his name again, nearer this time. Was that Nya?
Boots splashed through mud. The world tilted sideways, and hands caught his shoulders.
“Kai! Hey—hey, look at me!” Nya’s face came into focus, soaked and furious and terrified all at once. “Don’t you dare pass out on me.”
He blinked up at her. The others crowded behind—Lloyd, Jay, Cole, Zane—mud-streaked and dripping, but real. He tried to smile, but failed.
“Did…did you finish the mission?” he rasped. “You shouldn’t’ve—”
Nya actually laughed, a choked sound. “The villagers are taken care of. We’ve been looking for you!”
Cole’s hand was firm on his shoulder. “We’ve got you. Easy now.”
Kai’s body trembled uncontrollably, exhaustion closing in like a curtain. “Thanks for comin’ back for me.”
The team’s voices blurred together: reassurance, command, jokes meant to keep fear at bay. He caught snippets—Zane reporting vitals, Jay complaining about mud, Lloyd’s quiet “We found him, Sensei.”
Nya never left his side.
Somewhere between waking and sleep, he whispered, “Fire doesn’t go out that easy.”