Zephyr

In the mornings, the windows were white around the edges.

Robin liked to press one finger to the glass and watch the little circle appear where her skin was warm.

Mama did not like that.

“Robina,” she would say, not angry, but the kind of not-angry that meant she might become angry if Robin kept doing it. “Do not stand so close. Come here.”

So Robin went.

Mama always pulled her close with both arms, even if she was making tea, even if she had flour on her hands, even if Grandpa was calling from the other room. She smelled like soap, and wool, and the soup that stayed on the stove all day. 

The house had Mama, and Papa, and John, and Erik, and Grandpa.

Papa was there most days—not all days.

Some days he had to leave early—sometimes for many days—before Robin was awake. She would come into the kitchen and find his chair empty, his cup already washed. Mama would say, “Papa had to go,” and Robin would not cry because Mama looked tired when she said it. She did not want to make her more tired.

Other days Papa was there, and the whole house felt bigger.

He filled doorways. He took off his coat and shook snow from his boots. He said things in English too quickly, and Erik and John answered him in English too, quick and funny, like their mouths were running down a hill.

Robin understood them—mostly.

Sometimes they said words she did not know, and when she asked, Erik groaned. “You ask everything!”

“I do not!” She would say.

“You do!” Then he made a face at her, and said, “Clingy.”

Robin did not know that word the first time. She thought maybe it meant small. Or slow. Then John told her it was like something that got stuck to your sleeve.

“I am not clingy!” she said.

“You are!” Erik would insist.

Sometimes it was them who did not know words. They spoke Russian funny some times, especially long words.

Then Robin laughed when they did—when that happened John’s face always changed, and Erik’s did too.

So Robin stopped laughing.

She did not like when their faces changed like that. She only wanted to play with them, she did not want them to go quiet.

They would get angry and tell her she could not play with them.

Mama heard from the kitchen. She always heard everything.

“Erik. John.” She called.

Both boys looked towards her.

Mama stood with a spoon in her hand and that look on her face. The one that made even Papa stop talking sometimes.

“She plays too,” Mama said.

Erik sighed. John rolled his eyes.

Mama’s voice became harder. “She plays too.”

So Robin played.

At first they glared at her. Erik glared the most because he thought he owned all the games. John glared only until Robin let him be the brave soldier or until he forgot.

Robin did not mind the beginning—the beginning was always hard. After a while, they let her run behind them, and sometimes they even told her where to hide.

She liked being at home with John and Erik. She liked when Papa was home too.

Papa said he could fly—not like birds. Not with wings on his back.

With machines.

“It is a secret,” he told her, crouching down so his face was close to hers.

His eyes were blue. Robin liked that. Mama’s eyes were dark, like tea when it was too strong. Papa’s eyes were sky—even inside the house.

“A secret?” Robin whispered. “Like a superhero?”

Papa smiled, “Exactly like a superhero.”

Robin put both hands over her mouth.

Papa leaned closer. “You cannot tell anyone.”

Robin nodded very hard.

At school, she told Katya and Misha that her papa was a superhero, but it was a secret, so they could not tell anyone.

Katya said superheroes were not real.

Robin rolled her eyes.

Misha asked if he had a cape.

Robin thought about it—Papa had a brown coat.

“Yes,” she said.

School was good because her friends were there. The room smelled like paper and glue. Her teacher had a red scarf she wore even inside, and she put stickers on good work.

Last time, Robin did all her homework perfectly. All of it.

Even the line of letters that was hard because her pencil kept making the wrong shape—silly pencil.

The teacher looked at her notebook, smiled, and pressed a golden star on the page.

“Molodets, Robina,” she said.

Robin looked at the star for the rest of the day.

It was shiny. Not yellow. Gold.

When she got home, she showed Mama first.

Mama made the happy face that was not just a face. It changed her whole body. She took Robin’s notebook in both hands and looked at the star like it was something precious.

“Look at you,” Mama said. “My clever girl.”

Then Robin showed Papa when he came home, and he lifted her up even though Mama said it was dangerous.

Then she showed Grandpa.

Grandpa was sitting in his chair by the warmest wall. He liked that chair because Mama put a blanket over his knees and because he could see the window from there. Sometimes he looked out for a long time.

Robin climbed onto the little stool beside him and opened her notebook.

“Grandpa, look.” She called in Russian, because Grandpa did not understand English words.

Grandpa turned his head slowly.

He was very kind. That was what Robin knew about him first. He forgot things, but he never forgot to smile at her. His hands shook when he lifted them, and his skin was soft and dry, like paper that had been folded many times.

He looked at the golden star.

Then he looked at Robin.

“And who are you, little bird?” he asked.

Robin did not mind.

He asked almost every day.

“I am Robin,” she said.

He smiled and nodded like that was very good news.

“Robina,” he said.

Robin made a face. “Robin.”

“Robina,” Grandpa said again, softer this time. “Like my darling.”

Robin stopped making the face.

He always said that too.

Mama said Robin was named after Grandma. Mama’s mama. Grandpa’s wife—his darling, he called her. Robin had never met her, but sometimes she tried to imagine her. She imagined someone who looked like Mama but older, with the same dark eyes and the same warm hands.

Grandpa looked past Robin then, towards the kitchen. “Where is she?”

Robin turned too.

Mama was standing by the counter. Her back went still—only for a second.

Then she turned around with a smile.

“She will come back soon, Papa,” Mama said.

Grandpa nodded.

“Good,” he said. “Good.”

Robin looked at the door.

No one came in. No one ever came in after that question.

Sometimes Robin waited anyway.

She thought maybe Grandma was very slow. Maybe she had gone to a shop very far away. Maybe she had lost her mittens and had to look for them. Adults were always looking for things.

But Grandma never came back.

After Grandpa asked, Mama sometimes looked sad. Then she would see Robin watching, and she would smile.

Robin liked Mama’s smile, but she did not like that one.

Sometimes, when she smiled like that and Papa was home, he would sit with her and put an arm around her shoulders, and they would speak for a long, long time. 

After Mama would smile softer, but that smile was one Robin did like.

She liked when Papa was home because he always made things better.

One day, however, Papa had to leave for some days again. He took Erik and John with him.

They put on their boots in the hall, loud and excited. Erik had Papa’s old scarf around his neck. John kept asking if they would see the big planes.

Robin ran to get her boots. “I will go too!”

Erik groaned. “No, you’re not!”

Robin turned to look at him, offended almost “I am!”

“No.” He said, “Papa said you’re too little.”

Robin shook her head. “I am not!”

John laughed, “You are!”

Robin turned to Papa, because Papa fixed things. Papa could lift heavy bags, and open jars, and speak in the serious voice that made people listen. And Papa had never called her too little.

But Papa only looked at Mama.

Mama crouched behind her, her hands were already on Robin’s shoulders.

“Not today,” she said.

Robin twisted around. “Why?”

Mama knelt fully in front of her.

“When you can go with me,” she said. “One day you will go, just not now. Later.”

Robin did not understand.

Papa looked sorry, and that made it worse.

“I can be good,” Robin said.

“I know,” Mama said.

“I will not touch anything.” Robin insisted. “I will even hold Erik’s coat.”

Erik made a sound like he did not want that.

Mama pulled Robin into her arms.

Robin tried not to cry because Erik and John were watching, and if she cried, they would say she was clingy again.

Papa touched the top of her head.

“Next time, baby,” he said.

Robin glared at him from behind tears, “Why not now?”

He did not answer fast enough. Mama held her tighter.

The door opened. Cold came inside very quickly. Papa and her brothers went out into the white morning, and then the door closed again.

The house was warm again, and Robin hated it for a little while.

She sat on Mama’s lap even though she was angry with her. Mama rocked her, slow and quiet, and did not tell her to stop being angry.

Grandpa called from the other room.

Mama closed her eyes.

Robin looked up.

Mama did not answer right away.

Robin looked at her carefully.

Then she opened her eyes. “I am here, Papa.”

Grandpa came into the doorway, one hand on the wall. He looked at Mama as if she was far away, even though she was right there. He smiled—a smile as warm as the house.

“What is your name?” he asked.

Mama’s arms tightened around Robin. Not enough to hurt, just enough that Robin noticed.

For a moment, Mama did not say anything.

Robin wanted to whisper it for her.

‘Anya,’ she thought. ‘Your name is Anya.’

Mama looked at Grandpa, and the sad thing moved over her face.

Then she smiled. “Anya,” she said gently. “I am Anya.”

Grandpa nodded.

“Anya,” he repeated, happy. Then he looked at Robin. “And you, little bird?”

“I am Robin,” she said.

Grandpa smiled.

“Robina,” he said. “Like my wife.”

Mama made a sound. Not quite a laugh. Not quite anything.

Robin looked between them, trying to understand why names made everyone quiet.

Her own name did not feel sad to her. It felt like Papa saying Robin, quick and bright. It felt like Mama saying Robinochka when she brushed Robin’s hair. It felt like the teacher saying Robina when she gave her a golden star. It felt like Grandpa smiling because he remembered someone he loved, even if he did not remember where she had gone.

Sometimes, when the house felt empty because Papa was gone and her brothers were too, Robin touched the sticker on her notebook.

It shone when she moved the page.

Outside, the cold pressed against the windows. Inside, Mama cooked dinner.

The house stayed warm.

—

Robin hated the plane.

She hated it before it even went into the sky.

It was too big and too full of people. Everyone had bags, and coats, and voices that bumped into each other.

The air smelled strange. Not like the house, not like soup, or wool, or the stove, or Mama’s hands after she washed dishes. It smelled like plastic, and too much people, and something sharp that made Robin want to put her face in Mama’s coat and stay there.

Mama held her hand very tightly.

Papa walked ahead with the bags, turning back every few steps to make sure they were still there. Erik and John walked with him because they were big and could carry their own backpacks. They looked excited—but not all the way excited. John kept looking out the tall windows at the planes. Erik kept pretending not to.

Robin did not want to look—if she looked, then it was real.

They had taken pictures of her before—that was how it started to become real. Mama had brushed Robin’s hair until it shone, even though Robin said it hurt, and then they had gone to a place with bright lights where a woman told her not to smile too much. Papa had fixed the collar of Robin’s dress, Mama had told her to sit straight at least three times.

Then there were papers.

So many papers.

For days, the kitchen table had not been a kitchen table. It had been covered with folders, and pens, and Papa’s tablet, and Mama’s old documents, and little photographs with her face on them. Robin had tried to put her golden star notebook on one corner and Mama had moved it very carefully to the shelf.

“Not there, Robina,” Mama had said. “These papers are important.”

She also knew papers were more important than almost everything, because Mama and Papa both became quiet when they looked at them.

Grandpa was not there anymore.

That was the worst part.

The house was still warm, because Mama still made it warm, but it was different. Grandpa’s chair stayed by the wall for a few days, then Papa moved it. Robin had not watched him do it. She had gone to her room and put her hands over her ears because the chair legs made a sound on the floor.

No one asked where Grandma was anymore.

No one asked Robin her name every morning.

Robin thought that should have made things easier.

It did not.

Now they were at the airport, and everyone was walking, and Papa kept saying, “Stay close,” and Mama kept saying, “Robin, hand,” even though Robin was holding her hand already.

The plane waited outside the window.

It did not look like a superhero thing. It looked like a long white fish with wings.

Robin hated it.

She hated it.

Papa said planes were safe. Papa knew because Papa could fly. Papa could fly like a superhero, but it was a secret. Robin had believed that when they were in the house.

Now she was not sure.

When they got inside the plane, the seats were too small, and there were too many rows, and people were putting bags above their heads like the ceiling might eat them. Robin sat by Mama. Erik and John sat across the aisle with Papa, because they were big and did not need Mama as much.

Robin did.

She did not say it, she only held onto Mama’s sleeve. Clingy, she remembered, but did not let go.

The plane made noises. Clunks. Hums. A deep shaking sound under the floor. A voice said things from above, first in Russian and then in English. Robin understood both, but she did not like either. They sounded like school instructions, except worse, because at school she could still go home after.

She could not go home after this.

The plane started moving, and Robin’s stomach moved too.

“No,” she said.

“It is all right,” Mama looked down. “Robin—”

“I want to go home.”

Mama’s mouth pressed together.

Papa leaned across the aisle. “Hey, baby.”

Robin looked at him.

His face was gentle. That made her angrier.

“We are going home,” he said.

They were not. They were leaving home. Why would he lie?

The plane turned. The sound grew louder, enough that Robin could feel it in her knees.

She began to cry before she decided to. It came up too fast, hot and awful, and once it started, she could not put it back. Mama pulled her close, but Robin twisted in the seat belt.

“I want to see Katya,” she cried. “I want to see Misha. I want my teacher. I want my school.”

Mama whispered something into her hair. Robin could not hear it, the engines were too loud. Everything was too loud. The plane moved faster and faster, and her body pushed back into the seat, and then the ground was gone.

The ground was gone.

Robin screamed.

Someone in the row in front of them turned around. The woman’s face was tight and angry.

Another person looked too. Then another. Eyes came from the cracks between seats. Strange faces and frowning mouths.

Robin cried harder.

Her ears hurt. Not a little—a lot.

They filled up with pressure and pain until her own crying sounded far away. Mama told her to swallow. Papa passed something across the aisle. Candy. Mama put it in Robin’s hand and told her to suck on it.

Robin did not want candy.

She wanted Grandpa’s chair back.

She wanted the warm house.

She wanted the golden star on her notebook.

She wanted to play with her friends after school.

She wanted the cold outside the windows instead of the clouds below them.

Papa reached across the aisle once more.

“Robin,” he said, “we’ll go back to visit. You can say hi to your friends.”

Robin looked at him through tears.

Papa did not lie.

Usually.

But this sounded like a lie, once again.

“We will not,” she said.

Papa’s face changed, only a little. “We will try.”

That was different from yes. Robin knew it was different.

She cried until there was nothing left to cry with. The woman in front looked back twice more. The second time, Mama looked at her—the woman turned around at once.

Robin did not know what Mama’s face looked like, but it must have been the kind that made people stop.

After a while, Robin became too tired to sit up.

Her ears still hurt. Her throat hurt too, now. Her face felt sticky. Mama wiped it with her sleeve and kissed the side of her head.

“Sleep,” Mama whispered.

“I don’t want to.” She said. “I want to go home.”

Mama’s hand stopped for one second.

Then it moved again, slow over Robin’s hair. “I know.”

Robin fell asleep angry. When she woke up, the plane was still in the sky—that seemed unfair.

It should have been done already. She had slept, and sleeping was supposed to make things shorter.

John was watching a little screen. Erik was asleep with his mouth open. Papa looked tired. Mama’s shoulder was stiff under Robin’s cheek, but she did not move Robin away.

Outside the window, there was nothing but light.

Then, after forever, the plane went down.

That hurt worse.

Robin’s ears popped and filled and popped again. She cried quietly this time because she did not have enough strength to cry loudly. Mama rubbed her back. Papa told her to yawn. John yawned at her from across the aisle like a joke, and Robin almost laughed, but then her ear stabbed again and she hated him.

The plane landed with a hard bump.

Some people clapped. Robin did not, she had no idea what they were so happy about.

She gripped Mama’s sleeve.

The plane slowed down. The voice came from above again, in English first this time. Everyone started moving too soon. Bags came down. Coats went on. People stood in the aisle even though the doors were not open.

Papa smiled at her. “We made it.”

Robin stared at him.

He seemed to think this was good news.

When it was their turn to stand, Robin did not.

Mama unbuckled her seat belt. “Come, Robin.”

“No.” She remained seated.

Erik groaned from the aisle. “Robin.”

“No.”

John shifted his backpack. “We have to go.”

“No.”

Mama crouched in front of her as much as she could in the small space. “Robinochka,” her face was serious as she continued, “We have to get off the plane.”

“No.”

Papa came back from the aisle. People behind him had to stop. Someone sighed loudly. Robin heard it.

She did not care.

Papa looked at Mama. Mama looked at Papa.

Then Papa bent down.

“No,” Robin said, but he was already lifting her.

She kicked once. Not hard—she did not want to hurt him, she only wanted him to understand that she was not agreeing.

Papa held her against his chest and picked up one of the bags with his other hand.

“She’s tired,” he said to the people waiting.

His voice had a shape that meant they should not answer. No one did.

Robin put her face against his shoulder.

Papa smelled like travel now. Like plane air and coat wool and the soap from the airport bathroom. Not like home either.

He carried her out of the plane.

All the way through the tunnel. Through the bright building. Past lines, and counters, and people who looked at papers. Mama spoke. Papa spoke. People stamped things. Erik and John stood close, quiet now, maybe because even they understood that this was not a game.

Robin kept her arms around Papa’s neck.

She was too big to be carried like that. Erik would have said so. John would have made a face. They did not, and Papa did not put her down.

Outside, the air was different. It smelled wet, and like cars.

There was no snow, even if it was winter.

Robin looked for it, confused.

The sky was wide and pale. The cars were shiny. The road was smooth. Signs were everywhere in English, big letters standing up straight, telling people where to go.

Papa put her into a car she did not know.

Mama sat beside her in the back at first, until Robin stopped gripping her coat. Erik and John argued quietly about who had more room. Papa drove.

Robin looked out the window.

Everything moved past too fast. Houses. Roads. Lights. Trees without snow on them. Stores with names she could read but did not want to.

For some days, she did not know where anything was.

Their house was not Grandpa’s house.

It had different walls, different windows, different sounds in the night. Mama tried to make it warm, but the warmth was different too. It came from vents in the floor, and when it turned on, it breathed at her feet like a hidden animal.

Robin did not like it.

She kept her notebook in her bag. The golden star was still there—sometimes she opened it just to check.

A few days after the plane, Papa said they were going to visit his parents.

“Grandma and Grandpa,” he said in English.

Robin looked up. “Grandpa?” she asked.

Everyone looked at her.

Mama’s face softened. “Not that grandpa, Robina.”

Robin looked back down at her cereal.

She knew that. Of course she knew that. But there was a chair in her head, by a warm wall, and hands like folded paper, and a voice asking who she was.

She did not want a different grandpa.

Papa crouched beside her chair. “They want to meet you.”

Robin put her spoon down. “Why?”

Papa looked surprised, then sad, then not very sure, and said, “Because you’re their granddaughter.”

Robin did not know what to do with that.

Erik and John had met them before, she knew. They knew them from calls, and pictures, and visits when Papa went without Mama and her.

John said Grandma made good cookies. Erik said Grandpa had a television in the garage.

That sounded wrong to Robin—she did not know what a garage was, and televisions belonged in rooms.

They drove to the house after lunch.

Robin wore the dress Mama chose, dark blue with small buttons. Mama brushed her hair and tied it back. She told Robin not to worry.

That made Robin worry more.

Papa was quiet in the car. Not like angry quiet. A different kind.

He kept one hand on the wheel and one hand over Mama’s. Mama looked out the window. Erik and John argued in whispers until Papa said, “Enough,” and then they stopped.

The house was not very big, but it looked like it thought it was.

Everything was white. White walls. Pale stones by the path. Clean windows with curtains that did not move. The bushes outside were cut into hard little shapes, like someone had told them they were not allowed to be bushes.

Robin stood on the path and looked at the front door.

The house looked cold. Not because of snow—there was no snow.

It looked cold because nothing was soft. There was no color except for a single flag with little stars and little red stripes by the door.

Mama took her hand.

The door opened before Papa knocked.

A woman stood there.

She had Papa’s eyes, but not Papa’s face. Her hair was white and neat.

She smiled and said, “Alex.”

Papa hugged her—not like he hugged Mama. Not like he hugged Robin, or John, or Erik. Not with the warmth she had seen him hug Grandpa—her real Grandpa—either.

It was a careful hug, with space in it.

Then an older man came behind her. He clapped Papa on the shoulder and said something loud. Erik and John were pulled forward almost at once.

Grandma looked at them, “Look at you two!”

Grandma hugged John first. Then Erik.

She held their faces and said how big they were, how tall, how handsome. Grandpa laughed and asked Erik about school and John about baseball—though John did not play baseball, but he answered anyway.

Robin stood by Mama’s side. Mama’s hand was warm around hers.

No one hugged Mama.

Grandma looked at her after the boys.

“Anya,” she said. She smiled. Robin did not like that smile.

It was not a happy smile.

Mama smiled back. “Hello, Margaret.”

Grandpa nodded at Mama. “Good to see you.”

He said it like it was something written on a card.

Then Grandma looked down at Robin. Robin looked up.

She had practiced saying hello in the car. Papa had said she could say hi. Mama had said she could say hello if she wanted. John had said not to be weird. Erik had said she was always weird.

Robin opened her mouth, but Grandma spoke first, “You must be Robina.”

Robin closed her mouth.

Mama stepped closer, only a little. Robin felt it more than saw it.

Grandma’s eyes flicked to Mama, still smiling, “She looks like you.”

She turned and let them inside.

The house smelled too much like lemon and wood.

The floors shone. The walls were pale. There were glass things on tables and little bowls no one seemed to use. Robin was afraid to touch anything. She folded her hands in front of her dress and tried not to move too much.

Erik and John knew where to go. They went to the living room, where there were pictures of them on a shelf.

Robin saw them.

Erik missing two teeth. John in a red shirt. Erik and John with Papa in front of a car. Erik and John at Christmas.

No Robin.

That was because they had not known her, she told herself.

But Mama was not there either.

Grandma gave Erik and John cookies. Then she seemed to remember and offered one to Robin too.

Robin took it carefully.

“Thank you,” she said.

Grandma looked surprised.

“Oh,” she said. “Your English is very good.”

Robin looked at Mama. Mama’s face did not change.

Papa’s did, very quickly.

“She speaks English,” Papa said.

Grandma gave a small laugh. “I only meant—”

He interrupted, his voice low, “She understands you.”

The room became strange.

Robin held the cookie with both hands.

Grandpa cleared his throat. “Well. That’s good, then. Easier at her age.”

Grandma nodded. “Yes. She’s young. That’s a blessing. Young enough to learn properly.”

Robin looked down at her cookie.

Properly.

She knew that word.

Properly was how teachers told children to sit. Properly was how Mama told John to hold a knife. Properly was when something was wrong and had to be fixed.

She looked at her shoes.

Were they dirty?

Had she said something wrong?

Mama’s hand touched her shoulder.

Papa said, very quietly, “What does that mean?”

Grandma blinked. “What?”

“‘Learn properly’” He repeated. “What does that mean?”

“Alex,” Mama spoke.

Her voice was soft, but Robin heard something under it.

Papa did not look at her.

Grandma’s smile thinned. “We only mean she’ll adjust. Children do. Accents fade. Habits change. It’s better this way, isn’t it?”

Robin did not understand all of that.

But she understood accents.

She knew because Erik and John laughed when she said some English words, and then felt bad when she stopped talking. She had done the same with them too.

Papa leaned forward from where he was sitting, his eyes were too open and his hands turned to fists.

Grandpa said, “No one is criticizing.”

Papa looked at him. Robin had never seen Papa look at anyone that way.

Not even when John broke the blue cup from the kitchen and lied about it.

“Then what are you doing?” Papa said.

Mama looked at him.

“Sasha,” she said, and her voice held a warning.

Grandma’s face changed.

Robin saw it.

It happened the moment Mama had spoken. Grandma looked at the sound like it had put mud on her clean floor. Papa saw it too.

Something in him snapped. It was not loud at first, that was the frightening part.

“You will not do that,” he said.

Grandma drew back. “Do what?”

“You will not look at my wife like that.” He was not screaming but his voice was loud. “You will not look at my child like that.”

“Alex,” Mama said again, and now her hand was on his chest.

Not pushing. Holding.

Papa breathed hard once.

Robin had seen him tired. She had seen him worried. She had seen him sad when Grandpa’s chair had to be moved.

She had never seen him angry. Not like this.

Angry made him taller. Sharper. Like the whole room had become too small for him.

Grandpa’s mouth tightened. “You’re overreacting.”

Papa scoffed, then he turned on him. “I tried to give you a chance.”

No one spoke.

Erik stood by the shelf with half a cookie in his hand. John had stopped chewing.

Grandma’s face went pale in spots.

Papa’s voice was still quiet, but it shook at the edges.

“You wanted to videocal the boys. You asked for pictures of the boys. You sent gifts to the boys.” He opened and closed his hands, and the motion looked almost painful, “But when my daughter walks into your house, you talk about fixing how she speaks. You look at Anya like she’s a stranger.”

Robin did not know all the words.

But she knew daughter.

She knew Anya.

She knew foreign because someone at school had once said Papa was foreign, and Robin had told them he was not.

Mama’s hand pressed harder to Papa’s chest.

“Please,” she whispered.

Papa looked at her then. His face changed, but the anger did not leave. It turned towards pain.

“I told you it was not worth it,” he said to Mama.

Grandma made a small sound. “Alex, that is unfair.”

Papa turned back, but he did not speak.

Robin stopped breathing for a moment.

Grandpa said, “This is our first time meeting her.”

“Congratulations,” Papa said. “You failed.”

The room went silent.

Completely silent.

The vents whispered. A clock ticked. Somewhere outside, a car passed on the street.

Papa looked at Erik and John. “Get your things.”

John moved first, quick. Erik followed because John did.

Grandma stared at Papa. “You are leaving?”

He did not look at her. “Yes.”

She shook her head. “Because of this?”

Papa laughed once, but it did not sound happy.

Mama bent and picked up Robin’s coat.

Robin had not taken off her shoes. She was glad now. She did not want to sit to put them back on. She did not want to eat the cookie. She did not want to see the pictures without her in them.

She put the cookie down on the nearest table, suddenly not worried that crumbs had fallen.

Mama helped her with her coat.

Her hands were shaking.

Robin looked at her. “Mama?”

Mama smiled. That same sad smile from the warm house. The one she put on when Grandpa asked where Grandma was.

“I am here,” Mama said.

Papa opened the front door.

Cold air came in.

Grandpa said something to Papa in a low voice. Papa answered in a lower one. Grandma said Robin’s name again. Robin did not turn around.

Mama guided her out.

Erik and John had already gone ahead, quiet and confused. No one argued about the space in the car. No one said Robin was clingy when she leaned close.

Papa started the car.

For a while, he did not drive. He sat with both hands on the wheel, looking at the house.

Mama reached forward and put her hand on his shoulder.

“Sasha,” she said.

Papa bowed his head. For a second, Robin thought he might cry.

He did not—or if he did, he did it where she could not see.

Then he drove them away.

Robin looked out the back window.

The white house grew smaller.

It still looked clean. It still looked sharp. It still looked like it had never wanted her inside.

Robin touched her notebook through her bag, feeling the hard edge of it beneath the fabric. The golden star was in there. Her teacher had given it to her. Katya had seen it. Misha had tried to touch it and Robin had slapped his hand away, and then they had both laughed.

She would not see them again.

Not tomorrow. Not next week. Maybe not ever.

When they reached their new house, Papa carried her from the car even though she had not asked. He held her tight.

This house was still strange. The vents still breathed. The windows were wrong. The rooms did not know them yet.

But Mama turned up the heat.

Erik and John went quiet to their room.

Papa set Robin down by the couch, then knelt in front of her.

“I’m sorry, baby,” he said.

Robin looked at him.

Adults said sorry when someone got hurt. When something broke. When they stepped on your foot by accident.

She did not know what Papa had broken.

Papa touched her cheek with his thumb. “You did nothing wrong.”

Robin did not understand all of that.

But she understood love.

She understood Mama’s arms.

She understood Papa staying on the floor in front of her, even though he looked tired, and sad, and angry all at once.

Outside, there was no snow pressing against the windows.

There was no Grandpa’s chair by the warmest wall.

But Papa stayed.

Mama was there. John and Erik too.

After a while, the house became warmer. Not the same warmth. But warm enough that Robin stopped shaking.

She did not see Papa’s parents again for a very, very long time.

She forgot their faces, but she did not forget the house. She did not forget the feeling of not being welcome.

—

Robin folded the blanket, tightened the straps around it, and gathered what little she had unpacked the night before. So’lek moved with the same quiet efficiency beside her, checking the cave mouth before he stepped out fully into the pale morning.

Outside, the forest’s light was still changing with dawn.

Nika waited near the edge of the clearing, her wings tucked close, her head turning when Robin emerged. Ìley stood farther out, more watchful, his body angled towards the open sky beyond the trees.

They would reach the Plains today.

The thought came suddenly, with enough weight to make Robin’s fingers still around the strap in her hand.

She had known it since the beginning. She had known it since Tamtey left, since So’lek told her they would follow, since Nika first rose beneath her into the air and carried her farther from the shelter of now familiar trees.

Still, knowing something from a distance did not prepare her for the feeling of it drawing near.

The Great Games waited ahead.

Clans. Strangers. Eyes. Judgment, even if no one meant it cruelly.

Robin crossed the clearing and reached Nika’s side. The ikran lowered her head slightly, accepting the brief touch Robin pressed to her neck before checking the saddle. Warm hide shifted beneath her palm.

The leather was secure, the knots held, there was nothing wrong. Still, Robin did not mount.

Her hand remained against Nika’s neck.

Behind her, So’lek noticed. Of course he did.

“What is wrong?” he asked.

Robin pressed her lips together.

For a moment she only looked at the saddle, then at her own hand resting against the ikran’s neck, at the faint tremor in her fingers that had nothing to do with her receding fear of flying.

Then she turned enough to face him. “Do you really think this is a good idea?”

So’lek’s attention sharpened, she noticed.

Robin forced herself to keep looking at him. It would have been easier to make it a joke. Easier to say she was only sore, or tired, or still deciding whether her dignity could survive another day of being corrected because her flying was bad.

She did not. She chose the truth instead.

“I don’t want to go somewhere I’m not welcome,” she said.

The words came quieter than she intended, but they held.

So’lek remained still.

Robin looked away first, back towards Nika. Her fingers moved once over the ikran’s neck, following the line of warm muscle beneath skin.

“I don’t want to feel like an intrusion,” she said. “I don’t want to arrive and spend the whole time wondering whether everyone is only being polite because saying otherwise would be inconvenient.”

Her mouth tightened.

A bitter feeling had risen beneath her ribs, old enough that it did not belong entirely to this morning. To this body. To this life.

It had the shape of clean white walls, careful smiles, her mother’s hand tightening around hers. The shape of standing somewhere cold and realizing without anyone saying it plainly that she was being measured differently.

Robin pushed it down.

“And maybe that is selfish,” she added. “But I would rather spare myself a bad time if that is all I am walking into.”

The clearing went quiet.

So’lek didn’t answer at first. His silence, this time, didn’t feel like judgment. It felt like consideration.

Then he said, “You were invited.”

Robin’s eyes closed briefly.

She nodded once, more to herself than to him.

She had expected something longer. She had expected—perhaps she had even wanted—an argument. A reassurance. Some extense, careful explanation that would make the feeling smaller.

So’lek gave her only the fact. The one thing solid enough not to bend beneath fear.

You were invited.

Robin opened her eyes again.

The worry didn’t vanish. Neither did the old bitterness. It remained there, quiet and stubborn, refusing to be soothed simply because logic had placed itself in the way.

But she did try to understand.

The Na’vi were not careless. They would not invite Robin only to humiliate her. So’lek would not bring her there if he believed she had no right to stand among them, he was too respectful of The People’s way for that.

The knowledge settled slowly, not warm, not comforting exactly, but usable.

Robin gave another small nod.

“All right,” she said. Nothing more.

So’lek inclined his head, accepting the answer for what it was.

Robin turned back to Nika and checked the saddle once more, though she had already done so. Then she took hold where So’lek had shown her, set her foot, and pulled herself up.

Her muscles protested at once—she ignored them, settled her weight properly, and gathered herself into readiness.

For a moment, she looked towards the opening in the trees.

The sky beyond was pale and waiting.

Behind her, So’lek mounted Ìley.

Robin touched Nika’s neck one last time.

Even then, before she knew the truth, before W-17 returned to her in fragments of blood, static, and gunfire, Robin had not been able to hold much hate for the Na’vi.

Not then. Not before anger, revenge, and fear took hold of her copied mind and turned her into something that wandered from one RDA installation to the next like a war machine with a pulse.

Back then, when the lies still had weight and the RDA’s version of her death was the only version she had, the hatred still hadn’t stuck.

‘They were here before us,’ she had thought. ‘This is their land. They are protecting it.’

Hostile had always seemed like the wrong word for the People.

Humans used violence like architecture. They built with it. Expanded with it. Drew borders with it—then named those borders progress and acted surprised when the world bled.

Hostile was not the right word for the Na’vi.

It was, however, a perfect word for the ones surrounding her now.

Na’vi in shape. Not Na’vi in anything else.

Not in the way they stood. Not in the way they moved through the forest with that patient, unhurried cruelty, as if the trees themselves had learned to make room for them out of fear rather than belonging. Not in the way they looked at her—not with suspicion, not with caution, not even with the clean anger she had learned to expect from people who had every reason to hate the body she wore.

No. This was different.

Their paint was wrong too.

White across shaved skulls and cheekbones. Red at throats and jaws. Black dragged over chests and arms in marks that didn’t look ceremonial, didn’t look sacred, didn’t look memory honored in pigment.

It looked like a warning. Like old blood dried over their skin. Like death given color.

Their weapons were wrong too. Too many knives. Too many trophies tied into their belts and braids.

Their scars didn’t sit like the marks of hunters or warriors who had survived the necessary violence of a living world. They looked displayed. Kept. Fed. Some of them intentional, even.

Nothing about them resembled the way of the People. There was no sign of Eywa in them, Robin realized.

The thought arrived with such certainty it frightened her.

She had no idea how she knew that. No idea whether she had any right to claim she recognized the absence of something sacred. Maybe it was because her soul—if that was what she was allowed to call it, if that word wasn’t too large and too dangerous for what lived inside her—had been held in this moon’s living network long enough to know what called to it and what did not.

Maybe she had simply spent too much time with So’lek.

Maybe both. Maybe neither. It didn’t matter.

The truth of it sat cold inside her.

These people were empty in a way that wasn’t absence.

Absence could be quiet.

This was hunger.

Robin didn’t fight—she knew the fight was over the moment she realized there were more behind her.

Not because she didn’t want to fight. Her body wanted it. Her hands wanted it. Every old piece of training inside her was already measuring angles, distances, weapons, the gap between bodies and trees, with her bow on her back and knife at her side.

Three in front. Two behind. More above. One close enough to lunge at with her knife—and another close enough to cut her down before she finished drawing it.

The calculation completed itself with brutal efficiency.

Fight, and she died badly.

Run, and she died faster.

So she did neither. She held still—it cost her more than she showed.

They closed in slowly, as if disappointed she hadn’t given them the entertainment of panic. One of them snatched the bow from her hands before she could decide whether dying for it would be worth the attempt. Another took the knife So’lek had given her before they reached the Plains—that loss landed somewhere sharp, not because she believed the knife would save her, but because it was his.

Because he had placed it in her hand with that same quiet gravity he gave to things that mattered more than he would ever explain aloud.

A warrior pulled it from its sheath, weighed it once, and smiled as if he had found something amusing. Robin kept her face still.

Then someone kicked the backs of her knees—pain flashed white through her legs, and the ground came up fast. She caught herself badly, palms scraping on damp earth, shoulders jolting against the sudden stop. Before she could rise, hands caught her arms and wrenched them forward.

Leather cord wrapped around her wrists. Thin, tight, and expert. It bit into the skin as they pulled the knot closed, a narrow line of pressure that became pain the moment she tested it.

Robin kept her breathing even, or tried to, and she found herself kneeling, bound, surrounded, and with her heart hammering against her ribs so violently it seemed impossible that none of them could hear it.

Still, she straightened her back. Chin up. Shoulders steady.

If terror wanted to live in her body, fine. It could do so—quietly.

They spoke around her. Robin understood only pieces—enough of them.

Reward.

Kuru.

Who.

Cut.

None of the words led her mind towards a promising future.

She lowered her gaze to her wrists and began working at the knot anyway. Small movements with careful pressure. Thumb against cord. Skin dragging. The knot didn’t give.

Of course it didn’t. Of all the skills these people could have lacked, apparently ropework wasn’t one of them.

Fucking fantastic.

A foot nudged hers. Not gently.

Robin looked back over her shoulder, first to her feet, then up.

A woman stood over her, staring down with a small frown. Her head had been shaved close, the exposed skin painted in streaks of white and red. Her eyes moved over Robin’s feet with sharp interest.

“Look,” the woman said. Ordered, really.

Two of the men nearby followed her gaze.

Robin’s stomach tightened before she remembered why.

Five toes—of course.

The woman crouched and grabbed Robin’s bound wrists, yanking them up hard enough for the cord to burn across her skin. Robin hissed once through her teeth before she could stop herself.

The woman’s smile grew.

She pried Robin’s fists open with unnecessary force and studied her hands. One finger after another. The thumb. The wrongness. The human shape written into blue skin.

“Demon,” she said. Amused.

Robin almost laughed—she had been about to say the same thing to her.

A sound split the forest ahead of them.

Laughter.

High. Sharp. Terrible.

Not loud in the way of someone trying to be heard. Loud in the way of someone who already knew everyone would listen.

The painted woman’s face snapped toward the sound, her grip still cruel around Robin’s wrists.

A few of the others shifted. Not fear—or maybe a little fear—but mostly with recognition. Submission, too—or yielding. The subtle change of bodies making room for something worse than themselves.

Robin followed their eyes.

A Na’vi stepped through the trees.

A leader of sorts, her mind supplied at once.

He didn’t hurry—not that he needed to. The others had already made the space for him before he entered it, and he moved into it as if it had always belonged to him.

His head, too, was shaved clean. White paint covered the crown of his skull and swept down across his cheekbones. Black and red marked his jaw and throat. The patterns over his skin were too deliberate to be accidental, too ugly to be beautiful. Two scars crossed his face, one cutting through the paint near his brow, another dragging down towards his mouth.

The smile he wore did nothing to soften him. If anything, it made the severity worse.

In one hand, he held a braid. Robin’s eyes dropped to it before she could stop them.

Her body remembered Ïyo lying on his back nearby, eyes open towards the canopy, chest unmoving, the back of his neck bare.

It was them—they had killed him.

Not the thanator. Not the forest.

Them.

They had cut him apart in the one way that mattered beyond death.

Desecrated him.

Robin’s mouth went dry.

What the fuck were they?

And then memory opened beneath her.

Firelight. Food wrapped in green leaves. So’lek sitting beside her with the careful stillness he brought to anything that mattered too much to mishandle.

—

Robin had been tying the knife to the woven belt around her waist when So’lek came to sit by her side. He carried two bundles of food wrapped in broad green leaves and set one in front of her before his eyes moved to the blade.

“You kept it,” he said.

He meant the knife—the one he had given her.

Robin raised her eyes to him for only a moment before returning to the knot with suspicious focus.

“Well—yeah.” Robin replied.

The answer sounded too casual. It wasn’t casual. Robin felt like she was about to throw up just by talking about this with him.

She finished tying the knife into place and immediately reached for the food just to have something else to do with her hands.

So’lek’s eyes remained on the blade for a moment longer before he began to eat.

“It is old,” he said.

Robin paused, hands halfway through opening the leaves.

She cleared her throat.

“It works.” The words came out almost defensive. She felt more than saw So’lek’s gaze shift to her face. “You sharpened it before giving it to me. It works.”

She had hated how nervous she sounded.

Hated more that she was nervous at all.

It was just a knife. A weapon. Nothing soft or remotely unique.

It was also a gift.

From him—for her.

They ate in silence after that, because apparently both of them were very gifted at turning ordinary meals into awkward, emotional endurance tests. It sucked. She hated it.

When the food was finished and the fire had settled lower, So’lek spoke again. “I had another. Cycles ago.”

Robin turned to look at him.

He continued, “It was taken from me.”

She searched for something intelligent to say and found absolutely nothing.

“A knife?” She asked.

Obvious.

Dumb.

Very articulate.

So’lek answered anyway. “A knife—kept from before my clan was lost.”

The pull in her chest was immediate and strange. Painful in a place she didn’t have a name for. Not yet.

“Who took it?” she asked, though she wasn’t sure she had the right to know.

“Wukula,” he said. A name, she guessed. 

“Of the Mangkwan. During a raid.” His gaze remained steady, but something hard sat behind it. “We fought. I lived. He gained a wound. He kept the knife, too.”

The first thing Robin found in herself was anger. Not toward So’lek—of course not.

Towards this Wukula—whoever he was— who had taken something from him. Something old. Something from before loss had carved So’lek into the person sitting beside her now.

And despite her best efforts not to become ridiculous about it, Robin had begun to think of So’lek as someone close.

A friend, maybe.

In the quiet privacy of her own mind, where no one could accuse her of optimism as a crime, she liked to think he might see her that way too.

Then another thought arrived—a fight. Na’vi against Na’vi.

Why?

“Mangkwan?” Robin asked.

So’lek’s eyes found hers. “Ash People.”

Robin offered him a nervous smile. “That doesn’t sound very reassuring.”

He narrowed his eyes. “It was not meant to be.”

The smile slipped.

“They are a clan that lives far east, in dead lands.” So’lek said.  “Near a mountain that breathes fire and ash.”

‘So—a volcano,’ her mind supplied. For once, she decided against speaking her sarcasm. The moment felt too solemn for that.

“They have strayed from the way of the People,” So’lek said.

Robin’s frown deepened, more out of concern than anger now. “Why?”

So’lek looked down at the space between them for a moment, as if considering how much truth to give her.

Then his eyes found hers again. “They reject Eywa.”

Robin leaned back slightly.

He continued, voice low. “They are vicious. They act with aimless violence and anger.”

A cold discomfort moved beneath her skin.

When she first came to Pandora, that had been the nightmare. Violent aliens in the dark. Teeth. Arrows. Savages who killed because killing was what they did.

Then, slowly, the nightmare had become embarrassing.

The Na’vi were people who respected and protected their land. The RDA had been the monster in the story, and Robin, too young, too desperate, and too guilty, had not been able to see it clearly at first.

What So’lek described now sounded like the old fear wearing Na’vi skin. Her old nightmare, personified.

That made it worse.

She lifted a hand to the back of her neck, suddenly uncomfortable with the thought.

Robin, being herself, tried to hide the fear behind humor—a skill she had honed through the years.

“Good to know.” She let out a humorless laugh. “I’ll keep it in mind in case I ever see one.”

The humor didn’t reach him. If anything, he looked offended by it.

“Do not joke,” he ordered.

Robin closed her mouth.

“If you ever come to face one of the Mangkwan,” he said, low and very clear, “You run.”

He inclined his head toward her, as if to press the instruction into place. “You do not fight. You do not linger. You run.”

Robin was not against the idea—truly. The look on his face, along with the very short and very haunting description already offered, had thrown any curiosity she might have had miles away from where she sat.

Still, because apparently self-preservation had limits, she asked, “Didn’t you fight one of them?”

“Because I had to,” So’lek answered. “Not because I wanted to.”

Robin had no answer to that.

As if he believed he had not yet carved the warning deeply enough into her mind, he added, “With the Mangkwan, a quick death would be mercy.”

Her breath caught.

“Robin, they are not merciful people.”

—

The memory ended.

Mangkwan. 

That’s what they were. Mangkwan.

A braid landed in front of her.

The leader had thrown it there, casually, as if discarding a strip of hide. It hit the ground barely a foot from Robin’s knees.

Her stomach turned.

The severed end was clean—precise. A cut made by someone who had done this before, and would continue to do so.

The freezing realization struck her all at once.

She had not followed So’lek’s instruction at all.

Run. 

Do not fight. Do not linger. Run.

Not that she had been given much of a choice. By the time she knew the Mangkwan were there, they had already closed every path. Running would have turned her death into a chase. Fighting would have turned it into entertainment.

She refused both, but refusal didn’t change the shape of the trap she had fallen into.

She was still bound. Still kneeling. Still at their mercy—or lack of.

The leader crouched before her.

He had presence even in silence. The kind that pressed into the space around him and made everything else smaller. Robin refused to bend under it, and even when her eyes would not quite meet his face, her back remained straight.

He seemed to enjoy that. The defiance.

A breath of laughter left him through his nose.

“Demon of the People,” he said. As if that explained her.

Robin was not sure anything explained her that easily. Not in this life. Not in this body.

“Are you one of Toruk Makto’s?” He asked.

She understood the question. Toruk Makto. Jake Sully.

Once human. Once a dreamwalker. Once a demon, maybe, in the eyes of those who had not yet known what he would become.

A demon who had dressed like the People. Spoken like them. Learned their ways. Been accepted by Eywa in a way Robin still found impossible to fully understand without feeling something hollow and ugly open under her ribs.

She didn’t answer, thinking—maybe foolishly—that maybe silence might buy time.

Enough time for Nawk’tan to find her, or for Vauk to circle back—if either was still alive. Enough time for a distraction, a mistake, a shift in their attention. Enough time for her to get her bound hands under herself, force her weak knees to work, and run the way So’lek had told her to.

Her gaze dropped briefly to the braid at her knees.

Whose?

Vauk’s?

Nawk’tan’s?

Some other poor Na’vi who had crossed the wrong path in the wrong forest and found these bastards waiting?

A small part of her hoped Nawk’tan was alive at least. He seemed like the kind of man who would not leave his own behind—she only hoped she counted as one of them in his eyes. The thought hurt more than she wanted it to.

Before they had left, she had insisted on the radio. Nawk’tan had hated it immediately.

Too small. Too mechanical. Too complicated for something whose only purpose was speaking across distance. Robin had given him the communicator anyway and explained how to press the switch, where to speak, how close to hold it, what not to touch unless he wanted to turn the whole thing off and make her regret ever trying to bridge the technological divide.

He had looked deeply unimpressed.

She had kept hers on anyway.

Now, a larger and much more useless part of her wanted to press the comm at her neck and call So’lek’s name.

Not because it would work—she knew it would not.

He was too far away. She was too deep under the canopy. The terrain was wrong, the distance worse. Even if the signal reached somewhere, even if by some miracle—some impossible mercy—-it found the right receiver, he wasn’t close enough to do anything.

Calling him wouldn’t be strategy. It would be hope, stained with fear—that was worse than hope alone.

She wanted his voice anyway.

Not only because he would know what to do, though she believed firmly he would—though maybe that was unfair. Maybe she gave him too much credit because some part of her had started assigning steadiness to his presence and didn’t know what to do with herself when he wasn’t there.

‘Foolish,’ she called herself in her mind.

Still. It didn’t feel wrong to trust that. To trust him.

The leader’s eyes moved over her in one sharp sweep.

Then he reached out.

Robin recoiled before she could stop herself when he lifted the edge of her coat, exposing the skin at her side to the humid forest air. His fingers brushed the scar tissue there.

Not hard—that made it worse somehow. The touch was almost thoughtful, curious.

Robin’s breath shortened.

The scars along her side remembered claws and impact. They remembered Tamtey’s voice breaking above her. Remembered the white-hot certainty that she was about to die because Pandora had finally decided to finish what the RDA started.

He tilted his head, considering. His smile widened as he pressed one finger into one of the raised scar lines against her ribs, painfully.

Pain licked through her side. Robin’s mouth tightened. She did not give him the sound.

Then, through the panic, something important returned.

Two scarred lines.

Two scratches on the tree bark.

The thanator.

It was still out there.

Still hunting.

Still angry, reckless, and feral in a way nothing born to the forest should have been. Both kurus cut away, severed from connection forever, leaving only a creature driven by pain, confusion, and ungrounded hate.

A thing made wrong—Robin understood that better than she wanted to.

Her gaze lifted towards the canopy—too thick, too crowded. Nika could not land here even if she came.

Good.

Robin didn’t want her close to this.

Noise. She only needed noise. Movement, maybe.

One mistake from the circle around her.

“You will look at me,” the man said.

His hand gripped her side fully now. Robin didn’t look, her eyes remained raised to the hidden sky behind the leaves, thinking.

Spite was a stupid, petty form of courage. It was all she had left at the moment. She accepted it anyway.

“Look at me, demon.”

She turned her head, but not to his face. Past his shoulder. To the trees.

His fingers dug harder into her scarred side, displeased.

Robin drew air into her lungs.

Then she called. High and sharp, cutting through the damp air. The way she had heard the Na’vi call for their ikran—her own version of it, shaped by practice, embarrassment, and Nika’s selective willingness to acknowledge she had any rider at all.

A sound meant to carry. A sound meant to pierce through distance.

The man’s expression changed.

Robin drew breath to call again—a hand clamped over the lower half of her face. Hard.

His fingers dug into her jaw with enough force to make pain flash behind her eyes. His palm crushed over her mouth, stealing sound and breath in the same motion—instinct surged so violently she nearly threw herself backward without plan or purpose.

She stopped herself—barely.

Her nostrils flared as she tried to breathe around the obstruction.

He leaned close.

Now she looked at him. Now she could not help it.

Only then did he seem pleased with himself.

His hand tightened over her face. The other stayed at her side, keeping her pinned in place through pain alone.

“No one will come for you.” The words were quiet. Certain. He said them like he was telling her the weather.

Robin’s eyes burned, partly from pain, partly from the sharp panic of not having enough air.

He watched that too. Enjoyed it.

“Dreamwalker,” he said softly. “I will cut away every stolen piece of you until fear has nowhere left to live.”

His hand left her side and reached back.

For a weapon, most likely.

Robin did try to move away, then. His hold on her face didn’t yield.

A faint laugh left him, low and almost fond, as if her attempt had amused him.

“I will take your kuru last,” he murmured. “I want you to know the moment you become nothing.”

The words went through her colder than the knife could have.

Not death.

Erasure.

The fear in Robin’s body changed shape.

Her hands strained once against the cord—the knot held.

Wukula’s fingers shifted against her jaw.

Her heart lurched before she could stop it.

His smile deepened.

“Your people will follow what I leave,” he said. “Enough to understand. Not enough to bury.”

Robin’s vision narrowed.

For one terrible second she wasn’t in the forest. She was back in another room, another death, another voice asking for last words while her body bled beneath her and the air tasted like metal.

I won’t be able to protect you, Walker.

The memory hit hard enough that she almost broke against it.

Then the forest answered.

A roar tore through the trees, deep and furious. Close enough to rattle through the ground beneath her knees.

Every Mangkwan body around her shifted at once.

The leader’s head snapped toward the sound.

Robin’s ears pressed flat against her skull. Her side throbbed, not from his touch, but from the memory of claws, weight, and Tamtey’s trembling hands trying to hold her together.

The thanator roared again. Closer.

Wukula looked back at her, eyes narrowing as understanding settled over his face.

“Demon.” He spoke it like an accusation, then he shoved her aside by the hold on her jaw.

The force sent her hard into the ground—pain burst through one shoulder and for half a second she saw nothing but roots, leaves, the severed braid lying too close, the shape of Ïyo’s unmoving hand.

The pressure on her face was gone. Air came back violently. Robin didn’t waste the breath on sound.

The Mangkwan formation had broken—not fully, not enough for safety, but enough. Some turned towards the roar. Others moved to higher ground. One shouted a warning. Another drew a bow.

Robin rolled onto her knees.

Her wrists were still bound.

She had no idea where her own bow was, but she saw the startled Mangkwan who had taken her knife. Wrists bound and all, she pushed at him with her shoulder towards a tree, and taking advantage of his surprise, she snapped her hands forward, snatched the knife from his hold, and ran.

The forest floor was slick under her feet and every root seemed built for the express purpose of killing her pride before the Mangkwan could.

She ran anyway.

Behind her, the man called something. Too close. Too controlled to be panic.

A promise, maybe.

She didn’t understand. She didn’t look back either.

Looking back was for people with spare time and better options. Robin had neither.

She ran with her hands tied in front of her, using them for balance when she had to, catching herself against trunks, shoving through broad leaves and low hanging vines. Pain flashed through her wrists each time the cord pulled. The leather bit deeper. Warmth slid beneath it.

Blood, probably.

Branches slapped against her face and shoulders. The ground dropped without warning. She stumbled, caught herself, kept moving. Somewhere behind her the thanator crashed through the forest with the sound of something too large and too furious to care what broke in its path.

A scream cut off sharply.

Mangkwan.

Robin didn’t let herself feel relief. Not yet.

Another voice shouted behind her, closer than before.

She angled left, then immediately right, refusing any clean path that might give a pursuer line of sight. The canopy was too thick. Nika could not come down here. Nawk’tan had to be somewhere. Vauk too, unless they—

No. Not that thought. She shoved it away.

The comm at her neck crackled.

Static first.

Then a voice, broken by interference and distance. “Does anyone hear?”

Robin almost tripped.

Nawk’tan.

He had used the radio.

Stubborn bastard had actually used the radio.

Her bound hands flew to her neck, careful with the knife she held, and her fingers fumbled with the switch. The cord cut deeper with the movement. She pressed anyway.

“Nawk’tan!” Her voice came out rough, breathless. “There are Mangkwan!”

A beat of static.

Then his voice returned, shaken beneath the control. “I saw.”

That answer was worse than she wanted it to be. Robin pushed through a curtain of hanging leaves and saw light ahead.

A clearing. Small. Open enough.

Maybe.

“Fly,” Nawk’tan said. “Find a clear path and fly. We will meet in the air. Be quick!”

Robin would have rolled her eyes if she had not been busy trying to avoid dying.

Very helpful.

Just fly.

Brilliant.

Fantastic insight.

A roar shook the trees behind her—okay, maybe he had a point.

The clearing opened ahead, green and bright after the undergrowth, sunlight filtering down in hard shafts through the canopy break. Robin stumbled into it, chest heaving, wrists burning, side screaming with each breath.

She threw her head back and called for Nika. Once. Twice.

Nothing.

Her nerves spiked so violently she felt it in her teeth.

Behind her, something crashed through the trees. Not close enough to see. Close enough to feel.

Robin called again, sharper this time, throat tearing around the sound.

For one unbearable second, the sky didn’t answer.

Then a screech split the air above her.

Nika dropped through the opening like fury given wings.

She landed hard in the center of the clearing, talons tearing into earth, wings flaring wide enough to scatter loose leaves across Robin’s face. Her head snapped towards Robin, then towards the trees behind her, pupils narrowing.

Robin had never been so relieved to be judged by a reptile in her life.

“Yeah,” she rasped, already running toward her. “I know. Bad day.”

Mounting with bound hands was inelegant—that was the kindest possible word for it.

Robin grabbed the harness, missed one grip, caught it again, and hauled herself up with a sound she would deny making if anyone survived to mention it. Pain tore through her wrists. Her knee slipped. Nika shifted beneath her with an irritated shriek, which, frankly, wasn’t helpful.

“Oh—shut it!” Robin snapped breathlessly.

A figure broke from the trees. Mangkwan.

Robin didn’t wait to find out who.

The ikran launched. The ground vanished beneath them with a force that drove Robin’s stomach into her throat. She pressed herself low against Nika’s neck, bound hands twisted awkwardly in the harness, every muscle locking around terror.

The sky caught them.

Below, the clearing shrank. The trees closed around it. A painted figure stepped into the open and looked up.

Even from above, Robin knew him. He stood at the edge of the clearing. His face lifted, painted skull bright against the green.

He didn’t shout. Didn’t rage. He only watched her rise.

Robin’s breath came hard and uneven against the wind.

Her wrists throbbed. Her side burned. Her mouth still remembered the shape of his hand.

Nika climbed higher, wings beating strong beneath her, carrying them through the gap in the canopy and into the brutal relief of open air.

For one second, Robin looked towards the distance.

She felt the exact moment her face crumpled, a sharp breath escaping her mouth against her will. She leaned down and pressed her face against the back of Nika’s neck.

It was a search and rescue. A simple mission. 

She remembered telling So’lek she could do it. That she had survived worse.

What a fool.

She thought of him again. Not as a strategy this time. Not as a rescue.

Robin thought of his hand offering her the knife. His voice warning her to run. His face in the dark before dawn, serious, steady, and asking her to be careful, as if care could be ordered into the world by saying it clearly enough.

She had tried.

She was alive.

That would have to count for something.

Nika banked hard, answering some movement below, and Robin tightened her grip.

Static cracked at her neck again.

“Nawk’tan?” she forced out.

A burst of interference.

Then his voice, faint but present. “Fly south, Robin. We go to Hometree.”

Robin let out a breath that almost became something else.

Not relief.

Not yet.

She let her forehead rest again against Nika’s hide.

“Copy,” she said, because some habits survived every life.

Behind and below, the forest rolled on, green, endless—hiding its dead.

Ahead, the sky opened.

Robin held on.

—

So’lek watched the great Toruk climb into the sky.

Its wings caught the light above the Spires, vast and red against the open blue, each beat carrying it farther from the stone teeth and drifting cloud.

For a long moment, all sound seemed to draw back around it. Even the wind appeared to pause, as if the world was remembering old stories and had gone still to make room for them.

Against his better discipline, So’lek thought of Robin—her name rising inside his mind without permission.

He wondered what her face would have done at the sight. Whether her eyes would have narrowed first in suspicion, because wonder rarely reached her without passing through some wall of practical distrust first. Whether she would have gone quiet. Whether some small, dry comment would have found its way out of her mouth because silence made her feel too seen.

Her relationship with the sky was still complicated.

He had learned that not from what she said, but from what her body did before words could interfere. The way her shoulders still tightened when Nika climbed too quickly. The way her hands sought the harness with too much force, even when her seat was steady. The way her breathing changed before she mastered it. The way she looked away from height and then looked back, as if afraid and hungry for it in the same breath.

She loved the sky.

She feared it too.

Both truths lived in her at once, and neither seemed willing to yield.

A part of him believed she would have loved the Spires more than she had liked the Plains. The high wind. The vastness. The sharp stone rising through cloud and light. The sense of being above the world, untethered from all the things that waited below.

Then he stopped the thought.

It was not his place to assume the shape of her wonder. It was not his place to decide what would hurt her or heal her. Not yet—perhaps not ever.

He turned his gaze away from the sky.

Tamtey, Teylan, Ri’nela, and Rasi remained near one another, their voices low after all that had passed. The Spires still held the echo of battle. The RDA’s smoke had not yet fully cleared at the distance. But among the Sarentu, something quieter had taken root—something fragile and stubborn, like green returning to burned ground.

Rasi had given them song.

Old words carried through her own grief and survival, passed at last to those who had been left reaching for a history stolen before they could know its shape. So’lek stood among them while the sound rose, and though the song did not belong to his clan, though he was Trr’ong and would always carry that loss in the center of himself, he had felt the offering all the same.

They had welcomed him—not as an ally only, not as a weapon to be called when the fighting grew too difficult, not as the last remnant of a dead clan standing at the edge of another people’s future.

Family, they had said, without saying it too loudly.

The word sat strangely in him.

It had been a long time since he had allowed any place near it.

There was still much to do. Much to learn. Much to find. Nor was still missing, they would have to find him. They would have to make him see that the Sarentu had not ended in the dark places Mercer built for them—their future still existed. Not because it had been spared, but because they had chosen to make it with their own hands.

So’lek closed his eyes for a moment.

Only a moment.

When darkness came, it did not bring rest. It brought the Plains.

Smoke. Pale new wood. Firelight low against tired faces. Robin sitting beside him with her elbows on her knees, one hand caught in the sleeping child’s fingers, pretending she did not know he was watching her.

It had been days since he left.

Tamtey had asked him, once, whether there had been any word from Robin. She had asked it as if he would be the one to know—as if Robin’s movements, her safety, her silence, had become things that would naturally pass through him first.

So’lek had not disliked this as much as he should have. What he had disliked was having no answer.

There had been none to give. No quick communication existed across such distance, not in the way the Sky People liked to pretend all distance could be conquered by machines. The radios they carried had limits. The land had more—stone, forest, weather, and the strange interference of Pandora itself, all had their own will.

A signal from the Plains would not reach the Spires, much less one from Kinglor.

He knew this.

Knowing did not quiet anything.

Her mission—the one she had called simple—should have been over by now. By this time, Robin should have returned either to the Zeswa or to the Resistance’s hideout near the Hollows.

Or perhaps she had been sent elsewhere after. Perhaps she had chosen, against the better sense she sometimes found after long struggle, to move towards another problem before resting.

Or perhaps she was on her way to the Spires—no, he dismissed the thought almost as soon as it arrived.

She did not know the territory. Reckless as she could be, Robin did not cross unfamiliar forest alone when there was no need. Her respect for the wild still bordered on fear. He had seen it. He had seen the way her gaze moved through trees too dense for comfort, the way she listened for danger even when no danger had yet spoken.

She had learned the forest could take without warning. She had learned this in blood.

So’lek let out a slow breath and opened his eyes once more.

He hoped, perhaps uselessly, that her recklessness had not found a sharper edge wherever she stood now.

He did not enjoy the shape of that thought.

Robin was not his responsibility.

He was not her guardian. She was not a wounded hunter needing care. Not a duty given into his hands by clan or oath.

She had survived before him. She would survive beyond his sight. She was capable, stubborn, trained—she was also far too willing to step into danger if she believed there was someone on the other side of it who needed help.

He knew all of this.

Truly, he did.

Understanding did not make the worry leave.

By then, he had learned to accept this concern as part of his days. Fighting it had become a useless thing. A waste of strength. Like trying to stop rain with his bare hands.

The worry remained—so he carried it.

He had begun walking back towards the cave when he heard the voices.

In his hand, almost without realizing he had taken it out, was Robin’s bracelet. The one she had called ugly.

He looked down at it briefly, thumb resting against one of the beads. These days, he had developed the habit of finding it inside the pouch at his belt and holding it in his palm. There was no purpose to it, no reason that could be spoken without sounding foolish.

He only did it.

The bracelet was poorly made—there was no kindness in pretending otherwise. The spacing was uneven. One knot had been tied twice as if the first attempt had angered her. The pattern had the uncertain quality of a thing made by hands with no grace.

A small child could have made it better, perhaps.

Still, the colors had meaning.

He could see Nika in them—her hide, her markings. The choices were careful, even if the craft was not. Robin had chosen them with attention, and maybe also irritation, along with fondness she would have denied if named.

He had kept it because it had been hers. No cleaner reason had come since.

A young hunter passed nearby, speaking too loudly for the words he carried.

“They saw them by the forest,” he said, voice solemn and strained. “They were Mangkwan. It is true.”

So’lek stopped. Every part of him went still.

The young hunter did not see him. Neither did the warrior beside him, who turned sharply with disbelief already on his face. “It cannot be. Mangkwan in Kinglor?”

Kinglor.

The name struck through him cleanly.

The first hunter continued, troubled by the fact that he had to believe his own words. “It is. Si’na saw it with his own eyes. Demons, he called them.”

So’lek’s hand closed around the bracelet.

“They hunted animals and hung them for display while they were still alive,” the hunter continued, his voice lowering now, as if the words themselves were unclean. “Wounded and crying, still. They have no feeling. No respect for our brothers and sisters.”

The warrior exhaled hard through his nose, ears flattening with offense so deep it looked almost like pain. “How can they do this?”

“I do not know.” The first shook his head. “I have never seen one face to face. I did not believe people could stand so far from Eywa and still be alive.”

Their voices moved past him.

So’lek remained where he was.

Mangkwan in Kinglor.

Robin’s voice came back to him at once, talking about a group of hunters lost in the forest in Kinglor, with no reason for their disappearance.

He saw her kneeling beside the half-finished frame, back turned slightly, hands too still against the wood. He heard the careful flatness of her voice. The way she had told him she was leaving too, as if stating a fact plainly could keep him from hearing what sat beneath it.

Her voice was clear in his mind.

It is a search and rescue.

Four people.

Daylight.

Known terrain.

Known terrain meant little when the danger did not belong there.

His grip tightened around the bracelet until the beads dug into his palm and pain answered. He loosened his hold at once and looked down—a dark mark had formed where one of the beads had pressed too hard into his skin. For one breath, the mark held his attention with unreasonable force, his eyes on the colorful beads.

Blue, yellow, pink—Nika.

Then the thought came.

Nika circling above Kinglor Forest. Calling. Searching.

No rider answering.

So’lek’s chest went cold.

The image changed before he could stop it—not the sky. Ground.

A body in the undergrowth. Blue skin gone still. A braid cut clean. The forest too quiet around what had been left behind.

He pushed the thought aside, and another rose in its place.

The white room—metal bars, sky People lights, the smell of blood on cold air. A human woman on her knees with death already in her body.

He had told himself he would speak of it when he returned from the Spires. He had told himself he would find words worthy of what they would open. Honest ones. True ones. Not perfect, because perfection did not exist for a wound of that shape.

Later, when he returned—

If later existed.

The thought landed like a blade.

His hand moved to the pouch at his belt. The bracelet went back inside, carefully now, as if careless movement might break something more fragile than beads.

His fingers brushed the dog tags there too.

Cold metal. Her name carved in a language he could not read.

The dead woman’s name.

The living woman’s name.

His breath left him slowly.

Robin was alive.

The thought came with such force it was nearly command.

She was alive because she had survived impossible things before. Because she was not easy to kill, that was her nature. The RDA had failed to keep her dead.

Because Pandora itself, in some way even he did not understand, had returned something of her that no machine should have been able to touch.

She was alive because he had not yet told her the truth. Because he had promised himself he would.

Because he had looked at her in the morning light and said only, ‘Be careful,’ when there had been so much more pressing against his teeth.

She had nodded.

‘You too.’

Two words, given softly.

Not command. Not farewell.

Something worse.

Trust.

So’lek turned towards the outside. His stride was steady before he had fully decided to move.

Someone called his name behind him, but he did not stop.

The distance formed itself in his mind with the clean precision of a hunt.

From the Spires to Kinglor Forest, three days at ordinary pace. Less if the good weather held. Less if Iley flew hard. Two days if he pushed through dusk and found only short rests on stone. One and a half if he flew through the night and accepted what it would cost them both.

He would accept it.

Iley would be angry.

He would forgive him later—or he would not. Still, he would understand.

The Spires opened before him in sudden air and height. Wind moved through the stone, carrying the scent of cloud and old ash. Iley waited on a ledge above, head lifting the moment So’lek approached. The ikran’s pupils narrowed, reading the change in him before any word was given.

So’lek placed one hand against Iley’s neck.

The ikran rumbled low, not soothed. Neither was So’lek.

“We fly,” he said.

Iley shifted, wings flexing.

There were questions he should answer before leaving. People he should tell. Plans that should be made with more care. Ri’nela would understand the need for information. Teylan would need reassurance he could not give. Tamtey, if she heard of Mangkwan in Kinglor, would want to come, and that would waste time in refusal.

Time was the only thing he could not spare.

He mounted.

Iley launched from the ledge in one powerful motion, wings catching the wind hard enough to pull the world away beneath them. Stone dropped. Air opened. The Spires spread outward in ridges and cloud-wrapped peaks, beautiful and indifferent to the chaos building in his mind.

So’lek leaned low against Iley’s neck.

Southeast, towards the Kinglor Forest. Toward where Mangkwan had been seen.

Toward the woman who was not his responsibility, not his to command, not his to keep, and yet had become the first place his mind went when danger found a name.

The wind struck his face. He welcomed the sting. It gave the body something clear to understand.

Below, the Spires began to fall behind.

Ahead, distance waited.

So’lek fixed his eyes on the horizon.

Robin was alive.

He knew she was.

He hoped she was.

For the first time in many cycles, hope felt less like weakness than a blade held too tightly in the hand.

Robin was alive.

—

Robin wanted to die.

No, not really—she was being dramatic, she knew it.

Her wrists hurt.

That was the main problem. Or one of the main problems. There were several, actually, and she was beginning to resent the universe for it.

The leather binding around her wrists had been tight when the Mangkwan tied it. It had become cruel after the flight. Every shift of Nika’s body, every hard beat of her wings, every instinctive tightening of Robin’s hands had dragged the cord deeper into already-broken skin.

At first, the pain had been sharp. Now it had gone strange. Numb at the edges. Hot underneath. Tingling in her fingers in a way she didn’t love and had no interest in examining too closely.

She had spent the last several minutes trying to work the knife into position between her hands—So’lek’s knife.

The one she had nearly lost to them.

Everything had become an ugly sequence of images too loud to hold in proper order.

Knife.

Cord.

Blood.

Nika’s scream.

Wukula’s hand over her mouth.

The severed kuru on the ground.

Robin swallowed hard and pushed the last image away.

Not now.

She turned the knife again, trying to find the angle. Her fingers barely obeyed. The leather slipped against the blade. The harness shifted under her knees as Nika banked with a dissatisfied shriek, and Robin froze.

She pictured the knife slipping from her clumsy hands and falling into open air, lost forever—So’lek’s knife, vanishing into the forest beneath her because she had decided to perform emergency surgery on her own restraints while flying on the back of an irritable ikran.

Absolutely not.

“Nope,” she muttered, voice rough from wind and panic. “Not doing that.”

She stopped trying.

The knife remained awkwardly trapped between both hands, blade turned away from her wrists now. Safer—useless, but safer. Her fingers throbbed. Blood, some dried and some still fresh, had tracked in thin red lines down her forearms.

Below, the forest rolled endlessly beneath them.

Too green. Too dense. Too full of things that wanted her dead.

Some minutes earlier, she had seen Nawk’tan’s ikran flying low through an opening between the trees. She had pulled Nika towards him, or tried to. Nika had responded with the approximate enthusiasm of someone being asked to attend a meeting she had already decided was beneath her.

Still, she went.

Nawk’tan had turned sharply the moment he sensed another ikran drawing close. His hand went to his bow before his eyes caught the shape of her, and even when he had recognized her, his posture only relaxed by a fraction.

Robin didn’t blame him. She, too, was too shaken still.

She was also very aware of how she must have looked.

Hair wind-tangled. Coat pulled wrong at one shoulder. Face still aching where the man had gripped her jaw. Bound wrists held awkwardly in front of her, smeared with enough blood to make the situation look worse than it probably was.

“Robin!” Nawk’tan called through the air.

Not through the radio—of course not. The man had used the thing once and apparently decided that was enough technological cooperation for a lifetime.

Stubborn.

“Land!” he called.

Robin stared at him as if he had lost his mind.

Land?

With the painted nightmare people somewhere beneath them and a thanator tearing through the forest?

‘Are you suicidal?’ She wanted to ask.

Then she saw where his eyes had gone.

Her hands.

Robin looked down too.

The cord had bitten deep. Blood had dried dark along the leather and across her skin, while new blood still welled in thin places where the movement had reopened the cuts. Her fingers looked stiff. The knuckles paling beneath blue skin.

That was probably bad.

The place of the attack was far behind them now. Far enough that landing might not be the stupidest idea anyone had ever had. Far enough that Nawk’tan seemed willing to risk it, which meant the danger had changed shape, if not disappeared.

Still, Robin felt her whole body resist the thought of touching ground again. Ground had not gone well today. For once, in a very long time, the sky seemed the safest.

She was left with no real option when Nawk’tan banked and lowered his ikran toward a small opening in the forest below.

Robin cursed under her breath and followed. Reluctantly. Very reluctantly.

Nika landed first, because apparently even when irritated she enjoyed proving she could do things better than everyone else. Her talons struck the ground, wings flaring once before folding back with a sharp rustle. Robin stayed mounted for half a second longer than necessary, scanning the tree line.

Leaves.

Roots.

Deep shadows.

Nothing moving—apparently.

Nawk’tan had already dismounted by the time she slid down. He crossed to her quickly, eyes flicking over the surrounding forest as he moved, alert, and controlled, fully aware that distance from danger didn’t necessarily mean safety.

That, at least, made Robin trust him more.

He caught her by the arm when her feet hit the ground and steadied her in one quick, practical motion. No fuss. No comment. No dramatic concern. Just one hand bracing her until the slight wobble in her knees passed.

Robin pretended not to need it. He pretended not to notice that she did.

Nawk’tan took the knife from her numb fingers.

For one second, Robin’s hand twitched after it—not because she thought he would keep it, but because letting go of it felt like losing something she had no right to miss yet.

His gaze flicked to her face, then back to the cord.

He said nothing. He simply turned the blade and cut.

The binding snapped apart with a soft, vicious sound.

Robin inhaled through her teeth as the pressure released.

Pain came back all at once—of course it did. Her hands had apparently been waiting for the cord to come off before reminding her that they existed and were extremely unhappy with the recent hypoxic conditions.

Nawk’tan pulled the leather away in one quick motion and tossed it aside. Then he returned to his ikran, unfastened a waterskin from the saddle, and came back without wasting a breath.

“Hold still,” he said.

Robin did, mostly because she was too tired to argue.

The water was cold when he poured it over her wrists. She hissed.

The cuts were not terrible once the worst of the blood washed away. Ugly, yes. Shallow in most places. Deeper where the cord had sawed against her during the flight, especially near the inside of her right wrist. The kind of wound that looked dramatic and would heal if cleaned, wrapped, and given a few days without anyone tying her up again.

Low bar.

Apparently, that was the standard now.

“Can you move your hands?” Nawk’tan asked.

He took one of them before she answered, turning it over with careful efficiency. Then the other.

Robin braced herself for the pause. For the look. The tiny catch of attention most people tried to hide and failed anyway—five fingers, human in shape, wrongness arranged neatly at the end of each arm.

But Nawk’tan’s gaze didn’t linger. He checked swelling, blood flow, the bite of the cord, the movement of her fingers. Nothing else.

Robin found herself oddly grateful for that.

She opened and closed both hands in front of him. Once. Twice. Her fingers tingled hard enough to make her stomach turn slightly, but they moved.

“Still attached,” she said, voice dry.

Nawk’tan gave her a look that suggested he didn’t find this as charming as she had hoped.

“Good,” he said.

Then he returned the knife.

Robin took it carefully.

She looked down at the blade instead of at him. “Thanks.”

Nawk’tan inclined his head once. Then his gaze lifted toward Nika. “Back to the air. We will get you treated when we get back to Hometree.”

Robin almost said there was no ‘getting back to Hometree.’

Not for her.

Nawk’tan was Aranahe. He had been at the Heart of the Plains for the Games, had learned of the lost hunters, and had gathered people who were strong enough to help and not too broken by recent tragedy to leave the search to someone else.

Robin had never been to their home—never stood under their Hometree. She had wandered the forest, yes, after leaving the RDA months ago, but she had never entered that space with invitation, recognition, or anyone familiar at her side.

Reaching the Plains had been difficult enough, and there she had arrived with So’lek, with Ri’nela, with Tamtey, with enough context around her to make her presence something other than an immediate crisis.

Now? Now she had just been chased through Kinglor by a feral thanator and a clan of painted murderers who collected extensions of other people’s nervous systems, with an old hunter who glared at radios for a companion.

Not exactly a diplomatic arrival.

Still, it was not as if she had better options.

Returning to the Plains injured and alone would be difficult. Staying in the forest would be stupid. Trying to reach the Hollows from here with no clear route and Mangkwan somewhere below would be the kind of decision people made shortly before being used as a cautionary tale.

So.

Hometree it was.

‘Great.’ Robin thought, humorlessly. ‘Love that.’

Robin looked once towards the trees. The forest gave nothing back. No movement. No painted faces. No flash of white skull-paint between trunks. No thanator moving like living wrath through the undergrowth.

That did not help.

Her jaw ached where the Mangkwan’s fingers had dug into the bone. When she swallowed, she could still feel the moment he had stolen breath and sound from her at once.

No one will come for you.

Her grip tightened around the knife.

Then she made herself loosen it.

Not here.

Not now.

She mounted Nika in silence.

It was easier this time with her hands free, though the cuts pulled sharply when she gripped the harness. Nika turned her head far enough to look back at her, pupils wide with attention.

“Yes, I know,” Robin muttered. “I look terrible. Thank you.”

Nika huffed. Robin chose to believe that meant agreement.

Nawk’tan watched long enough to make sure she would not immediately fall off, then returned to his own ikran and mounted. A moment later, he launched into the sky.

Robin followed.

Air rushed over her face, cold against the sweat still drying at her temples. The forest spread beneath them in layers of green and shadow, beautiful in the way a knife could be beautiful when held to the light.

Her wrists pulsed with each beat of Nika’s wings.

Slowly, her right hand rose towards the comm at her neck. Her fingers hovered there.

The radio was warm from her skin. Useless at this distance.

Even if the signal somehow carried, even if some impossible line opened through Pandora out of pure desperation, what then?

What would she say?

I ran into the Mangkwan. You were right. They are fucking crazy.

No.

He put his hand over my mouth. I was so scared I thought about you.

Right. Absolutely not.

Robin’s fingers stayed over the comm.

The thought of his voice came to her with such sudden tenderness that it almost hurt more than her wrists.

Just his voice.

Low. Measured. Irritatingly calm. Saying her name like it was something that had weight and place in the world. Looking at her and telling her to not be foolish, not be reckless, as if the words themselves might follow her wherever she went and stand between her and harm.

The wind tore at her hair. Nika’s wings beat steady beneath her. Ahead, Nawk’tan’s ikran banked towards the distant rise of Aranahe territory.

Robin’s fingers pressed once against the comm.

She didn’t speak.

Then she let her hand fall.

No. She would not call into dead air just to hear silence answer.

She adjusted her grip on the harness and focused on the flight.

On Nika’s breathing beneath her. On the pull of the wind. On the ache in her wrists. On staying seated.

On staying alive.

The sky opened ahead, wide and bright and merciless.

Robin followed Nawk’tan towards the Aranahe Hometree.

—

The night after the Mangkwan, Robin barely slept.

Calling it sleep at all felt generous. It had been more like lying very still in a borrowed corner of Hometree while her body performed the motions of rest and her mind remained wide awake, unpleasantly creative, and committed to making that a problem.

Every time she closed her eyes, she saw paint.

White across a shaved skull. Red over a throat. Black down arms that had held a knife with too much patience.

She saw Ïyo on his back beneath the canopy, eyes open to nothing. Saw the clean absence where his kuru should have been. Then she saw the braids the Mangkwan held in their hands as though they were no more meaningful than a strip of hide.

She saw his face, leaning close to hers.

No one will come for you.

Robin opened her eyes after that and kept them open.

The Aranahe had given her a spot near the base of Hometree. Not a room, exactly. Not even a proper alcove.

Not that they had not offered—they had. She hadn’t accepted, that was all. She didn’t want walls. She didn’t want closed spaces.

So she had been given a place where one enormous root curved high enough to make a wall at her back and the woven mat beneath her so that the place she slept on didn’t feel entirely like the ground.

She had been treated by the Tsahìk herself—Etuwa.

Robin had known who she was before anyone said it. Not because she had met her properly, but because some people carried authority without needing to lift their voices—the war Ri’nela often did, just to mention an example.

Etuwa moved like someone who knew what every hand in a room was doing and why. Her eyes were sharp, but not cruel. Her silence had weight, but not judgment.

“I saw you at the Games,” Etuwa had said while cleaning the blood from Robin’s wrists. “You stood with the Sarentu.”

Robin had looked down at the bowl of stained water between them.

She hadn’t had the heart to say that she hadn’t seen Etuwa. Not really. Not because she hadn’t cared, but because she had spent most of the Games trying not to visibly look like a stranger standing in the middle of a celebration she didn’t understand, surrounded by clans who had every right to stare and every reason not to trust her.

She had been too petrified with nerves to absorb much beyond the shape of the crowd, the sounds, the colors, So’lek somewhere near and at the same time far enough that she could pretend she wasn’t using his presence as a brace.

So Robin only nodded.

Etuwa’s gaze lingered on her for half a second too long, then she returned to the bandage.

The right wrist was worse than the left. The cord had bitten deepest there, cutting half-moons into skin that had gone swollen and tender around the abrasions. Etuwa washed it with something that stung sharply enough to make Robin’s fingers twitch despite every effort not to react.

The Tsahìk noticed. Of course she did.

She only wrapped the woven bandage with careful, even pressure and asked about the Mangkwan.

So, Robin told her.

How many she had seen. The paint. The violence. The thanator.

Etuwa had already known part of the threat, Robin realized. Not enough, but more than nothing. Her face didn’t change much, but her questions sharpened.

How many?

Were they alone?

Had there been victims?

Who?

Practical questions.

Questions for someone preparing not only to mourn, but to decide what kind of conflict had come walking into her forest.

Their conversation had grown quieter when Etuwa’s father entered.

The Olo’eyktan of the Aranahe had not looked pleased to find Robin there, though whether that was because of Robin herself, the Mangkwan, or the general inconvenience of fresh disaster, she couldn’t tell. Possibly all three.

Etuwa’s tone changed around him too. Not weaker. Never that. Only more deliberate.

Later, quietly, she told Robin that her father preferred to avoid conflict whenever he could. Etuwa herself, apparently, believed there were times when fighting was the only way forward.

Funny family dynamic.

Robin didn’t say that out loud. She had learned, at least occasionally, not to make things worse for herself.

The day after the first night, Robin went to a nearby lake to wash.

The water had been cold enough to bite, clear enough to see through it, and still enough to show her reflection before she could prepare herself for it.

Some of the Mangkwan paint had remained on her face.

Not much.

Enough.

A faint smear near her jaw. A white and black dragged too close to one cheekbone. Some paint was caught at the edge of her hairline where someone’s hand must have touched during the struggle.

For a moment she had only stared at herself.

Then the urge to punch the water had risen so strongly that her hand actually curled. As if the reflection had personally offended her on a spiritual level.

She didn’t punch it.

Growth, maybe.

She scrubbed until her skin hurt and the marks dissolved into the lake, black and white breaking apart over the surface before vanishing completely.

After, when she entered Hometree once more, someone brought food.

A young Aranahe woman, maybe close to Tamtey’s age, or maybe younger. Robin could never tell as easily as she wanted to. The woman offered the bowl with careful politeness and did not linger once Robin accepted it.

Robin ate little. Enough not to insult anyone. Not enough to satisfy the hollow place in her stomach.

Then she went to find a place near the base of Hometree, inside but close enough to the entrance that she could see the night beyond it. That mattered for reasons she was too tired to explain to herself.

Walls had never been her favorite thing. Neither had open forest. Apparently, the ideal solution was sitting exactly between the two and being unhappy with both.

She lowered herself onto the borrowed mat, back pressed to the high root behind her.

Grounded.

That was the word her body seemed to want.

Something solid against her spine. Something older than the panic. Something that had been there before she was met with violence and would remain after the memory finally stopped trying to crawl under her skin.

Robin adjusted her bandaged wrist against her stomach.

The wrapped skin pulled. Her jaw ached. Her side, traitorous and dramatic, throbbed where the scars had been pressed against bone.

She closed her eyes. Just for a second. Only resting them, nothing more.

The first night, Robin barely slept.

The second night, exhaustion won.

It didn’t win gracefully. Nothing in Robin ever seemed to. It dragged her down by inches while she fought it, as if refusing sleep on principle would somehow prove she was still in control of the body currently trembling from stress and the aftermath of not dying.

Then sleep took her hard. Deeply enough that the world vanished without negotiation.

The exhaustion had been heavy enough that when hands closed around her shoulders, she didn’t wake all at once.

That was the frightening part.

She came up slowly, through layers of dark and weight and the distant awareness of touch. Firm, not harsh. Fingers at her shoulders. A voice saying something she was not able to catch. The pressure of another body close above her.

For one stupid, suspended moment, her mind didn’t understand where she was.

Then it did.

Robin jolted upright.

A scream died somewhere in her throat, cut off before it could become sound. Her back hit the root behind her, and her hands came up too late, one catching uselessly against the root behind her, the other pressing to the mat as if she could push herself through wood and earth by force alone.

Her heart went wild. Too fast. Too loud.

The world blurred at the edges—root, shadow, woven mat, dim bioluminescence, a shape crouched over her.

Tall. Close. Still holding her shoulders.

Robin blinked hard, forcing the drowsy smear from her eyes.

Then she saw him.

Her breath caught so sharply it hurt.

For half a second, she could not make him fit into the space she sat in.

He belonged to the Spires, to distance, to first light and leaving.

He belonged to the place she hadn’t been able to call.

And yet he was there, crouched in front of her, travel-worn and still, his hands on her shoulders like he had reached for her before he had remembered whether he was allowed.

His eyes moved over her face. Her jaw. Her wrists, and the bandage.

Something in him changed.

Not visibly enough for anyone else, maybe. Enough for her.

“So’lek?” she said. Whispered. No, not whispered. Shouted. Whisper-shouted?

His hands tightened once on her shoulders. Only once. As if proving she was there. As if proving he was there, too.

Robin stared at him, still half inside sleep and fear, staring at the impossible relief of his face.

The thing that should have made him look at her like a trespasser, a ghost, or both.

He had not.

Which, somehow, made sitting beside him worse.

She had found So’lek almost without meaning to. One moment she was alone, and the next he was there, falling into step beside her without ceremony or explanation, the way he sometimes did. The way he seemed to do now more than ever.

They had moved towards the fire together. Grabbed food. Sat down.

Said nothing.

The quiet was making her skin crawl.

Robin stole a glance at his profile and found him the same as always — still, composed, watching the fire with the particular kind of attention that suggested he was thinking deeply and showing none of it.

Just the way he had been the first seventeen times she had turned to look at him from the corner of her eye in the last hour.

She looked back at the flames.

‘A rock,’ she thought. ‘He is in a contest with a rock.’

In an attempt to break the ice, she spoke.

“Tamtey should be on her way by now,” she said. “Right?”

“Yes,” he replied.

Robin waited.

Nothing followed.

She picked up the small bundle of food, still wrapped in green leaves, then set it down again. Rested her elbows on her knees and looked at her hands instead—her wrong-shaped hands. Odd hands. Five fingers where there should have been four, a fact the People’s eyes always found eventually.

She rubbed her left thumb over the knuckles of her right hand. Once. Twice. Then turned her palm up and pressed the thumb against the scar there, the one from Mercer’s base. From the metal structure. From the specific calculation she had run in real time about how long her grip would hold before it did not anymore, and she fell to her death.

Luckily, that had not happened.

Tamtey had been there—alone, inside the base.

She had found Robin and almost pointed her bow in her direction. She had been angry at her for leaving the Resistance in that dumb attempt to protect them from a danger bigger than herself, the way it had always had been—Robin had just been too much of a fool to see it then.

Too scared.

Then Tamtey had continued on her way, planning to bring the base down with only the promised help of the warriors outside and nothing truly guaranteed.

Now she was out there alone—again.

On another mission she had taken upon shoulders too young to carry war.

‘She’s capable,’ Robin reminded herself. ‘She’s been doing this longer than you’ve been in this body.’

The concern came back anyway. It had a habit of doing that, now.

She had warmed to Tamtey since the beginning, against every intention she had possessed back then. Even early on, before the Trees of Voices—before anything remotely good, really—she had looked at the young Sarentu and thought, ‘If something was coming, I would tell you before I escaped.’ Which had been, at the time, the closest thing to tenderness she could have managed.

Robin pressed her thumb flat against the scar and stopped moving it.

When she looked up at So’lek once more, he was already looking at her.

She almost flinched.

Didn’t.

She hesitated before asking, “Do you think she’ll be all right?”

He held her gaze for a moment. “She is a strong warrior.”

Robin pressed her lips into a thin line.

Not yes.

Not no, either.

She stared at him for a beat, then looked back at the fire. “Could you answer a question without sounding like a riddle, just once?”

A pause.

“I answered.”

“Right,” Robin said, sarcastically. “My mistake.”

He didn’t react to that. Not visibly, anyway.

Of course he didn’t.

Robin picked up the food again and made herself eat despite her body’s clear opposition to the idea. She didn’t need to look to know he was still watching her. She was fairly certain she was developing some kind of specific sensitivity to it.

A So’lek-stare-o’meter.

The fire popped once, scattering a brief constellation of sparks.

Robin swallowed with difficulty, both from concern and awkwardness.

“She went alone,” Robin said.

Not a question. Just the thing that had been sitting in her chest since Tamtey had told them about Anufi’s favor, finally finding its way out through the path of least resistance.

So’lek said nothing for a moment. Robin thought he was going to keep his silence, then. Let her drown in worry until it passed on its own.

Then he spoke, against her expectations.

“The first time I saw her, she had just come out of a deep sleep. In a cold box.” His gaze returned to the fire. “She had not seen the sun for cycles.”

Robin didn’t say anything.

“The others were still learning where they were,” he continued. “What had been taken. What had been done to them.” A pause. “Tamtey was already planning what came next before anyone had offered her food.”

Robin looked down at the bundle of food in her hands.

She knew some of it, maybe not with all the details. Tamtey had told her when they went to the Kame’tire, looking for healers who would help the injured at the Resistance. She had spoken of the little flashes of memory she still held of her infancy—the real one, without enclosure and metal walls and guns forced into her hands. She had spoken of lost family. Of cryosleep. Of the drowsiness that followed it, and the strain in the body—that part Robin knew well.

Tamtey had told her, maybe, because she had been too vulnerable then. Too shaken by Mokasa’s words and had found comfort in Robin’s. Or maybe because Robin had just agreed to follow her into TAP Con-1, despite her better judgment, and wanted her to understand enough of her life not to be taken by surprise by whatever they found there.

Robin had been surprised, all right. Just not in the way either of them had expected—with a feral tanathor on her tail and evisceration narrowly avoided only because the beast had failed to claw a little deeper into her flesh.

She grimaced at the memory.

“She does not stop,” So’lek said. “Not when she is tired. Not when she is afraid.”

Another pause, shorter than the first.

“I have not seen her fail to finish a thing she started.” He added.

Robin looked at the fire for a long moment, not completely convinced. But not untouched, either.

“Okay,” she said quietly.

It was not gratitude. Not exactly. Not relief either. Just the sound of something wound too tightly finally easing, only slightly, without making a performance of itself.

So’lek didn’t acknowledge it. He only picked up his food and looked back towards the fire, as if he hadn’t just given her the only comfort she would have believed from him.

His hand shifted once near his belt. Not towards a weapon—towards the small pouch there.

Robin noticed because she noticed too much about him lately, which was quickly becoming one of her least favorite personality traits.

Then his hand stilled, and whatever had drawn it there disappeared behind the same quiet discipline he wore like armor.

Robin looked away before he could catch her looking.

The quiet remained.

It only stopped feeling quite so much like punishment.

—

The Plains would not recover quickly.

So’lek had known this before the fires were out. He had known it in the first breath of smoke, in the first body carried from the wreckage, in the first child’s cry rising too thin and sharp above the confusion.

He had seen enough of what the Sky People’s weapons did to land and body alike to hold no illusions about the shape of repair.

Still, knowing a thing and watching it were not the same.

The Heart of the Plains had been made for movement. For voices, games, mounted races, painted zakru, the low thunder of many feet crossing grass made bright by sun and wind. Even at rest, the place had never felt still.

Now the movement remained, but differently. Slower. Careful.

The frames of broken shelters stood half-raised in the morning light, new bindings pale against smoke-darkened wood. Torn fabric had been stripped away and sorted into piles—what could be cleaned, what could be cut down for smaller use, what could only be burned. The air held many scents layered over one another—ash, wet grass, crushed healing leaves, blood gone old, and the sour metal stink left behind by fallen Sky People machinery.

The living continued because they had to. The wounded were carried into shade. Children were counted more than once. The dead were named softly where the young could not hear, and then named properly when the time came for grief to have its place. Those who could stand helped those who could not. Those who could not help sat with the injured and held bowls, held hands, held silence.

So’lek worked where there was need.

He lifted beams. Cut away collapsed bindings. Searched the grass for fragments of metal that had no place in the flesh of the land.

Work did not require much thought—that was useful. The body knew how to carry weight. The hands knew how to tie, brace, pull, and cut. The eyes knew how to search for weakness before it became failure.

And still, more often than he intended, his attention found Robin—she was difficult not to watch.

At first, he told himself it was habit.

He had watched her since the beginning. Tracked her. Measured her. Searched for the shape of danger in her posture, her silence, the way her gaze moved through a room before she allowed her body to follow. Watching had once been a necessary thing. The recom had been RDA, then not RDA, then something more difficult to name. It had been wise to observe.

He told himself this was the same.

He was no longer certain he believed it.

Robin had taken to the work without announcement. No attempt to make herself seen as useful. She simply appeared where need was visible and put her hands to it.

On the first morning, he saw her at the edge of the healer’s space, passing folded cloths and cleaned tools to those who did not have enough hands. She did not enter too far. Did not presume knowledge she did not have. She stayed at the edge until someone told her to come closer, and then she did.

Then, she carried water.

The vessel was large enough that one of the younger warriors looked ready to take it from her, perhaps thinking the wound at her side had not finished closing enough for the weight. Robin looked at him once—only once—and he stepped aside. She carried the water herself, jaw set, gait only slightly altered.

On the second morning, So’lek found her crouched beside a Zeswa warrior whose lower leg had been bound too tightly.

The hunter who had made the binding was young and tired. Too tired to enjoy correction. Robin seemed to understand this. She did not speak as if giving orders, she pointed instead, her fingers touching the edge of the wrap, then the cold skin below it.

“Too tight,” she said in careful Na’vi.

Her accent sat heavily on some sounds. Others had improved. She had learned by Tamtey’s insistence, by stubborn repetition, and by listening more than she admitted.

The young hunter frowned. “It must hold.”

“Yes,” Robin said. She looked down, searching for the words. “Hold. Not kill the foot.”

The warrior on the ground gave a short breath that might have been a laugh if pain had not taken most of it. The hunter’s mouth tightened.

Robin did not push harder. She waited. That, too, had changed. Once, she would have met resistance with force because force had been the only language she trusted to move things in time. Now she had learned that among the People, sometimes patience moved faster.

At last, the hunter gave a clipped bow of his head in acknowledgement.

Robin redid the binding.

Her fingers were not shaped like Na’vi fingers. The warrior watched her hands as she worked. Many still did. The difference always drew the eye eventually.

Robin noticed—So’lek knew she noticed. She gave no sign of it.

Her hands remained steady as she loosened the wrap, checked the skin beneath, then tightened the support again with better pressure. Not soft. Not delicate. Exact.

When the binding was finished, the warrior moved his foot once, then looked at her.

Robin sat back on her heels. “Better?”

He agreed. She seemed relieved, though only because So’lek had begun to know the smaller signs of it. The slight release at her mouth. The way her shoulders lowered by less than a breath.

“Good,” she said.

Then she stood too quickly, pressed one hand briefly to her side when the scar pulled into an uncomfortable feeling still, pretended she had not done it, and went to find the next problem.

By the third day, the small girl found her again.

Tseya had been moving through the recovering camp at Seyari’s side, solemn in the way children became when disaster had frightened them but not yet taught them stillness. Her voice, however, had not been diminished by fear. It carried with impressive strength for someone so small, cutting through the work around her with the confidence of one who had never believed the world should continue without her commentary.

She attached herself to Robin shortly after the midday meal.

So’lek saw the moment of impact from across a half-mended shelter frame.

Robin was kneeling beside a broken storage crate, trying to force a damaged hinge back into alignment with a small tool borrowed from one of the human resistance members. Her new coat shifted over her shoulders when she moved, lighter than the old cloak, made with Seyari’s hands and accepted with the strained discomfort Robin gave to kindness she had not earned.

Tseya appeared beside her as if summoned by trouble.

Robin looked down. Something moved across her face—not alarm, not exactly. More like the careful resignation of a warrior who saw an attack coming and knew no honorable retreat remained.

Tseya began speaking at once. Robin looked back at the hinge. The child continued.

The words came quickly enough that even So’lek did not catch all of them from where he stood. Something about the fire. Something about her mother’s weaving. Something about a creature near the water that had looked at her and then left without explanation, which Tseya appeared to consider insulting.

Robin kept working. She also did not tell the child to leave.

“Is that true?” Robin asked when the girl stopped long enough to breathe.

“Yes,” Tseya said, with grave seriousness.

Robin braced the crate between her knees and pulled the hinge straight with a sharp metallic sound. “That does sound rude.”

Tseya looked satisfied. Then she began again.

So’lek’s hand tightened once on the shelter beam he held. He looked away before Robin could find him watching.

He had seen her endure pain with less visible effort than she used to endure children. And yet she let them come.

Tseya was loud. Her younger brother was not.

The boy came differently.

He had known Robin before the plains, before the smoke, and the wounded, and the half-mended shelters.

He had seen her in the Resistance after the tanathor had torn into her side, when she had been weak with pain and reluctant fear, trying very hard to pretend neither had any claim on her. He had watched from near his mother then, half-hidden against Seyari’s leg. He had grabbed her hand and counted her fingers relentlessly too, while she slept, waking her with a start the first time.

So he did not approach her now with the caution of meeting something unknown. He approached her like a child returning to a strange thing he had already decided, once, was safe enough.

Still careful. Still watching. But not afraid enough to stay away.

At first he only appeared near her while she worked, close enough to be seen, far enough that he could retreat if Robin turned too quickly or looked too directly at him. He spoke in small pieces. A word here. A question shaped more by tone than language.

Sometimes he pointed at what she held and said, “That?” with solemn expectation.

Robin, who had faced RDA teams with less visible uncertainty than she showed when confronted with a child’s question, would look at the object, then at him.

“Tool,” she said once in Na’vi, holding up the small metal piece, one she borrowed from Teylan.

The boy repeated it badly.

Robin’s mouth moved at one corner. “Close enough.”

He seemed pleased with this, though So’lek doubted he understood the expression.

Another time, the boy brought her a small carved figure, rough and unfinished, shaped vaguely like some plains creature if one had a generous eye and a forgiving heart. He placed it on the ground beside her knee while she was sorting through a bundle of salvage and waited.

Robin looked at it. Then at him.

The boy pointed to himself. “It is mine.”

“You made this?” she asked.

He nodded once, very seriously.

Robin picked up the figure with great care, turning it between her fingers as if it were a weapon that might misfire or a sacred object she had not been warned how to hold.

So’lek saw the moment she understood what was being asked of her.

Not a repair. Not a strategy. Not a wound to bind.

Only witness.

The boy wanted her to see what he had made and agree that it had meaning.

Robin looked at the boy, then down at the carving again.

“It is good,” she said carefully.

The boy watched her face.

Robin seemed to realize the first answer had not been enough. She adjusted the figure in her hand and added, “Very good.”

That satisfied him.

He took the carving from her hand, turned, ran three steps towards his sister, then turned around again to make sure Robin was still looking.

She was.

When he saw that, he smiled.

Robin blinked once, as if the smile had caught her somewhere unguarded, then looked back down at her work with suspicious focus.

After that, the boy came more often.

Sometimes he played near her, not with her exactly, but within the circle of her attention. He would jump from one flat stone to another, then look back to see whether she had noticed. If she had not, he would do it again with greater force until the movement became impossible to ignore.

Robin learned, slowly, what was required.

“Yes,” she said one afternoon, without looking away from the broken fastener in her hands. “Wow.”

The boy stopped, dissatisfied. Robin felt the silence and looked up.

She stared at him for a moment. Then, with the grave exhaustion of someone accepting defeat, she set the fastener down and watched him jump again.

This time, when he landed, she lifted both brows. “Very impressive.”

The boy beamed. Tseya, nearby, immediately declared that she could do better.

Robin closed her eyes for one brief moment.

So’lek pretended not to see it.

The hands came later.

Robin’s unusual hands, the boy seemed to find them deeply interesting still, but not with fear. More with the direct curiosity children gave to things adults had already learned to stare at indirectly.

He would appear at Robin’s side while she worked and take one of her hands in both of his, examining it with focused attention. Turning it. Pressing a thumb against her knuckles. Considering each finger in turn.

Robin, more often than not, let him.

Once, the boy spread her fingers apart, then placed his own hand against hers to compare them.

Robin looked at the small hand over her larger one.

Something in her face went still. Not badly. Only quietly.

The boy looked up at her. Neither of them said anything.

Then he patted her palm once, apparently satisfied, and ran off to show Tseya the carved figure again.

Robin stared after him for a moment longer than she needed to.

So’lek did not know what to call what moved through him, watching that.

He left it where it was, because names had weight. He had learned long ago not to give them carelessly.

The foot, he did not anticipate.

Robin had been sitting, crosslegged, with a damaged signaling unit across her knees, one from the Valkyrie—some human-made device that had taken damage in the attack and had been resisting Teylan’s and the rest of the human’s efforts for the better part of an hour. She had asked to have them let her give it a try, and had been unsuccessful so far if her expression was anything to judge by. The boy had been playing nearby, building a small line of stones, then knocking them down with careful taps of his carved figure.

Every few moments he looked back at Robin.

Every few moments Robin, without seeming to realize she had become part of the game, gave some small sign of acknowledgment.

A nod. A hum.

He came closer while Robin bent over the signaling unit, and apparently determined that her foot, also quite odd with its five toes, was as worthy of attention as her hand had been.

Her reaction was immediate.

She pulled her foot back sharply, made a startled sound that dissolved before it became a word, and looked down at him with wide eyes and an expression So’lek had not seen on her face before—unguarded, briefly helpless, her composure caught entirely off-guard.

The boy stared at her. Robin stared back. 

Then she drew a breath, long and controlled, and said, very carefully, “Please do not grab my feet.”

The boy blinked.

Robin lifted one hand as though the explanation could be measured there. “Hands are fine. Arms are fine. The coat, apparently, is also fine.” A brief pause. “But not the feet. That is very—”

She stopped. Her mouth twitched.

“Uncomfortable,” she finished with great dignity. “Very uncomfortable.”

Tseya, sitting nearby, looked fascinated by this new weakness.

The boy considered the instruction.

Then, with grave acceptance, he moved to Robin’s side and grabbed her coat instead.

Robin looked down at him. The corner of her mouth moved again, closer this time to a real smile than a failed one.

“Thank you,” she said, as if he had made a solemn bargain.

The boy leaned against her arm without looking up. Robin went back to the signaling unit.

So’lek turned away before the sight could settle too deeply.

He failed.

It settled anyway.

In the evenings, they sat together at the fire.

There was no arrangement. No spoken agreement. He did not ask. Robin did not ask. One of them would arrive, and the other would eventually sit nearby. Sometimes close enough to feel the other near even without sight. Sometimes with a little distance between them, depending on the shape of the day, the number of people around the fire, the level of exhaustion sitting on Robin's shoulders.

The first night after Seyari gave her the new coat, Robin arrived before him. She sat with one knee drawn up, the other leg stretched carefully to avoid pulling at her side. Her hair had changed, though not as intricate as the first Tlalim braids. It remained practical. Neat. The kind of concession Robin could pretend was only convenience.

She looked into the fire when he sat beside her.

“You’re late,” she said.

“I did not know there was a time for arrival.” He replied.

She said, “There wasn’t.”

He looked at her.

Her mouth moved slightly. “That was the joke.”

“I see,” he answered after a moment.

She looked at him then, and the brief amusement that passed through her face came and went like the wind. It was a small thing. He kept it anyway.

Another evening, she brought two portions of food and placed one beside him without comment.

He looked down at it. Then at her.

She did not look back. “They gave me too much.”

“That is not true.” He said.

“They really did,” she lied.

He accepted the portion.

She ate slowly. More slowly than he would have liked. Some days, she also ate too little.

When she thought no one watched, her gaze drifted over the wounded, the children, the half-repaired shelters, and remained there too long.

He never told her he noticed. She would not thank him for it.

Sometimes they spoke of Tamtey. Sometimes of the work that still needed doing. Sometimes Robin asked for words she did not know, pointing with her chin towards an object or gesture and repeating the answer under her breath until it settled. Sometimes she said nothing at all, and he did not fill the silence simply because he could.

The silence between them had changed since the confession.

Before, silence had been a thing with edges. Silence had been defense. Punishment. Restraint.

Now it simply existed.

Not always comfortably. Not always easily. But it no longer demanded explanation every time it arrived.

The Plains breathed around them in the dark. The fire cracked low. People moved in tired patterns at the edges of the light. Somewhere behind them, Tseya argued with another child in a tone that suggested the future of the clan depended on the outcome. Farther away, the wounded zakru shifted in its sleep, the sound low and pained but alive.

Robin sat beside him.

He had been watching her a lot lately. Perhaps too much.

He knew she watched him in return.

Not too directly. Robin did not stare unless she wanted to make a point—but her attention had a shape. It came from the side. From the brief turn of her head when she thought his gaze was elsewhere. From the pause before she answered him. From the way she sometimes looked towards his hands, his bow, the lines of pigment that adorned his face, then away again before the act could become too visible.

He had felt it for some time. The careful presence of her attention. He had spent many days pretending he had not.

He was not certain anymore who he had meant to convince.

What he knew was this—something was growing between them.

He was not skilled at naming such things. He had lived too long with discipline as his closest companion and grief as the shadow walking beside it. 

Growth had a shape, like seeds sleeping until the season changed enough for them to finally wake.

He knew it when he saw it.

He saw it in the space beside the fire that remained empty until one of them took it.

In the food brought with false excuses.

In the quiet she no longer fled at once.

In the fact that when danger moved through camp, his first glance still sought her before he allowed himself to breathe properly.

He saw it in the way the children had decided, before many adults, that Robin could be approached. In the way she allowed this, not because it was easy, but because she would not punish them for offering what she did not know how to receive.

He understood then, because he was too aware of this to not realize it, that he was allowing it to grow over a hollow place. Hollow ground.

He had been in the cage—this was the thing he had not told her.

He had carried it since through her confession, through the moment she told him what she believed Eywa had done, or given, or returned. He had carried it while she stood before him frightened not of death, but of rejection. Frightened he would look at her and see trespass where she had only survived.

She had given him the truth she feared most. He had kept his own hidden.

He did not wish to deceive her, but a lie by omission did not become clean because one did not enjoy keeping it.

He had been in the cage. He had watched the human woman come through the door with blood already on her clothes. He had heard the broken Na’vi she forced through a mouth not made for the language, trying to tell them something that was not true and yet still kind.

‘All is well.’

It had not been well.

He had watched her go to her knees.

He had watched the Sky People drag her back.

He had watched the rifle rise.

He had done nothing.

The bars had held. The guards had been armed. The prisoners had been weak from confinement, rage, fear, hunger, injury. Struggling would have done nothing except fill the cage with bodies. A bullet for him. A bullet for another. A bullet for another after that, until the room fell silent and the woman on the floor had died for no one at all.

He knew this.

He had known it then. He knew it now.

The knowledge did not make the memory lighter.

It did not change the fact that she had died facing them.

It did not change the fact that he had remembered her for years only as the human who had failed to open the cages and died trying.

It did not change what she was now—not a ghost, not an echo.

Robin.

Returned to herself by means she did not fully understand and perhaps did not need to.

She did not know that when she spoke of W-17, he remembered the room from the other side of the bars.

So’lek looked towards the fire.

The pouch at his belt seemed heavier with every breath.

Inside it lay the cold metal of her human life. A thing the RDA had made to mark ownership and identity in the same small piece of metal. Beside it lay the bracelet from the stream, uneven and ugly by her own judgment, left behind as if it had not mattered.

He had kept both.

He had told himself there were reasons.

Dog tags carried names. Names carried cost.

The bracelet had been different—he had no clean reason for that.

It had simply been hers.

And he had not wanted the water to take it.

Beside him, Robin shifted.

The boy had fallen asleep near her, earlier than usual, curled on a folded mat. Tseya had finally been collected by Seyari after arguing that she was not tired in a voice made entirely of exhaustion. Robin had watched the exchange with the guarded fascination she often gave to tenderness when it belonged to others.

Now she looked down at the sleeping boy.

Something passed over her face.

It was small enough that most would have missed it. A tightening near the eyes. A brief softening at the mouth immediately hidden. Not grief, not quite. Not longing in any simple shape.

Robin looked away from the child and her gaze lifted.

Caught his.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

The firelight changed the color of her eyes, made them seem darker, less sharp. There was a healing scratch crossing one side of her jaw. Her hands rested loosely between her knees.

She looked tired. Not only in the body.

It struck him, suddenly and without mercy, that there might never be a kind time to tell her.

There would always be a wound. Always some new grief. Some new danger. Some new reason to wait one more night, one more meal, one more quiet moment by the fire.

He could tell himself he was protecting her. He could tell himself that truth, too, had its seasons, and this one had not yet ripened.

He could tell himself many things.

The hollow place would remain hollow, and whatever was growing between them would continue until it was heavy enough to break through the ground and fall into the depths of nothing.

Robin’s eyes narrowed slightly.

“What?” she asked.

The word was quiet. Not defensive yet—but close.

So’lek held her gaze.

The first words rose and died before even reaching his mouth.

I was there.

Too abrupt.

I saw you die.

Too cruel.

At W-17—

Too little.

He did not know how to shape it into something that would not cut her.

Perhaps that was impossible. Perhaps truth, when held too long, became a blade no matter how carefully offered.

Robin watched him for another heartbeat. Then her expression shifted, turning dry around the edges in a way he had come to recognize as discomfort seeking armor.

“What is it?” She insisted

So’lek looked closely at her expression. “I am thinking.”

“That’s what worries me.” The words should have been light—they almost were.

Beneath them, though, he heard the question she had not asked.

He had learned to hear those too.

Are you still here?

Did what I told you change this?

Are you going to become another silence I have to survive?

The boy murmured in his sleep, a small sound without words. Robin turned at once, attention breaking from So’lek as she looked down at him. He shifted, brow pinching.

Robin hesitated.

Then, very carefully, she reached out and set her hand against his, carefully.

The boy’s fingers closed around it at once.

His face eased. Robin froze.

So’lek watched the change move through her in silence. She did not smile. She did not make any soft sound. She only sat there, caught by a sleeping child’s trust, looking down at the small hand closed around her strange fingers as if she had been handed something fragile and did not know whether she deserved to hold it.

When she spoke, her voice was lower. “He keeps doing that.” Her head tilted slightly. “I don’t know why.”

So’lek looked at the child’s hand around hers. “He has decided you are safe.”

Robin let out a faint breath through her nose. Not clear amusement. Not real disbelief. Something between both. “That seems unreasonable.”

So’lek’s eyes moved to her once more, “It is not always reason that sees clearly first.”

Her gaze flicked to him. He had not meant the words to carry as much as they did. They settled between them anyway.

Robin looked at him for a long moment, and this time there was no wit ready in her face. No quick turn of speech. Only quiet, more cautious.

Then she looked back down at the boy.

Her thumb moved once, lightly, against his knuckles. The gesture was so small it might have been mistaken for an accident. So’lek did not.

The fire burned lower. The Plains moved around them, wounded and alive. Somewhere beyond the light, nightlife called through the wind. Someone laughed softly near a shelter, tired but real. The sound remained, softer than before, but still there. Among the People.

This, too, was how life returned.

Not all at once. Not cleanly.

A repaired binding. A shared meal. A child’s hand. A place beside the fire no one spoke of.

So’lek looked at Robin and understood with a heaviness that settled deep in his chest that if he allowed this to continue without truth, then the silence would not remain silence.

It would become betrayal—because she had trusted him without knowing the full shape of what he carried.

He would tell her.

He did not have the words yet—not ones worthy of the wound they would open. Worthy words did not arrive to men who used their absence as shelter, he knew this too.

He would tell her.

The fire collapsed inward with a soft hiss of sparks.

Robin did not look at him again. Her eyes remained on the boy’s sleeping hand around hers.

So’lek stayed where he was.

He said nothing, and carried what he carried.

For now.

—

He had known the message was coming before Ri’nela found him.

Not in any way that could be explained cleanly. No sound had reached him first. No scout had crossed the recovering plains with warning on his tongue. No cry had gone up from the edge of camp.

Only the weight had arrived.

It settled in the chest before the mind had cause for it, heavy and familiar. The body understanding ahead of anything else, the old instinct that had kept him alive through ambushes, through raids, through the moments before the world burned through war.

Ri’nela moved through the camp with the quiet purpose she reserved for difficult things, and when her gaze found his across the distance of the recovering plains, So’lek had already understood.

He set down the shelter beam.

The warrior beside him shifted to take the weight without question. The frame held. Pale new wood against smoke-darkened posts. A thing rebuilt because the living required shelter, and because grief and pain did not stop rain or wind.

Ri’nela stopped before him. She did not waste words.

She told him what there was to tell. Tamtey. The Spires. The Kame’tire. The RDA pressing from the east with the particular patience of something that did not need to hurry because it believed the outcome already decided.

Then, last, with the weight she gave it—Nor.

Still missing. Not seen by anyone. Not since then.

So’lek said nothing for a long moment. Then, “When do we leave?”

“At first light. Teylan is already preparing.” After speaking, she waited. In case he had more to say.

There were many things he could have spoken. Questions. Anger. Orders. The shape of a plan already forming around the edges of the wound her words had opened. Ri’nela knew this. She watched him with the calm steadiness of one who had learned too young that leadership often meant standing near another’s silence and not trying to force it into speech.

He gave her nothing. She accepted this, and left him to it.

He stood alone in the morning and looked across the Plains.

The land was still healing. Everywhere he looked there was evidence of hands at work.

The light was clean and low, the way it was in the early hours before the heat arrived and reminded the world of what it had been through.

So’lek remained still.

The Spires called.

His gaze moved without permission, and it found her, as it had taken to doing.

She was at the far edge of the healer’s space, crouched beside a half-finished frame, her new coat pale against the still-darkened grass. Her hands moved with the focused grace she brought to physical tasks. No wasted motion. No softness unless softness served the work. Her braid fell forward over one shoulder when she bent her head.

She had no idea he was looking.

For a moment, he did not move.

He told himself there were reasons. For looking.

He went to find her when he could no longer justify standing still.

She heard him coming. She always did, with that particular awareness that had developed over months of proximity since her arrival back at the Resistance, some mutual understanding of the sounds of their steps and breath, the form of their gait, and the shape of approach, until the camp around them had grown full of people whose arrivals blurred together, and still they arrived differently.

She did not look up.

“You’re here,” she said, without looking up.

He crouched nearby. Close enough to speak without the morning taking his words. Close enough to see the shallow pull at the corner of her mouth where exhaustion had set itself into the skin, the small nick along one knuckle she had not bothered to wrap.

She kept working, her eyes focused on the task before her.

He told her plainly, the way she did when what was being said was difficult—without cushion, without lying for comfort. The Spires. The Sarentu. The departure at first light.

Then—“Nor has not been found.”

He saw the moment her movements faltered. Robin recovered quickly, shifting so that she was facing away from him. Not entirely, only a degree—her shoulders angling just enough to put the line of her back between them. Her hands returned to the wood with the focus of someone who had decided, quickly and deliberately, to be elsewhere in the mind without moving the body.

He watched the change settle into her.

The set of her jaw. The way her fingers pressed harder against the binding. The particular stillness that arrived when something landed in a bruised place.

Nor’s absence was not simple for her. Neither was his presence, So’lek knew. He had noticed.

Nor himself had not been simple.

So’lek did not now the full shape of the discomfort. The distrust. Robin had never told him, or anyone, but he had seen it in her wary eyes and steady silence that carried the shape of impact. 

Still, he was missing.

“Robin—”

“There is a group of hunters…” she interrumped.

He stopped.

Her voice was even. Too even.

“Lost in the forest, apparently.” She explained. “In Kinglor. Only one returned. They are gathering a party to go look for the others.”

The morning continued around them. Somewhere behind them a beam was dragged across the grass. A child called for someone and was answered. The wind moved through the new pale bindings and the low smoke-stained wood and did not care about any of it.

So’lek looked at her back and waited for her to continue.

“I leave in the morning as well.” She said.

The silence that arrived was sharp, as it used to be before.

It did not break against them. It settled, before taking shape, and the shape threatened to cut. It filled the small distance between his crouched body and her kneeling one until that distance seemed larger than it was.

He held it for a long moment before he spoke. “That is not a simple mission.”

“It is a search and rescue.” Still not turning. “Four people. Daylight. Known terrain.”

“Kinglor is dense.” He said. “If they have not returned—”

“Then they need someone to go find them.” She pressed one hand flat against the frame. So’lek knew he was not only talking about the hunters in Kinglor Forest. “That is what search and rescue means.”

So’lek narrowed his eyes, “You are healing—”

“I’m healed enough.” She retorted.

He rose his voice without meaning to, “Enough—”

“—Is enough.” A breath. Controlled. “I've moved through worse with less.”

He was quiet.

She was right.

That was the difficulty of it—she was right, he knew she was, and the knowing sat in him like a stone he did not want to carry and could not put down either.

She had moved through worse. She had survived the wild alone without knowing it. Survived the RDA before that. Survived the body forced upon her, the lies placed in her mind, the hunt that followed when those lies failed to hold her.

She had survived things he had not been present for.

She would survive things he would not be present for still.

He understood this.

He did. Truly.

Understanding it did not help.

The silence stretched between them even more. Not hostile. Not comfortable. The kind they had learned to share the days before.

Robin’s hands had slowed against the wood.

She did not turn. But the quality of her stillness had changed once more, and he had been watching her long enough now to know the difference between the stillness that meant nothing and the stillness that meant she was listening for something.

He opened his mouth. Closed it. There were many things he could have said.

Too many, and none of them arrived in a form he trusted—none that would not say more than this moment had room for, none that would not cross a distance neither of them had agreed yet to cross.

‘Do not go. Stay where I can see you.’

The words had no right to exist.

He had no claim that would make them honorable.

He had other words to say. Larger ones. Older ones. Words that belonged to W-17, to cages and blood and the face of a dying human woman who had not yet known him.

‘I was there. I saw.’

The thought rose and pressed against the back of his teeth.

He said nothing.

Robin let the silence sit for a moment longer.

Then, quietly, without turning, “I know.”

Two words. Offered to the wood, not to him. Simple enough to mean nothing. Heavy enough that they both understood that was not it.

She knew what he had not said.

Not the secret—not that. But the smaller thing beneath this moment.

The worry. The useless shape of it. The way his silence had crowded too near the edge of a request he would not make.

So’lek looked once more at the line of her back. The fall of her braid. The careful stillness of her body.

Then she drew a slow breath and went back to work.

“You cannot be in two places,” she said. Quieter now. Not unkind, just honest. “Tamtey needs you there. The Spires need you there. The Sarentu…” A pause. “So, go.”

He did not answer immediately.

The morning held them both, inside the recovering land breathing around them.

After a moment, she spoke once more, “First light, you said.”

So’lek let out a slow breath,“Yes.”

Her thumb moved once against the wood. A finished task. She still would not turn to him.

“Then you should go prepare.” Robin said.

The deflection was gentle this time. He recognized it—the careful drawing back.

It was almost mercy. He did not push against it.

He rose.

For one breath, he looked down at her and allowed himself to see the shape of what would remain when he left. Robin kneeling by the finished frame, remaining there as if there was work left to be done. The pale coat gifted by Seyari’s hands. The hair she had let someone else arrange.

Then he crossed the short distance between them and crouched down beside her, closer than before.

Close enough that she would have felt the shift in the air.

“Robin,” he called.

He saw her expression harden in her profile, her head tilting away just slightly.

His voice became firmer. “Robin.”

She closed her eyes.

Then, she turned, and she looked at him. Her face was open in the way it almost never was—not armored, not performing steadiness, not holding anything managed behind her eyes. Only the honest and unguarded thing beneath it, the part she usually moved away too fast for him, or anyone, to see clearly.

The light had shifted, fuller now, with the morning committing to itself.

So’lek looked at her. She looked back at him.

There were many things he should have said.

There were many things he would have to say.

But this moment could hold only one.

“Be careful,” his voice was low.

Something moved through her face.

The seriousness remained but the edges of it changed—softened. Her eyes stayed on his and there was no performance in them. Only honesty. Only the quiet, real thing that lived under everything else and almost never had occasion to be seen directly.

She held his gaze for a moment longer.

Then she gave one slow nod. Not the clipped efficiency of acknowledgment. Something more careful.

“You too,” she said. Asked, with few words.

He stayed longer than was necessary.

Long enough that neither of them could mistake what the staying meant.

Long enough that the morning around them became peripheral and the space between them became the only thing in it.

Then he rose, turned, and walked toward the center of the camp.

He did not look back.

Some part of him wanted to. The desire moved through him once, sharp and unwelcome, and he let it pass without obeying it.

He walked as the light came full over the land, and the camp moved into its morning with it. 

He carried what he carried—the metal at his side, the unsaid words, the image of her face in the moment it had softened.

When he returned, he would tell her. He would find the words worthy of what they would open—not perfect ones, perhaps. He was not certain perfect ones existed for something this size. But honest ones. True ones.

He would not allow whatever this was to grow any further over hollow ground.

Ahead, the Spires waited. He walked towards them, and held onto what he was walking towards returning to.

—

She told herself it was not because of him.

She woke in the grey before dawn and lay there for a moment staring at the underside of the temporary shelter's roof, listening to the camp. It was quiet—not silent, not exactly. It was never silent on Pandora. But the Plains were breathing at a different pace. Slower. Carefully. 

She told herself she was awake because she always woke early. Because the ground was hard and the blanket was too thin. Because her side pulled when she shifted wrong.

She lay there for another minute.

Then she got up.

The air outside the shelter hit her face, fresh, still smelling of ash a little, but also of wet grass and the deep green heaviness Pandora carried at night. She pulled the coat tighter over her shoulders and stood for a moment. The camp was a scatter of low light and dark shapes, the half-rebuilt shelters standing pale against the dark, the fire pits banked to coals. A hunter kept watch, moving at the far edge of the torchlight, unhurried, and unaware of her.

She told herself she was just walking.

She found them near the camp's edge, where the ground was clear enough for ikran to launch and land without risk to those still sleeping. Ri'nela was there already. Teylan too, he stood to one side, speaking to a warrior Robin didn't know. So'lek was beside Iley, one hand resting on the ikran’s neck, checking the harness with the focused quiet he carried into everything, his bow already secured. 

He heard her coming before she reached them. She knew the moment he did—the slight shift in his posture, the way his hands stilled for a half-breath before continuing their work.

He turned after he was finished.

The expression that moved across his face in the moment before it settled was not surprise exactly, but something more careful. His gaze moved over her—the coat, her stance, the fact of her standing here in the dark with no particular reason to be—and then it came back to her face and stayed there.

"Why are you here?" He asked, not harshly. 

Robin shrugged and looked somewhere past his shoulder. "Couldn't sleep."

A pause.

"Your departure is not until midmorning." He said.

"I'm aware of when my departure is." She met his eyes for a moment and then, because the moment was becoming something she didn't want to name, looked at Iley instead, who regarded her with the flat imperious attention the ikran had apparently decided was appropriate for their species. "Nice morning."

He looked at her. She could feel his gaze without meeting it.

"It is still dark," he said.

"Yes. Very atmospheric." She nodded at the sky. The stars were still visible, pale and cold, and Polyphemus rested low on the horizon. "You get a good view of the stars before dawn. I appreciate that."

Robin couldn’t care less about the stars, if she was honest.

She was not honest, that was the problem.

He said nothing and Iley continued to regard her with sovereign indifference.

Around them the sounds of departure continued—Ri'nela's quiet voice, the creak of harness leather, the low percussion of an ikran shifting its weight. The camp remained asleep behind them.

Robin kept her gaze on the ikran.

"Robin." He called.

She looked at him.

His face was serious. Not unkind—it was almost never unkind, she had learned, even when it was hard to read.

His voice held the particular steadiness it wore when he had chosen his words carefully and intended them to land. "Be careful in Kinglor."

She held his gaze. Something pulled in her chest at that, and she chose—deliberately and with full awareness—not to examine it too closely. "You already said that."

His eyes remained steady. "I am saying it again."

She looked at him for a moment. 

"Go," she said, quietly. 

He held her gaze for one more breath. Then he turned back to the ikran, checked the last strap, and mounted with the practiced movement of someone who had done this ten thousand times and expected to do it ten thousand more.

And then… they left.

Robin stood there, alone, and watched the sky until there was nothing left to watch anymore.

She went back to her shelter to lay down and tried to sleep.

She didn't.

More like couldn’t.

She lay on her back, stared at the roof, and thought about the mission and the missing hunters.

She thought about her bow. About the pull of it, the snap of release, the way her elbow still moved inconsistently on the left side in a way she couldn't fully correct yet.

“You rush the draw,” So’lek had told her. “You commit to the release before you are ready for it.” He had said it without ceremony, standing beside her in the thin morning light three days ago, watching her send an arrow six inches wide of where she'd intended. No sting in it. Just the fact of it, offered plainly.

“You are better than you were,” he had added, which from him she had learned to read as something close to encouragement.

She thought about So'lek's face in the dark before dawn. The way he had looked at her when she appeared.

She turned onto her side.

She thought about the boy's hand closing around hers in sleep, and the small carved figure placed on the ground beside her knee with great seriousness.

She thought about Nor, her uncertainty regarding him, and the question the recom had placed in her like a seed in damaged soil back then, when Alma’s avatar died.

She thought about Tamtey in Hollows, alone. About the first time Robin had met her properly. And about the particular brightness she carried even through the terrible things.

She thought about W-17.

She turned onto her back again.

She thought about the far away voice ringing in her right ear. A voice she wanted to recognize but was not able to. 

“Last words…?”

Robin shut her eyes with force.

“I won’t be able to protect you, Walker.”

Her eyes snapped open.

Someone passed outside the shelter, footsteps quiet, and was gone. 

‘This,’ she thought, ‘is ridiculous.’

Deciding she wasn’t getting anymore sleep, she got up.

—

The bow sat in her hands with the familiar unfamiliar weight of a skill not yet fully inhabited.

She checked the string, the grip, and the arrows in the quiver. She had wrapped the grip herself, tighter than the previous wrapping, the way So'lek had shown her. Her elbow was still inconsistent—she was working on it.

She slung it across her back, grabbed the quiver she would strap to Nika’s saddle, and walked to the meeting point.

She was the last to arrive.

There were three others. The elder hunter—Nawk’tan, she had learned his name the day before when she had been told who would be leading the party—was perhaps in his late forties, built lean and capable in the way that came from decades of practice and discipline. He had the eyes of someone who had been reading terrain longer than Robin had been alive in any form, and when he looked at her it was with the same careful assessment most of the People still gave her, only it was followed by a deliberate kind of setting-that-aside because he had decided that judgement wasn’t practical for the mission.

She respected that.

The other two were younger.

Vauk, who carried himself with the quiet sureness of a man who had proven himself and no longer needed to perform it.

And Ïyo, the youngest of them, who had the particular lean energy of someone well-trained and not yet tested enough to know which parts of his training would hold under real pressure and which would fail him.

She hoped he would not find out today.

Nawk’tan told them what he knew.

A scouting party—small, three hunters on a route they had known well, going to retrieve food and materials from the forest's edge. Not a dangerous mission. Not unusual, either. The kind of errand experienced hunters completed without breaking sweat. Out of four, only one had returned.

He had described separation—a moment of distraction, a direction chosen wrong, the forest's density swallowing the sound of the others before he'd known there was anything to worry about. He had looked for them until dark. Then he had come home alone.

The Aranahe had been searching since. They found nothing.

Robin listened and filed the shape of it away—the terrain, the last known position, the hours elapsed, the condition of the one survivor. She thought about the gap between ‘I got separated’ and ‘I don't know what happened to them.’ A lot could happen in that space.

She said nothing about this.

They mounted.

—

The forests received her the way it always did—as an imposition.

They landed in a clearing where the canopy opened enough to allow their ikran to pass, and from the moment Robin's feet touched the ground she felt the weight of the place settle over her. The trees were still enormous, their roots breaking the surface in complex tangles that made each step a calculation. The bioluminescence was quieter in the day—underlying, present but subdued—and the sounds layered over one another in ways she was still learning to read.

The forest still got on her nerves—it made her think of her time alone in it—but less now. 

She touched Nika's neck before leaving her. The ikran made a short, dissatisfied sound. Robin didn't blame her.

They moved on foot.

Nawk’tan set the pace—measured, quiet, the kind of forward motion that minimized disturbance. They spread slightly, covering more ground without losing sight of one another. Robin stayed to the right, watching the space between the trees.

The first stretch gave them very little.

No blood. No obvious signs of impact or struggle. The ground was disturbed in places, but Pandoran forest floors were always disturbed—too much lived and moved and died here for disturbance to mean anything without context. Vauk crouched near a section of pressed undergrowth and spent time reading it with the focused patience of someone trained to draw meaning from what others would dismiss. Robin watched him from a few paces away. Whatever he found, he decided it held no importance for their cause.

She kept moving. Slowly. Watching wide.

She was studying the base of a broad root formation when something at a higher level caught the edge of her attention and pulled it upward.

She stopped.

High on a trunk—well above her eyeline, higher than she would have looked instinctively—two parallel lines scored into the bark. Not a scrape. Not the wear of weather or branch contact. Each line ran clean and deep, the wood exposed pale beneath, the force of it evident in the way the bark had curled at the edges of each cut.

She reached up and ran her fingertips along the edge of the nearest line.

Her side throbbed with the deep memory of the body, down in the scar tissue that had formed over the place where something very large and very fast had decided she was worth the effort.

The sensation moved through her like an echo—sharp, specific, unmistakable.

She knew exactly what had made this mark.

"Nawk’tan," she called, keeping her voice low.

He crossed to her. His eyes went to where her hand rested, then moved up to study the full extent of the score. He raised his own hand and pressed into the depth of the cut, inspecting it, the angle, the height of the strike. His jaw set.

She watched his face. He was reading the same thing she was.

He had not spoken yet when she heard it.

It was low—below the ordinary noise of the forest, in the frequency range that most sounds occupied before they became identifiable. A rhythmic displacement, something large moving through dense vegetation at a pace that was neither running nor casual.

She had heard that exact sound before, and minutes after she had been horizontal and bleeding with Tamtey crying over her. She had thought, with the flat clarity of someone who has moved past fear—´This is how it ends.'

She turned.

The plants at the far edge of her vision were moving in a direction the wind had no business sending them.

She looked at Nawk’tan, eyes wide.

The hunter said one word only.

"Run."

—

She ran.

The forest became noise, and motion and the fundamental problem of moving at high speed over ground that didn’t want to cooperate—high roots caught, wet earth, low branches. 

She heard Vauk ahead of her, then didn't. Heard Ïyo somewhere to her right, and then that too dissolved into the general chaos of pursuit and flight.

She changed direction. Used a dense cluster of root flanges as cover, flattened herself into the shadow on the far side, and held completely still while the sound moved past her — too close, close enough that the air changed.

Then it passed.

She waited.

She counted her own heartbeats until they began to slow. Fifteen seconds. Thirty. A minute.

The forest resettled around her. Sound returned—the ordinary sound, the layered ambient noise of a place that was not currently being moved through by something enormous. She listened to it for a long moment, checking each layer.

Then she straightened.

She thought about the young hunters—experienced but still green, out on a route they had taken before. This was probably how it had started for them too. Something ordinary becoming something terrible without warning. The kind of separation that happened in the first fifteen seconds of a run, when the only thought was ‘keep moving’ and the question of where everyone else had gone was a problem for after.

They might have been very afraid before the forest took them.

If that’s what happened. If.

She moved.

Carefully now. Measuring each step before placing it. Back towards the clearing, towards the last position she had marked before the run, towards the place where she guessed Nawk’tan would try to bring the party back together if the animal had moved on. Because the canopy was too dense to call Nika, or any of their ikran, through. 

She watched everything.

She was scanning wide, keeping low, when the shape registered at the edge of her peripheral vision and her body stopped before her mind had fully processed it.

She turned slowly.

A figure on the ground. Face up. Arms at his sides with a looseness that didn't belong to sleep or unconsciousness.

Her chest contracted.

Her first thought was the missing hunters—the ones they had come here to find. Then she got close enough to see the coat and the thought collapsed.

It was Ïyo

She circled wide before approaching, checking the trees methodically, the shadows, the ground for disturbance. Then she crouched beside him.

He was looking at the canopy—no, not looking—that was the word she was trying not to use and couldn't avoid. His eyes were open and directed at the canopy, seeing nothing. His mouth had gone slack, the expression of someone from whom all the effort of expression had simply been withdrawn. His fingers lay loose and open in the grass at his sides.

His chest was not moving.

Robin set her hand on his shoulder. She already knew, but she shook him once anyway as though she needed proof.

Nothing.

She pressed two fingers to the side of his throat and held them there, counting. Or wanting to count.

No pulse.

Dead.

The silence in the forest felt different now. Still. Attentive.

She sat back on her heels and made herself look carefully—at the visible surfaces of his skin, his neck, his arms, his torso. She was looking for the injury the thanator had left. The crushing force, the tearing, the specific damage that came from something that large moving that fast.

She found nothing.

She frowned.

She looked more carefully. Ran her eyes over every surface she could see. Checked for the grey-blue of Pandoran plant toxins, the swelling of impact, the collapsed quality of something struck hard enough to damage what was underneath without breaking the surface.

Nothing.

‘Where is his braid?’ She suddenly asked herself, noticing what was missing in the picture only then.

The back of his neck was bare.

Cold arrived quietly into her body and stayed.

She reached across him and gripped his far shoulder and turned him.

The braid was gone. The kuru it had protected—gone with it. The cut was clean. Not worried at, not torn away in haste or animal desperation. A quick cut, straight and deliberate. The kind that required a sharp edge and a decision made before the hand moved.

Robin knelt there in the undergrowth and looked at the damage done, and she understood.

Whatever had come through this forest today, the thanator wasn’t the worst of it…

Somewhere in the trees, a branch snapped.

She turned.

A figure stepped from behind a tree trunk and looked at her.

He was Na'vi. At least in shape — tall and moving with the particular deliberate ease of someone who had already decided how this went.

His head was shaved clean. His skin was covered in paint—white across the skull and cheekbones, red at the jaw and throat and chest, black in patterns down his arms that had nothing ceremonial or beautiful in them, nothing that spoke of Eywa or the way of the People.

His eyes were fixed on her with an attention that held no curiosity.

In one hand he held a knife.

In the other… a braid.

Robin felt as though the blood was suddenly drained from her body.

A second figure stepped from behind another tree. Then a third, to her left. Then sound—from her right, from somewhere above, from behind—and she turned once, twice, her body completing the rotation before her mind had finished the instruction, only to find them everywhere.

She was surrounded.

There were too many to count quickly. She counted anyway. Seven. Eight. More, perhaps, still behind the trees.

They stood with the stillness of people who had done this before and found waiting easy, arranged at intervals that closed off every direction she might have moved in. Their eyes were on her with the particular quality of attention that she had felt before, in other rooms, in other life.

Her breathing had gone shallow.

She was aware of this the way she was aware of most things her body did without her consent when it was afraid.

Her heart was very loud, the sound of it seemed to fill her ears in a way that made the forest quieter. Her hands were cold, not the cold of the air, it was warm—the cold of blood retreating to the center of the body, the ancient, involuntary calculation of what was important to keep warm when warmth had to be rationed.

She didn’t move.

The figure with the braid and the knife looked at her across the small distance between them.

Her legs were telling her to move. Her training was telling her to wait. She breathed through the shallowness, watched the figure with the knife and thought—

He was not sure when it had happened. When he had learned to read the small signs of her like tracks in soft earth. The imperceptible changes in her expression, small enough to ignore if one did not know to look. The change in the depth of her breathing, even when it remained slow. The way her posture became just a fraction straighter in front of danger, as though some part of her believed she could survive any blow if she met it standing.

She was afraid—no. Terrified.

And beneath the fear was something that struck harder—she looked like someone who had just been betrayed. As though So’lek had reached inside a wound she had kept well hidden and pressed his fingers there, not because truth required it, but for the pleasure of watching it bleed.

‘Why would you ask this of me?’ Her face seemed to say.

The thought sat badly in him.

Robin pressed her lips together and leaned back a little, just enough to put distance between them without taking an obvious step away. So’lek noticed that too.

For one breath, her eyes shifted towards the cave where the Tree of Echoes remained. It lasted no more than a beat. Then her gaze came back to him, wide and focused.

She looked at his eyes first. Held there. Then her attention moved across other parts of his face, quick and careful, as though she were trying to interpret what he was thinking, what he was feeling, what kind of danger she stood in now. She did this often when she was trying to understand a situation. When she was trying to decide who she was facing, how much truth could be given, and how much had to be hidden.

This time, she found no answer, or perhaps she found one she feared, because she only shook her head slowly, once from side to side.

“I don’t know.” She said.

So’lek’s eyes narrowed. He took one step closer. Robin did not step back, she only leaned away by another fraction, the movement too small for pride to admit and too honest for him to miss.

“You hide something,” he said. “I know this.”

Robin stared at him. There it was again. That caught look. Prey under light. A hunter with the path closed behind her and nowhere left to run without making the escape obvious.

“I don’t know,” she said again. The words were quieter now.

So’lek remained silent. Waiting.

Robin opened her mouth, then closed it. Opened it again. Closed it once more. For a moment, she looked almost angry with herself. It seemed as though language itself had betrayed her by not arriving in a shape that could hold what she needed to say.

Then she shook her head again, faster this time.

“I really don’t know,” she said. “At the time, I knew I was wrong. I knew that much, but I had no idea what I was doing.”

Her frown deepened. Not with anger, but with hurt. “I just wanted out.”

So’lek said nothing, but something close to concern began to rise beneath his ribs.

He did not know what she meant. He did not know where the path of her confession was leading, only that it was no simple matter. The fear in her was too old for that. It held too much shape. Whatever this was, she had not only hidden it—she had carried it long enough for it to become part of the way she held herself.

Robin looked away.

“I was desperate,” she said. “I didn’t know what else to do. I just—I was losing my mind.”

A hunter passed close to them, moving from the cave toward the outer path, moving with purpose. Robin saw the movement and lowered her head at once, not in greeting, but in concealment. As though even being seen speaking now was more than she could bear.

So’lek watched the hunter pass.

Only when they had gone far enough did Robin lift her head again.

She did not meet his eyes anymore. Her gaze fell instead to the grass near their feet, then shifted from one side to the other, unfocused, searching. Remembering, perhaps. Or trying not to remember too clearly.

When she spoke again, she was looking at his shoulder.

“It happened after the abandoned base,” she said. “The one that was supposed to be abandoned.”

So’lek went still. Robin noticed. He knew she did, though she did not look directly at him.

“The one where we were ambushed,” she continued. “Where we found the recom. The one who—”

She stopped. Her hand lifted and made a small, unfinished motion toward the back of her head—towards her kuru. Her eyes met his for only a second, then they lost themselves somewhere beyond him, into the dark horizon.

So’lek remembered.

He remembered the mission, the false emptiness of the place, and the violence that followed.

He remembered the recom, who had reached for her like she was something to be taken apart.

He remembered the dawn when he returned to the cave and found her gone.

He remembered tracking through the forest and finding signs of struggle.

He remembered reaching the cave and finding Robin there with a stolen knife trembling in her hands, her eyes too wide, her body held on the edge of fight and collapse.

Of course he remembered.

Inside, he felt much. Outside, he said nothing.

He listened.

Some part of Robin seemed to have expected him to interrupt. When he did not, her ears shifted downward by the smallest degree, not in relief. Disappointment, almost. Or dread. As if interruption would have spared her from deciding how much more to say.

She wet her lips.

“I left for a moment,” she said. “I don’t even remember how anymore.” Her jaw tightened. “I was hit with a dart—I think that was it. Something in the blood. Something that made everything... wrong.”

So’lek’s hands remained still at his sides.

Robin’s fingers did not. They flexed once, then curled lightly, then opened again.

“I lost myself,” she said.

The sentence came plain enough to sound almost small.

It was not.

“I ran away from noise and into noise. Away from light and into light. I don’t know if that makes sense.” She swallowed. “I could hear everything. Smell everything. Feel every branch, every leaf, every breath in the forest like it was happening inside my skull.” One of her hands raised, her fingers brushed against her temple. “I thought I was going insane.”

Her hand fell back to her side. “I didn’t know where I was going. I only knew there was a pull.”

Her gaze flicked down towards her own body.

“Since I woke up like this, there had been... something. I don’t know what to call it. Not a sound. Not a voice. Just something there, under everything else. Like a thread I could feel but not see.”

She looked down at her hands. “I followed it.”

So’lek looked at her in silence.

Robin was breathing slowly. Too slowly. Each breath deliberately placed, as though she had to make herself continue one inhale at a time.

“I didn’t understand it then,” she said. “I don’t think I understand it now. I just knew I was supposed to find it—but I’m not sure if I was supposed to reach it.”

There it was, the shape of the fear. So’lek felt it before she gave it words.

Robin’s eyes shifted once more towards the cave. Towards the sacredness inside and all that still hung there in the hush of Mokasa’s passing. Then she turned back.

“I found a place in the forest,” she said. “Covered in Trees of Voices.”

The silence that followed was immediate. It was not empty. It seemed to take form between them, a living thing.

So’lek did not move. Neither did she. Robin took a slow, careful breath.

Then she bowed her head.

“I connected to them.” Her voice was low now.

Not quiet because she wished to be unheard. Quiet because she was telling him what she believed was a great sin.

“I connected to Eywa.”

The words struck him with more force than he allowed his body to show.

Robin continued quickly, as if stopping would make it impossible to begin again.

“I didn’t understand the significance of it. Not fully. Not then. I knew it was sacred. I knew that much. I knew I shouldn’t have been there. I knew I had no permission, no right, no one with me who knew what it meant, but I—” She stopped, her mouth closing hard around the rest.

Her hands clenched at her sides.

“I was not trying to steal anything,” she said.

So’lek’s eyes sharpened.

Steal.

Robin seemed to hear it after she spoke it. Her expression shifted, uncertain, as if even she did not know whether that was the right shape for what had happened.

“I don’t think I was trying to…” She corrected, then shook her head. “I don’t know anymore.”

She looked at him again, and for once her eyes were not steady. “I connected, and something happened.”

Robin’s throat worked. “When I woke up, my memories were back.” Then she stopped. A second later, she shook her head sharply. “No. Not memories.” Her voice trembled, almost helpless. “Not only those.”

So’lek waited.

“After the tree, something changed.” Her hands stilled. “I remembered. Not just facts, not just images—I remembered like... like myself.” The confusion in her eyes was almost unbearable because it sat beside something like awe. “My family and my friend. The sky on Earth. The way things felt. The way I felt. The years here, and Miguel, and—” Her voice caught slightly. “I remembered the cages… Everything came back with weight.”

She touched her own chest once, lightly, as if the answer were somewhere beneath her flesh.

Robin looked at him then. Fully.

“I think I took something,” she said.

The words were hesitant, each one placed as though it might collapse under its own meaning.

“I don’t know what. But when I woke up, I wasn’t only remembering her. I wasn’t only carrying her memories.” Her eyes moved between his, searching for judgment, for anger, for rejection. “I was her.”

The confession was nearly breath.

Then, quieter still. “I think I am her.”

So’lek could not move.

Robin’s face tightened, and she added quickly, almost desperately, “I know what that sounds like.”

He did not answer.

“I know,” she said again, as if she had to make certain he understood that she had already judged herself before he could. “I know it sounds wrong. I know what I touched was sacred. I know I had no permission. I knew enough even then to know I shouldn’t have done it.”

“I did it anyway.” A pause. Then, “I’m sorry.”

The apology fell between them with a weight that made So’lek’s jaw tighten.

He was not sure if she was not apologizing only for touching the trees, or for surviving the touch. For coming back with something she feared might not have been hers to claim.

So’lek looked at her and felt the shape of his own understanding begin to change.

He did not know all the details of the RDA’s recombinant soldiers. He did not need to know all of them to hate what they were.

Tamtey had explained enough once, with discomfort and anger tangled together in her voice. Bodies like avatars in appearance only, but not sleepwalkers who returned to their own bodies when dreams took them. There was no other body waiting somewhere safe. No true flesh breathing elsewhere. They were made, grown, their minds were filled with whatever echoes of memory the Sky People had taken from others and preserved before death.

A false continuity.

Machines pretending fake remembrance was the same as life.

The RDA could make a body. They could shape bone, muscle, and skin into something useful. They could place thoughts inside it and tell themselves they had brought a person because the result could speak, obey, remember enough to function.

But a soul? No. Not them.

That belonged beyond their machines. Beyond their cold rooms and their bodies grown for war.

For Robin, the echo should have stopped before Pandora. Before the forest. Before the white room and the blood and the cages.

And yet she remembered things. Not as stories told to her. Not as images seen in the Sky People devices. Not as documents studied, read again and again.

She remembered with grief. With shame. With the body’s own terror.

She remembered them as lived things.

So’lek looked at her—the woman standing before him with tension drawn through every line of her, waiting for him to give a verdict on what she had already condemned in herself—and the meaning of what she had confessed widened until it seemed to leave no air between them.

If Eywa had taken what died in that white room and held it…

If under the Trees of Voices that lost thing had been returned…

Then the RDA had not made Robin, not her present self—not all of her.

They had made the body, perhaps. A vessel built by violence and purpose. But not the thing looking out through her eyes with grief and guilt. Not the stubborn, impossible will that had stood bleeding before cages and still tried to open them.

Not the soul.

The woman before him was not a copy of the dead—but the dead, returned.

The thought struck him with such quiet force that he could not answer at once.

The white room shifted in his memory. The woman in the blood-stained uniform no longer remained at a distance, softened by anonymity and years. Her face sharpened into the one before him now. The one he had watched argue, fight, fly, yell, grieve, and smile despite herself. The one who had stood beside him under the Tree of Echoes and asked, with a voice too soft for the size of the question, whether even humans returned to Eywa.

So’lek felt something heavy settle under his ribs.

Robin was still watching him.

Her eyes had not left his. She was searching for something in his expression. Waiting. Her shoulders had lifted slightly again, tension building, as though every second of his silence became another answer she feared.

She was waiting for him to tell her what she was. Or worse—what she was not.

So’lek thought of many things at once and found none of them ready for speech.

He thought of sacred places and desperate hands.

He thought of trespass.

He thought of mercy.

He thought of a body made by Sky People and a soul no machine could have touched.

He thought of Robin alone in the forest, half-mad with poison, hunger, and hatred, drawn toward the trees by something she had not understood.

Robin’s breath changed, only slightly. Enough for him to know his silence had begun to wound.

Still, no answer came easily.

Because what could he say that would not be too small?

What could he give her that would not become judgment if shaped poorly?

Robin lowered her gaze first. The movement was careful, almost defeated. And So’lek understood, too late, that she had taken his silence for condemnation.

—

Robin lowered her gaze.

She hated herself for it the moment it happened. She had wanted to keep looking at him. She had wanted, at least, to stand beneath whatever answer he chose to give and not flinch from it.

But So’lek had said nothing.

And in that silence, Robin heard everything she had feared.

She heard judgment. Disgust, perhaps. Not loud, not dramatic, not cruel in any simple way, but there all the same. A quiet verdict forming behind his eyes.

She had touched something sacred without permission. She had gone where she hadn’t been invited. She had connected herself to a place that belonged to the People, to the dead, to Eywa, and she had come back with pieces of herself in her hands, as though that made the trespass less ugly.

Her fingers curled at her sides.

She shouldn’t have said so much—the thought came sharp and immediate, followed by another that contradicted it almost at once—no, she had needed to say it.

Or maybe she hadn’t needed to, but once she had started there had been no stopping. The words had spilled out of her like water through a split dam, too much pressure held too long behind something badly built. She had told him things she hadn’t told anyone. Things she had barely allowed herself to arrange into language even in the privacy of her own mind.

Maybe because it was him.

That was worse, somehow.

If it had been anyone else, maybe she would have lied. Maybe she would have denied everything and carried the secret until it rotted inside her chest.

But So’lek had looked at her and asked why, and the truth had come out of her piece by piece—jagged, frightened, and more honest than she had intended.

Now he was silent.

Robin drew in one slow breath and forced herself not to take a step back.

She could feel the cave behind them. The Tree of Echoes still inside. The mourning voices softened by stone and bioluminescent light. Mokasa’s death had left the air heavy with something sacred, and here she stood at the edge of it admitting that she had once reached into another sacred place with desperate hands and no right.

So’lek’s gaze remained on her. It didn’t move over her like suspicion. That would have been easier. It didn’t skim the surface of her, weighing body, weapons, threat. It felt instead as though he was looking through the layers of her, past the body, past the name she wore, past the shame she had just handed him, into something she wasn’t sure she wanted anyone to see.

Robin lifted her eyes again despite herself.

He was serious, very still, and his face gave little away, but that had stopped meaning emptiness a long time ago. She knew better now. There were storms in him that didn’t reach his skin.

She wondered what he saw.

A thief.

A fool.

A trespasser.

Her chest tightened.

Then movement came from inside the cave.

Robin turned her head a fraction before Tamtey stepped out into the open air, one hand brushing the edge of the cave wall as she emerged. She still looked tired from her own injuries, but more awake than before, more herself. Grief sat in her face too, as it did in most of the ones gathered, but there was purpose there now, threaded through the sadness.

Her eyes found them both. For a moment, some small warmth crossed her expression.

“There you are,” Tamtey said, her voice low, mindful of the mourning behind her. Her gaze moved from So’lek to Robin, and the warmth deepened by a fraction. “Both of you.”

Robin didn’t know what to do. She gave the smallest nod because it was all she could manage.

Tamtey turned more fully to So’lek. “Anufi asked something of me.”

So’lek’s attention shifted, though not completely—Robin could feel that too. Even with Tamtey before them, even with his duty called back into the shape of immediate purpose, some part of him remained aware of her.

Robin hated that.

Tamtey continued, “There are Kame’tire who left cycles ago, after the Sarentu were lost. Anufi believes they may still live. She wants me to look for them.”

So’lek inclined his head once, grave. “You will go?”

“Before nightfall.” Tamtey’s mouth tightened slightly. “If they are out there, they should know. And if they can be brought home—if they wish to come back...” She did not finish the thought. She didn’t need to.

Robin listened, but the words came to her from a distance. Kame’tire. Sarentu. Cycles. Loss. People scattered by grief and violence, people who might or might not come back. It all mattered. She knew it mattered.

But her own skin still felt too tight.

She needed air.

More air than this open space already gave her.

She was not planning on running, and she was not thinking of exiling herself, not in that dramatic, childish way where shame turned itself into punishment and called it justice. She didn’t want to be alone on a moon she barely understood. She didn’t want to survive the forest again by spite, terror, and luck.

She had been alone in the forest before, more than once. She had seen what real exile did— she had seen it in Mokasa’s face, grief carved into him.

Robin didn’t want that.

She wanted to stay—the realization was almost painful.

She wanted the shelters, the fires, the low voices, the people who had somehow begun to make space for her even when she hadn’t known what to do with it. The children who watched Nika with bright eyes. The elders who repeated stories because they liked the shape of them. Tamtey’s too-honest concern. Ri’nela’s steady presence. Even So’lek’s silence, infuriating and unreadable as it could be.

She wasn’t leaving. She only needed a moment, that was all.

A moment to gather herself before whatever consequence came next. A moment to breathe without his eyes on her. A moment to take the shame somewhere less visible and decide how to stand under it when she returned.

So while Tamtey spoke to him, Robin shifted her weight and began to turn away.

She hadn’t gotten to take a second step before So’lek’s hand shot out and closed around her wrist.

Robin stopped at once.

His grip wrapped over the beaded bracelet at her wrist, pressing the small shapes into her skin. Not hard enough to hurt—hard enough to be impossible to pretend she hadn’t been caught.

She looked down first, startled by the sight of his hand there. Then she looked up at him, her eyes wide.

So’lek looked back at her.

“Wait,” he said.

One word, quiet but unmistakable.

Robin’s pulse kicked beneath his fingers.

She tried to pull her wrist away, discreetly. A small movement, more suggestion than fight, because Tamtey was standing right there and Robin still had some pride left, even if the situation was doing its best to strip it from her.

So’lek’s grip tightened by a fraction. Still not painful, only firm.

“Wait here,” he said.

This time, there was no mistaking that he meant it.

Tamtey went silent.

Robin felt her look before she saw it.

Tamtey’s gaze had dropped to their hands. Then it moved to Robin’s face, then to So’lek’s, then back to her. Something shifted in her eyes. Not alarm, not disapproval, not even surprise exactly—-though there was some of that too. There was a glint there Robin could not place, something almost bright beneath the grief and fatigue.

Interest, perhaps.

Robin couldn’t read it. She was too raw to trust interpretation. Too nervous to decide whether the look was good, bad, or merely another thing she did not understand.

Tamtey’s mouth softened slightly.

“I leave before nightfall,” she said again, this time more quietly.

So’lek acknowledged it. His hand didn’t leave Robin’s wrist.

Tamtey looked at her once more. Then she smiled, only a little. The expression was gentle enough to make Robin’s chest ache in a place she hadn’t prepared to defend.

Then Tamtey turned and went back toward the cave, leaving them in the open with the sound of her footsteps fading over stone and grass.

Robin stared after her.

For one second, she considered pretending the whole thing had not happened.

Without looking at him she said, her voice low, “You can let go of my hand.”

“It is your wrist,” he said.

Despite everything, Robin blinked. She turned to look at him, incredulous.

The correction was so dry, so completely unhelpful, that under different circumstances she might have laughed. Under these, all she could manage was a flat look. “So’lek.”

His face didn’t soften. “I am not sure I can.”

Her expression tightened. “Why?”

“I am not sure you will stay.” The words landed more heavily than how an actual accusation would have, and much more real.

Robin looked at him. “I am not going to run.”

So’lek held her gaze, solemn and unamused. “You have done this before.”

She opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

The problem with indignation, Robin thought distantly, was that it worked much better when the other person was wrong.

He was not.

She had, in fact, done this before. Maybe not exactly this, not this particular shape of confession and shame, but close enough. She had left when danger followed her. Left the hideout because she had convinced herself that her presence would bring the RDA down on them—sure in her own head that removing herself from the equation was the cleanest answer. She had walked into the forest alone because it was easier to endanger only herself than sit still and let others choose whether she was worth the risk.

And before that, in smaller ways, she had left rooms without speaking. Closed doors inside herself. Made silence into a border and dared anyone to cross it.

So no, she couldn’t say he was wrong.

The realization must have shown on her face.

So’lek’s grip loosened.

Not because she had asked. Maybe because she had stopped pulling. Because she had made herself stand there and not flee, and perhaps he had decided to trust that for the moment.

His hand slid away from her wrist.

The skin beneath felt strangely colder without it. Robin resisted the urge to rub at the place where his fingers had been.

She stood beneath his gaze, waiting.

Whatever came next, she would take it standing, she decided.

She had said the truth—or enough of it. She had opened the thing she had been hiding and placed it between them, and now there would be consequences.

There had to be.

Sacred places did not become less sacred because someone had been desperate. Trespass did not become clean because it had saved the trespasser.

So’lek looked at her as though he understood exactly where her thoughts had gone.

“You heard judgment,” he said.

Robin lifted her chin, the movement was defensive before she could make it anything else. “Was I wrong?”

For one heartbeat, he didn’t answer.

Then he said, “Not entirely.”

Cold moved through her.

It was strange, how fast the body could betray itself. Her face remained still, or she hoped it did, but her fingers went numb, her shoulders tightening before she could stop them. Somewhere behind her ribs, something small and fragile folded inward as if it had known all along that this was where the conversation would end.

Not entirely.

There it was.

So’lek saw her reaction—of course he did. These days he seemed to see too much.

He continued before she could retreat fully behind it.

“What you did was not small,” he said. “I will not pretend it was.”

Robin swallowed.

He continued. “But I did not say you were wrong for coming back.”

The words caught her off guard.

She stared at him.

For a moment, she couldn’t decide what he meant.

Coming back from Eywa.

Coming back to herself.

Coming back to the Resistance.

Coming back from the forest, from madness, from whatever edge she had been walking.

Maybe he meant all of it.

Maybe he didn’t know what he meant.

Either way, the distinction struck somewhere deep enough to hurt.

He wasn’t telling her that touching the Trees of Voices had been nothing. He wasn’t absolving her so cleanly. He wasn’t making it small to comfort her.

But he was telling her that her existence now was not a crime.

That the fact of her standing here, breathing, remembering, being herself again, was not something he condemned.

Robin’s throat tightened.

So’lek watched her quietly.

“You think you took something,” he said.

Robin didn’t answer. She didn’t need to, the silence and her lowered gaze gave her away.

He lowered his voice. “Do not misunderstand. The Great Mother is not so easily robbed.”

Robin’s eyes flicked to his.

The words moved through her slowly, as if her mind refused them at first because they were too large to accept all at once.

She had never thought of it that way. She had thought of herself as the thief, the desperate thing with dirty hands reaching and leaving with something impossible clutched against her chest. She had thought the guilt was proof. That shame knew what it was talking about because shame had been there from the beginning.

But So’lek said it differently.

Not that she had done nothing wrong. Not that it did not matter.

Only that Eywa was not something that could simply be stolen from by a half-mad woman in the forest.

Robin looked down again.

“I didn’t mean disrespect,” she said.

The words came quieter than before. Worn. She had said them too many times in her own head for them to sound new aloud.

“I know.” He answered immediately.

No pause. No hesitation. No weighing of whether to believe her.

Robin closed her eyes for a brief second.

The relief was so small she almost missed it. It didn’t take away the shame—it didn’t fix anything, really. It only loosened one knot in her throat enough that breath could pass around it.

When she opened her eyes again, So’lek was still watching her.

“That is not what troubles me most,” he said.

Robin looked up sharply. That, somehow, frightened her more.

“What does?” She asked without meaning to.

His gaze held hers. “You went alone.”

The answer was so simple that, for a moment, she didn’t understand it.

Then she did.

It was not only anger in his face. Not only the sacred offense. There was something else beneath it, something quieter and harder to look at.

Maybe, just maybe, he was upset that she had reached such desperation inside herself without witness. That she had gone into a place she didn’t understand, touched something that could have swallowed her whole for all she knew, and there had been no one there to stop her, to guide, or to tell her what she had found or what she had risked losing.

Robin’s lips parted slightly.

The memory of that night rose again in pieces. The forest too loud. The lights too bright. Her own mind tearing itself apart by the seams. The pull. The roots. The tendrils. The terrible relief of connection and the terror that followed after waking whole.

“There was no one,” she said.

It was not an excuse. It was barely even a defense. Only the truth.

So’lek looked at her for a long moment.

Then he said, “There is now.”

The words were quiet. They didn’t ask anything of her. They did not demand confession, gratitude, or trust she wasn’t ready to give. They simply stood there between them, solid as stone.

Robin stared at him. Something in her chest tightened sharply, then eased in a way that almost hurt worse.

There is now.

She didn’t know what to say to that.

So she said nothing.

She only remained where she was, beneath his gaze, no longer trying to pull away.

—

So’lek watched the small crease form between Robin’s brows.

Her eyes moved from one of his to the other, searching, measuring, trying to discern whether what he had said was true and, if it was, to what extent she was allowed to believe it.

There is now.

The words remained between them.

Robin did not answer at first. For several breaths she only stood there. Then her gaze fell to the space between their feet.

She thought in silence. So’lek let her.

At last, she nodded once. Then again.

When she lifted her face, she did not meet his eyes. Her gaze wandered somewhere between his shoulders, not quite touching him, not quite fleeing either.

“Okay,” she said.

Simply that.

Then she nodded a third time, smaller than the first two, as though she were trying to convince herself of something she was not yet ready to trust.

So’lek did not know what answer she had found inside herself. He only knew the worst of the fear had shifted. It had not left her, but it no longer stood as sharply in every line of her body.

Robin turned slightly.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Back to camp.” Her voice was steady, but worn thin. “I’m tired.”

As if summoned by intent alone, Nika descended from the sky above with a sharp cry, wings spreading wide before she landed a short distance away. The ikran’s claws scraped against stone, and she lowered her head towards Robin with an intensity that So’lek had come to recognize.

Nika had grown possessive quickly.

Perhaps all bonds were like that in the beginning, fierce and new, but this seemed more than newness. The ikran watched Robin as though the whole world was a thing that might take her rider if not kept under hard attention. She had known Robin for so little time, and yet there was already a claim there, bright and unmistakable.

Robin walked to her without hesitation.

The fear she had once carried around the ikran was gone. So’lek remembered it clearly—the wary distance, the tension in her shoulders, the careful way she had measured the creature’s every movement. None of that remained now. Robin lifted one hand and let it travel over Nika’s head, fingers smoothing along dark hide with an ease that looked almost old. Familiar. As if her body had learned that trust before her mind had found words for it.

Nika leaned into the touch.

Robin moved to the saddle and mounted.

So’lek turned his face to the sky and gave a sharp call.

Iley answered from above. His ikran circled once, then dropped by him, landing with a clean beat of wings. So’lek climbed into the saddle without speaking.

Robin watched Iley for a moment, then looked back at him.

Her eyes stayed on him longer than expected. Assessing—not cold, not angry, not even sad in any simple way. Confused, perhaps. Or still trying to understand the shape of what had happened between them.

Then her gaze moved to the sky.

Nika launched first. Iley followed.

They flew in silence.

For a while, there was only the wind, the clouds, the distant shimmer of the gathering falling behind them. Nika kept slightly ahead, Iley matching her pace at So’lek’s direction. They did not fly close enough for their wings to cross air. Not far enough to feel separate either. Side by side, but with space. Enough for thought. Enough for all that had been said to settle badly or gently, depending on the breath.

The Plains opened ahead.

At the distance, the camp stood in the heart of them, wounded but lit. The burned flags could be seen from above, their colors darkened and ashen where fire had taken them. The shelters had been remade where they could. The fires burned lower than they once had. The whole place seemed smaller from the air now, not in size, but in spirit.

A celebration had stood there once. Now survival did.

It was not far—not close either. It did not explain why Robin suddenly banked left and down.

So’lek’s gaze sharpened.

For one breath, he thought something had happened. That she had seen danger, or heard something through the bond, or chosen some new reckless path with no warning. Then Nika dipped lower toward a narrow line of water glinting between grass and stone.

So’lek guided Iley after her.

By the time he landed, Robin had already dismounted. She stood beside Nika, fingers working at the knot that held her cloak over her shoulders.

When So’lek slid down from Iley, she looked at him. “There’s no need for you to follow.”

He did not answer that.

Instead, he asked, “What are you doing?”

“I need to wash this off.” She pulled the cloak free and placed it over Nika’s saddle. Then she lifted her arms slightly away from her sides and glanced down at herself before looking back at him, as if that should explain everything.

It did.

Her skin was streaked with sweat and soot. Smoke had left dull shadows over her arms and throat. There was blood too—some likely hers, some likely not. Dried dark at the edge of one shoulder. Smudged near her ribs. Flecked over her forearm where she had not noticed it before. The day had left itself on her body in layers.

Robin gave a small shrug and turned away, walking towards the stream.

The water was shallow, clear enough that the stones beneath it showed pale under the sunlight. The water rose only around her calves, rippling outward in silver lines.

Her hands moved to a knot at the side of her chest piece—then they hovered there.

So’lek saw her ears twitch.

He did not look at her face then. He understood enough. The gesture paused in the space between instinct and awareness, between the desire to clean herself properly and the knowledge that he stood close enough to see too much—according to the human customs about the way they regarded the body.

Then her hand dropped back to her side.

She bent instead, gathered water in her hands, and began to wash what she could.

Her forearms first. Then higher, over the tense line of muscle in her arms. Water ran gray with soot and disappeared into the stream. She scrubbed at dried blood until it loosened under her fingers. She washed the back of one hand, then the other.

She did not look at him. Her back was to him now.

From that angle, he could see the closed lines of the scar along her right side, where the skin had healed but not forgotten. A wound that had come too close to an ending. One of several, he knew now. Not the first. Perhaps not even the worst.

Her confession had opened a thought in him that would not close again.

It had been a long time since the white room.

A long time, cycles, since cages, blood, a Sky Person in a stained uniform slamming hands against a panel and trying to open doors that would not obey. Since death had taken what he had believed, until recently, to be a stranger.

He had remembered it too clearly for the time that separated it from the present.

Memory had been survivable when what lay buried in it was unknown.

Now that grave had opened, and there was no stranger inside—only her.

Only Robin who now stood in the stream, alive before him, rubbing dried blood from her skin with her own hands.

The knowledge made the past feel less past than it should have. The tragedy had already happened, nothing would change it. He had survived it. He had placed it among the dead and gone on living because that was what the living did.

But now it seemed to happen again in him. Not because the memory had altered—because she had. Or perhaps because he had finally understood.

In the beginning, when he first made the connection between Robin and the woman in the white room, he had found, perhaps wrongly, some small consolation in the belief that the woman now before him was only an echo of the one who had died. A copy, as humans called it. A shape made by human hands with borrowed memories from a dead woman.

Cruel, yes. Tragic, yes.

But separate enough that the grief remained where he had put it.

Death had claimed the woman then. This one lived. Simple.

But the words Robin had shared had broken that clean division.

The soul that had stood in blood and violence before the cages was the same one here now, trying to wash away stains she could not even fully identify. The same one, wrapped in a body the RDA had made and a life Eywa had perhaps returned.

The thought was haunting.

It was also true.

So’lek moved silently to the edge of the stream.

Robin did not turn.

His face and gait remained steady enough that she would have not been able to see the turmoil moving beneath them if her eyes found him. He crouched by the water, cupped some of it in his hands, and began to clean his own forearms. The stains of the fight clung there too—dirt, smoke, a line of blood near his wrist. He rubbed them away with practical motions and let the stream carry what it could.

His eyes found her again despite himself.

Robin had moved to the side of her neck now. She scrubbed at a place below her jaw where she seemed to feel dried blood but could not see whether it was gone. Water ran down her throat, caught briefly at the edge of the chest piece, then disappeared beneath the dark fabric.

One of the beaded bracelets at her wrist shifted.

So’lek noticed before she did.

It had always been a little too loose. Unevenly made.

It slid over the wet skin of her hand as she bent again for water. Then it slipped free. Robin realized a moment too late—the bracelet dropped into the current and began to drift away.

She turned her head and watched it go. For one brief second, she seemed to consider whether it was worth chasing. Whether losing it mattered enough to step quickly through the stream and reach for it.

So’lek reached first.

His hand closed around it before the current could take it farther. He lifted it from the water. The beads glistened in his palm.

He looked at it for a moment.

It was not well made.

The spacing was uneven. The thread had too much give. Some beads gathered where they should have been balanced and spread too thin where they should have held together. Whoever had made it had done so without much skill.

But the colors were chosen well.

Blue. Green. Pink. Yellow. Nika’s colors, he realized.

So’lek looked up.

Robin was staring at him as if frozen where she stood.

Her gaze moved to the bracelet in his hand, then to the other still on her opposite wrist. That one was not perfect either, but it was smaller, tighter, better made. It stayed where it was meant to stay.

She looked back at the one he held.

“You can throw it away,” she said.

The words came too quickly.

She turned back toward the water before he could answer, gathering another handful and resuming the work of cleaning herself.

She added, “It’s the ugly one, anyway.” 

So’lek looked at the bracelet again. He did not know what, precisely, she meant by that.

He sighed quietly.

It would be disrespectful to throw it away in front of her. Even if it was ugly—and it was. So he reached to the pouch at his belt, opened it, and let the bracelet fall inside.

His fingers touched something already there.

Cold. Flat. Too perfect at the edges.

So’lek stilled.

Dog tags.

Hers.

For a moment, the stream, the wind, the soft movement of Nika nearby—all of it seemed to fall slightly away.

He remembered finding them in the forest.

Robin had left the Resistance then. Willingly. Stubbornly. Because she had learned the RDA was hunting her specifically and decided, in that silent, terrible logic of hers, that her presence made everyone else less safe. So she had removed herself before anyone could argue. Taken danger as though danger belonged only to her.

He had searched for signs of her then. Not because he wanted to, but because it was practical, he had told himself at the time.

A lie, perhaps.

He had found the tags. He had kept them.

Then forgotten, or chosen not to remember, that they remained in his pouch.

Now they lay there with the bracelet she had dismissed as unworthy of keeping. One object from the life the RDA had named and numbered. One from the life she was trying, awkwardly, unevenly, to make here.

So’lek closed the pouch in silence.

For a while, neither of them spoke.

Robin finished before he did. She straightened to her full height, water running in thin lines from her hands. Her shoulders rose and fell with one slow breath, as though she had decided she had done as much as she could.

When she turned, So’lek was still crouched by the stream.

His eyes moved over her once.

The scar at her side. The soot still gathered near one collarbone. The tired set of her mouth. The faint tremor that came and went in her fingers when she thought no one was looking.

“There is still blood,” he said.

Robin raised her brows at him.

“On your neck,” he explained.

She lifted one hand to the side of her neck.

“The other side,” he clarified.

Her hand fell, and the other rose.

Her fingers brushed her skin, searching, then paused when they found the dried patch. The blood had begun to crack at the edges.

“Oh,” she said softly.

She turned back to the stream, bent again, and cleaned the place carefully this time, rubbing until the dark stain broke apart and washed away. She checked once more with her fingers, then let the water fall from her hands.

So’lek rose to his feet.

Robin stepped out of the stream and walked back to Nika. She gathered the cloak from the saddle and drew it over herself again, fastening it with tired hands. The scar at her side disappeared beneath the fabric. So did most of the ash, the soot, the evidence of the day.

Not all.

Some things did not wash off.

Robin turned back to him.

“Well,” she said, voice quiet in the open air. “Back to camp, I guess.”

So’lek heard her.

He did not answer at once.

His thoughts were still with the pouch at his belt. With the dog tags and the bracelet resting together in the dark. With the white room and the stream. With the woman who had died and the woman who stood before him now, one and the same, alive beneath the sky, pretending that washing blood from her neck was a simple thing.

Robin watched him for a second, then seemed to decide not to press. She mounted on Nika in silence.

So’lek turned to Iley and climbed into the saddle.

Nika launched first, dark wings cutting upward into the night.

Iley followed.

They flew back toward the camp quietly, with the stream falling behind them and the wounded lights of the Plains waiting ahead.

—

Robin had expected the rest of the day to be quieter.

Not peaceful. She had stopped expecting peace on Pandora with any real sincerity. But quieter, at least. No more fighting. No more arguments held in low voices at the edge of sacred caves. No more strange conversations about souls and memories and whether a person could come back wrong or whole or both at once. No more confessions forced out of her because So’lek had looked at her too closely and asked the one question she had spent too many weeks trying not to answer.

Most of all, no more thinking about whether the thing held between two people could remain where it had been, or whether it could change right before her eyes without her noticing until it was already too late.

All those expectations went through the window the moment she heard a small voice call from across the camp. “Dreamwalker!”

Robin stopped.

Slowly, with the deep and immediate dread of someone who already knew the universe had decided to embarrass her, she turned.

At first, she saw only a small figure running in her direction. A child. Fast, determined, and cutting through the recovering camp as if nothing in the world had ever had the right to stand between her and her chosen target. Her hair was braided close to the scalp, beads threaded between the tight rows, the sides of her head shaved in a style Robin recognized only a second before she recognized the clothes.

Tlalim.

For one brief, merciful moment, Robin didn’t recognize the voice or the face.

Then the girl came closer, and a memory rose with terrible clarity…

Unevenly placed beads.

Even more uneven braids.

Most of all, the feeling of her scalp being subjected to something very close to torture by small, determined hands yanking her hair into what had been promised as beauty and had resulted instead in something resembling a nest built by a blind bird during a storm.

Robin’s soul, a recent subject in the earlier discussion between her and So’lek, nearly left her body.

The Tlalim child.

The one who had looked at her with all the solemn judgment a child could possibly gather and informed her, with no mercy at all, that she had no fashion.

Robin stared.

For a second, she had no idea why the girl would be in the Plains at all. Then reason caught up with her. The Tlalim wandered—of course they might be here. Especially now, after what had happened. Especially if word had spread and people had come to help.

She looked around more carefully.

They had come, she realized.

There were more Tlalim among the Zeswa and the others gathered at the Heart of the Plains, moving through the half-remade camp with practiced hands and serious faces. Some helped repair torn shelter frames. Some carried water. Some sat with the wounded. Others sorted through what had been salvaged from the destruction. Their bright beads and layered cloth moved among the ash-dulled colors of the camp like stubborn pieces of life refusing to be dimmed.

The small girl, however, had apparently decided her own contribution to the crisis would be personal.

Very personal.

Robin turned slightly, searching for So’lek almost on instinct.

He stood not far away, one hand resting against Iley’s neck in quiet thanks after the flight back. His attention, however, had shifted fully to the child running towards them. His face gave away very little.

Which meant, almost certainly, that he was entertained enough as it was to keep his silence without leaving the scene, probably.

Robin narrowed her eyes at him preemptively.

He didn’t react.

The girl reached them and stopped just short of colliding with Robin’s legs. She didn’t acknowledge So’lek, not even a glance. She simply planted herself in front of Robin, tilted her head back, and looked up at her with wide, accusing eyes.

A frown gathered on her small face. “You did it again!”

Robin blinked. “I did what again?”

The question came in Na’vi, and the fact that it came more easily now than it once had should probably have made her proud. Unfortunately, she was too busy preparing for whatever disaster this child had chosen to become.

The girl pointed to Robin’s head. “You undid the braids.”

Robin’s hand rose automatically towards her hair.

“You did it again,” the girl said, more severely. “It looks ugly!”

Robin’s fingers touched the side of her head.

Her hair was not ugly.

It was neat. Practical. Parted cleanly through the middle and bound into one firm braid that protected it and kept it out of the way, just as she had worn it since the beginning of this life. It had served her perfectly well through running, fighting, flying, almost dying, and every other nightmare Pandora had decided to throw at her.

Except, apparently, it had failed the aesthetic standards of one very small girl.

Robin let her hand fall. “It was necessary.”

The child looked even more offended. “No. It is ugly.”

“How can it be ugly?” Robin asked, truly regretting that she had allowed herself to be drawn into this argument. “It is cleanly done.”

The girl made a gesture with both hands, as if Robin had said something so outrageous that words alone could no longer hold the weight of her disbelief.

“It has nothing!” she yelled.

Robin stared at her.

The girl lifted her chin. “If it has nothing! It is ugly!”

An incredulous laugh escaped Robin before she could stop it.

Of all the ways she had imagined this day ending, being publicly insulted by a child over the emotional emptiness of her braid had not been on the list.

Her hand drifted to touch the braid near the base of her kuru. Yes, it was simple. No one else had made mention of it. No one except this child, who seemed to have a personal hatred for simplicity.

Trying to redirect the situation before it got worse, Robin looked around.

“Where is your brother?” she asked. “Did you leave him somewhere?”

The girl’s frown sharpened.

Wrong question.

Very wrong question.

“Why are you asking for my brother?” she demanded. “I am the one who came here!”

Robin opened her mouth.

The girl leaned closer. “Do you want him to come?”

“No,” Robin said quickly. “No, no. I only—”

“He is busy,” the girl said, as if Robin had deeply insulted her by implying the conversation required any additional participants. “I came here.”

“Right,” Robin said. “Clearly.”

The girl huffed.

Truly, Robin thought, this child was on a roll. Or on a mission.

When she grew up, she was going to be a fury. Robin was absolutely certain of it.

The girl lifted both hands towards Robin, though she was so small that even if Robin was not particularly tall by Na’vi standards, the child could barely reach past half of her arm. If she stood on her toes, perhaps she might reach Robin’s shoulder. Perhaps. With ambition.

Robin looked at the raised hands.

“What?” she asked warily. “What is it?”

“You need to sit.” She explained.

Robin’s stomach dropped. “Why?”

The girl looked at her as if the answer were obvious and Robin was embarrassing them both by requiring it to be spoken.

“I will fix it again.” She said this as though accepting a great burden. As though Robin should be overwhelmed with gratitude.

Robin thought of the pain her scalp had suffered the last time. She thought of the uneven braids. The crooked beads. The way she had eventually been saved only by the child’s mother, who had taken one look at her daughter’s work and shown mercy.

Robin was more known here now than she had been then.

That was the problem.

Back then, she had been too strange and too isolated to fully understand the social consequences of being turned into a walking craft experiment by a child.

Now she knew people.

Now people knew her.

Now if this child turned her hair into a disaster, Robin would most certainly not wait until later to undo it, and when she did the girl would almost certainly come back angrier. 

And Robin, frankly, had faced enough fury recently. Mostly her own.

She tried one last distraction. “Do you not want to look at my hands instead?”

She lifted one hand slightly, remembering the little brother’s deep and horrified fascination with the number of her fingers.

The girl looked at Robin’s hand. Then at Robin’s face. Then she dismissed the entire subject with a flick of her own small hand. “I already know you are deformed. Now sit.”

Robin went utterly still.

Beside her, So’lek still made no sound. He still didn’t leave.

Which was how Robin now knew he was absolutely enjoying this, because a man like him didn’t do things without purpose. And there was no reason for him to remain standing there listening to childish chatter other than for entertainment only.

She turned her head slowly toward him.

He stood there with one hand still on Iley’s neck, looking perfectly calm and perfectly useless.

Apparently, the man who had spent so much of the earlier hours demanding to know what she did, where she was, what she was thinking, without shutting up once, had now decided silence was sacred.

Robin looked back down at the child, who was still waiting with both hands raised and the expression of someone who had never once considered being denied.

God bless her soul, Robin thought for herself, with genuine feeling.

Just as she began to accept that there might be no escape from the hands of this terrifying little artisan, another voice called from nearby. “Tseya.”

The girl’s eyes widened and her head snapped around.

Robin felt immediate, profound relief.

A woman approached from between two half-repaired shelters, her cloak shifting around her legs as she walked. Her hair was braided neatly, beads woven through in beautiful strands that caught the light when she moved. Jewelry hung from her ears, subtle but elegant, and there was a tiredness in her face that belonged to the day they had all survived, softened by the patience of someone who had known exactly where to find her daughter.

Robin recognized her at once.

The little girl’s—Tseya, apparently—mother.

Tseya relented, but only partially. She looked at her mother, then back at Robin, not stepping away.

When the woman reached them, her eyes moved first to her daughter, then to So’lek, then to Robin. A small smile touched her face.

Her gaze lingered over the clothes Robin wore—the loincloth, the cloak, the pieces that had once been gifts from her hands. For a moment, the smile grew warmer. Pleased, almost.

“We meet again, warrior,” Seyari said. “Still patient with children, I see.”

Robin raised her brows. She wanted to deny it.

Seyari’s eyes lowered to Tseya, who still looked deeply committed to her cause.

“You are about to become a victim of my child once more,” Seyari said lightly. “You should say no while you can.”

Seyari’s smile faded by a degree. Not fully—not into grief, not into alarm. Only into something quieter as her eyes lowered from Robin’s face back to the cloak over her shoulders.

She lifted one hand and touched the edge of it.

The fabric was scorched there, darkened where fire had licked too close during the chaos of the attack. She had noticed it before, distantly, in the way one noticed damage when there had been too much to count. The edge had stiffened in places. Some of the fibers had curled inward, brittle and useless.

Seyari rubbed the damaged cloth gently between her fingers.

“You were here?” she asked.

Robin understood what she meant.

Not here in the camp now. Here when the sky had fallen.

She nodded once. “I was.”

Her gaze moved towards So’lek before she could stop it. He stood where she had last seen him, his attention fixed on them. For one brief second, their eyes met.

“We were,” she said.

Seyari looked to him, recognition passing over her face. She inclined her head slightly, the fingers from her free hand touching her forehead before extending in So’lek’s direction.

“So’lek.” She acknowledged him.

“Seyari,” he answered with the same gesture.

Robin blinked once.

Of course they knew each other. She had no reason to be surprised by that. Pandora had existed without her in it. These people had histories, names, and ties that had nothing to do with her arrival among them. Still, the realization settled strangely, as if she had stepped into a room and only now noticed the doors had been there long before she entered.

Seyari’s hand fell from the cloak.

“Come with me,” she said.

Tseya immediately made a sound of protest.

“Sa’nok,” she complained, pointing once more at Robin’s head with the full intensity of moral outrage. “It is ugly.”

Seyari looked down at her daughter.

She didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to. Her expression barely changed, but something in it became calm and unmistakable in the way only a mother’s warning could be. The kind of look that told a child, very clearly, that the next choice would not only be a warning.

Tseya’s mouth pressed into a displeased line. She huffed, very loudly, but lowered her hand.

Robin watched in fascinated silence.

Apparently, that was universal. A mother’s skill.

The public shaming of Robin’s hair ceased. For now.

Seyari looked back at Robin. “Come.”

Robin followed. She resisted, with almost heroic effort, the urge to glance back at So’lek as she walked away.

It was becoming a problem.

Not dependence. She didn’t think it was that. She could move without his approval, think without his permission, breathe without first checking whether his expression allowed it. But she had become acutely aware of his presence in ways that irritated her precisely because she couldn’t stop noticing them. His silence. His gaze. The moments when his face gave little away and yet her mind still tried to read it. The weight of his attention when he was near.

It’s not that she didn’t want to look back to see what he was thinking. She wanted not to want to. That, unfortunately, didn’t make the wanting disappear.

She managed to keep her eyes forward and followed Seyari between the newly repaired shelters.

The camp still bore the shape of disaster. Some frames stood freshly tied, their fibers pale where new material had replaced burned supports. Others leaned in ways that would need fixing by morning. The air carried smoke beneath the sharper smells of grass, medicine, and damp earth. People moved carefully through the spaces where celebration had once spilled bright and easy.

Seyari led her into one of the reconstructed shelters. She sat on her heels, and Robin did the same, sitting in front of her.

Inside, the light was soft. Bundles of fabric sat in one corner, along with small tools, beads, thread, and folded pieces of clothing. Tseya slipped in after them with the stealth of someone who absolutely believed she belonged wherever her mother happened to be.

Seyari turned to Robin and held out her hand.

“The cloak,” she said.

Robin hesitated only a second before removing it.

The air touched her side at once, cool over the scar usually hidden beneath the fabric. She tried not to react to that. It was only skin. Only an old wound. She was not ashamed of it, not exactly, but the cloak had made it easier not to feel the eyes that sometimes drifted there. Easier to avoid questions. Easier not to be reminded by every curious glance that this body carried a history people would see even when she wanted silence and secrecy.

Seyari took the cloak and spread it over her lap.

She examined the damaged edge.

Her face remained tired, still elegant in that effortless way Robin had noticed the first time they met, but something like disapproval gathered in her eyes.

“Charred fiber,” Seyari said. “No use wearing this anymore.”

Then she let the cloak fall to the ground beside her.

Robin felt the loss before she could reason with it.

It was ridiculous. She knew it was ridiculous. The cloak had not originally belonged to her. It had been given. It was fabric. Practical, replaceable, now damaged beyond proper use.

Still, something in her chest tightened.

She hadn’t meant to become attached to it. She hadn’t even realized she became attached to it.

But she had.

The cloak had been one of the first things offered to her without demand. One of the first things she had taken from Na’vi hands and kept wearing afterward. It had covered her, yes, but it had also marked a moment she hadn’t known how to name at the time. Not acceptance, perhaps. Not belonging. But something adjacent to kindness.

And now it lay on the floor, useless.

Seyari didn’t let the moment linger long enough for Robin to drown in it.

She turned her body towards the bundle of folded fabrics in the corner and began sorting through them with practiced hands. After a few seconds, she pulled out another piece and let it unfold by gravity.

Robin watched it spill downward in soft, layered lines.

It was another cloak, though not quite like the first. Lighter. More like a shawl, wide enough to cover the shoulders and side, but thinner, made for movement and wind rather than harsh weather. The weave caught the light subtly when Seyari turned it, and the colors were quieter than the first, but carefully chosen.

The woman studied it, then gave a small approving hum.

She returned in front of Robin.

The new fabric lay between them in Seyari’s hands. She extended it. Robin looked at it. Then at her.

Taking gifts was still not her forte.

The first time, there had been an excuse. A strange one, but an excuse all the same. She had let Seyari’s children have their fun with her even when she had been tired and hurt, too bewildered to argue properly, and Seyari had given the cloak afterward with enough ease that refusing would have taken more strength than accepting.

This time, there was no excuse.

Robin had done nothing.

She hadn’t earned another piece of clothing. She hadn’t even asked for it. She had no claim to Seyari’s time, work, or kindness.

The fact that she wanted it, that part of her had already reached toward the comfort of being covered again, only made accepting it feel worse.

Seyari watched her for a moment.

Then her mouth curved slightly.

“You should take what is gifted,” she said. “Or you will be rude.”

Robin looked up.

There was no malice in the words. No true reprimand. Only a calm, knowing firmness that made refusal suddenly impossible without turning the moment into something larger and more awkward than either of them needed.

The woman knew exactly what she was doing.

Robin let out a small breath. Then she accepted the cloak.

The fabric was lighter than the old one. Softer too, maybe. It settled over her hands with a quiet weight that felt, despite everything, like relief.

“Thank you,” Robin said.

Seyari’s expression warmed with approval.

Before anything else could be said, Tseya appeared at her mother’s side with all the impatience of a storm cloud given legs.

“Sa’nok,” she said, still insistent, though far less rude than she had been with Robin. “Are you going to fix her hair now?”

Robin closed her eyes for half a second.

For one wild, sincere moment, she wanted the earth to open beneath her, swallow her whole, and spit her out somewhere very far away.

The hideout, perhaps.

Preferably beside a sleeping mat.

Preferably with enough distance between herself and this child’s hands to finally, finally get one decent night of rest.

—

So’lek watched Robin walk with Seyari back into the camp.

The child followed close at their side, still speaking with her hands as much as her mouth, clearly offended by Robin’s lack of decoration. Robin kept her head slightly bowed as she listened, and from where So’lek stood, he could see the exact moment she turned.

Not fully. Only the smallest hesitation in her step along with her head shifting his way by a fraction, as though she meant to look back.

Then she stopped herself, and kept walking.

So’lek noticed because he had wanted her to do it.

He had wanted her to look.

That unsettled him more than the almost-glance itself.

His hand remained against Iley’s neck, but his attention had followed Robin across the camp with a steadiness he could no longer hide behind excuses. The awareness between them had become too constant to ignore. It was there in the silences, in the moments when she looked for him before catching herself, in the way he knew the smallest shifts of her posture now, in the way his own gaze found her without being commanded.

Something had shifted. Not loudly. Not cleanly. But it had shifted all the same, and now that he had seen it, he could not return it to what it had once been.

Robin had confessed her truth to him.

Not all of it, perhaps. Not every wound, not every fear. But enough—maybe more than enough. She had opened the secret she had carried since her first days among them, since the forest, since the Trees of Voices, since she had been desperate enough to reach for a sacred place she did not understand—a place that might have given her back to herself, or taken her away entirely.

She had told him.

Haltingly. Fearfully. As though every word might become the one that made him look at her differently.

And he had—that was the truth of it. He did look at her differently now. Not with disgust. Not with rejection. Not the way she had feared. But differently all the same.

Robin had given him the truth she feared most.

He had not done the same.

The thought settled with weight.

He had seen her die.

Now he knew it had not been a version of her, not an echo. It had been her. And she did not know that he had been there. She did not know that when she spoke of W-17, of cages that did not open, of dying for nothing, he remembered the room from the other side of the bars.

The trust between them was growing, he could feel that. But it was growing around a silence—his silence—that might one day wound them both.

So’lek’s jaw tightened slightly.

Ahead, Robin exited the shelter after Seyari. The new fabric the Tlalim woman had given her shifted over her shoulders, lighter than the old cloak, catching briefly in the low firelight. She stood there, wrapped in a gift she probably still did not know how to accept.

And So’lek felt the weight of silence settle deeper inside him.

The camp moved before him. Low voices. Distant work. The soft, stubborn sounds of the living continuing after ruin.

All at once, the pouch at his belt seemed heavier. His hand lowered to it almost without thought.

Inside were the dog tags he had found then. Cold, cursed metal. Human-made. A name, a record, a life the RDA had tried to own.

And beside them now lay the uneven bracelet from the stream. The one she had deemed ugly, almost the same way the child had judged her hair. A thing imperfectly made, dismissed too quickly, left to be carried away by water if he had not reached for it.

Two small things she had left behind without looking back.

Two things belonging to her that he had not thrown away.

So’lek closed his hand briefly over the pouch.

It wasn’t the truth—or not the whole of it. The truth was that Earth had become a place with no reason left in it.

He had been honorably discharged, which sounded cleaner than the way it felt. There had been a ceremony. A handshake. A file closed with good words and a polite summary of service.

He had been a pilot for most of his adult life, Navy before private contracts, disciplined enough to survive the parts of himself that had wanted badly to collapse—people respected that about him too. They spoke of his steadiness as if it were virtue instead of stubbornness, as if not drinking himself into the floor after his son died had been proof that he was made of stronger material.

It wasn’t strength.

It was habit.

You woke up. You shaved. You ate something if the stomach allowed it. You went where you were meant to go. You did the work placed in front of you. You did not give the grief an opening because if it found one, it would enter with teeth and make you bleed.

His son had been seventeen.

There had been treatment—that was the part Elias learned never to say aloud unless he wanted the old rage to wake fully. There had been treatment. There had been technology, medication, procedures, therapies with survival rates printed in clean optimistic numbers. There had been doctors who knew what to do. Clinics with glass walls. Machines that could map the illness almost beautifully, if beauty was a word a man could use for the thing killing his child.

There had been a cure, or close enough to one that the distinction had stopped mattering.

But there had not been money—not enough, and not the right kind. Not the kind that opened the right doors and made the right people hurry.

He had served. He had flown. He had risked his life for governments that printed gratitude on paper and called it honor. And when his son needed saving, honor did not pay.

Service did not pay.

Years in uniform did not pay.

The military took care of its own, people said. Elias learned that meant it took care of the parts of its own still useful to it.

His boy died in a bed too white and too sterile for a child.

Afterwards, his marriage didn’t survive the silence. It died too.

He and his wife—ex-wife—hadn’t meant to become cruel—at least, Elias didn’t think they had. They had simply found themselves left with a kind of hurt too large to hold properly. With nowhere honest to place it, they placed it on each other. Who should have pushed harder. Who should have called someone else. Who should have signed the contract sooner. Who should have sold what they still had. Who should have seen the symptoms earlier. Who should have known. Who should have saved him.

No one had saved him.

That was the only truth.

But grief hated clean truth. It preferred blame because blame at least gave the hands something to close around.

By the time they separated, there was very little left between them but exhaustion and the memory of a boy neither of them could mention without drawing blood or tears from each other.

Elias lived alone after that.

He taught sometimes. Flight simulation, emergency response, old military procedures adjusted for private companies that wanted men with experience but not opinions.

He did the work well because he did most things well. He corrected posture. Corrected grip. Corrected bad habits before they became fatal ones. He watched young pilots laugh too loudly in break rooms and talk about the sky as if the sky had not yet taken anything from them.

He didn’t envy them.

He didn’t hate them either.

He simply felt far away.

When the RDA made its offer, he read through the packet once. Then again.

Pandora. Long-term deployment. Hazard pay. Flight support. Transport. Reconnaissance. Aircraft escort. Resource protection.

Resource protection was a beautiful phrase for ugly things.

He knew that much before he ever set foot off Earth.

He signed anyway.

People thought it was greed—it was emptiness. There was a difference.

Pandora, when he arrived, wasn’t beautiful to him at first.

Other people said it was. They whispered it behind sealed glass and exo-packs, wide-eyed in a way that reminded him of recruits looking up at their first launch sky. Elias understood the reaction in theory. The scale of it. The color. The impossible floating mountains. The forests that breathed light. The sky that seemed too large because Earth’s had grown so choked, crowded, and old.

But beauty required a part of him that had not come on the ship.

To Elias, Pandora was just another war, only farther from home.

The uniforms changed. The enemy had another language. The air itself could kill you without equipment. The terrain was worse, the wildlife worse, the command structure more honest in its brutality. But the center of it was familiar enough—men with money wanted something, and men with weapons made a path towards it.

And so, he worked.

He flew transport runs between bases. Moved personnel, equipment, sealed cargo with too many warning labels and not enough explanation. Sometimes he flew escort for crews sent into places they had no business entering. Sometimes he taught younger RDA pilots how not to die in storms, or under a sudden ikran attack, or in the disorienting magnetic fields that made instruments lie.

He became useful again.

It didn’t bring him joy. Nothing did, really.

Then he heard the name—Walker. Robin Walker. 

At first it came through casual talk, the kind that drifted through mess halls, hangars, briefing rooms, places where people believed a man was not listening only because he didn’t often speak. Captain Robin Walker. Air Force. A former flight lead. Young, though not as young as she looked, apparently—that caught him off guard, because he had wrongfully thought the captain was male. Walker was, apparently, sharp enough to make people careful and pretty enough to make them resent her seriousness.

Elias saw her for the first time across a operations room lit too brightly.

She was shorter than he expected.

That was the first thing he noticed and dismissed just as quickly, because it mattered less than people liked to pretend it did. She was thin too, compact in the way some pilots were, all restraint and contained energy. Her hair had been tied back with exactness. Her uniform sat perfectly on her frame. She wore herself like someone who understood the value of appearing composed in rooms where people were waiting for any excuse to mistake softness for weakness.

She was composed, elegant in a severe sort of way, with a face that would have invited gentleness if the eyes had not warned against assuming too much.

There was hurt in those eyes.

Elias noticed because old grief recognized young grief even when young grief had learned to stand straight.

She was never disrespectful, he saw that too. Her answers were precise. Her tone measured. She didn’t waste words on people who wanted to pull more from her than the conversation required. That, more than anything, seemed to offend them.

“She’s got a hell of an attitude for someone built like that,” someone said once near the hangar.

Elias did not look up from the maintenance checklist in his hands.

Another man laughed. “Face like that, attitude like a blade. Shame.”

“She thinks she’s better than everyone.”

“No,” Elias said before he meant to.

The conversation stopped, and the men looked at him.

He kept reading the checklist. “She’s doing her job. That’s all.”

No one answered that.

They didn’t stop talking about her, of course. Men like that rarely learned shame from one correction. But they lowered their voices after, at least when Elias was near. He didn’t defend her because he cared for her. He didn’t know her. He defended the line, perhaps. The principle of it. Discipline mattered. Respect mattered. A person’s competence didn’t become less real because someone else wanted access to softness and was denied it.

And Robin Walker denied a great deal of softness without seeming to try. That made people talk.

Months later the rumor started.

She had found Jake Sully, they said.

Not captured him. Not brought him in. Not killed him. Found him—found the trail others had chased for years and failed to hold.

People whispered about that too, with irritation sharp beneath fascination.

How had she done it?

What system had she used?

What pattern had she seen?

Why had she left so little behind?

No clean methods in the logs. No full map of her reasoning. No useful breadcrumb trail for the next hungry officer to follow.

Some said she was hoarding the glory. Gatekeeping the only method that had worked so command would need her again.

Elias didn’t believe that—or not entirely.

He had seen enough reluctance in her silences to suspect something else.

Maybe she had found what they wanted and understood, too late, that finding wasn’t the same as handing over.

Maybe she had stepped close enough to a truth and then regretted the direction of her own feet.

Maybe she had chosen not to leave a path because some part of her didn’t want anyone to walk it after her in case she decided the mission was too rotten to leave to other’s hands.

He had no proof, only instinct.

Pilots lived by instruments until instruments failed. After that, they lived by instinct or they died.

He heard she had been reassigned to W-17 after that.

Before she left, there had been a few other missions. One of them became a story people repeated for different reasons depending on who told it.

A human doctor had gotten lost with Walker in the forest overnight. People lost in Pandora—that wasn’t usually the kind of story that held survivors.

Pandora didn’t forgive strangers in the dark. Not humans, ever. Not even recoms, from what Elias understood, even if recoms liked to act as if blue skin and arrogance made them native enough to be spared.

But the doctor and Walker survived, somehow.

They were found after dawn, coated in dried mud, exhausted, half-feral with tension—but alive. Rescue teams didn’t fly into that forest at night.

—

‘Too much risk,’ command would say. ‘Too much loss for one pilot and one scientist,’ though they never said that part aloud.

—

So the two women had spent the night alone under the canopy while everything hungry and curious moved around them.

Elias heard the doctor tell it weeks later in the infirmary, voice shaky with the strange laughter of someone who had survived and still didn’t know whether to be amused or horrified.

“She grabbed me—” the doctor said. “—by the shoulders. I was panicking, I know I was. I couldn’t breathe, and she just grabbed me and shook me hard enough my teeth clicked. Told me to ‘calm the fuck down.’”

Someone laughed.

The doctor did too, but not fully.

Her voice shook when she continued. “Then she shoved me down into the mud. I thought she’d lost it. I honestly thought, ‘This is it, she’s going to kill me because I’m making noise.’ But then she just gets down in front of me and starts smearing mud over my arms, my face, my clothes—everywhere. I asked her what the hell she was doing and she says, ‘Hiding our scent.’ Like that. Like it was obvious.”

Elias had stopped pretending not to listen by then.

“She found some hollow under roots or rock, I don’t even know. I was terrified. Dragged me in. We stayed there until morning.” The doctor’s smile faded. “I think… I think some Na’vi passed by through the night. Some animals, too.” She shook her head. “She acted calm, but she had that rifle in her hands all night and I don’t think her grip loosened for a second.”

“Did you sleep?” someone asked.

The doctor looked at them. “No… No. Neither of us did.”

That story stayed with Elias.

Not because it was heroic—heroic stories were usually just terror edited after the fact. It stayed because he understood what it was to be the calm one when calm had become only another task.

Walker had been scared—of course she had—only idiots were not scared of Pandora at night. But she had known panic would kill them faster than the forest alone, so she gave the fear a job and called it survival.

That, Elias could respect.

After, she was deployed. To W-17.

Her name became rarer.

Not gone. Names like hers never disappeared fully. But it moved differently through conversations.

Less admiration hidden beneath resentment, and more caution. Less gossip, more glances. Something had changed around her file—something about trust, assignment status, information access. Elias knew better than to ask directly.

If command wanted a person forgotten before they were dead, they made the forgetting procedural.

The next time Elias saw her, she was already cargo.

The assignment came just after noon, logged through standard transport channels with more clearance attached than explanation. W-17 to Hell’s Gate. One sealed cryo bed—biological material, it said. Priority handling. No delays.

Biological material.

Elias stared at the words longer than he should have, his eyes narrowing at the words, knowing they were embellishment for something ugly.

He went to W-17.

The base looked ordinary from the air, which was the first sign that it was not. Pandora bases always tried to look smaller than they were from above. Less brutal. Less desperate. A cluster of metal structures cut into green, smoke marking activity, walls marking fear. And W-17 sat in the landscape with a quietness he disliked at once.

Upon closer inspection, it looked uglier than it should have been. It had been raided, it seemed.

He landed, completed the approach check, and waited while a tech in a stained uniform waved him toward the loading area.

No one said much.

That was another sign.

The cargo bay doors opened with a hydraulic groan. The cryo bed waited inside the loading hold, already sealed, frost gathered thick along the small viewing window. There were two soldiers nearby and one medical officer signing off on the transfer. The officer barely looked up.

“Destination Hell’s Gate,” she said.

“I read the order,” Elias answered.

She held out the slate. “Sign here.”

He signed and the soldiers moved to load the cryo bed. Elias watched them guide it toward his aircraft with the mechanical care given to expensive equipment.

He told himself that was none of his business.

That was how the day was meant to go.

He had survived many years by understanding when something was not his business.

But when the cryo bed was secured inside the transport, when the soldiers had stepped back and the medical officer was already leaving, Elias remained beside it for a moment longer.

The window was frosted over.

He could have walked away—maybe he should have. Instead he reached out and wiped his gloved hand across the glass.

Frost smeared beneath his palm.

The face beneath came clear enough to recognize.

For one second he didn’t understand what he was seeing. Then he did.

“Fucking hell, Walker.” The words left him quietly.

No one answered.

Robin Walker, former pilot, lay under a white sheet drawn up to her collarbone. Death had altered her in the subtle, terrible ways death always did. It had smoothed the tension from her face but not given peace in return. Her skin looked wrong in the cold, waxen under the cryo light. Her hair had been arranged badly, with no care for how she might have worn it in life. Her mouth was slightly parted, as if the body had not fully understood when breath stopped being required.

The sheet covered most of her, but not all.

At the base of her throat, just above where the fabric began, he saw the first ugly line of the autopsy incision. It had been closed after. Stitched. The cut disappeared beneath the white sheet and likely continued down through the whole torso. Dead flesh that wouldn’t heal. Wouldn’t scar.

Even after death, they had opened her.

He didn’t know what happened in W-17, not exactly. He didn’t need to. The shape of it was clear enough.

A woman who had once hunted Jake Sully and left no trail for others to follow. A woman sent to a base people stopped speaking about. A body returned as biological material under priority clearance with autopsy marks at the throat.

There were moments when a man could still pretend detachment was neutrality.

This wasn’t one of them.

Elias lowered his hand from the cryo bed and looked toward the cockpit.

The pilot waiting beside the loading ramp glanced at him. “We good?”

Elias looked back at Walker.

“No,” he said.

The man frowned. “What?”

Elias moved.

He completed the loading process because stopping there, in the open, would only invite questions too early. He secured the cryo bed himself. Checked the locks twice. Closed the ramp. Entered the cockpit. Cleared the pad. Lifted into Pandora’s sky with W-17 shrinking behind him in the rear feed.

For the first few minutes, he flew the assigned route.

Then he disabled the tracker.

Not clumsily. Not in panic.

He had been good with systems before the RDA hired him. Better after. Good enough to know how to make a failure look like interference for a few seconds, then a longer disruption, then nothing anyone could immediately pin to deliberate action.

He cut the location beacon. Rerouted a false diagnostic loop. Killed the backup ping.

The transport vanished from command’s map.

Almost immediately, the radio crackled. “Transport Three-Seven, your location just dropped from our system. Confirm status.”

Elias kept flying.

“Three-Seven, confirm status.”

He looked ahead. Clouds moved in torn bright layers over the forest. Light scattered across them in colors Earth had forgotten how to make. His hands were steady on the controls.

“Three-Seven, do you copy?”

Elias reached out and switched the radio off.

The silence that followed was not peaceful.

It was final.

He didn’t feel heroic. Mostly, he felt tired.

But beneath the tiredness, for the first time in longer than he could remember, there was something clean.

He flew until the base was far behind and the route no longer mattered. He chose a clearing at the edge of the forest, somewhere roots rose thick from the earth and the canopy opened just enough for landing. It wasn’t safe. Nowhere on Pandora was safe, not for a human alone. But it was quiet, and the trees there stood large enough to seem older than the war trying to cut them down.

He landed.

For several minutes after the engines powered down, he sat in the cockpit without moving. The silence of the forest pressed against the hull.

Then he got up.

Getting the cryo bed out alone was ugly work. It was heavy, awkward, not made for one man and whatever stubbornness remained in him.

He used the loading sled first, then manual release, then leverage when the sled caught on uneven ground. Sweat gathered under his collar. Twice he had to stop and listen because something moved in the trees beyond the clearing. Each time, nothing came close enough to show itself.

Finally, the cryo bed rested on the ground beneath the roots.

Elias stood over it, breathing hard.

He turned it off. The hum died.

For a moment, that felt obscene. Then it felt right.

He waited until the frost began to loosen around the edges. Until the seals gave. Until the lid could be opened without the machine fighting him.

When he lifted it, cold air spilled out in a pale breath and vanished into Pandora’s warmth.

Robin Walker lay very still beneath the white sheet.

There was no machinery between them now.

No glass.

No frost.

No cargo designation.

Only a dead woman, too far from home.

Elias removed his cap and held it in one hand.

He didn’t know what to say. That bothered him for a moment, then stopped.

What right did he have to say anything? He hadn’t known her. Not really. He had seen her across rooms. Heard stories. Understood pieces. Respected the idea of her from a distance. That wasn’t enough to claim grief.

But it was enough to refuse indignity.

She looked younger.

That was what hit him first.

Not that she was dead. His mind understood that. His eyes saw it.

But she looked young.

Older than his son had been, yes. Walker had been a woman, not a boy. A captain. A pilot. Someone who had crossed oceans of air, and war, and ambition before Pandora took her. His son had been seventeen and had never even gotten to finish high school. He had never worn a uniform. Never earned wings. Never stood in a briefing room with grief hidden behind disciplined eyes.

But grief didn’t care for precision. Or for truth.

Elias’s hand remained on the edge of the cryo bed.

His boy had wanted to fly.

That memory came so suddenly he nearly flinched from it.

He had said it when he was ten, then twelve, then even later when illness had begun to thin him and everyone pretended not to see it.

Wanted to fly, like his father. Wanted to go up where the world made sense from above. Wanted to feel clouds under him and see the horizon ahead.

He never got to.

He never got to become anything.

Walker had become something. Something formidable, by all accounts. Something sharp, difficult, and disciplined. Something people resented when they couldn’t make her smaller. 

She became something, and still, here she was. Cold beneath a sheet. Marked as cargo. Headed back to the hands of the people who had taken her life or failed to protect it so completely there was little moral difference.

Elias forced himself to look down at her.

Then could not bear to keep doing it.

He lifted his gaze towards the sky beyond.

The sky had always been refuge.

Even on Earth, even after the air had grown crowded, dirty, and owned by whoever could pay to rise above the ruin, the sky had remained the one place where his mind knew how to arrange itself. Altitude. Weather. Speed. Distance. Risk. All of it clear. All of it answerable if the hands were steady enough.

But now even the sky blurred.

Clouds moved over Pandora in immense pale formations, slow and indifferent above the world. Elias stared at them until their edges went soft. For a moment he thought it was the humidity, cold steam from the cryo bed, anything else.

Then he blinked—hard. The blur cleared.

He didn’t cry. Not quite.

He hadn’t cried when his son died either, not in front of anyone. Later, maybe. Alone. Once, or twice. Never enough. Never in a way that helped.

His hand tightened once on the cryo bed’s edge.

Somewhere back on Earth, someone might be waiting for Robin Walker. A father. A mother. A brother or sister. A partner, maybe. Children.

He didn’t know, and had no right to imagine too much.

Someone who still thought of her in present tense. Someone who believed she was far away but living. Someone who would wake under Earth’s poisoned sky and not know that she had died on a moon too distant for grief to reach properly.

The RDA wouldn’t tell them the truth, he knew that with certainty. Maybe they wouldn’t tell them she was dead at all. Maybe she would become classified loss, delayed communication, reassignment, operational silence. Maybe some carefully worded notice would arrive months too late, telling them only what could be admitted without consequence. Maybe nothing would arrive. Maybe whoever loved her would be left to make peace with absence because the company that owned her contract also owned the story of her ending.

Just as the hospital had owned the story of his son in codes, invoices, and treatment denials written in language clean enough to hide the murder under policy.

Elias looked back down at her. Then he moved.

He found tools in the transport. Not proper ones—but enough to get to work. A field shovel. A cutting edge. His own hands when the roots made the work difficult.

He chose a place between the roots of a large tree where the ground was softer than stone and partly hidden from the open clearing. He dug there.

It took a long time—longer than he expected, though he should have. Pandora didn’t yield easily. Roots caught at the shovel. Soil clung heavy and dark. Sweat ran down his back. His arms began to ache. More than once he had to stop and breathe through the burn in his shoulders.

The light shifted as he worked. The bright overhead glare of day softened, tilted, became gold through the canopy.

Still, he dug.

He thought of his son once and then many times.

Not in memory of the hospital, not at first. He thought of the boy at twelve, sitting in the old grounded trainer Elias had been allowed to show him once. His hands had been too small around the yoke. His grin had been enormous. He had asked questions faster than Elias could answer them.

He thought of Walker, young and staring at aircraft, wanting the same impossible thing.

He didn’t know if that had happened. He imagined it anyway.

The grave didn’t need to be perfect. Only deep enough. Honest enough.

When he finished he returned to the cryo bed and stood there for another moment.

Then he wrapped Robin carefully in the white sheet.

That was when the autopsy mark showed again, beginning at the throat and vanishing beneath the fabric. Elias paused only once. His jaw tightened. Then he pulled the sheet higher, not to hide the truth from himself, but because whatever had been done to her body didn’t need to meet the open air.

He carried her to the grave with more care than he had expected from himself. Set her down between the roots. Adjusted the sheet once when it caught beneath her shoulder.

For a moment he stood there. The forest watched.

In the end, he said only, “You’re not going back to them, kid.”

His voice sounded rougher than he intended.

The words were not a prayer.

They were not enough.

They were all he had.

He covered her with soil. Slowly.

By hand at first, because the first fall of dirt felt too harsh from the shovel. Then with the shovel when the work demanded more than feeling could manage. The white disappeared by degrees. Then the shape beneath. Then there was only dark earth between the roots of a Pandoran tree and one man kneeling beside it with dirt under his nails.

When it was done, Elias remained there.

He sat back on the ground, one arm resting across his bent knee, and looked toward the horizon through the break in the trees.

The sky had changed again.

Gold to violet. Violet to deep blue. Then darker. Stars came one by one, brighter than they had any right to be on this night. Around him, the forest began its night life, small sounds first, then larger ones in the distance.

Elias knew he should move. Knew the dark was dangerous. Knew staying in one place too long was foolish.

Still, he stayed.

He thought of whoever might be waiting for Robin Walker again.

He thought of his son.

He thought of the RDA, of the empty cryo bed, of the radio he had switched off.

He thought, with a strange detached clarity, that his life had just ended in one direction and would need to begin in another.

When he finally stood, his legs were stiff.

He didn’t take the cryo bed.

He left it there, empty, near the landing site, useless to anyone who came looking too late. Let the RDA have the container, if they found it. Let them have the broken chain of custody, the failed transport, the questions they wouldn’t be able to answer cleanly.

They didn’t get her.

Elias returned to the aircraft.

He didn’t fly to Hell’s Gate.

He flew to the Resistance.

Not directly. Not stupidly. He knew how to vanish better than command had ever suspected, because command often mistook obedience for limitation. It took time. It took caution. It took channels already half-built through months of quiet betrayal.

He had been helping the Resistance before that day. Supply routes. Patrol timing. Weak points in escort schedules. Places where a raid would hurt equipment more than people. He had told himself it was enough—that he was doing what he could while remaining useful where he stood. That a man didn’tt need to burn every bridge to stop walking across some of them.

But half-measures had a way of becoming cowardice when the dead were placed in front of you.

By the time Elias reached them, he was no longer a contact.

He was a defector.

A traitor, if the RDA wrote the file.

A man late to decency, if he wrote it himself.

Years passed differently after that.

Not easily. Never easily. But differently.

With the Resistance, he found work that didn’t require him to pretend he had no morals. He flew when they needed him. Taught when he could. Fixed what he understood. Learned what he did not. He spent time in High Camp when Jake Sully’s needed him there, living among those who understood exile in more forms than one.

Healing didn’t come dramatically.

That disappointed him at first, though he never admitted it. There was no morning when he woke and discovered grief had left. No ceremony. No clean absolution. Pain didn’t vanish because he chose a better side. His son remained dead. His marriage remained broken. Earth remained far behind him, wounded and cruel and full of ghosts.

But slowly, the old disinterest in life began to thin. Not disappear. Thin.

He learned to look forward to certain sounds. Morning voices. Engines that started cleanly after difficult repair. Laughter from people who had survived long enough to be surprised by it. Rain on tarp. The call of ikran passing overhead. The particular hush that fell over High Camp when the sky changed color at evening.

Sometimes he flew and felt, for a few minutes at a time, like the sky was home again.

And, some days, he thought of Robin Walker.

Not every day. Saying he did would have been dishonest. The living were demanding, and grief, even grief for one’s own dead, changed under the pressure of years. But sometimes a phrase brought her back. A young pilot standing too straight in a briefing. A woman ignoring the men who wanted her attention and resented her for not giving it. A story about someone surviving by doing the ugly, practical thing first.

Sometimes it was the sky.

He would stand at the edge of High Camp and look out over the floating mountains, over mist and light, and wonder what Robin would have done if she had lived long enough to see a life beyond the RDA.

Would she have come to them eventually?

He thought she might have.

Not easily. Not softly. She didn’t seem like a woman who would have allowed herself to be forgiven too quickly, even by people who didn’t know what she blamed herself for. But he thought she might have come all the same. Step by step. Refusal by refusal. Choosing the harder right thing and then pretending it was only strategy.

He wondered whether the hurt behind her eyes would have eased.

He wondered if she would have learned to make a life away from Earth. If Pandora would have remained exile or become something stranger, something like home.

He wondered if she would have flown again one day, not for command, not for orders, not to hunt anyone, but because some part of her remembered loving the sky before war made it another place to bleed.

He wondered if she would have found people who respected her properly. People who didn’t resent her discipline. People who didn’t mistake her refusal for cruelty. People who could stand beside her without trying to make her smaller.

Maybe even people who loved her.

That thought always hurt in a different way, because life was not just, and wondering didn’t change that.

Robin Walker was dead. Buried beneath roots in a clearing Elias didn’t know if he could find again even if he tried, though sometimes he believed his hands would remember the place even if his eyes did not. Whatever she might have become had been taken. Whatever healing might have waited for her had been left in a future no one would reach.

Still, he hoped.

It was a foolish thing, hope. Stubborn. Illogical. Difficult to kill even in men who had tried to become empty.

Some of the Na’vi said Eywa could receive the souls of Sky People too, if she chose. Elias didn’t know enough to say whether that was true.

He knew machines. Weather. Engines. The sound a craft made when something was wrong. He knew grief. He knew how a body felt when carried to a grave. Souls—those were beyond his expertise.

But he thought of Robin beneath the tree roots.

He believed, without proof and without argument, that if Eywa received humans at all, she would have received that one.

She had tried to do right. Maybe too late. Maybe imperfectly. Maybe without enough time to save herself or anyone else the way she meant to.

But she had tried.

Elias had learned, over the years, that sometimes trying was the only sacred thing a person had left in the end.

So when the sky over High Camp shifted towards evening and the light turned soft over the mountains, he would let himself think of her. Not for long. Just enough so that the memory of here wouldn’t die just yet.

A young woman under a white sheet.

A grave between roots.

An empty cryo bed left behind for the RDA to find.