#jake sully

The sound that came out of Neytiri was not a sound she thought she would ever make again. It tore up through her chest and out of her throat, and then there was another behind it, and another, until there was nothing but sobbing, until she was no longer standing but held up, her whole body folded into the unbending frame of her mother.

Mo'at spoke above her. Not in Na'vi now, but the clipped human words she used when Grace needed them.

"Outside. For a little while."

Grace answered low. Neytiri did not hear the words, only the agreement in them. Then Mo'at was guiding her away from the glass and fluid and wires, one arm hard around her shoulders, the other keeping Neytiri's head against her as though she were very small again and fevered and being carried from a bad dream.

The night air struck her wet and green.

The shack fell behind them. Its light dragged across the mud and broken roots in long white slashes, then thinned as Mo'at led her toward the treeline. Behind them the machines kept their small mechanical vigil — the hum and tick that had become the whole shape of the day, the tank's cold blue glow, Jake's body suspended in the fluid like a question no one could answer aloud. Now the forest opened in front of her instead, dark and wet and living. Her feet remembered ground better than her mind did; they found root, moss, stone. At the treeline the chemical tang finally loosened from her throat, and the first true breath of forest entered her.

It hurt.

Everything living hurt.

Mo'at lowered her to the moss with a tenderness that cracked Neytiri open. Her knees folded, her body gone lighter and less her own than it once was, the child a low steady weight that pulled her earthward. She sank down, and her mother came down with her, facing her in the dark where the leaves roofed them and rain collected in the high branches before falling through in silver ticks.

"Look at me."

Neytiri tried. Her eyes would not hold still. Tears made Mo'at's face swim and double.

Mo'at cupped her jaw. Thumb under one eye. Fingers at the throat. Palm over the quick-panting chest. Then lower, to the place where her child grew, small and warm and sleeping.

The frown came.

It was small. A tightening between the brows, a stillness at the mouth. Her mother's hands had stopped over her stomach, where the child lay low and sleeping under the skin, and they did not move on.

Neytiri's chest tightened.

She has found it.

The hole where he was. The empty room at the center of her. Of course her mother could feel it — of course it was written in her pulse, in her breath, in the flesh of her. She had carried it into her mother's arms like a body.

A thin sound left her. Not a word. Not even a cry. She bent forward as if struck, but Mo'at held her upright, hands steady, brow furrowed.

"Something has changed," Mo'at said, voice low.

Neytiri shook her head.

"You are worse than when I last read you." Mo'at's voice stayed level; that was how Neytiri knew the fear in it was real. "What has happened, ma'ite?"

The question split her open.

"He is gone," Neytiri choked out, the words were too small for what they held. Her hands shook as she grabbed onto Mo'at's wrist.

"He is gone, sa'nu. I have killed him."

Mo'at lifted one hand from her grasp to touch the crown of her head.

"Calm yourself, ma'yawntu, tell me what has happened."

"I cannot hear him." Neytiri folded down until her forehead pressed against Mo'at's thigh. The moss was cold under her knees. Her tears soaked into her mother's cloth. "I cannot feel him. There is nothing where he was. I woke and there was nothing. I did it. I looked at him and I—"

The memory rose, bright and ugly: his human body, broken and small under the harsh light; her own disgust moving through her before she could name it; the rage; the words; the fire.

"I drove him out. I doubted him. I hated him. I killed him."

"No." Mo'at did not say it sharply. She said it the way she might steady a bowl filled to the brim — a hand placed so that nothing in it was lost. "No, child. You will breathe first."

Neytiri tried sucking in a breath, but it choked out of her with another sob.

"I cannot."

"You will."

Mo'at bent until her brow touched Neytiri's. Then she breathed in — slow, deep, patient — and because she was Mo'at, because she was sa'nu, because before Neytiri had been anything else she had been a body tucked against her chest learning the rhythm of the world, Neytiri's breath went looking for hers. It stumbled. Broke. Found it again, and then slowly it followed the pattern.

When the sobbing no longer threw her whole body forward, Mo'at drew back, hands staying pressed against her.

"We will see together," she said.

A sickness rose from her stomach like fear.

Her braid lay against her shoulder, heavy as a living thing. At the thought of giving it over, terror ran through her so cleanly that for one blink all the grief went white.

Mo'at saw the recoil. She did not reach.

She only drew her own braid forward and held it in her palm like an offering.

The forest waited around them. Rain ticked from leaf to leaf. Somewhere in the dark, a night insect called once and fell silent. But for Neytiri, everything seemed to freeze.

Her hands moved as though they belonged to someone braver. She brought her braid forward. The violet tendrils stirred, seeking. Her fingers shook so badly that the ends brushed Mo'at's palm twice before they found the tendrils in her own braid. Mo'at did not move, she let Neytiri come to her, slow and patient, and when the ends met, her hand moved to press against Neytiri's cheek to steady her.

The bond opened.

Mo'at entered the way water enters dry ground — without force, spreading into every crack, every dark corner of Neytiri's being and filling it.

Neytiri pressed her teeth against her cheek and did not pull away.

Her mother reached the child first. The touch moved through her, soft and exact, to the life curled beneath her heart. The child slept, small and stubborn and continuing. Mo'at lingered there long enough for Neytiri to understand: this is safe; this still lives.

Only then did her mother read the rest.

Pulse too fast. Blood too thin. Body spent. Mind frayed to threads. Grief eating what food had not replaced.

"You must care for this body," Mo'at said aloud, though she did not need to. The words moved through the join as well, heavier there. "Not only because it is yours."

Neytiri turned her face away.

Mo'at did not let her hide inside that. Through the bond, Neytiri felt her mother move toward the place she herself could no longer bear to touch: the empty room, the wound where Jake had been, gone cold and silent.

Her whole body braced for Mo'at to confirm what she herself already knew.

For the clean absence. For Mo'at's breath to catch. For the truth to become larger because another person saw it.

Mo'at went still.

The join narrowed to one point of listening.

There was nothing but her mother's attention and her own terror beating against it.

Then Mo'at opened her eyes, and a soft sigh pressed out of her chest.

"He is not lost," she said.

Neytiri could not fit the words into her own understanding. She flinched when Mo'at pulled her kuru away, severing the join gently.

The world returned in pieces: wet moss, leaf-shadow, her own mouth open around no sound. Mo'at placed both hands on her face.

"He is still there, my daughter, you have not killed him."

A broken sound came from Neytiri's chest, almost angry in its grief.

"No. No, I cannot feel—"

"I know." Mo'at's thumbs pressed her cheeks. "He is far from you. Weak. Something has wounded the bond very deeply. But he is not gone."

Neytiri's hands clawed into her own thighs, her body rocking forward. "It was me." She sobbed, bowing her head.

Mo'at's face changed then — not softened, not hardened.

"Tell me."

So she told her.

It came out of her in pieces, out of order, the way the dream had come.

"There was a voice. His voice — in the machine." It scraped the back of her throat. "It would not stop. It played back what he gave them: the high paths. The roots. When the clan gathered. When we scattered. Where to strike so we break." Her hands opened and closed on nothing.

"I ran. The hallways had no end. Then I was in a room of dead light. He was in the chair — the one that held him because his legs would not. So small. So unlike him."

Her voice thinned to almost nothing. "His face. And he looked at me like he already knew what I would do."

"And what did you do?" Mo'at asked. Not gentle. Not cruel. Only there.

Neytiri could not say it to her mother's face. She turned into the cloth at Mo'at's thigh.

"I refused him." She choked out, "Refused his body, his name, his touch."

Mo'at's hand came down over her head gently, and Neytiri pressed her eyes closed against the sudden urge to cry.

"When I woke," Neytiri whispered, "he was gone."

Mo'at listened until there was no more.

"No," she said.

Neytiri looked up.

"I do not think your anger did this."

Neytiri pushed up, looking at her mother.

"But I—"

"I do not think your anger did this," Mo'at repeated. "Anger is heat. It burns, yes. It can wound. But what I read in you is not a thing burned away by anger." Her gaze sharpened. "It is a thing nearly cut loose by doubt."

The words struck.

"You and Jakesully were bound in a way neither of you understood," Mo'at said. "His spirit took shelter in you when his body could not hold him. In the dream, something made you question whether that shelter was real. Whether he was real. Whether the one you loved and the broken human before you were one soul."

Mo'at paused, looking at Neytiri. "That disbelief came close to severing what held him."

Neytiri covered her mouth.

Mo'at let the truth sit. She did not soften it into comfort, and for that, Neytiri loved her with a child's helplessness and a woman's pain.

"Can it be mended?" Neytiri asked.

Mo'at looked toward the shack lights between the trees.

"Wounds are mended by tending," she said. "Not by tearing them open with fear, and they will not be tended by a body already pushed to its limit."

Neytiri swallowed, shaking her head.

"I cannot sleep."

"You must." Mo'at pressed, her hands coming up to touch Neytiri's shoulders, "You cannot do anything if you do not have your own strength."

"The last time I slept, I lost him."

"The last time you slept, you doubted what you knew." Mo'at touched Neytiri's brow. "This time, you will go believing."

Neytiri laughed once, the sound like ash on her tongue, her eyes watering, her chest suddenly tight with hope and fear alike.

"I do not know how." She whispered.

Mo'at nodded. "I will hold you until you remember."

Neytiri let her mother draw her down. She had no strength left to argue. Her head found Mo'at's lap, her hand wrapping tightly into the cloth at Mo'at's hip. Fingers moved through her hair gently, pulling the loose strands from her sweat-streaked face and tucking them back.

"I will not leave you," Mo'at said, gently. "When you wake, you will see me first."

Neytiri held that promise like a bead between her teeth, her hands shaking.

She did not want to close her eyes.

She fought sleep, the way she had once fought deep water — chin lifted, breath held, some animal part of her certain that to yield was to drown. Each time her eyes slipped shut she dragged them open again, back to her mother's face, to the grey light coming through the leaves, to anything that was still here and still hers.

But her body was no longer waiting on her permission. It had been spent past the place where will could reach it. Her lids came down and did not rise. Her limbs went heavy as wet earth. The last waking part of her strained upward like a swimmer toward light, and could not hold, and began to sink.

Then Mo'at began to sing.

Low. Almost without sound, more breath than voice. It was a song from before — before the tank, before Jake, before Neytiri had a name for any of the things that could be taken from her. The song her mother had hummed into her hair when the dark had been only dark, when fear had a shape small enough for a song to cover it. The melody moved through Mo'at's body and into Neytiri's cheek where it rested, and her breath, without asking her, went looking for the rhythm of it. Found it and slowed.

She stopped fighting and let herself fall.

☾─────•──•°•𖥸•°•──•─────☽

For a moment there was only dark, and in the dark the terrible habit of reaching — the automatic turn toward Jake, towards the light that always led her to him, to the distant sound of his breath inside her.

There was nothing, only dark, only silence.

Then the dark changed under her feet. Falling away until she stood on a path she would've known blindfolded.

The path to Utraya Mokri opened up around her, the bright light of moss and leaf glowing bright and filling her vision with light.

No machine spoke here. No empty dead light. No flat voice following her.

Only the hush of hanging tendrils far ahead, the old living whisper of the sacred place, and the path beneath her feet remembering every step she had ever taken on it.

She had walked this way as a girl. As hunter. As daughter. As woman going to choose. The last time she had walked it like this, Jake had followed her beneath the Tree of Voices with all his clumsy courage and all his lies, and she had loved him enough to see past both.

Now she walked alone, each step slow, searching as she let her eyes move along the landscape, hoping that he would be waiting.

She did not call his name.

The silence had become a creature to her. She would not feed it a name and hear it swallow. The hope was a fragile thing in her chest, and his silence would be enough to shatter it.

The tree came into view slowly: pale tendrils moving like breath, violet light gathered in the roots, the whole place alive with memory.

For a moment she stopped, staring into the swaying vines, eyes catching on every small hint of blue, breath catching at every possible shape that could be him waiting. She could almost picture him waiting, like he had all those days before, when his face had not been marked with guilt, and he had looked at her like she was the most beautiful thing he had ever been permitted to touch.

He wasn't waiting now.

Neytiri stopped.

The hope she had been holding died so suddenly that she made a sound and went down to her knees.

Mo'at had been wrong. Or Mo'at had seen a fading thing, one last ember, and the dream had come too late. The moss received her hands. She bent over them, shaking, and the voices of the ancestors moved around her in soft endless threads that did not include him.

She pressed her palms flat against the moss, as if she could hold herself together through the ground alone. The ancestors' voices threaded past her, layered and murmuring, old joys and old griefs that were not hers to carry, and none of them wore his shape. She listened anyway. She listened the way she had listened for him every hour since she woke into the silence, straining after some fold in the sound that might turn out to be him after all.

Nothing turned.

Grief came up through her in waves that had no rhythm to brace against, arriving and receding and arriving again before she had found her footing from the last one. She thought of his hands cupping her face beneath the branches. She thought of the wrongness of the other hand, small and pale, reaching for her in that dead room, and could not tell anymore which memory was punishment and which was simply what remained of him.

She had come all this way to be too late.

Her body curled lower over her hands. The moss was cool and gave nothing back. Somewhere above her the Tree kept singing its endless names of the dead, indifferent to which name she had come to find.

Something in her let go.

The grief that hope had been holding back now had nothing to press against, and it came out of her all at once, wave on wave, until it was not weeping so much as a body trying to survive what it could not hold. She keened into the moss. She broke her own rule and said his name — once, twice, a dozen times, flung it out into the grove as if she could throw it far enough to reach him — and the silence swallowed each one and gave nothing back. She clawed the earth. She curled and uncurled around the child while her stomach heaved on nothing. She cried until the sound cracked and thinned and lost its shape, until there was only breath dragged raw across a throat gone useless.

And then, slowly, it wore itself out — not because the grief had eased, but because there was nothing left in her to spend on it.

She lay where she had fallen, curled into the moss with her cheek against it and one hand still open on the roots, too spent now even to weep. Her breathing came shallow and even, the emptied quiet of someone worn down to the floor of themselves. The tendrils stilled. The sounds of the forest emptied. Little by little the whole sacred place settled around her, until she could hear the wet earth beneath her palm and her own heart knocking slow and tired against the ground.

Which was why she heard it at all.

A footstep behind her.

Small. Almost nothing. The wet press of moss under foot.

Neytiri froze, her eyes opening and staring at the moss beneath her, terrified that if she moved, it would disappear.

The world held its breath with her.

Another step.

She could not turn. If she turned and saw nothing, the last part of her would go. If she turned and saw some dream-made trick wearing his shape, she would not survive that either. If she turned and it was him—

"Neytiri."

The voice broke on the middle of her name.

His voice. Not the flat silence she had been living inside, not the memory she had worn thin with listening — his, broken and close and real, the first sound that had come from him and not from her own desperate reaching. It went into her like warmth into a body left too long in the cold.

She turned, breath catching in her throat.

Jake stood at the edge of the roots.

Not as he had been in the room of fire. Not small and human and hurt under white light. He stood in the body she had first taught to breathe the forest, tall and blue and trembling like a sapling after lightning. Violet light lay across his shoulders. One hand gripped a low branch beside him, not for grace but for need. His mouth was open. His face had no defence on it at all.

He tried to say her name again and failed.

Neytiri was moving before thought could catch her.

She struck him hard enough that his breath left him. His arms closed a half-beat late, then fiercely, around her back and shoulders and head, gathering whatever of her could be gathered. She buried her face in his chest. His skin was warm — warm, when everything of his had been cold since she woke to the silence: the glass, the fluid, the silence she reached into and drew back from as though from something dead. His heart beat under her cheek. Not a number climbing on Grace's screen. A heart, quick and uneven and his. His hands shook where they held her, and even the shaking was a mercy, because it meant there was something left in him that could tremble.

All that day she had turned inward and met nothing — the reaching, the silence, the recoil, over and over, until the emptiness had begun to feel like the truth and everything else the lie. Now there was nothing to reach for. He was simply here, all around her, and the hollow she had carried so long she had stopped believing it could be anything else closed over him like water over a stone.

"Jake—"

She cried with her teeth in him, with his name somewhere in the wreck of her throat, with one hand clutching the back of his neck and the other fisted so hard in his side she was sure she would see bruises forming if she looked. He tried once to draw her back to see her face. She made a sound so wild he stopped at once and sank with her instead, sitting among the roots, pulling her into his lap because distance — even the width of looking — was too much to ask.

"I've got you," he said. Again and again. "I'm here. I'm here. I'm sorry. God, baby, I'm so sorry."

She could not answer until there was no crying left, only the aftershocks of it moving through her ribs. Then she lay against him empty and alive, nose pressed to the hollow of his throat.

"I thought I killed you."

His arms tightened.

"You were gone," she said. "I could not hear you. I could not find you. I thought—"

"No." He pushed her back then. Only enough that she had to see his face. His eyes were wet. "No, Neytiri. You don't apologise for being angry. Not ever."

"It was more than anger."

"I know."

The words were quiet enough that she stilled.

Jake swallowed. "I felt it. Not all of it, maybe. Enough." His gaze flicked away, then came back because he made it. "The way you looked at me. In that room."

Her shame rose so fast she could barely breathe.

"I knew it was you." The words came out cracked. "I was just so angry, Jake, I still am, but—"

"I know, you have nothing to feel sorry for, Neytiri," he said, voice fierce. "I earned that look, I earned all of it."

For a long moment she had no words to give him.

The Tree whispered overhead.

"I am sorry," she said. The words were too small. She put her hand against the side of his face because there was nothing else large enough to say.

He leaned into her palm with a weariness that looked older than the war and shook his head.

"Don't be sorry, I lied to you first," he said. "For a long time. About the mission. About myself. About what I was scared you'd see if you looked too close." His breath moved unevenly. "I deserve your anger. Don't bury it to spare me. I can take the anger. I can't take you disappearing inside yourself again."

"I do not want to be angry anymore."

The answer came out of her before she knew it was ready.

Jake's face folded.

"I know," he whispered.

She came back against him. He let her. For a few breaths they pretended the statement could be enough, that truth had been named and maybe that would be enough to wipe the wound clean. His chin rested against her hair. Her ear lay over his heart.

Then he moved.

"We still have to talk."

Her whole body went tight.

"No."

"Neytiri—"

"No." Sharp. Too sharp.

She felt the dream around them and waited, terrified, for the tree to shudder and tear him away as punishment for her anger.

Nothing happened.

The tendrils swayed. Jake remained under her hands. Anger moved through the dream and did not kill him.

"I'm not going to force you," he said, gently. "But we can't avoid it forever."

She stared at the small bright marks on his chest. Her hand moved, almost without thought, down to the curve of her belly. His followed more carefully, asking in the pause before it settled there.

For one breath they held the child between their hands.

"Someday," Neytiri said. "Not tonight."

He breathed slow against her.

"Okay."

A flinch cut across his face.

It was gone almost before it came, but she had learned the cost of missing such things. Her hand snapped to his side. The dream did not split. Still, his jaw clenched so hard the tendons stood out.

"I'm okay," he said.

The words were too quick.

Neytiri did not move. She held his gaze and let the silence gather weight until the lie curdled in it.

"Do not lie to me anymore."

Something in him resisted. She saw it. Then his shoulders dropped.

"I'm scared," he said.

It was so naked she forgot to breathe.

He closed his eyes. "I don't know if the tank holds. I don't know if this bond holds. I don't know if there's a version where I get all the way back to you." A faint, ugly little laugh tried to rise and failed. "And I don't know what happens to me if I don't."

Neytiri pressed her forehead to his, her own chest tight with the same fear.

"Then be scared here," she said. "Just do not go."

His arms came around her as though those words had undone him.

After that, they lay down in the roots. He pulled her against him with the same stubborn tenderness Mo'at had used, refusing to let her hold herself up when there was nothing left to hold with.

"Sleep," he murmured.

"I am already sleeping."

"Then rest."

She held him tighter.

Around them, the dream began to thin, the edges of her vision beginning to shudder as sleep began to fall away.

"No." Panic sharpened through her. "No, I just found you."

"You can come back."

"What if I wake and there is nothing?"

"Then you remember this." His hand came up to the back of her head. "You listen with that stubborn heart of yours and you come back."

She tried to answer and could not. The grove was going soft at its edges, the tendrils losing their line, the violet light bleeding out of the roots the way colour bleeds from cloth left too long in the sun. She could feel the pull of it now — that same downward drag that had taken her the last time, only turned the wrong way round, hauling her up and out and away from him.

She fought it the way she had fought sleep in her mother's lap, chin lifted against the current. She fixed everything she had left on him: the warmth of his chest, the uneven knock of his heart, the tremor in the hands that held her. She tried to press it all somewhere deep enough that no waking could reach in and scrub it away.

"Stay," she said. "Stay until I am gone. Do not let go first."

"I won't." His arms tightened — and even tightening they were already thinning, losing their weight, becoming light and then less than light. "I've got you. I've got you. I promise."

Above them the Tree sang on, vast and indifferent, and for once its endless names of the dead did not frighten her, because his was not among them.

"I will listen," she said. "I swear it. I will find the far side of the silence."

"I know you will."

His voice was already going soft at its edges, thinning the way the light was thinning, until it was less his voice than the memory of it laid over the sound of the grove.

"Jake—"

The roots faded. The violet light broke apart. She clutched at him until there was no him left to clutch.

And then even the clutching closed on nothing, and she was rising through grey water toward a surface she did not want, still reaching back down into the dark after a shape that had already let the current carry it under.

☾─────•──•°•𖥸•°•──•─────☽

Mo'at's face was the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes.

For one suspended breath Neytiri did not know which world had kept its promise.

Then her mother's hand stroked her hair, and the moss under her cheek was real moss, and dawn had come bright and grey through the trees.

Her breath came out of her broken.

"You stayed," Neytiri whispered.

"I said I would."

Before she could stop herself, Neytiri reached inward.

Silence.

The dream's warmth vanished so abruptly that her throat closed. Grief rose. Frustration. A loneliness so flat and wide it seemed to have no far edge. She pressed her eyes closed, fighting the urge to go back to sleep where she could see him again. Her hands, trembling, pressed against her stomach.

Mo'at watched her face.

"He will be silent in the waking world for a time," she said. "Do not mistake silence for absence."

Neytiri dragged in a breath, her eyes opening and shimmering with new tears.

"How do I listen, then?"

"With what believed him in the dream."

That answer was not enough.

Not because waking in the human body is new. You have done it enough times now to understand the rough mechanics of it, the ugly little violence of returning from one skin to another, the way the mind has to narrow itself again to fit a shape it no longer entirely believes in. Usually there is at least a rhythm to it. A few disorienting breaths. The hiss of recycled air. The coffin-lid opening. The ache in muscles that always feel older here than they do anywhere else. Tonight none of that arrives first. What arrives first is the clean, severed knowledge that the warmth around you is gone. 

For one panicked instant, your body does not know which world it belongs to. 

Your hand jerks across the inside edge of the link unit as if it expects bark, woven blankets, blue skin warm with sleep. Instead, your fingers hit smooth artificial lining and cold metal joints. The contrast comes like an insult. The soft dark after the Tree of Voices still clings to the edges of your mind in torn fragments. Bioluminescence. Breath. Neytiri’s hair is over your wrist. Jake’s mouth is in your throat. The three of you folded around one another in a world so alive it had seemed impossible anything dead could ever touch it again. Then the lid finishes lifting, the fluorescent light bites into your eyes, and Pandora is gone. 

You lie there breathing too hard for a few seconds, staring at the underside of the raised shell as if you could force it to turn back into leaves. 

Across from you another lid has already opened. 

Jake is pushing himself upright in his own unit with the same rough stunned slowness, like a man surfacing from water too deep to belong to him. For a moment he does not seem to know where to look either. Then his eyes find yours. 

Everything in you stills. 

Not because the dislocation leaves. It does not. It only changes shape. But there is something so naked in the way he looks at you that the wrongness of the room has to make space for it. He looks wrecked by the shift, boneless with exhaustion, hair damp at the temples, face still marked by the pressure ridges of the unit pillow. He also looks unbearably happy. Not in a loud way. Not in the easy arrogant way he sometimes lets himself get away with when he thinks he has won something. This is quieter than that. Stranger. A happiness made fragile by how much has already gone into it. 

You realize dimly that you must look the same. 

Neither of you speaks right away. Grace is asleep in the narrow bunk against the far wall with one arm crooked over her face and papers spilled over her chest. Norm is half folded in a chair at the workstation, chin tucked to sternum, one hand still hanging over a keyboard. The shack hums around all four of you with its ordinary mechanical breath. Outside, somewhere beyond the thin wall, an engine pings as it cools. Everything about the place is too familiar and too dead and too small. It makes what just happened feel less unreal than indecently private, as if something vast and sacred has been dragged into a storage container and asked to pretend it belongs there. 

Jake rubs his hand over his mouth. When he drops it, he is still looking at you. “You okay?” 

The question is ridiculous. Your body feels as if someone has poured sand into every joint. Your human skin fits wrong after so long in the other one, too blunt in the senses, too narrow in the lungs, too helplessly heavy. You can still feel phantom traces of a tail that is not there and ears that would have twitched at the sound outside and the pressure of two other queues braided with yours beneath a singing tree. Nothing about okay applies. 

But his voice is rough with the same displacement eating you alive. 

You push yourself upright, swing your legs over the edge, and let your feet meet the cold floor. “No” you say honestly. 

A corner of his mouth moves. 

“Yeah” he says. “Same.” 

It should not help. It does. 

For a little while you just sit there in the fluorescent dimness, breathing through the aftershock. Somewhere across the room Grace mutters in her sleep and shifts hard enough to slide a notebook onto the floor. Neither of you moves to get it. The silence between you is not empty. It is full of breaking with everything neither of you knows how to say in this body. The memory of Neytiri between you is still too close. Not memory only. Presence. She feels less absent than she should. Your skin has not yet accepted the lie of separation. 

Jake drags a hand back through his hair and looks away first, not because he wants to but because if he keeps looking at you like that one of you is going to do something stupid in a room that does not deserve witness to it. 

“That was...” He stops. Starts again. “Jesus.” 

The laugh that escapes you is too small to deserve the name. “Real articulate.” 

He looks back at you and huffs a breath that is almost one in return. “You want poetry, ask Norm when he wakes up.” 

“Norm would somehow make it worse.” 

“Oh. Absolutely.” 

Silence returns, but easier now. Your pulse settles enough to let other details in. The stale smell of the shack. The line of Grace’s boots by the door. The condensation collecting in the corner of one small window. The brutal ordinary fact of human life. Beside it sits the impossible tenderness of what happened under Eywa with no place obvious to put itself. It presses behind your ribs until breathing is work. 

Jake seems to feel something like the same thing. He glances toward Grace and Norm, then back to you. His voice drops lower. “You regret it?” 

Not the mating. Not the bond. The everything inside it. 

You should probably be insulted that he has to ask. Instead, you understand exactly why he does it. Not because any part of him doubts what happened, but because joy this large always comes with the old reflex to look for the knife hidden behind it. The world has taught all three of you that too well. A thing can be beautiful and still be taken. 

So you answer with the same honesty as before. “No.” 

His shoulders loosen. Barely. Enough. 

“Good” he says, and there is too much in the one syllable. 

You stand because staying seated any longer feels dangerous in a way you cannot name without making it worse. Your legs protest immediately. Human muscles, half wasted and always resentful, have no dignity about transitions. Jake watches you rise with that same helplessly attentive focus that has become harder and harder to pretend not to notice. It follows you when you cross to the narrow shelf where someone left a bottle of water and a folded shirt. It follows you when you twist the cap open and drink too quickly because your mouth still tastes like link gel and lightning. 

When you turn back, he is still watching. 

“You should sleep” you say, because one of you has to be sensible and it is apparently going to be you. 

He gives you a look that says the same thing right back. 

That nearly makes you smile. Nearly. 

Grace snores once in a way that sounds medically disapproving. Norm shifts without waking, murmurs something about sample contamination, and goes still again. The absurdity of the room against what is inside you becomes almost too much to bear. You set the bottle down harder than intended. 

Jake braces a hand on the edge of his unit and levers himself up. In this body, he has to work for every movement. You hate, suddenly and fiercely, that you are both here at all. Hate the walls. Hate the thin gravity of machines and quotas and command chains. Hate that there is a whole ugly world waiting outside this shack to tell the night under Eywa what it is worth. Jake gets as far as dragging himself upright before the motion goes uneven. His arm shakes once as he braces against the side of the cot, breath catching hard through his teeth. Instinct moves you before caution can catch it. Your hand closes around his forearm. 

He stills under your touch. 

So do you. 

The contact should be less in this skin. It is not. His arm is leaner and colder and more human than the body you held in the forest, but the recognition that moves through you is immediate enough to sting. His gaze drops briefly to your hand, then rises again to your face. 

Neither of you steps back. 

It is stupid. It is dangerous. It is also the only true thing in the room. 

You release him first because if you do not, you are going to drag him somewhere private, and the shack has nowhere private to offer. “Go lie down.” 

“Yes, ma’am.” 

“Don’t start.” 

That does get a ghost of a grin. “You kissed me first.” 

“Oh shut your little ass up” you remind him. 

His grin gets worse. 

He moves toward the bunk built into the opposite wall. You take the strip of floor space and folded blanket that has been yours often enough to stop protesting. The shack light stays low. The silence stretches again. It is different now, richer and somehow sadder for how much neither of you can touch. You lie down facing away from him at first. It lasts less than a minute. Then some miserable need for proof turns you back. 

He is already looking. 

The relief of finding that nearly undoes you. 

No words pass between you. None fit. But when you push yourself up on one elbow and lean over the small distance between makeshift beds, he meets you halfway without thinking. The kiss you give him is brief enough to be deniable, restrained enough to survive in the room, and nowhere near restrained enough for what it does to the air anyway. Your mouth catches the corner of his, warm and rough and careful. Not possession. Not hunger. A promise made sideways because it is all that this body will let you manage without breaking. 

When you pull back, his breathing has changed. 

“You know that isn’t going to help me sleep.” 

You lie down again before he can see the full force of your expression. “Go to sleep, Sully.” 

He huffs one quiet laugh into the dark. 

Much later, with the thin human blanket pulled up and the machine hush of the shack pretending it can pass for peace, you close your eyes and chase the shape of another body, another tree, another world where waking did not mean loss. 

Sleep takes you eventually. It does not take you kindly. 

Dreams do not come as dreams after that. They come as punishments shaped like tenderness. In one, you are back under the Tree of Voices and everything is exactly as it was for one impossible suspended breath: Neytiri sprawled warm against bark and woven roots, Jake half over her and half over you, all three of you loose with the boneless aftermath of being wanted and answered and claimed. The lights in the branches pulse in slow blue currents. Eywa hums under your spine. Then, without transition, the glow turns sterile white. The roots harden into cables under your hands. Jake’s body grows cold and human while you are still touching him. Neytiri opens her eyes, but they are full not of sleep or love or laughter. They are full of smoke. You wake biting down on the inside of your cheek hard enough to taste blood. 

You lie very still afterward because the human body is always worse immediately after fear. The heart feels too violent in too small a cage. The air tastes processed. Your old life presses close in all the wrong ways: the discipline of military sleep, the instinct to inventory exits, the ugly little reflex to put fear somewhere useful before it has time to become weakness. That training should help. Usually it does. Tonight it leaves you with nothing except the knowledge that if something happens to them while you are in here, asleep and blind and useless, there is no amount of human skill in the world that can make up the distance. The thought sits in you like poison until exhaustion finally drags you under again. 

When morning finally claws its way in, it does so by increments cruel enough to feel deliberate. A hinge settling. Grace turning over with an irritated mutter. Norm’s soft congested snore from somewhere near the workstation. Jake shifting on the opposite bunk with the sleepy restraint of someone who also woke too many times and pretended not to. You do not open your eyes at once. You listen first. It is a soldier’s habit and a frightened woman’s one. The shack is still standing. No alarms. No boots. No pounding on the door. The relief is so disproportionate it almost shames you. 

Then Jake clears his throat softly, and the sound alone is enough to drag your gaze open. He is already awake, propped half on one elbow, hair flattened on one side, human face still carrying the ghost of whatever he was dreaming. Tired does not suit him. Neither does distance. Right now he wears both, and still there is something in the line of his mouth that goes gentler when he sees you looking back. It should be simple. Morning. Breath. Survival. Instead it feels like the last thin moment before some enormous thing tips. Neither of you says that. Neither of you says anything at all. 

Grace wakes a minute later and immediately starts being Grace, all dry efficiency and sleep-rough impatience. Norm follows after that, blinking hard and trying to pretend he was not dead to the world through all of it. The four of you fall too easily into the old motions of the shack. Water. Equipment checks. Grace finding something edible and acting like she resents having to keep the rest of you alive when in truth reaaaally deep down she likes it. A joke from Norm lands badly only because everyone is too tired to carry it. Grace notices more than she comments on, which is how you know she notices. Her eyes move from you to Jake once, then away. Respectful. Clinical. Not unkind. 

That almost makes the normality worse. The terrible thing about happiness is not only that it can be taken. It is that the world often keeps moving around it as though nothing sacred has happened at all. Link beds still wait. Computers still hum. Human plans still exist. Somewhere beyond these walls men are already drinking coffee, checking rifles, making decisions about land they cannot even hear. And here you are standing barefoot on cold metal with Neytiri’s touch still living somewhere under your skin and Jake’s kiss still bright at the corner of your mouth, trying to act like your heart has not shifted shape overnight. 

Jake, predictably, tries to make for the unit too soon. Grace catches him with all the ruthless precision of someone who has spent enough years corralling men with death wishes to know the signs by instinct. “You are not getting in there on an empty stomach” she says, shoving a plate toward him before he can argue himself into stupidity. He takes it with a look of long-suffering offense that would be more convincing if he were not already obeying. “She’s also not going anywhere” Grace adds, tired and sharp and almost amused. Something soft and private moves beneath your ribs at that, because she has no idea how true and how false the sentence is about to become. 

You drag on yesterday’s shirt, rub sleep from your face, and catch Jake’s eye over the rim of Grace’s mug. The look that passes between you is quick, conspiratorial, indecently tender for a shack full of people. Norm notices enough to squint at both of you and then, mercifully, decides his morning is not improved by asking questions. “You two are weird” he mutters. “Thank you” you say. Grace points a fork at you without looking. “You’re next. Sit. Eat. I’m not force-feeding another one of you degenerates.” You obey because unlike Jake you have not yet forgotten how terrifying she is before the coffee is finished. 

The food is barely food by Pandora standards and yet obscenely human in a way that makes your chest ache. Rehydrated eggs. Something pretending to be toast. Coffee black enough to strip paint. Jake finishes first and immediately turns toward the link beds with the impatient, restless energy of someone already halfway elsewhere in his own mind. 

Grace stops him before he can reach his unit, shoving the plate back into his hands and ordering him to finish what remains. He looks offended by the delay, but he obeys, swallowing the last few mouthfuls far too quickly while you force yourself through the rest of your own breakfast. There is only the soft hum of equipment, Norm moving between the workstations and Grace muttering about the two of you acting as though your avatar bodies might disappear if you leave them unattended for another five minutes. 

Jake hands Grace his empty plate and pulls himself into the link unit before she can find another reason to stop him. You follow a few seconds later. 

————————————————— 

At the same time, in another body, safety has already ended. 

Neytiri wakes first because the land wakes her. 

Not gently. Not through birdsong or temperature or the affectionate shift of two sleeping bodies around her. She wakes because the forest is screaming before any throat gives the sound shape. The first thing she hears is engines grinding through sacred morning like a blade through living flesh. The second is the crack and splinter of wood under weight too brutal to belong anywhere near the willow glade. Her eyes fly open to gold dawn broken by movement where no movement should be. One heartbeat of stunned incomprehension. Then the dark wall of a bulldozer blade appears beyond the curtains of willow and the world becomes pure horror. 

You do not see it yet, but later you will imagine it often enough to make memory out of invention. 

Neytiri jerking upright with your braid still over her wrist. Neytiri seeing the machine and understanding at once that the dreamwalker bodies beside her are blind and helpless in a way no true Na’vi body should ever be. Neytiri shouting your names into skin that will not answer. Neytiri throwing herself first toward Jake because he lies closer to the advancing line, then wheeling back to you because the blade is broad enough to kill without choosing. Panic is too small a word for the state that takes her. It is terror and fury and disbelief and the ancient sacrilege of hearing engines in a place where Eywa is listened to. 

She shakes Jake first. Hard. Then you. Her hands are frantic on shoulders and face and arms, trying to pull consciousness into bodies that are not occupied. “WAKE!” she cries in Na’vi. “WAKE UP! COME BACK NOW!” 

————————————————— 

In the shack, you do not hear her. 

You lower yourself into the link unit with a grunt because your human spine complains about everything these last few months. The gel is cold. The lid hums. Across the room Jake has already settled into his. Grace is still talking, half complaint and half fondness. “Shower sometime this week, Marine. Honestly.” Jake swats her hand away from the controls with no respect at all. You let your eyes close. 

For one suspended instant you are nowhere. 

Then you are in the glade and the world is ending. 

The first thing you feel is Neytiri’s grip. 

Her fingers are digging into your arm hard enough to hurt, voice shredded with panic somewhere near your face. Your eyes snap open to motion and light and a noise so wrong your body thinks predator before machine. The willow glade is no longer a sanctuary. It is a battlefield in the first breath before anyone decides to call it one. Great hanging curtains of white tendrils sway under the pressure of moving metal. The blade of a bulldozer is shouldering through the edge of the glade, forcing trunks apart, crushing roots, turning sacred earth into churned destruction. 

You jerk upright so fast Neytiri nearly loses her hold. 

Jake comes awake half a beat later with the same ugly animal confusion. For one instant all three of you are just bodies and noise and raw instinct. Then understanding hits. 

No. 

The word is not spoken. It tears through you anyway. 

Neytiri is trying to pull you both up at once, trying to drag impossible dead weight away from the path of the machine, and there is such naked fear in her face that something in your chest gives way under it. Jake gets to his feet first. He looks at the blade, at the grove, at Neytiri, and the color drains out of him. You know that look. It is the exact second guilt becomes physical. Not a thought. Not a theory. A body-blow. 

He runs toward the dozer. 

Of course he does. Peace first. Explanation first. Convince the thing with enough humanity that it will stop before it kills something it should never have touched. He throws himself into the machine’s path, waving his arms, shouting in a voice half drowned by engine roar. “HEY! HEY! STOP! STOP!” 

For one heartbeat, impossibly, it works. 

The machine hesitates. The treads shift. Its camera mast angles down at him. Somewhere far away, unseen behind walls and consoles and men who have never knelt under living roots, someone is watching a screen and deciding what a sacred place is worth. 

You scramble up beside Neytiri, every nerve on fire. She is still breathing like she has outrun death by inches and knows it. The machine ahead of Jake looms broad and stupid and monstrous in the morning light. For one insane instant you think it will back off. 

Then, beyond it, other sounds answer. 

More engines. More cutters. The scream of metal through wood. The forest around the glade begins to come apart in widening circles. Animals burst from the underbrush with eyes white around terror. Branches crash. One of the pale willow trunks goes over with a sound so wet and final it makes your stomach turn. Sacred threads of light scatter under treads and vanish into mud. 

Neytiri makes a sound you have never heard from her before. Not anger. Not grief exactly. Something more primal and less survivable. 

That is the moment Jake freezes. 

Not for long. Not long enough to make him cowardly. Just one terrible second where the truth of it lands too fully. It is still moving. It is still obeying. It will not pause for sacred ground. It will not pause for prayer. It will not pause for Neytiri’s fear. The machine jerks forward over torn roots and crushed moss, and Jake stands on it like a man who has finally seen the shape of what he helped bring into this world. 

Her eyes are huge, still fixed on the blade as it shoves into the hanging curtains of the Tree of Voices and chews through glowing tendrils as though they are nothing. She does not move at first. That is what horrifies you most. Neytiri, who is always motion, always instinct sharpened into grace, is simply staring. She has seen machines similar but not this terrorizing. Not a beast. Not fire. Not a storm. Something dead made to move. Something deaf. Something that kills without hunger. 

You move before thought can form around it. Before fear can become strategy. Before grief can become language. Your hand closes around Neytiri’s arm and yanks her sideways just as the machine surges again, because if she runs at it like this she dies and there is no world left standing after that. She stumbles hard into you, twisting in blind panic, still trying to reach for the tree. 

“THEY ARE KILLING IT” she chokes, voice breaking around the words. “They are killing it.” 

“I know.” 

You do not know if she even hears you. Her whole body is rigid under your grip, trembling violently, not with hesitation but with terror so complete it has nowhere clean to go. Behind her the Tree of Voices is being torn apart in pieces. Glowing tendrils drag across the blade. Roots rip from the ground with sounds too wet, too wrong, too close to flesh. Every instinct in your body reads it as butchery. 

Jake moves at last, crossing the distance between them too quickly to look graceful. He drops beside Neytiri and reaches for her, checking her face, her arms, the frantic rise and fall of her breathing as though he needs proof that she is still whole before he can understand anything else. 

But the second of stillness has already told you everything you need to know. Jake’s instinct, when horror strikes, still catches first on understanding. On shock. On guilt. On that brief, terrible pause where the mind tries to make sense of what the eyes are seeing before the body remembers how to move. 

Yours does not. 

A crack splits the air. Gunfire. 

Not aimed to kill. Not yet. A warning shot, maybe. A threat. A habit. It does not matter. The sound tears through the glade like permission for something inside you to stop pretending it is civilized. Neytiri flinches so hard she nearly folds. Jake half-turns toward the sound. And you- 

You let go of Neytiri only when you know the tread cannot catch her on its next push. 

Then you run. 

There is nothing graceful in it. Nothing measured. No last look for instruction. You grab a rock while still running. You hit the side of the machine with all the force in your body, catch metal, haul yourself up, and bring the rock down on the camera housing in one savage strike. The first hit cracks it. The second caves it in. The third sends sparks spitting out in a burst sharp enough to sting your wrist. Somewhere inside the machine something screeches wrong. The blade jerks. The engine whines. Good. Let it feel damage. Let it feel fear, if fear can be beaten into steel. 

Below, Jake shouts your name. 

You do not answer. The black thing in you is too deep now, too clean. This is not rage the way humans talk about it in bars and barracks and after-action reports. This is older. Simpler. A killing instinct with nowhere living to sink its teeth except the thing desecrating what should never have been touched. You strike the ruined housing again and again until the metal buckles inward. The machine slews crookedly, blind now, grinding one side too deep into the torn earth. Its blade shears uselessly sideways through willow roots and churned mud. 

Jake reaches it a second later, not because he arrived where you are emotionally, but because once you make the terms plain enough he can follow them. He grabs for purchase, smashes at what is left of the external sensors, kicks at the housing, does whatever violence he can with the frantic desperation of a man trying to make one broken act matter against the weight of everything that came before it. But it is your violence that got there first. Yours that moved before thought. Yours that knew instantly that if the thing was alive enough to move, it was alive enough to maim. 

Another burst of gunfire rips across bark close enough to shower splinters over your shoulder. 

That finally forces motion back into the rest of the world. Jake looks toward the shots. Neytiri screams both your names, voice ragged with terror. The machine bucks under you once more, half-blind and veering. It is enough to know the next round will not miss by accident. 

Jake reaches up. “DOWN!” 

You drop from the side, hit the ground wrong, roll through mud and torn roots, and come up breathing like something hunted. Jake is beside you almost immediately, one hand catching your shoulder, the other already reaching back for Neytiri. She is still staring at the dying tree as if some part of her mind has not yet accepted that sacred things can be shredded like this. The glow of the severed tendrils paints her face in broken light. She looks young in that moment. Not softer. Not smaller. Just stricken in a way you know will never fully heal. 

The machine grinds blindly into a bank of roots and finally stalls. 

It does not matter. The damage is done. 

“MOVE!” Jake snaps, and this time all three of you do. 

You grab Neytiri again and haul her with you into cover as more shots crack through the glade. Behind you, the Tree of Voices sags in torn luminous curtains, half-destroyed and still moving, as if the ancestors themselves do not yet understand what has been done to them. The sacred morning has become metal, smoke, prayer ripped open, and the knowledge, cold and perfect, that next time you will kill faster.  

————————————————— 

The three of you only make it a little way into the cover of the trees before you stop. 

Not because any of you wants to. Because Neytiri cannot seem to go farther. Jake pulls her down with him behind a screen of roots and broad-leaf growth just beyond the immediate path of the blade, and for one brutal second it almost feels like enough. Shelter. Concealment. Breathing room. 

It is not. 

The machines keeps moving. 

Through the breaks in the leaves you can still see the Tree of Voices being torn apart. Glowing tendrils drag across the blade and vanish beneath the treads. Whole curtains of willow-fiber shudder, rip, and collapse in wet luminous ruin. The sound of it fills the grove even here. Grinding metal. Splintering wood. Roots being ripped from the earth with a noise too close to flesh. Gunfire cracks somewhere behind it, but the machine is worse. The machine is constant. Deaf. It keeps going as if prayer, memory, ancestors, all of it, were nothing but matter to be cleared. 

Neytiri breaks. 

She drops hard enough that Jake has to catch her by the shoulders to keep her from pitching forward completely. A sound tears out of her that you have never heard before, thin at first from sheer disbelief and then suddenly raw enough to flay. Her hands clutch at Jake, then the ground, then her own chest, as though the pain is too large to hold in one place. Tears spill openly down her face. She is staring through the leaves at the dying grove like she cannot force herself to look away, like if she does it will become real in some final irreversible way. 

Jake tries to comfort her. 

You can see he does not know how. Not for this. Not for something this sacred, this intimate, this violently beyond language. But he still tries. He kneels close, one hand on the back of her head, the other braced at her shoulder, saying her name low and rough like saying it enough times might hold her together. He says something else after that, something you do not fully catch because his voice is pulling apart under the weight of his own guilt. Sorry, maybe. Or I am here. Or both. 

You crouch on her other side, fury still burning so hot inside you it feels like your bones are full of sparks. “Neytiri.” Your voice comes out sharper than you mean it to. You force it down, force it steadier. “Neytiri, look at me.” 

She cannot. 

Her breathing is turning ragged. Her whole body shakes with every silent sob she tries and fails to choke back. She says something in Na’vi, broken clean through, and you catch only fragments. The grove. Eywa. No. No. 

Then you look past her and see the machine still moving. 

Still destroying. 

Still there. 

The anger in you goes cold. 

This cannot be where you stay. Not with the blade still grinding through sacred ground. Not with guns behind it. Not with Jake kneeling here like grief is enough to hold the world still. 

You touch Neytiri’s shoulder once, gentler than anything else in you right now. “I know” you say, because it is the only thing small enough to be true. Then you rise and hook an arm around her, pulling her up as carefully as you can. 

Jake looks up sharply. “Wait-” 

“No.” You do not even look at him when you say it. Your eyes stay on the grove, on the machine, on the ruin. “Get up. We have to move now.” 

There is anger all through the words. Not wild anymore. Worse. Focused. 

Jake stares at you for half a second, still caught between horror and guilt and the instinct to stay beside the wound even while it is still being made. Then something in his face hardens. He gets up. 

Good. 

You keep one arm around Neytiri and start guiding her back through the trees. “Step.” She stumbles once, and you tighten your hold without hurting her. “Again. Watch the root. Good.” 

Your voice stays low, direct, leaving no room for collapse because collapse will kill her here. Jake falls into place on her other side, close enough to catch but not crowding, and together you move her away from the sound of the machine. 

Behind you, the Tree of Voices dies in pieces. 

Ahead of you, the forest opens into a narrower path between thick roots and hanging vines. You angle Neytiri toward it with a hand at her back and another at her forearm, steering more than dragging now. “There” you murmur. “Good. Keep going.” 

Her breaths still hitch badly at first. Her shoulders still shake. But after a few steps she begins, little by little, to obey the shape of the path instead of the panic in her body. One foot. Then the next. Still crying. Still wrecked. But moving. 

————————————————— 

By the time the first woven bridges of Hometree come into view, the three of you look less like hunters returning and more like something the forest has spat back bloodied and shaking. Scratches stripe your arms from bark and snapped willow-fronds. Mud has dried in dark fans across Jake’s calves. Neytiri’s feather hangs half-loose, her face streaked with the aftermath of grief and fury, but by the time you step into the Commons she is no longer breaking. Whatever had nearly brought her to her knees in the cover of the trees has been dragged back under her skin and bound there by force. She is rigid now. Reassembled. Every line of her body pulled tight by purpose hard enough to cut. 

The Commons is already armed. 

Hunters stand painted and ready, weapons raised, fury moving through the gathered people like heat through stone. Grace is already there, and the sight of her in the middle of it lands strangely. She looks out of place in the way a knife does when left on an altar: useful, sharp, and suddenly capable of becoming part of the violence around it whether it wishes to or not. Her eyes find the three of you at once. You see the exact moment she registers the scratches, the mud, Neytiri’s disarray, Jake’s face, yours. Alarm flashes over her features so quickly most people would miss it. Then she masters it. Grace Augustine has spent too many years surviving impossible rooms to indulge panic where others can see it. 

So are Eytukan and Mo’at. So are too many eyes. 

The clan already knows enough to gather, enough to rage, enough to prepare for something. No one asks what happened. No one needs to. The answer is already in the air, wrong and metallic and closing in. Jake feels all of them turn. You do too. Neytiri stands between you, one hand clasped in each of yours, her head held high. Her breathing is still heavy but steady now, and she is no longer folded inward around the wound left behind in the grove. The morning has already gone feral, and Hometree itself feels like a bowstring pulled too tight. 

Grace takes one small step forward before thinking better of it. 

That is all. Just one step. But you know her well enough now to hear everything inside it. Concern. Calculation. The wish to intervene before this becomes worse. The knowledge that if she moves too quickly she will only remind everyone what blood she carries and where she came from. Her gaze flicks from Jake to Neytiri to you, sharp and searching, and then past all three of you to the war party already gathered. Whatever she reads there makes her mouth flatten. She knows the timing is wrong. She knows this is about to turn. 

Tsu’tey stands among the warriors with his shoulders squared and his face set into something harsher than anger. He looks first to Neytiri because he cannot help it. Then to Jake. Then to you. 

That is where he stops. 

And somehow that is worse. 

Because what lives in his face when he looks at you is not simple hatred. Hatred would be easier. This is injury made public. Fury dragged raw over something that had once, however unwillingly, begun to resemble regard. There had been something forming between the two of you in the ugly language warriors trust most: force met cleanly, pain endured without flinching, the slow unwilling recognition that the other could be worth having at your side in a fight. Not friendship. Not softness. But something real enough to wound. 

Now it is dying in front of everyone. 

Jake’s voice drops low, urgency tightening every word. “Tsu’tey, don’t do this!” 

But Tsu’tey is already moving. 

Fast enough to turn heads. Fast enough to split the air open around him. He comes straight for you, not Jake, and the force of that choice lands a second before his hands do. Then he slams both palms high into your chest. 

The shove is hard, sudden, and meant to humiliate as much as hurt. You give half a step because surprise takes what strength would not. The Commons hushes around it. 

Neytiri moves before you have fully recovered from the force of Tsu’tey’s hands. She steps directly between you, plants both palms against his chest, and shoves him back with enough strength to force space between your bodies. Her own body remains in front of yours afterward, shoulders spread and teeth bared, shielding you from him as instinctively as if he had raised a weapon. 

She understands his anger. You can see that in the pain tightening her face and in the brief tremor of her hands where they remain pressed against his chest. But understanding does not make her move aside. Whatever guilt she feels, whatever history stands between them, Neytiri has already chosen where she will stand. And it is between Tsu’tey and you. 

The world is not loud. It does not need to be. His eyes rake over you with open betrayal, over the scratches, the mud, the loosened hair, and then past you to Neytiri. When he speaks again, it is not a speech. It is a wound torn open in public. 

“You mated with this woman?” 

Jake goes still so completely he may as well have been struck too. You hold your ground. Neytiri turns sharply toward Tsu’tey, and in the same instant Mo’at and Eytukan understand what he means. 

That realization moves across them differently. 

Eytukan’s disbelief is blunt and immediate, striking through the stern authority of his face so hard it nearly becomes visible. It is not only outrage. It is shock that the shape of his daughter’s future may already have shifted beyond his hand. Mo’at’s is quieter, and far worse. Her eyes goes through the three of you, and what settles there is not confusion but the first brutal shape of disappointment. Not only because of the bond itself, but because she understands its consequences faster than anyone else in the room. 

Grace’s eyes close for one brief second. “Oh. Shit." 

It is not surrender. It is recognition. The tiny private collapse of someone who has just seen half a dozen fragile truths collide at once and knows none of them will survive untouched. When her eyes open again, she is watching Mo’at, because Grace knows that the most dangerous reaction in a room is not the loudest one. 

Mo’at steps forward. “Is this true?” 

The whole Commons seems to tighten around the question. 

Neytiri does not hesitate. 

She steps fully to your side, chin lifted, shoulders squared, every inch of her now warrior rather than daughter. Tears no longer shine on her face from the grove. There is nothing fragile in her when she answers. There is fury. There is grief. There is dignity held like a blade. 

“We are mated before Eywa. It is done.” 

The effect is immediate and catastrophic. 

Shock flashes through the Commons. Eytukan’s whole body locks with it, as though the answer has struck him physically. Mo’at closes her eyes for one brief beat, and when they open again the grief there is sharper for being contained. Around them, the gathered clan reacts in a wave of disbelief, whispers, anger, the sudden raw intake of a people watching the future shift under their feet. 

Your gaze snaps toward Tsu’tey the instant you see his weight shift. 

“Brother, please do not atack the sky people. The Omaticaya will die if you do.” you start, sharp and warning and already too late. 

He turns with full force all of a sudden. “I AM NOT YOUR BROTHER” 

He attacks. 

Tsu’tey tears himself out of Neytiri’s hands, and the knife is in his grip so quickly that it seems to materialise there. Fury has finally outrun restraint. He lunges straight at you with a cry ripped from somewhere too deep for language, and there is nothing ceremonial in the movement, nothing measured enough to be called a challenge. This is betrayal reaching instinct before honour has time to catch it. 

His roar shatters through the Commons, striking harder than the blade and harder than the force of his earlier shove. It hurts because he means every broken piece of it. Whatever fragile understanding had begun forming between you in has been dragged into the open and severed before the entire clan. The grief in his face is so naked that, for one terrible heartbeat, you almost forget to move. 

Almost. 

You turn sideways before the knife can enter your body, catching his wrist with both hands as his momentum drives you backwards. The blade passes close enough to your throat that you feel the air move against your skin. You twist beneath his arm, force his hand away from you and shove him hard in the chest, creating enough distance for Neytiri to be swept by her father. 

You do not draw your own knife. You do not answer his pain with a wound simply because you are capable of giving him one. Your hands remain open at your sides, even as every instinct in you demands a weapon. 

“And you are not my enemy” you tell him, forcing the words through your ragged breathing. “The enemy is out there, and they are more powerful than you understand!” 

Tsu’tey stumbles back a step, his chest heaving above his broken ego. For a fraction of a second, you think the words might have reached whatever part of him still remembers the hours spent teaching you, testing you and slowly allowing you to stand beside him as a warrior. 

“We can talk to them.”  

Then his expression twists, grief hardening into something far easier to survive than helplessness. “No more talking!” he roars. 

This time there is no hesitation in him and no room for you to restrain him gently. You evade the first slash, turning beneath his arm as the knife cuts through empty air, but the second comes from too close and too fast. The blade tears across the upper curve of your chest, shallow enough not to stop you and deep enough to pull a sharp cry from your throat. 

Neytiri screams his name. 

The sound is raw enough to draw the attention of everyone in the room, but Tsu’tey does not seem to hear her. He raises the knife again, eyes fixed on the blood already beginning to run down your skin. Whatever he sees when he looks at you now is no longer the warrior he trained or the woman his people welcomed. He sees the sky people, the machines and every grave they have left behind. 

Jake reaches him before the blade can fall. 

He catches Tsu’tey’s knife arm with both hands and drives his shoulder into him, forcing the weapon away. Tsu’tey turns on him immediately, snarling as the two of them struggle for control, their feet tearing across the woven floor. Jake hooks one leg behind his and wrenches him off balance, giving you the opening you need. 

You move because there is no longer another choice. 

Your fist drives into Tsu’tey’s stomach hard enough to force the breath from him. When he still attempts to rise, you strike the side of his head with the heel of your palm. Not hard enough to destroy, only hard enough to leave his body unable to follow the rage still commanding it. Jake completes the takedown, pushing Tsu’tey’s back making him fall far from you. 

Tsu’tey hits the ground on one knee, coughing as he tries to drag air back into his lungs. Blood runs from his nose, bright against his skin, and the sight turns your stomach. You never wanted to see him beneath you like this. You never wanted to become another alien who answered the pain of his people with violence. 

Jake steps in front of you before Tsu’tey can rise again. His body blocks yours from view, though one of his hands reaches backwards until his fingers find your wrist, checking without looking that you are still standing. 

“We are Omatikaya” Jake says, his voice carrying across the Commons. His Na’vi is imperfect, but the meaning reaches every person gathered around you. “We are of the People now, and we have the right to speak.” 

Silence descends over Hometree. 

No one comes forward. No one lowers their weapon either. The clan watches the four of you from every level, their faces marked by fear, anger and a betrayal they do not yet fully understand. Mo’at stands near Grace with one hand pressed against her chest, while Eytukan looks at Jake as though trying to see beneath his skin and find the truth hidden there. 

Tsu’tey slowly pushes himself upright. He wipes the blood from beneath his nose with the back of his hand and stares at the red streak left across his knuckles. When he raises his eyes again, the rage is still there, but something more painful has returned beneath it. 

You meet his gaze over Jake’s shoulder. 

Your ears have flattened so completely that they nearly disappear into your hair. You do not ask for forgiveness because he does not yet know the worst thing you have done, and whatever mercy he once might have given you will not survive the truth. Still, something in your face begs him for one final scrap of trust. Enough to listen. Enough not to turn away before Jake speaks. 

Jake releases your wrist and steps forward. The confidence leaves him in pieces as he looks at the clan, then at Eytukan, Mo’at and Tsu’tey. Finally, his eyes find Neytiri. 

“I have something to say” he begins in Na’vi, his voice roughening around the words. “To all of you.” 

He draws in a breath, but it catches before it reaches his lungs. Fear is written plainly across his face now. Not fear of the clan’s weapons or Tsu’tey’s anger, but fear of the moment Neytiri finally understands what he has done and begins looking at both of you as strangers again. 

You reach for his hand. 

Jake’s fingers close around yours immediately, clinging with enough force to make the bones ache. You know what comes next. You know there is no version of the truth that leaves the three of you untouched, and no choice remaining except to stand beside him while it destroys whatever it must. 

Unlike Jake, you cannot look at Neytiri. 

Then Grace collapses. 

There is no warning. One moment she is standing beside Mo’at, tense and watchful, and the next every part of her simply goes empty. Her eyes roll back as her knees buckle beneath her, and a kid lunges forward quickly enough to catch her before her head strikes the floor. 

For one stunned heartbeat, nobody understands. 

Then the truth hits you. 

The link did not fail on its own. 

“Oh, fuck” you breathe. “They found the shack.” 

You turn toward Jake, but his fingers are already going slack inside yours. His eyes lose focus first, the life behind them vanishing with such sudden violence that your stomach drops. His body folds before you can catch him, striking the floor with a weight that does not belong to sleep. 

Neytiri cries out, her father restraining her while she reaches desperately toward him. Confusion and terror tear across her face as she looks between their motionless bodies, unable to understand why they have both abandoned themselves at once. 

You run to her. 

Eytukan still has both arms around Neytiri, holding her back as she struggles toward Jake’s motionless body. She fights him with blind, terrified desperation, calling Jake’s name as though the force of it might drag him back into himself. When she sees you coming, her eyes snap to yours, wide and demanding an explanation you no longer have time to soften. 

You stop directly in front of her and reach for her face, but Eytukan’s hold keeps her just beyond your grasp. Your hands close around her forearms instead, fingers digging into her skin as you try to anchor her attention to you through the panic. 

“Neytiri, listen to me” you say, the words already breaking apart beneath the urgency. “Jake was sent here to-” 

The world disappears before you can finish. 

Your connection is torn away with no gentleness and no warning. Neytiri’s face is the last thing you see. Eyes wide, hands reaching for you, betrayal still one unfinished sentence away, before your avatar body goes completely limp in her arms. 

————————————————— 

Back in the shack, Quaritch enters with boots and soldiers and the familiar imperial confidence of a man who thinks he owns anything he can reach with a gun. The link room is half-lit, half-lived-in, ordinary enough to insult the violence about to happen there. Your human body lies in the unit with a softness you would hate seeing from outside. Jake’s too. Grace is turning toward the Colonel with all the slow dawning fury of a scientist who knows her worst prediction has come true. 

“What the hell are you doing here?” she starts. 

Quaritch does not answer because answers are for equals. 

He signals the tech. The link feeds cut. 

The sensation of being dragged out of your avatar body without warning is worse than waking. Waking is a split. This is amputation. 

Consciousness slams backward through the bond with such force that you choke on it. The shack ceiling crashes into existence above you. Human lungs seize. Every nerve screams confusion. Somewhere to your left Jake jerks in his unit with a strangled sound. Someone is hauling the lid open before your hands even know how to move. 

You come out ready to hit. 

That instinct, at least, survives any body. 

A soldier reaches for your arm and you drive your elbow backward on reflex hard enough to make him curse. The world is still swimming. Quaritch steps into view through the blur and the sight of him, after the willow glade, after the machines, after all the weeks of his attention circling like rot beneath skin, drops the last restraint from your body. 

You lunge. 

Not because you think you can kill him here. Because some part of you would rather break your own hands on his face than allow one more second in which he gets to stand there untouched after what he has done. 

Two soldiers catch you before contact. One on each arm. You still nearly wrench free because rage makes temporary miracles out of tendons. The whole shack jerks around the struggle. Grace is shouting. Norm is trying to get between bodies with no plan beyond moral outrage. Jake is half out of his own unit and still so disoriented from the forced severing that he cannot do more than grab for the nearest support and swear like the words might hold him together. 

“You son of a bitch!” you spit at Quaritch, voice wrecked raw. “When I catch you-” 

The soldier on your right tightens his grip hard enough to bruise. 

Quaritch looks at you and for one brief terrible second there is something like disappointed fascination in his face. Not regret. Never that. The expression of a man who had hoped resistance would break cleaner once pressure was applied, and who is instead finding that it has only made you harder and uglier and therefore, to his diseased way of thinking, more compelling. 

“Well” he says. “There goes my last optimistic theory.” 

You would kill him with your teeth if they let you close enough. 

Jake drags himself farther out of the link unit, one hand gripping its edge while the other reaches toward Quaritch. His useless legs fold beneath him, but the soldiers do not give him time to find the floor properly. He looks at you restrained between them, at Grace and Norm, and then at Quaritch as the memory of the willow glade crashes back into him. 

“Are you out of your goddamn mind?!” 

Quaritch steps into his reach without the slightest hesitation. “You crossed the line.” 

The blow catches Jake across the side of the head. His grip slips from the link unit, and the soldiers barely catch him before he strikes the floor, his body going completely slack between their hands. 

You surge against your restraints with a sound that no longer resembles language. One of the soldiers holding you curses as your heel catches his shin, and something vicious twists across his face. He waits until Quaritch turns away before driving the butt of his rifle into the side of your head with far more force than necessary. 

The shack tilts violently. Grace shouts your name, Norm lunges forward, and the soldier’s grip is the only thing keeping you upright as the strength drains from your body. The last thing you see is Jake hanging unconscious between two men before the darkness takes you too. 

————————————————— 

By the time they bring the four of you into the Ops Center, the bruises have already begun to darken.  

Jake sits rigidly before the central screen, one side of his face swelling where Quaritch struck him. Grace and Norm stand nearby, both still carrying the red impressions left by the restraints around their wrists. You remain on your feet beside Jake, held there more by fury than balance, with the side of your skull throbbing where the soldier struck you. Armed guards line the edges of the room. Selfridge watches from behind the central console, visibly irritated by the disruption, while Quaritch stands with the satisfaction of a man who has finally caught someone crossing a line he drew himself.  

The image on the largest monitor is frozen on your avatar face. 

Ceremonial paint marks your skin. Your teeth are bared. One hand is lifted above the damaged camera, the rock caught just before another strike. Without the grove around you, without Neytiri’s terror or the willows being crushed beneath the machine, the image makes you look exactly like what Quaritch wants everyone in the room to see. 

A hostile native. 

A compromised operative. 

Proof. 

The recording advances by a few frames. Jake appears climbing onto the machine after you, striking what remains of the external sensors while gunfire breaks bark around both of you. Quaritch pauses it there, leaving the two of you caught side by side in the violence. 

He studies the screen before turning toward you. 

“You just couldn’t help yourself, could you?” 

Your jaw tightens. 

Quaritch gestures toward your frozen image. “Sully at least stopped long enough to try waving it down. You went straight for the camera.” 

“It was destroying the Tree of Voices.” 

“It was company equipment performing an authorized operation.” 

“It was tearing through a sacred place while we were standing there screaming.” 

Your voice rises before you can force it back down. Quaritch’s expression barely changes, but you see the small satisfaction beneath it. He wants you angry. Anger makes the decisions he has already made easier to justify. 

“You blinded a remote vehicle in an active clearing operation” he says. “Then you damaged additional sensors while my people were taking fire.” 

“Your people opened fire on us.” 

“My people responded to a threat.” 

“You brought the threat with you.” 

Quaritch’s eyes narrow. For a moment, the room seems to contract around the two of you. 

“You were supposed to be smarter than him” he says. 

The contemptuous tilt of his head indicates Jake. 

Something in you turns glacial. 

“And you were supposed to protect human lives” you answer. “I guess we are both disappointing each other.” 

One of the guards shifts behind you. Jake turns his head slightly, watching the distance between you and Quaritch as if calculating whether he can reach either of you from the chair. Quaritch notices that too. 

He looks down at Jake next. 

“You let me down, son.” 

Jake meets his gaze without answering. His hands tighten against the arms of his chair, but the rest of him remains still. Quaritch’s expression hardens. “You got a little local tail and completely forgot what team you play for.” 

The humiliation in the words lands across the room. Jake’s jaw clenches, but before he can respond, Grace steps forward. 

“Parker, listen. There’s still time to salvage the situation.” 

Quaritch turns on her with such sudden violence that even the guards seem to tense. “Shut your pie hole.” 

Grace does not retreat. The shock crosses her face and disappears almost immediately beneath anger. “Or what, Ranger Rick? You’re going to shoot me?” She turns sharply toward Selfridge. “You need to muzzle your dog.” 

Selfridge lifts both hands, already exhausted by a conflict he helped create. “Can we just take this down a couple of notches, please?” 

Jake finally speaks, his voice low but steady. “You say you want to keep your people alive. You should start by listening to her.” 

Quaritch’s attention shifts back to him. You can see how personally he takes Jake’s defiance now. It is not merely the loss of an operative. Quaritch believed Jake belonged to him in the uncomplicated way one soldier might claim another, and the discovery that Jake chose something else has made the betrayal intimate. 

Jake nods once toward Grace. Grace draws a breath and faces Selfridge. “This is bad, Parker. Those trees were sacred to the Omatikaya in a way you can’t imagine.” 

Selfridge leans against the console, his impatience returning now that the conversation has moved back into territory he considers beneath him. “You throw a stick in the air around here, it’s going to land on some sacred fern.” 

“I’m not talking about pagan voodoo.” Grace moves nearer to the holographic display of the forest. “I’m talking about something real and measurable in the biology of the forest.” 

Selfridge gestures for her to continue. “Which is what, exactly?” 

For the first time since entering the room, Grace falters. 

You know that look. She is not uncertain of the work. She is trying to compress years of research into a form simple enough to survive Selfridge’s attention span without betraying the science itself. 

Grace looks back at Selfridge. 

“All right. We don’t have all the answers yet. We’re only beginning to understand the questions.” She points toward the branching network displayed above the table. “What we think we know is that there’s some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees, like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has thousands of connections to the trees around it, and there are trillions of trees on Pandora.” 

Selfridge stares at the display. “That’s a lot, I’m guessing.” 

“That’s more connections than the human brain.” Her words come faster now, urgency overriding the fear of oversimplifying. “It’s a network. A global network. And the Na’vi can access it. They can upload and download data. Memories. At sites like the one you destroyed.” 

The Tree of Voices appears in your mind before you can stop it. The soft fall of its tendrils. Neytiri’s hands guiding yours beneath them. The voices moving through your body more than your ears. The three of you lying together beneath something ancient enough to remember every promise made there. 

Then the blade grinding through it. 

Selfridge gives Grace a look of open disbelief. “What the hell have you people been smoking out there? They’re just goddamn trees.” 

“No.” Grace’s voice sharpens. “You need to wake up, Parker. The wealth of this world isn’t in the ground. It’s all around us. The Na’vi know that, and they’re fighting to defend it. If you want to share this world with them, you need to understand them.” 

Quaritch walks toward the main console. “We understand them just fine.” His gaze finds Jake. “Thanks to Jake here.” 

Jake goes still beside you. 

Quaritch selects another recording. 

Jake appears on the screen again, but this time he is human. The image is from one of the later video logs at Site 26. He looks thin, exhausted and barely anchored to the body speaking into the camera. 

“They’re not going to give up their home” the recorded Jake says. “They’re not going to make a deal. For what? Lite beer and blue jeans? There’s nothing we have that they want. Everything we sent out there was just a version of what we are. They’re never going to leave Hometree.” 

Quaritch freezes the image. 

Jake watches his own face staring back at him. 

You watch Jake. 

At first, the words only hurt because of how Quaritch intends to use them. Then the date stamp in the lower corner of the recording registers. 

Your stomach drops. 

It was recorded after the conversation in the shack. After you confronted Jake about what he had been giving Quaritch. After he admitted that the reports were dangerous and promised you he understood. You had believed that meant he had stopped handing them anything useful. 

Apparently, it had only changed the way he described it. 

The screen blurs at the edges of your vision. 

“You kept sending them.” 

Jake’s head turns toward you. 

“What?” 

“You kept sending reports.” Your voice is low, but the room has gone quiet enough that everyone hears it. “After we talked about this. After you told me you understood what he was doing with them.” 

Jake looks toward the screen as though seeing the date for the first time himself. “That wasn’t for him. It was a personal log.” 

“Stored on their system.” 

“I wasn’t giving him tactical intel.” 

“You told him there was nothing they could offer. You told him the Omatikaya would never relocate. What did you think he was going to do with that?” 

“I wasn’t thinking about him when I said it.” 

“That is the problem, Jake.” 

He flinches. 

The anger in you is not clean enough to become hatred. That would be easier. You understand what the recordings became for him: confession, documentation, a place to put everything that no longer fit inside his human life. You also understand that he knew Quaritch had access. You had warned him. He had continued anyway. 

“I thought you stopped” you say. 

Jake’s face folds inward beneath the accusation. “I stopped reporting to him directly.” 

“That is not the same thing.” 

“I know.” 

“No, you know now.” 

Grace looks between both of you, grief and urgency tightening her expression. She does not interrupt. There is nothing she could say that would make the betrayal less real. 

Jake’s hand closes around the wheel of his chair. “I’m sorry.” 

The apology is immediate and sincere, and that only makes you angrier. 

“Oh shut up.” 

Quaritch watches the exchange with open satisfaction. The fracture between you is useful to him, and the knowledge of that forces you to stop before the argument gives him anything else. 

He turns back toward the frozen recording. 

“Since a deal can’t be made, it gets real simple.” His mouth twists. “So thanks. I’m getting all emotional. I might just give you a big wet kiss.” 

Grace turns toward Selfridge again. “Parker, we have to talk like rational people.” 

“I’d cherish that.” Selfridge’s voice is flat now. Final. “Unfortunately, you’re all out of here on the next shuttle. I’m shutting down the Avatar Program, effective now.” 

For a moment, nobody speaks. 

Norm looks as though the floor has disappeared beneath him. Grace stares at Selfridge with the blank disbelief of someone hearing years of her life dismissed in one sentence. Jake’s eyes remain on the frozen recording, but you can see the devastation settle deeper into him. 

You do not look at him again. 

Your first instinct is violence. 

It comes cleanly, almost calmly. The distance to Quaritch. The sidearm at the nearest guard’s hip. The angle of Selfridge’s throat above his collar. Every possible action and every certain consequence arrange themselves with the familiar precision of training. 

Then Jake’s hand closes around your wrist. 

You look down at it. 

 For one ugly second, you nearly tear yourself free simply because it is him touching you. Then you see the plea in his face. Not for forgiveness. Not yet. Only restraint. Only the understanding that dying in this room will not save anyone outside it. 

You force your hand to remain open. 

————————————————— 

The Bio Lab is already being dismantled when Trudy runs inside. 

Files are being boxed. Equipment is shut down under the supervision of armed Sec-Ops guards. Technicians move with the defeated quiet of people being forced to take apart something they built and still believe in. Grace stands near one of the workstations while Norm gathers what little they are being allowed to keep. Jake remains in his chair several feet away from you, bruised, silent and watching the Avatar Program disappear around him. 

The distance between you is small enough to cross and too raw to touch. 

Grace’s fury has not diminished. 

“They bulldozed a sacred site on purpose to trigger a response” she says. “They’re fabricating this war to get what they want.” 

Norm looks at her. “I can’t believe that.” 

“Believe it” Jake says. 

His voice carries the dead certainty of experience. 

“That’s how it’s done. When people are sitting on something you want, you make them your enemy. Then you’re justified in taking it.” 

You look toward him. 

There is no distance in his expression now between Pandora and the wars he knew before it. Different world. Different people. The same machinery underneath. The same machinery he continued feeding without understanding that every observation became another part of the weapon. Jake catches you looking. Regret moves openly through his face. There is no time to do anything with it. 

Trudy rushes through the laboratory doors wearing her flight gear, helmet tucked beneath one arm. “Sec-Ops is rolling the gunships.” Everyone turns. “They’re going to hit Hometree.” 

Jake’s chair moves before the last word has finished leaving her mouth. “When?” 

“Now. We’re spooling up now. I have to go.” Trudy turns back toward the corridor, but Grace is already moving in the opposite direction. “My God.” 

Jake follows her as fast as the chair will carry him. You stay beside him, one hand catching the back of the chair when the turn into the corridor nearly sends him into the wall. The contact is practical and nothing else. Norm calls after you, but there is no time to answer. 

The Ops Center windows overlook the airfield. Beyond them, crews swarm around the aircraft. Gunships are being loaded and brought online. The heavy rotors of the Dragon have already begun to turn. Grace reaches Selfridge first. “Parker, wait. Stop. These are people you’re about to-” 

“They’re fly-bitten savages who live in a tree.” Selfridge points through the glass toward the forest. “Look around. I don’t know about you, but I see a lot of trees. They can move.” 

“For God’s sake, there are children in there. Babies.” 

Something flickers across Selfridge’s face, but not enough. 

Jake moves closer. 

“Look, you don’t want this kind of blood on your hands. Let us try to talk them out.” Selfridge looks at him. “They trust me” Jake says. 

The words nearly break beneath their own weight. 

You know what he is thinking. Neytiri at the grove. Tsu’tey in the Commons. Eytukan placing his hands against Jake’s chest and naming him a son of the Omatikaya. Every trust Jake is about to destroy because the only alternative is allowing them to die without warning. You step forward beside him. “They may not listen after what happened” you say. “But they will listen longer to us than they will to your gunships.” 

Selfridge looks between the three of you. 

Then he makes his decision. 

————————————————— 

The armed escort takes you directly to the link room inside Hell’s Gate. 

There is no return to Site 26. No flight into the mountains. The gunships are already preparing to leave, and every minute Selfridge granted is measured against the sound of their engines outside. 

Jake, Grace and you move toward the link units while Norm and Max rush to prepare the system. Guards remain inside the laboratory, weapons held across their chests as though any of you might attempt to steal your own bodies. 

Selfridge follows far enough to deliver the terms himself. “You’ve got one hour.” 

Jake pulls himself from his chair into the link unit. He moves quickly, but his human body refuses to understand urgency the way his avatar does. His legs have to be lifted by hand, dragged into position while the aircraft outside continue to spool. 

Selfridge looks down at him. “Unless you want your girlfriend in there when the axe comes down, you get them to evacuate. One hour.” Jake’s face hardens at the description, but he does not waste time correcting it. 

You lower yourself into the unit beside his. 

Max checks the connection at your temples. His fingers are unsteady. “Calibrating three and four” one of the technicians calls. 

“And her link” Norm adds, already working at the adjacent console. “Bring the sequence online too.” 

Grace settles into her unit. 

The lid begins to lower above you. For one brief moment, before it closes, you see Jake watching you from the neighbouring link. 

“This is not over” you tell him. 

His expression tightens. 

“I know.” 

“But they come first.” 

“They come first.” You hold his gaze long enough to decide that you believe him about that much. 

“Stay with me.” His answer comes just before the lid shuts. 

Darkness closes over you. 

Then Pandora takes you back. 

You wake beneath Hometree to the weight of the entire clan watching. The Commons is full. Eytukan and Mo’at stand before the gathered Omatikaya while hunters, families and elders crowd the living chamber around them. Tension already moves through the People before Jake speaks. They know something is wrong. They have seen the damage to the Tree of Voices. They have sent warriors against the machines. They are waiting for the retaliation they understand must come. 

Neytiri brings you to her parents. 

The sight of her nearly destroys the purpose that brought you back. She is composed now, but the grief of the grove remains carved into the set of her mouth and the stiffness of her shoulders. When she saw you and Jake, something vulnerable passed through her face before caution covered it. 

Jake steps forward. 

“Eytukan, I have something to say. To everyone.” His Na’vi carries clearly through the Commons. 

Eytukan looks down at him. “Speak, Jakesully.” 

Jake draws a breath. “A great evil is upon us. The Sky People are coming to destroy Hometree. They will be here soon.” A murmur runs through the gathered clan. Jake continues before fear and anger can swallow the warning. “You have to leave, or you will die.” 

Mo’at’s gaze sharpens. “Are you certain of this?” 

“Yes” you say before Jake can answer. Every eye turns toward you. “Their flying machines are already coming. They are carrying weapons and gas. They are coming here now.” 

Tsu’tey steps forward from among the hunters. “How do you know?” 

There is no safe way through the answer. Jake looks at Neytiri, then lowers his gaze. “They sent me here to learn your ways” he says. “So one day I could bring this message, and you would believe it.” 

The room changes. The murmuring stops. Bodies become still. The truth does not need to be explained before the People understand the shape of it. 

Neytiri looks at Jake. 

“What are you saying, Jake?” Her voice is quiet at first. “You knew this would happen?” 

Jake cannot meet her eyes. “Yes.” 

You see the answer strike her. 

“At first it was just orders” Jake says. The words begin to tear as they leave him. “Then everything changed. I fell in love with the forest. With the Omatikaya People.” He finally looks at her. “With you. And by then, how could I tell you?” 

Neytiri’s breathing breaks. “I trusted you.” 

He moves toward her. “Neytiri, please. Then trust me n-” 

“I TRUSTED YOU!” 

Her voice fills Hometree. 

Jake stops. 

Neytiri’s gaze moves from him to you. The betrayal in her face changes when it reaches you, but it does not lessen. Jake came carrying orders. You came carrying knowledge of the people who gave them. 

You force yourself to speak before he can try to shield you from your share of it. “I knew what they wanted from him.” Jake turns toward you. You do not look away from Neytiri. “I knew they wanted information about Hometree. I knew Quaritch would use it if the negotiations failed. I confronted Jake when I understood how much he had already given them, but I still stayed silent because I believed we could stop this before it happened.” 

Neytiri’s face empties. 

“You knew?” 

“I did not know they would come today. I did not know about the Tree of Voices.” Your voice threatens to break, but you refuse to let it. “But I knew they wanted Hometree.” 

Jake tries to interrupt. “She tried to stop—” 

“No.” Your voice cuts across his. “Do not make this smaller for me.” 

He falls silent. 

Mo’at looks at you with quiet devastation. Eytukan’s disappointment is colder, shaped by everything you were allowed to learn and every place beside his family you were permitted to occupy. 

Neytiri looks between you and Jake. “You will never be one of the People.” The words strike Jake first. “NEVER!” 

But when she turns her face away, the rejection leaves both of you standing outside her. 

Tsu’tey calls to the hunters. “Bind them.” They move immediately. 

Jake does not resist when they seize him. Grace is forced down beside him. Two hunters close around you, one catching each arm, prepared for violence from the body they have seen fight. You give them none. The cords are drawn around your wrists. You are driven to your knees beside Jake and Grace while the clan looks upon you as the foreign things you had nearly convinced yourselves you were no longer. The three of you are taken to the entrance of Hometree and bound upright against the posts among the great roots. 

The sound reaches you before the aircraft appear. 

Rotors. 

Not the distant mechanical pulse that approached the Tree of Voices, but a formation large enough to press the air out of the forest. Leaves lift from the ground. Branches bend beneath the downwash. Children look upward while the shadow of the Dragon passes across Hometree. 

The gunships emerge above the canopy. 

Jake strains against his bonds. “YOU HAVE TO GET OUT OF HOMETREE!” he shouts. “RUN TO THE FOREST! PLEASE, I’M BEGGING YOU!” 

Tsu’tey stands nearby with a knife held ready, his attention fixed on the aircraft rather than Jake. Another hunter takes position beside Grace. The Omatikaya gather with bows in hand, refusing to abandon the home holding every generation of their People. 

Eytukan turns toward Tsu’tey. “Take the ikran. Attack from above.” Tsu’tey calls to the hunters and runs upward through the roots of Hometree. The Dragon hovers before the entrance. Jake pulls harder against the cords. “They don’t understand.” “They understand that someone has come to destroy their home” Grace says. “They don’t understand what those weapons can do.” You look toward the aircraft. 

You do. 

The first gas rounds strike inside Hometree. 

Explosions thunder through the Commons. White clouds billow outward between the roots, swallowing the entrance and rolling across the gathered Omatikaya. The People cough and stumble as the gas reaches them. Children scream. Mothers cover their faces and drag them toward the open forest. Eytukan remains before the entrance, firing arrows toward the gunships with the other warriors. The arrows strike the armoured glass and fall away. The gas thickens. 

“EVERYBODY OUTSIDE!” Eytukan orders. “GO TO THE FOREST!” 

The Commons erupts into movement. 

The Omatikaya pour from Hometree, coughing, carrying children and supporting those already overcome by the gas. Jake twists his hands within the bindings until the fibres cut into his skin. You work against your own cords, trying to create enough space to slip one wrist free, but the knots were tied by hunters who know exactly how dangerous your hands can be. 

An incendiary round strikes inside the Commons. Fire blooms through the entrance. The interior of Hometree becomes a chimney. Flames climb the vast central shaft while those still trapped inside stagger toward the roots through smoke and gas. The rotor wash drives heat and sparks toward the posts where you remain bound. 

Mo’at emerges from the smoke. 

She has a knife in her hand. 

For one savage heartbeat, you think she has come to kill you. 

The belief arrives without resentment. It makes perfect sense. Her home is burning. Her people are choking. Her daughter has been betrayed by all three dreamwalkers bound before her. Perhaps this is the mercy available to her now: cutting the false bodies open before the Sky People can use them again. 

Grace stills beside you. 

Jake watches Mo’at approach with desperate hope in his face, but you cannot understand how he finds it there. All you see is the knife and the terrible composure of Mo’at’s expression. You shift against the post, attempting to put more of your body between the blade and Jake. The cords barely allow it. 

“Do not fight her” you tell him. 

Jake looks toward you. “What?” 

“If she decides we die here, do not fight her.” 

Grace turns sharply. “She isn’t—” 

“You do not know that.” 

Mo’at reaches Jake first. You brace for the blade to enter him. 

It falls through his bonds instead. 

The cords drop away. 

For one suspended moment, none of you moves. “If you are one of us” Mo’at tells him. “Help us.” 

Jake catches the knife, stunned. 

Relief strikes so violently through you that it almost becomes nausea. There is no time to recover from it. Jake cuts Grace free first, then turns toward you, sawing quickly through the bindings around your wrists and chest. 

The moment your hands are free, you pull the remaining cords away yourself. “We have to move” Jake says. “He’s going to blow the columns.” 

The three of you run with the Omatikaya as the gas and fire drive everyone away from Hometree. You remain within the stream of fleeing people, pulling anyone who falls back to their feet and forcing the movement away from the roots. 

A child collapses in front of you, choking. You lift him and place him into the arms of an older woman who has turned back to search for him. She takes him without thanks or hesitation. Neither of you expects gratitude here. 

Another round detonates somewhere above. The pressure wave strikes you across the back and throws you forward. Your shoulder hits the ground first. The world flashes white, then returns in fragments of screaming, smoke and feet running past your face. 

Jake shouts your name. 

You force your arms beneath you. 

Every part of your body demands that you stay down. Your ears ring so violently that the forest seems to pulse around you. You taste blood where your teeth cut the inside of your mouth. Then you see three children frozen beside a fallen section of woven platform. They are too frightened to move. One is crying without sound. Another has both hands wrapped around the smallest child’s arm, holding so tightly that her nails have broken the skin. 

You crawl toward them before your balance returns. The ground bucks again. Grace goes down several body lengths away. Jake turns toward her, caught between both directions. 

“GET GRACE!” you shout, though you cannot hear your own voice properly. “I HAVE THEM!” Jake hesitates only long enough to see that you are still moving. Then he runs toward Grace. 

You reach the children on your knees. “Look at me.” None of them reacts. You grab the oldest by the shoulders and force her eyes toward yours. “Look at me. You know the western roots?” She blinks through the gas. “Go there. Take them and do not stop.” Another explosion rolls through the earth. The smallest child screams and tries to curl into the ground. You seize him and rise with him against your chest. Your legs nearly fold. The blast has turned the world into something unsteady and distant, but you stay upright because the child has both arms around your neck now and because falling with him would be worse than falling alone. 

The older children follow when you push them forward. 

You make it only several steps before another Omatikaya stumbles across your path, an elderly man with blood running down one side of his face. You shift the child to one arm and catch the elder beneath the other. “Move.” He attempts to shake you off. “Children first” he rasps. “They are moving. So don't whine.” You drag him with you until another hunter reaches him, then shove the smallest child into the arms of one of the women guiding families toward the forest. 

She recognizes you. The accusation in her face is instant. 

You do not look away from it. “Take him.” 

She does. 

You turn back toward Hometree. 

Grace is running again with Jake beside her. He sees you emerging through the smoke and the relief on his face is almost anger. “YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO MOVE!” 

“THERE WERE CHILDREN.” 

“THERE ARE CHILDREN EVERYWHERE!” 

“THEN STOP WASTING TIME YELLING AT ME.” 

The formation above changes. Jake hears the shift in their weapons before the missiles launch. “No.” 

The first missiles streak toward the western columns. The base of Hometree disappears inside a chain of explosions. The pressure wave takes you off your feet again. This time there is no chance to brace. You hit the ground on your side, roll through ash and shattered wood, and collide with one of the great roots hard enough to empty your lungs. 

For a moment, you cannot move. Sound vanishes. Not silence. Something worse. A high, thin tone swallows everything while the world continues breaking without noise. Shapes pass through the smoke. Omatikaya bodies. Adults carrying children. Hunters turning back. Someone falls and disappears beneath the feet of those fleeing behind them. 

You force air into your lungs. 

Hometree groans. 

It is not the noise of an ordinary tree breaking. It is too deep, too enormous, moving through the ground and the bodies standing upon it. Every Omatikaya who feels it understands before the first visible movement. 

The great trunk begins to lean. 

Jake shouts for everyone to run. 

You push yourself upright and see a mother several meters away trying to pull two children from beneath a fallen lattice. One child comes free. The other remains trapped by the leg. 

The entire world is tilting above them. 

You run toward them. 

Jake catches your arm. 

“NO!” 

“THE TREE IS COMING DOWN!” 

You tear free. 

The mother is screaming now, pulling uselessly at the lattice while the trapped child claws at the earth. You reach them and grab the woven beam with both hands. 

It does not move. 

The first fragments of Hometree strike the ground around you. 

“AGAIN!” you shout. 

The mother grabs beside your hands. Together you lift enough for the child to drag one leg free, but her ankle catches. She screams. 

The shadow above you expands. Then the past opens beneath your feet. For one second, Pandora disappears. You are back on Earth. Concrete dust turns the air grey. A building’s inner wall has folded into the street. People run beneath the scream of alarms while something burns beyond the wreckage. A child’s red coat is visible beneath a slab where no child should fit. Someone beside you is shouting that the structure is going, that there is no time, that you cannot save everyone. You remember ignoring them. You remember pulling until the fabric tore. You remember the weight coming down before you reached the small hand inside it. 

Pandora crashes back into existence around the sound of the Omatikaya mother screaming. Not again. You wrench upward with everything left in you. The lattice shifts. The child comes free. You seize her around the waist and throw her toward her mother. “RUN!” They do. 

You turn after them and see Hometree falling. Not beginning to fall. Falling. 

The sight is too large for the mind to contain. Platforms and branches tear loose overhead. The mighty trunk crosses the sky while hundreds of Omatikaya scatter beneath it, reduced to small blue bodies in the path of something that has sheltered generations. 

Some will not make it. You know it before the first branch reaches them. 

A group near the eastern roots disappears beneath a collapsing platform. One moment they are running. The next there is only wood, dust and the brief upward reach of a hand before the wreckage covers it. 

Earth overlays Pandora again. Concrete over blue skin. Human hands beneath grey stone. The red coat. A boot protruding from a collapsed transport. Your commander pulling you backward while you screamed that people were still alive under there. The same helpless arithmetic. Too many bodies. Not enough time. No way to lift the world once it decides to fall. Your legs stop. 

Terror locks every joint. 

The child’s hand beneath the concrete becomes an Omatikaya hand beneath bark. The face of a woman you failed on Earth becomes the face of someone you ate beside at Hometree. Dust becomes ash. Alarms become ikran cries. 

You cannot breathe. 

Jake reaches you from the side and tackles you behind one of the outer roots as a massive branch crashes where you were standing. The impact throws both of you down. He covers your head with his arms while bark, dirt and burning fragments tear through the air. You do not hear him calling your name at first. You only see his mouth moving above you, his face distorted by panic. 

Then sound returns all at once. “Look at me!” Your eyes find his. “Look at me. You’re here.”  

Someone is screaming beneath the wreckage. You try to rise. Jake holds you down for another heartbeat as debris continues falling. “There are people under it.” 

“I know.” 

“We have to—” 

“We can't!” 

The pain in his voice reaches you where the command cannot. 

Hometree hits the ground like the end of the world. 

The earth convulses beneath your bodies. Dust and pulverized wood consume the clearing. The force presses the breath out of you again, but this time you hold onto the root, onto Jake’s arm, onto the knowledge that there are still living people around you who need hands more than they need terror. 

When the worst of the collapse passes, you shove Jake away and rise. The great trunk lies broken across the forest. Fire spreads through the wreckage as more incendiaries strike. The gunships sweep over what remains, driving the flames outward while the surviving Omatikaya retreat before them. 

You stand frozen for only one second. 

Then training takes the terror by the throat. “Grace!” 

Jake turns toward the sound of her coughing. 

You point toward a cluster of survivors near the western roots. “Get her and move them away from the fire.” 

“What about you?” You are already moving toward the nearest cries beneath the wreckage. “I’m getting whoever I can.” 

You do not go deep beneath the fallen trunk. There is no time and no safe way through it. You remain along the outer debris field, where smaller branches, broken platforms and pieces of woven structures have trapped those close enough to reach. 

A young hunter is pinned through the thigh beneath a narrow section of branch. You cannot lift it alone. Two other Omatikaya arrive, and all three of you heave until he can drag himself free. 

The next person is already dead. You know from the angle of her neck before you touch her. 

Earth tries to enter again. You force it out. Not now. You move to the next voice. 

A little girl is trapped beneath part of a collapsed sleeping platform, one arm visible through the woven fibres. You tear at it until your fingers bleed, ripping cords and splintered wood apart while she cries for her mother. “I am here” you tell her. “Keep talking.” The words are as much for you as they are for her.  

“My mother-” 

“We will find her.” You do not know whether that is true. 

You tear the opening wider anyway. When you pull her free, she clings to you so violently that her nails break the skin across your shoulder. You carry her toward the survivors and place her into the first pair of arms that reaches for her. 

Another cry rises behind you. Then Neytiri’s voice cuts through all of them. The sound of her grief passes through the ruin with enough force to stop your body more completely than any explosion. 

Jake had reached her before you did. 

Eytukan lies beneath the wreckage, a great splinter of Hometree driven through his body. Neytiri kneels beside him, both hands pressed uselessly near the wound. He is still alive, but only barely. 

You stop several steps behind Jake. 

There is no place for you inside that circle. Eytukan looks at his daughter. With the last of his strength, he gives her his bow. “Ma ite. Take my bow. Protect the People.” Neytiri closes both hands around it. His body stills. She collapses over him. Jake kneels beside her before grief or guilt can warn him away. 

“I’m sorry.” 

Neytiri turns and shoves him back with both hands. 

“Get away from me.” 

He stares at her, shattered. 

“Neytiri-” 

“Go away!” Her voice breaks into a scream. “NEVER COME BACK!” 

Jake staggers backward. Her eyes find you beyond him. For a moment, neither of you moves. Ash clings to her face. Tears cut through it in bright tracks. Everything that existed between the three of you beneath the Tree of Voices is still real, and it is still not enough to survive what lies between you now. Your hands are bleeding from the wreckage. A child’s blood streaks one forearm. Dust and ash cover your body. None of it matters. Saving anyone does not erase the part you played in bringing the people who killed her father. 

You do not approach her. You do not tell her you tried. You do not point toward the children you pulled from the gas or the bodies you helped uncover. None of it belongs beside Eytukan’s body. “I’m sorry” you say. 

Neytiri’s face twists. “Go.” 

The word is quieter than what she gave Jake. It hurts more. You step back until you stand beside him. 

Neytiri turns away from both of you and bends over Eytukan again, clutching the bow he placed in her hands. Around her, the Omatikaya move through smoke and fire, gathering the wounded and calling for those who will never answer. 

Jake walks away first. Not because he wants to leave her, but because she ordered him to and there is nothing left in him that believes he has the right to disobey. 

You remain for one heartbeat longer, staring at the fallen pieces of Hometree and seeing another ruined street laid over them. Different planet. Different war. The same bodies disappearing beneath structures brought down by men who would later call the deaths unavoidable. 

You turn to follow Jake through the burning forest, but the sight of him a few steps ahead of you makes the anger rise all over again. 

His reports. His promise that he understood. The recording still sitting on their system after you had warned him exactly what Quaritch would do with anything useful. Neytiri’s rejection is still cutting through you, Eytukan’s blood is still fresh in the ash, and Jake is walking away carrying the same guilt that has followed him through every disaster without ever stopping the next one from happening. 

He looks back when he notices you are no longer beside him. 

For one moment, you only stare at him. 

There is nothing gentle in your face now. No reassurance. No silent promise that you will endure this together. Whatever he sees in your expression makes him stop, but you do not give him the chance to speak. 

You turn away from him. 

Jake says your name behind you, rough and uncertain, but you keep walking in the opposite direction. You cannot stand beside him now. You cannot comfort him while the consequences of his choices are still burning around you, and you cannot let his remorse pull you into forgiving something you have not even begun to understand. 

So you leave him among the wreckage. 

You move deeper into the forest alone, away from the surviving Omatikaya and away from the voices calling through the smoke. Every step takes you farther from Jake, from Grace and from the ruined place where Neytiri kneels beside her father. Soon there is nothing around you but shattered trees, drifting ash and the low roar of fire moving through the undergrowth. 

Blood has dried across your hands and forearms. Some of it is yours. Most of it is not. Ash coats your skin, settles into your hair and clings to the wet tracks beneath your eyes. You stop in the middle of what remains of the forest because there is nowhere left that feels like a place you are permitted to go. 

For the first time since the attack began, nobody needs you to move. 

The absence of purpose is almost enough to bring you down. 

You stand alone among the broken trees, breathing smoke and staring at the blood beneath your fingernails while Hometree burns behind you. Earth still flashes at the edges of your vision. Concrete folding over bodies. A small hand disappearing beneath debris. The same helpless horror wearing another world’s face. 

Far away inside Hell’s Gate, the order is given. 

The link is severed. 

There is no one near enough to catch you. 

The connection tears through your mind without warning, ripping Pandora away so violently that your knees give out before you understand what is happening. Your avatar body collapses alone in the middle of the ruined forest, ash rising around it as it strikes the ground. 

The last thing you see is not Jake. 

It is your own blood-darkened hand against the earth, fingers going slack beneath a thin layer of ash while the fires continue burning beyond the trees.