AS.Wilder

What you’ll find here

✦ ✧ ✦

Writing updates (drafting, posting schedules, snippets, moodboards, playlists etc.)

Rambling about story craft, characters, and feelings, especially Jake Sully

Notion Templates for writers (because yes, I’m that person)

I love making moodboards and have an extensive collection of images which I am happy to share! Feel free to message if you see a picture you want to use! I have a degree in Art and Photography and have used that skill set to build an extensive library of upscaled and enhanced Avatar photos.

If you want to follow my other blog @aswilderuniverse where I post Fandom content + reblogs + occasional “I’m not okay” screaming

You can also follow me on Instagram, X, Tiktok. I'm always looking for mutuals.

My current obsessions (in case it wasn’t obvious)

The Lion King has had me since forever — and Simba is my absolute weakness. Even when I don't post for him, he is my OG.

And I’m completely, unapologetically in love with Avatar… especially my KING Jake Sully.

I write with Notion (and I’m obsessed with it)

I use Notion to organize basically everything: story hubs, outlines, character + worldbuilding notes, scene banks, revision checklists, posting plans — all of it. If you ever wonder how I keep track of my plots without combusting, the answer is: Notion. Always Notion.

I do not use Generative AI, I feel its important to say that, especially in the climate we're currently living in. If you have questions on my process, you can check out this post here!

Templates (if you’re into that!)

I also sell my Notion templates on the Notion Marketplace for anyone who wants to steal my systems and make their writing life easier. I give them away for free, I make no profit from my templates because I believe creative tools should be available to everyone. If you’re a writer who loves structure (or needs structure like me), you might like them.

The link to my Marketplace is here, and the link to my Ao3 is here!

You can also find my Wattpad right here!

Finally, I'm still pretty new to Tumblr, if you see me use a Gif/Photo or anything that doesn't belong to me, please message me because I did not do it on purpose! I will happily put credit or remove the post!

Let’s be mutuals

If you like fandom + writing + intense character feelings + organized creative chaos, you’re in the right place. Feel free to say hi, ask me about my projects, or scream about Simba and Jake with me.

Before light found the sky, Neytiri was already moving.

She rose in the dark and took her bow.

No clan fed her now. That truth had settled into her body the way grief settles, not sharp but constant, present in every meal she did not have handed to her, every fire she did not sit at with sisters who once teased her for eating too fast. She was a Tsahìk's daughter and mate to a dead man and mother to an unborn one, and none of that fed her. Only her own hands could.

So she hunted, some mornings well and some mornings badly and some mornings not at all, and it did not matter which, because the act itself had become its own medicine. Her body did not always agree to it. There were mornings the sickness climbed before she had gone a hundred strides, mornings her arms shook too badly to hold the draw steady, mornings she crouched in the wet brush and had to simply breathe until the grey at the edges of her sight receded. On those mornings she stayed low and still longer than any hunt required, not from patience but from necessity, and told herself the two were the same thing.

Jake felt all of it — his ruined body lying still in the shack's cold room, his soul riding behind her ribs, the one part of him the fire had not taken.

You don't have to do this every day, he said, more than once, in the flat grey hour before dawn when her legs would not quite hold her weight and she straightened anyway.

"I know."

That's not the same as not doing it.

She did not answer him. There was no answer that would satisfy either of them. The truth was simpler than argument: the bow remembered her hands even when her hands forgot themselves. The stillness before a shot, the read of wind through leaf, the old language of weight shifting through a stalking foot — these had not changed, whatever else had. For the length of a hunt she was not a vessel carrying two lives and a grief too large to carry. She was only a hunter, the thing she had been before she had ever been anything else, and some mornings that remembering was the only mercy the day gave her.

Grace had offered, once, to spare her the trouble.

"We could go out for you," Grace had said. "Norm's not a bad shot. It would save you the trip."

It had been early, when the shack still held only waiting. Norm had come out with one of the demons' long metal things slung over his shoulder, offering it with the careful, apologetic air of a man extending a gift he suspected would be refused.

Neytiri had looked at the weapon. At its straight black lines, its cold weight, the small dead click it made even resting still in Norm's arms. She had looked at it the way she looked at everything the Sky People carried that killed from far away and asked nothing of the hand that held it.

"No."

The word had come out flat and final, a door closing rather than an argument opened. Grace had not pushed. Something in Neytiri's face must have told her there was no ground to push against.

It was not pride. A hunt taken with a demon's weapon, killed at a distance too great to know the animal's eye, blessed by no word and no breath and no gratitude spoken over the still body — that was not hunting. That was only killing, and killing without the rest of it fed no one who mattered.

When she caught something — Ipiran's smaller game, the striped ground-runners no larger than a forearm, once even a slow, elderly nantang too worn to flee her properly — she brought it back and cleaned it herself, and before the first cut into meat she spoke the words she had spoken over every kill since she was old enough to hold a knife. Thanks to the Great Mother for the body given. A promise that the body taken would return to Her in turn. She did this even when no one watched. She did this especially when no one watched, because the words were not for Grace's ears or Norm's, and because some small stubborn part of her still needed to prove that exile had not managed to take the one thing that made her Omaticaya even now: that she ate as the People ate, blessed as the People blessed, no matter how far the People's law had pushed her from their fires.

Some mornings gave her nothing.

The game did not always make itself known to the arrow; some days the forest simply declined her, and no skill of hers could argue a creature into the open that did not wish to be found. On those mornings, and on the worse mornings when her body would not carry her far enough to hunt at all — when the sickness sat too heavy, when her legs would not answer, when Jake's voice went tight and worried behind her ribs long before she admitted defeat — she gathered instead. Root and fruit and the soft new leaf of the plants Mo'at had taught her to know blind, by smell alone, since before she could properly walk. It was slower work and humbler, and it filled her only enough to keep two lives fed rather than three or four, but it was still her own hands doing it, still no one's charity, still hers.

And there were mornings, not many but enough to remember, when the forest gave generously. A fat prürhupa dropped clean with one arrow. A second kill following the first before the light had fully come. On those mornings she carried home more than her own hunger required, and she did not pretend otherwise when she laid the extra portion on the counter Grace had cleared for her things.

"You don't have to," Grace said the first time, startled into saying it.

"I know," Neytiri said.

The nights were their own kind of hunt, and their own kind of mercy.

Every evening she went down into sleep the way a woman goes down a path she has walked so many times her feet no longer ask her eyes for help — without fear now, only need, only the old animal certainty that on the other side of the dark something waited that would not vanish the way the waking world kept vanishing around her. She did not always find the pond. Sometimes it was only his voice in some other formless place, or his hand before the rest of him arrived, or the two of them sitting somewhere without a name, the forest reduced to light and breath. But she always found him. That was the mercy the dream never once failed to give her, however cruel it was in every other way: it gave him back whole, and it gave him back warm, and for as long as the dream lasted she was not a woman carrying a dead man's soul and a living child through a war that had not finished taking things from her. She was only his.

Waking was its own torture.

There was a moment, brief and merciless, the same every morning, before her body remembered, when her hand moved before she woke fully and reached for the warmth that had been beside her in the dream. Some mornings she did this and caught herself mid-motion, some small guarding instinct closing her fingers before they found empty air. Other mornings she was not fast enough. Her hand went out into the cold space where he should have been and found only the packed earth or the shack's hard floor, and for one unguarded breath her whole body waited for warmth that did not come.

Then the fog came down.

Dropping over the dream's warmth the way mist dropped over the forest at first light, erasing the shapes that had seemed so solid in the dark. The pond gone. His hands gone. Only the voice left, threaded behind her ribs, patient and bodiless and his, and it was not enough. It had never once been enough. It only made the leaving of the dream crueller, because the voice stayed to prove exactly how much of him was missing.

I know, he said, some mornings, before she had said anything at all. He always felt it. There was no hiding the particular shape of that grief from a man living behind her own ribs.

"You do not have to say it," she told him once, low, before the sun had fully cleared the trees. Grief threading through her bones as she pressed her hands to her face.

I know, he said again.

That was the worst of it, and the only comfort in it. Whatever the dream gave and the morning took, he lost it exactly when she did. Neither of them got to keep it and neither of them got to grieve it alone. Some mornings that shared ache was the closest thing to being held that the waking world would allow her.

─── · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ───

It took several days for Grace and Norm to make their plans.

Or perhaps it took longer. Time had begun to lose its edges inside the shack. It thinned and thickened around the same few things until the world was made only of them: the cold room door; Grace's voice behind it, low and clipped and breaking only when she thought no one heard; the machines that watched Jake's ruined body with tireless patience; the clearing where Seze and Jake's ikran kept their own vigil in the wet grass; the floor where Neytiri slept when sleep took her; the place beneath her ribs where Jake waited and spoke and tried, again and again, to make himself less worth saving.

Morning came by the colour of the glass.

Night came by the way the forest pressed closer to the windows.

Her body marked the rest.

The sickness had a shape now — quieter than the hard climb that had felled her beside the cold room door, a low and constant pull, as if some patient hand had taken hold of her from the inside to draw her thin one breath at a time. She had learned its ways because there was nothing else to do: if she stood too quickly the room moved; if she went too long without eating the emptiness under her ribs turned black at the edges.

You have to sit down, he said the third morning, when she came back from the stream with the filled skin against her hip and sweat cooling along her spine though the air was not warm enough for it.

Neytiri set the water down on the counter and did not answer.

Neytiri.

She unstoppered the skin and drank.

The water went down too cold. Her stomach turned once around it and settled by force.

Please don't do that.

"Do what."

Make me watch you pretend I can't feel it.

Her hand tightened around the water skin.

From the other side of the room, Norm looked up. He had been bent over a sheet of paper, hair coming loose around his face, eyes red-rimmed from too little sleep and too much light. He looked from Neytiri to the empty air beside her shoulder, then carefully back down again.

Grace still watched her with the helpless, furious attention of a healer seeing a wound refuse to be named.

Now she stood at the old communications station with one hand pressed to the headphones over one ear and the other braced on the table. Her avatar body should have made her look strong. In this light she looked only borrowed. Blue skin under hard white lamps. Human grief wearing Pandoran bones.

"Say that again," Grace said to the machine.

Neytiri went still, ears pricking up.

Norm's head lifted fully this time.

The room changed before any of them understood why. Grace's fingers tightened on the headset. Her mouth went flat and white at the edges. She listened to a voice Neytiri could not hear clearly, a thin scratching thread buried under static, and all at once the waiting gathered itself into one moment.

Max.

The name had become a door in the room. A man behind the walls. A voice Grace reached for in the hours before dawn. A small, dangerous hope carried through machines Neytiri did not trust and words she did not understand.

She had never seen his face.

She had no shape for him except Grace's face while she listened.

"No," Grace said. "No, don't bring it through the north fence. If they sweep the road—" She stopped. Listened. Her eyes flicked once toward Neytiri, then away. "You did what?"

Norm stood.

Trudy came in from outside, pushing the door shut with her shoulder. Rain clung to her human hair and to the black cloth covering her arms. The mask set tight to her face. Her eyes took in the room in one fast pass — Grace at the comms, Norm upright, Neytiri still as a drawn bow — and she closed the door without a sound.

"Is that him?" Trudy asked.

Grace lifted one finger. Wait.

The machine hissed and crackled.

Neytiri heard only fragments: a man's voice, far away and flattened. Not words she could keep.

Grace closed her eyes.

"Max," she said, low. "You beautiful idiot."

Norm made a strangled sound that might have been a laugh and might not.

"What?" Trudy demanded. "What did he do?"

Grace listened one more breath. Then she pulled the headset down around her neck and turned to them.

For the first time since Neytiri had carried Jake's body through the door, hope stood in Grace's face without apology.

"He moved it," she said.

Norm stared at her. "Moved what?"

"All of it." Grace's hand shook once before she flattened it against the table. "The clean tank. The cradle array. The culture drums. Stasis fluid, enough to start, if it survived transport. He moved everything he could get loose out of the main stores before they finished inventorying what was left after the fight."

"Moved it where?" Trudy asked.

Grace looked to the dark window.

Beyond it, the forest breathed. Somewhere in the trees, Seze shifted her weight.

"Not inside the gate," Grace said. "That's the point. He couldn't get us in. He got the equipment out."

The words meant little by themselves, but their shape was clear enough. Neytiri came closer.

Grace saw her and changed the language of her hands, if not her words. She pointed on the paper spread across the table: lines, circles, square marks, the demon's view of a living land flattened into strokes.

"Here," she said, tapping one place hard enough to bend the paper. "Old field station. East rim. Decommissioned years ago after the jungle took half the power grid and the team got pulled back inside the perimeter. Nobody uses it. Nobody watches it. They keep the main cameras on the walls, the roads, the active pads. Not a dead shack they already wrote off as empty."

A dead shack.

Neytiri looked down at the marks. Straight lines. Small boxes. Lies about the world made neat enough to mistake for knowing.

"It is a trap," she said.

Grace's mouth tightened. Not in anger. In respect for the question.

"It would look like one," she said. "If they knew there was anything there. They don't."

"They will know when you go."

"That's why we're not giving them time to look." Grace drew one finger from the old station toward a darker cluster of lines Neytiri knew only as Hell's Gate because everyone in the room hated it when they said the name. "Max sets a fire here. Science wing. Not enough to kill anyone if he does it right, God willing, but enough smoke and alarms and panic to pull every guard and engineer inward. Every eye in the place turns toward the fire. Every road goes that direction. We come in from the east, away from the glow, and lift the whole station out. It's a drop-module. The demons slung it in on a cable years ago and never bothered to sling it out. Max cut it off its footings before he lit the fire. Shack, tank, and all. We lift it whole, and we go."

"No fight," Trudy said, as if saying it could make it true.

Grace looked at her. "No fight. If we fight, we lose. If they see us, we lose. This works because they don't know there's anything worth seeing."

"And because they're too busy putting out Max's fire," Norm said softly.

Neytiri looked at the small machine that had carried his voice. A man she had never seen had moved the tools to the forgotten edge of his own people and now meant to set fire to their heart so she could take them. He would not come with them. He would not be in the dark path out. He would be the flame behind the walls.

"He stays," she said.

Grace's eyes came to her.

For a moment no one answered.

Then Grace said, "Yes."

The one word sat in the room.

Jake rose inside her so suddenly that her breath caught.

No.

It was not the worn, sad no of the last days. Not the voice that had asked for rest, that had begged to be released because months would take too much of her. This came hard and immediate, a body throwing itself in front of a blade it no longer possessed.

No. Neytiri, no.

She turned her face a little away from the room because the force of him went through her eyes first.

Grace saw. Of course she saw.

"What is it?" she asked.

Neytiri did not answer her.

You are not going there, Jake said.

His voice filled her. Low. Fierce. Terrified past pride.

Anyone else. Grace can take Norm. Trudy can fly. Max already staged it. They don't need you.

"They need hands," Neytiri said aloud.

Trudy's gaze sharpened.

Grace did not move.

They need people who aren't carrying a baby and a dead man in the same body.

The words struck low.

Neytiri's hand closed over the edge of the table. The paper crumpled under her fingers.

Jake felt it and did not retreat.

Listen to me. Listen for once. You go out there carrying me and the baby both, toward Hell's Gate, toward everything that killed us, and if something happens—

"Then I will not let something happen."

That's not an answer.

"It is mine."

Neytiri.

There were too many people watching. There was too much white light. Too many demon machines breathing around the cold room where Jake's body lay cut off from touch and warmth. She had been torn apart in front of all of them already and still the room had ways of taking more.

She lifted her eyes to Grace.

"You need me," she said.

Grace's jaw worked.

Norm looked away.

Trudy did not.

"We need someone who can move quietly in dark," Trudy said, careful. "Someone who can carry more than a human can. Someone who won't freeze if something goes sideways on the ground."

Grace turned on her. "Trudy."

"She's asking for truth," Trudy said. "That's the truth."

Grace looked back at Neytiri. Her grief and her guilt and her scientist's need all moved under her face, none of them winning cleanly.

"I won't order you into this," she said.

Neytiri almost laughed.

Order.

As if any of them had that right.

"You do not order me," she said. "I go."

Jake recoiled inside her as if the words had hands.

No. No, damn it—

"I carried him out of the fire," Neytiri said.

The room went still.

Her voice had not risen. It did not need to.

She looked at Grace. At Norm. At Trudy. Not at the cold room door. If she looked there, she would go to it and put her hands on what was left of him and the going would become impossible for one more breath.

"I carried his body here. I carry his spirit now. I will not send you to the edge of the demons' country to bring home the rest of him while my own hands stay clean."

Inside her, Jake made a sound with no words in it.

Pain. Anger. Love turned against itself until it cut both ways.

Before anyone could answer, the door to the shack pushed open.

Mo'at stepped in with the forest behind her.

No one had heard her come.

That, too, was a kind of answer.

Rain shone along her shoulders and in the beads at her throat. Her eyes moved once around the room — Grace at the machine, the map crushed under Neytiri's hand, Norm half-standing, Trudy by the door — then came to rest on her daughter.

She had the look already.

The Tsahìk's stillness. The mother under it.

"So," Mo'at said. "The night has chosen itself."

─── · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ───

Mo'at read her before she let her go.

Not in the main room with Grace trying not to watch and watching anyway. Not under the white lights or beside the demon-map with Hell's Gate made small and flat beneath Neytiri's hand. Mo'at took her outside, where the rain had thinned into mist and the clearing smelled of wet leaves, old metal, and the deep animal musk of waiting ikran.

Seze lifted her head when Neytiri came down the steps.

Jake's ikran lifted with her.

The two beasts had not left the clearing since the night Jake's body arrived. They hunted and came back. They slept apart and woke facing the same door. Seze still turned toward Neytiri at once, bond alive and bright under the skin, but the riderless one watched the shack with eyes too intelligent for mercy.

It could not understand.

Neytiri looked away first.

Mo'at's hand touched her chin and brought her back.

"Do not turn your face from every grief that looks at you," her mother said.

Neytiri's throat tightened.

"I am not."

Mo'at's mouth changed in the smallest possible way. Not disbelief. Sorrow that had known her too long.

She took Neytiri's face between both hands.

The touch was warm. Familiar. Unbearable. Neytiri had been a child once under those hands, fevered after her first long hunt, furious from some lesson failed, bright with secrets she had thought no mother could read. Mo'at had always read them. Pulse under the jaw. Breath held too high. Heat in the skin. Spirit moving wrong behind the eyes.

Now her thumbs rested below Neytiri's cheekbones, and the reading went deeper.

Neytiri let it.

There was no privacy left between them. Not since Mo'at had joined with her and found Jake hidden inside, alive and threaded through the places no other should have touched. Not since the child had been named inside her belly. Not since every choice had become a thing her mother could feel taking its cost from her.

Mo'at's hands stilled.

Jake went quiet inside Neytiri, as if silence could make him lighter.

It could not.

"You are thinner than when I last held your face," Mo'at said.

Neytiri looked at her mother's throat rather than her eyes.

"I eat."

"I did not say you starve."

Neytiri's ears lowered.

Mo'at's hand moved down, two fingers at the pulse in her wrist, then to the hollow beneath her ribs, then lower, over the place where the child slept too small for movement but not too small to change the shape of every breath around it.

Neytiri covered her mother's hand with her own before she meant to.

Mo'at looked at the gesture. Then at her.

"Still you mean to go."

"Yes."

"He fights you."

Neytiri's mouth tightened.

Inside her, Jake said nothing.

"Yes," she said.

"And you do not listen."

"I hear him."

Mo'at's eyes sharpened.

There was the difference. There had always been the difference.

The mist gathered along Neytiri's shoulders. Behind them, Trudy's stolen demon-bird crouched beneath its netting at the far edge of the clearing, vines dragged over its hard shell to break the lines. Soon it would be uncovered. Soon its blades would beat the air and Neytiri would climb into a thing that smelled of fuel and metal and war. Soon she would leave Seze behind to fly toward the one place no ikran could go and live.

Mo'at's fingers pressed once over her belly.

The pressure was not hard.

It anchored and accused.

"The night alone will not take you," Mo'at said. "Not if the path is as Grace says. Not if Eywa is kind. But this is not one night, daughter. This is all nights added together. This is the slow cost I told you would come. It is already coming."

Neytiri drew breath through her nose.

Wet leaf. Machine oil. The cold edge of dawn.

"If I do not go, the body cannot be built."

"If you spend too much, the body may be built and still not be returned."

The words struck harder because they were quiet.

Jake moved inside her then, not speaking. Only grief pressing outward.

Mo'at felt some part of it through Neytiri's change in breath. Her face softened, and that was worse than anger.

"I will keep him," Mo'at said.

Neytiri's eyes lifted.

Mo'at nodded toward the shack, toward the cold room at its back.

"His body. The fire. This place. I will keep the vigil while you go."

The relief came so sharply that Neytiri hated herself for needing it.

She had thought of the cold room all morning. Thought of the door shut between Jake's body and her hands. Thought of leaving him there with Grace's machines humming, with no eye on him, no mother, no mate, no one who knew how to sit with the dead even when the dead were not empty. She had told herself that Jake was not there. She had told herself he was with her.

Both things were true.

Neither had helped.

"You will stay?" she asked, and the child in the words shamed her.

Mo'at heard the child and answered the woman.

"Until you return."

Jake's voice came then, quiet and raw.

I'll be with you the whole way, he said. I'm not in there. I'm with you.

Neytiri closed her eyes.

For one breath she let that be enough.

Then Mo'at released her face.

"Go, then," she said. "Bring the rest of him home."

─── · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ───

Seze stood at the edge of the clearing with her wings half-open, restless under the sound of the Samson being uncovered. She did not like the machine. None of the living things did. The forest itself seemed to draw back when Trudy pulled the last net free and the demon-bird crouched in full sight, ugly and angular and dead.

Its belly opened.

A smell came out: metal, old sweat, oil, the bitter sharp tang of fuel.

Neytiri's skin wanted to crawl away from it.

Trudy climbed in first, human-small and quick, mask sealed now over her face. Norm followed with crates of tools strapped across his shoulders, moving too fast and then too carefully, as if fear and purpose kept tripping over one another in his limbs. Grace turned once at the door to speak to Mo'at in a low voice.

Mo'at only nodded.

She had already taken her place beside the door, her hands pressed against her chest as if in prayer.

The sight nearly undid Neytiri.

Jake felt the break in Neytiri before she did.

Don't look back too long, he said softly.

She hated him a little for knowing.

She looked at Seze instead.

The ikran's head lowered until the warm, ridged skull nearly touched Neytiri's chest. Neytiri put both hands to her, and leaned her brow against the living bone.

The bond hummed.

Home.

Not Hometree. Not clan. Not safety.

But something living that still knew her name in its blood.

"Stay," Neytiri whispered. "Watch with her."

Seze breathed hot across her shoulder.

Jake's ikran made a low sound from the trees. Neytiri turned toward it, and for a moment the beast looked so sharply at her that her hand moved toward the place where Jake lived.

Jake heard it through her.

She felt Jake fold inward with a grief he had no hands for.

Neytiri turned before that became more than she could bear and crossed to the Samson.

The step up into it felt like stepping into an old enemy's mouth.

The floor was hard under her feet. Straps hung from the walls. Everything had edges. Nothing yielded. Nothing breathed. When the door pulled in and the world narrowed to metal and the smell of humans, her body went tight with the memory of other machines: the roar above Hometree, the demon-birds dropping fire, the hard black bellies opening and killing the world beneath them.

Trudy glanced back from the front seat.

"Strap in," she called over the rising whine. "It's ugly up there tonight. That's good for us."

Neytiri looked at the straps and did not move.

Norm came toward her, stopped, and lifted both hands slowly.

"Here," he said. "May I?"

She stared at him.

He swallowed. "If we hit weather and you're not clipped in, Trudy will yell at me. A lot."

A strange small thing almost happened in Neytiri's chest. Not laughter. The memory of a world where laughter could exist.

She let him show her the straps.

His fingers shook when he clipped the harness, but he did not touch more than he needed to. That, too, she noticed. That, too, was a mercy.

Grace climbed in last.

The blades began to turn.

At once the world became noise.

Neytiri's ears flattened. Her hands went to the straps, claws scraping against woven material. The whole machine shuddered under her, a dead thing forcing the air to obey it. Through the small window the clearing broke apart into motion: grass flattening, rain spinning, Seze's wings flaring against the wind of the blades, Mo'at in the doorway with one hand braced against the frame and her eyes fixed on her daughter.

Then the ground fell away.

Neytiri's stomach went with it.

Not like flight.

Never like flight.

Seze's lift lived under the thighs, through the bond, wing and muscle and breath. This was a box tearing itself upward by violence, and Neytiri's body knew the difference even when the forest dropped beneath them all the same.

The blades' beat rolled into her chest the way another sound once had — the same low, violent rhythm, multiplied past counting, that had come down over Hometree in the hour the sky caught fire. She had not let herself name it in the clearing. She named it now, and her breath went short and fast before she could stop it.

Jake felt it before she did.

Hey. Hey — I know what this sounds like. His voice came quick and close, working to slow itself so hers might follow. I know exactly what this sounds like to you. It isn't that. I promise you it isn't that.

Her hands had found the straps and would not let go.

First time I ever sat in one of these, he said, quieter now, was the day I met you.

That caught her.

Hauled up over the canopy in a tin bucket, engines screaming, looking down at green that didn't end. I didn't have a name yet for half of what I was looking at. Didn't know a damn thing. A few hours later you had an arrow drawn on me like I was the least impressive thing you'd ever tracked in your life.

Something in her chest loosened, small and unwilling.

I was terrified of you, he said. Terrified, and half in love with the whole world before I'd even landed in it right. This sound used to mean that to me, before it meant the other thing. It doesn't only have to mean the other thing now.

Her breath came back to her in pieces.

She set her jaw and did not close her eyes.

The shack shrank into leaves. The clearing became a dark mouth in the green. Seze and the riderless ikran were two pale shapes at its edge. Then branch and mist took them.

Jake went very still.

At first she thought it was the height, the machine, the memory of war. Then Trudy banked east, and the line of the world opened ahead.

Far off, under the low belly of cloud, Hell's Gate burned with its own light.

Hard, white, unblinking. A ring cut into the forest. A wound that refused to grow leaves. Even from a distance Neytiri could feel the wrongness of it in her body — the cleared ground around it grey and dead, the straight roads like scars, the towers pricking up from the dark as if the demons had hammered their teeth into the land and called it shelter.

She had never seen it like this.

She had known it in stories. In the taste of the People's hatred. In Jake's shame when he spoke too near the old days. In the demon-birds that had come from it and returned to it after making the world burn.

Now it sat on the horizon, and the man inside her knew every edge of it.

I know this run, Jake said.

His voice had changed.

Neytiri turned her face slightly toward the window, though there was no face there to see. The fear was still in him. The pleading too, buried but not gone. Under it something else had risen, cold and practiced, a shape of him she had never met.

I used to fly it the other way.

The words moved through her like a hand over an old scar.

"You do not have to look," she whispered.

Grace glanced back, but the machine noise swallowed the words before they could become a question.

Jake answered only her.

Yeah, he said. I do.

─── · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ───

They did not fly toward the lights.

Trudy kept them low, so low the tops of the trees rose and fell like black water under the belly of the machine. Rain tapped against the glass and tore sideways. Twice she dropped lower still, and branches vanished under them close enough that Neytiri's legs tightened by old instinct, ready for a landing that did not come.

"Hold east," Jake said.

Neytiri repeated it because no one else could hear him.

"East."

Trudy did not question where the word came from. She only adjusted, jaw tight, eyes forward.

"Tell her not too high," Jake said. "There's an old sensor mast past the creek bed if it's still standing. Dead, probably, but don't trust dead RDA equipment."

Neytiri passed that on too, though the words sat strange on her tongue. Jake gave them to her without thinking now, and each one showed her another piece of the place he had once belonged to.

He knew the roads, the dead towers, the places the cameras did not look because men grew lazy when no one made them afraid. He knew where the forest had swallowed old outstations. He knew the habits of patrols, the arrogance of people who believed a thing written off stayed worthless because they had stopped wanting it.

He hated knowing.

She felt that too.

"There," Trudy said.

Neytiri's face lifted to look out into the dark below.

The field station emerged from the shadows so slowly Neytiri nearly missed it.

At first it was only another place where leaves gathered thick. Then a straight line cut through them. A roof. A black square where a window had been. Metal pale under moss. A small demon shack drowned in green, crouched at the forgotten edge of Hell's Gate's reach.

Neytiri's heart struck once, hard.

It was too much like Grace's shack.

Not the same. Grace's had been reclaimed, lit, made into a living wound. This one was dead. The jungle had laid itself over every surface and begun the patient work of forgetting for them. Vines crossed the door. Ferns grew along the seams. The steps had rotted on one side and sunk into mud.

No lights.

No voices.

No guns.

No one.

Trudy brought the Samson down in a gap between trees where the ground looked too small to hold it. The machine settled with a groan, blades chopping rain and leaves into a wild circle. For one breath Neytiri could not move. Her whole body listened for what should come next.

Shouts.

Fire.

The crack of metal weapons.

Nothing came.

Only the blades. The rain. The far-off hum of Hell's Gate like a hive behind walls.

"That's it?" Trudy said, voice tight. "Nobody's home?"

Jake's answer moved through Neytiri with a dry bitterness that might once have been humour.

Nobody's home.

Neytiri gave the words without the dryness.

Trudy huffed once and killed the blades down to a low beat.

The quiet that followed was worse.

Neytiri unclipped herself before Norm could offer help. The floor shifted under her when she stood; not much, only enough that she caught the wall and hated that Jake felt it.

Slow, he said at once.

She ignored him and stepped down into wet grass.

The forest closed around her like a held breath.

At once she belonged to her body again in a way the machine had stolen. Mud under her toes. Rain cooling the back of her neck. Air full of rot and leaf and old metal. She crouched low without thinking, ears turning, tail still. The others were too loud behind her — Norm's boots in the mud, Grace's breath in the mask, Trudy checking the weapon slung across her human chest — but the forest around the station held.

No alarm.

No watched eye.

It set her on edge.

A door left open was a mouth. A path with no guard was a snare. A place this easy to enter should have had death folded somewhere inside it.

Neytiri did not move toward the shack.

Grace came to her shoulder and stopped because Neytiri had stopped.

"What is it?" Grace whispered.

Neytiri listened.

Rain. Leaves. The distant base. The slowing blades.

Then, faint and far beyond the trees, a light lifted into the low clouds.

Orange.

Not the hard white of Hell's Gate. Not the steady lamps along its walls. This was alive and moving, a bloom of colour behind smoke, small from this distance but growing.

Max's fire.

Grace saw it too.

Her breath caught.

The comm at her shoulder crackled, and Max's voice came through thin enough to break.

"Fire's going in the science wing now," Grace translated, though she seemed hardly to know she spoke aloud. "He's saying — you've got the window. Take it and go."

Jake's voice came under hers, for Neytiri alone.

It's not a trap. Every eye in the place is on that fire now. This corner was already forgotten. Tonight it's invisible twice over.

Neytiri stared at the orange bloom.

─── · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ───

The door to the shack had already been forced once. Neytiri saw it before Norm's tool ever touched the panel: vines hacked back rather than grown shut, the cuts still clean, still too green to have healed over. Someone had come through here in a hurry, and more than once — first breaking in, then dragging the door closed again behind him, sloppy with speed rather than years.

Max's hands. Max's haste.

Norm worked at the panel beside the door with a small tool and a whisper of curses until the dead thing clicked. Grace shoved her shoulder into it. The door opened on air gone stale with years, and underneath that staleness, something newer — sweat not yet weathered out of it, oil disturbed rather than merely old.

Dust, mold, oil gone sour — and beneath it, oil recently touched.

The old cold smell of demons, and laid over it, the fresher print of one demon's careless speed.

Neytiri's lips pulled back before she could stop them.

Inside, the station wore its abandonment the way a scar wears an old wound. Tables stood under dust thick enough to remember every drop of rain that had leaked through the roof, save where boots had scattered it into streaks leading straight toward the centre of the room. Chairs lay on their sides, save one dragged upright and shoved out of the way, its legs cutting clean lines through the grime. Papers had swollen and curled in the damp everywhere except one space swept bare near the waiting shapes under tarps. A wall of small dark screens watched nothing. Vines had come through one broken window and crossed a counter, green fingers laid over metal keys as if the forest had begun to learn the demon language by touch, save where those same vines had been torn free and left in a heap, greener and fresher than anything else in the room.

And there, in the centre of the room, under a grey tarp and straps still new enough to be Max's doing, stood the tank.

Neytiri knew it at once because it was impossible not to.

It was huge. Pale. Coffin-strange. Its curved surface caught the little light Grace carried and threw it back sickly and green. Beside it sat sealed drums marked with demon signs, crates stacked in careful rows, bundles of tubing and metal and glass that meant nothing to Neytiri and everything to Grace.

Grace stopped so hard Norm nearly ran into her.

"That's everything," she whispered. "God. It's all here."

Her voice was thick with hope.

Neytiri did not look at the tank first.

She looked at the room.

A shack like the one where Jake's body lay. A dead twin. The demons had made so many small houses in the forest, so many straight-edged wounds, and this one had been forgotten long enough for vines to soften the crime of it. Now it held the vessel meant to grow him a body.

Not his body.

A body.

The thought struck strangely.

The body in Grace's cold room had laughed under her hands. Had carried scars earned in the forest. Had learned to move like one of the People by failing where she could see him fail. It had carried his first awkward bows, his first hunt, his first true breath after tsaheylu with his Ikran, his weight over her under the Tree of Voices.

That body was ruined.

This pale demon-coffin would make another.

Jake stirred inside her, and for a moment she felt his fear turn toward the tank itself — not of it failing, but of it working.

Don't look at it like that, he said, very low.

She did not know what her face had done.

"Like what."

Like you're already losing me again.

Before she could answer, Grace moved.

The room became work.

Grace and Norm lashed the drums to the wall brackets and wedged the crates so nothing could break loose and smash the tank in the air. Trudy hauled the heavy sling-line in from the Samson, boots slipping in the mud tracked across the floor, and fed it out toward the corners of the frame. Neytiri listened to all of them and to Jake underneath, the map of him unfolding in broken, necessary pieces.

Four lift-points, he said. One at each corner of the frame. Max should've freed the footings already, but check the back two. He was moving fast and scared. And whatever you do, don't cut the red line. Not that one. Jesus, tell Norm not that one.

Neytiri repeated what mattered.

Norm froze with his hand on the wrong line and went pale.

"Right," he said weakly. "Not red. Great. Love that."

Max's voice came again over Grace's channel, thin and distorted.

Grace bent her head to listen.

Neytiri watched her face as she answered. There was no space here for all the words, no room in Neytiri's mind to hold them. She kept only the shape: the fire spreading where Max wanted it; people running inward; the window open; Max staying behind.

"He's telling us to hurry," Grace said.

Trudy snorted without humour. "Tell him we're taking requests after we fly a haunted house through his front yard."

Grace did not smile.

Neither did Neytiri.

The back two footings had not let go.

Max had freed the front of the frame and run out of time on the rest; the shell sat locked at its rear corners, gripped to the earth by two bolts sunk in demon-stone. Norm swore at them. Grace snapped something back. Trudy set a bar under the nearer one and pulled until her arms shook and the metal only sang.

Neytiri stepped forward.

"Wait," Grace said automatically.

Neytiri did not wait.

She took the bar from Trudy's hands, set it deep, found the weight through her palms, lowered her shoulder, and heaved.

For one breath nothing answered.

Then the footing tore free of the ground with a sound like a great root ripping, and the whole shell settled loose in the mud.

Norm's head snapped up.

Trudy gave a sharp, breathless laugh. "Okay. Yeah. That helps."

Neytiri did not look at her. She moved to the last footing and did it again, and then she was hauling the heavy sling-line up onto the roof of the shell, dragging its dead weight hand over hand and lashing it to the corner rings while Norm scrambled up after her to work the others. The labour filled her body, honest and brutal. For the first time in days the world became simple enough to fit in muscle: lift, breathe, set; lift, breathe, set. Grace guided the lines below. Trudy ran back for the Samson. Neytiri dragged the sling taut across the roof of the demons' forgotten house inch by inch, in the dust and the rain.

For that small stretch of night, her body was not only a vessel being drained. It was hers — strong, useful, needed.

The fierce relief of it made her careless.

Then the cost showed itself.

Not much.

Only a hitch in the breath when she wrenched the last footing loose. Only a strange hollowness through her arms when she leaned into the sling. Only the brief, cold knowledge that this weight should not have reached so deep into her strength so quickly.

Jake felt it at once.

Stop.

She hauled the line another handspan tighter.

Neytiri, stop. You're working too hard. I can feel it. Let them take some.

The sling drew taut across the corner ring.

Her vision narrowed at the edges, then cleared.

Please.

His fear made the plea small.

That almost stopped her.

Almost.

"It holds," she said through her teeth. She did not know whether she said it to Norm, to Grace, to Jake, or to the body that wanted to make a liar of her. "Do not slow for me."

Grace looked up sharply.

Neytiri set the next line before the look could become words.

The rain struck her face like a blessing.

Beyond the trees, the world had grown brighter with distant fire. Hell's Gate glowed behind the canopy now, orange licking into the underside of cloud. The sound had changed too. Under the rain and the idling Samson came something far away and mechanical: engines, shouts carried thin by the wet air, alarms rising and falling like demon-birds crying in metal throats.

All of it pulled inward.

Toward the fire.

Away from them.

Then Jake's voice cut through her, suddenly cold as stone.

Down.

She dropped flat before she understood why.

Her hand shot out and caught Norm by the back of his shirt, dragging him down against the roof beside her. He hit the metal with a breathless grunt. Below them Grace froze against the side of the shell. Above, Trudy held the Samson steady, low and loud, her hands full of the machine.

For one second there was nothing.

Then a light moved through the trees.

Not at the station.

Nearer than the others.

A single white beam swung across rain and trunks, far enough away that it caught only the high leaves at first. Then lower. Wandering.

Lost.

Coming wrong.

Neytiri's body went still in the old way, every breath taught to be smaller than a leaf's trembling.

Norm shook under her hand.

She tightened her grip once. Be still.

Jake's voice became the whole shape of the world.

Don't move. Don't breathe.

The light drifted closer.

Below, Grace's eyes found the two flattened shapes on the roof. In them was the terrible knowledge that all their cleverness could still be undone by one bored demon in the wrong place.

The light paused.

Rain glittered in it.

Neytiri's hand found her knife.

No, Jake breathed. He's just lost. Heading for the fire like the rest of them.

The beam swung across the roof of the dead station.

Stopped.

Neytiri's heart did not beat. Or beat so hard it became the only sound.

Three, Jake said.

The beam trembled, then began to move.

Two.

It slid away from the roof. Back toward the road. Toward the orange glow.

One.

The light vanished behind trunks.

Jake was silent for a moment, as if waiting for the light to return. It didn't.

Gone. Go.

Neytiri was already moving.

Trudy walked the Samson in over the shell until its belly-hook swung low above the roof, and Neytiri rose to her knees on the wet metal to catch it.

The rest of the night became hands and weight and speed. She caught the belly-hook and drove it home through the sling's iron ring until the latch snapped shut; Norm cinched the last strap; she checked each corner with her own hands, because her own hands were the only ones she trusted with this weight. Grace made her last count of the drums and crates through the shell's open hatch — twice over, as if leaving one piece behind would kill him again — then hauled herself up into the Samson's belly.

Norm clipped a line from her harness to the corner ring before she could wave him off, hands shaking, the way he had shown her the straps on the flight in.

Trudy's voice came down over the noise from the cockpit above.

"That's it — that's all of it. You two riding it down are out of your minds. Hold on to something and do not let go."

Norm made a wild, breathless sound that might have been a laugh, and did not let go of the line.

Neytiri set her back against the cold shape of the tank through the metal and took a fistful of strap in each hand.

The Samson took the strain.

The lines came up hard. The shell groaned, shifted, and tore free of the mud with a great wet sound, and then the ground was falling away beneath them — the whole demons' house rising into the rain and Neytiri riding the roof of it with the wind coming sideways and the forest dropping into black beneath her feet.

She looked down once.

Where the station had stood there was only a dark scar in the mud, a shape pressed into the earth like the print of something that had died.

The blades roared above her.

The wind took her hair.

The ground was gone.

─── · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ───

No fire followed them.

For a long time Neytiri did not believe it.

She lay flat along the roof of the shell where it swung beneath the Samson, one hand knotted in the strap at the corner ring, the other closed around the knife at her hip. Below her the forest streamed past, black and silver under rain, close enough at the low points that the topmost leaves hissed against the shell's belly. Behind them, Hell's Gate shrank from a wound to a glare, from a glare to a dull orange stain under cloud.

No gunships lifted.

No searchlights found them.

No alarm turned outward.

Norm lay a few strides from Neytiri along the roof, spread flat, both fists knotted in the straps, eyes shut, lips moving in some prayer or calculation. Above them the Samson's open belly-hatch framed Grace on her knees at the lip of it, one hand fisted in a cargo net, watching the pale shell swing beneath her as though it might vanish if she looked away. Rain tore sideways off every edge. The whole shell shuddered under them, dragged through the air by a machine that had never been built to carry a house.

Neytiri waited for victory to feel like anything.

It did not.

The danger did not end all at once. It loosened by degrees, and in the spaces it left behind, her body came back to her.

The sharpness of the station, the weight, the light in the trees — all of that had made her into purpose. Now purpose thinned, and under it waited the low, steady drain. Her arms felt hollow. Her legs trembled once and stopped when she commanded them. A tiredness deeper than the night opened behind her ribs, not sudden, not dramatic, only there, as if it had been walking beside her all along and now stepped close enough to be named.

Her hand went to her stomach.

The child was too small to answer.

Jake did.

It's over, he said.

There was no triumph in him. Only exhaustion and the broken tenderness of someone who had spent the whole night helping the thing he wanted stopped.

You did it.

She pressed her cheek to the cold metal of the shell and breathed.

I know it's taking something, he said. I can feel it. Even now.

"Do not," she whispered.

Don't what.

"Make it grief before it is done."

He went quiet.

The machine flew.

After a while Grace looked down through the open hatch and found her.

She saw Neytiri's hand pressed flat to the shell over her own belly. Saw, perhaps even across that gulf of wind, the grey cast around her mouth, the way she held still because stillness cost less than any other shape.

"Neytiri?" The name came down torn half to nothing by the rushing dark.

Neytiri lowered her hand at once.

"I am well," she called back, though she doubted it carried.

Grace's mouth tightened. She leaned further, one arm out into the wind as if she could close the ten strides between them by wanting to, and could not.

Trudy's voice snapped up from the cockpit. "Get back from that hatch before I lose you too."

For a moment Grace did not move.

Then she drew back, because there was nothing else to do, and let the wind have the space between them.

Jake's voice came soft, and only for her.

Just breathe, baby. I've got you.

That reached her where Grace could not — where Grace, ten strides up and helpless in the belly of the machine, was never going to be able to reach her at all.

Her eyes closed and she leaned her head against the strap.

For one breath, riding the roof of the stolen shell with the cold shape of the tank that would remake him just beneath her through the metal and Hell's Gate burning smaller and smaller behind them, she let herself lean into the place where his voice held.

Not rest.

Never rest.

Only one breath in which she did not have to stand alone inside her own skin.

Then the shack clearing opened below them, and she straightened before anyone could see.

─── · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ───

Mo'at was already outside when they landed.

She stood at the edge of the clearing with rain darkening her shoulders and the dawn not yet strong enough to make colour of the world. Behind her, the shack glowed with Grace's white light. Seze paced once at the tree-line, wings mantling against the wash of the Samson's blades. Jake's ikran stood beside her, neck extended, eyes fixed on the pale shape swinging low beneath the machine.

Trudy lowered the shell down into the wet grass until it kissed the earth and the cable went slack, and the moment its weight left the sky Neytiri smelled home.

Wet leaves. Ikran musk. Mud. Her mother's skin under rain.

She had not known how badly she needed it until the air struck her. The relief was almost sickening.

She unclipped her line and climbed down off the shell too quickly.

The ground tilted.

Mo'at was there before anyone else could move.

Her hands closed around Neytiri's arms, firm enough that there could be no pretending she had not needed them. Neytiri's ears went back. Mo'at did not comment. She only drew her one step away from the machine and held her where the rotor-blades could not steal her balance.

For a moment mother and daughter simply looked at one another.

Then Mo'at's hand rose to Neytiri's face.

Neytiri almost turned away.

Mo'at read her in the half-light. Pulse first. Breath. Skin. Then the hand came down to her belly, and Neytiri covered it as she had before, this time not to stop it but because the touch was the only thing in the clearing that did not feel made of noise.

Mo'at's face went very still.

Jake went still with her.

Grace had come down behind them. She stopped when she saw Mo'at's expression.

"What?" Grace asked.

Mo'at did not answer her first.

Her eyes remained on Neytiri.

"You are a little less than when you left me," she said.

Neytiri swallowed.

"The night was not long."

Mo'at's thumb moved once along the inside of her wrist, where the pulse beat too fast under skin.

Grace was silent.

Norm, halfway down from the Samson with a crate in his arms, froze.

Neytiri did not look at any of them.

"And it is done," she said. "He can be built now."

Mo'at's mouth tightened as if the words had hurt her.

Then she looked past Neytiri to the stolen shell settling in the grass, to the hatch Grace was already wrenching wide on the pale curve of the tank inside.

"Then we begin," she said.

So they did.

Trudy lifted the Samson once more, a short and careful hand's-breadth of flight, and walked the shell across the clearing until it settled flush against the wall of Grace's shack, hard against the seam where the cold room stood. The two dead structures leaned into one another like a beast and its shadow. Norm and Grace lashed them fast, cut the shell's hatch wide, and opened the shack's wall to meet it, until the two rooms became one long room with the tank standing at the join.

It looked stranger in dawn than it had in the dead station — paler, larger, more obscene against wet grass and living trees.

Neytiri moved to set her hands to the work until Jake whispered her name in warning and Mo'at's hand found her shoulder.

"No," Mo'at said.

Neytiri turned on her.

Mo'at did not move.

"You have carried enough of this one thing," her mother said. "Let other hands join the houses."

It should have angered her.

It did.

But the anger had no strength behind it. Only a thin flare, then ash.

She stepped back.

Grace saw. So did Jake. Neytiri hated them both for it and loved them and said nothing.

They joined the stolen shell to the shack, and the tank never left it.

The room that had held only waiting changed around it.

Grace and Norm cleared the centre space where Jake's body had first lain on the table. Trudy dragged cables from storage to bridge the two rooms. The drums of fluid stood where they had ridden out the flight, still lashed along the shell's inner wall. Crates were freed from their bindings and stacked where Grace could reach them. The old machines woke as Grace moved among them, switches snapping, lights flickering, the demon hum deepening until the shack seemed to breathe through metal lungs.

The pale tank stood at the heart of it all, dark and empty.

Not alive.

Not yet.

Grace stood before it with both hands braced on her hips, soaked to the skin, avatar face hollowed by exhaustion and something too fierce to be called hope.

"That's everything," she said. "Once it's powered up we'll know what survived."

Her voice broke very slightly.

She swallowed it.

"God help us. We can actually start."

Jake's presence folded inward.

Neytiri felt him looking at the tank through her eyes and wanting it and hating himself for wanting. Felt, beneath that, the harder grief: that every light Grace woke, every tube she connected, every careful step toward rebuilding him was another step into the months that might unmake Neytiri.

I got you through it, he said.

She stood near the wall, one hand resting on the back of a chair because the room had not quite stopped moving.

I'd do it again, he said. Every direction. Every step. I'd do it again if it kept you alive.

His voice thinned.

And I hate that I did. Because now they'll build it. And it starts with you.

Neytiri looked at the empty tank.

A season ago, she would not have understood that love could point in opposite directions and still be love.

Now it was the only kind left to them.

"It began with you," she whispered. "Do not put all of it in my hands."

He made no answer.

Perhaps because the answer was that her hands were all he had.

Outside, Seze called once from the treeline. Jake's ikran answered, low and grieving.

The shack lights flickered.

Grace turned toward the main power stack.

"All right," she said. Her voice had gone thin with fatigue and iron. "Let's see what made the trip."

The first thing the machines did was hum.

Then blink.

Then wake too much at once.

Neytiri had learned some of the shack's sounds in the days of waiting. The soft patient breath of the cold room. The small clicks Grace's instruments made when they were watching Jake's body. The low electric tremble in the walls when the lights burned steady.

This was different.

The salvaged equipment came alive in a rush and stutter, as if the dead station had carried old sleep inside its metal bones and now spilled it all over Grace's floor. Lights climbed in rows. Screens flared blue-white, died, returned. A pump coughed once and fell silent. Another began to whine until Norm struck the side of it and Grace shouted at him not to strike anything that had to keep Jake alive.

Neytiri stood very still.

The sound pressed against her skin.

Demon tools. Demon light. Demon air. All of it wrong, all of it necessary.

Grace moved from one station to another, hands fast, eyes faster. Norm read numbers aloud. Trudy stood near the door with her arms folded, weapon within reach, looking like someone who would rather fight ten men than stand in a room full of fragile machines and hope none of them failed.

Mo'at watched from beside the cold room door, her hands held together, her eyes on her daughter.

The lights flickered again.

One screen woke behind Grace's shoulder.

No one touched it.

At first Neytiri did not know why her body noticed.

It was only a square of light among others. A flat thing coughing itself awake on a side cart, half-buried under cables and dust from the old station. Lines crossed it. Words she could not read. A small spinning mark. Then the screen went black.

Then a face appeared.

Neytiri's breath stopped.

"—ak Sully, Video Log—"

For one impossible instant her mind refused to know it.

The face was too small. Too pale. Wrongly shaped. Hair close to the head. Eyes set in a human face she had seen only in glimpses before, through glass, in memory, in the awful knowledge that Jake had once worn another body as his own.

The wrong face.

His face.

Grace turned at the sound Neytiri did not know she had made.

On the screen, Jake looked back. There was none of the warmth she had grown to love — only tired eyes and a flat expression. He began to speak.

His voice came out flat, thinned by the old speakers. Human. Yet still his, and strange to hear in the open air after so many days of having him only inside her own head.

She walked closer, her hand lifting towards the screen as if to touch him. Inside her, Jake went rigid, the understanding of what she was looking at reaching him a breath before it reached her.

Neytiri did not understand the words at first.

The shock held them away.

Then certain pieces came through because Grace had taught too much in other days, because Jake had spoken too many demon words near her, because some meanings did not need to be carried whole to cut.

"—they trust me now," the Jake on the screen said.

The room went still.

Neytiri's hand froze, inches from the glass, sickness rising in her stomach.

Grace's face went white under blue skin.

"I can get you anything you want to know about them. Routes. Numbers. The internal structure of Hometree. Their hunters use—"

Grace lunged, knocking a chair aside as she crossed to the screen.

"No."

Her hand struck the controls.

The screen kept playing.

"The clan's taking me in. Neytiri's teaching me directly, which gets me access—"

The name hit like a cold blade into her chest. Neytiri flinched, her hand pulling back.

Jake was silent inside her; she wished he wasn't. Wished that he would speak, drown out the voice on the screen, tell her it was a lie, it was a trick the demons had created to destroy the last good thing she had.

He didn't.

Grace's hands flew over the controls again.

The voice cut off mid-word.

But the image did not go with it.

Jake's face stayed on the screen, frozen mid-sentence, the human mouth still half-open, the pale eyes fixed forward.

Silence crashed down around the shack.

Not true silence. The machines still hummed. Rain still tapped the roof. Norm was breathing too fast somewhere near the tank. Trudy had gone utterly still by the door. Mo'at's eyes were on her daughter, not the dead screen.

But the voice was gone.

Too late.

Grace stood over the dark machine with the torn cable in her hand.

"That shouldn't have happened," she said.

No one answered.

Then she turned — not to the dead screen, not to Norm, but to Neytiri. What stood in her face was not shame for the words the machine had spoken, nor grief for the old betrayal dragged up out of the dark. It was fear.

"Listen to me." She crossed the floor too fast and put herself between Neytiri and the screen, as though the frozen face on it were still dangerous. "That was a lifetime ago. That is not the man in there." Her hand cut toward the cold room, toward the tank, toward all of it. "You carried him out of the fire. You walked to the edge of their whole world tonight to bring the rest of him home. Do not let a dead recording take that back."

Neytiri did not answer her.

The floor seemed to fall away, and she was somewhere deep and drowned, looking up through cold water at the face on the screen.

The wrong face. The human one. Small and pale and close-shorn, the throat that had shaped her name and made a door of it. She had never seen it before tonight — not truly, not living and speaking and sure of itself. She had known Jake only as the People had remade him: the clumsy dreamwalker, the hunter learning to breathe her air, the weight of him over her beneath the Tree of Voices. She had loved the shape the forest gave him and let herself forget there had ever been a first one.

Grief came first, because it always did now. Then, beneath it, older and colder and waiting all this while under the grief that had been larger for a time — the anger. It rose whole. It did not shout. It simply stood up inside her and looked at the frozen face.

Inside her, Jake did not plead.

She had braced for it — the rush of him, the that was before you, the reaching, the I changed. It did not come. What came was quieter, and far worse, because it did not fight her at all.

Yeah, he said. That was me.

No softening. No before and after. He laid the words down flat, the way a man sets aside a weapon he has decided not to raise.

That's who they sent. Routes, numbers, the inside of Hometree — I gave them all of it. And I let you teach me so I'd have more to give.

He did not stop there. He reached for the worst of it and held it up where she could not look away, each word offered too readily, as if some part of him had been waiting a long time to be rid of it.

Something in her went cold at how easily it came.

Neytiri looked at the face frozen on the screen, and inside, where only he could hear her, she said it — not aloud, not for the room, only for him:

"This is you."

Not a question.

For a moment he did not answer. Then, low, with nothing raised in front of it — not the guide, not the mate, only the man who had first spoken into that machine:

Yes.

Neytiri said nothing, though something in her chest cracked.

The machines hummed around the stolen tank. Grace stood frozen. Norm's eyes were wet. Trudy looked away, jaw locked, as if there were things even soldiers knew not to watch.

Neytiri kept her eyes on the human face frozen on the screen. The world was burning around her all over again.

When at last she spoke, it was aloud, and it was to him, and her voice did not rise and did not break.

It took them nearly two hours to find the shack.

There were no lights.

Neytiri had expected demon light to betray it: some hard white eye in the trees, some window burning through leaf and mist, some straight-edged shape refusing to belong to the forest around it. Instead the old field station had let the jungle fold itself over every metal line. Vines dragged across the roof. Moss furred the broken steps. The dark glass held only leaves and moon and the slow breathing black between trunks. From above, even on Seze's back, it was almost nothing.

They had searched by memory and old paths, by Mo'at's low corrections at Neytiri's back, by the shape of the land rather than any sign the Sky People had meant to leave. Twice Seze had circled the same stretch of forest while Neytiri stared down through branches until her vision blurred. Once they landed in the wrong clearing and found only old root, wet stone, a piece of metal no larger than a hand half-swallowed by moss. Mo'at had said, not here, and they had risen again.

All that time Jake's body had hung lashed against them.

All that time Neytiri had held the harness and not let herself feel the weight of him slipping every time Seze banked.

More than once Mo'at's arm tightened around her middle as the sickness climbed. More than once Jake rose inside her, voice frayed thin with fear.

You have to stop.

She had not stopped.

The fire was behind them now. A whole world behind them. Burned country gone to dark; the ruin of Hometree swallowed by distance; the place where Tsu'tey had stood and made exile into law shrinking behind Seze's wings until it could no longer be seen.

Still she searched.

When they found it at last, it did not rise out of the trees.

It appeared by degrees: a flatness where the forest should have curved, a black pane catching one torn strip of moon, the edge of a roof buried under green. Only then did the shape resolve into the shack — quiet, lightless, waiting in the leaves while Hometree burned, while the People bled, while Jake's body lay under root and ash and every night took her back into the fire.

For one mad breath Neytiri hated it.

A demon place.

Grace's place.

The only place left to bring him.

Seze dropped through the last black branches with a shudder that went up through Neytiri's thighs and into the hinge of her spine. The ikran's wings beat once, twice, hard enough to flatten the wet grass beneath them, and then her claws struck earth.

Neytiri did not move.

Her hands stayed locked in the harness.

For a moment she could not make her fingers open. She had held the leather through too many hours of flight and searching, through the drag of Jake's weight lashed against them, through the awful, swaying pull of the wrapped body whenever Seze banked. Mo'at's arms had been braced around her from behind for most of the journey, one hand on Neytiri's middle when the sickness climbed, the other hooked into the saddle to keep all three of them from sliding too far with the dead weight at their side.

Still she held on.

"Neytiri."

Her mother's voice came close to her ear. Not sharp. Not command. Only her name, spoken as though Neytiri might have gone somewhere too far to follow.

Seze shifted under them, exhausted, the great chest heaving. A second shape cut down through the trees and landed at the edge of the clearing with less grace and more grief. Jake's ikran. Riderless. Bondless. It struck the ground, opened its jaws without sound, and turned its head toward the wrapped shape lashed at Seze's side.

It went through her like a hand under the ribs.

The beast had followed all the way.

It had followed the body. Or the ghost of the bond. Or the soul it could not understand had been torn out of one flesh and lodged inside another. Since the ruin, it had kept off Seze's wing as if some old training held when tsaheylu no longer did, casting again and again toward what was not there. Toward the body that no longer answered. Toward the rider who lived now only as weight in Neytiri's blood.

Seze folded her wings and did not snap when the other ikran came nearer.

Once, that would have mattered.

Now everything mattered and nothing did.

"Neytiri," Mo'at said again.

Neytiri made her fingers open.

Pain ran through the bones of her hands. She looked down at them with a strange dull surprise, as if they belonged to someone else: cramped, dark with dried blood at the nails, shaking now that the holding on had ended.

You're exhausted, Neytiri.

Jake's voice came from the place behind her breastbone, low and close and ruined by gentleness.

It was not the voice from the burning dreams. Not the voice that had called and vanished. Since the ruin, since he had broken whatever silence grief and death had held him in, there had been no true door between them. He was there when she reached. There when she did not. A presence drawn through her, threaded under breath.

That was mercy.

That was torment.

Look at you, he said. You can barely stand. You have to rest.

She did not answer him.

If she answered, the words waiting behind her teeth would come. If she gave him one thread, he would pull the whole plea through again. Let me go. Do not carry me. Not for this. Not for the child. Not for a people who have already cast you out.

He did not say it now.

It was there anyway.

Neytiri swung one leg over the saddle and nearly fell.

Mo'at caught her, hard enough to hurt. Neytiri hissed, more at the shame of needing the hand than the pain of it, and straightened before her mother could say anything. The clearing tilted once and steadied. The dark bulk of the shack blurred, doubled, then came back into one shape.

She was fine.

She had to be fine.

Jake's body was still lashed to Seze.

That fact alone held the world in place.

She turned to him.

The hide around him had darkened in places during the flight where old blood and rain and the fluids of ruined flesh had seeped through. It had dried stiff along the edges. Neytiri put both hands to the knots and worked them loose. Her fingers did not want to obey, shaking so hard that the binding kept slipping. Mo'at moved beside her to help.

Neytiri let her, pressing her hands together before placing them where his shoulders were and simply holding there.

Only because the knots would not come fast enough.

The binds loosened quick enough, and the dead-weight of his body sagged to the side.

Neytiri caught him.

Her knees bent. Pain snapped white at the edge of her sight. Mo'at said her name, a warning this time, but Neytiri had already gathered him in. All that was left of his body settled into her arms, heavy and wrong and familiar in the way any beloved thing became familiar once the body learned the shape of carrying it.

He was heavier, she thought, than he had been the night before the world had ended.

She had flown the whole way with him lashed to her.

Now that he was in her arms again, she could not understand how she had borne even that small distance.

The need to hold him came up so sharply it was almost hunger. In the ruin there had been shock. There had been ash, and the impossibility of finding him worse than any nightmare had known how to make him, and Seze screaming above her, and the world cracking into tasks because if she let herself look too long the tasks would end. Get him free. Bind him. Fly.

Here the ground was under her.

Here there was light enough to see the ruin of what remained.

Here no falling timber demanded speed, no hunters closed behind her, no fire chose what could and could not be touched.

Her hand slid under the hide before she could stop herself. Not far. Only enough to find the angle of his shoulder, the cold line where flesh gave under her fingers in a way flesh should not give. She pressed there anyway.

Jake went very still inside her. Then softly enough that the words could've been her own breath—

Neytiri, don't do this to yourself.

Neytiri's breath caught. She should have drawn back. She did not. Her thumb moved once over him, over ruin and cold and the terrible fact that this body had housed him, had laughed under her hands, had moved through the trees as if the forest had made him only late and was glad, at last, to have him.

Even wrecked, he was hers.

Even cold.

Even like this.

She lowered to her knees, resting his weight into her lap, and felt her mother move close behind her.

The shack door opened.

Light spilled across the clearing, hard and white and intrusive.

It caught, at the clearing's edge, a shape she had learned to hate over a burning world: one of the Sky People's flying-things, the kind that beat the air with turning blades and carried fire in its belly. Someone had hooded it in netting and dragged vine and branch across it until the forest half-swallowed it, the way it had swallowed the shack. Trudy's. The machine the pilot had stolen out of the demons' own grip the day she turned against her kind and flew them all clear of the fire. It squatted bound and blind in the leaves.

Neytiri gathered Jake against her and rose to meet it.

Grace came through it at a run.

For one half-breath Neytiri saw the woman she had known in a body that should not have been hers: tall and blue and living, hair bound back, face gone raw with alarm. Grace's avatar body moved with a grace the human body had never had, and the wrongness of that might once have made Neytiri flinch.

Now she understood too well.

A spirit could be worn in a body not born to it.

A life could sit strangely in borrowed flesh and still be true.

"Neytiri—" Grace stopped so hard the boards under her feet creaked. Norm came out behind her and nearly struck her back. Trudy came last, human and small between the two avatars, a breathing-mask strapped over her nose and mouth, a demon-weapon slung at her back and her hand near it out of old habit. Grace's hand rose to her own mouth. "God. What happened? What is—"

Her eyes found the wrapped shape in Neytiri's arms.

The rest of the words left her.

Norm's face changed first. The colour under the blue went sick and pale. Grace took one step down from the threshold, stumbled and caught herself against the doorway. Then she took another step, then another, slowly now, as though speed had become dangerous.

Neytiri stood in the demon light with Jake's body in her arms and waited for them to understand.

They did not.

Not until Grace reached her.

Not until her hands, those long blue hands that had taught and cut and healed, came under the hide with a steadiness that lasted only as long as ignorance did.

"Here," Grace said, voice clipped, because command was how she stayed upright. "Bring him inside. We need light. Norm—"

Grace reached for the weight of him.

Neytiri hissed.

The sound was there before thought, low in the back of her throat, her arms tightening around Jake so sharply that the hide pulled taut under her fingers. For one breath she did not know herself. There was only the hand coming for him, the dead weight in her lap, the body she had dragged out of fire and ash and hidden branches, and the old animal law of the blood: mine.

Grace stopped at once.

Not recoiling. Not offended. Only still, hands half-raised in the white spill from the doorway, her face changing as she understood what Neytiri had done almost before Neytiri did.

"Neytiri," Grace said softly.

Shame struck after the sound.

Neytiri's mouth closed. Her ears flattened before she could stop them. She looked down at Jake, at the hide clutched in her hands. In her anger she had shifted the fabric, and one of his ears now poked out into the harsh white.

Her chest went tight.

Neytiri, it's okay, I'm right here.

Mo'at came close behind her, close enough for Neytiri to feel the warmth of her mother at her back.

"Daughter," Mo'at said, low and steady. Not rebuke. Anchor. "Help them."

Neytiri's breath caught.

Grace took one careful step nearer, her voice kept low as if speaking to a wounded thing that might bolt. "I'm not taking him from you. I'm helping you get him somewhere safe." Her eyes flicked to the door, then back to Neytiri. "But I need light. I need a table. Help me carry him inside."

Safe.

The word found a place under the snarl and pressed there.

Not taken. Moved.

Not lost. Kept.

Neytiri swallowed. The sound hurt. Then, one finger at a time, she loosened her grip on the hide enough for Grace to slide a hand beneath the wrapped weight.

Mo'at's hand came to Neytiri's shoulder.

"With them," her mother said.

So Neytiri moved because Grace touched him carefully, and because Mo'at had told her to help, and because the door was open, and because if she stopped moving now she might never move again. The inside of the shack smelled of metal and old damp and human things burned into the walls: oil, stale cloth, cold equipment, the sharp ghost of medicines. Lights hummed overhead. Machines blinked in their sleep.

Neytiri hated all of it.

She did not want him anywhere near any of it; she wanted him surrounded by green and blue life.

She carried Jake through.

There was a table. Not the ground. Not a mat. A table, cold and narrow, with straps still hanging from one side where some machine-bed had once been dragged nearer. Grace cleared it with one sweep of her arm, sending tools clattering to the floor.

"Here," she said.

No.

The word rose whole in Neytiri's chest.

Not there. Not on metal. Not under this light. Not out of her arms.

She forced down the bile that rose up and laid him down anyway.

Because she had come here for Grace's hands.

Because she had carried him to a demon place to ask a demon's work of it.

Because love, now, was not the holding.

The moment his weight left her arms, Neytiri's body leaned after him. She caught herself with one hand on the table. Her palm landed on the hide over his chest and stayed there.

Grace looked at the hand.

Did not tell her to move it.

That was the first mercy.

Then Grace gently lifted the hide and drew it up and away.

Neytiri shut her eyes for a second and then forced them open.

For a moment no one breathed.

Grace's face did not break all at once.

The scientist held.

The eyes moved. Catalogued. Took in the angle of the ribs, the blackened side, the broken line of limbs that had been bound straight only by hide and need, the burned root of the kuru, the body made catastrophic by a death that had not been clean.

Then her mouth opened.

Nothing came.

The scientist went out of her.

"Oh, Jake."

It was not a word. Not really. Only the shape grief made when it found a name too late.

Norm turned away.

He turned so fast he struck the counter behind him. His hands went to the back of his head first, fingers lacing there, elbows high, then slid over his face as if he could hold something in through bone. His head tipped up toward the ceiling. He made no sound.

Then Norm made himself turn back. He had been the eager one, the student who trailed Jake into the forest those first days and never learned to keep his face from showing what moved through him. Grief made no warrior of him. It only made him look — because looking was the last thing left that he could give.

"They told us Quaritch—" His voice failed. He swallowed. "They said there was nothing left to—"

He could not finish.

Good, Neytiri thought.

Let there be no finished words for it.

Grace's hands hovered above Jake's body. They did not touch yet. When they did, they were careful in the terrible way of healers and scientists, careful not because the body could feel pain but because the living could.

Neytiri kept her palm on the hide.

"He is not gone," Mo'at said.

Grace did not look up.

The words lay in the room and did nothing at first.

Mo'at stood just inside the circle of light, the Tsahìk's beads dark against her throat, her face lined with the flight and the walk before it and the grief of a mother who had seen too much and still had more to say. She had not lowered herself into Grace's space. She had not asked permission of the machines.

Grace's head came up slowly.

"What?"

"His body is dead," Mo'at said. "His spirit is not. It is in her. She carries him."

Silence.

The machines kept their small demon sounds. Somewhere outside, Seze clicked low in the clearing, answered by the ragged breath of the other ikran. The forest pressed close against the glass.

Grace looked from Mo'at to Neytiri.

Not to her face first.

To her chest.

To the place where Neytiri had learned to feel Jake waiting.

Then Grace's expression closed.

Neytiri hated her for it before she spoke. The wall. The demon mind shutting its doors, reaching not for truth but for the shape of truth it already knew how to hold.

"Neytiri," Grace said carefully. "I know how badly you want that to be true."

The old fury lit under the exhaustion so suddenly Neytiri nearly swayed.

Grace's voice softened, which made it worse. "When we lose someone, the mind—"

"I am not a grieving child."

The words came low.

They stopped Grace more completely than shouting would have.

Neytiri's hand tightened over the hide.

"I know what I carry," she said. Her voice shook. She let it. "He is here."

Grace looked at her as though grief had grown teeth.

Mo'at stepped forward.

"The proof is not hers to make," she said.

Grace's jaw flexed.

Mo'at did not raise her voice. She did not need to. "I did not take her word for it. I joined with my daughter to read what was wearing her thin. I felt him there. Alive. Threaded through her. Do you think the Tsahìk cannot tell a living spirit from a grieving girl's dream?"

The word Tsahìk did what Neytiri's anger could not.

It entered the room with old authority even Grace had learned to respect.

She looked at Mo'at, and the wall did not fall.

Not yet.

But something cracked.

Norm wiped at his face with the heel of his hand. "Grace."

"Don't," Grace said.

"Grace."

"I said don't."

But the fight had gone uncertain at the edges. Neytiri watched the scientist turn against herself, watched the mind that wanted to refuse pull up its own old proofs.

Grace looked down at her own hands: blue, living, impossible.

Then at Jake's body.

Then at Neytiri.

"I mapped that bond myself," she said, very quietly. "I know what it carries."

No triumph came.

Hope did not lift Neytiri. It cut.

Grace moved closer to her, the old hunger coming into her face now: not grief, not disbelief, but the need to reach, to test, to make the impossible answer.

"Jake?" Grace said.

Neytiri went still.

Grace's voice cracked on the name and then steadied by force. "Jake. Can you hear me?"

For one breath Neytiri wanted him to answer.

Not for Grace's proof. Not only. For Grace's grief. For Norm's. For the terrible small mercy of letting someone else in the room know the shape of him, not as ruin on a table but as voice, as presence, as the stubborn living thing she had carried all this way.

She reached inward without resentment.

Jake.

Inside her, he drew back.

She felt it as clearly as if his body had stepped away from her hand. Not absence. Refusal.

Don't, he said.

Her throat tightened.

Grace watched her face. "Neytiri?"

Neytiri tried again, gentler, almost pleading. She is asking for you.

The refusal held.

Then words came, low and worn and meant only for her.

Don't let them fight for me.

Pain moved through her so sharply she almost bowed over it.

Grace took a step closer. "Is he there?"

"Yes," Neytiri said.

The answer came at once. That much she would not let him take from her.

Grace's breath broke. "Then ask him to answer me."

Neytiri closed her eyes.

She did.

He did not.

Not because he could not.

Because he would not.

"He will not answer," Neytiri said.

Grace stared at her.

"What do you mean, he won't answer?"

Neytiri opened her eyes. The anger in Grace's face was grief trying to stand. Neytiri understood it and hated that she understood.

"He hears you," she said, and the words hurt worse for being true. "He will not speak."

Jake went silent inside her, but the silence had weight. Refusal. Love turned into obstruction. Fear made hard because he knew that one word from him would become another hand dragging them all toward the rescue he did not want.

Grace looked from Neytiri to the body, then back again.

Then her face changed again.

Not gentler.

Worse.

Useful.

Belief, in Grace, did not become wonder. It became work.

She turned back to the body.

"Norm," she said.

He moved at once. Norm came to Grace's shoulder, wiping his face once more before he bent over Jake.

Grace's hands finally touched the ruin.

Her mouth tightened.

"Catastrophic thoracic collapse," she said, and the words meant little except in their tone. "Spinal trauma. Pelvic—God. Burns down the left side. Crush damage everywhere. This isn't repair, Norm. This is..." She stopped herself.

Neytiri understood enough.

Not repair.

Grace moved to the head.

Her fingers parted what remained of hair and braid. Neytiri's whole body locked.

There.

The place that had made the world tilt in the ruin.

The kuru, burned away to the root.

Grace's hand stilled.

"The queue's gone," she said.

Neytiri heard it again, though she had already known. Heard it as sentence. As door closing. As the body answering that no, no road went through this flesh anymore.

"Burned to nothing," Grace whispered. "Without that there's no bond. No transfer. Nothing to put him back into."

Jake's presence went small and silent.

Neytiri could not look at him, so she looked at Mo'at.

Her mother did not move.

Mo'at had known too. Had known since the ruin when she knelt with blood on her hands and hope like a blade in her mouth.

"The bond held," Mo'at said.

Grace looked at her.

"The cord burned," Mo'at said. "Still he crossed."

Grace's eyes sharpened.

In Grace's face, the end became not an end but a problem.

"If the queue was gone," Grace said slowly, "and the connection held long enough for him to cross into you..." Her gaze shifted to Neytiri. Not her face now. Not only. All of her. "Then it wasn't only the queue."

Neytiri did not understand the science of it. Did not need to.

She understood the horror.

If the bond had crossed without the cord, then Jake's life was not tied to the ruin on the table anymore.

It was tied to her.

Only her.

Grace breathed out once. "The original pathway is gone. We can't use this body. Even if we stabilized what was left, the neural interface is—there's nothing. But if the spirit is anchored in the existing mating bond..." She stopped, eyes moving fast. "A new body. A viable queue. A grown interface."

Mo'at spoke before Neytiri could. "You grew your own body."

Grace went still.

The room seemed to pull itself toward her.

"You gave it breath," Mo'at said. "You made a living cord for it. Can you make his again?"

Grace closed her eyes.

For a long time she said nothing.

Neytiri heard only her own breath, the machines, Jake's silence, the faint scrape of Norm's fingers against the table as his hand tightened there. Outside, the bondless ikran made a low, broken sound. Seze answered, not comfort, not warning. Only presence.

Grace opened her eyes.

"I grew these bodies once," she said. "I can grow this one."

The words entered Neytiri like sunlight through a wound.

Then Grace said, "If."

Of course there was an if.

Hope always came with teeth.

Grace stepped back from the table. The work had steadied her and ruined her in the same breath; grief sat now under her eyes, but her voice had found its old clipped shape.

"If we had the right equipment," she said. "If we had a clean growth tank. If we had the cradle array, the culture medium, stasis fluid enough to hold an adult-form recombining body without collapse. If I had access to the files Hell's Gate didn't let me steal when I ran."

"Hell's Gate," Norm said.

The name landed in the room like a weapon drawn.

Neytiri knew the place by stories and smoke and the way the People spat when they named it. The stone-heart of the demons. The place behind walls and guns, where Jake had first come from, where Quaritch had made war into orders and orders into fire.

Everything they needed was there.

Grace looked at Neytiri and did not soften it. "I can't do it with what's in this shack."

"Then we take it," Neytiri said.

Grace's mouth tightened. "It's not that simple."

"It is."

"No." Grace's anger flashed again, but this time it had fear in it. "It is not. Even if we could get it out — and that's a very large if — growing him isn't days. It's months."

Months.

The word did not strike her mind.

It struck her body.

Her stomach turned. The floor shifted. One of her hands went, without her telling it, to the lower curve of her belly. Not visible yet to Grace's eyes, perhaps. Visible to Mo'at's hands. Known to Neytiri now as one of the two small weights around which the whole world had begun to move.

Months of carrying Jake's soul.

Months of the sickness that had climbed on the flight and not gone. Months of feeling the strain draw through her like a thread pulled too tight. Months of the child growing while the dead man she loved lived inside the same flesh.

Jake rose inside her with such force her head ached.

No.

His voice was low.

Not gentle now.

No. Not for months.

"How many?" Norm asked, though his face said he did not want the answer.

Grace shook her head. "I don't know. Not exactly. If we get the equipment intact. If the body takes. If the genetic base is recoverable enough from what we have. If the queue develops cleanly." She looked at Jake's ruined face and swallowed. "Months. I won't lie about that."

No, Jake said again, louder.

Mo'at had been watching Neytiri, not Grace.

Now she spoke.

"The time is not the only cost."

Grace turned.

Mo'at's eyes did not leave her daughter's face. "She is spending herself now."

Neytiri looked away.

Too late.

Her mother's voice followed. "To hold one living body and one child is a great work. To hold a second spirit that should have gone on, one wounded and pulling toward its own flesh..." Mo'at's throat moved. "It thins her. I felt it in the joining. I see it in her now."

Grace's gaze sharpened again, this time on Neytiri's body. The trembling hands. The grey cast under the skin. The way she stood only by will and the table's edge. Scientist, mother, healer — all of them saw too much.

"Months of this may take her," Mo'at said. "Before it gives him back."

The room went very quiet.

Then Jake broke.

Not loudly. Not as the dead should break. But he had been holding himself under the words, and now the hearing of them — tank, months, child, Neytiri's life named as payment — tore him up through her.

Neytiri.

She closed her eyes.

Neytiri, listen to me.

"No," she whispered.

Grace's head lifted. Norm stilled. Mo'at's face tightened because she knew who Neytiri had answered.

Jake did not stop.

No. Not for months. Not with the baby. Look at you — You can barely stand. If this is already hurting you, if it gets worse—

"Stop."

Let me go.

The words came clear.

They had been under everything since the ruin. Soft at first. Broken. Then fierce. Then silent when she would not answer. Now he gave them whole.

Please. Let me go, don't do this!

She opened her eyes.

Grace was watching, breath held.

Mo'at, too.

None of them heard him, but all of them saw what his voice did to her.

It would have been easier if only he had asked. If Grace had urged the work and Mo'at had held the spiritual line and Jake alone had begged for release, Neytiri could have made his fear into one more pain she carried. But they were all against her now. Grace with the months. Mo'at with the cost. Jake with the love that had turned itself toward leaving.

Neytiri stood in the demon shack with his ruined body under her hand and listened to all three.

The decision did not arrive.

It had been there before the words. Before the tank. Before the flight. Before Tsu'tey made exile into law. It had been there when she turned back toward Hometree. It had been there the first night the dream took her into the burning tree. It had been there under the Tree of Voices when she had chosen him before Eywa and called that choice forever because no one had told her forever could be broken into flesh and soul and child and ash.

There had never been a choice.

Only the saying of it.

"Then it takes me," she said.

Grace went still.

Mo'at closed her eyes.

Inside her, Jake's pain changed shape.

Not grief now.

Anger.

It rose hot and sudden through the bond, so unlike the worn pleading of the flight that Neytiri's hand tightened over the hide before she could stop it.

No, he said, and the word struck hard enough to make her breath catch. No, you don't get to say it like that. You don't get to stand there and spend yourself like it costs nothing because you're too damn stubborn to listen.

Her eyes narrowed.

Grace saw the change in her face and stilled further. Mo'at's head lifted a fraction, reading what she could not hear.

Jake did not stop.

You decided before we got here. Before Grace said months. Before your mother said it could take you. You already decided, and now you're calling it love because that sounds better than admitting you don't care what it does to you.

The anger that answered him came so fast it steadied her.

After everything — after the flight, the ruin, the exile, the body beneath her hand — he would call this carelessness. He would make her will into recklessness because he was afraid of being the thing saved.

"Be silent," she said.

The words came aloud.

Grace looked at her. Norm stopped breathing behind Grace's shoulder. Mo'at's face tightened, because she knew exactly who had been answered.

Inside her, Jake went still.

For one breath.

Then, lower, furious and afraid together: Neytiri—

"Be silent, Jake."

This time his name struck the room.

Grace flinched as if she had been touched by it.

Neytiri did not look away from the body. Her hand spread over the hide covering his chest, palm flat above the place where no heart beat.

"I have carried worse," she said, though she had not. Her voice shook with anger now, not doubt. "We rebuild him."

For one breath no one moved.

Then Grace turned away.

Not in refusal.

In work.

"Norm," she said, voice rough. "Get me the old secure channel."

Norm stared at her.

"Grace—"

"Now."

He moved.

Grace braced both hands on the counter and bowed her head for one breath, only one, as if letting herself grieve any longer would kill whatever had to be done next. When she lifted her face, it had changed again.

"There's one person left inside who'd help us," she said. "Max. If anyone can get what we need out of Hell's Gate, it's him."

Neytiri kept the name.

Max.

An ally behind enemy walls.

Norm was already dragging a chair to the old communications station, fingers moving over keys. A screen blinked blue-white. Grace leaned over his shoulder, issuing short commands, revising herself, cursing under her breath in a language Neytiri only half understood.

Trudy's name surfaced soon after.

"The Samson can lift the tank if we get it to the perimeter," Norm said. "If Trudy flies dark, maybe—"

"Maybe gets us shot out of the sky," Grace said. "But yes."

The plan was not yet a plan — more hope than shape, a path into the demon fortress made of people Neytiri did not know and tools she did not understand.

Still, the strange comfort of it moved through her: Sky People turning their strange competence toward Jake instead of against her own. Grace's grief made into lists. Norm's shaking hands made useful. A far-off man named Max becoming, in their mouths, a door.

Then Grace looked at the body.

The room changed.

"Until then," she said, softer.

Neytiri knew before she continued.

"No."

Grace's face tightened. "We can't leave him out here."

"No."

"Neytiri."

"No."

Not in the back. Not away. Not behind a wall. Not in the cold where the body would be safe and her hands would be empty.

Grace came around the table slowly. "Listen to me. We have to preserve what we can. Tissue samples. Neural structures. Anything recoverable. Heat is not our friend right now. Exposure isn't. Animals aren't." Her voice gentled, and the gentleness hurt worse because Neytiri could hear the care inside it. "We'll keep him cold. Keep him safe. Until we can do better than this."

Safe.

Safe was not in her arms.

Safe was not warm.

Safe was a demon cold room at the back of the shack and Grace's machines humming over what was left of him.

Neytiri looked to Mo'at.

Her mother's face gave her no rescue.

"He is not there," Mo'at said quietly.

Neytiri flinched.

"He is here." Mo'at's gaze dropped to her chest. "The body must be kept for the road back. Let the healer keep it."

The healer.

Grace heard the word and looked away, as though she did not deserve it.

Neytiri did not move.

Then Jake spoke, almost too softly to bear.

Please rest.

Not let me go.

Not this time.

It undid nothing.

It made her obey.

Grace and Norm lifted the body.

Neytiri went with them every step.

Her hands stayed on him as they carried him down the narrow passage, past hanging wires and storage crates and old field gear gone dusty with abandonment. The cold room waited at the back, its air sharp enough to sting the inside of her nose when Grace opened the door. A pale breath rolled out across the floor.

They laid him on the waiting slab.

Neytiri kept touching him until there was nowhere left to touch that did not block Grace's hands.

Then she had to let go.

For a moment her hands did not know what to do without him in them; she pressed them to her chest, then against her stomach so she could stop them from reaching for him.

Even now, with all the ruin of him bared, the shock had worn away and now all she wanted was to draw him close and keep him.

Her arms twitched once.

She locked them at her sides before they could reach.

The People did not fall on their dead and cling while healers worked. Daughters of Tsahìks did not crawl over bodies in demon cold rooms because grief had made their hands empty. Hunters did not let wanting rule the hand.

If she let herself move once, she would not stop.

So she stood still.

The stillness was worse than flight.

Grace watched her from the other side of the slab.

Saw too much again.

But she said nothing.

When the body had been covered, when the first machines had been set, when Grace's hands began the careful work of preserving what ruin had left, Neytiri stepped back into the main room.

The shack. The body in the cold. Grace and Norm turning grief into work. A far-off ally behind enemy walls. Trudy and her flying machine not yet summoned but already part of the road. Seze at the clearing's edge, the one path out of all this if Neytiri chose to take it. Jake's ikran beside her, bondless and still not gone.

And Neytiri in the middle of it.

Carrying the one part of Jake that still lived.

Mo'at found her at the doorway.

For a while neither of them spoke.

Then Mo'at said, "I cannot stay."

Neytiri had known.

The warrior in her had known. The small frightened girl in her had not.

She looked at her mother and said nothing because if she spoke, she might ask for the impossible.

Mo'at's face softened as if she had heard the unsaid. "The People will miss the Tsahìk. Tsu'tey watches the paths I take. I have been gone too long already."

The People.

The word came from far away.

They were not Neytiri's, now, or she was not theirs. The sentence had been spoken. Exile. No return until Jake was cut out and she was made clean. Yet her mother still belonged to them. Mo'at could move where Neytiri could not. Mo'at had duties not even grief could break.

Neytiri understood.

Understanding did not stop the old childhood dread from rising.

She was to be left in the demons' place with the dead and the Sky People, and her mother was the last of home.

"I will come," Mo'at said.

Neytiri looked up.

"Every few days, when I can. By paths they do not watch." Mo'at reached and took her daughter's face in both hands. "You will not be without me."

The relief hurt.

Mo'at's thumbs moved once over Neytiri's cheekbones, reading even as she comforted. Pulse. Breath. Heat. Spirit. The Tsahìk's hands did not stop being Tsahìk because they belonged to her mother.

Neytiri let herself be read.

There was no privacy left anyway.

Mo'at's expression went very still.

That stillness frightened her more than any word could have.

"I will watch your spirit as Grace watches his body," Mo'at said. "When it thins too far, daughter, you will hear me say so."

"I will hear," Neytiri said.

She did not say she would obey.

Mo'at did not pretend not to know the difference.

Her mother's hand lowered then, not to Neytiri's face but to the place beneath her ribs, to the small life no one else could see. She rested her palm there. Neytiri's breath caught.

She held her hand there, acknowledging both: the child under flesh, the soul threaded through.

Jake stirred inside Neytiri.

Grief. Wonder. Terror. He kept all three wordless.

Mo'at felt Neytiri feel him and closed her eyes.

Then she drew her hand away.

"I will take you back," Neytiri said.

The words came quickly, because Seze waited. Because the offer gave her something to do. Because watching her mother walk into the trees alone felt unbearable.

Mo'at shook her head.

"The flight is nothing," Neytiri said.

"No, daughter."

"I can—"

"Let me walk."

The refusal stung because it was gentle.

Mo'at looked toward the dark beyond the shack lights. "I have thinking that only the forest will hold."

Neytiri's mouth closed.

She understood then.

The long walk home would be her mother's own. No daughter failing in her arms. No dead son-in-law carried between them. No demon machines, no Grace, no Olo'eyktan's sentence, no need to be Tsahìk before anyone's eyes. Only the forest, and whatever grief a mother allowed herself when no one needed her hands.

Neytiri would not take that from her.

They stood together at the edge of the clearing.

Seze lifted her head when Mo'at passed. Jake's ikran watched with bright, wounded eyes. Mo'at did not look back after the first few steps. Her small straight figure moved between the trees, beads dark against her shoulders, feet sure on hidden paths.

Neytiri watched until the forest closed over the place where her mother had been.

Then the last of home was gone.

─── · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ───

Grace came to her once more before the night fully took the shack.

Neytiri had thought the woman would bury herself in the cold room until morning, but the door opened behind her, and Grace stepped out with bloodless hands and a face stripped down by work. She had washed, perhaps. Not enough. Jake's ruin still lived in the set of her mouth.

For a moment they only looked at each other.

"I'm sorry," Grace said.

Neytiri did not move.

"For what I said. For blaming you." Grace's voice roughened. "I know now it was never yours to carry."

The apology landed on a wound Neytiri had no strength to open.

If she answered, she might say that Grace had left him too. That Norm had left him. That all of them had run because living bodies run from fire and dead bodies do not call loudly enough. She might say that blame was a net and every hand in it was bloody. She might say that Grace's guilt was useful only if it built the tank.

She said none of it.

She was grateful.

That, too, she did not say.

Grace seemed to accept the silence because perhaps she had expected no better.

"Is there anything I can do?" she asked. "Anything to make you more comfortable tonight?"

Comfortable.

Neytiri looked past her to the shack: the machines, the table, the cold room door. Comfort did not live here.

"No," she said. "Thank you."

The words felt strange in her mouth.

Grace blinked at the thanks, as if it hurt.

Neytiri looked toward the trees. "I will be well enough in the forest. It is more home to me than any roof."

Grace nodded.

Neither of them believed it fully.

Still, Grace let her have the lie.

Later, when the shack settled, Neytiri did not go to the forest.

She meant to.

She stood once and made it as far as the door. The trees beyond were black and wet and alive, and somewhere among them Seze waited, and Jake's ikran grieved, and the ground would be softer than the demon floor. There would be leaf-smell. Night insects. The breath of the world that had made her.

She could not cross the threshold.

The cold room was behind her.

Jake's body was behind her.

One wall. One door. One step.

She returned to it as if pulled by a rope through the ribs and sat on the floor beside the cold room door.

The shack went quiet around her by degrees. Norm's voice lowered in the front room, then vanished. Grace moved for longer in the back, opening drawers, setting instruments, muttering once to herself. Then even she stilled. The machines kept their watch with tireless demon patience. Lights blinked. Metal ticked as it cooled.

Outside, past the glass, Jake's ikran had settled at the clearing's edge and would not leave it. Now and then it called — low, questioning, pitched for a rider who did not answer — and each time the sound went through Neytiri like her own grief given a throat. It did not understand death. It understood only that the bond had gone quiet and the body had not come back, and so it kept its own vigil over the place where he was held, as she kept hers.

Neytiri sat between the living and the dead.

No waking soul watched her.

Only Jake.

You should sleep, he said.

She leaned her head back against the wall.

The voice was worn down to almost nothing. Not gone. Never gone now. But emptied by the day and by losing every argument he had made.

"You should be silent," she whispered.

A faint ache moved through him. Not amusement. Almost.

I tried that.

Her eyes closed.

"This is the place, then," she said into the dim. "This is where we live now."

Jake said nothing.

She set herself to the watch.

It was the only thing left that belonged wholly to her. Spine straight. Knees drawn up. Ears open to the machines and the forest beyond them. Hand resting over the place where Jake lived when he spoke, then over the place where the child slept too small for movement. The old posture found her though the body had little strength left for it. Hometree gone. Clan gone. Mother's hands gone into the trees. Jake's body shut in cold.

Still she could watch.

She had kept vigil at the Well of Souls when the People would not look at her.

She could keep it here.

For a while the discipline held.

Then the room breathed strangely.

Neytiri pressed her wrist to her mouth as nausea rose. It passed. Came back. Passed again and left sweat cold along her spine. Her head felt far from her neck. The lights smeared when she opened her eyes.

Sleep, Jake said again. Please.

"I am watching."

There's nothing coming through that door.

"You do not know that."

Neytiri.

She hated the tenderness in it.

She hated that it could reach her even when she had no softness left for anything else.

She reached inward for him, not to answer but to feel. He was there. Quiet now, spent the way a person went quiet after saying everything and losing. The plea remained between them, unanswered and standing: let me go. He did not press it. Perhaps he had no strength. Perhaps he knew hers was gone too.

The floor tilted.

Neytiri's hand shot to the wall.

No.

Not yet.

She forced her eyes open. The door across from her steadied, then wavered. Her breath came too shallow. The child under her hand seemed suddenly the only warm thing in the whole cold world.

No.

She had kept watches through storm and hunt and war. She had flown through ash with a body lashed to her side. She had stood before Tsu'tey and heard exile spoken. She would not be defeated by a floor.

Her body did not ask her.

The strength simply went out.

There was no graceful slipping into sleep. No dip and jerk and stubborn rise. One breath she sat with her hand braced to the wall; the next the wall was gone and the floor came hard toward her.

No—

She did not know whether the word was hers.

Jake shouted.

Not in anger. Not in pleading for release.

Terror tore him open.

Neytiri!

Her name struck through her so hard that for one instant it seemed it might hold her in the world by force. There was no sacrifice in him then. No noble leaving. Only panic, raw and whole, his voice reaching for her with everything he had.

She was already falling too far to answer.

The shack thinned.

The lights drew out into pale lines.

The floor lost its cold.

─── · ─ ·𖥸· ─ · ───

For one breath she expected fire.

Smoke. Heat. The old burning corridor. The tree made into nightmare around her, walls of flame and Jake somewhere ahead, calling, always out of reach. Every dream since the fire had known only that country. Every sleeping road had led there.

This one did not.

There was no smoke.

No heat.

No roar.

She opened her eyes on the ground outside the shack.

Night lay soft around her, and whole. She was in the very place she had fallen — not slept, fallen — but the fall had not followed her here. When she rose it was without bargaining for it: no nausea turning under her ribs, no tremor in her hands, no belly-deep drag of two lives and one death. The exhaustion that had put her on the floor was gone as cleanly as the smoke.

That alone told her she was dreaming.

The shack stood where it had stood, but gentled — its hard edges softened, its glass gone amber and dim, the machines silent, the cold room nowhere she could feel. The forest breathed slow around it. The old dread did not come, because the fire did not come with it. Every dream since Hometree had opened onto the burning halls; this one had not, and the change frightened her more than any flame.

Then, out of a habit older than a day, she reached for Jake.

Not with her hands. Inward — to the place behind her ribs where his voice had lived since the ruin, where his presence had become as steady as her own pulse.

Nothing answered.

She reached again, harder, pressing into the quiet where he should have been. Jake. No worn warmth. No thread drawn taut between them. Only her own self, echoing back through a body that had not, since the fire, ever been this alone.

The dream's softness cracked, and terror came up through it.

"Jake."

It came out of her aloud — the first spoken sound in the whole still dream. Nothing answered. She said it again, louder, and then she ran.

Her body gave her everything she asked of it, and that frightened her more — no weakness to slow her, no sickness to fold her double, only a speed she had not owned in days. She hit the steps in a single stride and threw the door open on his name. "Jake!"

The shack was empty.

"Grace." Her voice cracked around it. "Norm—"

No one answered that either. No Grace at the table. No Norm among the machines. No footsteps, no hard white light that human hands made. The cold room door stood open on darkness, and when she reached it the slab inside was bare.

Jake's body was gone.

"No." It came low and then climbed, the pained cry of a creature losing what it had already lost once. "No — Jake —"

This was worse than fire. In the burning halls she had at least been chasing him; here there was no voice in her, no body in the cold, no one who had ever sworn to keep him — as if the whole day had been the dream and this emptiness the truth beneath it. She had lost him again. The world had reached in while she slept and taken him a second time.

"Jake!"

Her cry went out into the trees and came back with nothing.

Then, beyond them, a glow moved.

Soft. Blue-green. Not flame, not the demons' light, but the living kind that gathered under wet leaves and in the throats of small night things. It breathed at the edge of the clearing, low and patient, and it had not been there before.

She went to it the way she had once gone toward his voice through smoke — without caution, her whole self leaning after the only answer the dream would give. But this light did not flee her and did not roar. As she came near it did not brighten; it spread, evening out through the trees, until the dark itself seemed lit from underneath.

The trees opened.

A pond lay cupped in the hollow, lit from within — blue and green and pale gold where the water moved over stone. Glowing seed-drift hung above its surface. Moss along the bank shone soft as breath, and the leaves crowding close were pricked all over with light, as if the whole forest had bent to look into the water.

And Jake sat at its edge, his feet in the pond.

For a moment she could not understand what she saw. He sat easy, hands braced behind him, head bowed, shoulders loose — at rest. Not ruined. Not wrapped in hide. Not a voice caught behind her ribs. Just Jake, as though he had been waiting at the water a long while and would have waited longer just for her.

The sight of him at peace undid something in her before he moved.

She stopped at the edge of the light. She did not trust it. She could not.

Then he looked up.

For one breath his face went utterly still. Then he was on his feet, water sheeting from his legs, crossing the moss fast and then faster —

"Jake—"

His name tore out of her and would not stop, half his name and half a sound with no shape to it, and she was moving too, running the last of the distance, and then his arms closed around her — all the way around, solid and warm, his mouth in her hair saying her name once and only once, as if more than that would break him.

"Jake."

She said it again into his throat, and again, as though the saying were the thing keeping him there. Her face had found the curve of his neck as though her body knew the place better than her mind did. His chest rose under her hands. His heart beat there — steady, living — and for a long moment there was nothing in the world but the shock of him whole.

No wound. No burns. No crushed and broken places. No kuru seared to the root. His queue lay thick and unbroken down his back, its beads cool against her wrist; his skin was warm; his breath moved at her temple; and the smell of him filled the place where smoke had lived too long.

Jake. Not memory, not corpse, not voice. Jake, alive and holding her.

He is whole here, she thought, and the words were not large enough to hold it.

Then thought gave way to the older need, and she had to be sure of him.

She turned her face into his throat and breathed him in. The scent went through her like a blow — rain-warmed skin, leaf-smoke, the salt and living musk she had learned in the dark under the Tree of Voices. Not the cold room. Not burned hide. Him.

Her hands would not be still. She took his hands and turned them in hers, pressing her thumbs to the warm centres of his palms as if she could make the heat confess itself. She laid both palms flat to his chest, then his throat, and felt the pulse hold there under blue skin. She cupped his face, and he closed his eyes beneath her touch, and that nearly broke her. Her fingertips passed slow over his eyelids, slow, pressing slightly to feel the orbs beneath; he did not flinch, did not smile, did not try to make it lighter than it was. He only stood and let her learn him with her hands and her nose and her eyes. Her hand rose, shaking into his hair and found the root of his queue, whole, and a sound left her that was not speech. She traced it from root to tip, needing to feel every part of it unburned.

Every unbroken inch of him answered the ruin in the cold room and the voice with no body, and still it was not enough. She could not get her fill.

Through all of it, Jake held still.

He did not gather her up and make the touching his. He did not turn his mouth to hers. He stood in the glowing moss with his arms loose around her and gave her the whole of himself to be certain of.

"Easy," he said, low, the word moving through her where her mouth rested at his throat. "I've got you. Take what you need."

Then the stillness went out of him.

His hands rose — not to take, only to have her — one pushing up into her hair, the other spreading wide between her shoulder blades, and both of them shook as badly as her own. For days he had been a voice behind her ribs and nothing more. No hand when she carried his body through the fire. No arm when she stood under the sentence. No touch when she went down onto the cold floor with the wall between her and him. He had spoken to her through all of it and reached her through none of it. Now the dream had given him hands again, and they moved over her without pause, relearning her, as if stopping would cost him the having of her twice.

"Neytiri." Her name came apart in his mouth. "Neytiri. I couldn't reach you. All this time I had to talk to you and watch you break and I could not put a hand on you. I couldn't—"

His voice went out from under him.

She drew back far enough to see him, and his face was wet. Jake, who in the cold room had no eyes left to weep with, wept here. His mouth would not hold its shape. One of his hands came up to her face, clumsy with need, his thumb dragging the tears from under her eye and losing his own down his cheek in the same breath.

That was what undid her.

Not the body. Something beneath it — the thing that had held rigid from the moment she found him under the burned roots. It all came down at once: the flight, the ruin, the exile spoken over her head, the tank, the months, the child, the cold-room door, the floor rising to meet her because she had nothing left to stand on. It fell through her like a rope let go.

She broke against him.

There were no words in it, only the body folding. Her arms went around him hard enough to pull a sound from him, and then his closed fully — not loose now, not careful except in the way strength can be careful — and he held on while it moved through her. It came out of her rough and small and animal: breath that would not catch, a shudder at his neck, her fingers dug into his back as if the dream might try to take him mid-breath.

And he broke with her.

She would not have believed him able to. In the waking world he had spent his last strength telling her to rest, to let him go, to be reasonable, holding his own fear steady so that only hers would show. Here the steadiness was gone. The arms around her shook. His breath tore against her hair. He said her name and it came out ruined, and then he said it again, and he was weeping into her hair without shame for any of it, his hands moving over her back and her shoulders and the nape of her neck as though the days of speaking to her out of nowhere had left him as starved for the fact of her as she was for him.

He held her through it, and she held him, and for once neither of them was the one keeping the other upright.

Since the fire she had been held down, held apart, held in place — by law, by shame, by hands that meant to keep her from herself. She had carried his silence and his voice and his body, the child and the exile, and stood straight through all of it. Here, only here, she could set the world down. And here, for the first time since the ruin, he could do more than speak into her blood. He could put his arms around what his dying had done to her, and hold it, and break over it the way he had not let himself break while he was only a voice.

His hand moved, slow, from the nape of her neck down the length of her spine, then rose to cradle her head against him. He pressed his wet face into her hair. "I'm here," he said, and the words cracked straight through. "I'm here. I've got you. I'm here."

She made a sharp sound and held tighter.

"I know," he said, and there was grief in it, because he knew that where she would wake it would not be true enough. "I know. I've got you. I know."

Even so, his hands would not be still either.

As she shook against him they began to move — not to soothe now, to search. They ran down her back and along her sides, over her ribs, down her arms, turning her wrists as though she might be hiding a wound the way she hid everything else. One rose to the back of her head and cradled there, searching out the place the cold floor had found when she fell. Here her body answered him whole and strong — no tremor, no grey sway, none of the thinning he had watched take her across the long day. But he had spent that whole day able to do nothing but talk while it happened, and the fear had hands now, and it would not be reasoned out of them.

"Are you hurt?" The words came broken against her hair. "Neytiri. Tell me if you're hurt. Anywhere. Tell me—"

Then one hand slid between them and flattened low over her belly.

It stopped there.

His whole body stilled around that single point of touch, his palm spread wide over the small life she carried — the child that until now had been only a weight in her voice and a thing to be terrified for. A breath went out of him, shaking. His thumb moved once over the curve of her, careful past bearing, asking the thing he could not make his mouth say. Both of you. Are you both still here.

"We are well," she said, and her voice broke on it. "Both. We are well, Jake."

He pushed his face into her neck and breathed her in — deep, ragged, greedy — the way she had breathed him, dragging the scent of her down into himself as if he could carry it back through the wall between the dream and the cold floor. His arms gathered her the rest of the way in, close and then closer, until nothing of the dark could get between them.

"Then stay," he said into her skin. "Stay well. For me. That's all I ask you. Just that."

For a long while the pond breathed its light around them, and he let her have it.

Then, somewhere inside the holding, she felt him gather himself — the small breath, the tightening in his chest — and knew before he spoke that he was reaching for the hard thing. Even here, even whole, Jake did not know how to leave a wound unnamed once he had decided it was his to answer for.

"Neytiri," he said into her hair. "There's something I have to say to you."

No.

It rose in her cold and immediate. She knew what stood outside this light — the lie he had lived among her people, the trust she had given away piece by piece while he kept his own truth behind his teeth, the wound with his name on it, buried under all the newer ones and never healed, only covered over.

She knew it waited. She did not care. Not now, not with his pulse under her mouth, not in the first place death had given him back to her.

She pressed closer, turning her face full into his neck. "Not now."

"Neytiri—"

"Not tonight." Muffled against him, and no less a command for it.

His arms tightened. For a moment she felt him war with himself — the part that needed to confess, the part that believed love meant handing her the knife hilt-first. Then the breath went out of him.

"Okay," he said.

She did not thank him. This was not forgiveness; the dream held none in it, and she knew the reckoning would only come for them harder for being turned away now. Let it wait. Tonight she wanted the fact of him and nothing else — whole, and warm, and hers.

Some hunter's part of her knew the pond for a dream. It knew there was a cold floor somewhere, and a colder room, and a morning that would give her back a voice behind her ribs and a body behind a wall. She refused the knowing. She held on, and let the blue light close around them both.

In the end they came down together into the soft moss at the water's edge. Jake lowered first, as though even here his body remembered how to bring someone gently down with him, and stretched back into the glow; she followed without letting go, settling onto his lap, up on her knees, both arms wound around him and her face pushed into his throat. Not for heat. Not yet, not that. Something older and smaller — a creature curled around the thing that had been taken from it, a mate keeping watch over breath. His arms came around her and stayed, one hand spread between her shoulder blades, the other low at her back, and the pond moved its slow light across them both.

She breathed him in. Again. And again.

The frantic checking had passed. The breaking had passed. What was left was stillness — deep and animal, the quiet of being exactly where the body believes it belongs, even as the mind knows better. His throat under her mouth. His chest lifting beneath hers. The moss soft at her knees, the water whispering close.

Everything that needed to be said stayed unsaid. The betrayal. The reckoning. The cold morning. The cost. All of it waited outside the light, and neither of them called it in.

For now, Jake did not speak.

For now, she did not ask.