Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The third of March was Quarterly Physical day for the avatar drivers.

Living on Pandora was not, generally speaking, good for humans. The gravity was a little low, the UV was a little high, and the magnetic field of the nearby gas giant meant a constant bombardment with high-energy particles that could damage tissue. Trace gases from the toxic outside atmosphere seeped into the habitats no matter how good the seals were. Iodine supplements had to be taken with every meal, and a not insignificant number of people had to sleep with rebreathers because the sulphur compounds bothered them.

For all these reasons and a host of less-urgent ones, there was no way Grace Augustine was going to let anyone she was supervising to skip their assigned Quarterly Physical Day – even though she hated it as much as they did. It was an interruption to routine, and consumed time that could have been spent on research. Every moment on this planet was precious, and Selfridge’s recent grumbling noises had made that clearer than ever – so while she was grouchy about it, Grace obediently dragged Jake and Norm back to Hell’s Gate bright and early for their checkups.

“How long is this going to take?” Jake asked, like a petulant child, as he wheeled himself down the hallway to medical.

“What do the Omatikaya say about that?” Grace prompted him. “About how long things take?”

He sighed. “They take as long as they take.”

“Exactly.” She scowled at the ‘no smoking’ sign above the sliding door. “The Omatikaya know you have to be here for this, so I don’t think they’ll hold it against you. Quarterly Physical Day has been a thing for as long as there have been humans on Pandora.’

Jake nodded, unhappy.

“Maybe you can go first,” Norm suggested. “There won’t be anybody using the link beds in central today, so you can borrow one of those and use it while Grace and I go.” He looked to see what Grace thought of the idea.

She nodded. “You can pop in and reassure them you aren’t dead.”

Half a dozen avatar drivers were already gathered in the waiting room, looking at e-readers or doing puzzles while the medics went down their list. Grace greeted a couple of them. “Hi, Pete,” she said, nodding to Peter Bierdragr, the xenogeneticist she’d left, along with his wife Carol, in charge of the avatars at Hell’s Gate while Grace was in the field.

“Morning, Grace,” Peter replied, while Carol looked up from her crossword to wave. “How’s your project going?”

“It’s going,” was all Grace would say, and then turned to say hello to Shiufung Shum, who was walking towards her with a purpose. Dr. Shum had started off as one of the avatar medics, but had ended up doing so much field work that they’d grown her one for herself. “Good morning, Shiufung.”

“Grace,” Shiufung said without returning the greeting. “Have you heard from Dulac and Bardakci this morning? They’re late.”

Louise Dulac and Ramazan Bardakci were entomologists, onsite at a rather fascinating supercolony of insects the Na’vi called tsawnyuhì’ang. Grace had not spoken to either in weeks, but they shared with her a tendency to get wrapped up in work and forget the outside world. “I haven’t,” she said. “Maybe they’ve lost track of the days.” It was easy to do in the field, with only jungle and sky in every direction.

“If they’re not here by noon, I’m going to call them,” Shiufung decided.

One of the medics arrived then to greet them and check their names off a list. This was a plump Indian woman named Manpreet Singh, dressed in dark blue scrubs but setting them off with complicated, glittery earrings. She had intermittently dated Max Patel, although it was Grace’s understanding that the relationship was currently in its ‘off again’ mode. Reet glanced at the clock on the wall and said, “I think we can get to you within... maybe twenty minutes?”

“Jake’s going first,” said Grace.

“I hate sitting around,” Jake deadpanned.

Reet blinked, then seemed to realize it was a joke, but did not laugh. “We can do that. Here are your questionnaires.” She handed out the tablets. “We’ll be right with you.”

Grace found a seat, and Norm took the one on her right. Jake parked himself in front of them, and began drumming his fingers on his knee impatiently.

“You weren’t like this in December,” Norm observed, filling out his form.

“In December I was just kinda relieved to get a break,” Jake replied. “Now I’ve... I’ve kind of got some stuff on my schedule.”

Something about the deliberate vagueness of this statement bothered Grace, but she ignored it for now. It might be nothing – and if it weren’t, it would doubtless come up again and she could ask him about it then. For now, she was distracted by a rhythmic thumping sound, which announced the arrival of a woman on crutches.

This was Audrey Tolliver, a marine biologist whose thin build, long dark hair, and large hazel eyes made her look something like a Na’vi herself. She was not, however, an avatar driver, and normally spent most of her time on the research ship the Pandora Clipper, out in the eastern islands. She hobbled up, and pointed to the seat on Grace’s left.

“Is this taken?” she asked.

“Nope. The Marine brought his own,” Grace said.

“Thanks.” Audrey sat down heavily and stretched her long legs out into the area where people were supposed to walk. Her right ankle was in a brace, which told Grace something about why she was not currently at sea. Audrey saw her looking at it, and sighed. “I slipped on some intertidal rocks and broke my ankle,” she explained. “I didn’t want to come back, but we don’t have the facilities on board to replace a broken bone, so Dr. Grey packed me off back here.”

“John will have you back on your feet in no time,” promised Grace.

“Yeah, but Nick’s out there flying drones over the ilu calving pools and I’m missing it,” Audrey pouted.

Grace would have said something sympathetic, but then she heard something that made her frown. The room was full of the sounds of conversation and people coming and going, and hints of music or podcasts from several sets of headphones... but all of those noises were suddenly joined by another, familiar but very unexpected.

Norm looked up, too. “Is that... a baby?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Audrey. “One of the pilots just had one.”

That was going to be a problem, Grace thought. There weren’t supposed to be children on Pandora. That didn’t mean there weren’t, of course – birth control was never guaranteed effective and humans were horny bastards.

“Is she doing okay?” asked Grace.

“Yeah. Kid’s healthy.”

“that’s good,” said Grace. You couldn’t put small children in cryo. Their tiny bodies couldn’t handle it. It would be ten to twelve years before they could send this child home, and in the mean time the company would be pissed that they had to pay for the upkeep of somebody who couldn’t contribe to the colony.

A nurse – a youngish guy with very fair skin and a mop of untrimmed red curls – stuck his head into the waiting room. “We got a Bruce Carpenter?” he called out.

There was a brief silence as everybody looked at each other, searching for the man in question. Grace knew Bruce, too – a guy with a bushy moustache, who was doing climatology at a site up north with two other drivers, Maureen Lindsay and Mike Oschipok. The last was trying to convince the Tawkami people to teach him their alchemical secrets. Last Grace had heard, they still weren’t interested.

Bruce didn’t appear to be in the room. The redhead nurse looked at his holopad again. “How about Robert Hathaway?”

“That’s me,” said Rob, a middle-aged fellow with grey hairs creeping into his beard. He and Keith Pacharanat were archaeologists whose explorations often took them far and wide, but they’d been stuck at Hell’s Gate the past few weeks because of a problem with the power at their remote trailer.

“All right, come on in,” said the nurse. “If Dr. Carpenter arrives, tell him we’ll take him next.”

“I’ll let him know,” Grace promised, but she was frowning. Bruce and Maureen were normally punctual and conscientious, and they made sure Mike was too, eve if it was frequently against his will. Them being late was much weirder than it was for the easily distracted Louise and Ramazan.

Of course it took much longer than twenty minutes for anybody to call them. Medical was always understaffed and behind schedule. Noon came and went, and Shiufung asked Grace to hold her place in line before hurrying off to call the entomologists. Grace nodded, yawned, and thought about the samples in the refrigerator back at site, in need of sorting and labeling – and about the pack of cigarettes in her pocket.

“Grace Augustine!” the red-haired nurse called out.

Grace sat up and told him, “Jake wants to go first.”

“That’s me.” Jake wheeled himself forward.

The nurse did the same double-take everyone did the first time they noticed Jake in his wheelchair, but rallied. “Jake... Jake... here you are, Sully. I’m Simon O’Toole. Follow me.”

Grace leaned back again and shut her eyes. It would take them at least half an hour with Jake, probably longer because of his reduced mobility. Then she would have to go. Maybe another spot would open up for Norm in the mean time, but probably not. No matter how often the people in charge promised it would be a smooth process, Quarterly Physicals always took all damned day. Grace’s avatar was going to be starving next time she used it.

“Excuse me, Dr. Augustine?” somebody asked.

Grace looked up. The speaker was a skinny black kid who looked like he was in his late teens... she vaguely remembered him being introduced as somebody’s postdoc. Hopefully he was older than he appeared. “Yeah?” she asked.

“Sorry to wake you up,” he said, “but some people want to talk to you in operations.”

“I wasn’t asleep,” said Grace, relieved and annoyed at the same time. Relieved because this would be something to do besides sit and wait, and annoyed because nothing good ever came of anyone wanting to talk to her in ops. “All right,” she said, “I’m on my way. Norm?”

“I’ll text you if they call you,” he said.

Another nurse, this one a woman, appeared in the doorway. “Shiufung Shum?” she called out.

“Better text her, too,” Grace said to Norm.

He nodded and tapped his watch to activate the display.

Grace followed the kid to ops, wondering as she did if there were a polite way to ask his age without insulting him in the process. He was probably tired of hearing about it. She decided to keep her mouth shut.

In operations, she took the opportunity to light a cigarette, then joined the group of people who were gathered around the main holotable, which was displaying a map constructed from satellite photo and LIDAR data. Normally it depicted areas where humans were living and working, or places that were under exploration – but right now it was showing an apparently random patch of jungle canopy. Grace moved around to the other side, and found an area of open ground pockmarked with mounds on which grew only a few plant species, those that attracted very specific types of insects – the preferred prey of the tsawnyuhì’ang colony.

“Grace!” said Max, standing next to Parker Selfridge. “Good, you’re here. Come and look.”

Grace could feel her heart rate rising. Had something happened to Louise and Ramazan? She squeezed herself in between Max and Selfridge and leaned closer, trying to spot their trailers. They would be tiny at this scale, but they ought to be there...

“You want a coffee Augustine?” asked Selfridge. “The kid makes great coffee.” He pointed a thumb at the boy who’d led Grace here.

“Thank you, Mr. Selfridge,” the young man said politely.

“I’m good,” said Grace. She took a drag on her cigarette and reached into the display to enlarge the spot where she knew the trailers should be – two banged-up metal boxes similar to the ones she, Norm, and Jake were living in, set among a patch of asymmetrical wild Spartan plants on a ledge four metres above where the insects had their colony. Their shape and colour would be obviously artificial among the riot of foliage. Where...

... there they were.

The trailers were indeed still there, but they were so overgrown it looked like the site had been abandoned for years. Walls had buckled and windows cracked under the weight of the vegetation. How long had Louise and Ramazan been out of communication? Grace herself hadn’t talked to them in a couple of weeks, but there hadn’t seemed to be anything wrong at the time, and surely all this had taken longer than that to grow.

“Do we have a higher resolution?” she asked.

“Here.” Max gave her a holopad with a 2d version that showed more detail. Grace increased the opacity and frowned as she studied the image. It still didn’t show enough for a species-level identification, but... she didn’t think she recognized those plants. The thick stems resembled the cablevines that grew in the tops of Hometrees or in the mountains, but those shouldn’t be at ground level, and they did not produce fruit. This plant had put out four massive, scaly, pear-shaped pods, one on top of the trailer and three fanned out on the ground next to it, each at least the size of a human. Those looked like cocoonwood, a family of plants with a symbiotic relationship with insects... but cocoonwood pods were no more than fifteen centimetres long, and the plants were not closely related to cablevines. Then there were the leaves, which looked more like gyrasols...

“Grace?” asked Max.

“How long has that been there?” she asked.

He pulled up another image. “This is four days ago.”

Four days ago, the trailers had looked totally normal. The satellite image even showed Ramazan’s avatar on the roof, adjusting the high-gain antenna.

“So all this happened in less than a week?” That was no plant Grace knew of on any planet. Even kudzu wasn’t that fast. “I need a closer look,” she decided. “Let me grab Norm, and we’ll stop off back at the site for our avatars and my sample kit. Where’s Shiufung?” She’d said she was going to try to get in touch with the missing scientists.

“She’s in comms, trying to raise them. They aren’t responding,” somebody said.

Grace’s heart sank further. “Has anyone heard from Bruce, Maureen, and Mike up north?”

“Are they missing, too?” asked Max.

“I don’t know. They might just be late, but it’s worth checking,” said Grace. “See if you can get recent pictures of their place, and...” she looked at the pictures again, at the bent metal, burst seams, and broken polycarbonate of what had once been a sealed habitat for humans in the midst of a toxic, alien environment. Several possibilities occurred to her for where Louise and Ramazan might actually be, but the worst was that they might still be in there. “How soon can we get a lift?”

“I’ll call Chacon,” said Max, and brought up a comms screen.

“We’ll meet her in hangar two,” said Grace.

She threw away her cigarette and returned to medical at the nearest thing to a run that Grace could do in her human body, which wasn’t in nearly such good shape as her avatar. She arrived just as Jake was getting out of his appointment, looking bored and annoyed as Reet Singh wheeled him back into the waiting room.

“I don’t have time to exercise,” he was complaining. “I’m with the Omatikaya all day. I barely use my body at all.”

“Well, unfortunately your brain still lives in it,” Reet told him. “That means you have to take care of it.” She straightened up as she saw Grace come in. “Dr. Augustine, Mr. Sully is losing upper body muscle mass. Dr. Eboigbe is recommending at least an hour of exercise...”

“Where’s Norm?” Grace asked.

Reet was startled to be interrupted. “Uh... he was just called. He should be with John in room four.”

“Thanks. Head for the hangar, Marine,” Grace told Jake. “We’ll catch up.”

Norm was indeed in room four, in the process of taking off his shirt so the head doctor, John Eboigbe, could listen to his heart and lungs. John was as tall as Norm at a hundred and eighty-eight centimetres, but much more heavily built, with a round dark face and his hair in short dreadlocks. Both men looked up in surprise as Grace barged in.

“Sorry, John. Norm and I need to go,” she said. “Now.”

John was not amused. “Is this one of your ‘botanical emergencies’?” he asked.

This was a joke between them, but it was a fair description of what Grace had just seen. “Yes,” she said.

John made several more protests, but Norm got his shirt back on, and they collected Jake on their way back out to the airfield.

“What’s going on?” Jake asked as they boarded the Samson.

“Something Norm and I need to take a closer look at,” said Grace. “You can go hang out with the Omatikaya while we do. Medical will just have to take a rain cheque. We’ll talk about your exercise program later.”

Trudy climbed into the cockpit, pausing to blow Norm a kiss before closing the door. “Are we going straight to Dulac and Bardakci’s?” she asked through her radio headset.

“No,” said Grace. She pulled the door shut and did up her harness. “We need to stop for our avatars. I have a feeling we’re gonna be on site for some time, and we might have to move some stuff that’s too big for humans.” Also... Grace didn’t like the idea of risking her avatar, but if there were something dangerous in that area, it was better to use a body that didn’t actually have her consciousness tied to it. Hopefully she’d be able to unlink in time and not ed up like Cam Hegner.

At the trailer, Jake climbed into his link bed and pulled the lid shut after him, impatient to get back to the village for whatever it was Neytiri was planning on tormenting him with today. There’d been a lot less complaining in the past few weeks, Grace had noticed, ever since he’d tamed his banshee... maybe that was what he’d meant earlier. Maybe he was just eager to be in the air. Grace and Norm got into their own avatars and collected their gear, and climbed back into the Samson for the flight to the insect colony.

This was over an hour’s trip, taking them to the very edge of the jungle where it began to thin into the great grasslands. Grace therefore had plenty of time to download Max’ photographs onto her personal holopad and to think some very worried thoughts as she went through them. She was certain the plant was new... but new might mean a couple of different things here. It could be new as in she just hadn’t seen it before, but if so, why had it suddenly popped up when and where it had? Was that only a coincidence, or was something more sinister at work... could it be new in the sense that it hadn’t existed until just this week?

If Grace’s suspicions about the Pandoran biosphere were correct, if the entire network were capable of something that might loosely be called ‘thought’, could it decide to do something like overgrow and destroy a trailer to kill the humans inside? If so, what had Louise and Ramazan done that it ‘thought’ they deserved such a fate? Or were they just the unlucky first victims of something that was going to get much worse?

What they found when they arrived was in no way reassuring. Trudy dropped them off on the edge of the clearing, and Grace and Norm stepped between large stones to avoid treading on the lines of shiny black insects that were carefully tending the plants they allowed to grow there – if these felt bothered, they could deliver a painful squirt of acid. This open area ended in a steep slope, at the top of which were the trailers.

As shown in the photographs, these were covered with a network of dense, woody stems made of many smaller vines that had braided themselves together as they grew. It looked like it must have been there for years, and the scaly pods they’d put out were even bigger up close. A human could have used one as a tent. What could even fuel a plant to grow that fast?

Grace rapped on a pod with her knuckles and found that it was not hollow. While she examined it, Norm stuck his head through one of the broken windows and took a quick look inside the trailer.

“It’s full of plants in here, too,” he said.

“Any sign of Louise and Ramazan?” asked Grace. She knelt down to examine a leaf. It was shaped like a ginkgo, but was the size of a human and oriented towards the sun. The veins in the surface produced a network of pentagonal facets that gave the whole thing a jewel-like appearance. Gyrasols produced leaves like that, but this was not a gyrasol, any more than it was a cablevine or a cocoonwood. What was it?

Norm tried to climb into the trailer but couldn’t quite squeeze through. “I don’t see any bodies,” he said. “One of the link beds is open. The emergency rebreathers are still on the wall.”

“All right.” Grace stood up. “Our first job is to find them. We’ll have to cut this back to get inside, and we’ll want to save plenty of samples.” Grace wasn’t the only botanist on the planet and all of them would be itching for a look at this strange chimera. She took her backpack off and unzipped it to get her sample kit. “I’m gonna get a closer look at these pods. Do you want to...”

She paused as something brushed her leg. Grace looked down, and found a narrow vine wrapping itself around her ankle like a snake. For a moment she just watched, fascinated by the movement – it twirled itself like a morning glory looking for something to climb, only it was happening in seconds instead of over hours. Then she realized she might be in danger, and tried to step away. When she did, it suddenly tightened its grip, and she stumbled and fell backwards.

“Grace! I’m coming.” Norm hurried to her side and took out a knife to cut the plant, but a second, vine whipped up to wrap his wrist. He tried to shake it away, but it curled tighter until he yelped in pain and dropped the knife. Grace tried to crab walk back, away from the pods, but another vine was suddenly on her arm, and a third fell from above across her shoulders.

Before she could react to this, a thicker stem looped around Norm’s neck, and he was yanked bodily off his feet with a strangled scream. The last Grace saw of him was his boots as he was dragged up onto the roof of the trailer and vanished from sight. For a few moments more she could hear his shouts, but then these were abruptly cut off.

Grace had no time to try to process that, though. Move vines were still twisting around her as well, wrapping her up like a mummy. Her fingers and toes were starting to tingle as the circulation cut off. There was only one thing she could do to save herself, so she did it – she shut her eyes and focused on her body back in the link bed. Once she was out of here she could make sure Norm was okay and then call Hell’s Gate and get them evacuated... she could grieve the loss of her avatar later.

A split second later, she heard the sound of an alarm, and found herself blinking into darkness. She was back in her body at her own trailer, but there was an emergency happening here, too. The sound she was hearing was the atmosphere alert. The airlock had been compromised.

Grace threw the machine’s lid open and sat up. It was unusually dark, and when she looked at the opposite wall she saw why – the window was almost entirely covered by a tangle of stems and leaves. The whole trailer was groaning and shaking, and before Grace’s eyes the window popped out with a dull, plasticky thunk. The vines started curling in, and with them came the unmistakable rotten-egg stink of sulphur dioxide. Her sinuses burned as the alien atmosphere flooded into the room.

The emergency rebreather was hanging on the wall next to the window. Grace got up and lunged for it, but a vine was already growing across it, cutting her off. Her head began to spin as she tried and failed to breathe.

Was she dreaming? Surely this couldn’t be happening. Surely it was some kind of nightmare.

On her left she heard a series of metallic twangs. When she looked in that direction, Grace saw she spokes on Jake’s wheelchair snapping one by one as the plants twisted around them. Just as they had at Louise and Ramazan’s, vines began to curl around her body, restraining her limbs, and with nothing to breathe, she couldn’t fight them.

Her last thought as she slipped into unconsciousness was that this would have been fascinating, if it had only been happening to somebody else.

The next thing she knew, she was standing in a clearing in the forest.

Grace looked around, puzzled. There was soft green moss under her bare feet and blue sky overhead. A light breeze was blowing, but the air was warm, hexapedes were grazing as if unaware of her presence, and clearing was surrounded on all sides by shady jungle. Grace could see towering Pandoran palms, poisonous delta trees, squat wild spartans, and firecracker vines with their dangling pods that would explode into showers of seeds when touched. And in between them, ferns and bromeliads and orchids of a thousand different types, some familiar and others entirely new.

There was only one thing to do. She rolled up her sleeves, and got to work taking samples.

It was hard to say how long she was at it for. The sun was bright and warm, but not blinding or overly hot. The sounds of distant animals and the wind in the foliage was soothing. None of the plants stung or pricked her, even the ones she knew tended to do that, and she had plenty of jars and bags in her backpack. Grace was doing exactly what she liked best, and she felt like she could have done it forever. It might have been a few moments. It might have been weeks.

The outside world re-entered her consciousness with a sudden blast of cold air. Then the jungle seemed to rip open, flooding Grace’s senses with the roar of blood in her ears and blinding white light in her eyes. Something that had been holding her up broke, and she was dropped on the dirt in a sticky, coughing heap.

A moment later, something heavy and bony fell on top of her. Grace yelped in surprise and pain, and started coughing her throat raw all over again. Somebody groaned.

“Who’s there?” she managed, gasping for air.

“Grace?” a voice rasped. “Is that you?”

“Of course it’s me, Marine,” she wheezed back, wiping hair stringy with mucus out of her face. She pushed herself up onto her elbows, her muscles weak and shaky. Jake was lying on his back on top of her legs, too busy gasping for air to try to get up. Grace crawled out from under him and rolled over into patch of wet ferns, criss-crossed by thick, woody stems that dug painfully into her bare flesh. From there, she was able to get to her hands and knees and take a proper look around.

She was outside a trailer that was covered with the same types of mystery vines she’d seen at Louise and Ramazan’s – but where those had been thick and healthy, these looked dry and withered. The leaves were brown and had gone all leathery, losing their faceted gleam. Dents in the side of the trailer showed were much larger stems had wrapped around it, but all that was left where dehydrated husks. When she lowered her gaze, she found Jake’s avatar lying on his back in the mud, naked and halfway inside one of the giant pods, which also looked withered and deflated. A second one was dangling off the side of the trailer directly above Grace, and seemed to be the source of the stringy goo she was covered in.

Just to check, Grace held up her own right hand and confirmed that she, too, was in her avatar. Her muscles were sore and her head was spinning, and she was hungry. Those were all things she could deal with, but... why was Jake here? He hadn’t been with her and Norm when they were – for want of a better word – attacked. He’d been back at the Omatikaya village, hadn’t he?

“Norm?” she called out.

“Over here,” came a weak reply. A blue hand emerged from the stand of foliage surrounding a third deflated pod and grabbed one of the dead vines, which Norm used to pull himself to his feet. He stood there a few moments, wobbling, and then leaned heavily against the side of the trailer.

He didn’t have any clothes on, either – nor did Grace. She pulled one of the giant leaves off the vine to wrap around herself, and got to her own feet by holding on to the window frame. For a moment this made her so dizzy she had to shut her eyes, but that passed, and she was able to take a look inside the trailer.

It was dark, and there were more dead plants everywhere – but among a tangle of wiry brown vines, she could make out a pile of twisted metal that had once been a wheelchair. They were at their own trailer.

How had that happened? Where were their bodies? They definitely weren’t here. Grace could see an open link bed, but there was nothing in it except dead plants and the nest of a creature resembling a very angry six-legged opossum.

“What’s going on?” asked Norm, stumbling towards her.

“Hell if I know,” said Grace. “Watch my avatar a minute and I’ll ask somebody.”

Norm nodded. He kept his eyes on her as he went to help Jake, who had managed to roll over but hadn’t made much progress on actually standing.

Grace sat down against the trailer wall and hugged her knees against her chest, then leaned her head on them, shut her eyes, and focused on her human body again.

At least, she tried to. It had been easy to do earlier. Link beds were supposed to provide as much sensory deprivation as possible but the weight of lying down was always there, the tickle of nicotine addiction, the occasional itch or twitch from being still for so long. Right now, though, Grace couldn’t feel any of that. She opened her eyes again, puzzled.

Jake was on his feet now, but leaning heavily on Norm. There was something wrong with his legs. He was moving them, but they were weak and clumsy and incredibly thin, much thinner than Norm’s. Both of them also had odd haircuts, Grace realized. Neither had ever expressed any interest in doing anything with their avatars’ hair, simply leaving it all gathered into the plait around their neural queues, as Grace herself had. Now the front and sides were loose and shaggy, as if they’d had it cut short months ago but neither had bothered with a trim since. Grace reached up and peeled away some of the hair stuck to her own cheeks and neck... it was long to her shoulders.

“What is that?” asked Grace. She pointed to a pale scar on the right side of Norm’s abdomen, just above where the leg joined.

He looked down and ran his thumb over it. “I had my appendix out when I was fourteen,” he said.

“Your avatar didn’t,” said Grace. She moved her leaf a bit and looked down at her own abdomen, where her human body had two short diagonal scars from her oophorectomy. After nearly thirty years they’d faded a lot, but she could still feel them if she touched them. She wasn’t surprised to see no evidence of them now, because her avatar hadn’t had that procedure... but then what sense did Norm’s scar make?

Norm looked equally puzzled. He touched the mark again, then flushed. “We gotta find something to wear,” he said.

“And then we gotta call somebody,” Grace agreed.

Chapter Text

The possum creature was not an animal Grace knew anything much about, and not one she wanted to know any better. It hissed and spit and brandished a sting in its tail as she chased it out of the link bed. A second one had taken up residence in avatar storage, which had also been broken open and busted up by invading vines. The stems and leaves were dry and leathery, and even once she found a knife Grace had a hard time breaking or cutting them to get to a drawer that should have contained clean clothing.

One particularly inquisitive vine had forced its way in, and the items in that compartment were damp and dirty, with moss starting to grow. The things in the drawer below, however, were fortunately still wearable. Grace found a t-shirt and a pair of yoga pants, and quickly washed up with icy-cold water from the roof cistern before getting dressed.

“Bathroom’s free,” she announced, sitting down on the step to tie her shoes. “You boys clean up. I’m gonna see if any of the communications equipment works.”

She pulled more dead vines away from the airlock, and crawled through into the trailer interior. This was an odd experience – the trailer was intended as a living space for humans, and Grace had never entered it in her avatar. Everything was familiar, it was just... small.

Most of the windows had been broken or forced out of their frames by the vines, letting in not only vermin but weather – when Grace started clearing her desk, she found that everything on it was wet. The empty coffee cup she’d left before heading to Hell’s Gate for Quarterly Physicals was now half-full of water and dead insects, and devices and paperwork were damp. For the first time, she wondered how long she’d been unconscious. Her dream about the jungle seemed to have lasted a long time...

She got to work assessing what was available, trying to ignore the increasingly insistent grumbling of her stomach. The solar panels on the roof were overgrown with vegetation and some of them had been literally ripped from their mounts as the vines curled around them. Those would need parts to repair them, and expertise Grace did not possess. She needed to find something that was both dry and had its batteries charged. There was the emergency radio, stored under one of the link beds, but it was so thoroughly tangled in vines that she couldn’t get at it.

Finally, in a locked filing cabinet she found a holopad that would still boot up. The power was only at forty-five percent, but that would do. The shock was the date that popped up in the lower corner when the UI loaded.

“Bloody fucking hell,” said Grace out loud.

“What?” the men’s voices asked in unison. Norm appeared in the window, pulling a t-shirt over his head.

“It’s May fourteenth,” said Grace, holding up the screen for him to see. “Last thing I remember was Quarterly Physical Day – March twenty-fifth.” She did some mental mathematics. “We’ve been out for fifty days.” Nearly two months... what had happened during that time? Had anybody looked for them?

“No wonder we’re hungry,” said Jake, but then he realized that didn’t make sense, either. If they’d gone without food for seven weeks, they’d be dead – their bodies and avatars both.

Once dressed, Norm got to work going through their supplies. Fortunately, most of the avatar rations were freeze-dried and vacuum-packed, making them almost entirely impervious to time, weather, and possum creatures. Unfortunately, their reconstitutors ran off the same solar panels as everything else, and were useless for the foreseeable future. All they could do was tear open packets and gnaw on the contents as if they were eating instant ramen without boiling it.

They finally got a stroke of luck when Grace found the high-gain antenna. The vines had torn it off the roof and left it lying upside-down in a patch of ferns, but the titanium struts weren’t bent and it could be opened and re-shaped into a dish. She and Norm managed to fasten it back to its mount with zip ties and reconnect the wires with silver tape. The signal wasn’t great, but it did exist, and there was enough power in the batteries to run it for at least a few minutes.

The problem was, as usual for Pandora, the ionosphere. When Grace tried to connect to the internet, she found that the planet’s magnetic field was extremely active, and they weren’t going to be able to talk to anyone far away. Hell’s Gate was out. The Mekong in orbit was definitely out, and Gateway Centauri, orbiting at Polyphemus’ L1 point to keep it out of the magnetotail, would have been impossible even if there hadn’t currently been a whole planet between them and it – they would have needed a satellite relay. Who did that leave?

Grace thought for a moment and then, more or less on a hunch, tried to call Louise.

The connecting symbol flashed for an awfully long time, but then the screen lit up with a vew into a similarly trashed and overgrown trailer, and there was Louise Dulac’s avatar in a hoodie and jeans, holding a mug that looked like an espresso cup in her hand.

“Grace?” she asked, eyes wide. The image dissolved into static, leaving Grace worried that was as far as the conversation would be able to go, but then it re-formed.

“Louise!” said Grace. “Are you guys okay?”

“I... I think we’re as okay as we can be right now,” said Louise uncertainly. “What’s going on?”

“I have no goddamn idea,” Grace told her.

Norm leaned over Grace’s shoulder to talk to them, leaving Jake sitting on one of the bunks with their snacks. “How long have you been awake?” he wanted to know.

“Since last night,” Louise replied. “We think we got spat out by those weird fruits. We can’t contact anybody, and we can’t seem to unlink from our avatars. We don’t know where our bodies are. Ramazan!” she shouted to her colleague. “Ramazan! It’s Grace!”

The display went to static again, but cleared in time for Grace and Norm to see a second avatar duck through a doorway meant for humans and come up behind Louise. This one was wearing a navy and white İstanbul Üniversitesi t-shirt. Perhaps Grace should have been worried about other things, but in that moment what she was looking at was their hair. Louise wore her blonde hair in a chin-length bob. It was, of course, black in her avatar, but it was hanging around her face in roughly the same cut. Ramazan’s hair was long, gathered back in a man-bun. He didn’t have the short beard he wore as a human, but male Na’vi did not grow facial hair. So far, there was nothing here to disprove the hypothesis she was forming.

“Grace, are you all right?” Ramazan asked.

“Physically, yeah, we’re not hurt,” she said. “You said you can’t contact anybody. How long has the magnetosphere been like this?” It mostly varied on predictable cycles. If she knew when the turbulence had started, they could get a rough idea of when it might calm down.

“Since first thing this morning, at least,” said Ramazan. “That’s when we got one of the solar cells working. We tried to raise Hell’s Gate and couldn’t get through. At first we thought it might just be the interference, but then we managed to download a satellite picture.”

“Here,” said Louise. “It doesn’t look great.”

There was long wait while the laptop downloaded her email. The display repeatedly turned to snow and then back into Louise and Ramazan, who were watching the connection nervously. Louise sipped from her mug, and Grace desperately wanted to ask what was in it, but did not.

Finally, an image popped up in the corner of Grace’s screen. She enlarged it, and even after what she’d seen on the holotable before things got weird, there was a moment in which she thought it had to be the wrong picture. A couple of trailers disappearing under foliage was one thing. Hell’s Gate, home to some two thousand people, was on another level.

After staring blankly for a moment, though, Grace’s eyes started to find the telling details. Shapes of buildings and vehicles were still visible, but they were so thoroughly overgrown that the compound was almost unrecognizable. These weren’t the dead stems that covered their trailers, either – they were thick and lush, and there were literally hundreds of the large pods lying around on the tarmac and visible through broken walls and collapsed ceilings. Each was more than big enough to have a human being inside it.

“That’s not the most disturbing thing, either,” said Ramazan.

“Oh, good,” said Grace.

“There are bones outside.” Ramazan turned his head and looked out the window, as if checking they were still there. “Not human. They, uh... they look like they came from avatars.”

There were many distressing things about that statement, but the fact that he’d said avatars instead of Na’vi was particularly so. What was the difference? “Show me,” Grace ordered.

Louise put her mug down and picked up the holopad she was using so she could point its camera out the window. The bright light flooded the CCD for a few moments, but then the machine compensated, and Grace got a look at the ground outside their trailer. The vines and leaves were still there, but now they were dead and dry, and the pods – were there more than there’d been? – had split open in spirals, with strings of dried goop dangling from them. And tangled in these mucusy webs were jumbles of long, deceptively gracile bones.

At first they did look very like Na’vi bones, but then Grace saw what Ramazan had been talking about: the skulls were etched with indented lines and depressions, showing where there had been wires and electrodes to enable neurosynchronization. Two such skulls were visible, so there had been at least two individuals here, but the number of pods made Grace think there were probably more.

If there were four of them, that could have been her, Norm, Louise, and Ramazan... but it was their human bodies that were missing and those were absolutely not human bones. Were they dead? Was this the Pandoran afterlife? Or was it, as Grace increasingly suspected, something not only worse but much, much weirder?

“What do you think?” asked Louise. “If you’ve got a hypothesis, we’d love to hear it.”

“I’ve got a couple,” Grace replied, “but I need more data. I’d like to look at the healthy plants, the ones at Hell’s Gate.”

“How do we get there?” asked Norm. “We can’t call for a ride.” He swallowed hard, and Grace knew he must be thinking of Trudy. Was she inside one of those plants?

“The People can take us,” said Jake. “If I can get to Hometree, I’ll...” he started to stand up, but didn’t get far. His weak legs could not support him, and he dropped to his knees on the floor. He grabbed at Grace’s desk for support, and pulled a drawer out, scattering papers and pressed leaves. Norm turned around to help him back onto the bed.

“You’re not going anywhere, Marine,” said Grace. “Unless you’ve got some telepathic powers I didn’t know about, we can’t call the Omatikaya any more than we can call anyone else. We’ll have to think of...”

That was when there was a loud thump on the roof of the trailer, shaking the whole structure. Jake slid off the bed again in surprise, taking Norm with him, and Grace jumped to her feet only to whack her head on the ceiling. She cursed and rubbed it as there was a second, much less violent thump, followed by a flash of blue out the window as a Na’vi jumped from the roof to the ground.

Grace took a sideways look at Jake, wondering for a moment if he were psychic, but he was clearly just as startled as the rest of them. He got back up by holding on to Norm and the bed frame, and called out, “Neytiri!”

The woman outside turned around and stared at him. Her gold eyes were huge. “Jhake?” she asked, and then without waiting for an answer, she climbed through the window to crowd a fourth Na’vi into a space designed to hold three humans. Jake lowered himself back to sitting on the bunk, and Neytiri knelt in front of him, holding his face between her hands in a surprisingly tender manner.

“Ma Jhake!” she said again. “You’re alive!”

“Grace?” Louise asked, her voice crackling as the signal broke up again.

“I’ll call you back, Louise,” Grace promised, and disconnected so she could focus on the situation in front of her.

“Of course I’m alive,” said Jake, taking Neytiri’s hands as she closed her eyes to hold back tears. The intimacy between them was both surprising and a little worrying. “Why would you...”

“We missed seven weeks,” Grace reminded him. “I’d be assuming we were dead, too.”

Neytiri had a better reason yet, though. “The vrrtepyom spit your bones out this morning,” she said. “I came to see if the same had happened to the other dreamwalkers. We would have buried you all together.”

Vrrtepyom – the demon devourer. Probably as good a name for the plant as any.

“What made you think they were my bones?” asked Jake.

“They came out of the plant that swallowed you,” Neytiri said. “Do you remember that morning? We were in the village, on our way to tell my parents we were mated...”

“Oh!” said Norm. “Um... you are?”

“Oh, shit,” groaned Grace.

“Yes... I remember,” Jake said. “The vine grabbed me, and... after that I think I was dreaming? I remember flying, up in the mountains, letting the ikran chase tetrapterons. Then the next thing I remember was falling on top of Grace outside.” He looked up at her.

Everything Grace was learning supported her hypotheses – both the one about what had happened to them, and the one that Jake Sully was a fucking idiot. She needed a cigarette. She needed an entire pack. “Neytiri,” she said, “I think we need to get back to Hell’s Gate. Can you take us?”

“There is nobody there,” Neytiri told her. “Eywa reclaimed the whole place. Many of the People were celebrating,” she added, “but the children were sad to think they would not see you again.”

Grace would have been upset to never see the Omatikaya kids again, either, but that was beside the point. “I’ve seen pictures,” she said. “Eywa reclaimed it the same way she did this place, with these plants. I need to know what’s going on with them, and for that I need to get there.”

“If anyone can figure out what’s happened, it’s Grace,” said Jake.

“I have to study them before they start opening,” she said.

“Then I will have you taken there,” Neytiri decided. She stood up and took Jake’s hand, pulling him to his feet. “Ma Jhake, za’u.”

“Wait!” Jake protested, but it was too late. He stumbled and fell against her, knocking her over on top of Grace and sweeping the salvaged holopad off the desk, along with the coffee cup and half a dozen other items.

“He can’t walk,” Norm explained belatedly.

Grace, Neytiri, and Jake began picking themselves up, which was difficult in the narrow space. “He told me his other body cannot walk,” Neytiri said. “This is his Na’vi body.”

“I don’t think it’s either,” said Grace.

They untangled themselves, and Neytiri and Norm got Jake back onto the bed while Grace did her best to pick up the fallen objects – not that many of them were worth saving anyway. Neytiri squeezed Jake’s calves, feeling how thin they were and how close to the skin the bone was, and reappraised the situation.

“Wait for me here,” she decided. “I will return.”

“One more thing,” Grace said, as Neytiri began to climb out the window again. “We’ve been in touch with a couple of our colleagues, Louise Dulac and Ramazan Bardakci. They’re scholars of insects, the same way I’m a scholar of plants. They were camped out by the tsawnyuhì’ang colony, way out on the edge of the forest. Somebody needs to help them, too.”

“I know where that is. I will tell the People,” said Neytiri. She paused, and then slid back into the room to give Jake a quick kiss on the forehead before climbing out the window again. Her banshee crawled down from its perch on top of the trailer, and Neytiri mounted it and flew away.

Jake gazed out the window at where she’d been, looking almost like he was lost in thought, but at that moment Grace was pretty sure Jake Sully didn’t have a single damned thought in his head.

“Hey.” She gave him what she intended to be a gentle smack, but it was probably less so than he would have liked. “What the hell was that?”

Jake blinked and said, “nothing,” although from the look on his face, he must have known this was the stupidest possible answer.

“You two got married?” asked Norm in disbelief.

“No,” said Jake. “I mean, we didn’t have a ceremony or anything.”

“You wouldn’t have,” said Grace. “The Omatikaya consider it a private arrangement, not a public celebration.” It was the birth of children that was treated as a big deal, not the steps leading up to it.

“Telling her parents makes it sound pretty serious,” Norm pointed out.

“Didn’t you read any of the cultural background material I gave you?” Grace asked. She’d assumed he was at least doing his homework.

“I did!” Jake protested. “Yes, I know the bond between mates is sacred, and once...”

“And you still slept with her!” Grace interrupted, in... it wasn’t even disbelief. She was surprised, but she felt like she shouldn’t have been. It was not at all out of character for Jake to do something so colossally stupid.

“I’m not planning on leaving!” Jake said. “I decided that a while back, actually. I don’t want to go back to Earth. I want to...”

“Well, good news, I don’t think any of us are going back to Earth, ever!” snapped Grace. “I don’t think we can!”

The men both looked at her in shock. Whatever either or both of them suspected about this situation, they hadn’t thought Grace would come right out and say it. She ducked through the airlock, and sat down on the steps outside to glare at the world in general.

“Grace...” Jake began.

“Shut up, Marine,” she told him. “Just sit and wait for your wife.”

A couple of minutes went by with no sounds but the chatter of animals in the forest and the rummaging of one of the guys looking for something inside. Then Norm came out and sat down next to Grace. He handed her a bottle of water and opened a second one for himself.

“I can’t unlink either,” he said.

“Did you expect to?” Grace asked. After she couldn’t, and Louise and Ramazan had said they couldn’t either, he couldn’t have had high hopes.

“I thought it was worth a try.” Norm shrugged. “These... aren’t our avatars, are they?”

“Nope.”

“So... is this permanent?”

“I don’t know. Probably.” Grace sighed.

Norm took another swig of water and thought for a few moments. “I mean... this is clearly not a natural process, right?”

“There are dozens of species of insect on this planet that have a symbiotic relationship with the cocoonwood plants,” said Grace. “The plants actually provide some of the DNA the larvae need to undergo metamorphosis, and in return the insects living on the plant use chemicals to drive off larger herbivores that might do real damage.”

“We’re not caterpillars,” Norm protested. “We’re aliens. This planet doesn’t even understand our DNA.”

“No, but we do. We understand it well enough to make ourselves avatars, which the plants also consumed, digested, and then spit out the bones.”

He frowned. “You’re saying the plants were able to analyze and compare our DNA, and...”

“It’s the only idea I’ve got so far,” said Grace. “You were going to suggest that whatever happened to us had to be directed and... I guess intentional. Something or somebody had to set out with this as their goal. I’m saying that the materials were there to work with. We provided some of them ourselves.”

“What about all those people at Hell’s Gate? There were way too many pods for them all to be avatar drivers.”

“That’s one of the things I’m hoping to find out.”

A few minutes after that, Jake managed to crawl out and join them, but neither spoke to him. If Grace had tried to say anything she would have ended up lecturing him, and Norm was off in his own world, watching flying creatures pass overhead and occasionally taking thoughtful deep breaths. About another forty-five minutes after that, a rumble in the ground told them somebody was coming.

Norm and Grace both handed their empty water bottles to Jake, and stood up to greet the new arrivals. Neytiri was in the lead, riding into the clearing on the back of a direhorse. Behind her were four or five more mounted Omatikaya. They brought their animals to a stop, and Grace stepped forward while Norm helped Jake up.

“I have sent others to find your friends at the tsawnyuhì’ang colony,” Neytiri said. “We will take you to your village.”

“Thank you,” said Grace. She reached in the window to grab the holopad she’d been using. Hopefully there were still computers that worked at Hell’s Gate, or at least, ones that could be made to work. “We’ve got other people at sites throughout this whole area, and some further away. If they’ve also been, uh, attacked, we’ll need to make contact with them, as well.”

“My mother is in communion with Eywa,” said Neytiri. “She will learn what the Great Mother has planned for you. Ma Jhake.” She held out her hand to him.

He took it, and Norm and Grace helped him get up on the animal’s back. His legs did work – he could move them, but the muscles were very weak and had no stamina. He put his arms around Neytiri’s waist and leaned forward to kiss her cheek, which made her shoo playfully at him.

“People are watching, ma Jhake,” she said.

“Let ‘em watch,” he murmured back.

Grace rolled her eyes. God, were they going to be one of those couples, like Audrey Tolliver and her husband Nick, who couldn’t keep their hands off each other?

Where were Audrey and Nick now? Were they okay?

Another rider took Norm’s hand and pulled him up to sit on his horse behind him, and a third, a powerfully muscular female, helped Grace onto her own mount.

“You three,” Neytiri said to the others in Na’vi, “check the others places where we know dreamwalkers keep their bodies. Perhaps they, too, have been reborn. We will meet you at the Sky People village.”

Without needing a verbal command, the horses turned and thundered up the slope to carry out her orders. Neytiri turned her own animal in the other direction, and the group set off down the slope towards the valley, where they could follow the river the Na’vi called Kureyon almost all the way back to Hell’s Gate.

It was a tooth-rattling ride, another entry for the long list of reasons Grace liked plants better than animals. The horses splashed through streams, ducked under thickets, and at one point took flying leaps over a fallen log, giving Grace a moment of awful vertigo and flashbacks to the time she’d thrown up in zero gravity. At least the woman she was riding with was solid to hang on to, gripping the horse with her knees so tight it was as if the two were one organism.

“What’s your name?” Grace asked in her ear.

“Letswal!” the woman replied. “I was at your school when I was small!”

Grace suddenly remembered her. “You got damn tall,” she said.

“Like my mother!” Letswal agreed proudly.

It was late afternoon with the suns getting low when they arrived, tired and bruised, at the edge of the area the humans had cleared to build on. As the satellite picture had showed, it was no longer clear. The edges had begun to be recolonized by the jungle, as they always did when not pruned regularly, but that was just normal growth. It was nothing on the scale of the rest of the compound, which was entirely overgrown by the same vines, leaves, and giant pods Grace had seen at Louise and Ramazan’s trailer. Windows had been broken, walls crumbled, and vehicles entirely tangled in the mess. The Omatikaya brought their animals to a stop just outside the border, and Grace climbed down from Letswal’s horse and stumbled, her thighs aching, through a gap in the chain link fence.

“Hello!” she called out. “Is anybody here?”

There was no answer.

Norm also got down and looked at the scene. The airfield was spread out in front of them, covered with wreckage, vines, and more of those pods... way too many of them to have only consumed the avatars. There’d been a little over two thousand humans on Pandora last time Grace had gotten a number for it. Not all of them were at Hell’s Gate, but by far the majority were. If each of these pods contained a human being... or something that had started out that way...

Grace couldn’t deal with that idea right now. She had to be scientific about this. She had to analyze it. She needed samples.

Norm was already heading for the open doors of the hangars – of course he was. He was looking for Trudy. Grace set off after him, taking long strides to keep up. The Omatikaya stayed behind at the fence, apparently unwilling to cross that boundary, except for Neytiri. She stayed on horseback, with Jake sitting behind her, and followed them in.

The hangar had so many vines and leaves growing over it, it was like walking into the ruins of a lost civilization. The roof was high enough that even Neytiri and Jake on their horse did not have to duck, and the group spread out a little to see what they could find. The interior was gloomy and green, with no artificial light and the sunshine tinted green by all the vegetation. A few vehicles appeared to be missing, as if people had managed to flee, but most were covered in vines that had forced their way in the doors, through the windows, and even up through the floor. A row of amp suits was impossibly tangled. A big Dragon gunship had been all but torn apart.

“Here!” shouted Norm, running up to a particular vehicle. It was lying at an angle, with one of its rotors ripped off and the windshield shattered into cubes, but there was a familiar serial number painted on the side, right above the name G Chacon. Below that, weighed down by the broken rotor, was another pod.

Norm went up and put his hands on the pod, then pulled them back with a cry of surprise.

“What?” asked Grace, running to see.

“It’s hot!” he said.

Grace reached out and carefully touched the side of the pod. ‘Hot’ was an overstatement, but it was nevertheless shockingly warm to the touch, more like the skin of an animal than the surface of a plant. She put an ear up to it, and could hear sounds from inside... faint rustles and gurgles, like something was moving in there.

“We’ll monitor it,” she promised Norm, although that didn’t seem like nearly enough. They needed an MRI machine to put this in and see what it was doing. They needed... she didn’t even know what.

They picked their way through wrecked vehicles and gnarled vegetation to the airlock, which was choked off by so many plants it was completely impassible. They had no tools to cut their way through, and were eventually forced to climb in by a second-storey observation window whose pane had popped out when the wall buckled under the weight of the plant growth. Neytiri dismounted, and she and Norm held Jake upright as they ventured inside to explore.

Here they had to stoop to move under the lower ceilings. Windows were broken, skylights had been torn out, and vines and ferns were poking out of cracks in the walls. The impression, as before, was of a place that had been abandoned for years. It was deeply unsettling.

There had been no bodies at the trailer, but there were here. The smell of decay alerted them to the first – three soldiers who’d barricaded themselves in a supply closet. All had been shot, the two men between the eyes and the woman in the right temple. The gun was still in her semi-skeletal hand. They’d tried to keep the vines out but when they realized they were going to fail, she’d killed her companions and then herself.

In operations they found the entire roof caved in, with wines trailing down to tangle around the tables and chairs. Water was dripping through the opening, and the giant pods were everywhere. Was one of those Max? Was one Selfridge’s coffee boy? Medical was the same. A wall of John’s office had come down, and there were two pods in the room... was he inside one? What about the other? Reet? The red-headed nurse? In the labs they found even more, plus another suicide, curled-up and decomposing inside the walk-in freezer. The vines did not touch the dead.

They had also, curiously, stayed mostly out of the link room. There was growth there, hanging from the ceiling and winding its way in through the broken emergency airlock. The link beds were covered in them and starting to grow moss, but there were no pods, and the damage wasn’t nearly as bad as in other places. Some of the equipment looked like it might still work if it only had power.

“There was nobody in here,” said Norm.

Grace looked over her shoulder at him and realized he was probably right... there’d been nobody using their avatars when this happened. Louise and Ramazan had been taken first, possibly along with Bruce, Maureen, and Mike, and then Grace, Norm, and Jake themselves. That would be more than enough to convince the people in charge that this was a danger specifically to the avatars, and their response might well have been to suspend the program for their protection.

“Let’s check the bunkhouse,” she decided.

The avatar bunkhouse was on the other side of the agricultural area, where a few fields had been planted with Pandoran fruits and vegetables so the avatars could have some food that wasn’t synthetic. This building was also completely overgrown by plants, but these were browner and starting to wither, not as fresh as the ones outside but not as dead as the ones at the trailer. The surfaces of the pods were leathery and slightly warm, but not hot like the one in the hangar had been, and when Grace put an ear up she couldn’t hear any sounds.

“Okay,” she said, straightening up. “Marine, I think you and the missus should go back to the Omatikaya. Ask them to visit as many of the remote sites as possible. Climate, vulcanology... you guys know where those are. I need to know if they’ve also been overrun, and if you find people there, bring them back here.” Sticking together was going to be important.

“Your remote climatology site is in Tawkami territory,” said Neytiri.

“See if you can ask them to look, then,” Grace said. “Norm, you and I – and Louise and Ramazan when they get here – have to see what we can salvage. We’re going to need help and it can only come from the people in space.” The plants wouldn’t have been able to reach them there.

“Got it,” said Norm. “What are we going to tell them if they ask what happened?”

“The truth,” Grace replied. “We have no idea.”

Chapter Text

Jake and Neytiri arrived back at Hometree around nightfall, with fires crackling in the village and the first of the night’s bioluminescence starting to flicker to life. It seemed the People had been expecting them, too – dozens of individuals came running to watch as the direhorse trotted to a stop beneath the canopy of the mighty roots. Neytiri slipped down and went to get her parents, while everybody else kept their distance, watching Jake with wide yellow eyes.

It made him feel naked, despite he t-shirt and shorts he’d borrowed from Norm. Jake knew most of these people. There was Ninat the apprentice singer. There were Wiyu and Weynu, two little girls he’d taken an interest in because they were, like him and Tommy, identical twins. There was Te’fnak the healer. These were friends and acquaintances, but they were looking at him as if he were some kind of monster.

He wanted to climb down from the horse and get out of sight, but he knew if he tried he’d only end up in a heap on the ground as his legs fell out from under him again. So he just had to sit there until the crowd parted, revealing Eytukan and Mo’at.

It would be rude to stay up there while talking to them. Maybe if he held on to the saddle, he could keep himself from falling over. Jake swung a leg over the horse and slid off, and for a moment it worked... then the animal moved, he lost his grip, and fell face-first in the dirt.

Neytiri ran to grab his arm and drag him upright as the direhorse wandered off, and he was able to lean on her as her parents approached.

“Oel mengati kame,” he said, performing the greeting gesture to them. “Ma Mo’at Tsahìk, my Eytukan Olo’eyktan.”

Eytukan wrinkled his nose. “His smell is different,” he observed, but did not elaborate. Jake would have liked to know if he smelled better or worse.

Mo’at stood still a moment, looking him over with a critical expression, much as she had the night he’d met her. It was as if she were searching for a crack in a facade, some visible flaw that would show him up as an imposter. Then she stepped forward and drew her thorn knife.

“Give me your hand,” she ordered.

Jake held it out, and the Tsahìk pricked it and tasted the blood. Jake himself hardly dared breathe as she examined the point of the thorn, but at his side Neytiri stood tall with her chin raised defiantly.

“Take off your Sky People clothing and dress properly,” said Mo’at, putting the thorn back in its sheath. “Then we will eat.” She turned and walked away. Her mate watched her go, then shot Jake a disapproving glance before following her.

Jake breathed out.

“Come,” said Neytiri. She looped his arm around her shoulder, and headed up into the branches.

He did his best to walk beside her, but she ended up all but carrying him as they climbed. Jake bit his lip and didn’t complain about it, but internally he kind of wanted to scream. The first day he’d used his avatar had been downright euphoric – after months of immobility he’d suddenly been able to just get up and walk. No surgery, no months of frustrating healing and physio, he was just cured. That wasn’t the main reason he’d decided to stay on Pandora, but it was definitely a contributing factor.

But now here he was, still on Pandora but needing Neytiri’s help just to stand. She didn’t seem to mind, but he felt intensely self-conscious about it, especially when he looked down and spotted Tsu’tey glaring up at him. As if that guy didn’t think Jake was useless enough already.

At least he was able to dress himself. Wrapping and tying a tewng was a fairly simple process, but Neytiri still hovered nearby in case he needed help. When he finished with the laces and looked over his shoulder, she was still there.

“I’m ready,” he said.

Neytiri came to help him up. Once again, Jake tried to plant his feet and at least pretend to walk along the platform, but it was no good. His knees wouldn’t lock, and the muscles were simply too weak to support his weight. When he tried, he fell, and she had to catch him.

“Sorry,” he said, embarrassed. How long was she going to have to drag him around for? Neytiri deserved better than that.

“Do not apologize,” she said. “You are one of the People now. When one of us is ill or wounded, the rest care for him, as viperwolves bring food for their injured packmate. When you are well, you will do the same for others.”

Those were reassuring words, but Jake couldn’t look her in the eye. How long did she think it was going to be before he was, literally, back on his feet? He had a feeling it was going to be a long time.

Back on ground level, the Omatikaya were gathering for their evening meal around the central hearth. Cooks were passing out vegetable fritters wrapped in edible niktsyey leaves, and people were laughing and talking – until Jake arrived. Then silence fell, and he was intensely conscious of the hundred pairs of eyes watching his every failed attempt at a step. It made him think of his first night here, when he’d been a curiosity, an interloper, something to gawk at – Neytiri probably looked like she was dragging a corpse as she brought him to her parents.

“What has happened to your legs?” asked Eytukan, as Neytiri helped Jake sit down.

“My legs didn’t work in my Sky People body,” Jake explained. “They work now, but they haven’t had any exercise in years, so the muscles are weak.”

“This is not your Sky People body,” said the chieftain, gesturing with an upturned palm.

“Grace Augustine thinks it is,” said Jake. “It’s just been altered. In the process it healed my spine, but it’ll take time for my legs to get stronger.” Neytiri had thought they’d been weak enough when he’d first arrived here all those months ago. This was worse than being set back to the beginning. He was as weak and clumsy as a toddler.

Mo’at bit into her food and chewed thoughtfully. “So, Jheyksuli,” she said after swallowing. “You are one of us, as you wished. What will you do now?”

“I’ll get strong again,” Jake promised. “And I’ll try to live my life here, as one of the People. I have what I wanted. I’ll try to be happy.”

The Tsahìk cocked her head. “Do the Sky People all think that having what you want will make you happy?” she asked. Her eyes seemed to bore into him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think it will.”

Eytukan muttered something under his breath. His mate glanced at him, then turned to Jake again.

“We shall see, then, how much you have learned. Now,” she said. “I think we must talk about my daughter.”

Jake froze with his supper halfway to his mouth. He’d forgotten about that. They never had made it to tell her parents they were mated. Neytiri had been eager to do so, saying that they would celebrate together as a family – which was apparently what the Omatikaya did instead of holding big public weddings – and discuss the future of the clan. Jake had been nervous about it, worried they wouldn’t approve of him and wondering if he’d made a mistake... but who could he have possibly chosen if not Neytiri?

Neytiri herself came to his rescue, putting her arm through his. “I chose him,” she said firmly. “He would have no other, and neither will I.”

“He has done nothing to earn such a thing,” said Eytukan in Na’vi.

“He has proved himself in the hunt,” Neytiri reminded her father.

“But never in battle.”

“He will when the time comes,” Neytiri insisted. “I have every faith in him.”

Jake quickly chewed and swallowed. He hadn’t understood all of that, but he’d gotten the gist, and he was very conscious of the fact that he wasn’t going to be proving himself at anything anytime soon. “Sir,” he said to Eytukan. “I apologize. I should have asked you permission...”

“You do not need my father’s permission!” Neytiri informed him. “You need mine, and you have it. That is all.”

“What about Tsu’tey?” Eytukan asked. “He waited many years to be your mate.”

“He waited many years to be my sister’s mate,” Neytiri corrected. “He would have been mine only as a second choice. Now he, too, may choose who he likes.”

“Tsu’tey is to be my successor,” Eytukan insisted. “If you reject him, you show the People a lack of belief not only in him but in your parents, in our plans. Is that what you want, or did you even think of that?”

“Sir!” Jake interrupted again, worried that Neytiri and her father would actually come to blows. “Sir, I chose your daughter because I love her. From the bottom of my heart. I’ve never met anyone like her. I promise, I’ll be good to her.”

“That is not what we are discussing!” Eytukan informed him and then spoke to Neytiri again. “Silwanin would never have...”

“I am not Silwanin!” she snarled at him. “Perhaps you wish I had died, and not her!”

Jake turned to his left to look at Mo’at, and found her calmly eating her supper, not looking at the furious pair. She didn’t seem to be looking at Jake, either, but she must have known he was watching her, because she spoke to him in English. “Neytiri has always had a strong will. I thought teaching you might humble her. It has not.” She took another bite.

Jake was glad of that – a humble Neytiri wouldn’t have been Neytiri at all. Hearing her argue with her father, however, was an uncomfortable reminder of too many heated discussions with his own parents that had all come down to a similar question: why couldn’t he be responsible like Tommy? What would Mom and Dad think, he wondered, if they could see him now?

Not that it mattered – Deb and Marcus Sully were dead. The woman in front of Jake now, however, was very much alive, and her opinion mattered a lot.

“Um,” said Jake.

“He thinks you chose well,” said Mo’at. “It is Neytiri who chose poorly.”

She was too good for him – Jake already knew that. “Uh... you’re not angry,” he said, trying to keep it a statement rather than a question.

“If Eywa allowed the match then I have nothing to say,” Mo’at told him. “Neytiri must live with her choices – and her choices must live with her.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” said Jake.

Mo’at pulled a section out of a piece of fruit and bit into it. “I have wondered sometimes if she is really the right one to follow me as Tsahìk, even if she is my own daughter,” she said. “Now I am reassured. She read the signs correctly. Eywa has a great destiny prepared for her, and for you.”

“For me?” Jake asked cautiously.

The woman swallowed her mouthful and spat out the seeds. “The People have been to your village, the place you call Hell’s Gate. It is grown over with the vrrtepyom, just as your outpost was.”

“I saw it, too,” said Jake. “Grace thinks that means that what happened to us is going to happen to everybody. Is that right?”

“Yes. When the Great Mother set us the task of teaching you to live by her rules, I believed we would fail,” Mo’at told him. “As I said then, it is impossible to fill a cup that is already full. But the cup that has held poison can be emptied, and filled again with sweet water. Eywa has seen that this is possible, and so now the others, too, must learn.”

“It’s not gonna be that simple,” Jake warned. He’d come here because he didn’t know what else to do with himself. His sense of identity had been shattered along with his broken back, leaving him adrift in the world without a purpose. Learning from the Na’vi had given him something he’d desperately needed, but the other humans on Pandora weren’t like him. They knew who they were and what they were supposed to be doing, and they weren’t going to be happy about this.

“They have no choice” said Mo’at firmly. “Eywa has given her terms: if you want to live in her world, you must do so as part of it. It will be you, Jhakesuli, who must lead them to her. You have shown that you can learn. Now you must teach.”

“There’s no way I’m going to be able to teach some of those guys anything,” he protested. “It’ll take more than this to empty their cups. You can ask Grace. She’s tried.”

“They have no choice,” Mo’at repeated, and continued eating as if she hadn’t just asked him to do something impossible.

Jake tried to picture Selfridge or Quaritch or even Max Patel learning to live like Na’vi. He couldn’t do it. His brain simply rejected the whole idea. He swallowed.

“Uh... what will happen to them if they don’t want to learn?” he asked.

“I do not know,” said Mo’at tranquilly. “Perhaps we will find out.”

That night, Neytiri helped him into their hammock – their joint hammock as a mated pair – to sleep, and curled up next to him with her head on his chest.

“Tomorrow we must go to the Sacred Tree,” she said. “We will give thanks to Eywa for bringing you back to us.”

“Right,” said Jake. He probably should.  Eywa had given him what he wanted, the opportunity to stay on Pandora and live his life as one of the People with the woman he loved... but she really couldn’t have given him legs that worked? If this new body was based on his avatar, it shouldn’t have been a problem. How was he supposed to teach anyone anything when he couldn’t stand up?

“Do not worry about Father,” Neytiri said. “He has not been watching you learn like Mother has. Soon he will know what a great hunter you have become.”

Jake snorted. “Right,” he repeated. “A great hunter with no legs.”

“You will become strong again. You said it yourself,” she said. “The healers will help you. I will help you.”

“Yeah.”

“You do not like to need help,” Neytiri observed.

“Does anybody?” Jake asked her.

“No, but we must all accept it sometimes,” she said. “Maybe that is the lesson Eywa wants you to learn.”

Maybe it was – maybe he could ask her about that at the tree. “Will you help me teach the other Sky People, too?” he asked. “Your Mom says that’s gonna be my job.”

She giggled. “Never! You must see how I have suffered, trying to turn some skxawng into a real person!”

“I’m serious,” Jake insisted. “I’m not going to be able to do that alone.”

“The Great Mother never gives us a task we are not equal to,” Neytiri told him through a yawn. “Even when it feels like she does. I thought I would never be able to teach you anything, and yet here we are.” She shut her eyes and curled against him, and he had to smile.

“It’s nice that somebody believes in me,” he said, putting an arm around her. Those worked, at least.

Back at Hell’s Gate, Grace and the others tried to clean up a little so they would have a place to sleep that night. They couldn’t move any of the giant pods and Grace figured it was a bad idea to try, but they managed to clear the vegetation and animal nests away from a couple of the bunks, and storage had some clean-ish sheets and pillows that could be put on them. More vines had to be cut away from the gate so that they could close and lock it.

While they were working on this, another party of Omatikaya arrived on horseback, bringing Louise and Ramazan. They let the two entomologists dismount, and then immediately turned to ride back to Hometree without saying a word, even when Grace called a ‘thank you’ after them.

“They haven’t had much to say the whole time,” said Louise.

Grace gave her a hug. “How are you two?”

“We’ve been better,” said Ramazan. He looked around at the compound, taking in the destruction, the vegetation, and the many, many plant pods. “I’m guessing this is the same thing that happened to us? Do these have people in them?”

“I think so,” said Grace. “To know for sure I’ll need some equipment. An ultrasound machine would be nice.” They would have to do some more poking around in Medical. Have you had anything to eat?”

“The Omatikaya gave us a snack,” said Louise.

“Any sign of our bodies?” asked Ramazan.

Grace gave him a sidelong look. “I think you know that’s a dumb question.”

He looked away. “Yeah.”

They raided the garden for fruits and vegetables for supper, and Grace outlined the plan they had so far. After that, they had to figure out what they were going to do overnight. They could lock the bunkhouse door, but the walls and widows were compromised and in one spot there was a big hole in the roof. The only idea they could come up with for keeping Pandora’s wildlife at bay was to build a big fire, so they collected the wreckage of the avatar exercise equipment and set it alight. After a few games of rock-paper-scissors Norm has chosen to take the first watch. He settled down cross-legged on the ground next to the locked gate, with the firelight reflecting spookily off the back of his eyes, while the other three settled down to sleep.

Or to try to sleep. After lying there with her eyes closed for a couple of minutes, Grace realized that she wasn’t trying to sleep: she was trying to unlink. It wasn’t possible to sleep in your avatar – if you nodded off or passed out, you’d snap back to your body. She wasn’t relaxing, she was shutting out her surroundings in the search for a sensory stimulus that just was not there.

Grace unlinked on her back, because she’d found that was the best position for making sure she wouldn’t return to her avatar to find cramped muscles or extremities full of pins and needles. But she slept on her side, so she rolled over, and stared into the dark.

She hadn’t had time to be scared yet. She’d had to think about what was happening and try to study it so they could figure out what to do next. She’d had to be calm and collected and in charge, because that was what people expected of her. Now, however, she was alone, and fear welled up inside her like a dark, seeping oil. What had just happened to them? Was it, as Norm had feared, permanent? If their bodies were gone... no, their bodies weren’t gone. These were their bodies. Could this be fixed?

One thing was for sure: Grace could not fix it alone. She couldn’t do anything about it alone. That was their priority for tomorrow. They had to get in touch with somebody who could help.

She was still lying there, her mind chasing itself in circles like a cat with a string tied to its tail, when somebody shook her shoulder. Grace cried out in surprise and her eyes flew open.

“Grace?” came a sleepy voice from the upper bunk – Louise’s. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” said Grace, breathing heavily. She looked up at Norm, who was crouched next to her bed with his hands up in apology.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s your turn to watch the fire.”

“Right.” She sat up, scrubbing at eyes that didn’t want to stay open. “I wasn’t sleeping anyway.” Grace arched her back to stretch, and let Norm climb into bed while she stumbled out to sit by the fire.

The next thing she remembered was waking up. The fire was out – there was nothing left but smouldering embers. It was raining a little, somewhere between mist and drizzle. Her back ached from lying on the cold concrete, and despite having apparently been asleep for hours, Grace’s eyes were itching fiercely and she had a ferocious tension headache, as if she’d been awake for days.

“You look terrible,” said Louise, offering her a cup of coffee.

“I feel terrible,” said Grace, accepting it. It was black – good. She didn’t want anything between her and the caffeine right now. “I need a cigarette.”

“No, you don’t,” said Louise, who didn’t approve of smoking.

Grace didn’t approve of it either, but after doing it since the age of nineteen she didn’t much feel like stopping. “What time is it?”

“Six forty-five in the morning.”

“Figures. Where are the boys?”

“They went down to the Winpay River for more clean water,” said Louise. “Everything in the cisterns stagnant and full of insect larvae. They’re armed,” she added.

“That’s good,” sighed Grace. For a moment she pondered the idea of crawling into one of the bunks and trying to go back to sleep, but there didn’t seem to be much point. She’d only lie there trying to unlink again out of sheer force of habit, and it wouldn’t be long before she’d have to get up anyway. There was too much to do today. Might as well drink her stimulants and get started.

Norm and Ramazan returned with buckets of water that everybody could splash on their faces and reconstitute some rations into a very runny and tasteless porridge for breakfast. Louise made more coffee by boiling it in a pot over a fire, campout-style, and thus fortified, they got to work.

The communications centre in ops was definitely not salvageable, at least not without far more technical expertise than any of the four scientists possessed. Instead, they dug out the emergency contact kits and went through them until they found one that was fully intact and dry. They set up the solar panel and got it charged, and then turned on the radio.

Grace braced herself, expecting a squealing howl of static, but the ionosphere seemed to have quieted down overnight. She raised the mic and fumbled a bit with buttons that were too small for her hands.

“This is Grace Augustine at Hell’s Gate,” she said, “calling the USS Mekong. Can you hear me?”

“Holy shit!” a voice exclaimed.

Norm put his hands on Grace’s shoulders from behind and gave her a small celebratory shake, and Louise squeaked a little in excitement.

“Hello!” Grace said. “You reading me?”

“Yes, we’re reading you!” the voice said. It was crackling with static, but still clear enough to understand. “Augustine! Where are you? We thought you were dead. Patel said you went to investigate something at another remote site and never came back.”

“I’m less dead than reported but I think more dead than we might have hoped,” Grace replied, deliberately cryptic.

“What?”

“Never mind. I’m here, Spellman and Dulac, and Sully and Bardakci are all here, we’re all okay. We’re not sure about anybody else but we’re working on it.”

“What happened?” asked the man on the Mekong.

“We’re not entirely sure,” Grace admitted. “Before we tell you where we’re at, can you tell me what we’ve missed?”

She was starting to hear other voices in the background of the transmission – the crew of the Mekong were gathering in the radio room to listen in on this development. The words weren’t audible, but Grace thought she heard her own name once or twice.

A different voice broke in. “Augustine, this is Captain Andrew Silverman. What’s going on down there? We haven’t heard from anybody in six weeks.”

Six weeks roughly squared with the length of time they’d apparently skilled. “Who, specifically, was the last person you talked to?” she wanted to know.

“The mine foreman, Ryuichi Satō,” Silverman replied. “He said the miners were upset they were expected to continue working while all the scientists were supposed to be hunkering down. That was about a week, I think, after the last time you were seen. He ended the call, and after that we couldn’t reach anyone.”

So they might have another week before they found out if everybody else had really suffered the same fate they had. “All right,” said Grace. “As for us, we just woke up at our sites. We didn’t realize how much time had passed until we were able to get a computer turned on, and...” how should she put this? “We appear to be stuck in our avatars. We’ve asked the Omatikaya to help us look for some of the other people we know are missing.”

“Well, that’s great if you want to get them shot,” somebody in the background muttered.

“We’ve got a man on the inside,” said Grace, annoyed. “For the time being, we’re trying to figure out what happened and how, but we don’t have a lot of supplies, and the plant growth destroyed most of our equipment.”

“Got it,” said Captain Silverman. “Let us know what you need, and we’ll send somebody down to deliver it.”

Grace hesitated a moment before answering. “You know what?” she said. “No. Don’t send people. Just equipment. If we can set up better communications, and get a spare reconstitutor so we can properly rehydrate our food, that’ll do for now, but just send it as cargo. We’ll set it up ourselves.”

“No people,” Silverman echoed. “You think something will happen to them?”

“I do,” said Grace. “There’s nobody at the compound, and our working hypothesis is that they’ve been swallowed up by the plants. I’m gonna need some time to study thing before I can tell you anything else besides speculation.”

“Roger. We’ll put something together for you ASAP,” he promised. “In return, could you have somebody check in, say every hour or so? Just so we know you’re all still okay down there. We promised the Mississippi an update on the situation.

That was right – the next ship from Earth was due to arrive in... if it had been seven weeks, probably less than a month now. They’d still be far enough out to make real-time communications impossible, but they’d be moving at sub-relativistic speeds and could exchange messages over a matter of hours. “Can do,” Grace said. “We’ll set an alarm. Just as soon as we find one that works.”

The idea that some sort of help was on the way helped invigorate everybody, even if it wasn’t much. They found a spot in the airfield that didn’t have any of the big pods in it and set to work with saws and machetes, clearing the vegetation to make room for a landing craft. This, too, was made rather awkward by the fact that none of the tools had been designed for avatars, but as evening closed in, they were able to splash col water on their aching muscles and feel fairly accomplished.

“We’ve got some ground cleared so you can land the cargo,” Norm told Silverman when they checked in again. “You should be able to see it on satellite.”

“We can. We’ve been watching you work,” the captain told him. “Augustine said there were five of you. We’ve only seen four.”

“Sully’s with the Omatikaya,” said Grace. “I told you we had a man on the inside. Even if he were here, though, he wouldn’t be much help. He can’t walk.”

“Oh, right, the wheelchair,” said Silverman, then paused. “He can’t walk in his avatar?”

“He can,” Grace corrected, “he’s just bad at it. I actually think the situation is more complicated than I said earlier, but I don’t want to go into it until I’ve had the chance to analyze some things. Right now, it’s survival first.”

“Of course. Of course,” Silverman said. “We’re sending you a reconstitutor, and we’ve asked the Mississippi to donate a spare one when they arrive, too. Also solar panels, comms equipment, and we’ve put together some medical gear for you – drugs the database says are safe for avatar, and a couple of diagnostic devices.”

Those would also be human-sized, but they would make do. “That’s amazing, thanks,” said Grace. “Talk to you in an hour or so.”

It was getting dark now. They returned to the avatar bunkhouse and got their fire going, and Grace took a flashlight and looked around inside to check on the pods that were still... she kind of hoped gestating wasn’t the right word. They were quiet, and when she touched one, this time to side caved in slightly. Grace snatched her hand away and took a couple of steps backwards.

For a moment nothing happened. Then the pod rippled and convulsed. Grace probably should have called somebody, but she just stood there frozen, watching as the side of the thing split open, spilling a mass of faintly glowing goop that rolled onto the floor and lay there, quivering.

It was an awful sight, and Grace had to force herself to come closer. Was there a person in there?

There was not. Just a pile of sticky, stringy goo that looked like mucus, or frogspawn, and was full of dark objects silhouetted against the faint light. Yes, those were bones, and when she spotted the skull it had the etched lines on it that signaled it had belonged to an avatar.

“Guys!” she shouted. “Get in here!”

The others came running and were in time to see as a second pod opened, then a third, disgorging what was left of the avatars they had consumed. Like the empty bodies Grace and Norm had left behind at the trailer, these were no longer any use to anybody. Their former drivers would have new bodies now... but where were they?

Not in the bunkhouse. The avatars had been locked in here while their drivers weren’t allowed to use them for fear of whatever the hell was going on. The actual people would be somewhere else.

“Grab a light and search the compound,” she said. “We’re gonna have company.”

Chapter Text

They took flashlights and spread out. Norm immediately ran for the hangar, doubtless thinking of Trudy, but Grace, Louise, and Ramazan headed for the living quarters, where they split up to peek in windows and pry open airlocks choked with vegetation. The first thing they were going to have to do, she thought, was to reassure everybody they could breath. Anyone not used to having an avatar would probably panic when they realized they were in the open air without a mask.

“Grace! Louise! Over here!” shouted Ramazan.

The women ran to see what he’d found. He’d put his flashlight on the ground and was holding on to somebody’s arm, trying to help a person squirm out a window between tightly interwoven vines. Grace grabbed her sampling knife to cut somet of these back, and Louise and Ramazan pulled out a naked, slimy avatar woman with her hair in a pixie cut, except for the queue down the back. She slid to the ground and they helped her to her hands and knees, whereupon she immediately leaned over and coughed up a gob of goo.

“Dr. Shum?” asked Ramazan.

Shiufung rubbed at her face, then raised her head to look at them. “Bardakci! You’re all right?”

“I’m fine. We’re fine,” Ramazan promised, though there was a note in his voice suggesting he wasn’t entirely sure.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Grace asked.

Shiufung coughed a few more times. “I... I don’t know.” She frowned, confused. “I was in my quarters and listening to the thunder and the rain. I could smell it... you know how rain smells? I could smell it and I realized the window was open, but I could breathe just fine. Was that a dream?” She looked around, then realized she had no clothes on, and curled up to cover herself. “What happened?”

“We’re working on it,” said Grace. “Don’t try to unlink. Nothing bad will happen, it just won’t work.”

“What?”

“I’ll explain later. “Right now we gotta see who else is out.”

Louise put an arm around Shiufung. “Come on, we’ll find you something to eat and something to wear.”

“Oh, good, I’m starving,” said Shiufung.

The two women started back towards the avatar bunkhouse, while Ramazan picked up his flashlight again and he and Grace resumed checking windows. A few doors down, they found the Bierdragrs – Peter and Carol were huddled in a corner, trying to figure out what had happened to them. Carol wrapped herself in a shower curtain and they squeezed out the window, right around the time when Norm returned with a woman leaning on him. This was not Trudy, but Reid Mecklenburg, an anatomist who specialized in large animals like zakru and sturmbeests.

“She was just inside the hangar,” Norm said. “The other pods aren’t moving, but they’re not as warm as they were.”

“Take her to Louise and Shiufung at the bunkhouse,” Grace directed.

They moved on to find Rob and Keith in the mess hall along with a couple of others. More were in the recreation areas, and one in medical. By the time the gathering darkness drove everybody back to the safety of their bonfire, they’d found about fifteen more people awake and confused – about half the full compliment of avatar drivers. The rest of the pods, which presumably contained people who had not had avatars, remained closed. Once they’d all cleaned up, dressed, and devoured some rations, they could talk about the situation.

“Who are we we missing?” asked Grace. “Sully’s not with us, but we know where he is and he’d okay. Bruce, Maureen, and Mike vanished at the same time as Louise and Ramazan. They ought to be awake by now.”

“We tried to contact them when we woke up,” Ramazan said, “but they never answered.”

“I asked the Omatikaya to look for them. I think if they’d found them, they would have brought them back by now, but we’ll ask again,” Grace decided.

“Sébastien Allende was on one of the prospecting ships, serving as translator and liaison with the tribes in the eastern islands,” said Shiufung. “I did try to contact them when we became aware of the problem but I never got a reply. Have you tried again?”

“We talked to the Mekong and they’ve passed word on to Gateway, but we haven’t reached anyone else on the ground,” said Norm. “Allende was the only driver at sea, right?” He looked at Grace, who nodded.

“We’re waiting on the Omatikaya to hear about the other remote sites,” said Grace, “but we’ll try again tomorrow. Some of them are outside the clan’s territory, like climatology.” She thought for a moment. “Zeke O’Connolly and Carla Birnbaum were out on the plains with the documentary crew filming the zakru migration. The Olangi might be able to look in on them.”

“What about Cam?” asked Archer Przemyslaw, a soil ecologist.

Grace sucked in a breath through her teeth. It was easy to forget about Cameron Hegner. He didn’t say much. Some days he didn’t even get out of bed, and when he did, he often didn’t leave his quarters. He’d been the first driver ever to have his avatar killed out from under him, and that was when they’d learned there was nothing to give somebody PTSD like actually dying.

“Does anybody know where he was?” asked Grace.

“He’d have to be here,” said Reid. “He doesn’t go anywhere else.”

“Then he must be in one of the pods that haven’t opened yet,” she decided.

“Why are they still closed?” Carol looked around, as if expecting to see more newly-emerged people staggering across the yard towards them. “Surely this all happened at once. If we’d gone first, everybody else would have tried to evacuate.”

Grace shrugged. “My best guess is that our genes were easier to figure out because we already had avatars – all the splicing was already done. With the others, the plants are going to have to do all the work that normally took the engineers months. I don’t know,” she repeated. “What I do know is we have to get organized, because this is going to get a lot worse. We’ll start on that tomorrow. For now... we all need some sleep.”

This was a problem – the avatar bunkhouse was now full of not only dead plants, but discarded bones and sticky, hardening jelly. Nobody wanted to sleep there until it was cleaned out, and they didn’t have the time or the light to do so right away. They ended up breaking back into the residential area of the complex and clearing away some of the furniture in the mess hall so they could sleep on the floor. Sleeping bags would have been nice, but nobody had ever thought to make any big enough for avatars. They had to do their best with the bedding they could scrounge, and even then, Grace could feel the cold, hard tile right through the layers of blankets. Her back was going to feel like hell tomorrow.

That wasn’t the worst part, though. The worst was the remaining pods, lying around on the floor of the room or dangling by webs of vines from the ceiling. Enough light from the planet and moons was coming in the smashed remains of the windows for them to be easy to see, and Grace found herself lying flat on her back again, staring up at one in particular that was twisting gently on the end of its vine. What if those opened during the night, dumping more people on them?

She supposed they would just have to deal with it. Hopefully they at least had a couple more days before that happened... when it did, she wanted to be able to give everybody some semi-solid answers about the situation.

Jake didn’t have to worry about his back – his legs were more than enough trouble. The healers had taken a look at them, testing reflexes and tapping on the photophores to watch them respond, and agreed that there was nothing wrong with the muscles or nerves. He just needed exercise to strengthen them. They recommended foods high in protein, and Jake just sighed and nodded, knowing that a physiotherapist on Earth would have said the same things.

Te’fnak, a healer who had a talent for woodworking and was often called on to make things like splints, came to sit with him on the afternoon of the second day. He had an armful of branches and bones, which he was making into a set of crutches.

“It’ll be a long time before you’re hunting talioang again, he noted, wrapping leather around the grips.

“Don’t remind me,” grumbled Jake.

Te’fnak glanced sideways at him. “Olo’eyktan says the Sky People get what they want, only to decide that they want something else even more. Is that true?”

“Probably,” Jake said. “That’s one thing about humans. They’re never satisfied.” Neytiri was going to be giving him shit about it for months. He needed to focus on the positive, like how nice it was to close his eyes at night and then just wake up back in the hammock in the morning, rather than having to go back to his human body and feed that and wash it before going to bed again.

The healer tied off the leather and trimmed the excess. “Here,” he said, handing the finished crutches to Jake. “Try to stand.”

Jake got them under his arms and clumsily, with a couple of false starts, managed to prop himself upright. His legs wouldn’t carry him, but with the knees locked they would hold him up just long enough to plant the crutches ahead of him, and he was able to move forward.

“You do it like you’ve done it before,” said Te’fnak, impressed.

“Yeah. I broke my ankle when I was nine and was on crutches for a week or so,” Jake told him. “I guess it’s one of those things you never really forget.”

“Like riding a pa’li,” Te’fnak said. “Keep going. It’ll be good for the muscles.”

Jake hobbled his way up and down the length of the big communal space under Hometree, attracting several young people who stood around and watched his progress. He tried not to look at them, and concentrated on what he was doing, planting his legs wide so he could balance better. It didn’t take long to get into the rhythm, but it was also hard work, tiring his arms almost as quickly as his legs. What was it Dr. Singh had said about him losing upper body mass? Not that he would have obeyed her instructions even if he’d had time.

“Very good,” Te’fnak told him. “With that and your other exercises, you’ll be back on your ikran sooner than you think.” He patted Jake on the back.

“Right,” said Jake. “Thanks.”

He made another trip to the roots on the other side, then sat down there to rest and shake out his aching shoulders. While he did, two little girls came scurrying up to talk to him. Wiyu and Weynu were seven years old, and quite difficult to tell apart, but Jake had figured it out. They were what was called mirror twins, identical in the way reflections were, and one of the ways it manifested was that Wiyu was right-handed while her sister preferred the left. Jake and Tommy had been the same way, with Tommy as the lefty.

“Hey, ladies,” said Jake. “What mischief have you been up to?”

They came and crouched in front of him. Weynu immediately picked up one of the crutches to examine it, while Wiyu looked at him and grinned. “We’ve been helping look for more Sky People!” she said proudly.

The Omatikaya had been doing this for the past couple of days. Jake couldn’t help, any more than he could do anything else useful at the moment, but he knew they’d located several sets of vrrtepyom pods. One was at the site of a hydroelectric dam that was now in utter ruins as the vines had torn it apart, and another was tangled high in the foliage of the floating mountains, around the wreck of a Samson. Both of these were being watched very carefully, as the people inside would find themselves in imminent danger the moment the pods opened. Envoys had also been sent to other clans, including the Tawkami and Tayrangi, to ask about people who’d been further afield, but it would be a while before they heard back from any of those.

“Have you?” Jake asked with a smile. “Where’ve you been looking?”

“Around Kireysi-Sa’nok’s school,” said Wiyu, “and we found some!”

“Is Kireysi-Sa’nok coming back soon?” Weynu wanted to know. Many of her students had called Grace Sa’nok or mother, because they didn’t have any other special term of respect for a schoolteacher in their language.

“I don’t know,” Jake replied honestly. “She wants to, but she’s got a lot of things to worry about right now and she’s going to have to deal with some of those first.” He looked at Wiyu. “You found some Sky People?”

“We found the fruit of the vrrtepyom,” Wiyu said. “Three of them.”

“They’re with parts of those...” Weynu thought for a moment. “The big machines the Sky People warriors wear, to make them as tall as Na’vi.”

“Amp suits.” Jake nodded. “Did you tell a grownup?”

The two girls exchanged a rather significant glance. Having had a twin himself, Jake immediately recognized it.

“You gotta tell a grownup,” he said.

“We weren’t supposed to be there alone,” Weynu admitted. “Dad says there’s bad spirits at the school. We’ll get in trouble.”

There was an uneasy feeling around the ruins of the schoolhouse. Jake could certainly understand why somebody would think the place was haunted. “So you’re telling me,” he guessed, “so I can tell somebody else, and your Dad won’t find out you went.”

Wiyu smiled angelically and nodded, while her sister sat looking very serious. “You won’t say it was us, will you?” Weynu asked.

“I won’t. Cross my heart.” Jake drew an x on his chest with one finger. “But no more sneaking around, okay? When your Dad tells you not to do something, it’s because he wants to keep you safe.”

“We know,” said Weynu, “but he worries too much.”

“My twin and I used to say that about our parents,” Jake told them. “Turns out, they worried just the right amount.”

Neytiri had been out hunting that day, and came back in the evening with several large birds that needed to be skinned and roasted so the meat could be shared among the People at supper. Jake was eager to help her with this job, despite how messy it was. It was something useful he could do.

“I see you have new toys,” she said, seeing the crutches propped against the roots.

“Te’fnak made them for me,” Jake replied. “They do help, but I’ve been thinking. I wonder if I could modify my ikran saddle to kind of strap myself on, so I won’t need to use my feet while flying.”

“Like a child flying with his parents?” asked Neytiri.

“Yeah.”

“That will be no way to hunt,” she said.

“No, but it’ll get me back in the air.” Jake ripped the last of the skin off one bird and set it aside to give to the leatherworkers, and got started on the next. “I feel like I’m gonna go crazy stuck here in Hometree. Also... apparently some of the kids have been by Grace’s old school. They said they saw vrrtepyom and amp suit wreckage there.”

“They did?” Neytiri gave him a suspicious look. “Which children?”

“I promised I wouldn’t tell.”

She smiled, knowing exactly who it must have been. “My lips are sealed. I will ask somebody to look.” She examined the obsidian skinning knife she was using, and then expertly tapped the tip of it against a stone to break a flake off. The newly sharpened point glinted in the firelight. “I wonder...” she began.

Then they heard a commotion overhead, as several banshees landed shrieking in the canopy. There was no immediate indication what had happened, but the news passed from mouth to mouth far faster than anyone could climb down the trunk, and soon a woman – Neytiri’s best friend, Peyral – came running to deliver it to the couple.

“More vrrtepyom are opening,” she said. “They have brought back two more.”

Jake grabbed his crutches and struggled to his feet. Neytiri would have helped him over to the trunk to meet the people coming down, but he assured her he could do it, and struggled over unassisted.

There were two, a man and a woman, both naked but wrapped in silver emergency blankets. Jake had met all the other avatar drivers at least once, but didn’t know any of them well except for Grace and Norm. He didn’t remember these two. The woman had long hair in dozens of braids that she’d tied into a knot at the back of her head. The man’s hair was very short, not a buzz cut but not far off, and he had a tattoo of a bee on one shoulder – that was familiar. It was a symbol of the city of Manchester in England, where its bearer had grown up, but Jake couldn’t remember the man’s name.

“Hello!” he called out, as the Na’vi helped them to the ground.

The woman looked up. “Who are you?” she asked.

“Jake Sully.” He limped closer and leaned on one crutch so he could shake her hand. “You?”

“Margo Oladele,” she said. “And this is Geoff Hall. We’re the geologists who were out at Mt. Ramahaw, at the edge of the Revelations.” This was a mountain range far to the south of Hell’s Gate and the Omatikaya territory, inhabited mainly by nomadic people who followed herds of grazing animals up and down the slopes over the course of the year. There were rumours of some more unpleasant types deeper in the volcanic areas, but the humans on Pandora hadn’t had any contact with them.

“We left our avatars there, on a feeding drip,” Geoff added. “How did we get here?

“The Na’vi weren’t big on answering our questions,” Margo agreed.

It was gonna be up to Jake, he realized... this was what Mo’at had warned him about. “These aren’t your avatars. Grace can explain this better than I can, but... our avatars are dead, and the plants rewrote our human bodies to match them. You want something to eat?” he offered. He’d been starving when he’d first emerged from that plant pod. So had Grace and Norm.

“Yeah, please,” said Geoff, grateful.

A crowd was starting to gather to look at these new arrivals. Jake looked from face to face until he spotted somebody he knew spoke decent English – a teenage girl called Ume – and called out to her. “Can you get these folks something to eat? Being embraced by Eywa leaves you hungry.”

“I will!” Ume replied, and hurried off.

She came back with some dried fruit for them, which the two geologists ate as if they hadn’t had a square meal in weeks. While they filled their empty stomachs, Jake explained what he knew about the situation – Grace’s theories, and the fact that Hell’s Gate was full of unopened pods.

“What’s that mean for Sean and Kip?” asked Geoff with his mouth full.

“Who are they?” asked Jake.

“Sean Petrie’s our vulcanologist,” said Margo. “He hasn’t got an avatar but he wasn’t in when they came to get us – one of his seismographs had quit and he’d gone to take a look at it. Kip said he’d go back for them.”

“Kipling Mayhew, our pilot,” Geoff agreed. “He should have been with us in the Samson.”

“I don’t know,” Jake admitted. “Maybe they’re still in the pods. It’s not just drivers, it’s everybody.”

“Ma Jhake,” Neytiri touched his arm.

He looked up. Mo’at and Eytukan were approaching.

Jake and the geologists had been sitting down to eat and talk, but now he got up again – again, Neytiri tried to help, and again Jake shrugged her off – and Geoff and Margo knew enough to do the same.

“Oel ngati kame,” Margo greeted the leaders politely, performing the associated gesture. Her rather stilted speech suggested this was all the Na’vi she knew. Geoff imitated her.

Neither of Neytiri’s parents returned the salutation. “We have sent warriors to look at the other vrrtepyom on our lands,” Eytukan said. “Has Jhakesuli told you what you will be doing now?”

“We were getting to that,” Jake told her. He took a deep breath. “Eywa wants the humans to learn how to be Na’vi. I did it, and now everybody has to do it, whether they like it or not. So now you’re here, I’m supposed to teach you.”

Geoff and Margo looked at Mo’at, who gave a single slow nod to confirm it.

“We have to stay here?” asked Margo.

“Where else were you thinking of going?” Mo’at wanted to know.

“We... we thought we’d have to go back to Hell’s Gate,” said Geoff. “That’s where we were going when... whatever happened. Sully says that’s where Augustine and the others are.”

“They will learn nothing there,” said Eytukan. “They will only continue on their foolish ways, their bodies altered but their minds unchanged.”

“That is not Eywa’s plan for you,” Mo’at agreed.

The geologists moved a little closer together, worried.

“We can’t keep them prisoner here,” Jake said. “I chose to come here.”

“They are not meant to have a choice,” Mo’at reminded him.

“And they’re going to resent that,” said Jake. “Humans aren’t used to thinking of themselves as subject to the will of something greater. At least, most of them aren’t.” There were some intensely religious people who might, but Eywa wasn’t the being they had in mind. “They need to at least feel like they chose this.”

“Who will convince them?” asked Mo’at. “You?”

Jake doubted it was him. The only answer he could come up with was, “Grace, maybe? It’s not gonna happen here.”

Mo’at scowled, but then very deliberately relaxed her face. “Very well. We will take them to her in the morning. I must speak with Grace Augustine anyway.”

“You don’t need to go, Mother,” said Neytiri. “I told you I would carry your message.”

“No, I am meant to go myself,” Mo’at said, clearly rather cross about it. “Even the Tsahìk is subject to the Will of Eywa – as your people must learn,” she added, looking at the geologists.

“Thank you, Ma’am,” said Geoff politely.

“I am not the one you should be grateful to,” said Mo’at.

As she’d expected, Grace did not sleep well, and as she lay on her side on the cold floor, closing her itching eyes against the early morning light, she recognized that this was going to catch up with her very quickly. She was used to feeling well-rested in her avatar, because the damned thing could sleep without her, while in her human body she had to make herself go to ed. Now here she as, with the worst of both worlds. Maybe she needed to drink less coffee, but that would make her even worse to deal with than she knew she already.

At least she had a no-effort way to quit smoking. The urge to put something in her mouth and suck on it was still present, but that was mere habit – the pounding need for nicotine was gone. That was weird in itself. Why was that cured, but Jake still couldn’t walk even though his spin was healed? Why did Carol Bierdragr still have that tattoo on the back of her shoulder, neatly scaled up to match the size of her avatar, while Grace’s oophorectomy scars were gone? There were so many levels on which this didn’t make sense.

She was trying to make a list of things she needed to do that day, and not having much luck as she kept drifting back to sleep, when she was suddenly startled to full wakefulness by the roar of rocket engines.

Grace sat up, blinking in exhaustion as she looked out the broken windows onto the airfield. There was nothing to be seen but billowing smoke. Around her in the room, the other avatar drivers were also struggling upright to watch, or crawling behind tables or pods to get out of the way of the vines and leaves that were flying away from the landing site.

The roar suddenly stopped, leaving the silence ringing in Grace’s ears, and the dust slowly settled. One by one, the drivers got up and climbed out the windows to take a better look.

A small, capsule-shaped cargo craft was standing on its legs in the middle of the area they’d cleared on the tarmac. Humans would have had to climb a ladder to turn the emergency release and start unloading it, but Peter Bierdragr just stood on his tiptoes and pulled the lever, and the hatch swung open. They looked inside, and found it crammed with boxes and crates.

“Very prompt of them,” Grace said, reaching in to start pulling stuff out. At least something good was happening.

She passed a couple of boxes down to the others, and then found one containing a proper communications set. She opened it and activated the holoscreen, and called up to the ship.

“This is Grace Augustine calling the Mekong,” she said. “That was some way to wake up.”

The image flickered, and a man’s face appeared – an east Asian guy with a bit of beard stubble. He blinked at her in surprise. “Dr. Augustine? Oh, good. I’ll call the Captain.”

Silverman, in his fifties and prematurely grey with full, ruddy cheeks, appeared a couple of minutes later and leaned down to the camera to talk to her. “Was that everything you needed?” he asked.

“We’re still unpacking,” said Grace, and turned the set so he could see Rob and Keith pulling boxes out. “You could have warned us.”

“The launch window was shorter than we expected and we didn’t want to wait another orbit,” Silverman said. “How are you getting along?”

“We’ve been better,” said Grace. “The rest of the avatars are out, and hopefully we can talk to the Omatikaya today about the ones who didn’t make it back here. The rest of the pods are still closed but Spellman says they’re not as warm as they were. Peter and Carol want to get a few things in the lab going so we can study them more closely.”

Silverman nodded. “We’ve been in touch with the Mississippi. Captain Rychwalski is gonna bring Ms. Lutz out of cryo early to see what she thinks.”

“I’m sure that will be very helpful,” Grace deadpanned. The Mekong’s relief ship was still weeks away in the outer part of the system, and Vanessa Lutz, the company executive on board, was unlikely to be much use. “We’ll finish unloading here and then let you know if we need anything else.”

“Rychwalski requested medical data from each of you,” Silverman added.

“Will do,” Grace promised.

As well as communications equipment and a couple of laptop computers – stupidly undersized, but usable – the Mekong had sent medical scanners and an ultrasound machine. Everybody’s favourite, however, was a small working fabricator. It wasn’t big enough to print anything except clothing and handheld tools, but having those made everything else much easier. They could wear something clean and start to make repairs.

The Bierdragrs had a very specific list of things they wanted cleaned up and working, and Grace saw the pattern immediately – they wanted to look at the genetics of not only the plants but the people, to determine how they were like or unlike their avatars. They took the doors off the lab and pulled the windows out, since those were no longer needed anyway, and got to work clearing vegetation while Carol took blood samples and Peter tried to get a database up so he could look at everybody’s records.

Grace was taking some of the trash away, throwing it on a midden they’d started behind the avatar bunkhouse, when a shadow passed over. She looked up and saw several circling banshees with Na’vi on their backs. Grace waved, and the riders came in to land.

Jake was not with them, but Neytiri was – and to Grace’s surprise, behind her on her banshee was her mother Mo’at. Grace hadn’t seen the Omatikaya Tsahìk since the memorial service they’d held for the dead students. Even when Jake had sweet-talked the clan into letting her visit Hometree again, Neytiri’s parents had avoided Grace, and she suspected they blamed her, personally, for the death of Silwanin. She wasn’t even upset about it – if it came to that, Grace still blamed herself, too.

“I see you, Tsahìk,” she said, as Neytiri helped the woman down.

“Grace Augustine,” the woman replied. “We must speak. But first, your people have requested to be returned to you.” Behind her, the other banshee riders were landing, and letting down a couple of people who were clearly not used to flying – their legs were unsteady and they looked a little green at the tips of the ears. That alone would have told Grace they were... maybe ‘Sky People’ was the best word, even if they hadn’t been wrapped in silver blankets instead of wearing Omatikaya tewngs. The woman looked over at Grace, and Grace’s face broke into a grin as she recognized them.

“Geoff and Margo!” she said, and gave each of them a hug. “You guys okay?”

“I’ll be better if I never have to ride one of those again,” Geoff replied.

Noticing the activity, a few other people came out to greet the new arrivals. Shiufung was the first to arrive, asking if either of them were injured. Archer came next, and laughed at what they were wearing.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got one fabricator – we can get you something to wear.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” said Margo. The other drivers led the new arrivals inside, and Grace turned to talk to the Na’vi again.

“Any sign of the others?”

“One fruit of the vrrtepyom remains with the wreckage of the flying machine,” Mo’at said, “and we have word that the ones at your weather station in Tawkami territory have opened, but we do not know what became of the occupants.” She looked Grace over. “Jhakesuli says you will be the one to convince the Sky people they must come to us and learn.”

He did, did he? He had a lot of faith in her. “I’ll do my best,” she said, “but right now I’m more worried about finding everybody. As well as the missing avatars, we’ve got a lot of other people who were scattered in facilities around the planet. It’s not gonna be easy to get them all back.”

Mo’at’s brow furrowed, and Grace felt like she was about to hear her own mother tell her to stop making excuses why she’d been home late. But instead of delivering a lecture, Mo’at untied a small pouch from her smock, and put it in Grace’s hands.

“This will help to open your mind to Eywa,” she said. “Place one on your tongue and suck for ten heartbeats, then spit. Do not swallow.”

Grace blinked, and then untied the pouch to look at the contents. It turned out to be half a dozen caps of mushrooms, still glowing faintly pink even though they’d been harvested and dried. Fungi weren’t Grace’s specialty, but she knew that a lot of Pandoran mushrooms were incredibly toxic – or powerfully psychedelic.

“Thank you,” she said, closing it again, “but I don’t think I need this.” She tried to give it back.

Mo’at pushed it towards her. “If you are to be a guide to your people, you must learn to hear and interpret the will of the Great Mother.”

Grace frowned. “You want me to learn to be a Tsahìk?” she asked.

“That is the role Eywa has given you.” Mo’at looked at Grace from head to toe again, as if judging her suitability for the role. She didn’t look like she had high hopes for her. “In return, she will give you what you want most.”

“What is that?” asked Grace. She could think of several things she wanted right now, but none of them were likely to be ones Eywa was able – or willing – to help with.

“You know that better than I do,” Mo’at replied, and reached for Neytiri’s hand to mount the banshee again. “When your people are willing, send them to us. They have much they must learn. The sooner they start, the sooner we can begin to repair the damage they have caused.”

Chapter Text

The next few days almost, though not quite, fell into a routine. The group would get up with the sun and have breakfast, and then they’d get to work. There was no shortage of things to do: vines needed clearing, solar panels needed to be reconnected, equipment had to be taped back together as best they could in the hope it could be made to work again. Peter and Carol managed to synthesize some agar gel and started doing comparisons between their avatars and their new bodies.

The pods did a number of things that Grace kept careful records of. When she’d arrived at Hell’s Gate they’d been plump and stiff-walled, but as they progressed in whatever it was they were doing, they seemed to lose fluids. Their skins wrinkled and became more leathery in texture, and they shrank a bit. The vines they were attached to started to wither, and the leaves to droop. These all seemed like signs that they would be opening soon, but for now they remained quiescent.

In cleaning and tinkering with the lab equipment she found that the three mass spectrometers had enough working parts among them to assemble one functional unit. Grace got that patched in to the database Peter had managed to bring up, and while results were very slow, they were obtainable – samples could now be properly analyzed. She powdered up one of Mo’at’s mushrooms and put it in the machine, and let it chew on that for an hour or so.

The results she got back were a shock, even though she knew they shouldn’t have been: the fungus was absolutely brimming with dimethyltryptamine, in the kind of concentrations that would absolutely take you to meet God and might not bring you back. No wonder the Tsahìk had told her not to swallow it! She put the pouch in a filing cabinet and locked the drawer. Most of the people here were smart enough not to put random things in their mouths, but with something like that she didn’t want to take chances.

As the days passed, Grace found Mo’at’s words niggling at her. Grace was supposed to become a sort of Tsahìk for the Sky People, which was ridiculous... and in return, Eywa would give her what she wanted most? But what was that?

The last time Grace Augustine had what she thought of as a big dream it had been to go to Pandora – but now she’d been here for years, with every intention of staying for the rest of her life. With that wish granted, she couldn’t really think of anything else she would ask for.

Maybe it was to understand Pandora properly, the thing she’d been working on her whole life. Mo’at might think that becoming a Tsahìk was the best way to do that, but that wasn’t what Grace had in mind. It wouldn’t get her into the electrochemical processes that went on in the plants, their relationships with the insects and the herbivores, the millions of tiny interconnections that made the biosphere of this world so endlessly fascinating. A hundred lifetimes of study wouldn’t have been enough to see all of that. It would take a mind as big as Eywa’s to know and comprehend it all.

When she’d been much younger, Grace had thought that what she wanted most was a child of her own, if only just to prove that she’d be a better mother than hers had been, but ovarian cancer at the age of twenty-two had taken care of that. Thinking about it made her reach down to rub the spots where the scars should have been, but of course she didn’t find them. Her avatar had never had that surgery and would theoretically have been capable of bearing children, but this wasn’t her avatar, and she would have needed to find a man to father them. Grace had known by the time she was fourteen that men didn’t interest her, and that definitely hadn’t changed.

Not long ago, she’d thought that what she wanted most was to be allowed to visit and work with the Omatikaya kids again. When Jake managed to talk the leaders around, it had felt like a dream come true, even if Eytukan and Mo’at had continued to be cold to her. Maybe that was it. Maybe once this was worked out, however that happened, she’d be able to go live with the People like Jake did, and teach their children.

If that were the case, though, she had a lot of work to do first.

She’d been sitting up one night going through some of the results from Peter and Carol’s agar plates when she nodded off, only to awaken with a start when somebody shook her shoulder.

“Grace,” a voice said in the darkness. “Grace!”

“Huh?” Grace raised her head and her back twinged, and she realized she’d been sleeping at her desk again. This had been a bad enough habit when she’d been the right height to do it – working at a human-sized desk and sitting on a human-sized chair while in a Na’vi body, she’d had to sprawl almost her entire torso on the furniture. She rubbed the bridge of her nose and looked up to see who was there.

It was Carol. She looked urgently over her shoulder before turning back to Grace. “Are you awake?” she asked.

“Might be.”

“I think the pods are opening.”

Suddenly Grace was fully awake. “Where?”

“Operations.”

Grace grabbed a flashlight and sat up. There were three pods in the lab, which she, Carol, and Peter had been working around. They were still quiet, but they looked smaller and more twisted than they had even earlier that day, as if a giant set of hands had wrung them out like dishcloths. A thousand things ran through Grace’s head. They didn’t yet have the answers they’d hoped to be able to give people. They didn’t have enough food, water, or clothing for the whole base. Everybody was going to be scared and hungry...

Carol’s hand went to her throat, where she was wearing a comm choker. “We’re coming, we’re coming!” she told whoever had called her, then took Grace’s hand. “Come on, we’ve got somebody awake.”

They hurried down the hall as fast as they could while still having to duck through the doorways, and entered the big circular operations room. By the light of a camping lantern hung from one of the broken skylight struts, Grace could see that the pods in here were moving. Some were merely rocking, but others were twisting and convulsing, and one next to the big holotable had indeed opened, disgorging a naked male Na’vi who was now being helped to his knees by Norm and Archer.

Grace went to kneel down in front of the guy, while Shiufung brought an avatar-sized blanket to drape around his shoulders.

“Are you all right?” Grace asked as the man coughed up gunk. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” he rasped, spitting out another mouthful of mucus. He wiped his mouth and raised his head to look at her, and blinked large yellow eyes in confusion. “Grace?”

Grace’s stomach turned inside-out as she realized she recognized him. It was Max. Just as the avatars looked like their drivers, this man had Max Patel’s full cheeks and thin brows, and the hair stuck to his head was already trying to curl even through the goop weighing it down. Grace patted him on the back.

“It’s me,” she said. “I’m here. We got you.”

“What’s going...” Max began, and turned to see Norm on the other side of him. Then he took in the other familiar faces all around him in the harsh light of the LEDs, and began to realize that things were even more wrong than he’d thought. Finally, he looked down, at the hand he’d just run across his face, and turned it over to see the palm. He flexed the fingers one by one, and then reached up to tug at one ear.

“You... made me an avatar?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” said Grace, grimacing. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

Max pulled the corners of Shiufung’s blanket into his lap – his head had cleared enough for him to realize he was naked, but not so much that he didn’t have to think about Grace’s question a moment before he could give her an answer. “I was talking to Selfridge,” he said. “About you, actually. Then we heard something shatter, and the ceiling...” he raised his head and blinked at the smashed skylight panels and the vegetation that had grown over them. “How long ago was...”

He was interrupted as a second pod split. This one was lying on the wreckage of the holotable, and another man spilled out, rolled off, and hit the floor with a splat. Carol and Peter ran to see to him, and Shiufung offered another blanket,

Max stared at this, then looked at Grace again. “What’s happening?” he asked weakly.

A yelp announced a third pod opening, then a fourth, then a fifth, all disgorging their occupants one after another. Grace caught movement through the observation windows and realized that the ones out in the courtyard were also starting to move and open.

“Oh, shit,” she said. Were they all going to hatch at once? That was going to be chaos.

Norm had come to the same conclusion, and got up to make his way to the exit. “Excuse me,” he said, stepping over the man who’d come out of the second pod, and then quickly apologizing when this brought his foot down on somebody else’s tail. “Sorry! Sorry, but I gotta find Trudy...”

Grace didn’t try to stop him. She left Max with Archer and started making her way around the room to see who else they had. There were a couple of programmers and technicians, and a couple of guys from secops. Oh, lord, secops... some of those guys were going to stab the first person they saw without asking questions. She hadn’t even thought of that.

“What’s your name?” she asked a guy who’d spilled out in a heap under one of the consoles.

“Charlie,” he coughed. “Charles Entwhistle. What’s going...” he did a double-take when he saw her face.

“Just stay calm,” Grace told him. “Panicking won’t help anyone.”

Then she heard a strangled scream. This wasn’t coming from Entwhistle, though – it was on the other side of the room. She stood up to see over the holotable, and found the man who’d come out of the third pod, yelling at people to get away from him. He’d kicked the guy from the pod next door in the face, and Carol was now trying to stop his nose bleeding. When the flailing man turned around, Grace saw his face and groaned. It was Parker Selfridge.

“Calm down,” said Rob Hathaway, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” Selfridge barked at him, then curled up, rubbing his upper arms. “This isn’t happening! It isn’t happening! Where’s the kid with my coffee?”

Grace considered several possible reactions. Sympathy did put in an appearance, but it didn’t stay for long. “Shut up, Parker,” she said.

His head snapped up, ears pricked and eyes wide. “Augustine?” he asked. “What the hell is going on?” He raised his hands to gesture, then quickly snatched them back down and stuck them in his armpits so he wouldn’t have to look at them.

Grace opened her mouth to answer him, then thought better of it. “I’ll tell you later.”

“What? What do you mean, you’ll tell me later?” His voice rose in pitch until it was tottering on the rim of hysteria.

“I mean, if I explain this individually to every single person in here, it’ll take years,” said Grace. “Let’s make sure everybody’s all right and then we’ll all sit down and talk about it. Right now, I need you to take some deep breaths.” She reached to take him by the shoulders, but he shrieked and scooted backwards away from her. “Don’t panic! If you panic other people are going to panic, and if people panic they’re going to get hurt.”

“How can you be telling me not to panic! I’ve turned blue!” he wailed. “Oh, shit... oh, shit, have I got a tail?”

Grace exchanged a pained glance with Rob, and then got to her feet again. Somebody had to take charge, and Grace knew by now that when she found herself thinking that, somebody always turned out to be her. “Peter and Carol,” she said, “stay with the people in here. The rest of us – and by ‘us’ I mean those who didn’t just hatch out – let’s spread out and reassure as many people as we can. If our own experiences are anything to go by, everyone’s gonna be confused, scared, and hungry. Let’s take care of that first.”

“I’ll go to medical,” said Max. He used the edge of the holotable to drag himself upright, wrapping the blanket around his waist.

Grace wanted to tell him to sit back down and recover first, but then she realized that like Norm running to find Trudy, he was probably thinking of Reet. “Take Selfridge,” she said. If nothing else, they could calm him down by sedating him. “Everybody else, pick a spot, and for now just tell people it’s gonna be okay and try to keep them calm.”

“We’ll do the mess hall,” said Louise.

“I’ll go to Avatar Ops,” said Shiufung. “People are going to need clothes, food, and medicine.”

“I’ll go with Dr. Shum,” said Geoff.

“Great,” said Grace, and took a deep breath. “I’m gonna go find Cam Hegner.”

There were two pods in the hallway. As she passed, one of them spit out a woman who rolled over to come to rest at Grace’s feet. Reid Mecklenberg stopped to help her, and Grace was able to keep going. Hegner spent most of his time in his quarters, so even though she felt bad about all the people she was having to pass by, Grace made her way there as quickly as she could. She arrived to find the door pried open by the plants that had made their way into the living areas, and heard a rhythmic thumping sound coming from inside.

“Please stop that!” a male voice was begging. “Dr. Hegner, please, you’re going to hurt yourself!”

“Who’s there?” Grace called. She ducked through the door and entered the kitchen area. This had only very dim pre-dawn light filtering in through a leaf-shaded crack in the roof, but by that she could make out the shape of a Na’vi banging his head repeatedly against a cupboard door, while another tried ineffectually to make him stop it.

Grace didn’t bother to ask who the second guy was. She knelt down and helped him wrestle Hegner away from the cupboards and into the middle of the room, kicking the table and chairs over so that he wouldn’t have anything else to hurt himself with. This didn’t seem to phase him. He started hitting himself in the head with his fists instead.

“Unlink!” he begged through his teeth. “Unlink! Unlink!”

The other guy grabbed him by the wrists, while Grace took Hegner’s face between her hands. “Cam,” she said. “Cam! Look at me. Look at me.”

He opened his eyes. Despite the darkness, the pupils were constricted almost to points. This was exactly what she’d been afraid of. The last time Cameron Hegner had been in a Na’vi body he’d felt it die. They would have sent him home, but Dr. Eboigbe had worried his heart was too damaged by constant stress to survive cryo. Now he must feel like he was reliving the whole horrible experience.

“I know you want to unlink,” she said, “but you can’t. No!” she added, as he tried to start hitting himself again. “Keep your eyes on me! Talk to me. Do you know who I am?”

“You’re Grace,” he managed. He looked at the other guy, but didn’t recognize him.

“I’m Nurse O’Toole,” the man said, and recognition tickled the back of Grace’s brain. Hadn’t that been the guy calling names on Quarterly Physical day? Thickset young man with freckles and untrimmed red hair. “I woke up out in the hall and heard him yelling.”

“Listen to me,” Grace repeated. “I know you want to unlink, but you can’t. None of us can. There is nothing to unlink to. These are the only bodies we have.”

Cam stared at her, uncomprehending.

“As best I can figure,” she told him, “these plants all around us were engineered to force us through a transformation, like how some of the insect larvae on this planet rely on Cocoonwoods to trigger their metamorphosis. I think we can all be grateful we didn’t turn into giant butterflies, okay? And the same thing,” she emphasized, “has happened to everybody. You remember Nurse O’Toole, right? He didn’t have an avatar but here he is.”

“Yeah,” said the nurse. “Yeah, here I am.”

“The windows are broken,” whimpered Cam. “They’re gonna come in! They’re gonna come in!”

“Nobody’s going to come in,” Grace told him, but she knew this wasn’t going to work. Like Selfridge, the best thing for him right now might be sedation. She looked over at O’Toole, still holding on to Cam’s wrists. “Are you okay?”

“He hit me a couple of times but I don’t think he did any damage,” the nurse said. “I’m... kinda trying not to think about the rest.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” Grace sighed. “Let’s get him to medical.”

Hegner didn’t want to uncurl. It took several minutes of reassuring words, gentle coaxing, and a few frustrated snarls to get him onto his feet. The whole time, Grace could hear people moving and shouting, both in the hallway and outside. She dreaded to imagine what was going on out there.

Finally they had Cam upright, and she and O’Toole half-guided and half-carried him out into the hall. They stepped over the empty pod that must have been O’Toole’s, and headed for medical.

“Has anybody seen Agniezka?” asked O’Toole.

“I don’t know who that is,” said Grace, as they rounded a corner into the promenade that surrounded the mess hall and recreation ares. There were empty pods and people everywhere here, some attempting to clean up themselves or their neighbours, a few just sitting and staring, others weeping or trying to cover themselves with the giant leaves of the vrrtepyom or with whatever scraps of cloth or plastic they could find.

“Hey!” O’Toole called out to this crowd. “Has anybody seen Agniezka Czechowicz? My girlfriend,” he added, by way of explanation. “She’s one of the administrative assistants.”

A man with a tattoo of Monty Python’s black knight on the back of his shoulder was trying to help a woman stand up. He turned in the direction of O’Toole’s voice and asked, “what does she look like?” Then he bit his lip and said, “never mind, stupid question. You’ll just have to call her name and see if she answers.”

“She’s deaf,” said O’Toole.

Grace should have had a reaction to that, but that happened to be the moment she managed to attach a name to the man’s familiar tattoo. “Wait, I know you,” she said. “You’re the head of communications, right? You had the dumb little goatee that made you look like evil Spock.”

“Mark Queloz,” the black knight guy said. He reached up with his free hand to stroke his chin, and seemed more annoyed than anything else to find it hairless.

“Great,” said Grace. “We’ve got a couple of working radios out at the avatar bunkhouse. Head out there and try to contact the mines. Try to contact the ships. There’s meteorology, there’s seismology, there’s the BBC expedition on the plains, there’s the magnetosphere people at the south pole. See if you can raise any of them. If you do, tell them not to panic and promise we’re gonna come and get them.” She had no idea how they were going to do that, but they’d have to figure it out.

The woman he’d been helping stared at Grace. “You’re giving us work?” she asked.

“No, no, she’s right, if this is everybody then we gotta find people.” He looked Grace over. “Uh... you got any clothes I can borrow?”

“Avatar storage. You look like you’re about as tall as Rob... maybe he can loan you something.”

The first thing Grace heard when they arrived in medical was a crying baby. She’d forgotten all about him, but if everybody else were emerging, she supposed he would be, too. At least the kid would be too young to understand what was wrong, although all the adults freaking out wouldn’t be doing him any good. The waiting room was full of split pods, but there were also a surprising number of new injuries. Some of the pods had ended up dangling from ceilings or over balconies, and had dropped people several metres when they opened.

“What happened to you?” O’Toole asked a woman with a blood-soaked bedsheet wrapped around her arm.

“I saw a native and thought I had to defend myself,” she said, her ears drooping in embarrassment. “Turned out it was a mirror.”

O’Toole looked at Grace.

“Go help,” she said. “I’ll take Cam in.”

Things in medical proper were actually shockingly calm. People were running around, wrapped up in sheets and curtains taken from the cubicles, but they were moving with purpose rather than panicking. Perhaps knowing there were patients here who needed their help had motivated them to pull themselves together quickly. Or maybe it was just that there was light here. The sun was rising, light flooding in through a collapsed esst wall.

In the middle of the room was a man who could only have been Dr. John Eboigbe. He was a head taller than anybody else, with the tips of his ears brushing the ceiling. His hair was still in short dreadlocks, which made him look more like a ‘real’ Na’vi than most of the others, and he had tied a smock around his waist to preserve his modesty, which Grace was grateful for. She’d seen way too much of way too many people.

“We’re still missing... Manish Arora?” John looked up from the holopad he was holding and around the room.

“He was on day duty at Site Two,” said the familiar voice of Reet Singh. She emerged from a cubicle, wearing a curtain wrapped around herself like a sari. “He’s probably still... Grace!”

“Hi. I’ve brought you Cam,” said Grace, allowing the man to slide to the floor next to her. He hugged his knees to his chest and started rocking back and forth. “O’Toole found him in his quarters, banging his head on the wall.”

John said something in Igbo which Grace assumed was a curse, and gave the holopad to Reet before kneeling down in front of Cam. “Dr. Hegner?” he asked. “How are you doing?”

“I can’t unlink,” Cam whimpered.

“No, I wouldn’t think so,” said John. “Dr. Loughlin! We got any more of that stuff they use to sedate the avatars?”

“Coming!” shouted a woman somewhere else in the room.

John and Grace got Cam up again and dragged him into a cubicle, where they could sit him down on the bed and John could get a vitals monitor on him. This was awkward – the clip was far too small for a fingertip, and had to be put on the webbing between the thumb and fingers, which looked like it hurt. A woman who must have been Dr. Loughlin came in with a syringe.

“I think this is the last dose,” she warned, kneeling down by the bed to administer it. They all looked, Grace thought, like adults crammed into a child’s hospital playhouse. Cam hid his face in his other elbow while Loughlin gave him his shot.

John rubbed his forehead and looked at Grace. “What the hell is happening?” he asked. “Dr. Patel said all he could tell us for now was don’t panic.”

“It’s one of my botanical emergencies,” she replied. “I’m gonna explain, but I’ll do it when I can do it for everybody all at once, when all the chaos is over. Max made it, then? Where is he?”

“Number four, with Selfridge,” said Eboigbe, looking up as the monitor began to indicate Hegner’s heartbeat slowing.

“Thanks,” said Grace. She didn’t particularly want to go look, but something told her she’d better. She left Hegner in the hands of the doctors, and went to take a look in number four.

She found Selfridge sitting on the floor in one corner, staring blankly at the ceiling. Max was on the bed, watching him with the posture of somebody who has much better things to be doing right now than babysitting a grown man – even if he wasn’t entirely sure what those things were.

“How is he?” asked Grace.

“He’s fine,” sighed Max. “I think they gave him enough to knock out a horse, but at least he’s stopped screaming.” His ears swivelled a bit, taking in the sound of the baby hollering somewhere nearby, but he did not comment on it.

Grace nodded. “Have you heard from Norm?” He’d at least known which pod probably had Trudy in it and could have gone straight there, but heaven only knew what was going on in the hangar right now.

“Not yet.”

“Dr. Augustine?” asked a voice.

Grace turned around, and saw a woman wrapped in a sheet standing nervously behind her. She was not one of the avatar drivers, but her long nose and chin were still familiar, though Grace couldn’t put a name to them. She’d found a place to wash up, so that her long loose hair was stuck to her head and shoulders by water instead of by mucus.

“Am I interrupting?” the woman asked.

“Selfridge’s nervous breakdown appears to be on hold for now, so no,” said Grace. “Audrey?” she guessed. When Grace had run into Audrey on Quarterly Physical Day, she’d been recovering from a broken ankle, but the woman standing in front of her was not wearing a cast or bandage, and there was no mark from surgery. As with Jake’s spine and Grace’s scars, it seemed this process could heal injuries. What did that mean for O’Toole’s deaf girlfriend? Why did Queloz still have his tattoo?

Audrey followed Grace’s eyes down, and then quickly looked up again. “It’s fine now,” she said. “Has anybody tried to call the Clipper?” The Pandora Clipper was the research ship Audrey and Nick Tolliver had been working on when she’d had her accident.

“I’ve got Queloz trying to get in touch with anybody he can,” said Grace. “He’ll be out at avatar storage with the radios.” What had happened to the people at sea? Between the Clipper and the two prospecting ships, there had to be nearly a hundred of them. Could these vrrtepyom vines grow in salt water, or would the planet have found a different solution? Surely somebody on the Mekong would have mentioned it if they’d been in touch with the ships.

“Thanks,” said Audrey, and started to turn – but then she winced and her ears folded back as the sound of the crying baby, which had lowered to a whine in the last few minutes, suddenly redoubled.

“Where is he?” asked Grace.

“Over there somewhere, I think.” Audrey pointed in the general direction of the sound.

Audrey hurried off to find Queloz, while Grace checked more cubicles until she found the mother and child. The woman who must have been Paz Socorro was sitting on the floor beside a bed that had been crushed by the weight of two pods – between them there might have been shreds of a third, tiny one. The blue baby in her arms was bawling. Next to her was Nurse O’Toole, who was trying to comfort them and doing a terrible job.

“I mean, you probably smell different. Maybe your heartbeat sounds weird,” he suggested awkwardly. “Maybe he doesn’t know who you are anymore.”

Grace had always found Na’vi infants rather fascinating, with their huge eyes that took in everything and their bare kuru, not yet hidden in braids of hair. Now wasn’t the time to admire the kid, though – his mother was looking up at Grace with red-rimmed, pleading eyes. She was still covered in goop that was drying and cracking all over her blue body and gumming up her hair.

“He’s been crying and crying,” she said helplessly. “I think he’s hungry, and I know I’ve got milk, but he won’t latch. I don’t know how to tell him it’s me!”

If she hadn’t happened to phrase it that way, it might have taken Grace a few more seconds to remember just what this woman was doing wrong. As it was, she realized immediately. “He needs tsaheylu.”

“What’s that?” asked O’Toole.

Only a very basic feature of Pandoran physiology and communication, but Grace knew better than to say that out loud in front of this woman who was almost as upset as Hegner or Selfridge. She crouched down next to her on the goo-covered floor.

“As well as feeding them on milk,” she explained, “Na’vi mothers provide their infants with vitamins and antibodies, and stimulate brain development, through a direct neural bond. Sorry about this, but I’m not sure there’s anything I can say to prepare you for it.” She pulled Socorro’s queue out from behind her and brought it around to connect with the baby’s. The softly glowing pink tendrils wove together automatically, and the child fell silent at once.

Socorro gasped. “Ay dios mio!” she exclaimed. “He is hungry!”

The baby, however, knew what to do now. He was already mouthing for a nipple, and when Socorro put him to her breast, he began to suckle hungrily. She bent her head, fresh tears rising in her eyes.

“He’ll need at least an hour of connection every day,” Grace said. “More is better. You can wean him of it when he’s about a year old, but some people keep doing it every once in a while until the kids are as old as five.”

“Thank you,” said Socorro quietly. She stroked her son’s cheek as he nursed. “Good job, Mijo.”

Nurse O’Toole sat back with a soft whistle. “Yeah, thanks,” he said to Grace. “What are we gonna do now? Can we fix this?”

“I don’t know,” said Grace. “But for now I think John’s got the right idea. We need to take attendance. We need to know who’s missing and where they were last and whether we can find them. The people who were out in the middle of nowhere when this happened are going to die if we can’t get to them.”

The curtain moved back. “Simon?” asked Reet, looking around the corner. “Oh, good – your girlfriend’s here looking for you.”

“Agniezka?” O’Toole started to get up, then paused and grinned awkwardly at the two women in the room with him. “Dr. Augustine, Captain Socorro, I’m sorry, I...”

“Go,” said Grace, gesturing for him to do so.

He hurried out without another word.

Socorro looked up from the nursing baby and asked, “has anyone heard from Miles?”

“Who?” asked Grace.

“The baby’s father. Colonel Quaritch.”

Grace did a double-take, thinking this woman must be joking – but her face was entirely serious. She spent a moment attempting to digest the fact that the cosmos had allowed Miles Quaritch to reproduce, and then had to take a few more to try to picture his reaction to this.

“I’ll... I’ll ask around,” she said.

She would have liked to sit there a few more moments – with the crying having stopped, this room was now an island of calm in a building that she was sure was full of chaos. But a moment later, Reet was back again, asking this time for Grace herself. At her side was a skinny young man with large eyes and short, tight curls.  Grace had a sneaking suspicion this was Selfridge’s coffee boy, based mostlyon the fact that he didn’t look like he could be older than sixteen or seventeen. A bandage on the bridge of his nose showed that he was definitely the guy Selfridge had kicked in the face earlier.

“Dr. Augustine?” the boy asked, his voice confirming his identity. “Sergeant Queloz asked me to find you. He’s made contact with the mines.”

“I’m on my way,” said Grace.