Frakrr Say

by Unobossard

Summary:

Following the disastrous battle on the SeaDragon, two of the RDA's recoms survive. With no leader and no mission, they are forced to fight against Pandora's deadliest hazards to return to the human city Bridgehead - a place where they might find themselves in even greater danger.

Notes:

i hope you like lyle wainfleet...............

good luck, mr wick

Chapter 1: The Way of Water

The limp body of the soldier hit Mansk square in the solar plexus. The impact sent him doubling backward over the rail, his spine bending all wrong until he pitched forward again. His AR slipped from his wet gloves and went spinning into blackness. Gunfire rattled in his ears, men shouted in the dark, flames flashed, there was a foul smell in the air; smoke, oil, burning metal, blood. Mansk blinked through sweat and seawater and ducked, sank to his knees, focused his attention on the soldier thrown into him in the chaos, which, luckily or unluckily, seemed to be temporarily shielding them from further contact. 

He leaned over, let the poor bastard‘s body go to the floor as gently as he could. His shades slipped from his face and clattered to the grating next to the soldier’s unmoving hand. The regulator mask appeared unbroken. Mansk made sure it was still tight to the skin with a deft hand. Dead or out cold, there was no time to check, no time to wait for the man to take a breath and mist the glass. He snatched his sunglasses and tucked them into a vest pouch. 

Sully was out there. Sully and the insane woman. And they were both bringing the hurt. The comms were quiet, or he couldn’t hear over the firefight. He thought he heard the Colonel, but there was too much feedback. Mansk nearly reached up to speak, but the risk Sully was on the line was too great and stopped his shaking hand. He was a Private First Class, not a little kid calling out during a game of hide and seek because he was scared. What he needed to do was take point, get back in there. No choice but to abandon the fallen soldier, and worse, his weapons. That ammo wasn’t compatible. Pistol it was for now. 

Before he could draw it, he heard Sully’s woman na’vi shout something out in the dark on the deck. He pressed himself to a crumpled mound of debris and kept his head down and legs in. His pulse hitched in his chest at the shriek in her voice. The screech put him on edge, adrenalin zipping through his arms and up his back, readying him to spring for another fight, but he waited. His skin prickled with cold seawater, and Jesus, was he panting? He yanked his pistol from its holster and checked the magazine, quietly spitting onto the deck. 

Mansk listened to the heavy slap of the woman’s bare feet as she moved, the strain of that bow, the sound of it cracking against flesh and glass masks, the shrieks of voices he might have recognised at speaking volume. He timed his outward noisier breaths to her footfalls as best he could. More racket, more shouts, but it grew quieter out there, which only meant SecOps boys and girls were going down like fucking dominoes. 

And then the na’vi woman screamed. The howl turned Mansk’s blood to ice in his veins, made him adjust his position against the debris, try to sink into it. He exhaled a spray of water through his teeth and closed his eyes. He hadn’t heard anything like that in his life, not from anything, not from a human, not from an animal. It was an otherworldly wail, something from a deep well from which he would never draw water. 

A quietness settled once the long echo of that scream petered away. It wasn’t total silence. The SeaDragon groaned underneath him. Flames cracked against each other near enough to feel the heat. Pieces of the Dragon’s scales tore away and fell with clangs and clanks. But he couldn’t hear the na’vi. She must have stealthily moved on, her rampage over. Had Sully left? If he looked up now would he catch an arrow in the eye? Again his hand strayed to his throat comms. Nobody else checked in. Not even the Colonel. Shit. Mansk bumped his head back against the metal behind him and planted his free hand on the deck, knees up and bent ready to leap to his feet. Who had been on deck with him? After the boom, where had everyone ended up? Prager, Z-Dog... the Corporal. He’d been closest. 

A few more quiet seconds passed and Mansk heard nothing resembling footsteps, so he risked rising to a crouch and looked out at the carnage. 

The SeaDragon’s deck was totalled, and tilting, he noticed, as his feet started to slip on the wet metal when he stood and crept forward, pistol lowered but reflexes sharp. He kept his footing and slid his way downward and across, avoiding stepping on anything that might cut his damn toes off. The fires blazing in pockets were bright, too bright, staring-directly-into-the-sun-bright, and he was forced to narrow his eyes until he slipped his shades back on to relieve his vision. 

He found Alexander first. Slumped on his side against the railing where those stupid kids had been tied up. His body was crushed. Mansk hadn't even seen it happen. They’d left his body lying there like fucking meat in all the havoc Sully stirred up. Mansk reholstered his pistol and rolled Alexander over. No blood, no open wounds, that shit was all internal. He’d rattle like a can of nails if he picked him up. He sighed and pulled Alexander’s cap peak down over his eyes. 

Prager wasn’t far away. He was stuck like an animal, spear through the chest, his hand still clutching it, suspended as if he was about to pull it out and laugh that he was fine. Mansk glanced around the deck, then went to him, lying Prager down on his side, ripping the spear from his body. Prager wouldn’t want to have something like that left in him. He stood over Prager’s body, a body Prager had only inhabited for a few measly months, a body that housed years of memories. All that effort. The person he had been. The person they chose to bring back, by name, at a great expense. He’d seen him laugh getting out of the link bed back at Hell’s Gate and ask if they took personalisation requests, make his avatar red. What an idiot. But no, who was this Prager? Was he really the Prager who laughed in the link bed? This Prager, the Prager lying dead at his feet, soaked through and cold and lifeless, this Prager hadn’t been to Hell’s Gate, hadn’t sat in a link bed.

Mansk tilted his head back as an arching wave leapt over the rapidly sinking railing behind him and weakly peppered water at a plume of fire, useless as a pail being thrown onto an inferno. Christ, what was he doing? 

Z-Dog was lying a way off with an arrow sticking from her flank. Mansk picked up his pace fighting the sinking SeaDragon to reach her. If she was just injured he could help her to shore, or at least to the rocks out in the dark. People could survive arrows. He’d heard the forest na’vi liked to tip their arrowheads with poisons, but no way had the enemy had time to do that for this assault, surely? Mansk slipped and skinned the heels of his hands as he ran to Z-Dog, but it turned out he needn’t have bothered hurrying. After one look at the second arrow in her skull he fought to keep his shoulders from dropping. Sully and his screeching alien woman had taken everyone down, and all he could do was be glad they did it fucking fast. 

Mansk lay Z-Dog on her back and tore the arrows from her, the one from her side and the other from her eye, and threw them with an angry grunt out into the dark. They landed with a clatter somewhere and sounded strangely loud over the roar of flames and low rattling of the SeaDragon going down. He took Z-Dog's AR and spare ammo. God, it made him sick to loot her. 

A quick scout of the rest of the deck confirmed Lopez wasn’t there. Mansk clocked him leap onto his banshee for an aerial dogfight before it all went dark and went to shit. 

The SeaDragon tipped again. He wanted to check the other soldiers, but the dark shapes lying on the ground around him all appeared very final in their resting places until they slid suddenly when the ship pitched. Nobody groaned, nobody stirred. 

Mansk slung the AR strap around one shoulder and kept moving, ended up climbing as the SeaDragon kept sinking, kept groaning and creaking and falling apart. Debris was starting to roll past him as he battled upward until finally he found himself jumping and dodging. He reached a rail mid-ship and clung to it, looped an arm around it, held on as the SeaDragon juddered its dying animal death throes. Z-Dog's body rolled, limbs flopping, and tumbled into the darkness. 

Baring his teeth and whipping off his shades now that ocean flooded the deck and killed the fires, Mansk let go of the rail and slid into the water. 

The water was cold, and it was dark. He broke the surface fast, hauling in a breath, skin freezing, clothes heavy, arms already tired treading water. His sodden gear was weighing him down, the AR on his back trying to drag him under as if it too wanted him dead, and still the SeaDragon tilted, rising like a black behemoth against a blacker sky, blocking stars. He needed to clear it before it flipped. The big beast was sinking double-time now that it gulped half the ocean and he, stupidly, was floating right under it. Mansk had never seen anything like this, he - the man he was supposed to be, that Mansk - had never seen a boat bigger than his grandfather’s beat up fishing boat, and even then he’d never gone out on it, not with the Earth water so riddled with-

Something hit him. It was the size of a car. It came away from the deck with a roar and a screech and rammed right into the sea inches from his chest. The water it disturbed in the splash took Mansk down and under with it, his kicking and clawing useless against it. He opened his eyes underwater and through the murk and the filth from the wreck saw it was a crabsuit. It was missing legs and a screen, the dead soldier inside still strapped in, his body red and pink with burns, strips of uniform sticking to parts of him like a second skin over his first. 

Mansk righted himself under the suit’s nose and clambered up it. He could feel his pants catching on shredded metal sticking out like spines, ripping the material, the sound of it tearing loud in his water-logged ears. The surprised breath he’d taken wasn’t nearly enough and already his chest was constricting, his lungs jumping in his ribs. 

He pushed off from the top of the crabsuit and was free, releasing far too many bubbles doing it. Should’ve paid more attention when Mom sent him to the local pool to learn to swim, just in case he ever went out on Grandpa’s boat. He twisted around in the dark water with a swish of his arms to face the SeaDragon, which was more in the water than on it. The lights were still on, and it cast an eerie, green glow out through the empty, watery underworld he was stuck in, but even as he looked on with stinging eyes, the lights began to flicker as the power began to give. The pull it had on his body as it plowed to the seabed was yanking him nearer, and nothing could stop it bringing him in close for a cold, wet hug all the way down to the ocean floor. 

He wasn’t far below the surface. What was that? Eighty feet? Shit, he could make that if he swam like hell now before the SeaDragon brought him down with it. Mansk swam. He swam like he’d never motherfucking swum before, ever, in his life, pushed his muscles to the limit, resisted exhaling just to stop that burning, desperate pain that was spreading from his chest to the rest of him. 

Everything passed him by like a bad art installation as he fought the water; equipment hanging as if held by invisible string, bodies looking almost relaxed as they drifted away, stuff from the deck, machinery, the props from a Sea Wasp, an AR he couldn’t risk catching, and that green light from the Dragon’s failing power fizzing and flashing through it all. It was that same green light, falling upon just the right part of the ship (God knew what it had originally been before it was blasted apart) which made his pulse quicken, and for once not from the shitshow the whole mission had become. 

He was running out of air, but he wasn’t about to abandon the Corporal without knowing if he was dead. 

Mansk gritted his teeth and changed his course, the water’s surface temptingly close and a tragedy to abandon. He forced himself downward again, riding the suction the ship offered as it sank, and soon he reached the limp body of the Corporal. 

The Corporal’s freckles, the strange bioluminescent dots that ran along all of their new bodies, were still gleaming. Mansk reckoned that meant there was life in the Corporal yet. The rest of the Corporal was not so glowing. Blood rose like red smoke from a nasty hit to the center of his forehead and he was caught good on something, his arms up above his ears. Mansk swallowed another urge to release his breath and dragged himself around to where the Corporal was attached to the damaged rail, batting his own queue out of the way to get a better look. It must have been the Corporal’s vest or his machete keeping him attached to the SeaDragon. Great. Mansk manoeuvred himself higher and took hold of the vest’s shoulder straps with both hands, the Corporal’s head lolling forward, and he kicked off from the rail as hard as he could. Something gave, tore, released its hold with a horrifying rip, and he hauled them both upward. 

His legs kicked weakly. The fingers hooked around the Corporal's vest were numb. He felt his middle cramp and a burst of bubbles escaped him. His heart rate soared, pulse thundering in his ears, in his chest, even in his hands, his whole body drumming a frantic beat. It hurt with every thump of it. He swam faster, as if he could catch those bubbles and put them back in somehow. His free arm he clawed upward harder. The Corporal was lighter than he would have been slung over his shoulder on land, yet his heavy ass was still dead weight and pulling him down. But he couldn’t drop him. He wouldn’t drop him. He’d dropped Brown, Prager, Z-Dog. Not the Corporal. 

Mansk flattened his ears to his head and forced every limb to work despite every kick and lunge through the water feeling tougher than the last. One final try. The SeaDragon roared beside him. He roared back, the last of his air disappearing above him, the remaining tiny remnants of his held breath rolling and bouncing over his gloved hand as he reached up to the undulating light of the surface. There were no more kicks left in him. 

His legs went still behind him and his outreached hand relaxed as a fingertip touched the darkening ceiling of the ocean. 

Chapter 2: Three Brothers

Summary:

Mansk and Wainfleet recover and find themselves alone on an island planning their next move.

Notes:

If you didn't know I wasn't a marine or American before, you will now!!!!

Sand stuck to wet skin as he heaved the Corporal up the beach. Out of the water and with burning lungs and ragged breath, Mansk fought to keep his aching fingers hooked around the Corporal’s vest. The beach’s incline wasn’t even steep. Why was he struggling? He was out of puff, panting noisily through an open mouth, even his ears were tired flicking water whenever a stray droplet rolled out of his hair. His feet slipped and sank into sand, made his calves sting. He gave up and put the Corporal down, the surf lapping a weak lick at their heels.

The Corporal lay unmoving. If he was breathing it was shallow. Mansk knelt with an exhausted grunt and put a gloved fingertip between his teeth, pulling the waterlogged glove off, tossing it aside to land wherever with a squelch. Jesus, he was worn out. He could feel it in his leaden limbs, a deep fatigue, as if the water in his gear and soaking his clothes still wanted to drag him down even after escaping. The AR on his back could have been an entire mountain pressing into his bones. If it hadn’t been for the Corporal he’d be lying in the dirt himself.

He leaned over the Corporal’s body and gulped air, swallowing, his back muscles complaining. He breathed out again and pressed a finger to the Corporal’s right eyelid, lifted it. A huge, yellow eye stared up at him. The black pupil constricted in the sunlight. Still alive. Insert Corporal Lyle Wainfleet brain activity joke here. Mansk snorted an amused, or shocked, breath out to himself and checked the other eye. A little slower to change shape, but concussion did that. Christ, Alexander had the medical equipment. Why didn’t he think to take it?

The cut on the Corporal’s forehead wasn’t as deep as it first seemed, but it was pouring now they were out of the water. Blood ran down the groove of his nose and slipped scarlet down to pool above his cupid’s bow. Something had snapped him in the face bad. Mansk wiped red away with sandy fingers, then glanced down the Corporal’s body. No compound fractures, no dark bruised flesh betraying internal breaks or bleeds, just scrapes and cuts on his arms and lower legs. Those carbon-reinforced bones had done their job. The lungs though, those were probably the same as before, or rather, the same as humans. Soft, weak, useless when filled with seawater.

Mansk brought his fist down onto the Corporal’s chest. He did it again and again, tilted the Corporal’s head back with a rough shove to the chin, driving half of his head down into the sand. Mansk hurt his shoulder drawing his fist back each time, his pinky finger starting to go numb with the dull, thudding impact. “C’mon, you stupid bastard,” he said through his teeth. The Corporal was giving him nothing, still limp and out cold and enviably peaceful. Mansk gasped with the effort of bringing his clenched fist repeatedly down onto the Corporal’s sternum. He wanted to pick him up by the collar and punch him in the mouth instead.

There was a second part to CPR. He ripped off his other glove and bent low over the Corporal’s motionless face properly. That stupid fucking face, normally twisted into some wry look, some high-eyebrowed smirk, some crass, brainless expression with creased half-moon-shaped eyes. Mansk had gotten so used to that dumb mug looking so moronic he could hardly recognise the eerie calm in the Corporal’s relaxed features. It made him look younger. Sadder. He’d seen it on the others. On Brown, on Prager, on Z-Dog. What did they have to be so calm about? They were fucking dead. It hurt them to die. Why were they so calm? Mansk felt his own face crumble and twitch. Another pound with his fist onto the Corporal’s chest to remind him to focus. Training told him that was the last thump before he had to...

No breath. No movement. He was losing him. Mansk growled and grabbed the scruff of the Corporal’s neck, tilted his head back as far as he could, until his throat was aligned with the rest of his horizontal body. He moved in close, close enough to see where the dark blue stripes along the Corporal’s jaw and temples faded into a paler shade, close enough to see the curious glimmering freckles on his face shine as big and bright as stars. He knew those had a name. There was a little collection of them on the end of the Corporal’s nose. Mansk’s pulse soared, sweat washed over him both hot and cold to soak his back all over again. Mansk took a deep breath, pressed the quivering fingers of one hand hard into the soft flesh under the Corporal’s chin and pinched with the other hand right over that sprinkle of lights.

The moment his top lip brushed the Corporal’s, Lyle Wainfleet coughed water and blood into his eyes.

---

Spluttering and wheezing and gasping, Wainfleet woke up. His eyes hurt, his neck hurt, his ribs hurt, and it was far too bright. He heaved in air and doubled over onto his side, eyes tight shut against that white light. There was something above him, a shadow, a shape, a thing, a whatever. He was too busy choking on the water and blood tipping out of his mouth like a waterfall to care. He retched at the taste of it, at the way it scraped his throat on the way out, unable to breathe in over the cascades. The sparks on the back of his eyelids flashed. His skull rang. His heartbeat was a drum in his ears. His middle felt both gone and smashed inwards at the same time. Did he have any memory of feeling this shitty coming around? Maybe in Hell’s Gate, but at least at Hell’s Gate there had been a warm smooth hip to slide a heavy hand over and hold onto. Here he had warm... sand. Sand. It was all over his face, sticking to something running hot and fast down his cheek. He whipped his head back up, teeth bared, water flying from his chin.

“-ral?”

Wainfleet blinked and rolled onto his back, his hands up by his neck and trembling.

“-ral?” said the shadow, shape, thing, whatever again. It moved closer.

Wainfleet lifted a shaking leg and booted the shadow, shape, thing, whatever right in its gut with a howl before it could reach him. It went sprawling backward like Sully when he hit him on the SeaDragon. Sully. That was what this blue fucker was. Another cough, another splatter of bloody water soaked the sand under him as he wobbled to his knees. He went to his side holster, clumsy wet fingers covered in coarse sand feeling for his pistol grip.

Sully was back, breathing hard, and grabbed him by the arm. His grasp was hard, squeezing. Wainfleet swung a left hook and caught him in the side of the head, more of a claw than a clean punch. Then the flat of Sully’s arm thudded against his collarbone and pushed him backward until he hit the sand.

“-orporal!” Sully shouted.

Wainfleet caught his breath again after losing a good amount of it going to the ground. His ribs were bad, his skull was worse. It kept blinking like a failing data pad.

Sully looked remarkably like Mansk. It was strange. He saw swirling in his blurry vision neatly buzzed hair and a strong, square face, a narrow nose, small eyes. And this Sully-Mansk, thankfully, was wearing pants. Mansk wasn’t Sully. Mansk was Mansk. And he looked like shit. Besides the na’vi thing. That always looked like shit. Wainfleet frowned, then took in a sharp breath at how much that made his forehead sting. “Mansk?” he managed to wheeze. “Oh, shit, what’s up, man?” He winced through a raspy laugh.

“You are,” Mansk said, taking his arm away. He shifted into a crouch on one knee above him. Wainfleet noticed him run a hand down his face where he’d been smacked. No blood. Mansk offered a hand down. It took a lot of force, but Wainfleet made himself reach up and clasp his arm, sitting up.

“Sorry, man,” Wainfleet said, spitting and wiping his mouth. “Didn’t recognise you without the shades.”

“Wish I’d worn ‘em, you look like a mess, sir.”

“Yeah,” Wainfleet said in a hoarse huff. He sat forward with a shameful groan, knees bent and apart, and rubbed his hand above his eyebrows. It came away bloody, and a second later he felt the sharp agony of the sand he’d just smeared into the open wound. As he grimaced and closed his eyes against the fading sting, he realised that was her handiwork, that animal of a woman with her stick or bow or whatever they used. Christ, he’d gone down like a sack of shit. He was lucky he woke up in time to beat Sully back. Since when had Sully been so cold? The man, if the word could be used to describe him, had been fucking brutal. He’d had an ax. Who was Sully now? What was he? Not Meals on Wheels anymore, that was for sure. Fuck.

He lifted his head and narrowed his eyes. It was still too bright. The light was joined by a sound whenever he moved. He couldn’t see the SeaDragon, and was mostly sure when he’d been standing on its deck it was night. Now there was just water. Just sky. “Damage report?” he asked, spitting again. His clothes were freezing. His shoulders were quivering.

“Charlie Foxtrot, sir,” Mansk replied in that calm voice of his, taking a seat next to him, balancing his wrists on his knees and lacing his fingers together.

“Fucking Christ. The Colonel?” Wainfleet looked at Mansk, blinking too much too fast and trying to keep his woozy head from swaying as he watched him. He ran the back of his hand across his forehead again and up over his scalp to the stubble of his hairline. Still bloody. Mansk watched him, and now that Mansk wasn’t wearing his shades, he could see him watching. He almost snapped that he was fine, but doing that would have taken up far too much energy.

“Gone.”

Wainfleet lowered his head. He ignored the nuclear-white-hot ache behind his eyes and watched water drip from his eyebrows instead. The droplets landed pink onto the sand between his knees. His hands closed into fists, nails digging into his palms. The sand covering them hissed as he twisted his fingers together. His forearms shook, and when he felt it he rolled his shoulders. Couldn’t let Mansk see that. He concentrated on breathing instead, disguising the tremors in his arms with deep inhales.

“It’s just us, Corporal,” Mansk said, letting one of his legs slide downward, digging a shallow golden trench into the beach, and leaning back on his elbows, water tipping from the folds in his clothes when he moved. Wainfleet supposed he was still smarting from that kick and punch he’d delivered to him. “Z caught one in the kidney and the eye. Prager...” Wainfleet watched Mansk push two fingers into his own chest, “right here. Lopez... no idea. And you saw what that thing did to Alexander.”

“The Spider kid?”

A shrug. A rapid shake of the head.

“Then we move out,” Wainfleet said.

Mansk rose to his feet heavily with a terse nod, and Wainfleet clocked the AR on his back. His own was long gone, dropped when he had. He could still hear the clang his shoulder and hip made against the deck when he’d fallen into the water. His ears twitched remembering the sound, his bruises flaring at the same time. Somewhere on him something still hurt, and bad, but they had no time to fuck around looking for the source. The mission was over. All he could do was hope Sully and his insane wife bought it when the SeaDragon went down.

“Ready, sir,” Mansk said, checking his shredded gear.

Wainfleet breathed (it still felt like exhaling glass shards) and inspected what he had left himself as he sat there. His arms were heavy and his fingers were cumbersome as he searched. No amount of blinking or wiping his eyes stopped the white light from blocking his vision, so he went by touch. Hopefully Mansk hadn’t seen.

Mansk unhooked the AR strap from around his shoulder and offered the butt of the rifle down. “Corporal,” he said.

“No,” Wainfleet replied, trying not to make a noise when he pushed the AR away. “I’m good with the 33R.” He paused, frowned, winced. “Your Hydra?”

Mansk slowly swung his head to face out to sea.

Wainfleet nodded. “Right.”

Mansk wordlessly slipped the AR onto his back again. Wainfleet could tell he knew something was off, but the whole fucking operation was off, so he could hide for now.

Wainfleet hauled himself to his feet, unbalanced, and discovered brand new twinges and pains on the way up. He’d caught the back of his calf on something and now wore an impressive red stripe to contrast the blue ones. But he could still walk, and a merc who could still walk was still in the game.

Travelling back to Bridgehead wasn’t going to be easy, and shit, it was going to be even less easy standing in the Ops Center reporting stiffly at attention the events moment by moment. There would be no Colonel to take the heat, or at least simmer it thanks to rank. They were going to rip Corporal Wainfleet a new one, because Corporal Wainfleet wasn’t Colonel Quaritch. Mansk should have thought twice about pulling him from the water. And about surviving himself.

Wainfleet planted his feet deep into the sand to keep himself from tipping over and shielded his eyes against the sun with a hand to observe the skies. He’d gotten pretty used to the banshee. Hell, it was even fun at times; a lot freer than clinging to a Kestrel packed in with everyone else. With the banshee he’d had control, found it easy to plug into it like an AMP but strangely its reaction time was... more accurate. He couldn’t explain it, didn’t want to. The first few instances he’d hooked up to the beast he couldn’t bear to look at the gross whatever-it-was under the girly braid he wore, but it was fine after a while as long as he glanced away. Now there was no sign of the banshee. Of anything. The sky was empty. Scared off. Fucking coward. At the end of the day it was an animal. A stupid animal. Maybe they could find a-

“Don’t see any boats, sir,” Mansk said, brushing sand from his shoulders.

“Then we’re walking,” Wainfleet said. He gave Mansk a look. He didn’t know what kind of look it was, whether it was tough or tired, but he got a nod back. “Bridgehead’s West from here, but without a ride we’re gonna have to go around, get in through the kill zone, which is gonna be a ton of fun. Other side of this island might have somethin’. One of uh, that dude Scoresby’s speedboats. Yeah...” Wainfleet rubbed his temple with a forefinger and shook his head. That high-pitched ringing again. The concussion. Had he just spoken aloud?

He didn’t hear Mansk shout. He spent long seconds stuck standing clutching his head and digging his nails into his scalp until finally he raised his eyes to see Mansk hurrying to the water. Light reflected the rolling shallows and made him turn his eyes away. The sand was too loud. No, the sand was too big. No, the sand was too bright. He tried to look again and could just about spot Mansk wading into the waves knee deep, powering through the sea to a dark shape floating on the surface. A dark shape wearing green and black with blue skin.

Wainfleet fell into an uneven run to join him, leaping into the water and letting it cool his scrapes as he surged to meet Mansk, who clutched Lopez by the collar and was floating him to the shore. There was a desperation in Mansk’s movements Wainfleet hadn’t seen before. Mansk was usually far more collected. He was baring his teeth now, his eyes closed, and not to keep the seawater from splashing them.

They dragged Lopez from the water and lay him face up on the wet sand. Mansk glanced to Wainfleet from where he squatted by Lopez’s side, and Wainfleet hesitated to meet his gaze. He looked on as Mansk bowed to check Lopez’s breathing. He appeared all right. No missing limbs, no major injuries, Mansk just needed to administer CPR. Wainfleet allowed a tiny smile to turn up the corner of his thin mouth. A gust blew past, whipped up sand and tugged at their loose pants. Three of them. Three made it. Wainfleet relaxed his weight onto his other leg and crossed his arms over his aching chest. Mansk had really gone to town, crushed his damn bones. But he was grateful. Or would be until they reached Bridgehead, then he’d wish Mansk punched a hole right through his ribcage and killed his ass. “He okay?” he asked after a moment, unable to crouch with all his joints singing in irritation.

Mansk sat back on his ankles and sniffed in a long breath, pressing his wrist to his upper lip.

Wainfleet frowned (it ached) and his smile faded. “What?”

Mansk pulled on Lopez’s vest to reveal the wooden stub of an arrow rising from his front. It struck him right through the ribs. The vest was dark with old blood.

Wainfleet unfolded his long arms and swayed where he stood. Another gust of wind picked up a rattle of sand and sea spray. Mansk lifted Lopez’s head forward and carefully slipped his dog tags off, curled the chain around his knuckles.

“Get that shit out of him,” Wainfleet said, unable to look any longer. His eyes hurt.

“Sir, I don’t think it’ll-”

“That’s an order, Private! Get that fuckin’ shit out of him right now! Move, I’ll do it,” Wainfleet said, bending low and taking hold of the broken wooden end of the arrow with blood and sand-encrusted fingers. He pulled but it didn’t move, not even when he put all the strength left within him into it. He could relinquish what power he’d recovered for Lopez. Splinters bit his fingers until he gave in with a grunt. Lopez was shot so effectively the arrow was embedded. Forever.

Wainfleet stood back up with a wobble and a growl through a clenched jaw and pointed at Mansk, breathing hard. He didn’t even know why he was pointing, but he jabbed at the air toward him, feeling his expression drop from what he hoped was anger to pain before he lowered his arm. Something was really hurting somewhere, right up and down him. Something inside.

“What do you want to do with-”

“Leave him. Put-put his arms over his chest, cross ‘em, make sure he’s lookin’ tidy for Petey on the gates and for the Lord when he’s through ‘em.” Wainfleet wanted to pace, wanted to throw something, kick something, kill something, but he was too exhausted, too short of breath to shout anymore.

“Shouldn’t we bury-” Mansk was answering back too much. Who was Corporal? Wainfleet flashed his eyes at him and pointed again.

“Hey, Private.” He made sure to enunciate the rank. “I said we leave him. And those sea creatures, those mermaid motherfuckers, if they come around here, they’ll know that we know. They’ll know that we know and that this is the last man who takes it lyin’ down. Do you get me?” What would they bury Lopez with, anyway? Their hands? Spend hours scrabbling around on the beach like the na’vi did?

“I get you, sir,” Mansk replied with a slow blink. That was better.

“Move out. Other side of the island by nightfall.” Wainfleet hoped he’d kept the pain out of his voice and spoken in as low a tone as it was possible. He wasn’t the Colonel, and, embarrassingly, they both knew it.

“Sir,” Mansk said. Good.

They left Lopez lying supine on the sand and moved into the darkness of the treeline.

Chapter 3: It's Bugs

Summary:

Mansk discovers why Wainfleet is struggling as they try to leave the island.

Notes:

Did i mention this is going to be the longest, slowest fic about disliked minor characters in the history of mankind? your move jim cameron

Lopez’s dog tags were hot in Mansk’s hand. He pressed the metal hard into his palm as he walked. He wouldn’t be surprised if Lopez’s blood type and religion ended up imprinted on his skin. He unfurled his fingers and read the stamped words. There wasn’t much there. Name, initials, gender. One word he read until it wasn’t a word anymore. Recom. Recom. His own old dog tags, or the ones which hung around the spindly, skeletal neck of a long-rotted body in a jungle far from home, had they read human? He turned the tag around in his hand again. Recom.

A fern that really didn’t look much like a fern brushed his arm and took hold of his sleeve with its coiled tendrils. Mansk caught himself returning to reality wandering away into the undergrowth as he followed the Corporal’s lead across the island. With a click of his tongue, he pulled his elbow away from the plant before it started to bite him or melt him or whatever it was that sort did. He gave it a good study before moving on, eyes narrowed behind his shades. Tall, tendrils like little fists on the ends of the leaves, orange at the stem.

He took a long breath in that definitely included several tiny jungle insects. Before him there was nothing but dense tropical trees and brush, and in his twitching ears were the sounds of small creatures he hoped not to meet; most animals on Pandora had teeth within their teeth. The ground underfoot was harsh and spiny, sticks and stones snapping and stabbing his bare soles with every tired step he took. All that ikran-riding had toughened his heels a little, but rocks still managed to find tender spots to drive themselves into. A quick glance to the sky placed the sun’s rays through the canopy in the wrong location for their Western trajectory. He pocketed Lopez’s dog tags and returned to the scruffy path the Corporal had chopped for them with his machete.

“Keep up!” the Corporal shouted, or had tried to shout. There was a hard, raking noise underneath his voice now. It sounded a little like an impression of the Colonel. A blink of blue ahead behind a tree with bark like lizard scales. Mansk hurried his pace and reached the Corporal, who had paused to wait for him.

“What’re you doing, man? Look alive,” the Corporal said, running a hand down his sweating, shining face. All that sweat couldn't have just been from the warm air, and it certainly wasn’t still seawater, that had all long dried. If the Corporal’s pride wasn’t hanging heavy around them, he’d have asked if he was all right.

Instead Mansk watched the Corporal’s tall figure as he trudged on ahead of him after their two second respite. He watched the way the backs of his pants by the knees hitched up above his naked calves with each step, the way his shoulders swung as he walked, the way the shine of the sweat on his cobalt skin glowed under soft infrequent touches of canopy-escaping light, the way his stripes stretched into new shapes as his back muscles bunched straining with the effort of covering as much ground as he could. It was very warm. The air. Extremely warm. Mansk wiped the knuckles of his fingers under his lower lip and decided it was better to watch the spiny sticks and stones roll by beneath him.

The Corporal was still taking them the wrong way. Mansk had allowed it for a while in the hope that the route would change, but it didn’t. He saw the Corporal touch his head too much, claw his fingers over his scalp, tap at his temples, even slap his own face a couple of times, pretending that was just excitement, barking stuttering laughs. Mansk could sense the Corporal was feeling the pressure of running the show on top of the erratic antics. What had happened to him on the SeaDragon?

Mansk tilted his head and let his shades slide down the bridge of his nose when the Corporal started scratching and rubbing at his arms and then hopping to massage his knee. “Sir?” he asked him, drawing closer but remaining at his back.

“What?”

“You good?”

“It’s bugs.”

“Bugs.”

“Yeah, what I said, fuckin’ bugs.”

Mansk didn’t reply.

They walked. Mansk couldn’t tell how long for. The Corporal had stopped twitching, but clearly because he was forcing himself not to. It had to have been the concussion, the drowning, the fact that he was making himself move on so soon after experiencing both. That sort of thing kept people flat on their backs in medical units for days. The na’vi were tough, granted, but they were still mortal. Recoms were still mortal.

Prager would have laughed, made some joke about living forever. He’d already teased several campsites back that if they died, they’d be resurrected like something from the movies, that Warren the Second and Zhang the Second were being cooked up as they spoke. Everyone had laughed. Everyone then chose a personality trait they’d want deleted for next time. Prager had exclaimed he’d crank his sex drive to eleven and run the biggest (free) one-man whorehouse in Bridgehead. Ladies would line up. To throw up on him, Z had snorted. Prager had such a serious face, a stern little mouth, small teeth, teeth so small anything he wanted to say easily slipped through them. He didn’t look like a funny guy, but that was why it was so funny in the first place.

There were red flecks in the sandy dirt under his toes.

Mansk thought they were bright stones for a moment, another odd alien feature of Pandora, then wondered if they were tiny leaves, but their shapes were too circular, and as he started to step around them, he saw they were wet, increasing in size. One splat was the size of an old-fashioned dollar coin. He looked up to the Corporal. A plant he brushed past pinged backward with its leaves painted scarlet.

Mansk whistled and stopped walking. “Corporal,” he called ahead, resisting the urge to rush over and grab the man by his arm, yank him backward himself. How could the Corporal not have noticed?

The Corporal slowed to a stop, his shoulders quivering as they resisted a hunch. “I said other side of this island by nightfall. Isn’t that what I said?” An attempt at Colonel Quaritch-style gruffness again.

“Sir, you’re bleeding.”

The Corporal rounded on his heel to face him, yellow eyes wide and accusing and looking Mansk directly in the hairline. Mansk couldn‘t help darting his eyes upwards when he saw the Corporal’s eyes roving. He looked ill. Very ill. “I know,” the Corporal said, jabbing a finger at his forehead.

Mansk stepped aside and jerked his head down at the trail of blood he’d been avoiding stepping on for twenty yards.

The Corporal scoffed. Since when did Corporal Wainfleet scoff? “That’s my leg.”

“I don’t think so, sir. You wanna turn around?” Mansk said, acting upon a theory. He twirled a finger in a circle in front of him as he asked, let the Corporal sigh and roll his eyes before he obeyed and faced his back to him again.

In that quiet moment the low, constant tssssssss of the jungle around them became extremely loud. Living things whooped and called. A quad of wings exploded from a branch overhead with a whistling flurry.

Embarrassment radiated from the Corporal as strong as his perspiring, and he was bristling with impatience. Mansk almost looked down to see if he was cartoonishly tapping his feet or checking an invisible watch. There was no easy way to go about it, but he had to check. Something on the SeaDragon had torn with a terrible rip when he’d rescued him, and the Corporal’s vest and shirt were intact. There was one other thing which could have made that noise and put up that much of a fight being forcibly released. He used a rigid, respectful index finger to brush the Corporal’s braided queue aside from where it hung down the center of his back.

“So?” the Corporal said, having sensed the movement despite Mansk’s light touch.

“Yeah, that’s not good,” Mansk replied, frowning and pressing his tongue to his top lip. There was a deep red line stained down the Corporal’s vest where the queue had been bounding against it during their trek. Mansk lifted the queue aloft with that same finger. Blood dribbled and slipped over his hand to run into the fine lines of his hot skin.

The Corporal twinged with a shudder and flew a hand to his head. Mansk let the queue drop and stood back, observing. No amount of pretending to massage his scalp or wipe sweat or scratch an itch was going to trick anyone now. “How bad?” the Corporal asked.

“Looks like someone ran over a hairy snake,” Mansk said, then: “Sir.” He knew what had really done it. Him.

The Corporal reached an awkward hand around his back and caught his queue, yanked it around his front to look at it, visibly quivering in pain but acting like it was nothing. Mansk swore he saw him imitate one the Colonel’s sneers of disdain.

He crept around the Corporal’s side and stood at his elbow, peering over the brim of his shades. Should he look away? Was there something about queues which had to remain private? They felt private. Or maybe they weren’t. Maybe it really was just a stupidly long mullet all tied up that just happened to have flesh beneath it. He couldn’t remember what the Spider boy had told them about it all. The kid had seemed far more engrossed with teaching the Colonel one-on-one. Maybe he’d hoped the knowledge would trickle down. It often hadn’t. Mansk averted his eyes when the Corporal began to peel the braided locks back in the search for more blood. He chose to watch the trees instead, one hand halfway to his AR. Or rather, Z’s AR.

“Keep moving,” the Corporal said, clearing his throat and twisting his mouth to one side. He dropped his queue and it swung heavy against his hip. His fingernails were red.

“We should stop and take a look at that,” Mansk said, rolling up a sleeve. It wasn’t going to be pretty, taking all that hair out to get at the flesh underneath, but if the Corporal cooperated, they could maybe find a temporary fix. Maybe.

“Why? So you can wrap a fuckin’... banana leaf around it and tie it with some fuckin’ grass? Huh? We keep moving.”

Mansk looked across at the Corporal. It was hard to tell if he was pallid. The dark blue stripes got in the way. The Corporal was frowning, but his eyebrows were sparser than the Colonel’s, his wide forehead less able to wrinkle into the scowl he was trying. He didn’t have to pretend to be him. “I’m sorry, sir,” Mansk said finally. If the stupid bastard wasn’t going to let him help, he might as well admit he’d been responsible for it.

“Sorry for what?” The Corporal moved past him and set the pace again. Slow.

“It was me, sir, you were stuck pretty good on the rail of the ship so I... I went ahead and pulled and I didn’t see what it was that was keeping you there. And I’m sorry, sir.”

The Corporal stopped again. Mansk watched a fresh line of blood ooze down the back of the Corporal’s calf when the muscle underneath the cut tensed. The Corporal’s head, shining with fresh sweat, lowered until Mansk couldn’t see even the top of his striped skull. “So, you wanna sit down and braid each other’s hair because you feel bad? Huh?” he said in a tight voice.

Mansk felt his fingers twitch. His ears swivelled back as if they too were annoyed to face Corporal Wainfleet. Behind him his tail curled it on itself and flicked a wicked breeze. “We’re losing the light, sir,” he said through his teeth.

The Corporal could bluster about the other side of the island by nightfall all he wanted, the stupid son of a bitch. He could keep his bleeding queue, keep his concussion and whatever else was hurting him, keep his pathetic Colonel Quaritch impression. Who was Mansk but just a Private to follow in his wake, do what he was told? So, he would. Keep moving it was. If the Corporal collapsed and reached a shaking hand up for assistance... dammit, he’d put his hand down and help him up.

Mansk exhaled noisily, closed his eyes behind the dark lenses of his shades, thankful for them as surely his yellow eyes had turned red by now. His turn to be the cartoon, steaming ears and all.

The Corporal had gone ahead, but it didn’t take long to catch him. Mansk fell into step behind him, watched the Corporal’s queue swing like a wet rope over his tail, drooling blood onto it as he walked favouring a leg.

He should have asked the Corporal when he’d last taken a drink, when he’d last eaten. Should have insisted he sit down and shut up and let him have a look at where he’d skinned his queue. What if that thing was degloved? Hanging by a thread? What if it dropped off in front of him with a thud and the Corporal keeled over dead?

Nothing happened as they moved through the undergrowth. The Corporal made it alive and awake to the end of the trees. He did trip and slide down a bank of sand but he did it with his arms out and a ringing, obnoxious laugh. He looked up at Mansk with a smile, the one that made his weak cheekbones rounder and his eyes half close. He was showing off in his delirium. Mansk grimaced a smile back, too busy praying the beach they stood on wasn’t the same one they’d left Lopez guarding.

He slid down the sand after the Corporal, a hand pressed to his AR on his back, and joined him. The warm sand soothed his toes after that rough stroll. It was only a tiny spit of an island, probably didn’t even have a local name, but it had still taken them a good bunch of hours to cross and taken its toll on his feet. Not that he was missing his boots.

The water beyond the churning white surf was turquoise. Mansk had no memory of the other Mansk having seen water so clear. It was also clear there wasn’t a single boat floating atop it, much to the Corporal’s chagrin, guessing by the long wail of despair he gave.

“We should wait. Wait for the RDA. They’ll come to salvage the... the wreckage and they’ll pick us up. They will,” Mansk said, nodding his head to himself. They wouldn’t abandon them. Not after this. They’d want to find them. They had to.

“They won’t let ‘em,” said the Corporal, leaning down with his hands on his knees and eyes on the sand. He huffed out and straightened up again. “The green ones, those Metkayinas. Anyone who shows up they’ll sink. They’ll have scouts out here now and shit. They ain’t as stupid as they look.”

“You think so?”

“Yeah, it’s the far apart eyes, makes ‘em look dumber than-”

“No, I mean the na’vi on alert.”

“Oh, yeah. I would if I were them.”

“You are them, Corporal,” Mansk said, tilting his shades down his nose with a finger tap. “And your eyes are pretty far apart, too.”

Before the Corporal could begin to think up an addled response (and Mansk was glad because he thought that had been a pretty clever comeback) a warbling screech echoed above them.

Wheeling through the greying sky was a pair of banshees – ikran, they were ikran, the Spider boy had insisted they were called – and Mansk recognised the dark green RDA braces clamped around their necks as the animals swept in close for a landing. A tornado of sand, both dry and wet, blasted outward in a cloud and forced Mansk to shield his face when the ikran hit the beach, their huge black sickle-shaped front claws sinking into the sand. The Corporal’s coughing and spitting suggested he’d not raised his hand fast enough. The ikran didn‘t care. They shook their fanned wings and chattered to each other, shuffling their strange little back wing-feet. Mansk hoped they were laughing at the Corporal. Spider would have. The Colonel might have even dared to raise an amused brow.

Mansk approached his ikran, greenish with a blue crest under its chin, and gave it a hefty slap on the snout. The blue one with the light blue speckles and the orange beard crest was the Corporal’s, who was occupied scraping sand from his tongue. He’d stood open-mouthed watching the ikran land and was paying the price. It was deserved. Sort of.

“You good, Corporal?” he asked over, making sure his ikran’s saddle was still connected correctly.

He looked up in time to see the Corporal roll off his ikran’s wing, catch a tailwhip across the stomach and land face down in the sand.

Chapter 4: FUBAR

Summary:

Wainfleet's injury brings more problems.

Notes:

thank you to anyone who reads this and gives these minor bad guys a chance!! let's go!!!

“Oka-, all r-ght, yo-’re good, c’m-n, get -p.”

Something was trying to talk to him from fifty klicks away. Didn’t it know he couldn’t hear? There was a sensation on the sides of his skull, a spinning in all directions. What was doing that? His fucking ears? He was sure he had a hand on him somewhere, and when his boiling nerves found it and flexed the fingers, a sharp sting zigzagged from the nailbeds to the shoulder, which felt like it was somewhere near his neck.

He forced that numb hand upward and searched for one of those rotating ears. He grabbed it and pressed it to the side of his head to stop it moving. They needed to give him a break, stop all that flickering. At least the bed was warm. He tilted his head down into it and breathed in, then snorted out again with a horrified cough, his nostrils filled with whatever had burst out of the pillow, maybe feathers, but when he nudged his cheekbone across them, those feathers were rough as hell. No, those were pizza crumbs. He got it. Take-out from the chow hall. Fike liked Hawaiian. Fucking vile.

Wainfleet felt something pulling on his back, something patting and pawing at him, trying to get a grip on him. Fike needed to understand that Hawaiian was fucking vile and he didn’t want to swap a slice, fuck off. He threw up an arm to push Fike back. A rough hand caught him by the wrist and flipped him over. Then he felt a bloom of pain spread up from his stomach. He dropped both hands to his sides and noticed he was being hauled into a sitting position. He shook his head, sandy pizza crumbs flying from his ears, and remembered.

“Corporal? Hey,” Mansk said, balanced on his haunches in front of him, his sunglasses in his hand and his small yellow eyes narrowed, dark brows meeting above a narrow nose. Why did Mansk get to have that nearly-human bridge? “What was that?” Mansk said again.

Wainfleet drove a hand into the sand, aching arm locked at the elbow, and peered around Mansk to glower at the blue banshee. His other hand slid over his vest at the middle where the banshee’s tail had connected. “Nothin’,” Wainfleet said.

He’d never had trouble syncing up with the banshee before. Sure, it was still disturbing to watch those revolting pink tentacles clasp and wrap around each other when he hooked up, and that feeling, that completely alien feeling which followed, always gave him an initial shiver. But the banshee had never bucked him off all those months he’d had it. It had grown a bad attitude, and it needed to be put in its place.

“Sir, I think you should-” Mansk started, but wisely shut up when Wainfleet shot him a look and rose to his feet. That pain rolling up and down under his skin like a wave wasn’t letting up. Jesus, his knees were close to giving up under him. Despite it, he stalked across the beach where the banshee was clacking its jaw and fluttering its translucent wing-fingers. When it saw him, its eyes gleamed and it drew its snake-like head back, showed off its brightly coloured neck.

Wainfleet switched from a brisk, determined walk to a bent-kneed half-crouch, tried not to picture the controlled way the Colonel had moved back in the Hallelujah Mountains at the free banshee store. He dug his toes into the sand, his calf smarting with that slice through it. A few rapid blinks cleared his sparking vision for another minute or two. Control.

The banshee’s mouth opened, revealing strings of slime and black teeth long as bowie knives jutting from a second hinged jaw. The nostrils in its chest flared.

“Work with me here, asshole,” Wainfleet said to it through gritted teeth, bringing his queue around and lying it across his shoulder, holding onto the end with a hard grasp. How was he ever going to get used to feeling that thing? Somewhere under the braid it looked like dog food, he knew it. If he squeezed he knew it would dribble blood. The hair was stiff under his fingers, fine flakes of red coming away on his sweating fingers like rust. His thumb was pressing where it was damaged; a jolt of agony struck him in the brain when he held it down, but still he kept it in hand, holding it out like a lasso.

The banshee issued a guttural rumble. The sound rose through its throat and it barked a scream, teeth flaring out, head snapping forward fast as a punch. A really bad fucking attitude.

“Corporal!” Mansk shouted.

Wainfleet froze and turned his head to face a perked ear to Mansk.

Mansk’s voice was unsettlingly gentle. “Don’t.”

Wainfleet sneered, smirked, narrowed his eyes, returned his gaze to the target. This wasn’t Mansk’s business.

He waited for the banshee to stop acting up and settle its stupid ass down on the sand before he rushed it, grabbing one of its head tendrils in a harsh yank. It screeched as he shoved the end of the queue in with a shout and laugh of victory, the hairs on the back of his neck rising when the connection took. There wasn’t time to breathe back in after laughing. Something bounced back into him, directly into his skull, a frightened distress turning to anger that scattered an excruciating agony through him from the top of his scalp to the tiniest patch of skin on the end of his littlest toe. It felt as physical as being shot and took all the air of out his lungs for the second time that day. He gasped and doubled over, eyes huge and mouth agape. The banshee pulled its head back and upward with a scream, flapping its wings down with a whoosh into the sand at the same time, lifting off. With a weak cry Wainfleet kept his hold on the banshee’s tendril and tried to drag it down again, but the animal was too strong for his fatigued arms, and he was knocked back, queue released and stinging.

The banshee returned to the beach after its brief hover with a long rattle, long jaws parted and black teeth on show.

Back lying on his ass again. And in front of Mansk. Wainfleet leaned on his elbows and glared, panting through his teeth and frowning hard enough to crack the scab on his forehead. What was wrong with it? Why had that stung like bitch? Shock was sending tremors though his hands. Was Mansk looking? Could he see his trembling fingers? He clenched his fists to hide it. Shit, he had a good mind to return the banshee to the mountains and brandish the receipt at the na’vi goddess, the one Grace Augustine loved to harp on about whenever she saw a turd in the jungle.

Still catching his breath and unable to get up, he watched the banshee drop the threatening display and relax back into chirping and preening. It was doing it on purpose. He growled and twisted around, the bruise on his stomach pulling, and ripped his 33R from its holster, lifting his arm. The pistol was ten times heavier than usual in his quivering hand. The hammering pulse in his wrist was trying to jump away from him, he could see the blood fighting to break the vein wall. He shook his head and closed a burning eye to aim right at the banshee’s smallest and ugliest peeper. Here was something he could do that he was good at, even lying down.

A blue tree trunk came down with a thump onto the flat of his arm and slammed it into the sand. His finger twitched over the trigger and fired a round with a crack across the beach. Wainfleet bit back a yelp and looked up, pistol now loose in his hand. Mansk ground his foot harder into his arm. All the squashed nerves in it screamed. Wainfleet didn’t. But he did nearly staple two clean holes in his tongue with his fangs.

“I said don’t, sir,” Mansk said.

“Get offa me, Private,” Wainfleet said, trying to scare Mansk off with a knowing chuckle. Mansk thought he could do what he wanted without the Colonel present, without the rest of the squad. Thought he’d go easy on him. They weren’t on vacation.

“I will, sir, I just have to do something first,” Mansk said. Wainfleet tilted his head and fought his own vision trying to read Mansk’s face. It was still, not angry in any way, but his eyebrows lifted as he spoke. In one swift motion, Mansk bent low and disarmed him, the pistol going into the back of his belt (hopefully with the safety off, asshole). The foot was lifted from his arm at the same time and Wainfleet immediately scrambled to stand, showering sand. Shame forged a hot path up his back.

“What are you doing?” Wainfleet snapped, pointing an irritated finger under Mansk’s nose, ears forward, then pinned low. They couldn’t seem to decide on a position.

Mansk spluttered. Actually spluttered. “What am I doing? What are you doing, Corporal? Gonna shoot your only way off this rock?” Wainfleet won a pointing finger back. He noticed for the first time in a long time that Mansk was taller than him.

“If it don’t work, then yeah, yeah, I am! You saw that!” And, turning to flail a hand at the banshee resting on the shore, shouted: “Piece of shit!”

Mansk ran a hand over his hair. Wainfleet heard the sound of his fingers hissing over the short style loud as the waves. What did Mansk have to be flustered about? Why did he give so much of a shit? “It isn’t working because you’re falling apart,” Mansk said, staring at him from under his eyebrows. “It doesn’t wanna touch you because...” Mansk threw up his hand and let it clap back down to his hip. “I’ll speak English, here. You cannot hook up to one of these things like that! You think something and it does it, right? Turn left, it turns left. It feels what you’re feeling. And if you jump on one of ‘em and you’re wrecked to shit, it’s going to tell you to fuck off, sir, in the only way it knows how. All the wires are exposed and you’re gonna plug the wet socket in?”

Fury sent another swathe of sweat along Wainfleet’s invisible hackles. Or maybe that was more shame. He looked at the blue banshee; back to normal, happy as fucking Lawrence. Mansk knew that he knew that he was right. Wainfleet attempted not to posture, shrugged a shoulder, tested his joints. Still all bad. Another shot of pain up his spine. It took the air out of him every time. Something else that Mansk was watching him on. Christ, did he have to always lock those yellow eyes on him? He raised a hand to Mansk and flexed his fingers inward. “My 33R,” he said, his gaze on the sand until he lifted it, glaring.

Mansk twisted a foot through the sand and remained still.

“I’m not gonna do nothin’. Ha, I’d sooner shoot you than that thing. C’mon,” he said again, stepping forward, forgetting himself and smiling. Wainfleet knew his smile wasn’t exactly the most charming. Women had told him so. Creepy, smarmy maybe, but never charming. Smiling made his face turn a stupid shape now. He tried not to do it anymore.

Mansk reluctantly reached back and took the pistol from his belt, spinning it in his hand and brandishing the grip.

Wainfleet snatched it and checked the safety. He didn’t appreciate being treated like a naughty kid having his confiscated data pad returned. Mansk got a scowl for that one. A scowl that looked more like a cringe. “So, I’m riding bitch now?” He asked.

Mansk made a wry face. “Either that, or... You ever hear of Napoleon?” He slid his shades back on and went to his banshee.

Had he ever heard of Napoleon? What did he think he was? Stupid? Wainfleet leaned forward and raised his eyebrows, his vision starting to close in on itself like a shutting hangar door. “Yeah, I have. He worked in Laundry.” Nobody could possibly forget ol' Napoleon Jeffries from Laundry at Hell's Gate. He tilted his head and pulled another smarmy expression. Got him.

Mansk didn’t reply, so he had been bested.

Wainfleet put his hands on his hips and exhaled all his breath until his ribs hurt, then took a long heave of air back in. He glanced up to check Mansk, who was adjusting the belts on his bird. His own was sitting in the surf like a moron. He guessed dogs really did look like their owners. “I’m gonna take a piss,” he announced to himself, stroking a hand down his face and pinching his chin to feign casual thoughtfulness. “Yeah, I’m gonna take a piss.”

Mansk hadn’t heard him. Instead, he had hopped up onto his banshee and got settled; a blue-skinned cowboy with Wayfarers. “Weather’s rolling in, sir. Better move soon.”

Wainfleet looked up. The sky looked bright, what was Mansk talking about?

“Where are you going, Corporal?” Mansk called when Wainfleet climbed up the bank to the edge of the sand.

“Jesus, I said I’m gonna take a piss! You wanna help and hold it for me!?” Wainfleet snapped back as he walked, refusing to turn around.

No answer. Good. Shut up.

He waited until he was inside the treeline and shielded by the dark foliage to fall into the stumble he’d been putting off for far too long. He found himself clinging to a tree and squeezing his eyes shut, white stars blinking and soaring around the backs of his eyelids. A million tiny fishhooks were ripping his lungs apart with every heave of his chest. He struggled into the jungle a few more paces, considered pissing to do anything that wasn’t reeling with agony, but Jesus, his hands couldn’t feel anymore, he’d never find his belt buckle. And that headache. It was a headache that had spread to all of him. That fucking braid. Why did the na’vi have to have such a redundant and fragile feature? Why did they have to stick it onto him? Couldn’t the RDA have done something to stop it developing when they’d cooked this body up? He didn’t need it. What did it do except let idiots have some fun flying lame-ass dragons? That was a kid’s fantasy dream. The lame-ass dragon didn’t even want him on its back. Those kids with those fantasy dreams would howl with laughter at him.

Wainfleet slumped against a tree and buried his face in his hands. He screamed into his palms, pressed the heels of his hands into his mouth and rode out the shakes as he slipped down to sit in the leaflitter. His tail was trapped under his hipbone, but who gave a damn. He didn’t need that thing either.

“That shit hurt, Corporal?”

Wainfleet pulled his hands down his face, the course gloves he still wore scratching his skin, and opened his eyes. “No, sir,” he said, sniffing and blinking. He ran a thumb under his nostrils and was relieved to see his skin had its peachy complexion back when he looked down at his fingers. Thank God.

“Then I’ll ask again,” Colonel Quaritch said with a dip of his head and a knowing smile. “That shit hurt?”

Wainfleet looked over to the Colonel. Quaritch, ever the casual and amusable superior, had his big bare arms folded over his broad chest, his shoulder leaning against a tree not far away, his strong legs crossed at the ankle. The eagle tattoo could have been flapping its wings as the light from the canopy flickered over dark ink feathers.

“Yeah. Yessir, I mean,” Wainfleet said, getting to his feet and lifting his chin. It didn’t take half as long to get up, and the jungle dwarfed him. The plants were doubled in size, the trees taller and wider. There was no bump of a queue against his back and no slow sway of a tail over his ass to annoy him. He breathed at the reprieve not feeling them brought.

The Colonel was at his eyeline. The pale trio of claw scars on the right side of his head, carved through the silver hair, glimmered. “At ease, Corporal. You’re fine.”

“Thank you, sir,” Wainfleet sighed, relaxing his stance just a tad. “The mission, sir. It... I’m sorry. Total FUBAR. Nobody except me and Mansk made it. We let you down, sir.”

“I’m glad,” the Colonel said. Another nod of his head, but this time when he raised it, there was a cut on his right eyebrow. Blood flowed down his face to his chin. The Colonel didn't seem aware of anything wrong. He was still smiling.

Wainfleet frowned, looked around. Had something hit the Colonel and he’d not noticed? Not been able to protect him? A laugh of disbelief escaped him. “Glad, sir? I don’t-”

“I’m glad it hurts,” the Colonel said. That same smile. A widening of those stark blue eyes. Wainfleet accidentally blinked. The Colonel’s smart uniform was ripped and burned. The patch on his right arm was hanging by a thread, the frayed edges black from fire Wainfleet couldn’t see.

“Colonel, you-” Wainfleet stepped forward.

An arrow the length of a javelin protruded from the Colonel’s chest. The feathers fletched on the end were black and yellow. It was quivering in him, as if freshly shot. The Colonel hadn’t moved. He was still standing with his arms folded, his ankles crossed. Smiling those pearly whites at him.

Wainfleet felt his face crumple, his eyebrows turn up the wrong way, his lip wobble. His pulse was a mile a minute, thundering enough for even his weak human hearing to pick it up loud as a storm. A bright light beamed down through the leaves above him. Wainfleet used his arm to protect his eyes from it as it increased by the second, a deep, bone-shaking hum joining it.

“Better be ready, Corporal.”

Wainfleet gasped and looked across again to Quaritch. A second arrow through his chest, blood everywhere, the Colonel still leaned against his tree wearing them like medals. The Colonel lifted his head, eyebrows up, smile blithe.

“Mask on,” he said.

With a lurch, Wainfleet’s heart bucked against his ribs. How long had he been standing there breathing Pandoran air without a mask? His hands went to his throat and clasped around the tendons, but the damage was done, his lungs were fighting disintegration. He crashed to his knees as the white light above flashed and took him and the jungle with it.

Wainfleet jolted awake with a shout in the sandy soil. His limbs jumped, all five of them. The familiar agony of the damage to the queue stung again, battered his nerves, his skin, his brain, and he almost welcomed it. The rustling plants around him, back to their smaller shape, the fingers poking through his fingerless tactical gloves, striped and blue. He balled them into a fist and coughed out a held breath. He got to his feet and turned around on the spot, every swing of the queue at his back sending shards into him.

The light from the canopy was gone. A sharp wind was whipping at the jungle vegetation around his legs. The creatures in the trees had fallen quiet. A storm was coming.

Chapter 5: Escaping Elba

Summary:

A storm breezes in to cause more trouble.

Notes:

the girlies are fighting!!!! reeeowwwrrr

thank you to everyone reading and commenting you are best!!!! happy new year!! ill fix grammar and spelling later!!

Rushing back to the beach through the jungle felt more like a mountain climb. Roots tripped him and skinned the tops of his feet, sticky leaves slapped his arms and smeared their disgusting stinking goop over them, sharp branches underfoot managed to find ways to stab him under the toenails with pinpoint accuracy. It was as if the forest was against him, like he was fucking Snow White being chased by trees with angry faces. And all the way from his sad little Snow White clearing of whatever-the-fuck-that-was-he'd-just-seen back to the real-life world of Mansk and the shoreline, Wainfleet stumbled and fell into trees and snagged his pants and rolled into the sandy dirt like an ugly blue pinball pinging around in a machine. And his queue followed, followed with a vengeance, tearing into his every movement, even blinks, even twitches at the corners of his mouth, where his teeth met his gums.

By the time he found the beach again, he wore more cuts and bruises than he had when he’d left it.

The sky was dull. The beach had stopped glowing gold. Brown sand cooled his stinging toes. Mansk stood ankle deep in the dark waves with a hand on his banshee’s gear, the animal shaking its head and calling, its wings flapping like a flyaway tent in the roaring gale. Wainfleet's blue banshee perked up from where it had drawn its head in against the wind and turned a dragony snout toward him. Mansk must have seen. He twisted to look over and touched a finger to his throat comms. “Corporal, you okay?” his steady voice crackled in Wainfleet’s ear, which lifted with a start at hearing the sound so close.

Wainfleet pressed a hand to his neck and headed over with heavy footfalls. “Situation?” he replied. Like hell he was going to talk about being okay. He’d never dare to ask the Colonel if he was okay. That just wasn’t done.

“Take a look up, Corporal. Shit’s coming down,” was the comms reply.

He lifted his eyes. Clouds boiled overhead, huge and dark, wrestling with each other for the best spot to mount their attacks on the world below. Further out a black thunderhead writhed on the horizon, a pacing Colonel, waiting. The wind picked up with a whooping wail, blowing right into his ears, pressing a hard hand into his aching chest, yanking on the queue behind him. Bridgehead lay in that direction.

“That’s West!” Wainfleet shouted over his comms, pointing at the storm with a shaking hand, the wind trying to turn him like a weathervane. He reached Mansk, was barely five paces away from him, but the sound of the wind forced him to continue to use the radio. The banshees’ mouths opened and closed. He couldn’t hear their cries.

Mansk followed his line of sight, then stared back at him behind his sunglasses, hand on his throat, unbelieving smile on his face. Wainfleet narrowed his eyes. Mansk was about to answer back again. “Sir, that’s suicide!”

Wainfleet clutched a hand around his comms collar as if it was Mansk’s neck, wringing it. “I don’t care! That’s the quickest way!” Bridgehead’s seagate was so close he could smell the concrete and metal. And beyond the seagate; a roof, a bed, food, water that hadn’t been pissed in by na’vi. The thought of it made him purse his lips and look down at the wind picking sand up in handfuls between his feet. He glanced up again when Mansk had something else clever to say.

“Quickest way to die, sir! We have to go around like you said before!” Rain peppered the lenses of Mansk’s shades, then, quick as a breath, pelted them mercilessly. Mansk snapped his head away from the onslaught and Wainfleet hunched his shoulders up to his ears against its cold barrage on the back of his head.

“That was the plan before our rides showed up!” Wainfleet shouted. Jesus, it was impossible to hear his own voice. He took a step sideways to brace himself against the screaming hurricane sweeping in from the water. It was going to take him down, he knew it. He was paper in its path.

“It should be our plan now! We can’t fly into that! They won’t fly into that!” Mansk yelled with his spare hand over his face against the rain, then waving it at the restless banshees.

All that answering back. Wainfleet ground his molars and let his pain fuel him. “Then we hunker down!”

“With what? Big leaves over our heads?! Corporal! This place is gonna be ripped apart!”

Wainfleet leaped forward, aided by the gale at his back, and shoved Mansk bodily to the beach. “I’m not goin’ in the opposite direction!”

Mansk looked up at him, his stupid shades askew, breathing hard, lying on his shoulders. Rain struck him over and over, his clothes and skin shone with it, it streaked clean lines through the wet sand clinging to his face. The big yellow eye Wainfleet could see behind the wonky glasses lens was fluttering as rain tried to get into it. What was he thinking? What was the face for? That half-ajar mouth, those eyebrows frowning. Wainfleet sneered at him, curled a pink nostril.

A deafening bellow over the unrelenting hiss of rain overhead joined the argument. Wainfleet flinched under it and Mansk clambered to his feet just in time to avoid a lashing wave, face to the sky. Lights zipped behind the clouds, zigzagging through their dark clustering shapes. A finger of lightning broke through and forked bright shivering lines around the island like an electric fence.

Mansk looked across at Wainfleet, and, for once, Wainfleet agreed.

They raced each other to the banshees, both of which were scrabbling through the sand, whipping their wings, on the verge of lifting off. If Big and Blue flew away he would for sure put a cap in its face next time he saw it.

Mansk pulled ahead. Damn, he was fast. Had to have been those longer legs. He was way ahead of him. That was strange. He could have sworn they were neck-and-neck a moment ago. There was a storm blowing in, what was he hanging back for? He laughed. Had he laughed? Had he stopped running? He looked down. His feet were still. His hands were on his hips. Why? It was hot. So hot he wondered if the heat would evaporate all that rain from his vest and pants. That would be pretty handy. He said a few words to himself in the wrong order, gripped his fingers into his waist, dropped his head down. Something sounded weird in his ears, something underneath the roar of rain, the howl of gales, the fizzing of his comms. It sounded like wire cables loosening and snapping apart.

Wainfleet felt himself grind the scuffed heel of a gloved hand into his eye socket and heard himself spit out another laugh, but he didn’t feel his cheekbone hit the hard sand when he keeled over.

 

---

 

Mansk drew his fingers away from his comms when it was clear the Corporal wasn’t going to answer.

He was already halfway back to him when he hit the deck. It was like watching a puppeteer drop their puppet after a show, every limb lifeless and lying sprawled where they landed. Mansk slapped his ikran on the neck, mentally begging it to stay where it was and to ignore the thunder shouting and the winds buffeting, before disconnecting his queue. He left it reeling and silently cawing to power across the wet sand. He skidded to his knees at the Corporal’s side, chased by the storm howling in his madly rotating ears. He rolled the Corporal onto his back, surprised to find that he wasn’t unconscious. He ripped his shades off to get a better look at his condition, hooking one of the arms over his vest collar.

The Corporal’s eyes were roving as if he was trying to read something, then they half closed, like they did when he smiled, and he bared his teeth, trying to roll himself over again. Mansk hauled him by the vest and rested his head on one of his kneepads. “Hey, hey,” he said down to him, one finger on his comms, the other hand still gripping the Corporal’s vest.

The Corporal flicked huge yellow eyes up at him, and for a moment they looked blank, dead, and then returned to life again, as if he was crossing in and out of... somewhere. He was speaking. Mansk leaned his face closer, ears forward as far as they could go to listen. The Corporal winced and reached a hand to cover his face. “Please don’t laugh,” he said in a whining stutter into his palm. “Don’t laugh at me.”

Mansk breathed in and pulled him further up his knee. “I’m not gonna laugh at you,” he reassured, almost forgetting to press the comms, almost accidentally laughing at the absurdity of the request. The Corporal wouldn’t be happy if that had slipped out. Mansk sat back on his legs and tilted his face into the driving rain.

“We gotta go, Corporal. We gotta go,” he said.

The Corporal seemed to be searching for his arms and legs. Mansk saw he’d only gotten as far as slapping his tail back and forth in the wet sand, carving lines into it. While the Corporal was out of it, he risked picking up his queue and letting it slide through his open hand. There was a part of it near the end which felt more ragged that the rest, maybe swollen, and his fingers were left red when the braid slipped out of his hold to thump to the beach, limp as its owner.

Another crack of thunder made his ears tip down. “Okay, sir,” he said, giving the Corporal a slap on the cheek. “Up.” He gave the Corporal’s vest a yank with both hands and lifted him off his leg, suspended him over the sand. The Corporal’s head lolled back, rainwater dripping from his neck and collar, but his hands and arms were moving. “Come on! Off your ass, Corporal!” he said again, knowing that he couldn’t be heard over the storm, shaking him. “Up! On your feet!”

The Corporal blinked, grunted, huffed sand from his nostrils. It was good enough. Mansk rose and heaved Corporal Wainfleet up with him, pushing him away once he was steady.

The Corporal wasn’t good. He immediately went to one knee as soon as he was off the sand, but he shot out an arm when Mansk stepped forward to help again, turning his open hand into a warning point. Raindrops hopped on top of his glove. Mansk backed off. They didn’t have time to wait, but like hell he was going to try to escort the Corporal across the beach like a little old lady over a crosswalk. He valued his life.

Lightning slashed a bright scar through the blackening sky and somewhere in the jungle a tree exploded with a bang.

Fuck it. Mansk moved and took the Corporal by that pointing hand, wrapped his fingers around his wrist and pulled him up, clapping him on the back and hurrying to the ikran, leaving the Corporal to make his own manly, prideful way.

The Corporal managed to shuffle to the ikran upright, but did use one of its neck belts to keep himself standing. Mansk pretended not to notice to preserve the Corporal’s dignity, let him privately recover himself under the cold drum of rain. He would have made a joke about the riding bitch comment, so very nearly did, just to lift the mood, but the storm was pressing down and they needed to vacate their almost-Elba.

He jumped up onto the ikran, swung a leg over its shoulder, connected his queue, then reached a hand down to the Corporal, beckoning his fingers at him, urging him to hurry his ass up. The ikran was already lifting its wings and flexing its shoulders, its back dipping up and down under his thighs.

The Corporal, Wainfleet, stared at his offered hand and Mansk had never seen the man look so put upon, look so unsure. No funny remark about sharing an ikran, no rolling of his eyes, no stupid smile to crease his eyes. Mansk could hardly believe Wainfleet had been hiding those kinds of worried expressions in his library. Shit, the odds of Wainfleet having been in a library were low. Of even knowing what one was. But maybe he did. Maybe Wainfleet did know about things Mansk, and the others, jested that he didn’t. Mansk averted his eyes but left his hand down. Do not fucking faint, he willed him. Take the hand. Take the fucking hand.

Wainfleet took it. He hauled himself up with a strained grimace and took position behind Mansk, and the lack of hands holding anywhere on his back or shoulders made Mansk click his tongue against the top of his mouth. He reached a hand behind him, seized Wainfleet by the collar to steady him, and made the ikran spread its wings. There was a rush of released stress from the ikran, and then an urgency which sent his pulse rocketing. Wainfleet’s blue ikran rose up alongside, brushing wings with his, as they hovered higher over the sand, both fighting against the wind for height. It felt worse now they were up, stronger, colder, louder, but the ikran picked up speed and thrust its wings back to surge forward.

A hand gripped his belt. Mansk breathed out. The ikran slipped through the air and turned East.

Chapter 6: Company

Summary:

There's no rest for the wicked in Metkayina territory.

Notes:

not much going on in this one lads sorry! we'll get to the good stuff soooon thank you for reading and being so nice!!! here might be some spelling errors coz it's 2am!! ill fix em later!

Mansk had to trust his ikran’s four eyes to guide them out from under the storm’s frayed grey edges; his own were slammed shut against the raging weather. He flew with his body dipped down flush to the ikran’s neck and his head angled over his shoulder, preferring the rain to hit the back of that than his face, which he didn’t particularly want shredded off. The position was better for gripping Wainfleet’s vest to stop him from slipping off the end of the ikran’s tail, though it didn’t make the muscles in his arm or his freezing fingers ache any less.

The reaching hands of the storm fell behind after a while, giving way to a brighter sky, but that brilliant blue overhead they’d all gotten so used to was gone, leaving a white void instead. Wainfleet’s ikran, lazily drifting a few yards away to his left, was an eye-watering bright blue splotch on white paper. Mansk watched its wings ripple with a crackle as they hit a slipstream and smiled, then he dove them lower to float over green, steaming islands and dim, grey sea. Wainfleet’s weight slumped against his back as they dropped. Mansk felt him push on his shoulders with clumsy hands to keep their bodies from touching, but eventually even that stopped. It wasn’t until he tried his comms to ask if he was all right and, upon receiving no answer, glanced back, that he realized Wainfleet was sleeping with his face pressed into his shoulder.

His clothes were wet enough without the addition of Wainfleet’s drool soaking them, but Mansk allowed it. Both of them were covered in seawater and blood and sand and sweat and dirt and some kind of foul jungle plant sap. Drool was nothing. Drool was, at least, familiar. Who knew what that foul jungle plant sap was going to do his sleeve, if he’d have a sleeve left by nightfall. Or an arm with skin still attached.

Wainfleet’s mouth was hanging open, his big blunt fangs on show, tongue threatening to roll out like a red carpet for B-movies over his lower teeth, and all of it was squashed against his shoulder, warm and wet. Mansk shrugged but Wainfleet only snorted and slid his cheek down further. The hands on his belt slackened. Mansk asked (asked?) his ikran to ease up on its dive toward the archipelago and straighten, slow its wingbeats, fall into a more idle rhythm. It surprised him every time that it didn’t need a yank of reigns or a kick of heels onto its neck to make it bank or turn or land. It never refused a mental order, as long as the mental order wasn’t a move the rider himself wouldn’t pull. It was a connection he supposed he would never understand. It wasn’t for him to understand. Not him, not Wainfleet, not the Colonel. He could only leave it at thank God it worked. Mansk bowed his head again when a sharp, cold gust whipped him right in the eyeballs, turning them into yellow deserts. What he’d give for an RDA-branded windshield. Convertibles hadn’t been the rage on Earth for at least seventy years, and Mansk wasn’t enjoying this one now.

Once the ikran was flying steady, Mansk turned his body as much as Wainfleet’s heavy form against him would allow, at the same time trying his best not to shift Wainfleet’s body over the edge for a rude but short awakening. It took a lot of shuffling to accommodate both Wainfleet and the bulk of the AR, the latter of which he left swinging freely to bounce against his hip. He ended up pulling one of the Corporal’s arms over his shoulder and holding onto his wrist, accidentally drawing his head (and a long transparent smear of dribble) further up his back until Wainfleet’s neck was hooked over his collarbone. Wainfleet’s chin was sharp as a stiletto point but wearing him like a backpack provided much needed heat, and thankfully the air rushing past them as the ikran cut a smooth path to the island treelines kept the stink of recent events away.

Holding onto him now, Mansk realized how out for the count Wainfleet really was. He’d never seen him floppy and bloody with his eyes unable to focus. This was a different Corporal he was clutching, a person he was afraid of. Afraid for. Worse, Private First Class Mansk had been the cause. Not that it mattered after the fact, not that he could do shit about it. Mansk twisted the Corporal’s wrist and felt for the pulse beneath his gloves, slipping his fingers under the material. He squashed the vein with his middle finger and waited to feel a bump of blood. It was there, faint, sluggish, but regular. Mansk sighed and pulled Wainfleet’s loose, clammy arm closer to his chest. He sat up, felt a few bones click, and draped his tail over Wainfleet’s leg. It was a pathetic excuse for a seatbelt, but he tucked it around and under his thigh anyway. Wainfleet’s ikran called beside them, its eagle’s eye staring at Mansk warily, before it slipped beneath the belly of his ikran and repositioned behind them, riding their wake.

He had to take them down. They’d been soaring for a good handful of hours, and once a person couldn’t feel their calves or their heels, it was time to get off the horse. That, and the seawater he’d drank couldn’t replace the real thing for much longer. He manoeuvred the ikran closer to the treetops of a small island, its wings beating close enough to rustle leaves, and tensed his tail’s hold on Wainfleet’s leg as he leaned to one side, scanned for a clearing big enough for ikran to comfortably land. The smell that rose from the speeding trees inches below was fresh and clear. He took a long lungful for the road. The Mansk from before had never known air like it. Filtration systems, air conditioning units, masks for excursions into the city, even the lake mist lying heavy around the head of a forgetful grandfather’s fishing boat, whatever that Mansk had breathed and thought was luxury, it had nothing on this.

A good-sized patch of long grass lay ahead not far from the beach. Mansk hit the brain brakes on his ikran and it touched down with a satisfied chirp. Wainfleet’s ikran landed a few hops away, tired wings already tucked up and long neck bowed, its nose on the sandy dirt. The force of the breath from the chambers on its chest flattened grass and ferns.

“Corporal,” Mansk said, giving Wainfleet’s arm a rough shake and slinging it off his shoulder. He was sure Wainfleet’s saliva had soaked through his sleeve to his skin. He closed his eyes in revulsion, carried on with the awkward dismount to distract himself. He slapped Wainfleet hard on the leg. “Wakey, wakey,” he said again, and finally felt Wainfleet peel his face away and sit back. Mansk could only imagine with huge eyes the sight of a line of drool connecting Wainfleet’s lower lip to his vest. Judging by the noises Wainfleet snorted, that was exactly what was dangling between them. Mansk leaped down, hopefully severing that string of dribble, and rolled his shoulders, glad to be on the ground, glad that Wainfleet was still able to rouse himself back to consciousness.

Wainfleet remained sat on the ikran, which was starting to shift from side to side with impatience at having a guest on its back rather than its bonded rider. The Corporal bent double, ran a hand down his face, pulling on his features and groaning into his fingers. Still not good, then, Mansk noticed. Wainfleet’s eyes when he looked up were a little more active however, so it was very possible he was registering surroundings and thinking about things. Prager would have had a good joke for that, a real cutting remark just for the Corporal, although the comments never needed to be all that smart; the Corporal barely kept up with even the most obvious of mocking banter. Mansk himself had never been quick to whip up wit, so instead of an amused quip, there was quiet.

They were back in the jungle again, and with it came that familiar staccato of whooping animals and fizzling insects and flapping leaves. Wainfleet slid down from the ikran, nearly losing his footing landing, and joined Mansk in his survey. “Don’t tell me,” Wainfleet said, clearing his throat and rubbing the back of his neck. “The island next door.” He inclined his head and raised his eyebrows at Mansk, who could only watch the scabbing wound on Wainfleet’s forehead fold into his wrinkles and witness in real time Wainfleet fighting the urge to scream with a jaw clench to rival an ikran’s bite.

“Island opposite, actually, sir. Nicer view from the condo,” Mansk replied, impressing himself. Maybe he could best Prager after all.

“Huh. Sea’s always greener, I guess,” Wainfleet said, shrugging. There was something far away in his tone that Mansk, again, noted but chose to ignore.

“Decided we should pit stop. I’m black on water,” Mansk said, stretching his spine before heading to the treeline to check their perimeter.

“Hey,” Wainfleet said, raising his voice over the low rattle of the jungle.

Mansk turned to face him. Standing alone in the grass Wainfleet looked strangely small for a man over nine feet. Maybe it was because his crown of blue shades was gone. “Tango mike, all right?” Wainfleet spoke so quickly it was nearly one muffled word. He smirked, then pinched the bridge of his wide nose, massaging it. “Get uh, get that perimeter secured.”

“Yes, sir,” Mansk said, unhooking Z-Dog's AR from his shoulder and picking his way through the undergrowth, eyes on his bruised bare toes rather than what lurked in the shadows.

“You clean that rifle after,” Wainfleet added, his voice stronger again with an order behind it, although there was that forced, low, throaty noise under it like before. The Colonel impression was back.

Mansk smiled to himself and swatted a fly with his tail.

---

On Pandora, day became night became eclipse became day became eclipse again became a pain in the ass. Wainfleet wondered if Mansk knew what the hell time it was beyond it being either night or eclipse. If asked, Mansk would likely say in that calm voice: ‘it’s dark, sir.' Wainfleet looked over at him, perched on a low branch that they’d found and arranged with others in a triangle around their crude little boy Scout campfire. Mansk was cleaning the AR as best he could without a cleaning kit, which made it more checking than cleaning.

They had plenty of company in their grassy little clearing. The banshees had settled for the night, lying next to each other like snoozing chainsaws. In the trees beyond their perimeter strange beasts cooed and whistled. Some of the warbling he knew by sound but not by sight, thank Christ. Every now and again branches would clack as an animal put its weight behind taking off or leaping or whatever it was these alien monsters liked to do at night, like melt each other’s faces off for foreplay or eat their own limbs to help them get to sleep.

Wainfleet sucked on a burnt finger, gave the pathetic fire a filthy look, and sat forward on his own stupid little branch, eyes on the dirt between his toes. His brain was still throbbing, right at the base where the queue met the back of his skull. It had eased after that doze, he’d admit, but maybe that had just been the first of a string of future blackouts? He still had the shakes, his skin shivering, muscles flinching, as wet with sweat as he’d been forty feet underwater earlier that day, night, eclipse, day, whenever it had been.

“You should have a look at that, sir,” Mansk said.

Wainfleet glanced up. Mansk had stopped checking-cleaning the AR. His sunglasses were on. At night. Wainfleet clasped his hands between his parted knees, elbows on his thighs, and hunched his shoulders forward, which only sent another stinging flare to burn down his back. “At what?” he asked. He knew the answer, he just wanted to hold off the inevitable embarrassment of doing what Mansk suggested.

Mansk said nothing. The answer.

Wainfleet ran his tongue across his front teeth and cumbersomely drew his queue around to hold it in his hand. God, how his mother would laugh to see him with long hair, and a braid at that.

He shook his head (a new headache nestled itself in next to the rest) and started to feel at the queue just above where it hurt the most. They’d already watered and washed at the freshwater spring further up beyond their valley, so the crunch of blood no longer cracked when he started to undo the locks. He narrowed his eyes when he’d released most of them. Damn, it was going to be fiddly as fuck to tie it all back up again. Why hadn’t the na’vi evolved armor over queues if they were so damn important? Why couldn’t they just sync up to their banshees and their trees with their minds like in the movies? Why did it have to be done via the thing he held in his hands now, with all of its skin and nerve endings and nasty little tentacles? And its deep bloody gouge.

It probably wasn’t as bad as it looked. Or felt. It was fine. He could leave it like that, splash water on it every so often to keep it clean, and when it was light they could fly back in the Westerly direction now the storm had passed, be in Bridgehead within the next few days, eclipses, nights. Easy.

Mansk rested his AR against the branch, rose to his feet and sat down beside him. Wainfleet couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses, but he could see the fire’s orange reflection swirl on the lenses. It made him look angry. “That doesn’t look so great, sir,” he said. There was a concern in his voice, not anger. “You feelin’ okay?”

“It ain’t nothin’. I’ll do somethin’ about it tomorrow.” Wainfleet set to work rebraiding it and thought again of his mother laughing that he’d learned to do such a thing. Him. Braiding hair. He did it with fingers which had thirty-five years’ worth of muscle memory tying only shoelaces, but that would have to do for now. It was agony, tightening locks of hair back around the injury, but fuck, what could he do? There was nothing out there to help. Pandora had nothing for him.

Mansk didn’t speak. Not until Wainfleet finished fixing the queue’s braid and had moved on to checking his pistol. “Do you think the Colonel-”

“Yeah,” Wainfleet replied. He clicked the magazine back in and rested the pistol on his knee, staring at Mansk’s big dark lenses. “I do.”

They were midway through eating some strange but not unpleasant reddish fruit-vegetable-root-thing that Mansk had foraged (Wainfleet was glad one of them had been listening to the Spider kid) when they heard it.

Wainfleet lifted his head, still chewing, a knobbled strip of red fruit skin hanging from his teeth, and swivelled an ear to listen. There were plenty of weird noises around them in the dark, but this felt like a deliberate sound. A sound with a goal behind it, not the sort of sound a freakish owl with five mouths flittering about made. He saw Mansk’s ears flick and frowned. It was a strange shuffing which repeated, then increased, the pattern changing. His chewing slowed, then he paused. He looked to Mansk again, who rolled his fruit across the grass and moved from a sit to a crouch, hand curling around to his AR.

“Kiwl ve fyrr,” Wainfleet said in a whisper through his mouthful.

Mansk was fluent in Wainfleetese. In one smooth motion, he slid his foot through the soft dirt and put out the flames of their tiny campfire, plunging their clearing into near-dark. The banshees stirred and rumbled.

Wainfleet could still see Mansk, his little glowing dots just about giving him away, and the banshees too, lit up like fucking Christmas trees. Mansk soundlessly joined him, shades off, and both went to their stomachs on the ground by Wainfleet’s branch and peered over it. Wainfleet waited for his vision to adjust, blinking furiously through little white sparking stars again. Not now. Christ, not now. Somewhere out there, somethings were moving. And the somethings were brandishing fire of their own. He counted at least three.

Wainfleet ripped his pistol from his side holster and knocked off the safety, rolling onto his back and still chewing on the sticky skin of the fruit, trying to chomp it down as fast as he could. He twisted his head to look again over their shallow cover.

The Metkayina moved closer.

Chapter 7: Scream

Summary:

Faced with fight or flight, Wainfleet makes a costly decision.

Notes:

this one got away from me and needs some serious editing aaaaaaaa

It was the banshees. The things weren’t local to the islands and their slow meandering flight over the ocean had been clocked by Metkayina scouts. He and Mansk had stopped for too long, allowed the na’vi to catch up. They should have flown into the storm. He’d rather have died by the hands of the weather than stuck with a na’vi spear. A glitchy fifteen-year-old dashcam video of Sully’s girlfriend was enough to exhibit what they were capable of.

Wainfleet gave the pair of banshees across the clearing a glare. They swung their heads and clattered their wings, sensing something was happening but too dumb to keep their lizardy traps shut. They were going to compromise their position, but shooing their big, noisy asses away would give them away quicker.

“Corporal,” Mansk said beside him. “We should-”

“We should? Who’s the fuckin’ Corporal here, Private? Move up on my signal.” Wainfleet shot Mansk a yellow glare. Mansk thought he was running the show, just because one of them was a little tired, had a papercut on his ponytail, wasn’t friends with his lame-ass dragon anymore.

“Corporal, this is a waste of ammo. Sir,” Mansk tried again.

Wainfleet frowned so deeply he couldn’t feel the muscles pulling on his eyebrows anymore, couldn’t feel the cut on his forehead stinging. A bead of sweat swam down his temple, leaving a clean, blue line through the mud and sand on his skin. And yet, after a moment frozen with fury, he felt his scowl loosen, twitch, fall apart when he darted his eyes away. If he rolled over onto his other shoulder, would he see the Colonel next to him ready to give the orders? Would he hear the Colonel chuckle a smarmy, knowing laugh at the fact Private Mansk was the one making all the smart moves?

“Move up,” Wainfleet said through a tight smile, “on my signal.”

They’d been here before. In the jungle, surrounded by glowing foliage ten times the size it should be, hot rain sizzling on sweating shoulders, splashing from Brown’s peaked cap, making itchy trigger fingers slippery. A firefight was a good enough way to go for Warren, Fike, Walker, Zhang, Lopez. It was good enough for Mansk and Wainfleet.

Mansk got the idea, but he didn’t appear happy about it. Without sunglasses to hide his eyes, Wainfleet saw irritation in Mansk’s stare, but he positioned his AR on top of their feeble little branch anyway, shrugging his shoulders and lining up his sight. Wainfleet checked his magazine for the fiftieth time, then went to touch at his pouches for his spares.

They both lifted their eyes to the trees dead ahead at the same time, watched orange balls of light bob between the black stripes of the trees ahead. Then the lights went out.

Wainfleet heard Mansk take a sharp breath of readiness. His grip on the AR creaked. Even Mansk’s tail was still. His own was. They waited.

A spear thocked with a judder into the branch barely shielding them, the impact spraying splinters into their faces. Wainfleet ducked low, snorted shards of wood from his face. Mansk grunted and wiped his eyes. They recovered themselves with shakes of their heads and fell back into position, ears forward, eyes huge.

An exhale. A throb in his skull. Go. “Contact front! Move up!” Wainfleet said. The banshees behind them screeched and raised their wings.

An echoing voice called in na’vi through the trees, their own little version of the same lingo. The banshees reared and crawled on their wings over to the perimeter, squawking.

Wainfleet scrambled to his feet, nearly tripping over the branch and falling into the spear still vibrating in it, pistol raised and trained on the trees, watching for anything; glowing dots, fire, the shine of starlight on bare arms and legs, the flick of tightly-braided hair. His breath hissed in and out through his bared teeth. He moved forward in a brisk, crouched walk, twigs snapping underfoot, rocks snagging and cutting his toes. He glanced aside to see the shadowy shape of Mansk flanking him, rifle high under his chin. Anticipation sent his heart thumping in his throat. Fresh, hot sweat oiled his underarms. His ears twisted back and forth on the sides of his head until they hurt.

The na’vi out there had switched to silent running mode. Wainfleet blinked, scanning the black treeline, holding position and gesturing for Mansk to do the same. Mansk was right, they didn’t have the rounds to spare, but fuck if he wanted to unleash them all the same. It took less time to squeeze a trigger than to draw an arm back to toss a spear. Maybe they could take down this little squad of Sully-lovers.

Wainfleet crouched by a scrubby little plant which wasn’t glowing, sent sweat droplets flying with a jerk of his head, tried to focus. He could feel he was on the verge of losing it again. A slow, growing sensation was grinding up his queue from end to base, a dull agony that built with every motion he made, like a sharp-toothed creature was chewing it off inch by inch. His pistol was ten tons in his wobbling fingers. He lifted the back of his wrist to smear sweat across his brow, the rough scab there snagging his skin.

Mansk flashed him a look from where he half-knelt five yards away, head low but eyes bright with concern in the dark. Wainfleet understood what he had said with them. What kind of enemy commanded their squad engage and then fall quiet?

Something crunched at Mansk’s two o’clock. Mansk whipped his head around to face it, then glanced over his shoulder to Wainfleet, who signed for him to move up, investigate, ambush if he could. Mansk moved off, gliding across the ground, not a sound from a single leaf.

Wainfleet dropped his hand back down to his lap and found himself slumping onto his knees, unable to hold his own weight on his ankles anymore. He swiped a hand up and over his scalp and resisted digging his fingers into the hair they’d left to cover the top of the queue.

The na’vi barrelled into him like a truck. Wainfleet was lifted from his feet by a broad shoulder to the sternum and landed hard onto his shoulder blades, air jumping out of his lungs and leaving him wheezing, pistol jumping out of his hand and leaving him unarmed. He squinted up into the darkness, unsure which stars were real and which were just flashes in his vision, and saw that it was just a kid who’d knocked him on his ass. A fucking kid.

The fucking kid saw him scramble shamefully back on his elbows, scraping his queue underneath him through the stones and the dirt, giving away a wince. It felt like an AMP suit had pressed a delicate tiptoe onto it. He rolled onto his front and pulled his trapped queue from under his hip, holding it up with careful fingers as his other hand sifted uselessly through the grass for his pistol.

There was nobody else attacking. Hadn't there been three? Had the other na’vi taken down Mansk already? Was Mansk dead? Why hadn’t he opened fire? Why wasn’t he here putting a cap in this fucking kid and helping him up?

He couldn’t see his pistol. Trembling fingers pushed through sandy soil and found nothing but stones. He growled, going for his machete, craning an arm back to snatch it from its holster. He used the wrong hand, but he couldn’t drop his queue in case it ended up trodden into the ground. The kid launched himself at him again. Clammy hands grappled his vest collar and twisted his wrist, pulling his arm up around his back and nearly out of its socket. Something clicked, the joints stretched and pulling. Wainfleet risked releasing the queue to clamp his other hand around his neck and feel with a desperate finger for the throat comms.

“M-”

He pushed it at the same moment the kid’s hard heel struck him in the middle of his back, knocking the wind and Mansk’s name out of him. The next kick aimed at his back he dodged by chance. He rolled with a heavy grunt when the broad foot lifted away, whipping his arm from the surprised kid's grip, coughing and spluttering and spitting. The kid stomped dirt instead of ribs, a cloud of glowing sand hitting him right in the eyes. A flash and a spray of light from an AR crackled a few yards away.

He was too slow. Christ, he was far too slow. Going one-on-one with Sully had been a cinch not long ago, and shit, he’d even leaped straight into the skirmish after a thirty second trip into the unconscious. But now? Now he was clawing and kicking and snarling like a trainee. A foot in the kid’s chest sent him flying back, back far enough to stumble into the gleaming light from the planet looming blue over Pandora. He wasn’t twelve, but couldn’t have been much older. He had the look of the water bunch; the greener skin, the bluer eyes, the stockier build. That was all Wainfleet had time to garner, as the kid flew at him again.

This time Wainfleet twisted around and clambered to all fours to try to put some distance between them, but before he could get to his feet the kid had him by the tail, tugging him backward to hit the dirt chin first. Then the kid caught and clutched his queue, leaping onto his back and holding him down with bony knees. The kid pulled the braid like a leash, enough to wrench it at the root.

Lyle Wainfleet had only screamed in pain, really screamed, twice in his life. The first time had been a childish scream, a seven-year old’s scream after falling from the roof of an uncle’s houseboat and snapping an ankle, costing a mother money she lied she had. The second time, a fourteen-year old’s scream (with an embarrassing teenage voice break in the middle) cried out when he put that same foot down onto a glass bottle shard in the shallows of the last of Florida’s puzzle piece islands.

The third scream tore through the air, sent animals exploding from trees with a clamour of wings and claws. The kid holding onto him balked in temporary horror before twisting harder. Wainfleet was reduced to screeching through his teeth, shockwaves of agony sticking spikes right into the brain, and the fucking kid knew it. Where was Mansk? Where was Mansk? Wainfleet forgot to go for his machete, forgot to do anything but lie there. Too much pain was shooting through his system, so much of it that it almost tipped over into no pain at all. The kid yanked his head back with the queue wrapped around a strong youthful arm.

“Vrrtep,” the kid said through an excited breath. Wainfleet could hear through his limp ears that the kid was smiling. He felt the cold flat bite of a knife made from serrated bone across his adam’s apple and closed his eyes.

---

“They’re gonna call you the Na’vi word for demon. A lot,” Spider said, crouched on a small hillock with his hands clasped in front of him. They’d stopped to water in the jungle on their way up to the Hallelujah Mountains and, knowing the Colonel, it was probably going to be their last break before the climb. The moment Spider hopped up and began his language coaching again, everyone grumbled. Mentally.

“Hell yeah they will,” Wainfleet said, raising a fist toward Z and jabbing knuckles with her.

Brown eyes narrowed behind a glass visor. Wainfleet raised his brows and turned his face away to hide a sly smile. Spider hadn’t liked the sound of that. He hardly ever liked the sound of anything Wainfleet said, or Prager, or Z. He didn’t like his precious little one-man na’vi fanclub mocked. Spider looked to the Colonel instead, who stood with his head bowed and a hand on his sidearm, unreadable as ever.

While Spider taught those willing to learn the fascinating Na’vi word for the devil, namely Alexander and Mansk, Prager’s remnants-of-a-Queens accent pierced the peaceful valley. Wainfleet was amazed the man managed to even catch that accent. Manhattan had disappeared long ago. New Yorkers really got everywhere, including on his nerves. “Thought you were a good Christian boy, Corporal?” Prager said, grunting through a laugh and bending down to soak his bandana in the water. He slapped it back around his brow and tied it tight when it was suitably drenched.

“Just a Christian boy, Prager,” Wainfleet answered, squashing a bug tickling the back of his neck.

“Think you’re Old Testament, Corporal?” Z chimed in, leaning forward on her rock, one boot off and a hand massaging the top of her foot.

“WWJD, What Would Jesus Destroy?” Wainfleet replied with a point and a laugh.

Z rolled her eyes. “Jesus is New Testament, moron.” she snorted, removing her other boot.

“Pretty sure Jesus only flipped bar tables. Once,” Prager said, rising to stand and speaking slowly.

“What else a guy who can turn water into wine gonna do?” Wainfleet crushed another insect against his chin.

Prager wheezed, amused. What was so funny? “That’s not-”

“Lyle.”

Wainfleet straightened his posture and spun on his axis.

The Colonel shifted his weight onto his opposite leg and ran a tongue over his teeth beneath his lip. His dark brows were drawn low, so low Wainfleet could only just see the gleam of yellow beneath them. “Repeat what Spider just said for the class.” The Colonel raised a lazy forefinger to point at him, shuffled his boots in the grass. His tail swung, ticking from side to side like a countdown.

Wainfleet shrugged through the heat crawling up his neck, smirked, looked at Alexander and Mansk, who seemed to know the answer but refused to mouth any help. Assholes.

“He said, uh, that we’ll be called Na’vi for demon, sir,” Wainfleet said, still shrugging too much but unable to stop.

The Colonel turned his mouth downward into a feigned impressed look. “That’s good. And after that?”

“After? After what? Sir?”

The Colonel stared, switched his leaning leg again. Wainfleet swore he heard Z spit out a laugh before trying to turn it into a cough or sigh or snort or some revolting new noise which didn't have a word to describe it yet. Probably had a term in Na'vi, though.

“Sorry, sir, I wasn’t liste-”

“Listening. I thought so. All right, let’s do this again. Maestro?” The Colonel said, waving a hand to Spider, who sat up and glanced from the Colonel to Wainfleet and back again until he nodded and faced Wainfleet, sunlight bouncing from the glass of his mask.

“Na’vi for demon. It’s-”

---

Something crunched at Mansk’s two o’clock. Mansk raised an ear, glancing in the sound’s direction before shooting a look to Wainfleet, who signalled in the dark for him to move up and check it out. He kept up his crouch, but the muscles in the backs of his thighs complained about it. Too much flying, too much dragging Wainfleet’s carcass around. He took a long draw of the hot jungle air and squeezed his eyes shut, just for a second, listened to his other senses. There was an odor riding the air, something he didn’t know, something different.

He pushed further through the vegetation, rifle poised, leaves and coiled ferns touching at his sleeves. Under his toes sandy soil glowed a pale blue, each tread giving away his position, but he had his orders.

From the darkness a pair of four-fingered hands leaped out like jaws and wrapped around the AR’s muzzle, pushing it back hard enough to strike him in the nose with its sight. Mansk staggered back, ears ringing and head spinning, pain exploding in his face, hands loosening their grip on the rifle. Another pair of hands attacked, this time as a punch to an already bleeding nose and then a rapid second hit to the stomach, right where the vest stopped and all the armor he wore was a shirt.

From what he could see, these were young men fresh from a rest on their flying fish or a canoe, tightly coiled and now springing. Mansk was the opposite. Even as he staggered back and ducked another swipe of a greenish mottled arm he felt so damn tired. But if he was exhausted, barely standing, unable to block half of what these na’vi boys were raining down on him, what was Wainfleet? He couldn’t see him, couldn’t hear him over the noise of the na’vi going for his AR, trying to knock it away from him. They knew what it was, what it could do. Which torched village were they from? They weren’t allowing him a window to fire, or even a window to escape, ruthless in their bombardment, driving fists into any part they could find, spitting na’vi through bared sharp teeth. But he kept the AR in a tight grip, used it to fend them off; driving the butt into eyes, cracking the barrel into jaws.

One of them took out the back of his knee with a slap from a spear and sent him to the dirt, the sand gleaming with a cyan blink when his weight fell onto it. The other hooked a foot under his ribs and spun him rolling through the foliage. Mansk rose to his elbows, head down, blood dripping red lines to the dirt, feeling the bloom of bruises growing.

His comms buzzed, Wainfleet’s voice sounding for all of a millionth of a second before dropping. Mansk reached up and slipped his fingers over the bloody strap to reply, but a na’vi was on him again, looking to draw the torture out. Mansk shoved him back with a heel to his shin and rolled again, ending up on his side, shoulder in the dirt. He raised the AR and shot at the dark above him with a shout.

The na’vi shouted back, shouted at each other, Mansk briefly spotting them ducking and covering their heads with their arms in the bright flash from the muzzle. He scrabbled to his feet and barged into the one on the left, throwing him to the floor with a pulse of cyan, and at the same time swung his AR into the skull of the other, dropping him.

The scream made him skid to a stop, a wave of sand sloshing a blue glow in front of his feet, a cold wash of new sweat soaking his back. That hadn’t been a na’vi screech. The pitch of it. Wainfleet had always had such a deep voice. His heart battered his chest, tried to bust right through the bars of his stinging ribs. Mansk moved, moved faster than his wounds wanted him to. He kicked Wainfleet’s pistol as he ran, sending it skittering over the soil, and he rushed to catch up to it, scooping it from the dirt and shoving it into his belt, AR back around his neck.

He didn’t stop when he saw a na’vi looming over Wainfleet with a knife at his neck. He didn’t stop when he saw it was just kid. He didn’t stop when the kid looked up with wide, fearful eyes at the sight of him racing out of the darkness. Mansk smashed the AR sideways into the boy’s shocked, waiting mouth and only stopped when the kid was lying dazed in the sand and his knife was far away, the boy’s stunned face more scarlet than blue.

With the kid temporarily neutralized, Mansk flung the AR onto his back and crouched over Wainfleet, pulling him around to face him. Not this again. Not the rolling eyes, the drooling, the confused, distorted expression. Mansk hurriedly checked his neck with quivering fingers, ran his hands around it, looking for cuts, feeling for gouting fountains of blood. Nothing.

“I’m sorry about the car,” Wainfleet said in a hoarse whisper.

“The what? The what, Corporal?” Mansk replied, still checking him for stab wounds. That knife had looked vicious.

Wainfleet tried to roll over, hide his face in the sand with a whine. Mansk gripped his vest to stop him. Wainfleet scrunched his stupid face and showed all the teeth in his head with a wince, his big yellow eyes glassy. His voice formed more of a long wheeze than words when he spoke. “Mom, I’m sorry I blew the car money, I was gonna... I was gonna get it back without you knowin’, I was gonna do it, I swear.”

Mansk stared. The kid he’d knocked flying was coming around and he could hear the dull thud of the other young men storming over. “What-” Mansk started, then he saw them. The high intensity chemlights on Wainfleet’s vest. He started to tug a light free, other hand holding Wainfleet’s shaking shoulder steady. He was freezing. “That’s okay, uh, sweetie. Just-just pay me back when you can, okay?”

“Really?” Wainfleet sighed, watching with a vague interest as Mansk ripped the light out of its pocket and held it up.

“Really,” Mansk said down to him, patting him on the cheek and trying to ignore Wainfleet’s pleased little smirk of relief.

The kid which had been worrying the Corporal was up on his feet again, one hand pressed to his bleeding face and his eyes scanning the ground for his missing knife. The other boys appeared, slowing to a stop and both also nursing their faces. Mansk swallowed and held the chemlight up with both hands above his head. The three boys paused, waited, paced, spears in hand, wary of the weapon he held aloft. Mansk snapped the light.

The na’vi boys shielded their eyes and backed up, their flat tails swinging and snarls issuing through their bloodied teeth. Mansk set his jaw and kept the light held high over them both, turning the clearing into a red island. His eyes narrowed and watered at the high-output intensity burning so close, his arm shaking. He glanced down. It lit Wainfleet’s still face, shadowed the lines under his eyes. He looked up again and threw the light at the na’vi boys.

The kids jumped with yelps and calls, leaping away from where the light landed, chattering in their language to each other, clearly concerned by the bottled bioluminescence. Mansk was banking on their fear of the unknown, their fear of this terrible sin capturing their goddess’s light inside plastic, to stay their spears.

Mansk remained crouched and grabbed Wainfleet by the collar again, pulling him up into a half-sit to rest him against his leg, arm over his chest. “Get outta here!” Mansk shouted over at the young na’vi. “Leave! Leave and I’ll let you live!” He raised his tail, hovered it over his shoulder, set his ears back hard, showed off all the threat displays he’d come to learn from Spider were understood by the na’vi. The only thing ruining it was Wainfleet’s sprawled body keeping him on the floor rather than towering over the boys.

The na’vi boys pointed their weapons and spoke.

Mansk slung his AR back around to hold it up with one hand. The two boys he’d shot at dropped their frowns. He didn’t pull the trigger to shoot uselessly at the sky again. He really couldn’t spare the rounds, not on scaring off children. He glanced down to Wainfleet. The Corporal was lucky these had just been young men trying their hand at slaying demons alone and not a bloodthirsty hunting party.

“Oe... oel vrrtep! Kä! Tul!” Mansk shouted when the boys didn’t leave. He shook the AR at them. “Tspang! You see this?! You stupid f- don’t you get it?” He clutched Wainfleet harder when he felt his heavy body start to slump. “Don’t you get it?” he asked in a lower voice.

The smallest boy, the one with the cracked nose from the rifle, grabbed the arm of another and spoke to him, his eyes darting often to the AR and sometimes to the bright light shining between their two parties. The older pair exchanged looks and then glared. One of them pulled his arm back, twisting his hand around his spear.

Mansk slid his finger lower toward the AR’s trigger.

The boy slammed his spear into the ground next to his own foot and wailed with frustration.

Mansk didn’t lower the AR until the tips of the boys’ paddle tails whipped through the dark undergrowth and vanished, until the last flicker of their giant black shadows cast by the dying chemlight melted back into darkness.

With the AR returned to resting on his back, Mansk used two hands to shake Wainfleet again. They needed that queue fixed, stat. Mansk stared at the Corporal, couldn’t help but hear that scream he'd cried out replay in his drooping ears. It had sounded... He didn’t want to think on it. Mansk sat back and clawed both of his hands through his hair, feeling new bruises each time he moved. “You owe me more than car money, Corporal,” he said, tipping his head back to stare at the planet Pandora spun snugly around. He was too tired to remember its name.

Chapter 8: The Sacred Fern

Summary:

Some traveling, some memories.

Notes:

bit of a dull traveling montage to break up some action! sorry yall! but also thank you for all the really lovely comments on this, i'm so pleasantly surprised every time?!!? thank you so much ALSO i am taking some liberties with where locations are in comparison to each other because there doesn't seem to be a map (no new map for the new movie anyway) so please forgive errors there for the sake of story!! au where every place is where i want it to be kjfglkf

i do need to edit/add to this one!

Eighty feet above a still, green ocean, Wainfleet awoke. The second he creaked gritty eyes halfway open they streamed hot water across his temples. Harsh, salty wind whipped across the mottled wings to his left and right, the banshee’s splayed stained-glass fingers stiff as uncle Darryl’s ‘clean’ laundry in a good breeze. The constant whoosh of the air filled his ears, explosion-loud. His blurry eyes tried to fully open, struggling with the piercing light of day. How many hours had it been?

Now wrenched back into an uncomfortable consciousness, Wainfleet realized he had to remember how to breathe and blink and move and speak and think. It had been pretty good, not thinking for a while, not being alive for a while. He guessed he’d already had fifteen years of that. Or someone had. No, no, that was him. He was Wainfleet. Waking up felt like being pulled from quicksand, complete with sklotch sound. Everything smarted. Everything was instantly heavy and fatigued again. His arms weighed a hundred tons each, his head five hundred tons. He swayed, something booming far away but also right inside his head, then he jumped, gasped, kicked a leg out, lost his balance on what it was he sat upon.

An arm swung across his chest and squeezed. The banshee underneath him wailed and flapped to stop a tilt, causing Wainfleet’s blue banshee to also wobble in the sky beside them with a snarl. Wainfleet clung to the arm around him, eyes huge, mouth ajar. He looked down. He was sat on the front of a banshee’s saddle, decked out in stylish RDA-green. Lifting his eyes, he saw the top of the banshee’s wedge-shaped head, the animal’s head-tendrils acting as fleshy safety ropes keeping him in on both sides. A blue hand held onto one of the reigns, the other blue hand clutching his opposite shoulder.

“Jesus, Corporal,” Mansk said, his steady voice close at the back of his head. Wainfleet’s ears tilted to listen. Mansk let out a hearty laugh, its ringing sound flying away on the wind rushing past them. Wainfleet’s ears flinched and flipped forward again at the sudden volume of it. "Nearly fell off the bus!”

Mansk was still laughing. Wainfleet blinked, swallowed to wet a dry throat, smiled, then gave into an ear-to-ear grin, forgetting how his ugly face liked to scrunch up to the top of his head when he did it, and laughed, too.

He took hold of Mansk’s forefinger and peeled his arm from his front after he’d caught his breath. That dull throb in his brain had kicked in again, and the last thing he needed was Mansk feeling through his arm the thumping of his heart. Even through his thick vest, it was a drum with a deep bass. The slow return of pain made him want to wring the stupid cause of it like a wet cloth. Mansk had draped his queue around his shoulders like a scarf, he realized, crawling his hand up his vest to feel it, presumably to prevent it whipping the driver in the face as they flew. As he touched his vest, his finger brushed the row of chemlights on his left side. A scratch around the pockets determined one was missing.

“Hey,” he said, frowning, then tutting to himself feeling the cut on his forehead fold.

Mansk hummed.

“Last night-”

“It was kids.”

“What?”

“It was kids. Just some kids.”

“They followed us?”

“I think they were in the area. Saw the fire.”

Wainfleet nursed the back of his neck, stopping himself digging his fingers into the root of the queue where that kid had nearly pulled it from its socket. The little shit. “Get any of ‘em?”

It sounded like Mansk had been waiting for that particular question, judging by the quick breath he took. “Couldn’t afford to waste the ammo. Sir.”

There it was. Wainfleet balled a hand into a fist as secretly as he could. “So you let ‘em run on home to tell the other fishies where we were?”

Mansk went quiet. Wainfleet listened to the rhythmic whumph whumph of the banshee’s wings powering up and down.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. Damn,” Wainfleet said, scratching his chin. “We’re slow,” he added, rolling his eyes and leaning forward over the banshee’s neck, holding onto its brace with both hands. “We’re slow, the banshees are slow. We’re fuckin’ slow. Shit. They’ll be on our ass twenty-four-seven.”

He felt Mansk move. Wainfleet looked over his shoulder with a wince to see Mansk twist in his seat and peer over the banshee’s wing, one hand on a tendril, the other trailing loose. He was wearing his sunglasses. Wainfleet resisted a smile despite his irritation. How those things had survived and his own lost, he had no idea. He guessed that was just how Mansk was. Cool. Cool and lucky.

“Sir,” Mansk said, turning to face him and lifting an eyebrow, nodding his head aside.

Wainfleet shifted and eased his torso downward to look beyond Mansk’s shoulder. Without his long rifle sight it was hard to work out what he was looking at to begin with. After a moment waiting for his eyes to focus, they appeared. Faint white lines disturbing the glassy surface of the water below. The wake of furiously lashing flying fish tails.

Mansk stared down with him, stony-faced as always. “Thought I’d lost ‘em six islands back.”

Wainfleet repositioned himself and sat as far forward away from Mansk as he could without sliding off the banshee’s nose. It was growing easier to blame Mansk and harder to keep the agitation from his voice. “Hustle up, man, put ‘em in our taillights.”

“This is max speed, Corporal,” Mansk said, and at the same time the banshee unleashed a long call that sounded far too much like an agreement. “And we gotta touch down soon. It gets tired faster with... uh, it gets tired faster.” Another long wail from the banshee, this time a complaint. Wainfleet could understand that.

Mansk. Cool and lucky. And stupid. What had he been thinking, letting little kids get away from him? What was wrong with the private? He’d had everything at his disposal; the AR, the pistol, the knife, his superior size and strength. Had he put his shades on in the dark and let them wail on him? Now that he thought about it, Mansk was sporting a suspect dark red smudge under a nostril…

“And where were you, Lyle?” the Colonel asked, tone warm and friendly.

Wainfleet blinked and swung his head slowly to the banshee’s other wing. The Colonel’s banshee was a wild shock of black and purple and orange, like something one of those modern artist-types would conjure by slapping the brush on the paper, pretend the finished bullshit was art and not talentless splotches hung up in museum galleries, destined to forever bore eight-year-olds forced to copy it on field trips. But it was a hell of a lot nicer than his blue excuse for a banshee. The Colonel stood low over his banshee’s neck, his eyebrows to his hairline, his open-mouthed smile showing off sharp teeth. He was good at that; the friendly, frightening look.

“I was there, sir,” Wainfleet replied.

“Were you? Huh,” the Colonel’s smile widened. “You were lyin’ down on the job, Lyle,” the Colonel said, pressing his thin lips together and shaking his head, just the once, quick as a tail flick, disapproving but still amiable. “Lie down on the job on Pandora and you know what happens. Don’t have to tell someone like you twice.”

“Boss,” Wainfleet said through a crooked smile. “I got this.” He leaned back and felt nothing behind him. No Mansk. He glanced down. Just the banshee, its huge neck and shoulder muscles bunching and shivering under his legs as it flew. There was no rush of air in his ears. But he saw it, there, a strong wind tugging on the banshee’s wings, and it was his banshee, not Mansk’s. His queue was free, disconnected. Didn’t he need that plugged in to make it work?

“Oh, you do?”

A pause. A frown. A nervy smirk. “Yeah.”

The Colonel gave him a half-sneer, lifting his upper lip high enough to show his gums. “Then wake your I got this ass up.”

Wainfleet snapped his eyes open so fast the lids clicked. Green. Leaves. The black specks of tiny bugs darting across his vision. They were down, back in another copy-paste jungle on another copy-paste island. Mansk had propped him unceremoniously up against a mossy rock. Insects were trying to crawl into his collar. That rainforest hiss was back like tinnitus, made him want to chop his giant ears right off, but he’d need hands for that. Where were his hands? He drew his fingers into his palms. Feeling returned to the rest of him, regrettably. This shit was getting real tiring.

He’d woken just in time to see Mansk emerge from the undergrowth, kicking and elbowing ferns out of his way to return to their parking spot. Mansk looked across at him, shades gleaming, arms full of the fruit they’d eaten before the kids had shown up. “Hey,” Mansk said, light glowing pink through his perked ears as if someone had clicked a lighter inside their shells. A fruit rolled over his arm and tumbled to the grass.

Wainfleet climbed to his feet and sat on the rock, aching elbows on aching knees. “Hey.”

“You fain-you passed out again so I landed us,” Mansk replied, throwing a fruit underarm at him.

It bounced off Wainfleet’s open palm, his fingers curling to catch it a full five seconds too late. He closed his eyes, and it took a full five seconds to do that, too.

Mansk was already in there, crouched at his leg and scooping the fruit up. Wainfleet started, feeling a clammy hand take him by the wrist just beneath his glove. Mansk planted the strange, soft-spined fruit into his open hand, only letting go when he forced his fingers around it. Mansk rose to stand and paced back to the rest of their lunch, which he’d piled into a pyramid. “I think we got maybe fifteen mikes until we need to go. Eat that. There’s a stream South by some rocks if you need,” he said.

“Thanks, mom,” Wainfleet said, rolling his eyes. It was still too easy to be a dick about it. Easier than the alternative, which was to be slightly less of a dick about it.

He saw Mansk pause at his words. His movements were rigid in the following moments, then it was gone.

“What?” Wainfleet asked, picking a nodule off the fruit and squeezing it.

Mansk looked away, busied himself with peeling the fruit with his knife. He sliced off a thick chunk with a sharp whip of his hand. “Nothing. Sir.”

---

Mansk shook his shoulders and opened his eyes as far as his drooping eyelids allowed, hoping the cold slap of wind against his eyeballs could keep him uncomfortable enough to remain awake. His head had dropped to his chest again, and it wouldn’t be long before he had no power left to lift it back up. The bruises the na’vi kids had left on him were also contributing to the shutdown, straining as much as his leg muscles after spending too much time balancing on the ikran and too little time recuperating. It wasn’t just the ikran tiring of their flight.

It was a challenge, steering with one hand and using the other to keep Wainfleet from slipping. Wainfleet spent more and more time sleeping, he had noticed, even in the air. Sometimes Mansk shook him to get him to move, make sure he hadn’t gone completely, and refused to stop until there was a twitch of a hand or a snort to confirm he was still alive. He’d done all he could with the damage he’d done to his queue, and had to admit, each time he checked it (only when Wainfleet was confirmed metaphorically dead to the world) there was a hot stab of guilt somewhere in his gut, twirling his insides like a poker in a fire. Would the Colonel have been so forgiving if he’d torn his queue?

They rinsed and repeated the island hopping, over and over, sometimes only spending an hour in the air before finding a place to stop. After heated debate number five, Wainfleet eventually warmed to the idea of taking the long way to Bridgehead, happy to abandon the islands and the pursuing Metkayina in their rear-view mirror, trade the ocean for a different sea. It meant traveling across Omatikaya turf and then traversing the kill zone, but he’d rather drag Wainfleet’s heavy ass through two miles of wasteland than guide the na’vi straight to the sea gate. They were in enough deep shit as it was.

Mansk nudged Wainfleet awake when gray cliffs topped with huge tree trunks and canopies, crowned by a thick swirl of hot mist, loomed ahead over clawing white waves.

Wainfleet didn’t speak and Mansk couldn’t see his face, but he knew he was watching as they approached, on full alert, sat forward with his ears up. He pictured a thoughtful expression, a little frown, just enough to crease the wide space between his eyebrows, behind which Prager had always joked (away from Wainfleet’s huge ears) there was absolutely nothing. Mansk wondered in retrospect if that had been a little harsh. Wainfleet had smarts somewhere. Maybe.

Both ikran swept up the cliffs and powered higher to crest the treetops in a whirlwind of wings. Wainfleet slid backward in his seat and threw out a hand to clutch Mansk’s leg to steady himself, laughing out a little brief fear. Mansk laughed back and took them lower, skimming the leaves of the canopy, the trees beneath the ikran’s belly turning gold as the sun became a low, red orb in the sky.

The smell was different here. Mansk couldn’t put a label to the scent, wouldn’t have been able to name a candle after it, but there was something strong in the breeze. He breathed it in through his new nose and spared a thought for the Mansk from before again, the man who’d spent so long behind a mask, whose nose hadn’t known much beyond the artificial. With another good lungful of rainforest air in him, he guided the ikran a tad to the Northwest, headed for where he hoped Bridgehead lay now that they were skirting the ocean.

They flew in relative quiet, and not long after the cliffs were behind them, Wainfleet fell into another mini-coma. Mansk had to do his one arm around his front technique again, and quickly, though he was getting pretty good at spotting when Wainfleet started to go. This time Wainfleet twitched like a dreaming dog, or a dreaming viperwolf, and he imagined the Corporal was wearing a different expression. When they touched down for another rest, this time having to slip down through the trees and dodge branches to disappear into the rainforest’s dark depths, Mansk caught a glimpse of that expression. He’d never seen Wainfleet look like that. There wasn’t even a word for what his features were pulling. There might have been a word for it in Na’vi, but who knew what it was.

Pit stopping was harder in the forest. The ikran didn’t like flying in close proximity to the trees and there was less space on the ground for them to land, so Mansk had to hang them up like pressed suits in the branches and clamber down to solid earth, Wainfleet in clumsy tow.

On the third day gliding over the forest, Mansk saw something. Something big.

He gave Wainfleet a jab in the back to either wake him or catch his attention. “See that?” he asked, leaning aside so Wainfleet’s round, bald dome wasn’t in the way, however after staring at it for days on end, he had noticed recently the shadow of dark stubble slowly creeping across his scalp. He hadn’t told Wainfleet about that yet, but the moment it began to look weird on him, he would make sure to flag it up, if anything to protect his own eyes from an uncanny horror worse than anything Pandora could conjure.

“See what?” Wainfleet asked, leaning to one side, which happened to be the side Mansk was using. He glared at the back of Wainfleet’s head for a moment, then swapped to peer over his other shoulder.

“What is that?” he asked, narrowing his eyes behind his shades, speaking more to himself than Wainfleet.

A large, green shape the size of an aircraft carrier lay draped across the forest. As the ikran continued drifting in its direction, Mansk saw it was more like a felled skyscraper, and with every wing beat, it grew bigger, swelling, as if it sensed their approach and felt the need to puff up to scare them off. It was coated in a vivid viridian fur, which, when they flew closer, turned out to be moss and other plant life. The tall trees clustered around it were stubs of broccoli in comparison to the fallen behemoth they hugged. Mansk pushed his sunglasses up his sweating forehead for a better look in the orange glow of the fading light. The tiny white dots rising from it were animals, though they seemed closer to the size of the gnats which enjoyed gnawing on Wainfleet. A cold finger traced a cool, hard touch from the top of Mansk’s head to the tip of his tail.

“Holy shit, would you look at that,” Wainfleet said, leaning further over the wing of the ikran. Wainfleet drew out the holy in holy shit, and Mansk had to agree. Curious, he wheeled the ikran around to pass directly overhead, but was hesitant to descend. That strong scent was back, emitting from the tree like a transparent smoke, sharper, clearer, almost searching actively, feeling around for something. Someone.

“You catch any of that action?” Wainfleet asked, glancing over his shoulder. He wore a proud smile.

“What?” Mansk replied, eyes transfixed on the mangrove-like roots on the dead tree’s ass end which used to anchor it to the ground. They stuck up like the dead legs of an insect, curled, pained.

Wainfleet tutted, spoke slowly, like Mansk was stupid, even spun his hand in a circle as he talked. “Were you there when the Colonel-”

Mansk blinked and looked at the tip of the ikran’s wing instead of the tree, though he could still see its blurry shape. “No, no, I, uh, shift rotation, I wasn’t there.”

“Damn shame. Helluva blast.”

Mansk felt that cold finger jab him in the small of his back. “Were you?”

“Oh, yeah, for all of two minutes before Trudy pulled us outta there. Ha, remember Trudy?”

The ikran called out as it glided over the tree, its cry rising high above them and disappearing down below in a long echo, its wings pausing their flaps to give way to quietness, just for half a minute. Animals far beneath them replied with faint sounds of their own. Mansk flipped his sunglasses back down over his eyes and mentally spurred the ikran to pick up some speed, putting the shattered tree behind them.

They’d been flying for all of three minutes when Wainfleet spoke up. “Wait,” he said, turning where he sat and blocking Mansk’s view more than usual, prompting him to sway to one side.

“Corporal.” Mansk forgot to sound polite.

“Turn around.”

Mansk frowned, thankful his shades hid most of his lowering eyebrows. Why did Wainfleet sound so urgent? “Back to the tree?”

Wainfleet snorted in disgust. “What? No, not the tree, take us North.” Wainfleet faced front again, but moved slowly enough for Mansk to catch his devilish smirk and wonder if he ought to take back what he'd thought about Wainfleet having smarts.

“Why?” Mansk asked, obeying and already pulling the ikran about, Wainfleet’s blue one faithfully following suit. “Bridgehead is that way. I think.”

“Yeah, but Hell’s Gate is this way.”

Chapter 9: Life, uh, Finds a Way

Summary:

The road to Hell's Gate proves a little tougher than first thought.

Mansk wiped the back of his hand across his forehead, skinned knuckles snagging over an old bruise. If he’d been human, the Mansk from before, that punch from the half-grown na’vi boy would have caved his skull in. Something in his throat bunched. Maybe the Mansk from before had already felt that, already witnessed the sight of his own brains dripping globules like soft, pink fruit in front of his eyes. Was that how that young man had gone? Howling with half his face crushed inwards? Or with a quick gasp and a twitch? He tumbled further into his thoughts. Where had that Mansk been assigned for the final assault six months… no, fifteen years ago? What had Sergeant Chiu shouted at him on that fateful August morning?

The ikran under him tilted, its wingbeats quickening, its black teeth fluttering as it opened its wide jaws and cawed. Mansk felt a fresh burst of anxiety pour into his chest. He shook his head, sloughed off increasingly violent images of a frightened man meeting his fate alone. Thinking about that wasn’t worth crashing over.

He leaned his face down until his forehead rested on the grimy black hair at the top of Wainfleet’s queue. Wainfleet was comatose again. He wouldn’t care. The locks of Wainfleet's sand-encrusted hair were falling loose from their bonds. The whole thing was badly tied, which he expected of the Corporal in his wobbly state. Mansk breathed in. Jesus, did Wainfleet stink of sweat and dirt and sand and sea salt and musty clothing and plenty of other horrible things, but Mansk was glad to smell the reek of someone else. Someone like him. Someone at a complete fucking loss without any direction. Mansk tightened the grip of his arm around Wainfleet’s chest and hugged him back into him, closed his eyes, trusted the ikran to fly itself.

He was so tired. It was a sensation beyond exhaustion. It pressed down onto his shoulders, felt like a comically oversized mallet driving him into the ground despite flying a hundred feet above it. He’d been fatigued before. No. He had the memories of being fatigued before, but the arm clinging to Wainfleet, the hand digging desperate fingers into the flesh of his shoulder, the bare feet going numb on the ikran’s stirrups, the tail turning into a stiff icicle behind him, the muscles tensed all over, the heart thundering in its cage, none of those parts of him had truly been tired. Not like that. It was new to this body, and it was finally beginning to struggle.

His ikran wailed and tucked in its wings, cutting through a harder wind. Mansk kept a firm hold on Wainfleet’s limp torso and turned his face into the back of his clammy neck, just to stop the air drying his eyeballs. Not even the high-pitched whistle of the breeze or the sharp motions of the ikran diving through it disturbed Wainfleet from his dead-to-Pandora naps. The Corporal could barely stand for longer than five minutes, let alone stand to attention for the dressing down of both his lifetimes once they reached Bridgehead. But Mansk knew Wainfleet would take the shit meant for slinging at the Colonel with nothing more than an inwardly-directed frown and clenched biceps. He’d do it without a word to defend himself. He’d do it with an arm freshly torn off. It was what he had to do. Fierce loyalty had Lyle Wainfleet racing with a keen heart to accept someone else’s punishment. Mansk gripped his middle tighter.

 

That afternoon the cold wind burned away, leaving the sun to beat white hot rays down onto the ikran’s leathery back and ping a blinding shine from the top of Wainfleet’s head. Mansk flipped his shades down to protect his eyes from the bright bombardment and gave the ikran a brain-nudge to descend to avoid the glare.

A shadow streaked across the ikran’s wings, too dark and low to be a cloud. Mansk frowned, twisted in his seat to scan their surroundings again, a painful, deep pop in his spine reminding him that he really ought to check the skies more often. His spine then felt something else; a cold shudder, which rose from his tailbone to both shoulders like a freezing hand slipping up his skin. He shrugged against the shiver and narrowed his eyes. A smudge moved on the horizon above the green carpet of trees below. Whatever it was, it had wings beating back and forth at a frenzied pace.

“Corporal,” he said, stabbing an elbow into Wainfleet.

Wainfleet stirred, ticked his head up with a grunt, then grumbled and unbelted himself from Mansk’s arm with pinching fingers. “What? Report?” he said. Mansk watched Wainfleet’s blue ikran pull up alongside them and fly in tandem, as it always did when he was conscious. He could almost give its curious expression a voice. It sounded just like Wainfleet. It would probably say something like Hey, man, you good or what, dumbass?

No amusing distractions said his training. “Got eyes, possible bogey on our six.”

Wainfleet shifted to watch the ikran’s wobbling kite tail behind Mansk’s shoulder. From the spaced look in Wainfleet’s eyes, Mansk could tell the Corporal wasn’t seeing anything at all and instead just springboarding from his statement. “Can’t be na’vi. The General drove ‘em to the mountains. Nobody’s out here.”

Mansk took another look for both of them. The dark blob was closer, and instead of meandering above the canopy minding its own, it was rushing to catch up to them, fighting winds and flapping wildly. “Looks like an ikran, sir. Flightpath’s pretty zeroed in on us. Might be the enemy.”

Wainfleet pressed his fingers into his forehead and drew a hard circle, pulling skin over bone, rubbing hard enough to smudge blue stripes. “Then lose it,” he replied through his teeth.

Mansk was developing an instinct for sensing Wainfleet’s Colonel impression. He exhaled. A bead of sweat slipped down the groove of his nose. Time for his own fucking Colonel impression. He grabbed his AR by the muzzle and swung it around his shoulder. “Sorry, sir,” he said, checking his almost-depleted magazine. He had enough. He had to have enough. “You’re gonna have to drive.”

“Wh-drive? Nah, nah, no way, I’m not drivin’ your bird,” Wainfleet said, throwing his hands up, losing balance for a horrified moment before slapping his hands back down again onto the ikran’s neck brace. “I said lose it, Mansk!”

“Sorry again, sir. I know what you said, but you said something else, too,” Mansk said, giving him a quick, hard look. “We’re slow.” Mansk strained his ears over the wind pulling at his AR strap as he turned as best he could in his seat, shoulders loose and ready for the ikran swiftly closing the distance between them. He raised the rifle, kept it tipped under his nose, poised, and ignored Wainfleet’s excuses, assuming from their still-steady balance the Corporal was at least steering at the same time as complaining.

The ikran following in their wake was erratic, and now it was nearer he could hear it screeching. Not screeching in the way his and Wainfleet’s would, chittering and calling only every so often. This ikran was screaming like a puppy suffering its first night in a new home. Mansk narrowed an eye and fought to hear over the familiar roar of air. No, it was screaming like a puppy pinned by a pitchfork, barely a pause for breath between its cries. And there was no na’vi battle trill joining it. There was no na’vi perched atop it at all. He lowered the AR and rapped the back of his hand on Wainfleet’s soaked-with-cold-sweat shoulder. “We need to slow up,” he said.

“Slow up? You kiddin’ me?” Wainfleet snapped, whipping his head around to glower. Mansk pretended for him that he really was glowering and not raising his eyebrows instead of lowering them, squeezing his jaw in pain rather than anger.

“It’s not na’vi,” Mansk said, slinging the AR away again. He looked back. There was no mistaking the green RDA saddle and neck covering on the ikran behind them.

Mansk took the reins and guided his ikran into a lazy tack across the sky. Wainfleet’s ikran matched, and soon they were joined by their distressed pursuer. It fell in on their right hand side, fluttering and squeaking.

Wainfleet leaned forward, head tilted. “That’s-”

“Alexander’s,” Mansk said, watching it. Its eyes were huge, its mouth hinged open, its teeth protruding. Its flight pattern was shaky, not the smooth fluid motion most ikran employed. It calmed after thirty seconds, but still kept up the noise.

“Fuck’s wrong with it?” Wainfleet asked. Mansk could hear his sneer.

Mansk said nothing. Alexander’s ikran cried.

 

Wainfleet saw the bulldozers first.

Mansk was surprised Wainfleet’s eyes were open in the first place, as the Corporal had been remarkably quiet long into the purple wash of the evening, and found himself even more surprised he’d managed to spot the dozers from so far away. After pushing his shades up for a quick skim of the forest underneath them, Mansk caught sight of a flash of yellow paint beneath constricting green tubes of vines and red claws of rust. The clearing the vehicles had carved a decade and a half ago had regrown, lush vegetation now enjoying pulling the machines down into the dirt they’d once merrily churned. It didn’t look unlike the huge na’vi tree, coated with green, bursting with animal life.

Wainfleet bristled in front of him, his shoulders up by his ears as he tipped his torso down for a better look. Mansk won a hefty tail smack across the nose and nearly pitched the ikran up into a stall with his flinch. Wainfleet didn’t notice, but Wainfleet had never really known what his stupid ass was doing.

“Yo, hit the brakes,” Wainfleet said, gripping one of the ikran’s tendrils hard until it clacked its jaws and hissed.

Mansk recovered the ikran’s position in the air, hiding his irritated grunt and twitching his bruised nose, but didn’t argue slowing, unable to ignore his own curiosity, which was, he had to admit, more for Wainfleet’s engrossed interest than the long-defunct machines. Plus, Wainfleet had said ‘yo.’

Alexander’s mournful ikran sailed down with them and landed with a hard thud next to Wainfleet’s blue edition, which was rattling its wings neat as a lady closing her fan. Mansk hit solid ground with nearly-numb feet, their naked soles, having just gotten used to nothing but smooth stirrups beneath them, now protesting at the stones and branches underfoot. He swept away his link to his ikran to give the poor beast a break and went to Alexander’s ikran, more stones and branches crunching into those protesting soles. Alexander’s ikran swung its head and drew to full height, neck straight and claws forward. Wainfleet’s ikran shuffled away through the brush with a bark. Mansk didn’t need to be hooked up to his ride to tell that the newcomer’s presence was upsetting the others.

Before he could raise his hands in surrender to their new guest, something grabbed the pistol from his belt at the small of his back. Mansk spun on his heel, both hands on his AR, only to see Wainfleet spinning the pistol in his hand. Wainfleet watched him for a serious two seconds, then watched him for a humored two seconds, a half-smirk lifting his cheek. “Yoink,” he said, tossing and catching his pistol by the barrel before returning it to his side holster. “Too slow.”

Mansk rolled his eyes, making sure to do it before removing his sunglasses. “Feelin’ better, Corporal?” he asked, suspicion lining his tone, mostly accidentally. Wainfleet’s crooked smile suggested his spirit was up, but the rest of him was down; his drooping ears, his dangling tail, his filthy, tangled queue, the other half of his smirk.

Wainfleet didn’t reply as he headed to the bodies of the dead dozers.

---

He wasn’t feeling better. Mansk knew he wasn’t. Wainfleet could see it, even behind those blank shades, could see Mansk’s small yellow eyes searching him constantly, like a father checking his unruly boy for scrapes after a fall. Mansk should never have asked the question. He didn’t stop asking that question. But Lyle Wainfleet had something else beyond a migraine on his mind.

The dozers grew larger with every step he took toward them, stretching upward. Deep tread tracks. Scorched metal, mounds of churned dirt and blanched trees, smoke twirling, the creak and groan of mechanical parts grinding against each other as they broke away, the crinkle of dying flames. Bodies. Six of them. Cochran, Fields, Bolter, Novak, Fernandes, Lancaster. The boys had struggled prying Bolter from the AMP. He’d been mannequin stiff, his body a butterfly pattern of carbon black and scarlet red. Some of the skin stayed behind when they finally ripped him out. Private Hutton, fresh off the boat, had bent over and shown everyone what he’d had for lunch right where Wainfleet was about to step. He hovered his foot over the ground, then planted it a little further to the left. The sky had been gray five months ago. Fifteen years ago.

Above him, high above the bulldozer’s dented two storeys-tall shovel hanging by a thread, above the very highest cracked camera on the tallest sagging rail choked with plantation, inky dark blue soaked into the clouds. Real night. Not an eclipse. Real night. Like Earth. And yet it still wasn’t full dark. A strip of pale purple peered over the black trees, a faded cobalt wash from the planet hanging like a mobile over their heads seeped into the navy. On cue, the light show glowed to life around him. Shit, he was starting to light up himself, he noticed, like a fucking lava lamp. He raised his arm and traced his gaze along the line of dots, freckles, moles, bumps, whatever they were. Were they underneath and shining through transparent windows in his skin? He ran a hand along the underside of his arm, elbow to glove, then scratched at one of the speckles on his wrist, really dug his sandy, cracked nails into and around it. He received nothing but a sting and red mark.

The bulldozers remained black inside the glowing garden when he fought his way through long grass back to Mansk.

---

Alexander’s ikran circled the bulldozers, screaming out after each breath in. Mansk had tried his best to placate it, even tried to touch it, but it had reared and barked and spat and trumpeted and slashed its claws toward him until it was clear it wanted no comfort from him. The other ikran had long crawled away to roost somewhere else away from its terrible noise.

Their new campfire was as miserable as the last one. They’d squeezed behind a detached caterpillar tread and made a home in the dark triangular cavern it had created alongside one of the bulldozers. It was strange, after all those days and nights so exposed to the elements to shelter within a corridor of metal walls again, even if those metal walls were crawling with lichen and creepers and strung with vines. Sometimes they would thrum and bounce under the claws of scuttling creatures.

Mansk chose the most comfortable-looking rock he could find and took a seat, hunched with exhaustion. Wainfleet sat to his side, perched on a sheet of thick metal sticking out like a subway seat, one leg bent up to his chest and an elbow on his raised knee. He threw leftover seeds from their decadent meal of more red, knobbly fruit into the flames, which spat them back out with the same disgust Wainfleet had while eating them ten minutes ago. His other hand was pressed over his ear, folding it flat under his palm to shut out Alexander’s ikran.

Their noisy guest wasn’t letting up. Mansk tilted his ears up in time to hear the fingers of its frenetic wing flaps through the dark ceiling. It returned along the same path within seconds, glitchy as a video game gone wrong. He looked across at Wainfleet, whose tail was whipping annoyed loops behind him, hard enough to clang against the dozer’s metal. Maybe it was better that Alexander’s ikran was voicing its upset. Mansk, for once, preferred the clamor over what would have been a deadly silence.

“Corporal?” he asked after another long semi-quiet. He had to time his words between ikran shrieks.

Wainfleet peeled his hand from the side of his head, his squashed ear springing to stick out again. He gave Mansk a slow blink. Mansk saw he was sweating, and not from the fire. “What?”

“You good?” Asking it felt like a natural reflex, subconscious as an ear twitch.

“Not if I tear my fuckin’ ears off with all that banshee noise.”

Mansk cleared his throat with a cough. He had to be careful. Wainfleet’s deep voice was deeper than usual. No banshee scream mythology jokes . “The Spider kid told me - well, us - that ikran bond for life. Y’know, like some extinct birds. Like those swans with the white feathers and the necks?”

Another slow blink. Another ikran bellow above their heads. “So?”

“So, I think it’s feelin’ lost, y’know? No owner, no purpose.”

“Then we don’t need it. It ain’t comin’ with us,” Wainfleet said, sitting forward and tilting his head to one side until something in his neck clunked. “Why’s it followin’ anyway?”

Mansk was disappointed he couldn’t answer, disappointed he couldn’t remember if the Spider kid had mentioned anything about obscure ikran behavior or if he just hadn’t been listening. He was paying for it now. Their ears were paying for it doubly so. “Guess it got used to us. Best it’s got,” he said, falling quiet again.

It hadn’t been the conversation he’d wanted to prise from the Corporal. Wainfleet had deflected it. Mansk couldn’t tell if he was doing it on purpose. But he couldn’t let that shit stew. Not this time. It had been left long enough unaddressed. “Sir, are you good?” he asked, stern undertone this time, bracing for the answer.

“Y’already asked that, man,” Wainfleet said.

“Don’t you wanna talk?”

“Just did.”

Mansk wrung his hands together and picked at the shredded skin on his knuckles to stop himself coiling his fingers into a fist. More deflection. The Corporal might as well have ripped off a chunk of bulldozer for a shield he was hiding so haughtily. Asshole . “I meant talk about what happened back there. Remember the SeaDragon? The Colonel-”

Wainfleet’s words were sharp, spat out. “There’s nothin’ to say.”

“Respectfully, sir, there’s a whole lot to say,” Mansk said, unable to hide the snap in his voice. Unable to hide the laugh, which he knew the second he barked it would land him in trouble. “I’m just askin’ you what’s goin’ on with you, that’s all. Jesus Christ!” He laughed again, lifted a hand to scratch at his hair where it was growing though around his ears. Couldn’t the Corporal just say he felt like shit? Felt bad? Damn, he’d even take he felt fantastic as long as it was honesty, not direhorseshit.

Wainfleet was looking at him from his little metal branch. It was an unnerving glare, unblinking, his wonky, yellow eyes reflecting the fire as well as any shades lens could. Mansk couldn’t hold the gaze, instead choosing to look at the dark space above Wainfleet’s head. By doing that, he nearly didn’t spot the change in Wainfleet’s face to something frighteningly benign. With a buck of his heart, a little tired but still enough of a jump to make Mansk sit up, he realized something was about to happen.

“Hey, why don’t you ask Z-Dog what’s goin’ on? Huh?” Wainfleet said with a jerk of his head. He paused, a pleasant smile wrinkling the skin around his eyes, then gave a sweeping gesture with an open palm to the empty space to his right, as if Mansk had somehow missed she was right there. “Z, what you think? Think that was a shitty night?” Wainfleet went on. He hopped down to stand, closed his eyes through what must have been a shot of pain, then rolled a rock with his foot toward the fire, addressing it. “Prager, my man, what is up? Thoughts on your final moments? Ratin’ outta ten?”

Mansk put up his hands. “Okay, I get it,” he said under his breath, but Wainfleet was far from finished with his childish tantrum. He was challenging Alexander’s yowling ikran for the loudest idiot in the jungle award.

“No, no, we ain’t heard from Lopez, let the man speak. Lopez, bro, how’s the arrow in your fuckin’ heart? Good?” Wainfleet continued, moving through the grass, one foot clumsily crossing in front of the other, visiting the invisible squad one by one. He scooped up a stick and drove it into the dirt. “Wanna ask Fike? You wanna ask Sean if he’s good? Or how about Alexander? Huh? You wanna ask him instead? Here he fuckin’ is!” Wainfleet kicked a squashed, half-eaten fruit at Mansk. It hit him in the shin and left a pink splodge of pulp to slide down his pants. Mansk could almost hear the Prager-rock laugh. Sorry , Prager might have said if he was feeling a little too mean, that joke fell a little flat. No, Prager would never say that. Not about Alexander.

“Not gonna ask him? Not gonna ask anyone else how they are?” Wainfleet turned on the spot with his arms outstretched, expectant.

It was too late to slip his sunglasses on and hide, so Mansk had solemnly watched instead. Wainfleet didn’t want him to join the conversation. There was no conversation. This was a rant, pure and simple. So Mansk watched Corporal Wainfleet. He watched his rising mania, his mad panting, his incredible ability to keep his face still even as he went full-throttle into his performance for the 241st Oscars. Best supporting actor, Lyle whatever-his-middle-name-was Wainfleet. The crowd, the RDA at Bridgehead , would hesitate to applaud, instead glancing askance to each other, asking themselves the same question. Who?

“And the Colonel!” Wainfleet continued with a laugh-cough, pointing at Mansk, who lifted his head. Jesus, he’d disappeared there for a second.

Mansk waited for Wainfleet’s next tirade, but it looked like the Corporal’s new, perhaps even negative, thoughts about the Colonel were proving difficult to voice. Corporal Wainfleet criticizing the Colonel? Impossible. Surely not. Mansk could see in Wainfleet’s next blink that he had caught himself, going quiet just in time for another bawl from Alexander’s ikran.

Wainfleet went for his pistol.

Mansk rose to his feet, and Christ did it ache. He kept his tone cool. “What’re you doin’, Corporal?”

Wainfleet gave him a look, checked the pistol’s safety, put both hands expertly on the grip. He headed to the entrance of their little shelter between the dozer and its separated tread. The cut on his leg was bleeding again.

Willing feeling back into his legs, Mansk followed at a quick half-limp half-trot. “What’re you doin’?” he asked, louder this time.

No answer.

“Corporal! What’re you-”

Wainfleet rounded on him. Mansk skidded to a halt, nearly went down as a heel slipped over gravel, his AR painfully bouncing against his hip.

“I’m puttin’ that stupid fuckin’ bat outta its misery,” Wainfleet said, addressing the pistol as he spoke, his voice matter-of-fact tinged with humored anger. He even shrugged afterward. “You said it yourself, man. No owner, no purpose. Might as well be dead.”

Mansk stared. Wainfleet must have felt it, because he raised his eyes and fixed him with a hard look for all of three seconds until he relaxed his frown, widened his eyes, parted his lips as if to say something else. Then he twisted his stupid face into a snarl, turned with a whip of his ragged queue and left the shelter.

Outside, or more outside than it felt inside their closed-in bulldozer hallway with its armored walls, Mansk chased Wainfleet through the grass to find him stood with feet parted waiting for Alexander’s ikran to sweep close. He was facing the bulldozer, pistol raised, body still. Mansk stopped ten paces from the dozer and turned to look up at the stars.

The ikran was wheeling around in its repetitive circle, swaying its head from side to side, as if it was straining to check if it had a rider on its back. As he watched it, Mansk realized he wasn’t stopping Wainfleet. He wasn’t grabbing the pistol or his arm to ruin his aim. He wasn’t even trying to talk him down. Another melancholy cry from Alexander’s ikran as it glided nearer, a dark shape stippled with glowing blue.

Mansk was about to turn away and let Wainfleet take the shot when a bigger, blacker shape dropped from the sky and blanked out the stars. It gave a scream that made his skin try to lift itself from his bones. Alexander’s ikran was snatched from the air mid-squawk by huge jaws. A crunch, the fluttering flaps of a remaining desperate wing, a choking final whine, tiny pops and squishes of flesh and soft parts that belonged on the inside.

With a breathy gasp, Mansk staggered backward, tripping over his feet, unable to rip his eyes from the sight of it. Whatever it was, this giant ikran, red-skinned under the planet’s dusty blue light, it shook the flopping body of Alexander’s ikran in its teeth and whirred overhead, landing by the trees with a Pandora-shaking thud. When the cloud of dirt cleared around its huge wings, Mansk saw it drop the smaller ikran with a splat and rumble a pleased boom. Something deep inside Mansk, something further away from him than he could understand, something from the side that wasn’t a jumble of human memories loaded onto a drive, sent his hands and heart into uncontrollable tremors.

The Corporal. Mansk spun to find Wainfleet in the dark. He spotted him, still motionless where he’d been standing before the giant ikran had shown. His pistol was down, fingers holding it loosely, his head tilted back. Slowly Wainfleet lowered his chin and turned to face him, his eyes huge, eyebrows so high they nearly sat on top of his head like his blue shades.

Mansk remained where he was, gave the giant ikran a quick glance. It was engrossed in feeding. Alexander’s ikran almost deserved it; it had drawn that monstrous motherfucker right to them. Over the hissing jungle and the cackles of distant viperwolves and the rush of the ever-present warm wind, he heard bones crack and wing membranes tear. His body was hot with a fear that didn’t seem quite his, but he was wearing it anyway.

Another look to Wainfleet. Amazingly, stupidly, the Corporal was lifting his pistol, training it on the giant ikran, which was still crouched and eating where the grass met forest.

Mansk moved. He took off into a sprint, forced his aching legs to fucking move, but it wasn’t fucking fast enough. Usually, Mansk would be the first person to praise rounds which fragmented upon striking a target, and shit, he missed his Hydra, but sometimes, just sometimes, animals the size of a six-wheeler weren’t for shooting at.

The round’s report echoed in Mansk’s ears. It didn’t hit a thing, that much Mansk had managed with a slap to Wainfleet’s arm. But the metaphorical damage had been done. They both heard the giant ikran snort. They both saw it lift its double-crested head and turn its eyes toward them. They both exchanged glances before falling back to the shelter in a scramble.

Back inside the temporary and likely brief safety of their little metal corridor, Mansk swung Wainfleet against the caterpillar tread wall and shoved him back against the vegetation and fungi growing deep in its fixings and metalwork. The pistol slipped from Wainfleet’s hold and clattered to the stones as he winced a hissing breath. His queue was trapped between body and wall. At the rate things were going, Mansk wouldn’t get time to feel bad about it later. He almost crushed Wainfleet further into the metal, just to see if anything sharp stuck him, made it hurt more. Worth it for his last two minutes. Worth it for all the moronic shit Wainfleet was doing. But wasn’t that moronic shit a direct result of Private Mansk’s own moronic shit?

Wainfleet grunted a handful of colorful swears under his breath and fought back against the hold keeping him down, both hands as fists and pressed against Mansk’s chest. Mansk seized Wainfleet’s collar to hold him against the metal. God, was that all Wainfleet had left in him? Enough for a feeble push that wouldn’t budge an empty cardboard box? Mansk could barely feel the pressure of it. Wainfleet’s expression was hateful enough, that at least was still at full health.

Mansk only had time to growl a quiet “Fuck d’you think you’re doing!” before the scraping of claws and the heavy sound of something pulling its gigantic bulk along grass and stones reached their lowering ears. Wainfleet’s expression dropped. Mansk let go of him with a final shove, stepped back, pressed a forefinger to his chin. Wainfleet understood that gesture just fine. He saw Wainfleet’s tail was knocking between his knees. Mansk felt a little bad. Turned out there was always time to feel bad, even during a man’s final two minutes.

The fire had to go. Again. As he hurriedly piled dirt over the flames, Mansk tried not to fall into thinking about how tired of hiding in the dark he was. But what else could the two of them do? They were black on ammo, black on brains. They’d never get to Hell’s Gate, let alone Bridgehead. They died here. Tonight. It hadn’t been a very good run.

“What is that?” Wainfleet said in a whisper.

“Big ikran. Didn’t the other you see anythin’ like that before when he had to hang out with avatars?”

“Hell you mean the other-?”

The scraping, grumbling sound was drawing too close. Mansk abandoned the smoldering embers of the dying fire and hit the wall, flattening himself against it. Wainfleet was within arm’s reach next to him, tail still rattling between his legs and his shoulders heaving. It was hard to tell if he was afraid or just struggling to stand. Mansk reckoned it was the same for him. His heartbeat was going haywire in his neck, his arms, his stomach. His throat was blocked with it. Sweat was waterfalling, and seemed to match every surge of his pulse with fresh droplets. Could the ikran hear it? Smell it? Where was its nose? Did it smell through its clavicle cavities? He should have listened more to that Spider kid!

His pulse thundered in his tilted ears as loud as the clacking claws of the big bastard ikran as it approached the bulldozer and began to dip its long snout into the triangular gap between the machine and its tread. The crest on its nose dragged along the sharp point of the ceiling. Mansk could hear the holes in its chest roaring as it breathed, could smell the stink of its recent kill huffing from its open mouth. Something slopped from between its teeth and splattered to the dirt. That stank, too. Mansk slid a hand up his face to cover his nostrils and closed his eyes. Eyes found eyes. They all knew that.

The giant ikran couldn’t fit its head and neck too far into their shelter. Mansk could hear the scraping sound of its beard crest digging a trench through the dirt as it tried to slide in further. Mansk could sense through its movements and growling that it didn't like searching for them in close quarters. This thing hunted through the skies, not caves. It snapped its teeth and swung its head, aggravated by the tight gap. The side of its face struck the bulldozer side of the corridor, shaking the whole structure, loose parts tinkling down from on high to plink from the ikran’s head like coins. Mansk shifted further along the wall, his quivering hands groping and catching on snapped pieces of metal. The other side of the tread was near. All they needed to do was keep creeping along, then it was a clear shot. To the harsh, unending jungle. Off a fucking cliff. Into the jaws of the red ikran’s wife. Something writhing in his gut was asking what the point of it was. If they made a break for freedom, the animal would slide out in seconds and smash them into the rocks like it was chasing ants. Tired, injured ants with fucked up brain braids.

He opened an eye to see Wainfleet in the dark beside him raising his arm to his back. The machete. Wainfleet’s fingers wrapped around the handle, began to slide the blade up. Mansk was about to stop him again, ready to scold a stupid child, but then he opened his other eye and saw something.

The ikran’s nose and chin crests. They were scraping over the metal above and driving into the ground below. Sometimes the points of those craggy old plumes got a little stuck. A quick shake released its crests, but still, they were starting to stick in its need to pluck them out of the dark. Mansk was sure it had reached in as far as its huge wings waiting outside the bulldozer wreck would allow. If they could wedge the ikran, really get it stuck, that clear shot would become a clear stroll. All they needed to do was get nice and close to all those prehensile teeth.

Mansk shuffled back down to Wainfleet, who was still halfway sliding the machete from its holster, and touched his arm as obviously as possible to stop him leaping like a scared cat right into the ikran’s mouth.

Wainfleet stared. He seemed committed to his own idiotic plan and looked none too happy having it interrupted. Mansk pointed at the machete, shook a finger, tapped his temple. New plan. He held one hand above his head, fingers straight, and did the same under his chin, then tilted his head, jerking a thumb at the ikran. Twist his crests and get him stuck.

The Corporal narrowed his eyes. The dark circles under them lifted as he thought. Then he lowered his hands, nodding his head upward. Mansk lowered his head back. Wainfleet, wisely, was going to take the nose crest. He needed a leg up to reach it to pull on it, and Mansk needed a low kick under the beast’s chin to bend the beard crest the opposite way, so Mansk went to sit, sliding sideways toward the giant ikran’s head, knees up by his chest. The creature was starting to thrash now, sensing that its quarry was right at its snout.

Wainfleet took the initiative to step up onto Mansk’s shoulder and position himself on the tread’s inner workings which had become as snarled as a rock face. He found a good spot to brace himself, right by a gap perfect for a hard crest to crack against and hopefully remain.

Mansk was eye to eye with a lot of teeth. He was glad of the semi-darkness hiding them, but the light from the end of the tunnel glinting across their wet surfaces showed them to be as long as his hand. He exhaled, a little too noisily. The giant ikran heard him and unleashed a deafening, shrill call in return which almost unseated Wainfleet. Even though it could barely open its mouth in the small gap, it was noise enough to bust human eardrums. Mansk, trying to think through the roar tearing his ears apart, had to time it. Holy shit, he had to time it, or he was losing a leg. The ikran kept up its long scream for two more seconds, two more mortifying seconds, two seconds in which Mansk still had time to go back on the plan, save his leg. And then it clamped its jaws closed again.

“Do it!” Mansk shouted. All four of the huge ikran’s eyes bulged. Mansk kicked out a foot and hit the thing’s beard crest square in the center, sending it swinging up and outward to the other side of the narrow space. He looked up and saw Wainfleet reach out and catch its head crest as its snout tilted, pulling it down hard and then shoving it back into that sharp corner he’d found in the metal.

Both of them jumped and rolled and fell over each other to get away from the ikran’s red face, which was an appropriate color considering its new predicament. Mansk risked a glance over his shoulder as he ran out into the hot night to see its jaws shut and both of its blue crests stuck fast into the metal of the old dozer. Its wings on the other side were flapping, its long legs kicking and throwing up huge clods of dirt behind it.

Wainfleet had dredged up enough reserve energy to jump and whoop, which was a little dangerous in Mansk’s books but he’d allow it as long as the Corporal didn’t faint dead right after it.

“That’s right, bitch! Don’t fuck with the RDA! Got your stupid ass even after all this time! That one’s for you, Bolt! Motherfucker!” Wainfleet shouted, out of breath by the time he was done but still gleeful.

Mansk relaxed his tensed shoulders and clicked a few bones in his back which had seized. He coughed when Wainfleet struck him with the flat of his hand in the middle of his spine.

The giant ikran was still growling through its gritted teeth and using its strong back legs to haul its head and neck out. Something clanked inside their old shelter and the tread shuddered.

“Oh, oh, y’know, we should definitely leave,” Wainfleet said, rubbing sweat from his head, still smiling from his outburst.

Mansk let himself smile along with him and folded his arms, eyes fixed on the giant ikran working its way out of the tin can. “Yeah.”

Chapter 10: Hell's Gate

Summary:

Like Mansk and Wainfleet, Hell's Gate has changed, or have they all remained exactly the same?

Notes:

HAHA THIS CHAPTER IS 9950 WORDS LONG!!!!! i'm so sorry!!!! next chapter will be 2 words as apology ;)

Hell’s Gate looked an awful lot more like Hell’s Overgrown Front Porch. So much so, they might have sailed right over it without knowing if Mansk hadn’t kept his eyes peeled, but he’d sensed they were near when the rain started to fall. Hell’s Gate had always attracted the rain; Pandora’s feeble attempt to wash the place clean. All it had needed to do was wait. Hell’s Gate was empty. All the demons had fled. Except the two returning to it.

Mansk gave his ikran a mental gee up. It flattened its limbs close to its slim body and swept downward through low, warm mist, spreading its wings wide again to slow their descent toward the green rooftops. Rooftops. The hairs on the back of his head stood to attention as if they knew where they were and hadn’t polished their boots the night before. He felt Wainfleet shift behind him and lean over, gawping like a tourist (he had insisted he was well enough to take the back seat, though seemed to value that position only an atom more than sitting up front).

“Jesus, look at that,” Wainfleet said in a low voice.

Mansk said nothing. He took them in for a closer look, drifting around the remains of the weapon towers positioned at each point of the pentagon. Only one still stood. The rest had either had their heads blown off or turned into tiny mountains of debris wrapped in dark roots. Beyond the towers, Hell’s Gate lay quiet. The shuttle runway tarmac was a cracked carpet of grass, the hangar was a neglected greenhouse overtaken, the spindly metal fingers of the refinery far away were bent and broken. The perimeter fences had tried to fight the weather, but their chain links had become delicate and bendable as daisy stems. Some buildings were scorched and shattered, showing signs of blast and artillery damage. Communication masts and radio pylons on the roofs had been crumpled into crooked insect antennae.

“That the admin building?” Wainfleet said again. Mansk banked right and they floated beside what was left of the central hub tower. They slipped close enough through fine rain to see the dirty shattered windows and the ruined control room beyond. Anything not sealed down had been blasted backward long ago. Plant life had crept green probing hands over the holotable and wilting screens. The color grey had all but vanished. Through his shades it almost looked like a black maw beyond jagged teeth. A huge, hungry animal brought down. Good , thought something at the base of his skull.

“Hey, take us down,” Wainfleet said. Mansk felt his knuckles nudge the back of his arm. He guided their ikran down to the field which had once rumbled as concrete under the heavy wheels of aircraft. The ikran landed, lighter and with less fuss than the old Samsons which used to roost in their tidy rows on the runway. Mansk dismounted, neck craned back to take in the squat metal block of the conmod. He lifted a hand to keep off the misting rain. Without the whooshing wingbeats of the ikran on either side, the quiet was loud in his ears.

Up ahead, lying torn on the ground like the shed skin of a snake, was what remained of the enclosed metal walkway which led to the habitat modules. Pandora’s flora had slipped across the runway to weave flowering tendrils through the links. He’d been here before. The old Mansk had been here before. How many times had he jogged through that cage, boots splashing through thin puddles? How many times had he laughed, or playfully punched someone, or been playfully punched? What had they come back from doing? Mansk twitched his head aside. He knew the answer to that.

The Corporal slid down from the ikran and Mansk listened to him unnecessarily vocalize his stretch. Mansk turned to look at him, studied Wainfleet’s dopey face as he shook himself and blinked up at Hell’s Gate’s cluster of sad, rotten buildings beneath an overcast, white sky. There was a twitch trapped in his wide brow. “Damn, they really fucked this place up, huh?” he said, resting his hands on his hips and tilting his head until something cracked.

“Big time,” Mansk said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Place was pristine when we last saw it,” Wainfleet said, moving past Mansk to wander toward the collapsed habmod walkway. His limp was growing worse. “Got told at Bridgehead Sully and his gang blew this place up rather than let us have it back. Boss move but the General got no respect lettin’ it get like this. After all that shit we did? After how long it stood here? We defended the shit outta this place and look at it.” Wainfleet threw up a hand and let it fall back to his hip, turning around to face Mansk, expecting an outburst of agreement in response.

Mansk couldn’t offer a sympathetic look, try as he might. Which was strange. “Med’s in HB 2, sir,” he said. The cut on Wainfleet’s leg was swelling pale pink into his blue skin. The graze on his forehead wept blood more often than it scabbed over. And the queue. It had been days since Wainfleet had let him look at it. For all he knew it was a throbbing nuclear green under there, cultivating its own mini Pandora.

“Yeah. Yeah, fine,” Wainfleet said. “Move out.”

The sky grayed, the rain started to clatter. It was a different sound, rain clanging on metal. Mansk hadn’t heard it for a long while. It was nothing like the sputtering hiss of rainfall through a canopy, or the dull drum of drops hitting sand. Mansk hunched his shoulders against it and led on, his bare feet feeling the cold with every wet step. He swung his AR to his front, took it in his hands, kept its barrel low. 

“Ha, right here,” the Corporal said behind him.

Mansk twisted around to face him. Wainfleet stood with a hand out, palm down, his eyes on the ground. The Corporal had a pleased look on his face, humor creeping into his features when he looked up. He waved his other hand out to the old runway. “Jake Sully rolled his ass off that Valkyrie. Me and Fike were right here. Funniest shit we ever saw. I mean, what sick asshole lets someone like that on Pandora? What’s he gonna do with a v-dog on his ass? Reverse over it?”

“He talk to you?” Mansk asked, narrowing his eyes against the rain hammering his shades.

“Nah, just called us limpdicks. Strong word for someone like that.”

Mansk felt the slow pull of a muscle turn the corner of his mouth upward. “Couldn’t have been that limp judging by how many kids he had.”

“Yeah, had,” Wainfleet snorted with a crooked smile.

“C’mon, man,” Mansk said.

“What?” Wainfleet replied, shrugging and huffing out a humored breath, smile still fixed on.

Mansk looked at Wainfleet. Really scrutinized him. Watched his eyebrows, his eyes, the curve of his lop-sided grin, even his throat when he swallowed. Wainfleet appeared a little too puffed up with pride at his own words. It came across as forced. He was pushing his demeanor, his stance, his stupid face, into cartoony. Again. Mansk waited under the rain and the gray sky until he saw it. Saw the flick of the Corporal’s big yellow eyes, a little to the right and a little upward, too fast for Wainfleet to see anything but a blur for a fraction of a second but fast enough to tell Mansk everything. It was good enough for now.

Before Wainfleet could crack another dead kid joke, Mansk moved on to the habmod door. It wasn’t fully closed, looked off-center. Had something from the inside bowed it outward? As soon as he reached it and was about to enter through the narrow opening to duck into darkness, heart thundering with anticipation in his mouth, Wainfleet spoke again.

“Hey, whoa, wait.”

Mansk stopped in his tracks, resisting a sigh. He lowered his head and let his shades tilt forward over his nose, glancing at Wainfleet when he appeared next to him. The Corporal looked oddly smug, as if he’d worked something out that Mansk hadn’t.

“We can’t breathe in there,” Wainfleet said, pointing at the door with his pistol, which Mansk noted was terrible weapon control. They needed Wainfleet fixed up before he started blowing toes off. His own, preferably. “You and me? We don’t breathe the same air anymore. Won’t last five minutes through that door.”

Mansk blinked behind his dark lenses and raised his eyebrows. At the same time he lifted his chin to face the building’s roof. Wainfleet followed his line of sight. There was a large hole punched into the wall above them. Pandoran wind whistled through it. Mansk lowered his chin again.

“Watch your six,” Wainfleet said, his voice deliberately low and commanding but a tad too quick. He swiftly ducked into a half-bend and squeezed through the gap in the doorway, heading inside. Mansk imagined him cringing to himself. Almost endearing.

Mansk turned about and gave the runway at their back a final sweep. Not that anything would follow them inside Hell’s Gate. He understood enough about Pandora and Eywa to know anything with six legs or wings or other body parts unknown to humankind wouldn’t be caught dead inside metal walls. Hell’s Gate was theirs once again.

---

Wainfleet cringed to himself. He closed his eyes, pursed his lips, curled his nostrils. ‘ We can’t breathe in there!’ What a fucking moron. The oxygen filtration system had died years ago, shut down the second power had been severed. He took a long draw of Hell’s Gate air, just to add insult to injury. Metal, dampness, wet plantation. A passing draft which stank of the same things swept by, tugging on his badly-cut pants. Rain spattered through gaps in smashed windows. He pressed further into the dark hall, pistol up. Broken glass skittered around his toes. If it hadn’t been for all that banshee driving and mindless running around on rough SeaDragon stairwells the old blunt shards might have actually pierced skin. He smirked, remembering a fourteen year old crybaby who’d stabbed glass clean through his foot on the beach. That scar was long gone. And all the dark hair. “Watch your step,” he said over his shoulder when he heard Mansk follow him indoors.

The corridor was narrow, low and dark. Already his neck and shoulders were feeling the effects of his stoop, plus dodging hanging light battens was going to get tiring fast; sidestepping a pair of them already had him wanting to rip them from their cables and shatter them onto the walls. There was a loud clang behind him followed by a hissing grunt. Mansk had successfully dodged just one hanging light.

He breathed out. It felt cramped, and not cramped like an AMP suit. It was a different kind of cramped which made his pulse thump and his hands rattle the pistol in front of him. Once more that exhausting feeling of fresh sweat washing over the old sweat, the sensation of new jangled nerves shaking so hard he forgot the rest were still twitching, the stumbling, the grinding of fifty muscles fighting to keep his eyelids pinned back. A hand flew out and slapped against the cold metal wall to his right. His hand, he supposed. He heard Mansk hurry his pace at his back to catch up. Go away. Fuck off. Don’t ask if I’m good!

“You okay to make it to Med, sir?” Mansk asked. It might as well have been that old ‘you good?’ classic.

For a second, Wainfleet considered tearing a light from the ceiling and slinging it into Mansk’s face, braining him, just so he could feel the same shit he was, if only for five minutes. Instead he straightened up and moved on, brushed his fingers along the wall until they touched a sharp ridge. He paused, looked aside. A long, rectangular metal plate, cold under his hand. Signage pointing in the direction of the commissary. A shiver prickled up the backs of his arms. Hell’s Kitchen. Jesus Christ. The embossed words beneath that row indicated Med and Briefing were near. Med first, tragically, as desperate as he suddenly was to see the cafeteria. Just to see it. No trees, no beaches, no plants, no animals, no soil underfoot, no shitty weather. Just normality. Just a simple fucking room with four walls and a roof and chairs and tables and vending machines.

The further they traveled through the halls with their shoulders up by their ears, the less damage from the outside was visible. The constant tap tap of leaks stopped, the air was denser, flatter in scent, green turned to dull gray. When it was clear there was nothing living inside, they both holstered their weapons. Darkness grew the deeper they crept, seeping up from the facility’s buried heart like a black wound. Wainfleet exchanged a look with Mansk before they turned into another dim corridor, and both understood neither of them had the engineering prowess to return power to the place.

Wainfleet was first into Med, shouldering the door open and ducking through it, irritated to find the ceiling was as low inside as it was out in the halls. He was even more irritated to discover that Med had been decimated. A square of struggling light from the hall lit the long room as best it could, but even without its help, it was clear anything not fixed to the floors and walls was gone. The cabinets had been left slid open, the same with drawers in desks. The beds were still there in their neat, nailed-down rows, along with their bread-thin plastic mattresses, but the sheets had been stripped away and taken. He’d sent a few people to sit on those cots himself. In his muddled mind’s eye he could still see them, nursing bruised jaws and shining black eyes. Campbell’s left brow ridge had turned every color of the aurora borealis after their one and only tangle, forcing him to eat with that side of his face turned toward the wall in the cafeteria for two weeks.

“Damn,” Mansk said beside him, rubbing his neck and going to the nearest row of cupboards. Wainfleet hung back, almost laughing at the sight of Mansk crouching and going through cabinets, trying to fit his huge hands into the backs of drawers. It looked like he was interacting with those miniature play kitchens little girls got for Christmas. All he needed was Spider posing as the toddler standing next to him to complete the picture. Hell, maybe Mansk would find a kid’s plastic medkit and they could pretend to patch him up.

Wainfleet started his own half-hearted investigation of the room. They were back on the SeaDragon again, squeezing through corridors, watching the ceilings, the lights, the alarms, feeling extremely aware that nothing was made for them but unwilling to voice it. “Nothin’,” he said after checking the other end of the bay. “Took it all, the sons of bitches.” He perched on a bed. It creaked. Loudly.

“Can’t blame ‘em,” Mansk said, pulling a desk out with a screech of metal legs on metal flooring. Wainfleet watched him paw around on the ground behind it for fallen objects only to be subjected to an eyeful of ass and calloused feet and a waggling tail. He rolled his eyes. Unsuccessful, Mansk returned to sit on his ankles, arm resting on the desk. “I’d take everything I could if that were me, knowin’ there wouldn’t be any more shipments. Ever.”

“That’s on them for stayin’. Shoulda sucked it up and gone home like everyone else.”

Mansk got to his feet, expertly paused his rise to full height an inch below the ceiling and left the room.

“Hey. Hey, man,” Wainfleet called after him, ducking out of Med and catching up to Mansk in a half-jog, all the while avoiding hanging lighting fixtures and trying to stop his queue from painfully bounding against his back. “Hey!”

Mansk was a tail taking corners at a breakneck pace. The tail took him on a twisting route until that too vanished ahead and Wainfleet was left to make his own way. He slid to a halt at a wide doorway and froze, stunned he hadn’t noticed how he’d been on auto-pilot all the way to Hell’s Kitchen. The huge shuttered window at the end of the hall. The rows of tables and benches. The vending machines on the left wall. The serving hatch on the right wall. But it very easily could have been a different room, and not just because he had a new nine foot three vantage point.

Pandora had made its way inside.

The ducting and vents above his head were strangled with vines, some so thick and heavy they had brought the pipework down to dangle in the tentacles of whatever creeping plant had moved in. Fixtures were colorful hanging baskets, the benches soggy with algae blankets, the rain outside rattled through a hole in the glass beyond the shutters in the large window. The glass in the vending machines hadn’t fared much better, their frontage either cracked or opaque with condensation, their contents long turned to mush. That was a bitch. He might have kicked one in and eaten something if they’d been intact. Under his feet and throughout the mess hall were wide, shallow puddles. How long ago had the nerds left Hell’s Gate? A year and a half? And the forest could cause this much damage in that short timespan?

Something in his brain wanted to give into dizziness. Was it dizziness he was feeling? To shut it up, he shuffled a foot over the threshold, looked down to see Mansk’s wet footprints leading to the right and into the kitchens.

Wainfleet moved down the central aisle, his wrists twitching under his pulse’s sudden and frantic assault. The Colonel loved this walk, loved doing his Kansas schtick for each wave of salad-green fresh meat, loved telling them that was exactly what they were. Shit, he could quote him, right there and then, send his piss-poor impression of that good ol’ boy accent ringing through the stale air. He stopped walking. It almost felt disrespectful, tracing the proud steps of ghostly tactical boots with bare na’vi feet. But the Colonel would laugh. The second Colonel would laugh.

He reached the end of the hall. Hot jungle air whirled through the broken glass behind the shutters. Wainfleet turned and faced into the room proper, the eager wind breathing on his back. Kansas speech. No, more important things had happened in this place; lunch. Fike on the right, two tables down, guarding his tray with an arm, a dragon protecting his hoard ever since the incident . Walker, she had the table behind him, always with the rabbit food salads. Warren liked to sit on the left, right by the wall, doing his old man thing, cutting notches out of the table with that tooth knife he’d get angry over if someone suggested he’d traded it rather than hunted it. Prager and Lopez. Prager and Lopez. Wainfleet scanned the tables. Where did those assholes like to sit and plot? Near Z. Wainfleet felt a smirk creep across his face. No way would that still be there. He headed to where he remembered Z-Dog used to chow down, easily finding her bench - he loomed over her while she ate plenty enough on his way to sit with Fike. Her fork always seemed to end up twirling at dick-level whenever he stopped to stand over her, irrefutable evidence she dug him.

Mansk emerged from the kitchens with something in his hand and made his way over only to jump back when Wainfleet hefted the table up. He was getting better at keeping the winces at bay, but his elbow still shook as he held the table at forty five degrees. “Check it out,” he said to Mansk, who joined him and after a moment grinned, glasses flashing.

Stuck to the underside of the table in a neat circular pattern were dozens of small, brown pebbles which had started their short lives bright pink and strawberry flavored.

“Nice,” Mansk said. “Got you a present.” He whistled and tossed something high into the air.

Wainfleet dropped the table with a clunk in time to catch the small medkit, one of those types that were strictly necessary by law but never dipped into unless fingertips got bitten by dishwasher doors. It sat in his palm like a tiny jewelry box. If he formed his hand into a fist he could crush the plastic like card. Almost did.

“Best I could find. We should check the avatar compound and hut for stuff that’s actually the right size,” Mansk said, brushing his palms and sleeves down.

“What else you find back there?” Wainfleet asked, shaking the medkit before looking up.

“Nothin’ much. No food.”

“C’mon, man, there’s gotta be somethin’,” Wainfleet said, flicking Mansk on the shoulder with his free hand and heading into the kitchens.

The greenery hadn’t made it as far as the pots and pans in the back. With a little spit and shine the place could nearly pass as clean enough for a restaurant preparing to go to court. The walkways were narrow and the ceiling in this section was even lower than Med, but Wainfleet squeezed his way past the sad fridges and empty fryers and fallen cookers, clanging and clattering his way to the store room. He was already preparing to assign Mansk the very important mission of grilling up some mean jumbo franks when he yanked open the storage door to find nothing but a pair of sad packets of ketchup sitting on the floor.

He narrowed his eyes, then reached a desperate, trembling hand out toward them.

“Sir…” Mansk said when he returned to the mess hall, his shades sliding down his nose.

Wainfleet stared.

Mansk tapped his own chin.

Wainfleet spat reddish-brown through his spluttery laugh and ran the back of his glove under his lip. “Hey, at leesht it ishunt blud,” he said, wishing the ex-ketchup at least had the viscosity of blood. And the color of blood, that might have been nice, too.

“Speakin’ of, you good to, uh,” Mansk said, nodding at the medkit still tucked in the crook of Wainfleet’s elbow.

Wainfleet gulped back the last lump of sour semi-solid ooze before it tried to stick a flag in his tongue and claim it as a new frontier. “I got it, thanks,” he said. He gave Mansk a fun over look like the ones the Colonel was so skilled at.

Mansk put up an accepting hand and said no more.

 

Wainfleet sent, no, ordered, Mansk to check the avatar compound, tired of the Private taking the lead. He supposed he should be grateful. Without Mansk he would still be on the SeaDragon. Under the SeaDragon. But he had to be Colonel-harsh with him. He had to be. He was squad leader. The table under him groaned when he sat and rested his forearms on his thighs. Some squad. He snapped open the medkit with clumsy fingers. The plastic broke at the hinges. 

The best he could do with his queue was untie the braid, clean the long cut carved deep into it and wrap it tight in gauze that just about covered the injury site. The entire process stung like a bitch and those familiar jagged stabs drove their way into his skull again. It was getting really good at making sure the rest of him got to join in on the pain. What did the patch of skin between his forefinger and middle finger have to do with the queue? Or the inside of his lip? Or the point of his kneecap? Twice he’d doubled over with heavy pants, rolling eyes and a slack jaw. If only it was as easy as throwing up and feeling fine afterward. Retying it all when he was finished felt worse, but the alternative was cutting the hair off, and that would look even stupider. More stupid. He reeled again and sat forward, head down by his knees.

He remained there until the icy puddle he’d planted his feet in took all the feeling from his toes, until Mansk’s voice over the comms made him sit up with a gasp and wide eyes.

“Where you at, Corporal?”

Where was he at? Where was Lyle Wainfleet? He tilted his head, fingers halfway to his neck to answer Mansk. There was another Wainfleet on base. The Wainfleet stamped onto a locker nameplate.

Wainfleet stood, waited for his toes to come back online, and left Hell’s Kitchen, not feeling all that much better despite the effort he’d put into fixing the ponytail. He didn’t reply to Mansk until he was in the corridor. His hand was heavy when he lifted it to speak. “Swingin’ by my old locker. You at the compound?”

“Been and back. At laundry.”

“Laundry? Serious?”

“Avatar-sized bunks need avatar-sized blankets.”

“Make sure you pick ‘em up from the right basket, all right? No avatar-sized skidmarks.” Wainfleet moved off. It was a fair walk to the lockers. He smiled. “Napoleon there?”

Mansk’s laugh crackled over the line. “Yeah. He says you should use your socks as socks for once.”

“Mine? But the labels always said Mansk!” Wainfleet replied, grinning. “Get your ass up here, Mary Poppins.”

Mansk accidentally cut himself off midway through another laugh.

Expecting to find the way to the lockers blocked by biometrics or debris, Wainfleet was surprised to discover his path was clear. Out in the field that was a trap, not good luck, and he couldn’t help but touch his fingers to his pistol as he approached the locker room, but he soon dropped his hand upon seeing the rows of little gray doors lining both walls. Little was the operative word. They were like birdhouses. Something turned over inside him. The backs of his calves tensed.

Almost forgetting to mind his head, he went straight to his locker, running a hand along the rest, letting his fingers bump over the metal until they reached his name. He had to bend at the hip to lower his eyes to read it. The black letters were as crisp and bold as they’d been that morning when he’d slammed it shut for a final time. Jesus, his hand was nearly as long as the locker was high. What would he have thought, all those months or years or however long it had been ago, if he’d known a hand as blue as the enemy would brush dust away from the words L. WAINFLEET with nostalgic care?

At least the na’vi-loving nerds had had the mercy to leave it all as it had appeared before the Tree of Souls assault. Resting a hand flat against his locker, Wainfleet looked along the row. Some little gray doors were hanging open, hastily emptied by survivors forced to clear out. He crouched to see who’d made it. Spicer, Rafferty, Rocca. He snorted a breath at that name. Rocca, known jagoff, had scraped through but Lyle Wainfleet bought the fucking farm? What the fuck had Lyle Wainfleet been doing down there on the ground? Who, or what, had-

Something banged with a metallic crack and sent his ears shooting straight up. Wainfleet whipped his head around to see Mansk rubbing an elbow freshly knocked into a loose locker door. Mansk lifted a hand and wiggled his fingers in a feeble greeting, his smile tired before he dropped it, going to the other side of the room.

“You open yours yet?” Mansk asked over, running a finger over his name.  A. MANSK .

Waintfleet drummed two knuckles against the locker door. “Nah.”

“Wanna do it on three?”

With an impatient grunt Wainfleet forced his fingers around the now-tiny turn lock and twisted it hard. Something crunched inside. He ripped the door open and had time to blink before stale air and a flurry of magazine clippings spilled out of the dark. Those were supposed to be taped to the inside of the door. With an oh shit under his breath, Wainfleet chased the glossy pages across the floor, backache be damned, and held them up to find the tape had turned beige and lost its stickiness a long time ago.

Mansk laughed behind him. Wainfleet spun to spot him admiring Mindy. Or was she Sophie? From what he could see of the torn cutting under Mansk’s fingers, her hair was red and she had her arms up, her clawing fingers frozen clutching messy scarlet locks. Bunny. She was Bunny. Mansk raised an eyebrow over the frame of his shades and fixed his black lenses on Wainfleet as he slipped the page under his shirt.

Wainfleet snorted and slid the girls he’d rescued into his locker again, feeling past them for what else he’d left in there. Technically it had only been five or six months. He ought to remember with ease what he’d left in there. But so much shit had gone down that he couldn’t even remember if it actually had been five or six months.

The first thing he grabbed was the datapad. It had a ding in one corner thanks to his excited hands dropping it the second he’d been given it. He turned it around in his hand. It was as though it had shrunk in the wash. He’d have to use his pinky finger on the screen, if they could get it charged in the first place. He shoved it down his vest front. Venturing further into the locker woke up a corps of used deodorant cans, all clinking when he pushed his hands through them. One fell out to clonk by his foot, rolling away. The tuck box for his playing cards, its edges furred from use, nudged his knuckles like it missed him. During his search his wrist disturbed two sad sticky notes. One said in his big loopy handwriting ‘CLEAN AMP TODAY!!!!’ and the other: ‘DANI 9PM ’.

He twisted his hand upward and felt above the inside of the locker’s front until he found something he definitely remembered stashing. He pinched the little plastic bag between two fingers, withdrawing it out into the dim light of the room. Even resting on his outstretched palm and safe inside their bag, the matchstick-sized blunts began to crumble. Heartbreaking. He crushed them under his fingers, ground them to ashes, and let the bag drop. Wouldn’t have had an effect on him anymore, anyway. He was pretty sure he’d gotten it from Rocca, so it would never have been good. Shit, he’d put a whole-ass five minutes into pre-rolling them.

On the inside of the locker door by his ear, next to Candice, Jaymie and the woman whose name he’d lost tearing her from the page, was that old photo of Fike and himself standing on a Valkyrie ramp. He recalled accosting a fellow greenhorn to take the photo, risking discipline the second the both of them stepped out of the line of ants moving to Briefing. The other newbie had shaken the datapad like an old Speak and Spell and blurred most of the image, but their faces were clear enough. Huge, open-mouthed smiles halfway through a long howl of excitement, both of their outer arms up, fists high, their inner arms draped over the other’s shoulder. Wainfleet conjured again that feeling of Fike’s heavy hand on his arm. Then he conjured the sound he’d made hitting the jungle floor with an arrow in his eye.

Another eye lurked in his peripherals. It was big and yellow. He glanced aside and used a finger to lift Candice and her 10/10 legs. In the mirror, hiding under the magazine scraps, he saw a na’vi. A na’vi with a cobalt complexion, pale stripes on its skull, a shimmer of freckles which glowed in the dark. A na’vi with a busted face, a scab on its forehead, a dark fuzz of short bristly hair on its scalp, circles under its wide apart eyes, which grew rounder the longer it stared at him. Wainfleet slapped a hand over the mirror to stop it looking at him, his knees twitching, heart constricting on itself, shoulders hot.

“Sir?” Mansk said.

Wainfleet lifted his chin and looked for help in the darkness at the back of the locker. Jesus looked back. He wiped the back of his glove over his forehead and laughed. Jesus’s eyes hadn’t been printed evenly. One was too high, too big. Maybe the little metal crucified Christ had been the one to drain Rocca’s shitty ganja. But Mom had bought it for him so it had joined him for the ride. Around one of Jesus’s tiny (deformed) hands on the left arm of the cross was a more formal silver cross on a slim chain, almost tying the poor guy with his one popping eye up there. Mom had also insisted he take it, too. She had never liked the chain cross. That shit’s gone, Ma. So have you. Maybe. Wainfleet darted his eyes to the bottom of the mirror peeking out from under Candice’s airbrushed feet. He could see the v of the na’vi’s throat in the reflection.

He reached into the locker and unhooked the silver cross from Jesus’s arm. He looked at Mansk over his shoulder, who was rattling around happily in his own locker. Or unhappily. Wainfleet went to bow his head and hang the cross around his neck, but paused, realizing it would never fit over his wide dome. Another glance at that blue skin in the mirror. He wound the thin chain around his wrist instead, the cross bumping against the back of his glove.

“Hey,” Mansk said, reminding Wainfleet he existed. When had Mansk cracked into his locker? Had he heard it?

Wainfleet hid his hand behind his back and leaned on the column of lockers next to his.

Mansk was holding a Rubik's Cube. An honest to wonky-eyed 3D-printed cheapass Jesus Rubik’s Cube.

“Get outta here, why’d you bring that?” Wainfleet said, breathing a laugh.

“Y’know, I can’t even do these?” Mansk replied, holding the cube up and twisting it around. In his big hands it was more like a Sugar’s Cube than a Rubik’s Cube. He used his other hand to tip his shades down. Wainfleet watched the stupid plastic thing tilt in Mansk’s hold and noticed every single square was in the wrong place. The puzzle would be impossible to solve without cheating. Wainfleet could solve it. He was very good at peeling off the stickers and putting them back to match the colors.

Wainfleet tipped his head back until it touched the lockers behind him. The stubble of his regrowing hair hissed across the smooth metal. That felt all kinds of wrong. He made a mental note to raid his bunk for his toiletries and shaving stuff. His chest squeezed and his stomach flipped. His bunk. No, not now. He threw himself back into the conversation. “Wait, you can’t even do them and you brought it all the way out here?”

“I can do one side.” Mansk looked up and Wainfleet swore his smile was bordering on sly.

“One side?”

Mansk sighed through a shrug and laughed to himself. Mansk had a classic ha ha ha laugh. Quiet. Rehearsed. “Yep.”

“All right, let’s see it.” Wainfleet folded his long arms and tilted his head until his jaw sat on his shoulder.

“Really?” Mansk said. Wainfleet could just about see his small eyes narrow over the brims of his shades.

“Thirty seconds on the clock, man.” Wainfleet started tapping the seconds against a locker with his tail.

Mansk laughed again and got to work. The cube was stiff with age, and Wainfleet gave him five seconds before he ripped it apart with his huge hands, but Mansk manipulated the cube’s spinning rows like a pro. Wainfleet’s mind drifted watching him turn it, his tail keeping terrible time, not that he’d really been counting. Mansk’s hands were bruised. His fingers were covered in cuts, his knuckles puffy and pink, his skin peeling in jagged rips. He’d gotten all that pulling his unconscious Corporal from the water, fighting off strong young men while his Corporal had been downed and caught, flying for days on end and keeping his out-cold Corporal from falling. Mansk looked up as he spun the top part of the cube, his sunglasses perched on the very end of his nose, and smiled.

At around fifty seconds, give or take ten more, Mansk completed his one side. He lifted it up with an over-the-top flourish, presenting it forward like a precious gift. “One side,” he said with a bow.

Wainfleet uncrossed his arms and looked at it. The face Mansk had finished was blue. They swapped knowing looks, fought grins, then laughed. The sound echoed through Hell’s Gate’s cold, empty halls.

Mansk’s laugh petered out and his eyes focused on something behind Wainfleet, who turned to read another name. A. ZHANG. Zhang had given him a downward nod after receiving his order to move up and try to take the na’vi by surprise. Take Sully and his animal wife by surprise. It had been a long chopper flight back that night.

“Did you wanna…” Mansk lost his words, frowning. “His datapad?” he tried again. Wainfleet noted for the first time Mansk had his own tucked under his arm. It looked so small.

“Leave it,” Wainfleet replied. Colonel impression.

On their way out, Wainfleet stopped at a locker at the end of the row. Mansk leaned around him to read the name. The door was locked.

“Didn’t make it,” Wainfleet said, reaching across to scratch dirt from the corner of the locker door. “Damn.” He pressed the butt of his fist into the metal. The tiny silver cross jangled on his wrist. He thought about the dull ache along his queue to help deepen his frown.

“You liked Garcia,” Mansk said.

Anyone else would have drawn out the last ‘a’ of her name with sing-song mockery . Anyone else would have teased, barked a laugh. That he could have handled. That he could have turned into a joke or a headlock. It was Mansk’s plain-faced sincerity which made him speak honestly by mistake.

“Nah. Nah, no way, man,” Wainfleet replied with a half-smile, shrugging. “And she wasn’t about me.” He moved off with a final tap on Garcia’s locker. Mansk followed.

---

Mansk had forgotten Wainfleet knew the avatar compound well. The moment they reached the hut as the dusk began to settle orange and yellow in the sky, Wainfleet reminded him that it was a longhouse, not a hut, and that he volunteered for playing jungle escort to Augustine and her nerds to take pot shots at nature out in the dangerous jungle rather than because he enjoyed the company of geeks. Mansk had hidden his eye roll behind his shades before throwing them off to land next to his datapad and Rubik’s Cube onto the cot he’d chosen for himself. He ripped down the ragged mosquito net over the bed and threw it in a bundle onto the floor.

“I put your stuff over there, Corporal,” he said to Wainfleet, who was too busy exploring the interior to listen. Mansk hid a tired sigh with a long breath in. The air inside was fresh, warm.

The longhouse wasn’t as derelict as Mansk had first assumed. The metal gates at the entrance had rusted in the rain but still put up a good fight when he’d pulled them open, and the Pandoran timber was sturdy, showing no signs of infestation or rot. The beams of combined metal and wood which lined the ceiling of the pointed longhouse roof had kept the worst weather at bay. There wasn’t a puddle or patch of moss to be seen anywhere inside, which was impressive for a floor lined with planks. The windows had no glass, and the wind could whip through the metal bars of the gate, but apart from the occasional green tendril hooking a curious flower over the sills, the interior appeared as though someone was tending it. He wondered if the na’vi’s Eywa had left it alone, maybe even approved of it. Perhaps the presence of na’vi, even in the form of human-engineered avatars, had won Eywa over. A stark contrast to the mess hall.

“I’m not sleepin’ here,” Wainfleet replied, a hand around one of the wooden pillars in the center of the room.

“What?”

Wainfleet cleared his throat, sniffed, pressed the back of his wrist to his nose. “Safer in the base. Thicker walls.”

Mansk squeezed his back teeth together. “Sir, this place is sized for us. We still have the safety fences.”

Wainfleet breathed out and disappeared into the shadows at the other end of the room.

There was an old saying about steps forward and steps backward which ran a dizzying circle around Mansk’s mind. He ran a hand up into his hair, surprised to find it had grown half an inch, ruining that neat bullet cut he’d maintained so well when on mission. What was the mission now? Take a walk. A small mission to take a walk. He could do that.

Mansk trotted down the wooden steps of the longhouse and headed into the purple night. A breeze threaded caring fingers through the soft carpet of grass underfoot as he made his way through an out-of-control vegetable and fruit patch. He parted tall plants with wide, frilled leaves, emerging where there had once stood an obstacle course. In its place was a large, scattered pile of timber poles. Not everything could withstand the rainforest’s monsoons. The ikran had found it and turned it all into a large nest, snoring tail to tail in the center of it. Alexander’s ikran would have liked that little den. Mansk’s green ikran woke and raised its dragony face to look at him, eyes and glittering spots glimmering in the dark, before it settled again.

With a long sigh, Mansk sat on the ground and let the warm wind ruffle his braid. He massaged his fingers idly one by one and watched the ikran, listening to the distant fizzle of the jungle beyond the safety fence. He realized he didn’t know what day it was. Did Pandora observe Wednesdays? It was smaller than Earth, so maybe one Wednesday back there was five here. He couldn’t remember the rules, couldn’t remember if the other Mansk had ever been told, or had even been curious enough to want to know. That Mansk was starting to get away from him. This Mansk looked up at the sky. It was bright with cottony swathes of purple and blue and green, felt clear and close enough to touch. Nights on Earth had been a choked, cloudy orange. He breathed the night in and glowed with it.

 

When he slumped back up the steps to the longhouse and creaked open the gate, he heard voices. With a hitch of the pulse in his neck and pulling the gate closed behind him, Mansk slowed his walk as he entered. The voices were excited, whooping and laughing, talking over each other. A blue light flickered on the left side of the room.

He found Wainfleet hunched with his arms folded over a desk and his forehead balanced on them, deep asleep. It was strange to see a desk the correct height after so long squeezing around the SeaDragon. It made Wainfleet look small again. Mansk crept closer. In front of Wainfleet’s arms, propped against the wall, was his datapad, switched on, working, playing a video. How he’d charged it was a mystery. He must have found something with a low battery and done a little hotwiring. Mansk went to one knee next to Wainfleet, hand on the back of his seat, and fixed his huge eyes on the screen.

It was them. Seventeen years ago. Or two years ago.

“Z-Dog!” Wainfleet’s voice shouted somewhere out of view. The video blurred. Someone had picked up the datapad and was jumping around with it, growling. Finally it steadied and Z-Dog’s back was to the datapad’s camera, her tattoos bunching and flexing with her shoulders as she turned. Mansk leaned closer and watched her throw something. The image jumped and swung around to record right up Wainfleet’s nostrils. “It’s Z-Dog’s birthday,” his nostrils said to the camera. “It’s Z-Dog’s birthday,” he said again in a fake serious voice, tone low. Lopez howled and garbled something that sounded like, “Fifty today!”

Z shrieked an evil laugh in the background and there was a thump. Behind the camera Wainfleet cackled into his can of beer and the mic boomed as he took a long gulp of booze. “It’s Lopez’s funeral actually, he’s fuckin’ dead,” Wainfleet said, turning the camera to focus it badly on Z with her arm squeezed around Lopez’s neck. Lopez’s tongue was hanging out. The second before the camera swung away again his face went from amusement to fearing for his life. Wainfleet continued to narrate, his voice posh this time: “We are gathered here today-hey- hey ! Don’t fuckin’-don’t fuckin’ do that, you… get your own, bro!”

Mansk was sure he’d never heard Wainfleet laugh so much in such a short amount of time, the drunken moron. He grinned and moved his hand from the back of the chair to hold Wainfleet’s shoulder. Wainfleet didn’t move.

The datapad had been set down on a table or a bunk, as the picture suddenly went still and Wainfleet and Fike were in full view. The datapad slipped. A voice off to the side said “Oop, fuck,” and righted it. The accent sounded like Prager. Mansk almost let out his own laugh. They were all so shit-faced. Fike was doing well pretending he was sober, but his exaggerated motions and his constant grabbing of his own ear gave him away. Wainfleet was gone. He was leaning over too far each time he spoke and slapping his knees and hitting Fike with the hand holding his beer. His brown eyes, somehow unfamiliar so closely set together and so dark, still scrunched up when he smiled.

“Mansk! Hey, over here!” Wainfleet shouted.

Mansk started and glanced down at Wainfleet, but it was the Wainfleet in the video who’d yelled.

“There he is! There’s the man! On the wodka!” Wainfleet laughed, yanking Mansk into frame. That Mansk. Mansk leaned forward further, nerves burning, fingers trembling on Wainfleet’s shoulder, his elbow wobbling.

The Mansk on screen laughed. Clean shaven, brown hair buzzed shorter than it was now, worried blue eyes. He was at ease under Wainfleet’s huge arm but at the same time experiencing a small difficulty keeping up as well as the others. He was short, young. The tattoo peeking out over his collar looked older than it did now.

“Shut up!” Wainfleet said over the noise in the video. “Shut up, gonna fuckin’ sing! It’s Z’s birthday!” He strangled and shook Mansk, who grimaced and used a hand to cover his glass.

Z-Dog laughed again and said somewhere in the room, “yeah, ‘coz we need your shitty chanting to summon even more demons into the Gate!”

“Shut up, Z, you’d fuck a demon if we summoned one special,” Fike called over, woozily tugging on his ear again.

Z-Dog loomed into view and picked up the datapad, pulling it right up into her face close enough for Mansk to see every line of color in her irises. “I fuck a demon every night, her name’s Walker, happy birthday to me,” she whispered into the screen. Prager must have heard her whisper, as he hollered a long whoop and shoved a fist into the shot for Z-Dog to bump.

“We’re gonna fuckin’ sing, shut up!” Wainfleet shouted again, the top of his bald head bobbing in the background beyond Z’s huge shoulder. She snorted and put the datapad down. It slipped forward and the image went black. Nobody picked it up this time. In the dark Mansk listened to Wainfleet shout ‘Ha-!” and refuse to finish the happy birthday song over and over until the video finished with a cacophony of laughter.

Mansk patted Wainfleet’s shoulder and gave it a gentle shake. Idiot. He minimized the video and went back to the datapad’s menu, glancing at the battery symbol in the corner. 17%. An idea struck him. He went to his cot and took up his datapad, returning to his spot crouched by Wainfleet’s snoring form and balancing his datapad next to Wainfleet’s. It was tough with such huge digits, but Mansk managed to select with a pinching motion the battery and expand it to fill the screen. He remembered holding down the battery image would offer the option to share charge. He prayed. A painful second passed. Then the battery symbol wiggled and the popup appeared. Mansk smiled and slid the battery across to his own datapad, which came to life.

He had enough for one video. He swiped through the reel until his finger hovered over a thumbnail toward the end of the collection. It wasn’t long. He glanced at the power button on the side of the datapad. He didn’t have to watch it. Didn’t have to do that to himself. He tapped the video. He settled down on his knees again and folded his arms under his chin like Wainfleet, who was still sleeping hard next to him. The light from the video when it started to play reflected in the shining drool wetting Wainfleet’s forearm.

The Mansk from before adjusted the camera and waited to make sure it didn’t tip over before taking a seat on his bunk. From the floor he lifted up into his lap a guitar. He hopped it up and down on his knee and tuned the A and B strings. Mansk looked at the camera with a boyish smile. “All right, T-minus twenty minutes until everyone’s back,” he said to his datapad.

Mansk watched himself, watched that other Mansk, strum a few starting notes. He remembered doing it, remembered sitting on that rigid bunk, remembered the weight of the guitar on his thigh. The fingers of his blue right hand curled over the desk, matching the Mansk in the video. He smiled, breathed out. It was a song he’d been writing for a while, one that wasn’t quite working in the refrain, which was ridiculous; usually he found the rhythm of a verse harder to nail.

The other Mansk began the song. He played it without the words first, just to get used to it, his face relaxed, eyes half-closed, thumb rolling over the strings. From the top he tried the lyrics. They were cliché at best and cheesy at their worst. His voice wasn’t bad. It had a crackle under it, and it was an octave or two lower than his speaking voice. He went wrong and clicked his tongue when the sound twanged.

“Wrong chord, idiot. E minor.” Mansk told him.

“And that was the wrong chord,” the Mansk in the video said with a shake of his head. He frowned, closed his eyes. “What we want is…” He played the right chord. “E minor.”

Mansk watched him start again repeatedly, making the most of his twenty minutes alone. Each time he reached the chorus that was giving him trouble he laughed rather than gave into frustration. He sang the line he was having trouble with on a loop: “I won’t have a something for you, if you don’t hear me comin’ through.” He tried every predictable noun in the romantic ballad dictionary for dummies, even tried adding a quiet oh, no at the end but that was taking things too far.

The battery was dying. 2%. Mansk dimmed the brightness on the screen, but doing that reduced the battery to 1%. The other Mansk continued to wrestle with his missing word in the video until the battery gave in after the thirtieth go.

“Keep at it, buddy,” Mansk said, flicking the datapad’s screen. “But you never get it.”

He ran a hand down his face, closed his eyes, massaged his eyeballs behind his eyelids with his thumb and forefinger until he saw white stars. Wainfleet had slept through all of it. He gave his shoulder a push and rose to his feet. “C’mon, let’s go,” he said. He kicked Wainfleet’s ankle when he received no response.

Drooling, snorting, breathing heavily through an open mouth and occasionally sticking a tongue over nubby canines were all healthy signs that the Corporal hadn’t passed in his sleep. Mansk was pleased he was resting, but wouldn’t be pleased if Wainfleet spent the next day complaining about a crick in his neck, so he shoved his arm again. “Corporal,” he said, raising his voice. Nothing.

Mansk rolled up his sleeves and bent low to pick Wainfleet up. He pulled him from the chair by the collar gracelessly and hefted him awkwardly into his arms, instantly regretting it, instantly wishing the RDA had pumped triple the amount of steroids into him when he’d been cooking. He clutched Wainfleet’s sleeve as he hooked one arm under his back and the other under his knees, holding him up against his chest, arms trembling under several hundred pounds. The Hydra was like a kid’s backpack compared to Wainfleet’s heavy ass. He thought back to when he’d dragged that heavy ass through murky water as the SeaDragon disappeared below them. Wainfleet had been blissfully light in his hold. Now, it was like lifting a car. Plus, just to add an extra little obstacle for fun, Wainfleet’s stupid tail dangled to the floor between Mansk’s feet and he had to watch his step taking the Corporal to the bunks. He mostly watched his step.

After rolling Wainfleet onto his bunk, Mansk fetched one of the green blankets he’d found in Laundry and unfurled it with a snap. The material was thick and scratchy, not that Wainfleet would notice until tomorrow or if he ate half of it in the night. He pulled Wainfleet onto his side by his arm to face the back of the longhouse and threw the blanket over him. He stood away to admire his work. It looked like he was hiding a body and wanted it found.

His own bed he’d sorted a long time ago. He tossed the Rubik’s Cube and his shades onto the cot to his right and stripped off his vest and shirt, biceps aching from just carrying Wainfleet from the desk to his bunk. The magazine scrap he’d stolen from Wainfleet drifted to the floor. He tilted his head and looked at it, looked at her. The lady with the red hair. He scooped up the glossy ripped page and tucked her back into his crumpled shirt under the bed.

Lying down on his shoulder and folding his arms across his chest under his own scratchy green blanket, Mansk found himself suddenly wide awake. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. It was both normal and abnormal, to be sleeping under a roof again. He shuffled again, twisted on the hard cot, felt his lower back start to sweat as he tried to force sleep.

He spun under the blanket for what felt like the hundredth time and found himself watching the lump in the next bed which was the Corporal. Mansk sat up, then swung his feet out onto the floor. He reached over and pulled Wainfleet’s blanket down, just enough to reveal his queue. Mansk crouched as quietly as he could and lifted it up, held his breath, waited to be batted away, but Wainfleet slept on. Mansk took the chance to check what kind of terrible repair job had been done to that queue. He parted the locks and saw the gauze. Not a bad kind of terrible repair job, was his answer. It needed real treatment, but only Bridgehead could offer that. If they knew how to treat a queue injury. If they gave enough of a shit to want to treat it.

Mansk tucked the queue back onto the bunk and slowly pulled the blanket up to Wainfleet’s neck, about to turn around when something thudded to the floorboards. Mansk blinked in the dark and saw Wainfleet’s tail had fallen over the edge of the cot.

Rather than stuff it under the blanket, Mansk risked pulling it further across the floor until it was nearly lying straight, then clambered into bed himself, facing his back to Wainfleet’s bunk. He pulled his blanket up to his chin and slid his own tail out from under it, searching the ground until he found the tufted end of Wainfleet’s. He rested his tail over it and closed his eyes. Within minutes he, too, was asleep.

Chapter 11: Even the Demons Believe and Tremble

Summary:

A cruel decision changes everything.

Notes:

another hefty chapter!!!! will fix any spelling errors later! thank you for sticking around and reading!!! love yall!!

“Hey, help me with this,” Wainfleet said to Mansk, pointing at the other end of the empty weapons lockers in a room outside the armor bay. “There’s somethin’ behind here.”

Annoyingly, unsurprisingly, storage had been picked pretty clean by Sully and the Augustine loyalists after the RDA’s embarrassing departure. He and Mansk had only managed to scrounge three rusted magazines and one old AR (human sized) in dire need of servicing. They'd been forced to throw it all - a handful of dropped mags designed for smaller weapons and forgotten fifteen year old rifles left to seize up in water-logged lockers weren’t going to cut it, not with Pandora still blocking their path to Bridgehead, so pulling Hell’s Gate apart in the hunt for anything remotely resembling a weapon they could hold without looking stupid it was.

“C’mon, man, there’s somethin’ back here, haul ass, huh?” he said again, waving for Mansk to move to the other side of the locker row. It was a little pathetic, needing Mansk to help. Before the papercut to his haircut he could have pushed the lockers over with his pinky. But then again, his squad, whether made up of one man or one hundred, was his to command for even the tiniest of tasks. The Colonel had asked for a hand locating the fucking mute button on his datapad, after all, and he’d hopped in without a word. Wainfleet waited a whole ten seconds for Mansk to snap out of his trance and obey. He had been quiet all morning, but what was new?

Wainfleet forced an arm as far behind the lockers as he dared without trapping it and braced his shoulder into the curiously spacious gap in front of the wall, pushing forward when Mansk joined him on the opposite side. A dull, muscle-deep ache pinged from his shoulder to his neck, trickling down his queue right to the longest split end. It reminded him he’d slept all wrong the night before, slept in his fucking vest. What kind of idiot crashed in his vest? The same kind of idiot who kept wearing the vest even after the area had been secured. And, weirdest of all, after each time he rolled an uncomfortable shoulder or cracked a stiff bone, Mansk seemed to retreat further behind his dark lenses.

“Heads up!” Wainfleet said after a loud grunt. The lockers tipped, teetered, groaned, then leaned forward and hit the floor with an almighty clang. Mansk’s ears swiveled like satellite dishes and he lifted his head away.

“Damn,” Wainfleet said, nursing the back of his neck and crouching near the wall.

The na’vi hunting bow which had been tucked behind the lockers was almost as long as he was tall. Wainfleet reached down and picked it up, half-expecting it to burst into a cloud of dust the moment his fingertip brushed the grain. The wood was smooth, dark, remarkably light in his hand. There was hardly a bump on its surface. It was brand new. The string, whatever it was made of, hadn’t rotted, wasn’t even discolored with age. Beyond a tanned skin wrap tightened around the center of the bow’s curve and a few uneven carvings at both ends, it was simple in design. Simple like the na’vi. But there was a warmth to it, or maybe it was drawing that warmth from his hand. Wainfleet stood, ignored the burn in his knees, and tossed the bow from one hand to the other before that warmth spread too far into his skin. “Weird thing to hide,” he said, hooking a finger around the string and plucking it. “Who’d even want this?”

“Remember Morgado?” Mansk said after a pause, crossing his long arms.

Wainfleet went still, ran his palm over the bow, which sat slack in his loose fingers. He raised his gaze to Mansk, stared at him from under his wide brows. Mansk’s lenses were huge, black eyes. They both remembered Vic Morgado. “Didn’t want the Doc finding his cute lil trophies,” Wainfleet said.

“She’d’ve hit the roof,” Mansk replied.

Wainfleet flipped the bow around and held it at arm’s length, the fingers of his opposite hand tensing the bowstring. He coiled his forefinger and middle finger around it and yanked back on it. He pulled his arm past his head until the string started to creak and the bow’s ends curved. His bent elbow quivered with the effort of keeping it poised in that position. It felt strange to hold it, to be trying to use it, even as a joke. Nobody on Earth who wasn’t a Parker Selfridge cared about archery anymore. Wainfleet couldn’t remember the last movie he’d seen which showed an arrow fired by the big hero. All that olden days shit from the Dark Ages didn’t matter, wasn’t even taught in schools. What was a fucking bow and arrow to an AMP suit? To a spacecraft? To the ability to bring someone back to life with a click of a file transfer?

When the string bit into his fingers and started to turn blue skin white, Wainfleet turned and aimed at Mansk, an eye shut. Mansk stared at him without so much as a twitch of a muscle. Wainfleet let the string go and it hummed through the air to snap back to its original vertical position, vibrating the rapid beat of an acoustic song. The imaginary arrow he’d loosed struck Mansk right through one of his shades lenses. Corporal Wainfleet couldn’t miss a shot like that. “Gotcha,” he said. He threw the bow to clatter onto the fallen lockers.

Mansk smirked.

 

Unsuccessful in their search for ammo and weapons (which weren’t made from sticks and string) in the armor bay, their attention turned to the hangar. Mansk hung back at Wainfleet’s left elbow, his glasses sitting on top of his head now they were back to navigating dark corridors.

As he stooped and moved down the hall to the hangar’s interior access door, Wainfleet felt his queue begin to smart again, tip to root. Sweat boiled his face and heated his hairline. He ran a hand over his hair, (fucking hair!) and scratched at it, dug his nails into the hard bristles, feeling the heat beneath his fingers. Dropping his hand before Mansk caught wind and parroted his favorite phrase, Wainfleet picked up the pace. The moment he turned his walk into a trot, the cut on his calf woke up. His trot became a half-hop until he got used to it and hid it with fake anticipation for their visit to the hangar. In retrospect he should have left gauze spare for that. And for the cut on his forehead. But, shit, the gauze was more like a display only sticker for all the good it was doing.

The further they ventured, the more the corridor’s condition deteriorated, and not because Pandora’s plantlife had infested it. Scorchmarks blackened the buckled metal walls. Dusty debris and shrapnel littered the floor, playing the role of huge, sharp crumbs leading their way. Wainfleet heard the quiet shfff of Mansk’s fingers drawing clean lines through the old smoke damage behind him. Sully. Sully and his little buddies. When they reached the inner door to the hangar and squeezed through it, the extent of Sully’s handiwork was laid bare.

Before them lay a gray graveyard. Rising to full height, Wainfleet trod a cautious path through the totalled, slumped remains of Samsons and AMP suits. None were still in one piece. He ducked under the drooping rotors of a bisected chopper, touched a hand up to the sagging blade, clicked his fingernails on the metal. The echo tinked tinked tinked to the high ceiling. Or what was left of it.

Part of the roof was gone over by the big bay doors which led to the shuttle runway. It looked like a kid had taken a can opener to a tin and cut downward and outward. Wainfleet craned back his sore neck to watch the white sky through the missing chunk. A cluster of stingbats exploded from one of the jagged edges of the blasted wall and swirled away to become black dots.

“Told you he wrecked the place,” he said to Mansk, who followed, his mouth a thin, grim line. “Sonuvabitch. Took all the good shit and blew the rest.”

The AMP suits turned the hangar into a battlefield's aftermath. Their human shapes, their hands, the fingers curled, relaxed. Dead men draped over each other, ripped and left. Wainfleet picked his way around their fallen arms and detached legs, watched his toes around shattered canopies. They were still giant machines. He’d gained nearly three feet in height but the AMPs remained titans. He took a wide step over an AMP hand the same length as his torso, turning to briefly walk backward and beaming at it. Closing his fingers into a weak fist, Wainfleet imagined the dead AMP’s broken digits curling to mirror. He remembered every move, sensed the ghosts of the foot pedals, knew exactly where to position his arms when wielding a GAU. He tested himself, put his hands out in front, trigger finger bent, furthest wrist the correct length from his hip. Easy. Shit, what he’d give to suit up again, just for old time’s sake. His current body was failing, what could be better than leaping into a body which worked? Jake Sully could attest to that one.

He stopped near an AMP lying on its face. Na’vi arrows stood from its knee joints and back, the old feathers black and red and blue and shades he’d never seen before landing on Pandora. But it was the color on the AMP’s leg which interested Wainfleet more, made him motion for Mansk to move up. He approached, kicking debris as he went, and crouched, sliding a hand through the dust on the AMP to reveal the faded paint of customized artwork. His eyes traced a familiar decal depicting a speeding bullet, straight lines flying behind it comic-book style, piercing and exiting a realistic (to a degree, but he was no medical doctor) drawing of a heart, which was filled in with blue. Splashing from the bullet’s point were huge cartoony droplets of blood, also in blue. He grinned and gave the AMP a pat. Danielle Casey.

“Find somethin’, sir?” Mansk asked.

Wainfleet stood, a little too fast, his queue hitting the AMP and sending another fun little pang of agony into his skull. He widened his eyes through the pain and coughed. “Yeah,” he wheezed.

“Weapons?” Mansk asked again, his eyebrows rising over his shades.

“Only the biggest.”

Mansk stared. Wainfleet could see him resisting a shrug, caught his shoulder lifting.

“This,” Wainfleet said, “is Danielle Casey.” With great difficulty, Wainfleet tried to turn a heavy crawl up the huge metal leg into a youthful hop and clumsily took a seat on the AMP’s back, avoiding the arrows. He yanked one out, making sure to keep his hands and arms away from the bone arrowhead, just in case that neurotoxin the na’vi were so fond of didn’t have a shelf life. He remembered the arrows being a lot longer.

“Danielle Casey,” Mansk said. Wainfleet sensed an unspoken question mark.

“Danielle Casey,” Wainfleet repeated, pinching a rigid arrow feather between two fingers and drawing them upward. Not a single barb fell out. “Made Trude look like Barbie, man. Didn’t you ever… y’know…” He looked down at Mansk and formed an ‘o’ with his finger and thumb, sliding the fletched end of the arrow slowly through the circle. “Stud like you?”

Mansk faced the floor and shook his head, his hands on his hips.

“Not once with her? Shit, man! She fucked you, know what I mean? And right here, too, if you were a good boy,” Wainfleet said, leaning forward and hitting the AMP with a tnk from the arrowhead.

“What, in the suit?”

“More times than her bunk. Canopy up and two people fit in real snug.” Wainfleet felt his tail thwack from side to side between two arrows behind him thinking about it, about her. Dani was an insane lay; better than Ellie, better than Zara, better than Juliet and her girlfriend who could do that thing with her legs. Dani was selfish when she wanted to be, used him up and sent him on his way afterward with an ass-slap and a ‘nice job.’ She liked to crack open her beers one-handed when they’d only been halfway there, take a swig and spill it down her neck, spitting and cackling over him. She liked to swap a cigarette during to shake up the panting rhythm. She always came with a close-mouthed grunt, stayed quiet to listen to him do all the squeaking. She fucked like the filthy deadbeat uncle people didn’t want over for Thanskgiving.

Mansk huffed a laugh through his nose and pushed his sunglasses up. “You two ever have the AMP on?”

Wainfleet watched Mansk on the ground, time-traveled back to the same location in 2170, and grinned. “Oh, man, we should’ve! AMP suit doing all that and walkin’ around!” Wainfleet laughed, miming the thrusting and then tipping backward, laughing more. He tilted his head and raised an ear to listen to his laugh rise through the hole in the hangar roof. “She’d fuck me like this,” he added once his lungs had air back in them. He twirled the arrow in his hand, spun it through his fingers, nodded to himself with a self-assured smile. “Yeah, she’d be the first lookin’ to blow me now it’s blue.”

His smile lost control of its curve. Maybe, in that fantasy world where Dani Casey still wanted him, he’d ask her to tie her long, brown ponytail up into a messy bun and pull her cap’s peak down so he could pretend her blue eyes were brown, too.

Mansk shifted glass which might have been part of Dani’s collapsed AMP’s canopy away from his feet. The crackle made Wainfleet remember where he was for the second time in twenty seconds. “Must’ve made it home if her AMP’s back, so maybe you can reawaken her thing for huge machines double her size.” Mansk said it in the same way his mom would say it. Jesus Christ. He needed to switch the subject up.

“She did make it back, didn’t she? Hell yeah,” Wainfleet replied, slapping his palm on the AMP under him. He swished the arrow through the air and span on his ass to slide down the other side of the AMP where there were less arrows to slalom through. He landed on unsteady legs and rested his free hand on the AMP.

Pausing to recover breath after an effort like an old man and waiting for the brain ache to go from volcanic eruption to smoldering in the background was costing them far too much time. They needed to be back at Bridgehead yesterday. The Hell’s Gate detour was his idea, sure, but he’d hoped there would be more than nostalgia to collect.

Looking at the metal his hand covered was automatic. Underneath his glove was more paint. He straightened his posture. He didn’t recall Dani having commissioned art near the canopy, and he would be the guy to know. There were too many NO STEP graphics and yellow and black warnings there for anyone to squeeze in any customization. He pulled his fingers across the mark. There was a lot of it. It trailed from the rim of the canopy to underneath the AMP’s chest. People didn’t line up to have brown painted over their AMPs, for obvious reasons, though he had heard one new pilot, after meeting a pair of thanators in the jungle, shit himself. That guy could definitely own a shit stain decal running down his AMP’s legs.

Wainfleet sighed as silently as he could. That was a lot of blood. Pints of it.

“Sir?” Mansk asked on the other side of the suit.

Maybe they’d wheeled Dani straight to Med. Maybe they’d had time to do that, patch her up, then cart her off-planet, save her life on the way home.

“Sir,” Mansk said.

Wainfleet cleared his throat and picked his way through the trashed parts cluttering the floor back to Mansk. “Move out. There’s nothin’ here.”

 

Mansk had wanted to stop at Augustine’s link bed room. Christ knew why. Some bullshit about his final human memory. Wainfleet had been too busy convincing himself he was choosing not to listen on the way there, and now that he stood with his neck cricked at an angle again in the low-ceiling lab, he wished he had listened and denied the request.

Augustine’s little haven was emptier than Med. The circular central console was dead, a bland gray without the cute little green and orange interfaces filled with stupid science facts about na’vi brains glowing all over it. His na’vi brain was killing him, and he didn’t need a PhD to know. Every single link unit was gone. They’d yanked it all out in a real hurry judging by the deep gouges the beds had made on the grating. The dweebs would have used avatars at first to help rip stuff from the floor and walls double-time until it was time to move their units out. There they were, in his mind’s eye, forced to use their legs to run rather than swivel chairs. They shouted, they fell over each other, bumped into avatars, furiously unplugged everything, zapped themselves in their rush. Then, once everything was taken, the lab shit, the Med shit, the artillery, Sully let off the explosives in the hangar. Asshole. Coward. Wainfleet daydreamed a version of events that had Sully trapped under an AMP in the blast and losing the use of his legs all over again to cheer himself up.

“Ain’t nothin’ helpful in here, man,” Wainfleet called over to Mansk, who had decided to check every single corner. “Hey! Let’s move.” He tapped the arrow from the hangar against his neck.

Mansk stood from his squat and dusted his pants at the knees. He seemed to have a sixth sense for knowing where the ceiling was, always stopping with his head bowed right before he hit it. He had something in his hand. Wainfleet knew it wouldn’t be anything useful. There was nothing useful to men like them to be found in a science classroom.

“What you got?” he asked Mansk, who pushed his shades up with his middle finger. Funny.

Mansk held up a wrecked book millions of pages long. The cover had a red band across the middle. Wainfleet narrowed his eyes for a better look, and also used that eye-narrowing to express his disgust. He’d seen that book before. The avatar scientists were always flicking through that blue brick. “What you want that for?” Wainfleet asked.

“Might be useful,” Mansk said, “to know what we’re dealin’ with out there now that we don’t have Spider.”

“We didn’t need the Spider kid, we don’t need this. Lose it.”

“Who taught you how to catch an ikran, Corporal?”

Wainfleet glanced at the battered book in Mansk’s hand, which made the huge na’vi bible look like a pocket diary, then to Mansk’s shades, which might as well have been his real eyes. Dammit. “Fine, keep it, but I ain’t reading anythin’ written by a guy who spells Fred with a ph.”

Mansk already had his head bowed and his shades facing the frayed, yellow pages. Wainfleet watched, wrinkled his nose, and hoped the book’s bindings peeled apart and sent every page floating to the floor.

While Mansk drifted behind with his flat nose in the book, Wainfleet went to the door. Who cared if this place was his newest human memory? All he’d done in here was kick off his boots and lie in a tanning bed which stank of silicone and the person before him’s bad breath. Mansk had done exactly the same. Nothing to cherish there.

He rolled the arrow over his neck again as he walked. Mansk was following, he could hear him doing the I am reading and not looking where I am going shuffle. Their search for weapons had come up short, but the day wasn’t wasted yet. He tapped the arrowhead to his lower lip as an idea tried to form, then realized what he was doing and spat, rubbing his mouth with the back of his glove. It was embarrassing, betrayed everything he used to stand for, but they needed all the help they could get.

“Mansk,” he said, stopping at the hangar’s blackened interior doors. “I got somethin’ I need to check. I’ll catch up.”

Mansk nodded, saved his place in his new book with a finger and headed back to the longhouse, leaving Wainfleet to duck into the hangar for a spell and pay the armor bay one more visit.

 

The arrow thunked into the ragged metal square of Samson flank he’d recovered from the hangar. It hit right in the corner and the panel wobbled. Wainfeet lowered the bow to his leg and pursed his lips at the bad shot. He grunted. The air was still. The clouds had rolled in, but it hadn’t rained, visibility was good. Wainfleet raised the bow again, a new arrow nocked, the red and black feathered one, and he drew the string back with three fingers to his cheekbone. He had the string tense enough to keep the arrowhead steady. Was he supposed to close an eye? He couldn’t even remember the title of the last movie he’d seen with a bow and arrow in it.

He aimed and released the string. The arrow struck too high on the metal sheet but was a tad more central. He had the green arrow left before he had to walk across the grass to collect the rest, try again. What was he doing? What was he doing shooting arrows? What was he doing standing in the ruins of Hell’s Gate with blue skin and yellow eyes and a tail shooting arrows?

‘I want you in on this Project Phoenix thing, Lyle,’ the Colonel had said that day, his wrists crossed on the table and his scarred shoulders up.

“Ah want yew in on this, Lahyle,” Wainfleet said to himself, his lip lifting, his fingers twitching on the drawback. “Lahyle,” he repeated, closing an eye, squeezing his teeth, loosing the arrow. The feathers brushed along his cheek quick enough to sting skin. He watched the arrow career through the air fast as breath.

Almost dead center. Fucking hell. Wainfleet huffed out a laugh and rubbed a gloved hand over his hair. He retrieved the arrows, deciding to stand further away this time, closer to the hangar doors. He exhausted his handful of arrows, one after the other, no pauses. No shot was perfect. A scope was better. An AR was better. He picked up the arrows again, returning to his spot with them clenched in his fist.

“Take the shot, Lahyle,” he said in an exaggerated North Carolina drawl. Arrow top left corner. “Take out Sully, Lahyle.” Arrow bottom left middle. “Don’t wait till he’s on board, Lahyle.” Arrow middle right corner. “Save lahves, Lahyle.” Arrow bottom right corner. “You’re team leader, Lahyle.” Arrow bottom center. He switched voices, back to normal, but he spat the words through a tight grimace. “Save Prager.” Arrow missed. “Save Lopez.” Arrow missed. “Save Z-Dog.” Arrow missed. “Save Alexander.” Arrow missed! “Save Mansk.”

Bullseye.

Wainfleet lowered the bow with a gasp, fingers aching and red, sweat prickling his forehead and sliding down the back of his neck. He blinked, swallowed, smiled. Damn. Right in the middle. Not bad. He laughed, looked down at the bow, slipped his hand over the wood. Thing packed a punch. Even the arrows he’d shot way off had slammed into the thin metal with ease. Lethal shit.

“Corporal.”

With a violent thump of his pulse, Wainfleet jumped and rounded on Mansk. “Jesus,” he said through a nervous laugh he couldn’t choke back in time, fumbling with the bow. “What’re you-what’re you doin’?”

“You didn’t answer on the comms,” Mansk replied. He spoke like a worried kid finding his dad after spending hours lost in a mall. Wainfleet saw in his hand that book. At the same moment Wainfleet rolled his eyes, Mansk lifted it and flipped through a few cardboardy, ratty pages. “Y’know, the na’vi, they draw the string back a lot more, at least uh, yeah, half a meter. And they twist their wrist the other way.”

“Why should I give a shit about that?”

Mansk tilted his head. His shades slid down his nose and Wainfleet saw an accusing but concerned glare peering over the lenses. A real glare. One of Mansk’s ears flicked. Probably a bug.

Wainfleet blew out a snort and walked past him, slinging the flat of the bow into Mansk’s chest. “Have fun practicing your lameass na’vi whatever. See you back at camp.”

Mansk caught and clutched the bow, turning to watch Wainfleet leave. Wainfleet could sense his beady yellow eyes on his back, or his blank, emotionless shades. Both had his tail up. He was as four-eyed as the local beasts. “It’s okay, sir,” Mansk shouted after him.

Wainfleet swung his head to one side and fixed Mansk with a stare, still walking. “It’s okay what?” he called back.

Mansk breathed a wheezy laugh, tried a smile, held up the bow. “To like it.”

Wainfleet slowed his pace, felt his ears twist, felt his eyes grow so wide he was catching gnats in them, felt something constrict and unfurl at the base of his stomach, wherever that had ended up after flipping over. He kept that slow pace all the way back to the longhouse, and by the time he reached it, evening was draping Pandora in purple.

If he’d been wearing his boots he’d have kicked in one of the longhouse’s porch struts. Instead he sat on the top step and stewed. He hunched forward with scuffed elbows on scuffed knees. Mansk’s comment was spinning in his brain, sticking to the sides like a wall-of-death, pressing his words into the bone. Shit was confusing, all that become the enemy bullshit. Extreme method acting was for marines, not mercs. It was for Jake Sullys and Colonel Quaritches, not Lyle Wainfleets. The Colonel, he’d been the one ordering them to do all that na’vi shit, had them nodding in a row like a real bunch of assholes. What had they really managed? Nothing. They’d learned six key phrases in Na’vi, all relating to finding one man in Metkayina territory. They’d stuck to the SeaDragon’s galley menu as much as it had been possible. They’d kept themselves armed with pistols and ARs, right to the bitter fucking end. Dead dogs couldn’t learn new tricks.

He switched to planting an elbow on his thigh and propping his chin on his knuckles. A long wailing caw made him flick his eyes up.

They’d learned to ride banshees.

That was something it was definitely okay to like.

Wainfleet saw their banshees roosting in the remains of the obstacle course. They weren’t doing much, content sifting through the broken beams and clacking their dinosaur faces. He stood and limped down the steps, closing the distance with his hands up ready. The green banshee ignored him, hopping away, but the blue one snaked its head through the air and twisted its head, eyes fixed on him.

“Hey,” Wainfleet said, falling into that same wary half-crouch he’d tried the last time he’d hooked up for all of three seconds. “I know we been on a break, but you wanna give this another go, baby? I’m feelin’ a lot better if you are about all of this. I’ve changed, I swear.”

His banshee flared its chest nostrils, clicked its teeth together, rattled a noise in its neck. Who knew banshees could smell lies as well as Sadie Thomson from English class? It even looked like her for a second there. It was all the gums. Jesus, why did he bother trying to get her back?

He moved nearer, slipped his queue over his shoulder, showed his banshee he’d wrapped electrical tape around the damaged cable. It didn’t waddle away, so he took that as permission enough to give its neck brace a cautious pat. The tendons under the filthy gear, which was still sandy around the belts and pouches, bunched and tensed. The banshee shook its huge head, issued a low growl. Wainfleet assumed that was it, rejected again, but it didn’t crawl off. Glancing around to make sure Mansk wasn’t about to sneak up on his ass again, Wainfleet closed an eye, took up one of the banshee’s head whips in his hand and hooked up, praying it went better than the hook-ups he’d had with Sadie Thomson pre-all the lies.

He couldn’t watch the little pink tongue finger tentacles clasp each other. It was weird enough feeling it. The banshee snorted. Wainfleet creaked open his eye and discovered he was still standing on two feet, which was good. The last time he’d been skewered through the brainpan and whipped in the gut. He grinned. “All right, yeah bitch, see that!” He hoisted himself up into the saddle and the banshee underneath him wriggled with his excitement. A swift brain hyah got it moving.

The banshee launched forward with a lunge of its front wings and kicked off with its back claws, blue and yellow wings flashing as they pushed down to the earth and lifted them from the old runway. Wainfleet drew in his knees and bent over the banshees neck, one hand on the grip connecting its tendrils. Oh yeah, he had missed this part. He left his other hand loose, felt the hand of the wind pull it behind him when they picked up speed. They rose higher, air rushing through the banshee’s chest, rushing through his chest. The banshee’s rippling wing-fingers were his, slicing the mauve sky.

As the sun set and plum clouds darkened, blue flecks began to glow on the top of the banshee’s head. His arm matched, a cyan line of glinting freckles gleaming from wrist to shoulder. They were up, higher than he and Mansk had been arriving at Hell’s Gate. The roofs were the size of datapads under his stirrups. Wainfleet seated himself now they were drifting, taking them further out and over the black briar patch of the refinery. He leaned to one side and swooped lower with a tilt, circling the highest stack. The Grinder was quiet down there. There was no clunking, no beeping, no roaring, no screeching. He could hear nothing but the rustle of the jungle outside the fences. The banshee piped. Wainfleet gave its shoulder a slap and smiled, inhaling a long breath of fresh air for the both of them. He pressed his ears closer to his head and took them up into the night.

This time they climbed high enough to feel the humid heat of the jungle turn cool and thin. An eagerness slipped up from banshee to rider. “Okay,” Wainfleet said when Hell’s Gate’s roofs were the size of Mansk’s Rubik's Cube, “then let’s go.”

They dove. The banshee pulled in its wings, a missile bombing down into the dark. At maximum velocity, at maximum thrill, the banshee let out a scream, and Wainfleet joined it with a long, throat-shredding whoop that he refused to stop howling until his burning lungs were the size of grapes. He lay his torso close to the banshee’s neck, forced to close watering eyes at the speed they reached, until he opened them, the banshee’s wings unfurling at the same time to throw them straight back up into the air with a whiplash jolt before a flutter brought them to the ground.

His legs wobbled when he landed and disconnected, his queue hurt when it swung around to hit his hip, but who cared? Flying himself after all those days sitting on Mansk’s bird playing the miserable passenger on the subway, was such a surge. He gave his banshee’s big jaw a push and it chirped a banshee-laugh, leaping back to its nest in the obstacle course.

There was a small fire going outside the avatar longhouse. Stuck in the dirt next to it was a vegetable skewer. Wainfleet breathed a laugh and wondered where the big cardboard box with the string attached was.

He’d been about to head over when a feathery touch tickled his shoulder.

Spinning on his heel in the grass and brushing down his arm, Wainfleet found himself face-to-something with one of the jungle’s floating jellies. He was close enough to see its little feathery ears or arms or feet. It was a bright white against the dark. He’d seen them before, always far away, always eager to get away from him if he happened upon a group when on jungle recon. The middle bulb of the thing was spiny. Augustine had never given a concrete explanation for whether they were animal or plant, just like the rest of her theories, all filled with ‘maybe it’s this,’ or ‘perhaps it’s that.’ They called it a seed, one from the Soul Tree he’d died attacking, but it appeared to be moving of its own accord now that it was fanning little tentacles around his nose. It was the blue dreamcatcher Grandma hung in his trailer bunk when he was five. That stupid thing stuck around until it was ripped through the window during that one nasty hurricane which had taken Grandma too.

The seed bumped into his shoulder again, so he raised his arm and watched it hop over his dragon tattoo until it stopped on his palm and twirled. Wainfleet drew his face close to it, clawing his fingers inward to keep the sprite from jumping out of his hold. It pushed its arms down with a pulse but didn’t rise away from him. It spun clockwise. Wainfleet tilted his head to the left, and it spun anti-clockwise in a little leap. He smiled and reached his other hand up to risk a jab at it. It warped when he poked a finger between its arms. It was soft, light, and the glow from it rivalled any match or lighter.

“Hey, man,” he said to it, using his finger to twist it around into another pirouette. “What’re you doin’?” The sprite flared its feathery skirt and he raised his other hand. It floated a gentle arc to land on his right palm. The little guy did a boogie and Wainfleet looped his tail in time with it, laughing. He was ready to bounce the sprite back to his left hand again when his ears rose to pick up a noise behind him.

Wainfleet spun like the sprite to see Mansk standing cross-armed on the longhouse porch and watching him play with the stupid little seed. Mansk’s new best friend, the big blue na’vi book, was sitting in the crook of his elbow. It looked more well-thumbed than it had a few hours ago. Of course it did.

The sprite still hovered in his hand, its silky little arms wafting over his thumb, tugging on it to continue the game. Wainfleet glanced from Mansk to sprite and felt a red hot burst of stupidity spear him in the stomach. Again. He’d been caught practicing with the na’vi bow and now he’d been caught messing around with a na’vi bug.

Staring down at the sprite, watching it rotate happily in his hand, Wainfleet let a sneer take over his face and crinkle his features. He breathed in a sharp inhale and lowered his clawed fingers toward his palm. The sprite pushed its feet upward with a flail. Whatever it used to keep itself afloat, whether it was a breeze he couldn’t feel or something to do with the gravity, it wasn’t quick enough to utilize it, unable to avoid pinching fingers catching it by an arm and dragging it down again. Wainfleet almost paused, almost let it go when he felt its velvety frongs searching for an escape.

He looked up at Mansk. Those small eyes studied him back from over his shades. They were both waiting for the other.

Wainfleet squeezed his fist closed.

The sprite’s spindly arms jittered through gaps in his fingers. He crushed it in his fist again until his nails stabbed skin, until the sprite’s tendrils went still. He released his hand and saw the little bulb in the center of its body had been concertinaed. His palm had sweated so much the crumpled sprite stuck to it, a thin, white spider. He wiped it down his pants leg until it dropped off. It didn’t make a noise when it fell into the grass. A wind flew between Wainfleet’s ankles and flipped the woodsprite over. It flopped, lifeless.

With a job well done hum, Wainfleet strolled to the fire and ripped the skewer from the ground, biting off the first vegetable. Mansk was staring. Wainfleet chewed uglier.

“Why’d you do that?” Mansk asked as Wainfleet passed him on the porch.

“Do what?” Wainfleet asked with a cheek bulging with food.

“You didn’t have to,” Mansk said.

Wainfleet rolled his eyes and went indoors. He stopped when he saw Mansk had leaned the bow and all of the arrows he’d torn from Dani’s AMP suit against his bunk for him. “Your book say I didn’t have to?” Wainfleet said with a shrug, swallowing his mouthful and stripping off another. He rested a shoulder on one of the longhouse’s wooden pillars, eyebrows up. Inside it was almost too dark to see, but enough of the bright Pandoran night beamed through the windows to light his freckles, and the ones vanishing into the chasm of Mansk’s frown.

“What? No, I’m sayin’ it.” Mansk followed him into the longhouse with his head tilted back. Was that agitation under Mansk’s calm tone?

Another crunch. The veggies were good. “Oh, I’m sorry, I just thought, y’know, the book was in charge. I break a sacred book rule?”

Mansk slung the book onto a bunk. “I’m only usin’ it to help. We’re alone out here. Wanted to put a little work into understanding this place so it doesn’t kill us. Like the Colonel said.”

Wainfleet laughed, chomped down another chunk from the kebab, spoke between chews. “We don’t need a book about the natives, man. Drove ‘em off with their tails between their legs. Even Sully. ‘Sides, all that bein’ na’vi shit was for gettin’ Sully, for all the good it did. Don’t gotta do that anymore. Our new mission is report back to Bridgehead, move on from this fuckin’ mess.” Wainfleet slid the last square of cooked vegetable from the skewer with his teeth and swallowed it whole, felt a sharp, burnt point scrape its way down his throat. He waved the empty skewer at Mansk. “We’re RDA, and RDA don’t need one of those Augustine books to get around. RDA don’t ever go around. We go through.”

“Fine,” Mansk said, throwing up his hands. “We’re RDA. We don’t need help. Got it, sir.”

Wainfleet used the skewer to unstick vegetable skin from between his lower teeth, then frowned. “Hell yeah, we’re RDA. We’re RDA first.” He gave himself an inward pat on the back for that one. Very Colonel Quaritch.

Mansk murmured something and went to his bunk.

Wainfleet flicked the skewer at him. It pinged from Mansk’s arm. Mansk grunted and carried on. Wainfleet wasn’t going to let a mumbled comment from Mansk go. “Hey. What you say?” he asked over.

“Nothin’.”

Wainfleet pushed off from the pillar and went to him, arms folded. “Asked you a question. Private.” He shifted from foot to foot as he waited, stuck his tongue out and held it between his teeth, jerked his head to one side.

Mansk sighed and straightened up, looking at him. “I said that I was tired and wanted to turn in. Sir.”

“You didn’t say that.”

Wainfleet saw Mansk clench his teeth behind his cheek. Mansk raised a hand and squashed his eyeballs behind their lids before dropping both hands to slap against his legs. Jesus, Mansk was frustrated. “I said yeah, sure look RDA, don’t you?”

“What?” Wainfleet drew closer, faced his ears as forward as their muscles allowed, pretended he hadn’t heard. Private First Class Mansk, Private First Class Mansk, was giving him shit.

Mansk’s ears and tail were going a mile a minute as he huffed and shuffled on the spot. It was the stupidest thing Wainfleet had ever seen. Man was about ready to take off faster than a Kestrel with that tail rotating behind him. “Heard me. You look more like the cover of that book than the RDA poster boy you think you are,” Mansk said.

Wainfleet laughed. He uncrossed his arms, ran a hand over his bristly hair and laughed hard; a real loud caw of a laugh. He turned and walked down the aisle between the bunks, then rounded on Mansk again with a finger pointed under his nose. His finger shook in time with his pounding heart. “That shit don't matter. This bein’ blue thing? Means to an end. Nothin’s different.”

“Nothing? Really? So practice with a bow, the atokirina, that’s not different?” Mansk’s voice kept its steadiness. That was almost worse than a shout.

Wainfleet really needed to stop himself laughing every other sentence, but Mansk needed to stop saying shit that was so laughable. “The what? The atoki-what? You talkin’ it, now, too? Fuck that mean anyway? Atok… You got a Na’vi-to-Mansk-to-English dictionary in the back of that book? Huh?” Wainfleet took a frantic breath, surprised to feel his heart still racing, as if he actually cared about this quarrel.

“Would that make you read it?” Mansk was getting into a stride now. His tone was loud but still.

“No, it wouldn’t, because I’m not a na’vi.”

Mansk’s shades flashed. “There’s no ‘a’ before na’vi, Corporal. It’s just na’vi. Maybe you should go back to your locker and take another look under your pin-up girls, find that mirror you were so scared of yesterday.”

Wainfleet tossed his head aside, closed his eyes, only to open them again and glare across the room to Mansk. A warm breeze slipped in through the windows and pulled on the mosquito nets, turning them into white flags. No way was Corporal Wainfleet about to wave his own, but he was fresh out of clever retorts. Hadn’t really had any to begin with. It was time to pull rank fast. Pecking order was the only ammo he had against him. “Watch it, Private. You’re oversteppin’ the mark.”

“Sorry, sir,” Mansk said, lowering his chin.

Wainfleet took a breath and put his hands on his hips. Christ, his fingers were jumping. His breathing was short. He’d barely kept up in that skirmish. Mansk would never have dreamed of arguing with him in front of the squad, in front of the Colonel. He was losing control. He was losing control over one soldier.

Mansk lifted his eyes over his shades and spoke again. “Sorry that I forgot you were human.”

Wainfleet snapped his head up, which sent spurs of pain snaking up the base of his queue. Control lost. Completely.

“Know what?” Wainfleet said, holding up a finger, “you know fuckin’ what?” He reached his other hand to his throat comms and unclicked the clasp, tearing it from his neck with a stinging rip and yanking off the earpiece. “English? Na’vi? You can shut the hell up talkin’ both to me tonight, all right?” He threw his receiver onto the nearest bunk and stalked to the longhouse’s parted metal gates.

“Corporal!” Mansk said as he passed, chasing him. “Where are you-”

“I’m goin’ to the base.”

“You shouldn’t-”

Wainfleet stopped short of the veranda and turned again, forcing Mansk to skid to a halt a foot away. “You the Corporal?” he asked, nostrils blazing, eyes huge, muscles aching in their battle to keep his enraged expression becoming a wince.

“No-”

“Then stop givin’ me orders, asshole! All you’ve ever done this entire time is tell me what to do! Don’t do this, don’t do that! What is it, you think I’m softer than the Colonel so you can lead instead? I don’t have to listen to you. You listen to me!” Wainfleet sucked in a sharp breath and held it behind his tongue. Unadulterated hatred unwrapped itself in his stomach and grew in size until it was all that was left inside him.

Mansk’s eyebrows were low behind his sunglasses. His thin mouth was bunched up, his teeth on edge behind it. “The one time we listened to you, you nearly got us both killed. Sir.”

Wainfleet snorted out the air he’d trapped. He’d done exactly what the Colonel would have done had he faced those sneaking reef boys. Get them first. It wasn’t his fault he wasn’t up to standard. That was Mansk’s fault!

Mansk made the mistake of continuing. This time, he shouted, and it made Wainfleet’s ears disappear against his head.

“All I’ve ever done this entire time is save your STUPID ass!”

Wainfleet lunged forward and took a swing at Mansk’s cheekbone.

Mansk dodged his fist, curving to the side in time, so Wainfleet grabbed him by the vest instead and swung him around, dragged him downward and slammed a heel into his knee pad to knock him from his feet. Mansk cried out and hit the deck shoulders first. Wainfleet refused to let go of his vest straps, going down with him and pinning him to the boards.

Something deep in Wainfleet’s chest flared as he glowered and loomed over Mansk, whose glasses sat skewed on his surprised face. It was something strong, maybe a voice, but originating somewhere else, not from his mind, not from his mouth. It came from somewhere he didn’t know, felt more alien than feeling the tail for the first time, than feeling the bald skin of the queue for the first time. It was the anger, it had to be, but there was more to it, more underneath it, and it forced its way out whether he wanted it to or not.

As the feeling clawed its way up through his neck, climbed the tendons, and made a grab for the back of his throat, he bared his teeth against it. No, he bared his teeth for it. He peeled back his lips to show his blunt canines because to clamp them shut would be worse. His pulse lurched as it built. The feeling reached his tongue and flattened it like an RDA dozer on its way out.

His nose wrinkled, his eyes half-closed, his ears were horizontal, every white tooth was on show, his tail a rigid ‘S’ over his back. He gripped Mansk’s vest so hard all of his fingers hurt and began to turn red under the tight blue skin. The noise wasn’t his voice at all. It had no accent, no inflection, no human tone. It was a sound played over his open mouth. A long, snarling hiss issued from a new place in him he didn’t know he had.

Mansk stared up at him with a single, huge, yellow eye.

Wainfleet’s hiss dissipated into a pant, and he loomed over Mansk for a full, stunned minute, knowing his eyes were as wide as the one Mansk was fixing him with. He closed his mouth, swallowed, as if doing so would keep whatever that hiss had been at bay forever, then peeled his fingers away from Mansk’s vest and held both quivering hands up, palms out, surrendering. A shaky smile shivered at the corner of his top lip. His lungs disagreed on a pace for catching his breath, so he suffered their switching between shallow and deep.

As he lifted himself up to his feet, he kept his hands out and down toward Mansk, who stayed exactly where he was, thank Christ. Once he’d staggered right away from him, he moved zombie-like out of the longhouse, down the stairs and into the night.

 

Wainfleet squeezed his teeth together as he stalked the corridors of Hell’s Gate to the barracks. If he opened his mouth, just to breathe, would he hear that noise again? He raised his fingers to his lower lip, accidentally drooled on them, drew a shining string of spit away on a trembling finger. Why hadn’t he just screamed and sworn in Mansk’s face? Why hadn’t he punched him? He spat on the floor and fell into a run which tired him out the moment he broke into it.

Auto-pilot took him to his bunk, and doubled as a welcome distraction. He’d last been to his bunk only six months previous, but even if sixty years had passed, the route to his own little three foot wide sliver of Hell’s Gate was scratched into the inside of his skull. With the base’s electronics and systems down, it wasn’t hard to open the door. It gave with a shove and a clank which suggested the door would never close again.

The room was even pokier from his new vantage point. Pokier and grayer. He bent low and squeezed inside, only able to sink to one knee facing forwards. It was hard to twist around. The ceiling was low, the door he’d just forced his way through was narrow. He shook his head, blinked, distracted himself by ducking and peering into Fike’s bunk on the left. It looked the same as it had at three thirty in the am the morning they’d all been booked in for the recom MRI. A few of the pictures Fike had stuck to the wall were missing, including a copy of the photo of the both of them jabbing their fists in the air on the Valkeyrie ramp. He leaned a hand on the bunk at his back and turned to stare over his shoulder at it.

Mitch Carby’s bunk was empty. He smirked. Mitch Carby had made it home. And snatched those photos to take with him. He’d been a good kid.

Wainfleet rose up until the ceiling stopped him three quarters of the way to standing. Another little burst of heat microwaved him. The room was tiny. He looked anywhere that wasn’t up. His bunk. His stiff blanket. He knew every single scar on the safety rails, knew every little scratch on the wall. He slid a hand over the sheet, awkwardly turning around for a better look. Was that all Lyle Wainfleet was? Glossy porno mag clippings, scrawls in black marker on a dull metal wall, the same covers as everyone else? At least the Wainfleet who’d aimed playful kicks at Mitch Carby’s face as he walked past wasn’t whatever he was now, hissing and snarling and spitting. Well, maybe with Dani Casey. But that had been his choice. Well, maybe. She really had been an insane lay.

He shrugged and focused on his footlocker rather than the noise he’d made at Mansk. But another noise had started, somewhere high above his head. He cocked his head and flicked an ear upward to listen. The low groan couldn’t have been pipes or vents. He ignored it, crouched and placed a hand on the locker containing his stuff. Nobody had bothered wrenching it open to go through it. They all knew he had nothing worth shit. His hands fumbled with the catch. His gloves were soaked with sweat. They were both warm and cold with it. Was the ceiling lower? Was the room smaller? It really was a tiny fucking bunk room. He looked up again. The sound was moving. It was a rumble. Heavy. Like someone with size one hundreds was galumphing a floor up.

The ceiling started to bulge downward.

Wainfleet fell back on his tail, limbs hot, hands clutching at a bunk each on either side of his heaving chest. The ceiling bowed, crunched, crumbled into itself, forming deep folds as easy as scrunched paper. And above it, that noise, that roar, like a huge animal, a sound that made his ears want to fold in on themselves and never hear again. The closer the ceiling reached down to the top cots the louder it became, the louder the thing above him pressing its great foot down became.

The walls clanged and popped, started to push the bunks toward him. Glass shattered. Where was the glass? What was that beeping? Wainfleet blinked through sweat and scrambled backward, squeezing between the bunks crushing his legs and hips and ribs. They hurt. They hurt. Metal was sticking into his flesh, chopping it up. A hand wobbling with tremors flew to his shoulder to unclip the belt holding him down. If he could unstrap himself he might be able to-

His soaking wet back hit the corridor wall.

Wainfleet tore at his vest, shrugged out of it in a panic and clasped a handful of his shirt over his drumming heart. He gasped out and coughed, stared across the hall to the bunk room. It was just a room. A room with a door, space for footlockers, a pair of bunks on opposite walls, a ceiling. Poky and gray.

He turned to press his cheek against the cold metal of the wall, felt the heat radiating from his skin warm it as he stood slumped. He eyed the bunk room again, waited, then twisted to face the wall. His forehead slid over the surface it was so coated in sweat. He drove his fist into the wall to push himself back onto the balls of his feet, but instead of standing away, he drew his hand back again and hit the wall harder. And again. He hit the wall hard and yelled out, kept going. The panel dented. The fabric of his glove split over his little finger. Each strike sent a judder through him that exhausted him further and drove him to punch the wall with more force at the same time. It’s Mansk. Do what you should have done to his face. He didn’t stop until the dent was a cavern. Finally he slid his hand down the wall and collapsed in a heap on the floor with his arms folded over his head.

---

Mansk breathed out and pressed his lips together, closed his eyes, waited for his thumping pulse to fade. He twisted his fingers until the joints of his bones complained, didn’t stand from the bunk until his tail fell still and the bumping blood in his wrists steadied. But then he thought about the Corporal and went right back to grinding his jaw. He kicked a bunk so hard on his way out to the porch it hit another cot and sent them both clunking against the wall.

The wooden rail squeaked when he wrung it. He leaned over it and imagined brown timber was a blue neck. After a moment he relaxed his hands and heaved in Pandora’s balmy night air, slowly eased it out again. The fire he’d used to cook the skewers crackled a dim orange at the foot of the steps, but the light of the stars and the galaxy was enough to see by. Enough to see Wainfleet’s expression after he’d made that noise. The Corporal had peeled back his lips, let his teeth jump out and hissed at him. But it wasn’t that part he was rewatching in his mind’s eye.

Mansk had heard a na’vi hiss before. He’d heard the Colonel hiss at his ikran before mastering it in the floating mountains. Z-Dog had combined her hiss with a yowl when it was her turn, more banshee than the banshee. Mansk had been quiet himself, too afraid to stutter even a swear, but he could tell the capability was there somewhere, somewhere in the same place his terror of the huge red ikran resided. It wasn’t the Corporal’s hiss and the teeth and the scowl that Mansk kept repicturing. It was the face Wainfleet had made once his snarl untwisted and his brow smoothed. When Mansk watched his features slowly return to normal above him, inches from his own face, Lyle Wainfleet had looked so lonely.

The safety fence pinged.

Mansk looked up and whipped his shades off, shoulders tensed, pulse up again for the millionth, tiring time. He could hear the fence wavering and still clattering its links. He ventured down the longhouse steps. Something black and quick slipped past the dying fire. Then another. One of the dozen shapes which passed by slowed, then stopped.

The viperwolf shone wet and black in the red glow of the flames. It lifted one of its four forepaws, flexed its strange, pink hand-foot and flapped up its mouth. It eyed him, then whooped a yip and returned to the darkness.

More followed it. More than Mansk had ever seen in a pack. Not a single one went for him. That special resistance to Pandora’s immune response which made him so indispensable as a weapon against the enemy was holding fast. But there was something deliberate about the trail the viperwolves skipped along. All of them had trotted as organized as ants in a line, and they’d headed further into the Hell’s Gate site rather than skitter back into the jungle upon spotting him.

Mansk jogged through the grass, leaving the fire behind, to watch the horde of black shapes swim quick as eels through the sea of vegetation toward Hell’s Gate’s habmod.

He almost didn't do it. Almost didn't care. He was almost happy to let the viperwolves go, let them trundle through Hell's Gate to do what viperwolves liked to do best to self-obsessed RDA poster boys. Almost. He sighed, lifted a finger, and pressed his comms. “Corporal, you have multiple v-dogs inbound to your 20.”

In the longhouse, sitting tangled on one of the bunks, Wainfleet’s comms echoed Mansk’s warning.

Chapter 12: Pandemonium: Part I

Summary:

A consequence.

Notes:

fair bit of alien animal death in this one but it's avatar and you've seen that before in the movies so let's go!!!

(i also haven't done a very good proofreading job on this one lmao i'll get it later!)

Wainfleet woke with the painful urge to piss.

He shouldn’t have let himself fall asleep needing to take a leak, but he’d been too afraid to stop dog-tired in a cold corridor and hose down a wall in case the warm steam from the flow tempted him to take a seat in it and doze off.

After a couple of jolting heartbeats spent staring into an unrecognizable environment, he remembered where in Hell’s Gate his weary ass had ended up. Then, along with his heart, his bladder started to beat, too.

The Condominiums had been a long walk, made longer due to the lack of working lights, working doors, working elevators, working legs, working brain. With the elevators out of action he’d been forced to haul himself up pitch black stairwells until his tail turned as floppy as his hurting queue and his thighs were the weight of cinder blocks, but shit had it been worth it. Why try and curl up in a tiny bunk room when Selfridge’s Alaskan king was right there? He’d had just enough time to blearily laugh at the euphemism before thumping face first onto the stripped mattress. How long ago had that been? A half hour? One minute?

Selfridge’s apartment served as a strange little museum overflow for his office, piled high with na’vi shit that Wainfleet would be embarrassed to be seen standing next to. Or sleeping under. He blinked up through the darkness at the hunting bow dangling from the ceiling over the bed. Who could possibly think all of those bracelets and necklaces were cool? Or worth anything? They were pebbles and shells and feathers. Everyone had seen that already in Earth museums. Then again, Vic Morgado probably had his own illegal na’vi museum hidden somewhere on base. Maybe there was a store room deep in the lower levels lined with rotting queues like ties in a closet. Wainfleet's wouldn’t look out of place hanging with them. He pictured Morgado tapping his chin and humming, standing in front of his collection. Which disgusting, decomposing braid shall I tie to the seat of my Swan scout car today?  

He was lying on his back, extremely aware that the door to the apartment’s luxury ensuite was sealed tight. He’d discovered it was closed while exploring blindly with hands out in the black, looking for the bed. The one fucking room he needed. Granted, the amount he knew he’d piss would fill the pan, maybe even spill, and the water had long been shut off so it was only good for one go, but at least it would feel nearly normal, to piss in a toilet.

He’d been pissing and shitting anywhere that wasn’t a bathroom for nearly two weeks. Sometimes he refused to shit for days for the express, petty reason there wasn’t a stall to huddle in. That, and every time he squatted over a log out in the jungle he swore the entirety of Pandora’s insect population perked up their fifty feelers and sensed a new dark hole to rush into. What he imagined alien bugs could do to his insides turned taking a luxurious dump into an intense time trial, into a new fucking Olympic sport. Power shitting. The fear was justified. What if there was a bug which evolved specifically to crawl up asses, armed with specially-developed bowel-pinching pincers? And it laid eggs all the way along the guts, which grew big as lightbulbs before they-

Rolling over and changing positions on the bed didn’t help the ache in his lower abdomen, and judging by the way his eyelids were pinned open, he wasn’t about to drop off to sleep soon enough to snooze through the feeling and sweat it out instead. He turned his head on the mattress and stared at the ensuite door. Who locked the bathroom but forgot to lock the main access door? What was in there? Some secret stash of amrita Selfridge was injecting so he could be an annoying little rat boy forever? What was up with that shit, anyway? Looked like piss. And with that thought he returned to holding back exactly that.

The discomfort cramping above his groin forced him to finally slip off the bed. His body was heavy again, but he made it move him to the half-open door and through to the long, dark corridor outside. He would have found a cozy little corner to wet if his sense of smell hadn’t improved twenty times over. The hallway was fine. Maybe Mansk would slip like a kid’s cartoon character on his yellow puddle if he tried to find him out here.

Wainfleet uncomfortably shuffled away from the apartment entrance with stuttering steps until his feet were too unresponsive to walk him anymore. He stopped and faced the wall, feeling for it with his hand so he could place himself a decent pissing-length away from it. It was almost identical to the wall in the barracks. He should have relieved himself back there rather than save it all up for the place he was trying to rest in. Still, he was here now, and nobody was looking. He’d let it go drunk on a busy sidewalk once, no hands, no aim, no mercy for expensive shoes.

He unzipped and leaned forward, put the flat of his left forearm against the wall’s cold metal surface and pressed his forehead hard against the tribal dragon’s back, eyes shut. The cross around his wrist scratched tiny thin lines though old dust. Below him the dam burst and the instant relief the strong pour gave had him releasing a deep, satisfied groan at the same time. He pissed for so long he needed to spread his feet to make room and keep his feet dry. It was difficult in the blackness to guess where it was pooling; already a big toe had not been quick enough to lift itself out of the flood. If he hadn’t been so exhausted, so wracked with agony, so busy breaking the record for longest, noisiest pee break of all time, so wrapped up in how good it felt he considered idly stroking himself through it, he might have spared a vague thought for the irony of the only living thing within Hell’s Gate being big and blue and using its once-hallowed and fiercely defended halls as a latrine.

Someone down the hall laughed.

It was a tittering giggle, almost polite. Wainfleet breathed in and dropped his arm, eyes open, ears up, piss still trickling. Another chortle, and joining it the click clack of something skittering over the floor. It sounded like nails drumming on a bar’s counter, nails clinking against a wine glass. The noise echoed, made it seem like there were thousands of little claws tapping along the corridor toward him. He smirked, letting out a tired hmph of a laugh. First the Colonel, then walls closing in, what was it now?

The clckclckclck of a lot of nails grew louder, grew more numerous. The snickering was closer, issuing from somewhere a few yards off at knee height. Wainfleet didn’t move, ignored his rising pulse, kept pissing until he was empty. After the last drips, he hastily shook off and shrugged his shoulders, twisted his neck aside, searching for whatever it was watching him. It felt like more than two pairs of eyes.

His eyes weren’t great in the dark, not as great as he’d imagined they’d be that first night he’d experienced as Wainfleet version two. No natural night vision for the recoms, it turned out. He supposed the Pandoran nights were so well lit with glowing plants and the huge blue planet taking up half the sky that na’vi didn’t need to worry about decent sight after sunset. Or it was that pinch of human which held them back. Either way, he couldn’t see shit. All he could do was face his ears as far forward as his skin permitted, their tips quivering with the strain.

Taking advantage of the tense silence, he stuffed himself away and rezipped. The second he moved, the tap of nails, claws , started again. The laughing started again. It was a noise not even a man weighed down by drowsiness could mistake. A shaky breath cooled his parted lips. “Aw, shit, no,” he whispered.

V-dogs.

Wainfleet took a step away, backing toward the apartment door, planted a foot slap into a warm, wet patch. His heart was racing again, failing again. He reached a hand up to grasp clawing fingers over his vest and scraped the chemlights stuck to the left breast.

A bolt of dozens of claws cracked over the metal floor and the laughing was barking, snarling, shrieking.

The chemlight snapped. The hallway turned a vivid red. Six writhing viperwolves screamed. Twenty four eyes flashed green.

Wainfleet dropped the chemlight to splash into his puddle and ran.

A viperwolf slinked eye-blink-quick alongside him as he fled and hurtled itself into the air. In the scarlet chemlight’s flare Wainfleet saw its bared teeth and gummy top jaw shine white and dripping. It hit him in the leg, closed its mouth around his kneepad, crunching the plastic with relentless gnawing. The points of its fangs pricked his flesh underneath it. Wainfleet yelped out and they both went sliding front-first to the floor. He rolled onto his back, used the momentum to flick the viperwolf from his leg, slamming its body into the wall. Another took its place, leaping forward over his legs, all four front feet outstretched, all teeth and tongue outstretched. Wainfleet drew up his knee, broken pad hanging off it, and struck the animal in its gut. He punted it backward. It slapped into one of its friends with a yipe, head tendrils and too many limbs flying.

Scrambling to his feet, Wainfleet went for the apartment door again. His queue jounced over his back, each whack of it shooting thorns into his aching body, which was dangerously close to giving up running and letting him die. One last push, a few more pumps of his stumbling legs. He was four, three, two paces from the apartment, the six v-dogs still clattering behind him.

The nearest viperwolf snapped and caught the longest tufts of his tail hairs between its incisors, ripping them out when Wainfleet twisted and brought a hard fist down on top of its head. A hollow thud sounded and the viperwolf squeaked, collapsing with all six legs splayed. The v-dog loping with its nose right on the other’s tail tripped over it, flipping over its head and kicking, black shadows of cycling legs darting across the walls.

Wainfleet had bought himself a few seconds, which was enough time to slip through the apartment’s frozen, half-closed door and grab a desk next to it. Display cases crashed to the ground, na’vi merchandise scattered over weaved mats. Wainfleet tilted the desk longways and smashed it up against the gap in the door. He held it there, felt a jolt through his arms as a viperwolf bounced from it, and risked leaving to drag a chest of drawers over, then a small coffee table, having to use the red light from the hall filtering through the spaces between furniture to guide him around the room.

When the jolts against his barricade became weak bumps and the viperwolves switched to digging and whining, Wainfleet rushed to the bed and went for his machete and pistol. The next time he took a piss inside a deserted base miles wide all by himself, he was going armed. It was a good fucking job he’d slung his vest back on or Wainfleet version three was cylinders of shit emerging from several viperwolf bungholes. If those things even shit like that. What were v-dogs doing climbing all the way up to the condo levels? Had he really pissed that loud? Why had they shown the second night and not the first? Was Mansk stuck in the longhouse? Was Mansk dead in the longhouse?

He wrenched off his chewed right kneepad and checked his mag. He had enough. Next he had to check in. He whipped a hand to his throat, looking for the comms. “Ma-” he said, clamping his fingers around his bare neck in realization, eyes wide. “No, no, no, motherfucker!” He stood and tore the sheet from the Alaskan king, pulled the mattress up, yanked the entire bed away from the wall. His throat comms was still in the longhouse. His ears lowered. A swathe of sweat drenched his shirt. Fine. No Mansk. He could do that. He didn’t need him. There were only six dogs.

Before he lined up the pistol through a slot in his furniture fort, he swiped his tail with his free hand and gave it a glance over, just in case. Missing hair, a little blue and pink bald spot. He rolled his eyes and dropped it, only to sense it hovering over his shoulder to steal a peek at what happened next. At least someone was excited.

The viperwolves prowled in the hallway, scratching and scuffling at the propped table. Wainfleet aimed. The chemlight was dying out there in the corridor, its five minutes of surface-of-the-sun brightness dwindling. The lurking dogs started to disappear into the dark. Wainfleet exhaled, long and noisy, licked sweat from the corner of his mouth, and waited for one of the v-dogs to go still.

One of the dogs at the back slowed its pacing to watch its pals, snout lowered. Wainfleet could just about make out its skulking shape in the black, lit by the fading chemlight. It paused at the patch of wall Wainfleet had hosed down minutes ago. It huffed a sniff at the stain, then cocked a back leg and sprayed over it. Wainfleet drew his head back, nose wrinkled, thin eyebrows meeting in a frown. Asshole. He narrowed an eye and squeezed the trigger. The shot screamed into the viperwolf’s head, knocking it backward. The shadow of a separated tendril flapped through the air and arced a splash of blood. The rest of the viperwolf cadre screeched, jumped around each other, rushed his barricade in a flurry of slapping feet and clattering claws.

Wainfleet aimed again. A v-dog turned its panting mouth into the red glow, the flaps of its lips lifted, its wet teeth and pink gums shining white. A round took the top jaw clean off with a meaty splat and the body dropped. The next animal swung its neck about to face him. Round in the chest. Took a couple of stiff kicks to die. The fourth viperwolf hurled itself at the desk, bent it forward into Wainfleet’s shoulder, nearly sending it slamming down into the room. Wainfleet pressed his bruised arm against it to keep it propped and stuck his other arm through the gap, finger down on the pistol’s trigger, a continuous burst of deafening rounds cracking through the hall, drowning v-dog yowls.

He stopped, heaved in air, the last round case clicking to his feet. Nothing moved outside. With a tired grunt and weak arms, he shoved furniture away from the door and ripped the desk down, stepping over the apartment threshold into the hall. 

The chemlight was fizzling underneath the leathery black body of the viperwolf missing the top half of its head. Running his hand down his sweating face, Wainfleet picked a cautious path toward it though the sprawled bodies of the dogs, unable to avoid wetting his toes in thick blood. It stank; the blood, the bodies, the open mouths, and somewhere in the middle of that foul stench was the scent of his own piss. Everything stank more now, mostly the bad shit. Wainfleet fluttered his eyelids against the reek and reached the light. He hooked a foot underneath the dog’s thin ribs, rolling it over, its numerous legs limply sagging over each other. The hallway bloomed red.

The chemlight was almost out, but he couldn’t waste another on this place. He spun it in the fingers of his free hand and gripped it tight, giving the closest dead viperwolf a disgusted stamp on his way to the stairwell. It thumped. The soft, smooth flesh was still warm on his heel. He spat on it and hurried his pace to the steps which led back to ground level.

Three stairwells down Wainfleet slipped and grabbed the banister, swinging around into it and half-collapsing. The chemlight tumbled from numb fingers and wheeled downward in a long fall, flashing red as a SeaDragon alarm until it landed and rolled away to glow out of sight far below. He clung to the rail, pressed his forehead against the cold metal, hauled air in and out with ragged breaths. His grasp on his pistol tightened. Last thing he needed was to lose that to a clumsy fall as well. He raised his head and peered over the edge into the dark. The fine hairs on the tips of his ears trembled.

Four floors under his feet, the chemlight slid back into view.

The four-fingered paw which had kicked it stepped into the light; a long, inky shadow stretching behind it. The viperwolf chattered and oozed smoothly up the first flight. A black wave of countless v-dogs followed, the final gleam of the dim red chemlight disappearing underneath their jostling, fluid bodies.

Wainfleet puffed out a long exhale, stood up, and waited.

 

---

 

Mansk chased the viperwolves into the mouth of Hell’s Gate.

They were fast. He barely had time to go for his AR balanced against the longhouse gate, and it was only due to their numbers that he managed to reach the straggler bringing up the troupe’s rear and follow its flapping flat tail inside the habmod. They raced too quickly to allow him to stop and pepper their backs with rounds, always turning corners or vanishing down shallow steps too speedily for him to get a good aim in.

Vegetation on the metal grating underfoot pulsed a blinding, pale green beneath the viperwolves’ rushing paws, lighting their way through the facility. Their excited yaps and cackles rang to and fro across the walls. They took another corner at top speed. The v-dog at the very end of the line twisted its head around as it powered behind the others, looking Mansk dead in the eye. Memories belonging to the Mansk from before leapt in his chest as he caught the thing’s gaze. He possessed mental images of sprinting through tall grass, of boots kicking at jaws on the backs of Swan scout cars, of watching bolder v-dogs throw themselves at the perimeter fences. This v-dog kept running, turning its toothy snout back to face its pack, pushing its six legs harder to keep up.

Mansk copied, forcing himself to move faster. The ground was sharp, uneven with roots and vines and hard stalks from glowing plants, which he kicked aside and trampled in his pursuit. Spines and spikes jabbed his toes in revenge. He slung his AR onto the back of his hip and refused to let burning lungs and aching ribs and smarting calves slow him. He was back in the tiny halls of Hell’s Gate, and his shoulders were feeling it.

The viperwolf ahead had to have been older, or weaker, as it was starting to fall behind. Mansk spurred himself forward and managed to grasp it by the tail and yank it backward. The v-dog snapped its head around, huge tongue lolling over its teeth, and barked at him, skidding to a stop with a flash of bright green light. Mansk jumped back, letting it go and staggering over his own heels, going to one knee to stop himself from falling. The viperwolf faced him, lowered its head, the long, fleshy tendrils waving behind its back, and raised its split top lip, showing off the hard pink mouth underneath.

Mansk fully expected it to launch itself at him, had his hands ready in front to catch its jaws, but the v-dog closed its lip shut and spun with a hop and a lash of its tail, spraying glowing grass. It vanished around another corner, calling for its pack to wait up.

He got to his feet, brushed away the grass the viperwolf had showered onto his pants, and caught his breath.

Viperwolves hadn’t given a shit about any member of Blue Team on that first failed hunt for Sully. Z-Dog had smirked at the sight of her namesakes flitting back into the greenery following a brief investigation and wary growls. He and she exchanged an impressed nod about it. But viperwolves would absolutely give a shit if some asshole pulled its tail. Mansk knew he would, now that he had one attached to his own ass. Why hadn’t it gone for his throat? Something was driving the dogs to press farther into the base and ignore everything else, even assholes like him.

They were searching for the other asshole like him.

He raised a hand to his neck, ran a finger along the hard, worn plastic of the comms. Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. There was no fucking Jesus Christ. Not for the Corporal. Crushing a dandelion on Earth inside a glass biome did nothing except make scientists weep for the survival of the genus. Crushing one on Pandora mailed hundreds of living razor blades directly to your coordinates.

Mansk set off again, full tilt as best he could under the low ceilings, AR digging into his side as he fought his own body to move. He listened for viperwolf barks and howls, ears forced so far forward it almost felt like he was racing them to be first over the finish line. He tripped more than he ran, his chest tight with the thought of what he might find when he finally caught up with the v-dogs. What if he discovered them all crouched in a circle, heads down, chewing, tearing, fighting over strips of blue striped flesh?

The rattle of gunfire joined the viperwolf howls. Mansk halted, his soles scratched to hell, the soft glowing ripple of green under them not soothing in the slightest. He held his breath for a little silence and twisted his ears back and forth, waiting for his keen hearing to sense a direction. More rounds spat, somewhere to the left. Mansk took off again, regretting holding his breath now that he had to haul air back in and out again to keep his legs from giving under him. He wanted to press his comms and tell the Corporal he was on his way, wanted to hear that stupid, gravelly voice wheeze back something like: no sweat, I got this, it’s like lettin’ Dani do me after she’s had a bad day!

More than that, Mansk wanted to hear the Colonel’s voice over the radio inform he was en route to their 20, tell him in his reassuring, deep tone that everything was under control, now, boys, you sit tight. You just sit tight, now. We gotcha.

He kept running.

 

---

 

The skull on his upper right arm drank blood.

Wainfleet clapped a hand over its grinning teeth to stop it declaring it had no fear and squeezed until it ached more than the scratch. He was nearly black on ammo. The viperwolves in the stairwell had eaten it all up, swallowed every round right down their slimy gullets until eventually a handful had been left to kick and throw on the way down from his high ground.

Out in the hallways he was running blind. As he moved he punched and snatched at the luminescent plants lining the walls which mocked him with their gentle luminescent oranges and purples. “Fuck this place!” he spluttered, expression creasing as he sniffed a nosebleed back up. He turned around to run backward when he heard more v-dog heckling. The entire fucking viperwolf population was gunning for him. Why? Why?  “I just wanted to take a fuckin’ piss!” he shouted down the hall. Viperwolves laughed.

His stooped running was more hobbling. His clawed arm ached. His queue was starting to act out again and stung with every new step. So much for the nine foot three, eight hundred pound, carbon-reinforced, RDA-patented killing machine. The thing the Colonel had said was extremely hard to kill was being killed pretty easily.

Through the semi-darkness, the glow of a pink plant with coiled petals illuminated a wide door ahead. He needed to hole up somewhere again, check ammo, rest, find a way to slip outside through a broken window, find Mansk. His stomach twisted around itself. Mansk. His stomach unwrapped. Mansk could do what he wanted. What was Mansk but a na’vi-loving idiot who couldn’t keep his mind on the mission? Wainfleet decided he was glad he wasn’t wearing his comms. Nothing worse than hearing Mansk’s urgent little voice asking him if he was good, if he was feeling okay, if he needed help. Fuck Mansk. Mansk clearly didn’t need him, so he didn’t need Mansk. Mansk was dead to him.

Wainfleet stopped in the doorway, one hand clawing at his collar, the other shaking by his side and flicking blood. Before him lay a gleaming Hell’s Kitchen. With a laugh he headed into the empty cafeteria, the wet, squelching algae under his feet spreading a green light through its wet clumps as he walked. It was cold. Wind whistled through the scar in the glass of the huge window. His ears turned against the chilled breeze, turned to hear the viperwolves scuttling through the corridors.

There was enough time to grab the nearest bench and push it along the floor toward the big, smashed window. The bench’s feet carved long, glowing lines through the algae to reveal the old metal beneath. He did it for every bench, yanking them away from the wall with grunts and groans to throw them all together into a new barricade, this time with every table in the commissary. He vaulted over it, realized he’d made a mistake vaulting over it, nursed a bruised shin and sprained shoulder, and crouched behind his bench-shield and prepared.

A few pistol rounds, his machete and the smaller knife strapped to his right thigh. That was it. His heart was blocking his neck, thumping as fast as the viperwolf paws clamoring down the corridor. Wainfleet shook off a shiver and let the air whipping through the window at his back cool the sweat on his neck and the blood painting his arm scarlet.

The manic hiss of clinking claws entered the cafeteria. Wainfleet puffed out a sharp breath. He straightened up in his crouch, balanced his scuffed elbows on the table’s edge and tucked his finger into the trigger guard. “They only serve Wainfleet raw in here, bitches,” he said through his teeth, squeezing the trigger and sending a round tearing through the mouth of the nearest, leaping viperwolf.

Five more shots. A viperwolf went spinning to the algae, green light exploding in a wave under it like a broken holotable. Four. A v-dog fell over its own legs and clonked into a table, wobbling his cover. Three. Viperwolf lost half its face and went snarling madly into a dog next to it, snapping what was left of its jaws, the other dog rearing and swiping. Two. Viperwolf down to five legs and screaming on the floor. One. A hole right through a v-dog ribcage, dropping it soundlessly. Black on ammo.

Wainfleet flew a hand to his back and brought under his chin his machete, drops of sweat landing and rolling down the metal. The first dog that reached its front legs up and hooked its open jaws over the table won a blade through its chin. Wainfleet twisted and pushed, jamming the machete into its hard palate. The dog’s eyes rolled, its muscles tensing.

A v-dog sailed over his barrier. He yanked the machete from the first dog and brought it down over the neck of the one which had just landed in his lap, cutting through its tendril and neck with a single sweep. Where was Zhang to flank? Where was Prager to take point? Where was Lopez to push forward? Where was-

Two viperwolves slid through a gap in his barricade and forced him to push the dead dog from his legs and drag himself backward on his tailbone away from them, pulling a bench in front of him like a swinging door. Both struck it with a jolt that pummeled his arm. He was boxed in tight. Where was the Colonel to tell him what to do next? Where was Colonel fucking Quaritch? Wainfleet pressed himself against the wall, watched viperwolf claws tear down the bench, watched drooling mouths shimmering with saliva strings part with a squish, watched as those strings of spit shook with the rank gale of their growls.

AR gunfire crackled to the ceiling, immediately followed by viperwolf shrieks. The two bearing down on Wainfleet flinched. Wainfleet lurched forward and drove the machete into a mouth. The viperwolf chewed on it until something at the back of its throat cracked and it went motionless. He ripped the machete through the viperwolf’s cheek and sunk it into its friend’s pair of eyes, forcing it to lie on its side, its legs thrashing. Rounds thudded into dogs on the other side of his wall of benches. He kept shoving the machete down into its skull, cutting bone like a cake until it too stopped moving.

Silence fell. No claws, no snarls. Not even the shuffle of a twitching viperwolf leg. He waited. Still nothing. Wainfleet risked standing. His shoulders heaved, his ribs pulled, the long scratch down his right arm twinged. He panted through an open mouth and felt a confused frown form, felt his grainy eyes narrow.

In the middle of the room, surrounded by dead viperwolves, toting an AR, breathing hard, swinging a tail and wiping his brow, was-

“Colone-”

Mansk adjusted his shades and turned to face him. He lifted his chin in a jerky nod.

Wainfleet’s puzzled frown smoothed. With a relieved sigh he pushed aside one of the benches, squeezing through the gap, and wiped his machete on his pants leg. Heading over, he held out his hands to show off the pile of v-dogs carpeting the mossy floor, topped it all off with a proud chuckle.

Mansk had a small mouth. Usually it sat under his nose thin as a thread, rarely turning upward unless there was something really funny going on. Sometimes he smirked, he’d grinned a couple of times, and if you were Wainfleet, you could encourage even the stoniest of motherfuckers to curve a smile. Mansk was not smiling with that small mouth.

Wainfleet approached, unsure if he ought to treat Mansk as a viperwolf which had learned to walk on two legs after falling into the blue stuff porta potties were filled with. He slid his machete back into its sheath on his back with a painful arm and stopped in front of Mansk, who twisted his hold on his AR.

“You gonna say it?” Wainfleet tried through a sarcastic laugh he’d not meant to let escape.

Mansk stared, then lowered his AR, bumping it against his leg. He exhaled, tilted his head, shades slipping down his nose, and moved past Wainfleet to inspect the benches by the window. With a creak of his AR, he leaned over the tables and glanced back. Was Mansk impressed or disappointed by the amount of viperwolves Wainfleet had managed to take out by himself? He took his shades off and tucked them into his vest, so maybe he was impressed. Not that Wainfleet was looking for praise from Mansk. “You really want me to say it?” Mansk asked.

Wainfleet pressed his lips together into a line thin enough to put Mansk’s small mouth to shame.

Mansk rolled his eyes and threw his AR up onto his shoulder. He shook his head and flipped his ears. His voice was a balanced combination of sarcastic and monotonous. “You good, sir?”

“Hell ye-”

The window at Mansk’s back exploded.

Something the size of a car leaped through the metal and glass, showering shards and beams. Thick as columns and black as smoke, the huge front forelimbs of a gigantic, glistening beast landed with a base-shaking rumble in front of them. Its sturdy rear legs came next, followed by a wide, swaying tail covered in armored plates, which slapped to the floor. The monster’s teeth jutted black from its pale mouth. It didn’t have a top lip to cover them, the big bastard was permanently ready to kill. Around its long face was a frill decorated with rounded dishes and thin waving fingers, all of them shaking and flaring when it bellowed.

Wainfleet knew what this thing was. His blood was ice water in his veins. If he hadn’t already pissed before the viperwolves, his pants would be wearing everything his bladder was able to store.

Mansk turned, AR loose in his hold, and swung it up into his other hand, finger fumbling for the trigger.

Wainfleet went for him. He went to grab the back of his vest, or maybe his sleeve, shit, he’d grab his tail if the thing hadn’t been wagging from side to side faster than the arm of a 3D printer. He dug his toes down into the slippery moss, pushed off into a run as fast as his tiredness let him, reached a sweaty, grasping hand out.

The thanator was faster.

It bore down upon Mansk with a deep scream. Mansk pulled the trigger. The rounds sang harmlessly past the thanator’s frill as it closed its jaws around his middle. There was a tear, a creak, a breath, a quiet unf of a strangled groan. The AR in his grip clattered to the floor. The thanator twisted its giant body and flicked its head, unclasping its jaws.

Mansk hit the left wall with a hard thump and rolled down it, leaving a line of blood. He slumped limp to the ground, face to the wall, still, silent. A wave of light flickered through the waterlogged grass around his body, then went dark.

Wainfleet felt Mansk’s name catch in his dry throat, felt his heart wedge itself into one of the gaps between his ribs. His outstretched hand froze, fell.

The thanator blasted air from its rippling chest gills and fixed yellow eyes on him.

Roaring the shout that was meant for Mansk’s name, Wainfleet skidded through the wet moss for the dropped AR and scooped it up into his arms. The thanator raised a sharp foot and swept curled claws through the air at him. Wainfleet ducked, rolled, scrabbled to his feet.

And ran.

Chapter 13: 2152

Notes:

sid toy story voice: it came! it finally came! the big one...............

as a gesture of goodwill for how SLOW THIS UPDATE WAS this is 12,700 words lads lmao

the character Corporal Garcia lovingly borrowed from the amazing @twiddlesprocket. Read Semper Fi for the COOLER GARCIA!

Seventeen years ago.

The bulldozer groaned and clanked to a hissing stop, its huge caterpillar tread crunching one last stumpy shrub into powder.

Mansk stopped with it, peering up at the huge mud-flecked behemoth stretching forty feet above him before a white, sunless sky. He hopped onto a mound of freshly-churned dirt and planted a boot over a sturdy root, leaning back and listening for the dozer to start up again. It was still light, and his bulldozer escort shift was nowhere near over.

“Private Mansk!” Vic Morgado called from the gunner’s roost of the Swan scout car as it swung around the bulldozer’s rear. It sped over, the car’s six huge tires swiveling and spraying fragments of shattered branches. It braked hard and skidded to a halt in front of Mansk’s little heap of earth.

“Hey, Red,” Morgado crooned through a tight smile which turned the old scar slashed through his right cheekbone white. He was high on the gunner’s turret, putting Mansk balanced on his dirt pile at direct eye level.

Mansk glanced down, the shudder spreading between his shoulder blades persuading him to focus on the Swan rather than hold Morgado’s dark gaze. “Sir,” Mansk said. He accidentally lifted his eyes to catch Morgado’s. There was mischief in the shadows curving his crow’s feet.

“Jump on,” Morgado said, “got a special lil job just for you.”

Mansk took a deep breath, his mask whooshing and misting when he huffed that breath back out, and stepped from jutting root to the Swan, swinging down into the empty passenger’s seat next to a guy called Frasier. Or maybe this guy was French. Frasier-French tipped his chin at him, his smirk a mirror image of Morgado’s.

They drove a wild, juddering path to the other side of the dozer, spinning muck and spiky shards of shredded jungle vegetation into the air. Mansk was glad of the mask when speeding bits of stalks and leaves flew into his face, harmlessly ticking and clicking from the perspex. Frasier-French swung them wide and hit the brakes, throwing Mansk (on purpose) toward the windshield. If he hadn’t slammed his arm up against the windshield frame and braced to cushion his face, he’d have smashed his mask.

Mansk had dutifully endured three days of this treatment. Two more days of bulldozer babysitting and maybe they’d stick him on perimeter patrol for a respite. Unless Morgado and Frasier-French got to him first, and they stuck him in the morgue for a different kind of respite.

Morgado leaped down from the gunner’s seat, slinging himself around and onto the dirt expertly with one hand on the back rail, fluid as a Pandoran panther (Mansk couldn’t remember what the big, black, lion alien was called, had only had two seconds to study the slide before the brief moved swiftly onward).

Mansk slid out of the passenger’s seat, wobbly as a Pandoran horse foal (he’d forgotten that name, too) and followed Morgado’s pointing hand. Stuck in the dozer’s tread was a small, straggly tree double his height. It looked like a stump of cauliflower compared to the dozer, looked like a fucking daisy had slipped into its tracks. That had stopped it? A toothpick?

The rest of the babysitting squad rolled over to check out what was happening. Mansk knew one of them was called Roswell; the blond man with the tattoo of a Chrysler Building eagle on the right side of his neck. If he hadn’t hated him so much Mansk would have thought it pretty funny, a guy called Roswell ending up on another planet.

“Here, Red,” Morgado said. Mansk turned just in time to feel the heavy body of a chainsaw thump him in the gut. He’d half expected the chain to be spinning. Morgado pressed it into him, forcing him to step a foot back with the push. “Chop ‘er out.”

Mansk heard a whirring. Frasier-French was poised to extend the Swan’s gunner seat to full height so it could play cherry picker. Roswell chuckled, his laugh muffled behind his mask.

“Can’t the dozer just pull forward and knock it out? Shit’s permalloy, c’mon,” Mansk said.

“No way, Red. Ops called ahead to say needs fixin’ by hand, can’t compromise any mechanisms or chains. Those kinda trees? Real bendy, hard to snap. What if it falls right into the dozer and it breaks down? Whole day gets lost,” Morgado said. He swapped a glance with Frasier-French. Mansk watched them both weakly fight a strenuous battle to hide wide smiles.

He ought to have known a prank was incoming. He’d gotten away with it for weeks, thought that was it, integration into the ranks completed without any trouble. The chainsaw was heavy. The price of refusing to let them have their laugh would be heavier. Mansk looked up at the tree, then waved for Frasier-French to bring the Swan close.

There was something else planned, a second half to this hilarious joke. Morgado must have had sway with someone in Ops and brokered a deal over a beer to stall the dozer. They were probably ahead of schedule and happy to spare the time to fuck around with newbies. Mansk predicted Frasier-French was going to pull the Swan away once the chainsaw was halfway through the tree, strand him up there clinging to the branches like a scared cat until he begged their help or let go and twisted a leg. If he cried for them to knock it off and they caught him princess style, he’d never hear the end of it. If he released himself from the tree and sprained an ankle he’d be reprimanded, accused of even doing it on purpose to avoid dozer duty. Unless the mystery second half brought a third, worse option.

Frasier-French brought the Swan nice and snug against the dozer’s tread, his face polite as anything, smiling sweetly, appreciatively. ‘Thanks so much for helping us out, Private Mansk.’ Mansk tossed the chainsaw onto the Swan’s cherry picker platform, snatched the safety gloves Mordago so kindly offered out to him and climbed into the gunner’s roost, signaling for Frasier-French to take him up. Mansk directed a long, hard glare at Morgado as the seat rose and he yanked on the beige gloves.

The tree’s trunk was a good four feet wide. It looked smaller from below, but up close it was a hefty hunk of wood. Mansk could just about hear the chatter below him. He glanced down to see five people resisting urges to elbow-jab each other and bend forward guffawing. They looked like a cute little line of Disney animals giggling at Bambi. If Bambi was a six foot merc with a chainsaw. He could almost feel Frasier-French’s foot hovering ready over the Swan’s gas pedal. Cute little Disney animals were never very original. Or very cute.

“C’mon, Red! Let’s see those big arms go to work!” Morgado yelled. Roswell’s shoulders were shaking.

Mansk fired up the chainsaw. The men on the ground raised their hands and clapped, pretending he was saving them a huge grief. Mansk couldn’t hear them over the saw’s buzz. He raised the saw high and brought it down onto the trunk.

Mansk narrowed blue eyes at the effort, at the bad angle, at the toughness of the tree. Morgado hadn’t been lying about its difficult, bendy hide. His arms were aching and shaking. Thirty seconds. Thirty seconds and he bet they pulled their dirty trick. He’d be ready.

When the blade was ten inches through the bark, Mansk shook fragments from his mask and hair and peered down. Morgado had his hand on his radio, his other tilting two fingers at the Swan. A rev vibrated under Mansk’s boots. He wasn’t the greatest at lip-reading, but he knew how the word ‘go’ shaped a mouth.

Mansk had a heartbeat to resign himself to his fate, a heartbeat to let go of the chainsaw and leave it embedded in the bark before it ended up in his neck. The Swan roared and jerked forward, the gunner’s seat rail punching him in the small of his back. Mansk jumped to avoid it crushing him against the tree and kicked off from the top rail, hooked his body over the tree’s rubbery trunk, clawing with the gloves and kicking for a foothold. He’d already spotted a few strong branches to cling to while sawing, and prayed he’d looked pretty nimble grabbing for them.

The Swan pulled away, the gunner’s seat already retracting, and bounded off into the deep trenches the dozer had carved into the clearing.

Morgado howled a laugh. Someone wolf-whistled. Mansk slipped, his gloves snagging, before he caught another one of the thick branches he’d assessed would keep him up. Jesus, it was so juvenile. And for what? Five minutes watching some idiot dangling off a tree? Mansk snapped his gaze down to the others, his skin hot with embarrassment behind his mask. The squad’s badly cropped crowns and bald spots turned to each other as they talked and laughed. Mansk made himself half-comfortable and waited for the jeering.

But Morgado had his hand on his comms again. Roswell chuckled. Morgado spoke. His voice didn’t carry high enough for Mansk to work out any words. Morgado tilted his head up and stepped backward. Roswell hopped back with him. They all did.

“Dasvidaniya, Comrade Mansk!” Morgado shouted, saluting.

The bulldozer quaked.

The tree Mansk clung to shivered and rattled, the leaves of its branches detaching, fleeing.

The dozer drove forward. Slow at first, slug slow, until it picked up to walking pace. The tree started to crack down its middle, the tread they were both stuck on chewing the wood. “Hey!” Mansk called, shifting and climbing and clawing. “Hey! Morgado!” Mansk whipped up his head to look at the end of the tread, which was rolling closer and closer as the bulldozer strolled forward, vibrating his little perch and trying to shake him off. His gloves slipped, the toes of his boots scrabbling desperately for purchase, his vest collar digging into his chin as he started to slide down. He’d seen movies where bad guys met their makers ground up underneath caterpillar tracks. As a kid, he’d found it funny. These bastards probably had, too.

He gasped and found a foothold on a branch beneath him. He leaned back and watched the ground. He’d need to hit it just right when he dropped or he was braining himself on rocks. Mansk let one hand go and lifted a boot to jump.

A javelin-sized arrow buried itself with a heavy thwock into the branches next to his left elbow, splitting the wood and peppering Mansk’s sleeve with wooden shrapnel. He yelped, flinching and wincing away from it. Strange, hot sap glooped burning from the arrowhead and spread fiery fingers through the tree’s dry limbs. Flames swept up the trunk, up to the dozer, up his arm. Fire exploded in his face, would have melted skin into the bones beneath if it hadn’t been for his mask, instead flashing bright across the faceplate. The heat was intense, his forehead was soaked, the perspex an inch from his nose cloudy with his breathing. Every organ inside his ribcage felt like they were trying to escape one way or the other, up or down. A thick glob of fiery sap slipped fast as a marble into a dark gap in the dozer’s tread. An orange glow grew.

Another arrow hit, this time twanging into solid metal above Mansk’s madly-turning head. More sap enveloped by flames oozed a fat tear of fire down the dozer’s yellow surface. The dozer stuttered to a halt, the tread mashing the tree further at one end, the fire eating through the other, both vying to be the first to reach Mansk in the middle. The roots of the tree stuck inside the dozer began to rip as they burned. Mansk held on with both hands, pressed his mask against blasted, black wood, cried out.

The fire boiling his uniform bit freezing cold then desert hot into the fabric and scorched flesh underneath. Mansk braced his boots against branches under his body and took a chance letting go with one hand, slapping it over the flames. He burnt his fingers bright red, reeled, cringed through a spluttering hiss. A third arrow slammed a bullseye into the tear belching fire in the tree’s stem. Mansk felt the heaviness of the arrow’s strike travel up his sizzling arm. The tree tilted with the force of the hit. Mansk looked down and saw more fire licking up the dozer’s tread. He loosened his shoulders and slipped down the bark, hung there like a kid stuck on monkey bars for two, terrifying seconds, then dropped.

Morgado and the mercs shouted. Their raised, applauding hands now wielded rifles, their wicked smiles traded for wicked snarls. Mansk rolled over where he lay and twisted to look over his shoulder at the hectic squad, feebly batting at his burning arm as he recovered from the sharp shock of his landing. Boots trampled and kicked up loose earth around him. Smoke started to billow from the dozer above.

Facing his head front again and staring across the brown, barren clearing, Mansk saw through blurry eyes a streak of blue. A streak of blue and red and green and yellow. Blue figures painted. Na’vi. They shrieked and stabbed the air with their bows. More arrows sailed yellow with flames into the white sky to land with clangs onto the dozer, both Swans, the dirt ten feet in front of his quivering boots. The na’vi weren’t big. All na’vi were big, of course they were, and these ones were far off, but they weren’t adult big. That was all he could discern before he collapsed onto his back.

Mansk’s head hurt. His arm hurt. It felt sticky. The burn spread from it into the rest of him, made his eyes rove and his teeth ache from the furious clenching of his jaw. He sputtered out his breaths.

“Put that shit out!” Morgado’s voice sounded through harsh coughs. Mansk clamped his hand over the last little candle of fire clinging to his sleeve (which was now black and wet) and ignored the searing agony of it to twist again to look for the squad.

Morgado was pushing his men to put out fires, shoving them, kicking them in the backs of their knees to move, throwing them by their collars to go stumbling to the ground. They had dirt in their hands, were tossing sprinkles of it onto flames in the hope it was a magical putting-out-fires fairy dust. Someone yelled for Morgado to radio it in. Someone else lifted a hand to do exactly that. Mordago caught him, shook the guy by his shoulders and flung him forward to keep working.

Mansk saw Morgado pause, his eyes toward him, and stoop to grab his rifle. Realization smoothed Morgado’s face and he took off running in Mansk’s direction. Mansk lay back down, his burnt arm twitching outstretched. He pressed it into the dirt, using the moist soil to cool it. He waited for Morgado to reach him, his other hand holding his vest around the neck, yanking it forward as if he could get more air that way. His mask felt too tight.

The thump of Morgado’s boots approached. Mansk felt so stupid, being rescued by the man who five minutes ago was planning to show him up in front of his boys, in front of the RDA. Morgado would have ordered Ops to stop the dozer at the last minute. They’d all have laughed. Great joke. Mansk lifted his hand, had it tensed ready to grab Morgado’s, and prepared to haul himself to standing.

Morgado’s shin clipped his fingers and sent his arm painfully flopping across his body.

Mansk gasped and curled onto his side, clutched his arm, then raised watering eyes to watch Morgado shoulder his rifle, lift its barrel and shoot at the young na’vi crouched at the treeline, who cried and vanished into the forest. The rounds Morgado unleashed after them cracked over the rush of flames and fwoosh of coiling gray smoke. Morgado disappeared into the dark, following. Hunting.

“Hey,” Mansk croaked. He coughed, spat into his mask, shuffled around on his shoulder to try to find anyone nearby. “Hey!”

Roswell looked up, his pale face streaked with sweat behind a blurred faceplate, his blond hair brown and dripping.

“Morgado!” Mansk wheezed, pointing and rolling onto his front. He managed to rise to all fours. “Christ,” he said again, speaking to the twigs and stones under his hands.

Roswell shouted something to another SecOps soldier. Mansk sat back on his knees. The other merc looked like Frasier-French. Both of them gestured toward the direction in which Morgado had stormed. The rattle of gunfire still echoed. Roswell and Frasier-French smiled at each other. They raced for their rifles. Mansk felt his back give and he slumped onto his ankles.

He let them run past him, his eyes on the floor, his arms and hands limp in his lap, his neck prickling. There was a sick feeling in his gut. He was on a Valkyrie which was swerving from side to side, being thrown from one wall to another, over and over, like a ball. A brainless little ball. He looked up. Smoke, black and curling, plumed over the dozer. He was relieved he couldn’t smell it through his mask. The rest of Morgado’s squad ran through the dark mist settling over the site, parting it like gray cotton candy, bouncing from side to side like brainless little balls, too.

With a weak, twitching hand, Mansk fumbled for his exopack’s inbuilt radio. His fingers were shuddering. The burn on his arm was frozen and oven-hot at the same time. “This is Private Mansk, come in,” he said. He waited, breathed, watched condensation slide down perspex. “Anyone on the air, this is Private Mansk, please come in.”

“Go ahead, Private Mansk,” said a deep, warm voice he’d only heard drifting down Hell’s Gate’s hallways. “This is Corporal Wainfleet.” Wainfleet sounded like he’d been halfway through laughing at something on his side. It felt a shame to put an end to that.

“Corporal,” Mansk said, tilting his head away from Morgado’s men. “Got a torched dozer, na’vi attack. Morgado and two of his guys are in pursuit of natives. I think they’re kids.”

“Whoa, slow up, say again, Private?” Wainfleet asked. The humor in his voice was gone.

Mansk breathed, closed his eyes. “Sir. I repeat. Na’vi have set fire to a bulldozer.” He hesitated, touched a hand to his arm and peeled it away again. “I-Injuries sustained. No men down but Morgado is in the jungle shooting, Sir.”

“What’s your 20?”

“Half a klick West from the schoolhouse.”

“Morgado?”

“Headed East that way, Sir.”

“All right, I see your smoke. Hold position. We’re comin’ to you.”

Mansk couldn’t find the energy to end the chatter formally, so instead he crawled to a mound of dirt away from the flames and lay on his back, shivering. He’d never been burned before. Not like this. Not with real flames. He’d been zapped by tech, poured boiling water on his fingers by mistake and ended up with a pill-sized blister on his knuckle, but he’d never felt fire eating through his clothes and melding material to skin. He nearly sobbed. The pain was constant, contant, constant. It didn’t stop, it didn’t ease, it kept burning, it kept being there. No thoughts could rid him of it, not even ones that felt worse than the pain, ones about what Morgado was doing out there, ones about what he was going to do to those na’vi when he caught them. But there was going to be no catching them. Mansk had seen Morgado’s face.

The Corporal and his squad emerged from the jungle South of the dozer clearing. A few of them froze mid-trot and stared. The Corporal (Mansk knew him to be the Corporal even from such a distance and angle, his shaved head and swagger unmistakable) stalked toward the dozer, rifle high, shoulders high. With a hand he signed for his boys to push up and secure the area.

The remnants of Morgado’s Headless Chicken Squad hurtled out of the smoke and swarmed Corporal Wainfleet, clamoring and gesticulating. Mansk watched Wainfleet push one man so roughly aside he nearly ended up on his ass. The Corporal spoke with the squad, shoved a few back when they got too close, when they shouted too much, then squirmed through a space between them to stride to Mansk. Mansk pushed a boot through the dirt to try and sit up.

“You Mansk?” The Corporal said, lowering to crouch, a big forearm on his knee and the other draped over the butt of his rifle, which he’d stuck in the ground, precise as the first flag on the moon. Mansk hadn’t seen the Corporal so near before. Behind the reflection of flames on Wainfleet’s mask, he saw small, closely-set brown eyes, a long nose and a neat jaw flanked by cheekbones sharp enough to cut the Pandoran landscape better than any bulldozer.

“Sir,” Mansk said.

“You’re good, Private, you’re good. Gonna get that arm looked at, okay? We got you,” Wainfleet said down to him. He gave Mansk’s arm (the good one) a gentle slap. Mansk breathed out and nodded. He felt stupid again.

Wainfleet raised his head. “Fike!”

Fike jogged over. Mansk didn’t know him. He was young, black, good-looking, if a little short.

“Kill these fires. Nobody touches anythin’ and nobody leaves. Get someone to radio our bird, fill in Ops and get a medic down here.”

“You got it,” Fike said, rubbing a hand over his short mohawk and turning on the spot to survey the damage. Mansk heard him swear behind his mask to himself before disappearing wordlessly to begin recovery.

“Na’vi did this?” Wainfleet asked Mansk, nodding his head at the burning dozer.

“Yessir,” Mansk replied. “Morgado got ‘em in his sights and abandoned post.”

Mansk looked on as Wainfleet studied the scene and saw the arrows. Wainfleet’s expression began as one of confusion, then became something closer to agitation. An annoyed huff turned the lower portion of his mask opaque.

The rattle of gunfire sounded above their heads. It was faint. Wainfleet stretched out his fingers and curled them into loose fists again. He stood and went for his radio, propping himself up with his rifle. Mansk could see he was itching to use it. “This is Corporal Wainfleet for Morgado, acknowledge.”

Nothing.

“Morgado, this is Corporal Wainfleet. You are ordered to disengage your pursuit and report back, do you copy?” Wainfleet tried again, raising his voice. He looked down at Mansk, who offered a head shake. There wasn’t going to be an answer. Not when the dog had a bone blocking its mouth.

Wainfleet turned his back and lowered his head. Mansk strained to listen over the shouts and roar of flames. “Come in, Colonel.”

“Central’s screens are playin’ The Towerin’ Inferno on repeat, Lyle, send your traffic.”

“Na’vi, Boss. Took out a bulldozer. Like the Fourth of fuckin’ July out here.”

“Say again?”

“Na’vi attack. Arrows and shit all over. And there’s another problem.” Wainfleet slipped a hand around the back of his neck and wiped sweat from under an exopack strap.

“Enlighten me.” The Colonel spoke in a faux friendliness Mansk knew would have anyone but the Corporal shitting themselves.

“We got guys chasing the na’vi in the jungle.”

The Colonel’s steady voice did not pause. “You know the answer to that one, Corporal.”

“Yessir.”

Mansk forced himself up. His arm stung, worse than stung. There wasn’t a word for it. Excruciating was close, but still didn’t feel strong enough. He didn’t feel strong enough, but was up anyway. “Ready to go, Corporal,” he said. He’d let Morgado pass him to chase the na’vi. He’d let the other two sprint after that asshole without so much as telling them to stop. A burn was no excuse. Joining Wainfleet was all he had left to offer by way of fixing it.

“Sit your ass back down, Private. We got a medic on the way for you, so you sit and you stay. That’s an order,” Wainfleet replied. Then he spoke again after a pause. “You good?”

Mansk sighed. “Hell yeah, Sir.”

Wainfleet nodded then set off trudging through the piled dirt toward the trees. “Fike! With me, we’re goin’ in, call it and get our guys to the schoolhouse yesterday.”

Mansk pulled a hand down his bad arm and looked back at the dozer. Enveloped in orange fire and billowing black clouds of smoke, it roared like a dying Pandoran rhino.

 

---

 

Wainfleet ran.

He leaped over logs, crashed through thick jungle brush and tore down huge, flat leaves blocking his path. Fike kept up behind, right on his tail. If he wasn’t half-expecting to use it, he’d have thrown his rifle aside to ditch a little weight, speed things up.

Victor Morgado had always been trouble. More fucking trouble than he himself had been a few years ago. Wainfleet had heard some serious shit about Vic in the chow hall; talk of firing at civilians, of an inability to differentiate between innocents and insurgents. Morgado cut his teeth defending mega corporations from rioting locals in unstable territories, which was a decent job with a good wage, but he’d still ended up on Pandora. Intel got iffy around his reason for choosing a tour of duty at Hell’s Gate. Intel always got real iffy right at the good part.

The schoolhouse was half a klick from the dozer site. As he calculated how far he and Fike had raced through the dark trees and how much of that half a klick was left to run, the sound of rifle fire snapped through the canopy. Shrieks followed. Shrieks from voices not quite human. He kept going.

The forest opened up, trees parted, a burst of fresh sunlight bloomed white across the vegetation in the small clearing leading to the wooden hut. Who was on Augustine duty? O’Donnell? Not O’Donnell, he’d seen him an hour ago. O’Donnell liked to trade his school security shift with the others as much as he could; guy couldn’t stand the slowness of it. Hated kids, too. O’Donnell only took the job when he wanted to avoid someone on another. Wainfleet struggled to remember the names of anyone else who’d been assigned. Banyaz was on his way home, his tour over, and York was sick. That left Garcia. Shit. O’Donnell always joked about how keen Garcia was to swap with him.

“Go get the rest of ‘em!” Morgado’s voice echoed.

Wainfleet put out a hand to stop Fike, who slid to a halt behind him. They crouched in unison and crept forward through thick plantation until the schoolhouse was in view. Wainfleet could hear Fike breathing hard into his mask.

“Find ‘em! Bring ‘em out here! There were more than three! I want the ones with the paint on!” Morgado yelled again. He paced up and down in front of the wooden steps, kicking at the ferns and grass, rifle in hand. A pair of blue-skinned legs daubed with yellow and green strokes lay unmoving at the top of the stairs, the rest of the body shaded by the doorway. There was another blue body in the grass ten yards away lying on its back, one arm flopped over its chest, head tilted back, blue lips parted.

Wainfleet watched Morgado. He was on his own at the front of the cabin. The Private mentioned two others, men he couldn’t see but knew were out there. Morgado had sent them hunting, and judging by Morgado’s position, his pals were to the rear of the building. No Augustine. No Garcia. That didn’t mean she was dead. Didn’t mean they were dead. He used the back of his arm to wipe his mask’s faceplate, wishing the gesture made an ounce of difference to the wet skin under it. He was sweating from the run, that was all.

Beside him, Fike darted his eyes to Morgado and back. Wainfleet ducked lower behind the foliage. He squeezed the rifle in his clammy hands. He should take the shot. Morgado had abandoned his post, refused to obey a direct order to return, opened fire on Augustine’s little pet project, killed at least two native kids. He wouldn’t put it past Morgado busting a cap in Augustine or Garcia now that his blood was up. Wainfleet’s arms twitched as he tried to raise his rifle. Was he really considering blasting a hole in the back of Morgado’s skull? He was still RDA. They were both RDA. Where were the other two assholes? Where were the assholes Fike had called in for backup? Where were Augustine and Garcia?

Wainfleet shifted in his crouch and readied to launch himself at Morgado’s back the next time he turned on his little patrol. Before he could spring, Frasier emerged from the side of the hut looking sheepish. Wainfleet knew the I-just-emptied-my-guts-and-could-maybe-go-for-round-two look. Brave piece of shit had whipped his mask off to do it, too. Wainfleet touched his elbow to Fike’s and nodded at Frasier. Fike pressed his lips together and rolled a shoulder.

Wainfleet surged from his kneeling position into a run, barreling into Morgado with a shout and striking him in the spine with the flat of his rifle. Morgado pitched forward, a surprised cry jumping from his lungs, and hit the dirt. He landed awkwardly on his rifle, trapping his own arms under himself. Wainfleet held the muzzle against the exposed back of Morgado’s neck. “Don’t move,” Wainfleet said, taking one hand from his rifle to go for the cuffs on his belt.

“Hey! That’s right, Frasier, drop the shit, now!” Fike’s voice shouted across the clearing near the hut. Wainfleet heard the clank of a rifle falling to hard ground and the gibbering of a man on the verge of throwing up inside his mask.

“Wainfleet?” Morgado said into the grass with a disbelieving chuckle. “Fuck you think you’re doin’?”

“Detainin’ your stupid ass.” Wainfleet ripped the snap cuffs from his hip.

“For what?” Morgado spat, “for defending RDA interests? For doin’ my job?”

Wainfleet said nothing. They were missing Morgado’s third man, but with Fike holding up Frasier, Wainfleet risked slinging his rifle into the grass and wrestling Morgado’s arms around to his back, clapping the cuffs around Morgado’s wrists while he had him subdued.

Wainfleet flashed his eyes to Fike. Fike wasn’t looking, too busy translating Frasier’s wibbling words. Frasier had never had a backbone when it came down to brass tacks. Wainfleet then looked down again at a squirming and swearing Morgado, at the back of his mask. What if he ripped it off? Hooked his fingers under the strap and lifted it away from his face, tossed it to vanish forever into the dense undergrowth? Fike would have his back on that. But Frasier wouldn’t. What if he severed Morgado’s exopack with a nick to the air tube? A bad fall onto a sharp rock was all it would take to cut the plastic, tough as it was. Anyone could believe that.

Instead, he dragged Morgado by the wrists across the ground away from his rifle and left him beside Fike to worm around and protest. By the time Wainfleet reached the first dead na’vi kid, Frasier was cuffed and kneeling, enjoying the company of Fike’s rifle nudging the back of his head.

The dead kid was young, but Christ, it was a monstrously big kid, taller than he was. The size of it made him realize that in all his years on Pandora, he’d never seen a na’vi so close. Wainfleet stared down at the body. Morgado’s rounds had pierced the na’vi through the chest three times. Pop, pop, pop, sternum, pectoral, clavicle. Clean.

He went next to the body he’d seen in the doorway. The wooden boards of the veranda were soaked dark brown under the kid’s legs. He was pretty sure this one was female. She was still. There was no sign of Augustine and Garcia, or of Morgado’s last man. He decided to give himself ten seconds to check the na’vi kid and then it was time to locate more important targets. If the Doc and Garcia were lying dead in the classroom inside, Morgado was facing a whole new bunch of fun charges.

Wainfleet lowered himself into a crouch and put a hand on the girl’s arm. The blood splashed over her paint was already drying in the rainforest’s heat, sticking dark red to the skin of his palm. He grasped her and rolled her over. She was heavy, as tall as the other one, maybe taller, and she was dead. He knew it by the floppy give in her body.

Something hurtled screaming from the darkness of the schoolhouse on all fours.

Wainfleet snapped his head up in time to see a pair of huge, yellow eyes the size of suns loom an inch from the perspex of his mask before giant fingers grasped him by the front of his vest and threw him down the steps.

He hit each stair badly. Every sharp edge stabbed him in an arm or a leg or his side, and a final grunt joined him in a rough roll through the grass at the base of the hut. When he found the breath he’d lost, his first instinct was to check his mask. He clawed his hand around and across it, making sure it was still tightened at the straps, smearing the dead na’vi kid’s blood over the glass, over his scalp. It was fine. He breathed and focused on the rest of him. Bruises, nothing worse.

On the schoolhouse veranda the na’vi which had thrown him bowed low over the dead girl. Her shrill wails were deafening. She threw her head back, dragged the dead girl into her arms and screeched, the beads in her tightly-braided hair clinking. She called out in Na’vi. So much for the Doc’s cute little school for learning English.

Wainfleet felt Fike’s eyes on him. He glanced over his shoulder across the clearing. Fike was hesitant to leave his post guarding Morgado and Frasier but eager to rush to his aid, so Wainfleet put him out of his misery, raising a hand for him to stay. There was blood in the grooves of his rings.

He then felt alien eyes on him. From where he sat in the ferns, he caught the fierce, yellow gaze of the young na’vi woman. Despite having no eyebrows, she managed to pull off a wide-eyed glower, her skin’s dark stripes meeting above her nose like those rebooted tigers back on Earth. She clutched the girl, her four fingers pressing hard into the body’s stiffening flesh. Air puffed through an open mouth, her teeth bared. Her tail whipped around her shoulders. She was an animal.

Breathing hard himself, Wainfleet stood and approached the lowest veranda step, both palms forward in surrender. The closer he moved to the woman, the larger she appeared, but her eyes were no longer on him. She buried her face into the dead girl’s hair and made strange, wheezing sobs, her shoulders hopping up and down. He needed to get into the schoolhouse, check for human survivors, look for Garcia and Augustine, but with the big, blue tigress in the way it was looking impossible.

At the same time he backed up and considered options to bypass the nightmare mode boss fight blocking the front door, a voice he knew drifted out from inside the hut. The voice spoke Na’vi, but there was no mistaking the Doc’s accent.

Grace Augustine clunked her heavy na’vi-sized lace-up boots across the veranda boards and sank to her knees next to the real na’vi woman, both hands clawed into her shoulders. The young woman didn’t seem to notice. Wainfleet briefly checked Fike, checked Morgado and Frasier were still under control, then dared to creep up the stairs. Neither of the women spotted him.

The Doc looked grim. Her small, thin mouth was turned downward, the grooves on either side of her thin na’vi nose wet with tear tracks. Her eyes were huge and glassy, like paperweights, all swirled with yellow and amber and black. On her blue forehead, just below her bandana and covering her stripes, were spots of red. Blood freckles. Red, bloody freckles on top of white freckles. One particularly large splash had the friendly curl of a smile, as if one of the kids had finger-painted it onto her browline.

Wainfleet turned his face away, went for his comms, frowned. “This is Wainfleet. Hustle your asses up, gonna need some wheels out here. Bringin’ some boys back in chains. Over.” Wainfleet shot Morgado a look, who smirked back with narrowed eyes before spitting on the inside of his own mask. Wainfleet sneered watching the lump of saliva slide down the glass. Motherfucker didn’t give a shit about anything. Just like himself. They were both RDA, after all.

A thump made Wainfleet look up to the schoolhouse door. Augustine had slapped her tail, well, her avatar’s tail, against the wood. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” she said in a rounded, angry voice, thick and on the verge of wobbling. “What is wrong with you?” she asked, raising a hand and bringing it cracking back down onto her thigh. “What is wrong with all of you! Look at what you’ve done! This is a school for children for Christ’s sake! You’ve killed children!”

“Gonna tell me who else was inside, Doc?” Wainfleet asked, refusing to let Augustine’s raised, accusatory tone get in the way.

His only warning was a rush of hot air gusting against his neck.

The blunt end of a rifle went sailing past him, just shy of his jaw, but the sharp edge scored the exposed muscle of his shoulder, burning through it like a papercut. He stepped out of the way, stumbling in his shock at narrowly avoiding getting his fucking head knocked off, and immediately tried to raise up his arm to retaliate. A hand shoved his elbow out of the way like it was nothing, then came down right on his ear.

He reeled, a hand flying to the side of his head. A piercing shriek echoed in his brain, but he was more concerned about his dislodged mask. The angle was wrong, the chin was twisted, the straps on one side were riding up his head. He yanked it back into place, took a few experimental breaths, then went for Garcia, who was already gearing up her next shot, fist pulled back.

He’d taken worse punches, but damn this one hurt like a bitch, even as it bounded from his mask. Garcia’s knuckles nearly flattened his nose under his mask’s hard faceplate. He went blind for a second, leaving him wide open for another hook which drove the edge of his mask deep into his cheekbone, but this hit felt more like a slap; a fumble made in haste.

“Leave them alone, you bastard!” his attacker growled. Her face was a picture of rage behind her mask, and he had to admit, beneath the sweat and the wet lines left by tears and the dark, blotchy skin, it was still pretty.

He’d never seen Garcia’s hair pulled into a braid before. It was a little too short, had some unruly strands flying hither and thither out of place because of it, but it was tight and skillfully tied. Two slick strands of hair stuck soaked to her forehead. He couldn’t stop looking at them, even as she snarled at him. She got another good lick in before going for her rifle a second time, and Wainfleet decided that was enough.

Combat training kicked in like a stick shift. He slapped the flat of his hand against her rifle and forced it wide, then grappled both of her arms, dragging her forward. They squabbled over the gun, both yanking on it until he twisted them around and slung her almost off her feet, her grip lost on the weapon. “Stand down!” he shouted, gaining the upper hand by forcing her backward into a stumble, rifle strapped longwise against her chest. With a yell, she threw her head forward.

Wainfleet knew an incoming headbutt when he saw one. He released Garcia at the last second before her mask could crack into his, and she went sailing forward and down like a tree, but when he moved to step out of the path of her fall, their legs twisted. They landed in a heap, a mass of angry shouts and flying elbows. Garcia had adrenaline on her side, but Wainfleet was bigger and stronger, and it was easy to use her strength against her to wrestle her onto her abdomen.

He had to straddle her and force her into the grass with the brunt of his forearm, his other hand clasping hers tight against the small of her back. “Stand down,” he ordered again. “It’s over.”

Even with his full weight pressing her into the ground, she had enough willpower to try and buck him off one final time. The shock of it caused his arm to slip, so he opened his palm and grabbed her neck instead, pinching the muscle there. She stilled, finally, teeth bared and breath misting the perspex. She was hot from head to toe, sweating through her fatigues. He breathed with her, hauling in air, a little too aware of Garcia’s warm, panting body, of how wet with perspiration her neck was, how tensed and hardened with stress the backs of her thighs were beneath him. A rush of blood throbbed through forming bruises under his mask’s edges.

On both sides of his mask, Wainfleet could feel the piercing stare of eyes. Eyes from Fike, desperate to assist, eyes from Morgado, blazing with amusement, eyes from Frasier, frightened, and on the school steps, eyes from Augustine, wet and accusing, and eyes from the alien na’vi, grieving, enraged. Only Garcia’s eyes he couldn’t sense, and he was glad.

Boots crashed and shouts called through the jungle. Wainfleet pushed his legs hard against Garcia’s in case she moved and watched backup leap through the undergrowth on its way into the clearing. SecOps spread through the ferns, secured the area, and relieved Fike of guard duty.

Before Wainfleet could let Garcia up and warn her not to try anything else, Morgado’s mystery third man bumbled sweating and staggering into the clearing. Wainfleet saw the instant regret on the asshole’s face, even from where he sat on Garcia. There was a twitch and twist in the guy’s body as he considered running, but SecOps surrounded him and put him on his knees. It took Wainfleet a moment to remember who he was. Spitting swears and straining to look for Morgado was Spence Roswell; still a private well into his thirties, which said it all.

They tidied up. In the quiet aftermath, a third kid was discovered, the smallest of the three dead. The bodies went with Augustine and the surviving na’vi, the Doc firmly refusing a human escort when she was offered. Wainfleet didn’t argue with that. Sergeant Pederson rolled in, took over, and it was done. Wainfleet checked his watch. Whole thing only took an hour.

He didn’t speak to Corporal Garcia again.

 

---

 

When they cut off his sleeve in Med, Mansk had been relieved to see the burn wasn’t the blistering and swollen red mess he’d expected it to be. He was even reassured it wouldn’t scar, but the tightness of the dressing cutting into his upper arm felt like it might. A twitchy guy with a receding hairline and glasses advised a follow-up appointment would be added to his datapad’s calendar and that was that.

On the way out, Mansk tested his arm’s mobility. He could lift it stiffly to shoulder height if he really pushed, and extending it didn’t get much further than a right angle at the elbow before it set a painful fire again in his muscle.

They’d keep him inside the fence for a while. He’d take them to the Pandoran courts if they didn’t. Mansk dropped his arm back to his side where it could rest in a position more comfortable and wondered what the reports would chalk the cause of his injury down to. Misadventure? Prank? Or was he the first victim of a na’vi attack? Did they have a tick box for that? He imagined coding experts scrambling like jets to be the first to design a new column for future charts and figures. Unprovoked na’vi attack. That’s how it would read. Mansk had heard something about one of the na’vi kids becoming disillusioned, maybe by the school, maybe by the machinery clearing forest. But that wouldn’t look good for the shareholders. Unprovoked na’vi attack looked better. Looked sadder for the poor little RDA. Things were changing. He could sense it, even sitting on a soft blue bench in Med, wincing as his arm was wrapped up, answering unusually probing questions through his teeth. The na’vi element had already overtaken the Morgado element.

Mansk took the corner outside Med’s main door and nearly knocked skulls with Corporal Wainfleet’s No Fear tat.

“Shit, sorry, man,” Wainfleet said, stepping aside. Even without the bulky vest, the guy didn’t look any smaller. The Corporal smiled, which drew attention to red, curved marks smiling themselves up both sides of his jaw. Since when did masks bruise their wearers? “They screwed your arm back on, huh?” Wainfleet twirled a finger at Mansk’s arm.

“Ha, yeah,” Mansk replied, then inclined his head. Wainfleet had the tiniest square of a dressing he’d ever seen stuck onto his bare shoulder above his tattoo. It looked like a processed cheese slice had been left out in the sun to crinkle, shrink and turn white.

“Suffered for my country, too,” Wainfleet joked, noticing Mansk’s eyes on his bandaid. He turned to face his other shoulder toward him. Whether it hurt or not, Wainfleet seemed hung up on that little scratch enough to want to hide it.

“Thank you for your service,” Mansk said, smiling and moving past him.

“Hey,” Wainfleet said.

Mansk stopped and turned, a hand on his bad arm. “Sir?”

“That bulldozer would’ve stopped. Morgado’s an asshole, but he wouldn’t’ve…” Wainfleet slid one of his palms quickly across the other with a slap.

Mansk paused, eyes on the floor. No. Morgado wouldn’t’ve. Not to a human. “Yeah. Sir,” he said, giving the Corporal a downward nod.

Wainfleet folded his arms and raised his eyebrows. “You did good out there, Private. Mean that. You called that shit in and you kept your shit together. Lemme see what I can do to get you with me and my guys while your arm’s fried. Things’re about to get different fast. Won’t leave you behind.”

Mansk nodded again. “Appreciate that, Sir,” he said, then he frowned. “Sir, about the school-”

“I’ll see you around,” Wainfleet said with a shrug, uncrossing his arms and leaving in the opposite direction.

Mansk watched him go and pressed his lips together, frown still on. He decided it best to leave that little blip at the end alone; he barely knew the man. At least there was a chance he’d receive a more interesting datapad message alongside his boring Med follow-up. It would be good to be part of a team.

 

---

 

Wainfleet checked his watch. 21:56. He leaned forward on Mitch’s bunk and twisted the watch strap around his wrist, considered clicking it off and pocketing it. He turned the metal links until the skin went red and he was ripping out arm hairs. A voice in his head told him to leave it alone.

Leave them alone, you bastard!

Garcia had been so quick back there. Quick to jab at him with her rifle, quick to punch him, however weakly with that second attempt, quick to try and headbutt him, quick to risk skewing both of their masks enough to cause damage. Quick to assume he’d fucking done it.

He’d been quick, too. Quick to put Garcia down in the dirt and press himself onto her back and legs, quick to push down on the back of her neck. His hands flushed hot, the veins on the backs of them rising to life. He rubbed them together, as if doing so would bring back the hard, wet feeling of her nape under his palm, the tickle of the wispy hair under her braid on the skin between his thumb and forefinger.

She only knew his name because he worked closely with the Colonel. Only knew his face for that reason, too. He bet his first name escaped her half the time. She knew his voice because he shouted at his boys in the cafeteria, shouted at recruits in the yard, shouted for her to stand down when fighting her into the ground. She didn’t know him.

He knew her as well as someone could know someone without having spoken to them. He knew she liked to draw, had never seen her drawings but wanted to, just to see if she was good. He’d seen her scribbling once. PT sent him past the fence a few months back, and there she’d been, sketching. She had probably been doodling plants, which was boring to do, but she’d been into it, which wasn’t boring to see. Craning his neck as he ran by, he’d watched her focusing on her pencil strokes. He knew she liked heading out into the field, knew she spoke a smattering of Na’vi, knew she was often the Hell’s Gate library’s sole visitor. He knew she had absolutely no control over those two curls of hair which always fell over her forehead. He knew her.

He also knew she cared about those na’vi kids.

Wainfleet ran his fingers up his cheek, across the red dents where Garcia’s punches had driven his mask into his skin. Fike said something, probably some stupid comment about his face, but Wainfleet ignored him.

Leave them alone. You bastard.

Morgado was the bastard. He was the bastard. And somewhere far below the metal floor under his boots in Level 1’s Detention Facility, the bastard waited. Wainfleet had thrown him into holding himself that afternoon, and he was still down there, a chained up demon from some shitty B-movie, anticipating not his judgment, but his release. A few hours in solitary and a finger-wagging was all the punishment he’d get before the locks came off. SecOps wouldn’t leave Victor Morgado, killing-shit-extraordinaire, to languish behind glass for long. They’d need him now. They’d need everyone.

He went back to the jungle, went back to the second Garcia came flying at him. What he’d have given to see Garcia crack her fist into Morgado’s mask instead, bust through the glass, crunch the shards into his eyes. The eyes Morgado had smiled with down in the cells when he’d made those comments about how he’d seen Wainfleet sitting on Garcia, seen him wriggling down onto her thighs, seen him grind, rub, get hard on top of her surrounded by dead alien kids. He hadn’t. He hadn’t.

Wainfleet was the bastard.

He almost tore his watch off to throw across the dorm.

A sharp clicking noise made him raise his head.

Fike had flicked a photo coming away from the wall. It was the one taken on the Valkeyrie ramp. Fike lay on top of his sheets with an arm behind his head and a knee up. After a noisy yawn, he dropped his head aside to look across the bunkroom with lazy eyes. “Gonna have to move your ass when Mitch comes back in five,” Fike said.

“Yeah.” Wainfleet stared at his watch again. 21:59.

At 22:01 Wainfleet stood up, not to relinquish Mitch’s bunk, but to leave the dorm altogether.

Fike propped himself onto his elbow and leaned over his bed. “Hey, where’re you going? Only said you gotta move when Mitch is back,” he asked Wainfleet’s retreating back.

Wainfleet blanked him. It didn’t feel good to do it, in fact it felt pretty damn shitty to do it. He felt shitty all over.

Out in the corridor he ran into Mitch Carby fresh from a shower. Mitch’s short black hair stuck up damp at all angles and he’d slapped a sodden towel over his shoulder. Wainfleet didn’t give him a chance to speak and shoved past him, shivering when Mitch’s freezing, wet towel licked his arm.

 

 

One person was guaranteed to know where Garcia was.

“Bow chicka Chacón,” Wainfleet sang as he reached Trudy’s parked Samson 16 in the airfield hangar. Trudy was good at concealing her hatred of that bad pun, so Wainfleet pretended he didn’t know she despised it, making it her treat to hear it all the time.

“Wainfleet,” Trudy said in a strained voice. She leaped down from the chopper’s platform with a heavy clump of her boots and yanked on the sleeves of the overalls tied at her hips. He watched her hands tighten them around her wide waist and sat his tongue on his lower lip, only putting it away when Trudy raised her eyes and hummed a breath seeing it.

Trudy was smoking hot, no breath of a lie about that; there was something about those hips and the white tees she liked to attack with scissors just over the tits, but his team didn’t play in her ballpark, and he respected that. He’d respected it ever since she’d cornered him on day three of her tour and advised him of the fact. The bruising he’d sustained in that particular area all those years ago hadn’t put him off faking interest however, or Trudy faking back she was flattered. They were so nearly almost friends.

“Look like you’re finishin’ up,” Wainfleet said, propping a leg up onto the Samson. Trudy called it Myra or some shit like that. He hoped that was the name of an ex-girlfriend. Something to think about and save for the nights Fike and Carby stayed late in the rec rooms.

“Nope, just saw you comin’ and wanted to leave,” Trudy said, cleaning her hands down her overall pants with open-palmed slaps. There was a joke somewhere in her tone about finishing and coming and leaving that he didn’t want to piece together. He was having trouble keeping his thoughts focused as it was without those words lurking in them. Trudy gave him a knowing smirk, which bunched up the side of her round face. He took in the way it half-closed her left eye and showed the tiniest hint of her white teeth.

For a moment, Trudy was Garcia. The wry smile had thinner lips, the eyes were longer, smaller, placed closer to the nose, the eyebrows arched higher and thinner. And she was sweating, like before, those two little unruly curls of hair sticking to her forehead. Would he use one or two fingers to brush them back into her hair? What about a long thumb stroke hard enough to pull wet skin? Where would his other hand be? The one he’d used to hold her down by the neck, the one he’d felt her tendons roll beneath? Back on her neck, the base of it, right over the bone at the top of her spine. And that smirk of hers would vanish along with her lips when they pressed into his.

Then his fantasy Garcia parted them and her closed fist cracked sideways into his nose. Bastard.

Wainfleet shook his head and cleared his throat. He licked his lower lip to remove the phantom feeling of hers there. Or maybe encourage it. “Seen Garcia?” He tried to ask it in the same way he’d ask if it was raining outside; innocent, searching but without apparent ulterior motive.

Trudy tilted her head and dropped the smile, her eyebrows hopping up her forehead. Dark bangs fell into her eyes. She blew the stray locks away with a puff through the side of her mouth. “Why?”

Wainfleet held out his hands, breathed a laugh. He smiled when he looked back at her, acutely aware it wasn’t a kindly one. “Asked you a question.”

“Wow, me too. And it was why?” Trudy pushed a digging finger into his shin and forced his leg off her precious Samson.

Wainfleet let her move him, standing back on two feet. He needed to pull the conversation back from the brink before Trudy fed him to her chopper’s rotor blades. Using Trudy to test Garcia’s state was a coward’s move, maybe, but he’d never spoken to Garcia in his life before that afternoon, and nothing about that particular interaction really counted as conversation. Trudy and Garcia however, were tight according to SecOps gossip. Wainfleet swiftly moved his thoughts onward before the word tight sent feelings downward. He shoved his hands into his pockets. “To apologize to her. To talk to her. That a crime?” he said with a shrug. He did want to apologize. And talk. And maybe do more. No, shit no.

“Depends what happens after the apology and the talk,” Trudy said, her voice low.

Wainfleet went quiet, unable to answer.

Trudy widened her eyes and climbed back up into the Samson, disappearing into the cockpit.

Movie clips played in order across the inside of his forehead. One went: he apologized, Garcia punched him, she closed her door on his hand. The second went: he apologized, she begrudgingly listened, she retorted, she closed her door on his hand. The third: he apologized, she listened, she let him inside, he pretended he felt bad about the school, she didn’t believe him, she punched him, she shoved him outside, she closed her door on his hand. The fourth: she knew he was pretending he felt bad about the school, she felt bad for him for pretending, they did everything, she pretended to close her door on his hand when he left, they laughed.

Who was he fucking kidding?

“Look, man, she won’t even talk to me right now,” Trudy said, muffled and far away. There was a note of something which sounded like sorrow under Trudy’s voice. It appeared he wasn’t the only person trying to get through to Garcia.

Wainfleet remembered he’d been in the middle of a conversation with a blink. He leaned closer to the Samson and put a hand on the gunner’s platform, straining to listen now he was back in the hangar and not fidgeting outside Garcia’s door wondering if he should knock.

Trudy’s boot came down through the shadows and he snatched his hand back a second before she squashed his fingers. She took a seat on the edge and kicked those dangerous boots, a datapad in her hand. “So she definitely doesn’t wanna talk to you.”

“You know what happened today, right?” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.

Trudy ignored him, swiping and tapping on her datapad.

“What’re you doin’?” he asked.

“Giving Garcia the head’s up that you’re prowling around out here lookin’ for her,” Trudy replied, her eyes on the screen.

“Nah,” Wainfleet said, “nah, no way, you’re not.” She wouldn’t snitch.

“Wanna bet on that, Wainfleet?” Trudy said, leaning an elbow on her knee. She stared with an eyebrow up, then returned to her datapad. “Lock. Your. Bunkroom. Door,” she said, speaking each word slowly as she typed. Or pretended to type. He couldn’t tell from the angle, but he wasn’t about to rip the datapad out of her hands to check either; her boots were at perfect-teeth kicking level, and he liked the level his teeth were currently at. “Get outta here, Wainfleet. And if you try anything, boom,” Trudy twisted her datapad around to show him a quick flash of her private messenger tab. He saw Garcia’s name but not much else to confirm Trudy had actually written anything. “Screenshots, bitch.”

Wainfleet snorted and folded his arms, both hands gripping his biceps to hide the flexes of agitation quivering them. “Last time I ask you for help, Chacón,” he said, smirking through his disappointment at her dirty trick.

“Go back to your Colonel, Wainfleet.”

He sneered. The Colonel was not going to be his next stop.

 

 

“Hey, man, what is up with you?” Fike asked when Wainfleet made it back to their dorm.

Wainfleet crossed the room without a word and reached up to his bunk to feel for his datapad. He ripped it from under his pillow and leaned against the metal leg of the bunks, swiping the screen until he reached the RDA’s glitchy in-house messaging app. The black screen of death crashed the entire datapad twice when selecting a name, as always. When it loaded up on the third go, his urgent fingers tapped the send arrow too many times. He ended up messaging a mess of single words and lone letters, but Danielle was good at translating.

He drummed the screen and waited for a reply, refusing to look up at Mitch and Fike.

Two words came back in the chat. Armor bay.

 

 

A bright worklight blazed in the armor bay. Black bars of shadow stretched through the legs of resting AMPs, covering the metal flooring with dark tracks big enough to hold a maglev.

Wainfleet walked a row of AMPs, their dark, glass canopies following him like huge, cyclops eyes, their still bodies sentinels, waiting. The closer he moved to that hard light, the louder the sound of an aerosol can hissing became.

He couldn’t see much of Danielle’s face, her nose and mouth covered by a white dust mask, but it wasn’t her face he was looking at on approach. The way she’d put a boot up on her AMP’s foot hitched up her hip, lifting an asscheek tight against her olive green jeans, and her raised arm, the one with all the skull tats, stretched out the softer flesh of her shoulder, rolled her shoulder blade across her hard back under her dirty white vest. It was weird to admit, but Danielle almost looked better with her clothes on. The friction of jeans around calves rubbing against skin had a certain that French phrase he kept forgetting. The only French phrase he used was ménage à trois.

Wainfleet moved in as she paused to shake the spray can. Danielle tipped her head to listen to him, her long ponytail swaying. She turned, kept her boot on the AMP, and held his gaze. Her lower eyelids rose with a smile he couldn’t see. She pulled her dust mask away from her face by its elastic arms, snapping it off and discarding it with a shake of her head. A blow of air through the side of her mouth flew strands of brown hair away from her eyes. She rattled the can in her other hand harder and faster for far too long. “Hey there, pretty thing,” she said, she breathed, going back to her work.

Taped to the leg of her AMP was a large stencil. Wainfleet hopped up onto the ramp and went to her side, leaning on the AMP’s leg next to it with his arms folded.

“Like it?” Danielle asked.

“Sure,” he said, not sparing it a glance.

“I was gonna go pink,” she said. Danielle never went pink. Not for him. It was always Lyle Wainfleet feeling the flush of blood run to redden his cheeks.

They met eyes in the semi-darkness and Danielle bit her lower lip, kept it there under her teeth, raised her brows once, quick, and pressed her forefinger down slow on the spray can’s cap. A cone of cobalt hissed from the nozzle and she started to cover the shape in the middle of the stencil with an expert sway of her hand, black shadows darting over the AMP’s thigh and hanging hand. Her rhythm was deliberate, teasing. It made his neck and fingertips hot to watch it, to watch her hand swing from side to side like that, her finger hard on the cap. He slid one of his legs over the other and crossed his ankles feeling his interest in her work spread lower.

“But I think,” she said when she was halfway done, facing him. She frowned playfully, gripped the can until her skin squeaked on the aluminum. “Blue’s in as of today.”

Danielle dug into the crook of his elbow for his hand, withdrawing it and slapping the can into his waiting, sweating palm. Her fingers undulated tenderly over his knuckles, then her hand flew to the neck of his shirt, grasping it hard, forcing him to uncross his legs for balance. Wainfleet hadn’t even seen her move. She was blocking the worklight’s yellow beam, but that made it better. He liked that he couldn’t see her. His pulse thumped everywhere being held like that. He hoped she felt his racing heartbeat vibrating against her fingers on his collar. She yanked his head close to hers, rubbed her temple over his (her hard temporal pressed a bruise, hurting in just the right way) and spoke hot air into his ear. “How ‘bout you finish for me?” The flat front of her teeth brushed his lobe. His palms overheated, the metal of the can under his fingers white hot. Her breath gusted. “You came here to paint, right?”

She swung his hand to face the AMP’s leg, let go, and watched him study her stencil. For a second he had no idea what he was looking at, too busy thinking about her hard, warm teeth on the skin of his ear, too busy remembering why he’d sought her out.

Most of the art on the AMP was done. The part not covered by the stencil showed a speeding bullet, straight lines flying behind it, the style ripped out of a pulpy comic book. The stencil had been cut into the shape of a heart, realistic, not the Valentine’s kind. Cheesy shit. Cheesy shit he didn’t care about. He sprayed a line down it and tossed the can to clank and roll away into the darkness.

Grabbing Danielle by her hips, his hands searching for the hem of her shirt so he could touch her, Wainfleet pulled her with him backward until he was up against the AMP’s cold leg. He ditched grabbing at her shirt and pulled on her elbow instead, his other hand pressing against her navel, his fingers fighting the tightness of her jeans waistband, his nails catching on her belt. Things were fucking fused to her skin. Danielle laughed at his effort and when he leaned his face to hers she caught his desperate kiss, humming the rest of her laugh into his mouth. The hum traveled through his jawbone and down his neck. The ghost of it squeezed past his pounding chest and ended at the base of his torso, right where he wanted it to be.

He tilted his head all wrong, met her at a bad angle, positioned his long nose too near her eye, their teeth clacked for a second, but Danielle didn’t seem to care. Her lips were smooth, growing wetter by the second with his spit. She held him around his middle, made him twitch with her fingers’ tickling. Nearly romantic. Nearly caring.

His hands roamed her front and he felt both of hers slip from his stomach up to his throat and higher, stopping to grip the sides of his face where his mask had bruised it, where Garcia had driven the plastic edges into him with her fists. The force of Danielle’s thumbs holding him there made those bruises smart, made his eyes roll up behind his eyelids. There was no way Danielle couldn’t feel him now.

With a rumbling groan, Wainfleet broke their clumsy kissing, a noisy squish leaving their lips, and gripped her tensed upper arms, the ones which had been responsible for her dishonorable discharge. A thin layer of sweat on her triceps made his pinching fingers slip. “Do that again,” he said through heady gasps of air, baring his teeth and closing his eyes.

Danielle didn’t hesitate dragging the pads of her thumbs down the sides of his face, this time raking her nails over the red lines, pushing his flesh inward and pulling his skin down over his skull. It sent him right back to the jungle, back to being punched, back to Garcia. That shooting pain circling a loop of agony around his head got him harder than any amount of kissing or pawing at Danielle’s jeans could ever manage, but in that jungle with Garcia and her pretty face and her flyaway locks curling over her forehead lay dead na’vi kids and a bastard standing over them. He snapped his eyes open.

“Hit me,” he said, panting, holding onto Danielle’s arms and squeezing.

Danielle stared at him, her blue eyes almost brown in the dark. He knew she was smirking; the right side of her face was pushed up by it, but that was all he could see. The worklight behind her turned her into a shape, a thing with a head and a neck and shoulders and a body with ribs and hips, under which he wanted to hook his fingers. He’d already seen her scraping her thighs together.

“You sure?” she said, breathing out a hot huff through her nose. “Haven’t done that in a couple weeks. What was it this time?”

Wainfleet tugged her forward again, chest to chest, her tits crushed flat into his, her nipples stiff pinheads under her vest. She sighed, groaned, writhed against him, pushed him further into the AMP’s leg next to her cute little stencil until his shoulders ached. He wanted to push back, push right into her even with their pants in the way, fuck through the fabric. Her fingers slipped under his belt, and, frustratingly, stayed there, refusing to release him, and his cock was hurting by now, the bitch. His fingers clamped at the small of her back, digging in the dents of her hips. They shook. They shook and his arms shook and his lip shook and his heart shook and shit, was he going to fucking cry?

To hide it, to stop it, he dipped his head low against hers to scrape an unshaven cheek down her smooth skin. He heard Danielle purr in the back of her throat as he hissed his chin up again until the corner of his mouth touched her hard cheekbone. He bet she was so wet, pictured her in the dark with a growing patch on those olive jeans, so fucking throbbing and wet she could soak denim. Or, he thought with a twinge in his ribs, she was bone dry, sealing up. She would be if he told her anything about the school. No talking. No explaining.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. Of course he was fucking sure, he’d asked, hadn’t he? “Hit me,” he added, frowning against her, pushing her backward, but Danielle dug claws into his waist under his shirt with one of her throaty laughs. “Please. Fuckin’ please,” he nearly whined before he caught himself and turned his pathetic, embarrassing begging into a gravelly growl. The memory of Garcia lashing out wasn’t enough anymore.

In the dark, like a bent, black snake in the worklight’s glare, Danielle’s arm pulled behind her.

Wainfleet’s head snapped back and struck the AMP’s leg. White blinked over his eyes like a datapad’s camera flash. He wasn’t sure Danielle meant for him to clank his skull into her suit, but he let the pain link up with the rest and wondered if his hurting jaw was hanging loose, wondered if he’d tear his fatigues with how rigid with a needy ache he’d become feeling Danielle’s knuckles connect with his face. Garcia’s knuckles didn’t have the chance to hurt him back at the school. He should have taken off his mask, let her do it, let her beat him into the ground for not giving a shit about dead children, for being unable to. Just like Morgado.

“Aw, doin’ okay, doll?”

Wainfleet spat hot blood. “Call me a bastard.”

“A little different,” Danielle said, angling her head, the light showing off raised eyebrows. She crunched a knuckle. The pop of it echoed up to her AMP’s canopy.

“Call me it,” he said through a wheeze, wiping blood over his top lip and resisting the urge to grab at himself. “Call me it.”

A left hook sent him reeling to one side and staggering. Another jab crashed into the side of his nose while he was doubled over and flattened him onto the ramp. He landed on his front with a hard grunt, had to stick a hand under his body to check he’d not snapped his dick like a carrot, used his other to smear more blood up his cheek. It hurt. The pain sang across his face, his frantic pulse pumping it faster under his skin, into his bones. It hurt good. But she hadn’t called him a bastard.

He heard the sound of hard-soled boots plant themselves on either side of his hips. He felt her hand descending before she touched him, was already shrinking under it, and then when her fingers grabbed a fistful of his shirt, Wainfeet jumped, let out a quiet inhale. Danielle went to tug him into a roll, but he flew a hand up to search for hers and clasped her wrist, shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, like this.”

Danielle took a seat, ground her ass into the small of his back, made sure he could feel her glutes roll on either side of his spine. Each shuffle she did as she lowered her body down to loom over him thumped a stronger jolt of arousal into his core. The hand he’d used to hold her wrist she pinned so close to her crotch his trembling fingers could feel her warmth there. His stomach pulse bumped under him. She was heavy, had his chest heaving, had his crushed dick fighting for air now that it was nosing against its own leak.

Danielle’s hand slipped to hold the back of his neck.

In the jungle he opened his palm and grabbed Garcia’s nape.

Danielle clenched her thighs on either side of his hips.

In the jungle he straddled Garcia and forced her into the grass.

Danielle’s ponytail fell forward and brushed his ear. He panted in and out her scent of paint and sweat and cigarettes, the smell increasing as she leaned down closer. She slid her hand around his neck to the cheek he had pressed to the cold ramp. She lifted his head and tilted it upward until their faces met.

The kiss was awkward, the both of them half-twisted. Wainfleet lifted himself with the arm he was resting on to meet her and squeezed his eyes shut. Danielle sucked his tongue and scraped her teeth down it, but he kissed her desperately, in the end roaming over her skin to pause holding his lower lip to the edge of her mouth.

“Good?” she asked, speaking a hard sigh of cigarettes into him.

“Yeah,” he said onto her skin, blinking.

“Want me to-”

“Yeah.” He wriggled. He was so into this shit. He was so pathetic for being into this shit.

Danielle sat back on him and the sound of her ponytail hissing over her perspiring shoulders signaled she was getting ready to draw her fist back again.

She hit him.

The blow crashed into his cheekbone and bounced his face against the ramp. He cried out this time, ripped his pinned hand from Danielle’s grasp and covered his face, groaning. Fat blobs of blood squeezed through the gaps in his fingers at the same time fat blobs squeezed from elsewhere. He shifted a leg to shamefully accommodate for that.

“Bastard,” Danielle said into his ear with Garcia’s voice.

Chapter 14: Pandemonium: Part II

Notes:

special matthew gerald birthday update, next chapter on may 2 2024!!!! /j

Wainfleet ran.

The cut on the back of his leg split open. Each step he took was a new hungry finger digging in and ripping skin, tearing it up like Christmas wrapping. Blood tickled hot from calf to ankle, splashed a trail behind him as he tore through the facility. Limping to save himself the agony was not an option.

Waves of bright green pulses rippled underfoot, lighting his way deeper into the base. Glowing plants clinging to the walls shivered their petals and waved barbed stamens out to him as he raced past. His chest was tight and rattly, the rest of him shot to shit and getting worse. The AR in his sweating, slippery hands felt too light but he couldn't afford to stop to check the mag, and he certainly couldn’t afford to ditch it altogether. Mansk’s AR. Mansk.

Mansk lay dead in Hell’s Kitchen.

Behind, out of sight for now, the thanator pursued.

If it hadn’t been for the narrow squeeze the both of them faced, Wainfleet knew he’d be halfway down the big fucker’s neck already. He was ducking and diving with each turn of a corridor, but so was the thanator. Thanks to Hell’s Gate’s tiny hallways, he could congratulate himself on winning the grand fucking prize of a further ten minutes of life.

The soles of his feet were slashed and stinging. His queue was hanging by a strand. His leg was seizing up. His tail banged limp against the backs of his legs, his muscles working too exhaustively elsewhere to bother holding it up. His breaths in were wheezes and his breaths out were raggedy puffs. Did he want ten more minutes? Did he want five more? One? What if he slowed, went from painful sprint to painful jog to painful standing and waiting? Would he face the animal head on or face his back to it? Would he close his eyes? Would he cry? How long would he feel it? How long would he feel it chewing through him and tearing parts off?

Colonel Quaritch leaned against the half-closed automatic door of a room ten paces ahead.

The moment Wainfleet saw him, the Colonel’s scars shining blue as the vegetation spreading up the walls, he swore he felt something land a vicious punch right into the root of his queue and grind invisible knuckles into the bone under it. It was a strong enough jolt to send him stumbling into a staggering lope. He coughed, righted himself, and clawed a hand around the tough collar of his vest, staring down at Quaritch as he passed him. He nearly dropped the AR, realizing he’d not even hung it around his neck. He risked slowing his run to quickly loop the strap over his head.

“He’s not hungry,” Quaritch said, following Wainfleet’s slow run with a twist of his head. “Or he would’ve eaten your boy.” A nod, a smile. Wainfleet had already lumbered by but the old man’s voice was loud in his twitching ears. “The one you left behind.”

Wainfleet pressed his mouth into a thin line and broke into a faster trot. He could smell the thanator powering through the halls in his wake. The reek of dirt and wet and leathery skin and fishy, fetid saliva filled his nostrils, driving him to keep moving.

Up ahead, shrouded in semi-darkness, Quaritch waited with arms crossed, smile wide, this time standing with his black boots planted firmly in front of a door frozen halfway to shut. There was no turning around to avoid him. “Leavin’ a man behind like that,” Quaritch said, tutting and curling his mouth to one side. Wainfleet heard the fleshy click of a tongue hooking over back teeth. He wished this Quaritch, this thing, this fucking thing which kept popping up, wasn’t so damn good at mimicking the old man’s tells. If it was a shitty actor he could laugh at it. Ignore it. The Quaritch thing went on. “Didn’t even check to see if he was still breathin’.”

Quaritch vanished as Wainfleet passed, but he could still feel his arrow-sharp blue eyes on him. For the millionth time, the trillionth, sweat cascaded over Wainfleet’s skin and a deep ache dropped anchor. There hadn’t been time to check Mansk, didn’t the Colonel understand that? If he’d run to Mansk, the thanator would have picked him up by an arm and folded him in half in its mouth.

Around the next corner, those blue eyes were back. “That’s a helluva squad, Corporal.”

“Shut up,” Wainfleet spat through his teeth, hobbling on. His bad leg begged him to slow up, but the thirty percent of his body which still functioned cracked the whip to keep going, keep going, keep going.

Quaritch reappeared in another doorway and let out a single, harsh ‘ha’ before speaking. “And a helluva squad leader.”

Wainfleet might have chanced throwing a punch if there’d been no thanator catching up behind. He streaked past again, his ears rotating backward hearing the clank and crash of the thanator’s pistoning legs. Thing had six of them, could probably get up to forty miles an hour. Wainfleet was managing four yards an hour.

Hanging a left at a junction lit by a cluster of glittering creepers, Wainfleet jogged straight through the Colonel.

He stopped and spun around, tail straight up, what was left of its pathetic tuft stroking the back of his head. He’d gone right into the Colonel and out again like the man was a floating map on a holofloor. His queue pulsed with pain as if it was fighting to keep the Quaritch thing generated. The queue was becoming more and more like an alien clinging by its jaws on the back of his head, doing whatever it wanted to him, showing whatever it wanted to him.

Quaritch rotated on a heel to face him, smooth as the twist of a Swan tire. “Wrong way, Corporal. Unless you’re lookin’ to get stuck in storage.”

Was this the wrong way? He could have bet money there was an emergency exit down here. Or was he all turned around and that airlock was in the opposite direction? It was the plants and flowers and vines. They were messing with his route, getting in the way of the familiar, growing over signs he needed to follow and covering doors completely, testing his mental map. He was running in circles.

He needed to get out of the cramped halls. There was too much shit to trip over and bump his head into. He was going to end up like that guy in Dead Air 3, the one who didn’t make it to the gate in time because he twisted his leg in the airport departure lounge. He had the goriest death, at least. One of Wainfleet’s top ten horror movie kills, always vying for third place with the inside-out scene from The Feedening.

Wainfleet bent and coughed and spat, hands on his buckling knees. The AR’s tough strap dug into the tat on the back of his neck, the one he’d made Uncle Darryl stay in the parlor for, the one Uncle Darryl had made him get in the first place, the one the RDA’s machines coldly replicated while he dozed in his tank.

Stopping was a mistake, but his lungs were cotton wool coming apart, his limbs AMP-heavy. His ten minute head start was gone. The thanator would be on his ass in seconds. He should have let it smash him into the floor and rip him up after it had broken Mansk against the wall. At least that way he’d be dead in Hell’s Kitchen with him and have some company on the elevator ride down.

“Givin’ up?” the Colonel asked, low and slow.

Wainfleet raised his eyes and stared from under his brows at the shiny toes of Quaritch’s boots. His knees trembled, His hands slipped.

Quaritch’s wide fingers shot from the dark and scooped him up by the neck before he could collapse. Wainfleet grasped Quaritch’s arm and was surprised to find his hands were small against the old man’s muscles. The finger and thumb poking through his right glove and clawing at the Colonel’s pale, scarred skin were still blue, but Quaritch was as tall as he was, and pushed him backward with ease until his shoulders met the wall.

His queue was pinned against the metal by the sharp point of his hip. Quaritch’s shove crunched it further into the bone. Wainfleet couldn’t keep the shameful yelp in. Was that old cut reopening under the dirty gauze? Something shifted and suddenly felt very wrong back there. His heart pounded the inside of his ribs, looking to get out and fight back, or get out and run. Quaritch’s big arm felt real. It was hot. Thick lines of veins bulged beneath it like fat strokes of oil paint, the skin had a rough texture, he could even feel the softness of tiny white hairs under his fingertip as he tried to force it away from him. But this shit wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.

“That it, Corporal?” Quaritch said through bared teeth and a tight smile, his pale blue eyes gleaming. “That all you got? You done?”

Wainfleet growled and wormed in the Colonel’s grip. His legs were going limp, his hands were scraping down that strong arm uselessly. His chest beat up and down, the lungs underneath it straining to suck in air. The Colonel’s tight hold around his throat kept all of his words stuck in his neck.

“That’s right,” Quaritch said, eyebrows wrinkling his forehead. The thing even had the sheen of sweat on its brow. “I think you’re done.” Quaritch wore a manic expression. His lips had vanished, curled over his gums to form a grimace of a smile, his even teeth white in the darkness. He tilted his head to listen for the thanator, then returned his gaze. “Ugly’s comin’ for you.”

Wainfleet couldn’t move. Quaritch’s press was solid as stone, and with every passing second he spent crushed against the wall, Wainfleet became more and more aware of the hunting animal slamming into walls and charging down the halls heading right for him. Its death-knell scream rang, impatient, starving. It could smell him. It could smell his blood, the dirt between his shredded toes, his bad breath, his wet skin, the pants he’d been wearing for nearly two weeks straight. It could probably smell his unwashed hair. A massive snout like that would be able to tell the difference between the stench of his braid’s crusty, stiff locks and the musty scent of what remained of the brittle tuft at the end of his tail.

He could see it. He could see this fake Quaritch, this thing, letting go of him and stepping back just in time to dodge the thanator. It would have the best view in the house. It would laugh. It would laugh and laugh and laugh and he’d hear it loud and clear, vibrating all the way down a footlong tooth jammed in his earhole.

Wainfleet’s body sagged. Quaritch’s hold on his throat increased. His aching leg was giving way beneath him. His queue was flattened and seeping fresh blood. Should he speak to this thing with Quaritch’s skin draped over it? Should he ask it to let go? Ask it why it was following him? Ask it where it came from? Ask it if it knew how to fix a broken queue? Would it question him back? Would it ask why he’d turned tail? Why he was bothering to get away when Mansk lay dead in Hell’s Kitchen?

Wainfleet spat out a breath, exhausted with shuffling his deck of tired thoughts. The spray of his spit misted over the Colonel’s face. The man didn’t blink, didn’t twitch his nose, didn’t turn his face away or raise a hand to wipe anything from his cheek. It hadn’t noticed a thing. Because it was a fake. It was nothing.

As he thought it, the Quaritch holding him against the wall wavered. The sensation of fingers stabbing into Wainfleet’s throat weakened. Quaritch seemed a head shorter, the top of that neat, gray, crew cut level with his mouth and the now-not-so-big arm angled high.

Quaritch narrowed his eyes and lowered his brows, almost as if he was noticing he was shrinking. He looked up again. Pissed off. Good. Quaritch tilted his head aside when a roar punctured the quiet. The smirk was back, but a little too twitchy to be a bonafide Quaritch smile. “Somebody’s comin’,” he said, he sang. His voice was deep. Wainfleet couldn’t believe his insane little hallucination had a good baritone on it.

Wainfleet smirked. “Then we better get movin’, Colonel,” he said, eyes wide.

“Think you’re gonna survive, Lyle?” Quaritch asked, smiling.

“Yeah,” Wainfleet said, tugging Quaritch’s hands from his neck. “I do.”

The Quaritch illusion was half his size. Its miniscule, weak human fingers wouldn’t even close around his Adam's apple. Why had it even tried? Wainfleet towered over it, twice its height. He shook his shoulders and blinked.

There was no hold on his throat.

There were no fingers around his neck.

Alone.

Not alone.

Wainfleet looked over his shoulder, queue swinging and bumping against his arm. With wide eyes, he watched the shimmering blue flower at the other end of the corridor draw in its leaves with a wet squish. A second later the black bulk of the thanator curved around the corner, sparks crackling from its claws.

The thanator took the bend and shouldered the wall with a clang so loud Wainfleet’s ears tried to run into each other at the back of his head. A pair of yellow eyes ballooned above the animal’s flapping lip skin. It stopped, grunting and shaking itself after its collision with the metal. Then it lifted its heavy head and saw him.

The backs of Wainfleet’s arms prickled. His skin wanted to fall from his shoulders, a discarded coat.

A scream like a jammed conveyor belt whipping free from its pulley wobbled the thanator’s fleshy mouth and the monster threw itself into a run, picking up speed with every forward thrust of its huge feet.

Wainfleet roared back and threw Mansk’s AR up into both hands, his ears folded down, eyes on the target. The glowing plants along the walls turned the thanator’s shining, black hide into a club dancefloor. He pulled the trigger, spraying a short, bright burst of rounds.

The thanator kept running. It stuck its snout against the ground with a snort as it powered forward, using its armor-plated neck and shoulders to protect its body.

Wainfleet turned and took off down the service corridor opposite storage. If he circled around he’d get back to where he’d been before, then it was a right, a right, a left, then straight on to that emergency airlock.

Behind him the thanator screamed and surged forward faster, the thump of all of its feet banging in time to his rushing heart, which was on the verge of giving out. The AR jarred into his back. His leg stiffened. He took the first right turn, pushing himself off from the wall for a pathetic boost. He took the next right, couldn’t feel his leg anymore, couldn’t feel his bent neck anymore. He swung around the left corner, his vest too tight, his ribs too tight. But it would be fine, because all he needed to do now was follow one last corridor, reach the airlock and spill out into the night. He was already planning it; if the exterior access door worked, he’d slam it closed into the thanator’s nose. If it didn’t work, or was missing entirely, he’d whistle for his banshee and hope it liked him enough to snatch him into the air, hope it liked him enough to wait for the queue hookup until after they were flying.

“And then what?” Quaritch’s voice sounded, loud as a shout, right into his ears, the two voices crashing into his brain at the same time from opposite sides. He ran through it, ran through the echoing boom of that terrifying question. The corridor was coming to an end. The airlock was dead ahead.

The corridor finished at a junction.

Wainfleet stopped. He clawed at his hair, which made his skull ache, which made him claw at it all the more. “No,” he whined to himself, huffing, turning on the spot, spitting through bared teeth with every outward pant.

The thanator hurtled around the corner, flecks of foam flying from its open mouth. It was fucking rabid, flapping its tongue and swinging its head like its ass was on fire. It looked as spent as he was, and still it pushed on, so Wainfleet did the same. He went left.

He lost the thanator winding back through the base, but he couldn’t keep up the cat and giant Pandoran motherfucker with too many teeth game for long. Wainfleet finally skidded to a clumsy halt outside the blasted doors of the armor bay. He whipped his head around with a gasp to check the hallway he’d just stumbled down, droplets of sweat flying from his bristly hair, his wet braid freezing his nape. The thanator’s frustrated cry rolled along the walls. It was like the thing couldn’t stop chasing, like something was forcing it to continue running and hadn’t let it in on the reason; a puppet with that Eywa bitch’s hand jammed up under its tail.

The hangar was a dead end, but a big one - a dead end a dumb animal could lose an even dumber animal in. Wainfleet squeezed through the doors, rushing into the warm maw of the darkness, dodging and clambering over the giant bodies of AMPs and Samsons. The echo of a growl at his back vibrated up and out of the missing ceiling, disappearing to mix with the rustle and hiss of the forest beyond the buildings.

He went straight to the other end of the hangar, snagging his feet along the way, and stopped next to a Samson shell missing everything but its fuselage, a bug with all its feelers and wings and legs pulled off. He leaned a hand against it, daring to rest. His lungs struggled with breathing, but at least the air they heaved in was fresher underneath the gap in the roof.

There was no way out. The rainforest’s quiet simmer was right there, just beyond the missing ceiling and the stuck bay doors. Climbing the sheer, smooth surface of the inner wall to get to it would be hard for a na’vi in good condition, let alone one like him with half its brain hanging off.

Wainfleet’s ears, as tired and droopy as the rest of him, tried to lift hearing the sound of the thanator slipping into the dark hangar. It was moving slowly. He picked up the tap of its claws. It had over twenty of them, each one the length of his hand. It was so quiet in the armor bay he could hear the plip plip of saliva dripping on metal and the thud of each of its six huge paws as it crept further inside. He could even hear the shuffle of its weird head-discs and the flexible finger-antennae sticking from them. Was it using those to look for him? Were its frills more ears? More eyes? More brains? He clutched the belt of Mansk’s AR and backed up until he felt the dented fuselage of the Samson.

He wanted Mansk beside him. He wanted to turn his head and see Mansk tipping down his shades with a finger to give him a look of support over the frames. Mansk was good at those kinds of looks. Wainfleet twisted the AR’s strap where it crossed his chest, leaned his head back, used the Samson’s half-chewed hull to cool the top of his head through his hair.

Where was the thanator? Was it fifty meters away? Ten? At the back of the Samson and already slinking around the side? Would he feel its blazing yellow eyes on him first or the hot tornado of its breath? What would give him away? His panting? The smell of his blood? Where was his discipline? His training had drained right out of him.

The creak of a metal girder in the roof made him look up. Rainwater and wet leaves splattered down the bay doors.

A clapping clatter of blue and black and yellow screamed from the beams.

Fike loved shooting stingbats. They were easy - big targets, slow in the day if it was dark and rainy enough to trick them into thinking it was night. Extra points for removing a head. Extra extra points for knocking off a stinger.

The stingbats twirled in a twisting cone through the dark above him, their thousands of blue, glowing dots shining when they dived. Extra points for jabbing him in the head. Extra extra points for stinging him in the ass.

His hand slipped down the AR and his finger brushed the trigger guard, but if the rifle turned out to be fresh out of rounds, he’d soon find his skull fresh out of eyeballs. Wainfleet forgot the AR, swung it onto his back, and jumped up into the hollow cocoon of the Samson. It creaked and rocked on its belly when he climbed on all fours into the cargo area. A fluttering wind followed.

He remembered the color Private Tina Jackson’s face turned when she’d been stung.

The bat got her three steps from the chainlink walkway. She’d been heading back after a day of grueling security patrols at the mines when he and Mitch, already under the walkway’s protection, saw it drop out of the dusky sky, all on its lonesome, and straighten its tail like a sword, skewering Jackson in the neck. She must have smelled good, worn some kind of perfume to impress that dude she’d liked, the miner with the chipped tooth and ponytail. Mitch bet he’d been the one to keep her from getting back before sunset. She’d gone down with a screech, immediately rolling around on the ground like she’d caught fire, arched her back, clawed the concrete. Then she’d started humming. By the time Mitch had blown the bat away and they reached her, she was balanced on only her shoulders and boot heels, the rest of her body curved upward like a kid struggling to do the crab walk in gym class. Her mask couldn’t contain her swelling face and neck. Wainfleet saw the straps strain as her head tried to spill over them like dough. Her skin was purple. Every vein under her puce flesh was green and popping. When her neck split the blood was dark green and wet bread-thick.

Allergic reaction, the med techs had said. Neither Wainfleet or Mitch had bought that excuse. Everyone was allergic to stingbats; the fucking things were aliens. Whatever ran through their venomous tubes had to be ten times worse than any prick from a Terran snake fang. They were all lucky the little shits were nocturnal unless disturbed, or caught a whiff of whatever Jackson had slapped onto her neck for Chipped Tooth Ponytail man. Jackson’s pal Romi Franks cried her ass off for four days straight. Wainfleet was just glad it hadn’t been Garcia.

Could a na’vi be allergic to a stingbat spine? Wainfleet became horribly aware of the exposed tail and queue flapping behind him as he clambered through the cargo area toward the cockpit, the whirr of wings hot on his heels.

He slammed the cabin’s glass door shut behind him once his tail was through, slicing the lead stingbat clean in half. Its front wings flapped and it continued to caw. Finally it shriveled into a ball, weak breath clicking behind a blob of ruby blood oozing from its mouth.

Wainfleet swept a hand up through his wet hair and laughed. He laughed hard and loud and turned to Mansk, grinning at the close call. He kept smiling at the empty space, kept staring at it. His eyes blurred and he had to look away.

The Samson’s cockpit had shrunk. Wainfleet’s feet and legs twisted around the seats as he tried to find a comfortable stance inside. His elbows bashed the windshield, his knees scraped against instruments, his head bounced from the ceiling. The sweaty skin of his tail squeaked across the glass when he spun around on the spot. His surging body heat cranked up the cabin’s temperature. Outside, the stingbats battered the cabin’s tiny door, chattering their spiny mouths and skittering their clawed wings down the perspex in annoyance. Wainfleet closed his eyes and breathed. The door was sound and most of the windshield’s glass was intact. Any gaps were too small for a weak little stingbat to punch through. They were quick, but they had no muscle.

Wainfleet sank to his haunches in the dark. The AR’s muzzle clunked against a seat. A new streak of blood ran hot down his leg. He could smell its metallic tang. “What’re you doin’ in here, Lyle? Why didn’t you book it?” he asked himself, wiping a hand down his wet face. He watched the stingbats ramming their ugly little faces into the cabin door. Some had parted from the swarm and swept from side to side outside the cockpit’s nose, their faint breeze cold through the broken panes. “Because you’d be dead, asshole,” he answered.

Mansk was the dead one.

A jolt shook the Samson’s wrecked fuselage.

Wainfleet braced himself with a grunt against the seats and narrowed his eyes, straining to see through the smoke-blackened windows ahead.

Augustine used to say stingbats had bad tempers, hated other animals, but these little fuckers were practically leading the thanator like wasp-scorpion-lizard-shaped guide dogs. In the streak of the dim, blue light from the space in the roof, he saw their glittering black shapes swoop around the thanator’s ugly mug and then go straight for the windows he hid behind, thumping into the glass, leaving smudges, some whacking the windows with such a force their stupid heads and wings got stuck.

The thanator vanished out of view with a swing of its heavy tail, leaving the stingbats to continue their attack on the cockpit windows. Wainfleet dislodged himself from between the pilot seats and made room to check the AR’s mag. The fuselage rocked again. He had a few rounds left. He clicked the mag back into place and spat on the floor when it steadied.

No Colonel to give orders. No Private First Class to receive them.

The Samson tipped until the floor was vertical. Wainfleet slid downward, hitting the cabin’s side windows shoulders-first with a shout and a crunch of glass and metal. For a moment the Samson balanced on its side, teetering, groaning. The more cowardly stingbats fluttered away in brainless fear. Wainfleet stuck his arms out and locked his elbows, one hand against the controls by the horizontal door and the other against the nearest windshield pillar. His queue was jammed under him, all that good work keeping it safe and bandaged and clean wasted.

One more push from the thanator and the Samson went over with a slam. Wainfleet hung on and tried to position his feet where the ground was soon going to be. He wasn’t fast enough and ended up on his front with his nose inches from the tiny specks of glass prickling his forearms. The Samson was upside down. The windows were destroyed. Lower to the ground.

The thanator didn’t give him time to rise painfully to his elbows. Contact front. It shoved its snout right through the cockpit’s largest window, its leaf-shaped tongue flexing out of its mouth as it forced its jaws further through the space in the glass. It cut its mouth in its desperation to get to him, the points of shards burying themselves into the animal’s hard palate, lines of blood in lines of drool.

Wainfleet scrambled back, panting against the wall of the cabin. The door to the cargo area was above him and the seats hung from the ceiling like the black shapes of dead men. The cockpit felt tighter now the Samson was rocking on its back. Wainfleet shook his head, which made his queue catch on the back of his vest. He was too big in here. His bent back ached and his neck didn’t want to keep his head raised anymore. Under his feet, loose cables, exposed by the explosion which had smoked the Samson all those years back, snaked around his ankles. His knees shook, his elbows shook, his heart shook.

Stingbats trying to squeeze through the gaps between the canopy and the thanator’s neck to reach him first ended up speared against glass, smashed into the frame, crunched under the thanator’s clawing paws. One darted in, its tail stinger flailing in front of it like a second swinging head, but the thanator caught it with a back tooth and curled it under the flat of its tongue, flipping it into its mouth easy as swallowing Hell’s Kitchen slop. Wainfleet watched the bat turn to red mush between huge gnashing teeth. The second a bat managed to slip past the thanator’s snapping jaws and he got his ass stung it would be over. He’d faint or trip balls or both right into the thanator’s jaws, and knowing his luck he’d be just about awake enough to feel teeth sawing into his stomach. Like Mansk.

He reached a searching hand up through the dark to find the door. The glass was still holding, and now that the canopy’s windows were gone the stingbats busied themselves squabbling around the thanator, buzzing between its shaking head-discs and feelers, waiting for an opening around its huge face.

Wainfleet twisted in his awkward squat. The AR hanging over his back was a heavy bitch. He fought to keep it behind him and faced the cargo area’s door, peering through the smeared, stingbat-shaped prints. It was clear out there. He tried the handle. Nothing. He jostled it again, sticking his large fingers around it, pulling. The magnetic seals were long dead, and being upside down shouldn’t have made any difference, but his heavy arms were having the fight of their lives trying to tug it open. He bared his teeth, spat through swears, strained until he reached a blood-vessel-bursting strain which threatened to wipe him out.

Giving up with using his hands, Wainfleet grabbed the AR and cracked the butt into the locks, only succeeding in bashing them further in. He panted from the effort, turning to look over his shoulder. The thanator was inside up to its eyeballs. Then he looked down at the rifle. He turned it in his shaky hold, licked sweat off his lower lip, stared at the wriggling thanator from under his wide brows. Back on the miserable island hunting the reef kids, Mansk had said they couldn’t afford to waste the ammo. Wainfleet shouldered the rifle. He lined up the shot, narrowed his right eye, set his teeth on edge, positioned his forefinger over the trigger, flexed the others around the grip.

And wasted the ammo.

The muzzle flash flared sun-bright and the rattle of the AR’s final handful of rounds cracked and pinged into the thanator’s face. It roared. Wainfleet roared. The AR roared. The Samson jumped clear of the concrete when the thanator yanked its reeling head out of the window. Wainfleet hung on, and when the Samson fell back with a creaking bounce, he dropped the empty rifle and crawled on his belly through the shattered glass of the biggest broken window.

The thanator whined and rubbed its snout along the floor, all of its four, thick forelimbs trying to get at its bullet-peppered face. The stingbats in their own confusion hovered, shrieking and jabbering, then in a black and gleaming blue whirlwind disappeared through the hole in the roof, afraid of the thanator’s snapping and thrashing. Wainfleet didn’t stop to see if the thanator fell back with them, stumbling to sore feet and kicking through debris on his way out of the hangar.

A scream from behind and thumping feet rumbling over blackened concrete pushed him to run faster. In the dark he struck his shin on something sharp and hit the ground with a painful slap, letting out a gasp. His queue smacked the floor next to him fast as a leather whip, and Wainfleet felt like he’d fallen from a thousand feet. He felt crushed, felt like all of him had been snapped, and when he moved, when he blinked, breathed, twitched his face, those snapped pieces of him snapped again into smaller ones.

He found enough strength to drag himself behind the leg of a dead AMP lying on its face and feel for his damp braid. In the glow of the freckles lighting his wrists and fingers, he saw the feeble bandage was coming away. He smelled it before he saw it. That sharp zing of blood. He grimaced against a gag, and as soon as he unwrapped the dressing, Wainfleet balled it up and threw it into the dark. He heard the thanator bound after the stink. Thirty seconds. Maybe a minute. Then the thanator would go after the source.

Jesus, he was close to collapse. Why was he bothering? Why was he sitting hiding, with all his limbs limp and sprawled and his hair dripping with blood and his head splitting open and his thin lungs wheezing, weaponless, useless? What was after this? More running? More pain? He threw his queue over his shoulder and let it hurt, leaned his shoulder blade into it and made it hurt. He’d had worse in Guyana. When Venezuela and Suriname threw hands, Guyana turned into a little kid ducking under their swinging fists. A giant alien cat was nothing compared to the ninety four hours he’d spent defending Triumph. But in Triumph his brains hadn’t been slopping out. In Triumph the assailants hadn’t sported teeth the length of bowie knives. And in Triumph the platoon had his back.

Mansk was dead or dying. The Colonel was dead. The squad. He was seconds from it himself.

Oh, well.

Oh, fucking, well.

He went to stand. He’d stand and let the thanator close its jaws around him like it had Mansk. The least he could do was go out the same way, push the button for the next elevator down after him.

Rising to a crouch as the thanator lumbered nearer, Wainfleet’s hand slithered bloody over the AMP’s dusty metal. He righted himself and looked at it, his streak of blood shining in the dark; shining right through the AMP’s leg tattoo. A cartoony bullet bursting at high speed through a realistic blue heart. “Dumb fuckin’ luck,” he said, staring at the line of red he’d painted over it, right where he’d sprayed a single, hurried line of blue over a decade back. A quick turn and he saw the AMP’s knife attached to the lower right portion of the broken canopy. It was a little dented, a little crushed, but the knife was still sheathed. Danielle Casey had always preferred to use the GAU. So had he.

Wainfleet pulled the hilt with a hefty yank and a foot braced on the AMP. Rust made it stick, but eventually the knife came loose and released a puff of red dust. The noise drew a growl from the hunting thanator and the sound of clicking claws built. With both hands on the knife’s grip, muscles shaking, tip of the blade on the floor and his knees bent, Wainfleet waited.

The Colonel had done it before, stabbed a thanator clean through its belly. He’d seen it on the dashcam, would have played it back a few more times if he’d been permitted. Shit had looked so cold. But he wasn’t the Colonel. He wasn’t even the Colonel-lite.

The thanator boomed. Wainfleet risked a quick glance over the AMP and saw the thing charge, gather its rippling, too-many-legs in the middle of its body, and jump, aiming to clear the suit.

Wainfleet swung the knife in an arc and sliced two of the thanator’s outstretched toes off.

The thanator landed with a bump and a roll, its bad leg tucked and the start of a scream leaving its mouth before its jaw hit the concrete and cut off its pained wail.

Wainfleet moved in, stars sparking from the blade’s point as he dragged it along the floor, and he went for the animal’s tail. He drove the knife into the tip, withdrew it, stabbed it along the limb over and over until he reached the powerful hindquarters. He pierced along its flank and hacked and slashed at whatever meaty part he could find which wasn’t armored. Dodging kicking legs and claws, he lined himself up with the thanator’s jawbone. Big bastard was crying out by now, lying on its front with its legs spreadeagled and its bad paw under its chest. Wainfleet sweated, breathing through his mouth, spit dripping as he exhaled, and, when the thanator exposed the pink of its jaw muscles, he ran forward and stuck the knife right in and through, forcing it forward with a howl until the knife’s tip tickled its tongue.

The thanator jerked its head up with a screech and ripped the knife from Wainfleet’s hands. He fell back and dragged himself along to a safe distance while the thanator bucked and tried to grapple its remaining front toes around the knife wedged longways in the side of its cheek.

Wainfleet picked himself up with a noisy groan. It took far too long to recover his balance and work out a stance which hurt his bleeding leg the least. As soon as his body was temporarily back in business, he showed the yowling thanator all of his teeth and growled at it. The growl was like the hiss back in the longhouse; it didn’t match his voice, felt more like something shoving a hand into his back and puppeteering him to do it, sounded like something from the nature channels he always skipped. Weirdly, it felt better to make a noise than speak. A growl was stronger than a swear.

The thanator shrank, understood. The holes under its neck huffed and it rolled its giant, yellow eyes. Its shot-up face shone with blood, and more tipped from the space where its toes had been like water from a tilted jug. The last of the bolder stingbats zipped down and pecked the thanator’s bleeding head-discs. The big bastard rumbled and panted, defeated, reduced to probing a tongue around the sharp blade jammed sideways through its cheek. With a last whimper-whine, it turned and padded lop-sided into the dark, its front foot on the right folded against its chest.

Wainfleet had had years to adjust to Pandora’s lighter gravity, but it was only when he watched the thanator almost float through a smooth jump onto the stomach of the upside down Samson and then drift in another leap to the hole in the hangar’s roof (points off for the ungainly scrambling and climbing over the bent wall) did he really get how different it was.

After shaking himself all over, flicking sweat and blood, Wainfleet limped back into the black halls of Hell’s Gate.

He was running out of strength, but he wasn’t about to abandon the Private without knowing if he was dead.

 

 

Wainfleet stopped at the entrance to Hell’s Kitchen.

A shiver closed cold fingers around his backbone and tried to bring his body down into the floor. Not even the warm, whispering wind winding its way around the room could combat that freezing pull.

It was difficult to avoid the bodies of viperwolves. Wainfleet did his best to step around them, but sometimes a naked heel would brush a v-dog paw, or an entire foot would go down onto a soft, cold belly. He kicked aside the corpses he could see, using the green pulse of glowing moss and grass to illuminate the mess hall and lead him back to Mansk.

He replayed it. Mansk struck the wall without a sound and hit the floor, not even a tail wag to indicate he was still alive.

Wainfleet stopped again. He stood there, breathing, hands by his sides, the muscles in his arms trembling, the tip of his tail fluttering at a right angle. He was facing down Schrodinger’s Mansk. If he went to him now, checked him, found him dead, that was it. Mansk would be dead for real. For good.

Mansk still lay where he fell. Wainfleet headed over, skidding through the wet, marshy carpet. He went to his knees at Mansk’s side, ignoring the sting in his shins and knees when they hit the ground, and reached over Mansk, taking him by an arm, pulling him over. There was a floppy give to his body. He shook him harshly enough to make his head roll. “Mansk? Hey, hey, it’s me. It’s-ah, Jesus,” he said, stopping to look at his scarlet palm, “Mansk, it’s Corporal Wainfleet, can you hear me?”

Wainfleet settled Mansk on his back. Mansk’s eyes were closed, his face slack, his mouth a short, pencil-thin line. Wainfleet patted the sides of his vest with frantic fingers for anything sticking out or falling out, hard or soft. Mansk’s shades had survived the crash, still hooked on his vest collar, ready to be slipped on. Wainfleet’s face scrunched and he coughed a laugh as he took them away from Mansk and held them up, rubbing a shaking thumb over one of the lenses. His glove left a dirty smear when he moved it away. He slid them into one of his empty pouches, just for now, until Mansk asked for them back.

The thanator’s jaws had hole-punched Mansk’s vest, stabbed a semi-circle of two-inch holes right through the front and pierced a matching bunch into his back. Wainfleet stuck his fingers into each tear in quick succession, felt around for anything warm and smooth and wet which belonged on the inside. His other hand he shoved against Mansk’s neck. He held it down firmly enough to crush Mansk’s larynx in the search for a pulse, but he could only feel his own pumping inside his fingers. His glove came away from Mansk’s vest damp and dark.

“No, Mansk, hey, don’t do this, man, c’mon,” he said through a stuttering laugh, leaning over Mansk and slapping his cheek. He put his bloodied gloves all over Mansk’s still face, pushed his hair back, pulled and shook his chin, roughly yanked up eyelids only to see unmoving black dots. Wainfleet tugged on an ear. It snapped back to its relaxed position. Mansk’s white freckle lights were on. Didn’t that mean he was still alive? Where was Mansk’s stupid na’vi book with all its cute little answers for everything?

A breeze clattered the broken shutters. Under him, soggy moss heated his legs. His throat was blocked, his shoulders were shivering, his eyes couldn’t focus for shit. And Mansk. Mansk lay there. No working throat to block up, no working muscle to shiver his shoulders, no working eyes to focus on anything. Was that it? Was that fucking it?

He shook Mansk, really shook him, roughly enough to send his head flopping from side to side. Maybe if he gave his neck enough of a sprain Mansk would snap out of it. What if he pinched him? Jabbed a thumb into one of his bites? Folded his tail in half until it clicked? And then he felt selfish. What if he only wanted Mansk alive because he wouldn’t last two seconds out in the Pandoran wilds alone without his help? The need for Mansk to come back was unexplainable. Shit hurt to think about, to feel about.

“Don’t do this, please, don’t do this, Jesus Christ, Jesus Chr-” Wainfleet’s features met in the middle of his face as a pained wince, his eyes hard and tight in their sockets. He lifted Mansk’s heavy head up with both hands, fingers nearly touching the loose hair falling from the top of Mansk’s braid, both thumbs on his cheekbones. Mansk’s arms lay useless at his sides. Wainfleet willed an ear twitch, an eyelid flicker, a tail coil, a finger spasm, anything. Anything.

“Aw. That’s too bad,” said a broad, dark shape standing in front of the window.

Wainfleet snapped his head up, eyes huge, pulse rocketing.

Colonel Quaritch’s hands were clasped at the small of his back. He stared through the shattered shutters and broken, filthy glass, his silver hair reflecting the bright bloom of the flowers and vines wrapped around the ducting overhead. Wainfleet watched Quaritch shake his wide shoulders and tense his arms. Mansk’s clammy, cold skin warmed under his palms he was holding onto his face so tightly.

“Great job with the squad, Corporal,” Quaritch said as he turned under his cyan spotlight, his boots creaking. “That’s all of ‘em. Congratulations.”

Wainfleet hissed in a breath, twisting his face into a snarl which pulled tight every muscle in his face.

“Why don’t you quit your whinin’, son, hmm?” Quaritch said, strolling closer, swinging his big arms and then lifting them high. “You think you’re what? Upset? Sad? C’mon now, you’re just mad you’ve lost your lil tour guide.”

Wainfleet couldn’t speak. He looked down at Mansk’s face. His tour guide looked so kind and gentle and dead.

“Your boy’s meat now, Corporal. And look at that, you ain’t even got the bags and tags for him.”

“Shut up.”

“Really? That the best you can do?”

Wainfleet said nothing to nothing. Quaritch was nothing. But he was also standing there, kicking his ass.

“But wait, we’ve already seen your best tonight, haven’t we?”

Wainfleet pulled Mansk up onto his legs, one hand under Mansk’s chin and the other clutching a fist of his opened shirt. He lowered his forehead until it touched Mansk’s stiff hair. It had grown longer, spiky, the controlled, neat line of his bullet cut becoming a haphazard zigzag.

Quaritch twisted his mouth in and up like a drawstring under his nose, tilted his head back, eyes empty as mist. “Look at you.”

Wainfleet frowned over Mansk’s unkempt, bloody hair.

“You’re a real shitferbrains, aren’t you, Lyle?”

Wainfleet’s nostrils wrinkled and lifted into a snarl. “No.”

“Can’t lead a squad.”

Louder. “No.”

“Can’t keep a squad alive.”

Mansk’s head was heavy on his knee. It slipped down further. Snarl gone. Volume gone. “I know.”

Zhang. Prager. Z-Dog.

But it wasn’t just Corporal Wainfleet’s squad. He wasn’t the Colonel. He took orders, like Zhang, Prager and Z-Dog had taken orders. And on the SeaDragon, there hadn’t been any orders at all before Sully pitched him headfirst into the drink.

“What about you?” Wainfleet asked. “What about your best?”

Quaritch smirked, lifting his eyebrows. Even this fake Colonel was unflappable. But he was silent.

Wainfleet lowered his face, his eyes, his voice. “Where were you?”

Two arrows, fletched with yellow and black, struck Quaritch through the chest.

They thudded into his ribs. One, two. Thwmp, thwmp. Quaritch tipped backward onto the grass and metal with a throaty yell, both hands clasped around the arrows.

Like Private Jackson after her bat attack, Quaritch writhed on his back, body convulsing, the arrows in his front clacking together. Wainfleet hunched his shoulders and grasped Mansk, his eyes unable to tear themselves away. It wasn’t really Quaritch, he knew that, he wasn’t the shitferbrains the not-real Quaritch claimed he was, but damn, the special effects were good all the same.

The cut on Wainfleet’s queue felt ripped open again. It throbbed a terrible ache with every thrash from the fake Quaritch, who seemed to increase in size with each flip of his body. His cries deepened, his silver hair darkened, growing longer, but only at the back. The dark hair, black and silky, wound around itself, elongated, finished in a little tuft like a girl’s tied-off braid. Quaritch’s skin darkened, too, but to a deep blue. Horizontal stripes dashed from his wrists to his shoulders, followed by a string of dotted lights.

By the time Quaritch had stopped wrestling with himself on the ground, a lion’s tail in that same blue color had sprouted from his lower back and lengthened to reach his ankle. His ears, still small, were now pointed and high on the side of his head.

Quaritch breathed, lifted himself onto his arms, and looked over at Wainfleet. His eyes were yellow as the neon signs they used back on Earth to keep everyone from clocking the scorched sky.

“Aw, that’s too bad,” Quaritch said through a groan, rising to his full height and brushing down his arms. Tiny stones and blades of grass fell from his skin. When he looked across at Wainfleet, his lower eyelids smiled. There were no scars for his crow’s feet to scrunch. There were no crow’s feet. “I liked Private Mansk.”

“Yeah,” Wainfleet said, shrugging. “He did pretty good.”

Wainfleet’s eyes dried out from staring unblinking at the arrows sticking from Quaritch’s chest.

Quaritch looked down at them, interested.

“That shit hurt, Colonel?”

Quaritch wrapped his fingers around one of the arrows and pulled it out with a grunt. “It can. Find it works best when it hurts.”

Cryptic. Cryptic-ass motherfucker. What did that shit even mean? Why was his own fucked-up brain cleverer than him?

“Well, at least you came back for him.”

Wainfleet looked up, searching Quaritch’s new, blue face. He screwed up his own new, blue face watching Quaritch rip out the second arrow. It didn’t make a noise when he let it go to the floor.

“That’s a helluva lot more than I did for you.” Quaritch sighed and moved closer, the clump of hard boots switching to the quiet slap of bare feet. The old man’s bones even creaked when he lowered to balance himself into a crouch. Wainfleet breathed out his amusement in a sigh. His illusion had a pretty big budget.

“I gotta stop talkin’ to you, Colonel,” Wainfleet said, trying a smirk and giving up on it soon after.

Quaritch flexed his hands. They both dangled between his knees. Beyond the gap in his bent legs, the Colonel’s tail counted every other second with an even swish. “We never really talked, did we, Lyle?”

“I don’t follow, sir.”

“Oh, but you do,” Quaritch said, smiling, narrowing an eye, pointing at him. “You follow good. And they followed you good back." A nod down at Mansk. "He follows you. Needs you.”

Wainfleet looked down at Mansk. He’d been doing a lot of that. A lot of looking and nothing else. “Colonel?” he asked.

Quaritch tilted his ears and inclined his head, blinking back at him, but slow, calm, controlled.

“Colonel, are you-” Wainfleet’s tongue felt stuck vertically between his front teeth. He blew out a breath and clutched Mansk closer. This thing wasn’t real. But it was the only thing left to talk to.

Quaritch frowned. It wasn’t a bad frown. Uncle Darryl’s frowns used to look like that. He would kneel down with his arms on his thighs and give kid Lyle the same frown; a sympathetic frown full of love which came before the correction of a well-meaning mistake.

The Colonel reached out a hand. Wainfleet flinched and cringed away with his eyes half-shut, expecting another throttling, but instead, a heavy hand landed on his shoulder.

Quaritch’s thumb pressed into his arm when he gave it a friendly shake. “Get your boy up, Lyle. He’s been breathin’ a whole minute and you ain’t even noticed.”

Wainfleet exhaled and turned his face back to look at Mansk’s relaxed features. Mansk wasn’t moving, but when Wainfleet lowered a swiveling ear down to Mansk’s ajar mouth, he could hear it. The raggedy scrape of tiny, inward breaths.

“Mansk?” he asked in a tone two pitches too high, turning to use his other ear to listen in case the first one wasn’t working right. “Mansk?”

Mansk stirred and screwed up his face, his body going stiff below him as if he’d locked up half-way through a stretch.

“Whoa, whoa, take it easy,” Wainfleet said, wobbling a smile. “You’re fine, you’re fine.” He looked around with a grin for the Colonel, but the old man had timed his exit well. Again.

Mansk blinked and parted dry lips. His flickering eyelids struggled to lift, but his eyes rose to meet Wainfleet’s as best they could all the same. “Hey,” he said.

Wainfleet laughed. He laughed and grabbed Mansk around the ears, pulling his head up. He planted a hard kiss on Mansk’s soaked temple with a noisy smack before pressing his face so forcefully against Mansk’s hair his flat nose disappeared altogether. “Oh, man, it’s so fuckin’ good to see you,” he said through his teeth, grinning into the wet, black locks. Unsure muscles tried to pull his face from smile to wince and then back again. Relief. Relief. It flowed like coolant up and down his nerves. His eyes felt rolled in sand and shoved into sockets too small to hold them, so he squeezed them shut. He could smell through his squashed nostrils the thanator’s dried saliva and Mansk’s sweat, could tell whether it was spit on top of sweat or sweat on top of spit.

Wainfleet sat embracing him for a long minute, eyes closed, until he felt the tug of Mansk’s weak hand on his forearm.

“You stink,” Mansk said.

“Oh, yeah?” Wainfleet replied. He moved one hand to hold Mansk by the back of his head, fingers just under his queue, and used the other hand to wipe under his opposite armpit. He smushed his thumb, so soaked with sweat there were thick beads of it on the pad, into Mansk’s nose. Mansk flinched away with a cough. “Awake now?” Wainfleet added as Mansk sniffed around for fresh air and leaned away.

“The- th-a-” Mansk said, his eyes shaking from side to side and focusing past Wainfleet’s ears.

“I got him. He’s dead,” Wainfleet said, patting Mansk on the side of his neck. Mansk didn’t need to know everything. Any chance to big himself up. Couldn’t tell Mansk he’d let Ugly get away.

He also couldn’t leave Mansk lying in sodden grass freezing his tail off, so he lowered Mansk’s head back down onto the soft algae, squeezed his shoulder (the one with the least amount of blood shining on it) and stood to go to the benches he’d transformed into the Great Wall of Pandora over by the window. Wainfleet grabbed the nearest one by its leg. It was upside down, had flipped when the thanator landed, but was still in one piece and long enough to support Mansk. The tiny, brown buttons of Z-Dog’s ancient gum clung defiantly to its undercarriage, a ring of mushrooms minus the Pandoran glow.

The bench clanged as he righted it and he returned to Mansk, grabbing him by the vest. “Gonna get you up, all right? Just for a second,” he said, not waiting for Mansk to reply before hauling him into a sitting position and slinging him over his shoulder. Wainfleet wobbled, felt his knees try to travel down his shins to his ankles with the weight, but he walked them the two paces to the table and lowered Mansk onto it as carefully as his weakening arms let him.

Mansk cried out and coiled up. Wainfleet didn’t recognize his voice. He dragged Mansk around and put him on his back, pushing his other hand into his knee to stop him rolling off the bench. “You’re okay, you’re okay, gimme a sec here, man, gonna get this offa you, all right? Don’t move,” Wainfleet said, a hand gripped around the collar of Mansk’s vest.

Mansk’s head lolled forward in a single nod. Or a faint.

After unclipping Mansk’s punctured vest and throwing it aside, Wainfleet snapped off his shirt buttons to check the bite wounds. The trio of death figures clustered where Mansk’s collarbones met watched him from beneath their crisply-inked, black cowls. They looked on as Wainfleet opened Mansk’s shirt to his waist. Mansk raised a hand to help, or stop him, but Wainfleet pushed it away with the back of his fingers. Mansk’s skin was wet and cold when it touched his.

“Okay, it’s okay,” Wainfleet said through a nervous splutter, yanking Mansk’s shirt aside. Lines of blood ran down Mansk’s ribs to join the red lake under his back. Wainfleet rubbed Mansk’s sleeve. It was an awkward brush up and down which lasted two seconds. He wasn’t good at this shit. Mitch was the nice guy with the kindly bedside manner. When Private Franks was crying her ass off for those four days over Jackson, Mitch had stayed with her. What had Lyle Wainfleet done? He’d told Mitch to find a way to buck Franks up ASAP so she could get back in the game. “Hey,” he tried, putting the flat of his palm over Mansk’s shuddering chest. “Hey, at least he didn’t get your sweet tat, huh? Not-not a mark on it, look,” he said. Mansk didn’t look. He was too busy whipping his head from side to side with closed eyes and bared teeth.

The vest had taken the brunt, but the scores through Mansk’s flesh were bad. Wainfleet stared at first, assessed the damage, then he ripped pieces of Mansk’s shirt off at the hem and forced the strips into the worst bites. He used his hand for the rest, well aware he was grinding old blood and dirt into the injuries.

Mansk gasped and twinged, trying to twist away, pushing feebly at his arms. Wainfleet copied Mansk’s long groan through gritted teeth and reduced the pressure. “Jesus, okay, you’re cool. Fuck, God, I dunno what I can do here, bro,” Wainfleet said, looking from Mansk’s face and back to his wounded chest. Had any of those teeth gone right through? Was Mansk drowning? He checked Mansk’s face. He wasn’t burbling up blood, but shit, Mansk could still be drowning all the same. Some na’vi exclusive organ inside him could be shutting down or melting or filling up with some na’vi exclusive fluid. “I don’t-I don’t know what I can do, I got nothin’ for you, man,” he said again, holding his hands over Mansk.

He stepped back. What was he going to do? Was he going to run? Was he going to leave him? He stepped back again. Mansk was bad. He was alive, but he was bad. What did Corporal Lyle Wainfleet have to help his one remaining soldier except the filthy bandage he’d already wrapped around his own queue? Using that nasty-ass rag would just kill Mansk faster. Another step. His foot rolled over a spent round case. It cooled his cuts until it grew warm under his sole. Wainfleet lifted his leg and nudged it with his toe, watched the cartridge case trundle through the moss.

“Mansk, I,” Wainfleet said, brushing a hand up and over his wet hair. Felt wrong. Had to find his shaving stuff soon. Had to chop all that shit off. “Mansk, I’m gonna be right back, okay?” he said again. He went to Mansk’s side and gave his arm a shake to keep him awake. It had been tough enough to rouse him the first time. “I am gonna be right back, don’t go anywhere, all right?” Wainfleet said. He caught Mansk’s tail mid-table-slap and gave it to him, curled his freezing fingers around it. “You hold that. You hold that real goddamn tight and you keep your eyes open. You do not sleep, you got that? Keep squeezing that, stay awake.”

Mansk snorted a grunt and shook his head up and down in a try at a nod. “Yeah,” he said through a thin-mouthed smile and a rasping chuckle. Wainfleet smirked down at him, patted him on the good shoulder and left Hell’s Kitchen.

 

 

When a stray, piping-hot cartridge case stuck itself behind Mitch’s goggles and nearly turned his eyeball into a goopy s’more, the rush for a medkit in the firing range hadn’t been a long one. An office at the end of the room, along with the usual wall-mounted emergency kit, always had at least four additional spares in a tall cabinet in the corner. Why hadn’t he thought of those before? Wainfleet focused on a small burst of pain traveling up his queue as he ran to punish himself for that one. Probably hurt as much as Mitch’s scalded eyelid when they’d thrown him through the doors to Med all those years ago.

The range wasn’t far, still on the ground floor, would take five minutes to reach if he limped double time. A few slips down a few hallways and he was there, new bruises purpling his knees.

He had to duck under the door, but the range’s ceiling was high enough for him to stand straight, allowing him to move as quickly as the darkness permitted to the office at the end. He ran his hand along the wall and felt the weapon racks. They were picked clean. No surprises there. His eyes adjusted and he saw the range itself was empty, a snapshot from the last time he’d used it, prepped for another round. The targets were all lined up along the back wall ready to roll. Wainfleet half-expected to run into Sergeant Pederson getting a little practice in, or maybe Evans from the demo squad. As he trotted by, his ears recreated the crack of gunfire, the whoops which followed highest scores, the wails which followed lowest scores. Wainfleet passed his own favorite spot, accidentally slowing down. The Grinder was well-practiced at reprinting the hanger clamps he liked to shoot off at the end of his sessions, and the guys who got the reprint requests were well-practiced at giving him the stink-eye at lunch.

The office at the back of the range had been forced open. Wainfleet sighed and licked his lip, feeling open air where the door ought to be. A broken automatic door didn’t mean the room had been cleared out. He squeezed inside, ignored the warmth of a new layer of sweat, and went through the cabinet drawers double time. None were locked. All were empty. He checked them all twice, slamming them shut and denting the metal.

The firing range office was the one remaining place in Hell’s Gate he could think of which might have had a medkit, and it was dry. He was too tired to kick the cabinet, so he ripped it away from the wall instead, threw it down onto its face with a crash, sat down on it and bent it into a banana. He laughed into the heels of his hands, elbows on his knees.

He sat there in the dark, tail whacking the hollow cabinet and the balls of his feet hopping up and down with his pulse. Mansk was going to die of blood loss. Mansk was going to die of infection. Mansk was going to die.

An unsteady foot kicked out from under him and his toes crunched into something flat and cold and hard. With a (human) growl, Wainfleet leaned forward and picked it up, ready to throw it, but his thumb brushed an embossed shape and made him freeze mid-toss.

He drew the metal box into his chest and felt around it, lifted it closer to an eye so he could see it clearer. Shit was a medkit. He kissed it full on the hinge and thanked Christ for the idiot who’d dropped it during the rushed evacuation. His money was on that moron Norm Spellman.

 

 

“Eyes open, let’s go,” Wainfleet said, tapping Mansk on the cheek. He put the medkit down on the bench with a clang to encourage Mansk to wake up, then smashed it on the bench again until Mansk’s ears turned back and his eyes rolled under their lids.

The medkit and its contents were difficult to manipulate with his big fingers, but Wainfleet managed to clean each of Mansk’s gouges, although he did have to struggle holding Mansk down a couple of times by the sternum to stop him clawing his face off. The more he depleted the stuff inside the kit, the more his queue complained about it, like the thing could see him wasting that tasty rubbing alcohol and gauze. As tempted as he was to use some of it for himself, he decided both he and his stinking queue deserved to hurt tonight. His hands were squeaky clean by the time he finished tying the bandages around Mansk’s heaving ribs.

It was tough work, taking Mansk back to the longhouse. Wainfleet reckoned a half-dead Mansk would do a better job carrying him, but at least he could shuffle through Hell’s Gate without v-dogs and thanators and stingbats gunning for their tails.

As he made his way outside and into the cool night, Wainfleet tried half-heartedly to keep his mind on taking one step in front of the other and not on wondering why an entire zoo had attempted to smoke him. And only him. Plus, they’d spoiled a perfectly luxurious piss.

The steps up to the gate were the hardest. Mansk weighed more and more with each strained knee-lift, but Wainfleet didn’t fall back, didn’t drop him. Inside, he slipped Mansk from his shoulders and onto his bed, hoping Mansk didn’t notice how unceremoniously he’d put him down. Then he took a seat on the bed next to him, utterly worn out.

Mansk moved after a long, five minutes, opening his eyes and resuming his pained breathing. Wainfleet held his wrist and waited it out with him until he chilled.

“Saved your shades,” Wainfleet said, deciding Mansk was calm enough to converse with. He dipped a hand into his pouch and flicked the sunglasses open. He waved them in front of Mansk’s still face, trying to give him an encouraging smile. Wainfleet got no answer, so he put the shades on. The arms squeezed the skin above his ears and the narrow, plastic bridge dug into the soft flesh of his wide, flat nose. Mansk’s head was more streamlined than his own big, blue melon, clearly. “Think I look like you now with this haircut, huh? Hey, we could be brothers, like, for real.”

Even though he received no reaction back, Wainfleet grinned, laughing to himself behind it. He probably looked more like he was getting bitten in half by a thanator than smiling brightly, cringing that ugly toothy smirk at Mansk. Guy didn’t deserve that. Wainfleet let the smile fade and rubbed his tongue over the blunt point of a canine.

In the quiet which followed, he eased the shades off his face (the bridge pinched on the way down) and rested them on his knee. He spotted Mansk’s Rubik’s cube on the other bed when he tossed his shades onto it. Mansk liked that thing. Wainfleet leaned over and grabbed it, brandishing it over Mansk’s face like he had with the shades. “Remember this? Wanna see me try doin’ the yellow side?” Wainfleet asked, turning the small cube in his hand. It slipped out of his fingers and landed on Mansk, who hopped up with a start at the surprise contact. Wainfleet picked the cube up and held Mansk’s arm down onto the thin mattress. “Whoops, it’s okay, just dropped it, see?” he laughed.

Mansk looked at him, then sighed and sent his glassy gaze elsewhere.

Wainfleet spent the next few minutes doing a terrible job with the cube. He’d ruined Mansk’s blue side in his quest to try and complete the yellow face, only managing to get a couple of squares, both too far away from each other.

Mansk murmured something before he rolled over and faced his back to him. It sounded like ‘don’t go away.’

Wainfleet smiled and shuffled closer. He tapped the corner of the Rubik’s Cube into Mansk’s hip, which made Mansk’s tail jump. Wainfleet grimaced at Mansk’s back. “Hey, don’t worry, I ain’t goin’ anywhere. I’m here all night.”

A long time passed before Mansk replied. Frankly, Wainfleet hadn’t been expecting Mansk to speak at all, so hearing his voice, however small it was, surprised him. “Go away,” Mansk said.

Wainfleet sat up straight, withdrawing his hands into his lap. His upper lip lifted into an attempt at a crooked smirk despite sensing both of his ears turning down. His hands nearly crushed the cube. “What? No, no, man, I’m stayin’ right here.”

Mansk hunched his shoulders up to his ears and hissed a wince to himself. “I said go away.”

Wainfleet snuffled a laugh, which was probably a bad move, but he couldn’t help it. Mansk was tired, that was all. Tired people talked BS. He went to nudge Mansk on the hip again, but Mansk’s tail swung wide and gave him a terse whip across the skull tat. Wainfleet slid away down the bed, right to the corner, and resisted nursing his arm. “C’mon, you’re hurt, man, you don’t know what you’re sayin’-”

“Leave me alone,” Mansk whispered, twisting where he lay and glowering over his shoulder, his eyes still managing to pierce from under their puffy lids.

Wainfleet stared back. “What? What the fuck? Nah, man, I’m not leavin’. You need me. You need me.” Wainfleet would be the first to admit he wasn’t exactly a hot nurse with huge defibrillator paddles, but why was Mansk throwing the offer of watching him for a night back in his face?

“I need you?” Mansk said. Sneered. Wainfleet heard the groan of pain loading like a struggling datapad file on the back of his tongue.

He was wobbling. Wainfleet felt his eyes darting, felt his eyelids blinking too much. “Yeah, you do. You’re messed up-”

“Because of you!”

Wainfleet tried not to choke on the spit stuck in his drying throat.

Mansk sat up, bent double so far Wainfleet thought he’d fall off the cot, and swiped a weak fist through the air a foot in front of Wainfleet’s nose. “Go away!” Mansk shouted, scowling. His eyebrows met, his smile lines were bold black strokes on both sides of his mouth, his lower teeth jutted. Man looked like the Colonel on the SeaDragon before they’d all gotten their asses handed to them. Mansk dropped the expression as quick as he’d made it, slumped onto the bed with a thump and curled onto his side again.

Wainfleet stood away from the bed, his free hand out in defense, glad Mansk couldn’t see his ears facing the floorboards and his tail pressing itself to a leg. “Sure,” he said, nodding, scratching his chin, doing anything that wasn’t thinking about that face Mansk had given him. “All right, I’m goin’,” he added in the chattiest tone he could find which made it through the tiny gap in his tightening throat. He backed up, rubbing the Rubik’s Cube against his thigh in the futile search for a pocket. “I’ll be, uh, outside. Rest up.”

“Save it,” Mansk muttered.

Wainfleet went to speak again, then decided against it. He continued to walk backward until he ran out of floor, then turned and left through the gate, dragging it closed behind him.

 

 

He sat on the veranda’s top step and propped his head against the rail, looking to cool his forehead. The hands of the humid air had kept the woodgrain warm, just for him. Hot jungle wind both dried his sweat and teased more from his skin, over and over. His posture sank in on itself, arms loose and ending up somewhere in front of him.

Pandora buzzed around his ears in the dark. The trees hissed. Nocturnal animals hunted, screeched, snapped branches, fluttered from black canopies. Maybe plants out there were getting up on their roots and doing the same shit the animals did; hunting and screeching and flying. He heard the chitter of stingbats. He heard the far away bellow of a wounded thanator. He heard his own messy sniff inward and gulp.

Something clonked onto the step below his cut and scabbing feet.

Wainfleet let his knee fall to one side and saw blue light catch a shiny sticker on the Rubik’s Cube.

Reaching down and pulling a muscle all wrong across the back of his ribs, Wainfleet picked it up.

Mansk had brought a stupid toy to the alien moon. Wainfleet could break it. It would be so easy. He possessed four times the strength of a human according to the user manual. He applied pressure with his fingers until the cube protested. His sweat slid over the stupid little stickers, made the whole thing cheep like a chick, which made him squeeze harder until the plastic started to bow and the spinning rows squashed into each other and threatened to crack.

He stopped with a gasp and pressed the cube into his brow, dented squares into his skin. Part of the cube snapped under his hand. He took it away from his face, twisted it, and found the middle row couldn’t move at all.

He made a noise. It started near his tonsils (did na’vi have those?) and fought like that hiss to get out, causing his stomach to leap and the top of his mouth to vibrate. He clamped his teeth shut on it. He called it a laugh, because shit, the real word for it scared him shitless. He laughed and smeared a wet trail of slime from his nose up his arm, dropping the Rubik’s Cube to bounce down the stairs like a die into the dark grass.

Daybreak honeyed the horizon. Wainfleet laughed and finally, weary from laughing, slept.

Chapter 15: Recharge

Notes:

oh frakrr say remember frakrr say?

July 2025 wordcount 800+ i am writing this again very slowly! Thanks for your patience!

Wainfleet squatted in the brook with his back to Hell’s Gate and his eyes on the jungle.

His pants, vest and shirt dried in the humid noon heat. He’d flung them onto a log lying in the grass on the bank. They weren’t clean, not by a long shot, but an acceptable degree of freshness would be restored now that he’d scraped blood and mud from their seams. His vest still held sand in the corners of the empty pouches. Morgado’s stolen na’vi hunting bow rested against a chunk of driftwood nearby, a clutch of arrows stabbed into the soft, wet soil next to it. He’d have preferred a rifle, a pistol, but the bow was better than nothing. Still a weapon. Still dangerous.

With his ears swiveling this way and that, picking up every new caw or call or click from the dense trees, Wainfleet gave himself a rigorous bath.

He shed the sweat and the dirt and the blood and whatever else had splashed him since his last strip wash. From his tender pits he rubbed away the dust of Hell’s Gate’s hangar. From his twinging jaw and around his bruised nose, he removed the spit sprayed from the thanator’s mouth. From between his lacerated toes, he wiped off the strange-smelling sludge of suspicious brown he’d stepped in on the way to the water. He even swept a wet thumb over his greasy DMT, bringing back its old shine.

Wainfleet hadn’t bothered to wake Mansk before he’d left. Holding the back of his hand under Mansk’s nose and waiting for shallow breath to warm his little finger’s knuckle was all the care he’d given him before leaving to secure the area and then bathe. He probably should have shaken Mansk back into consciousness and made him eat or drink or something, but he wasn’t good at shit like that. Mansk didn’t want him around? Wish granted.

The cold stream rushed around his scuffed shins. He let his tail free-float on the surface behind him, giving its muscles a break. It was a fight to stop himself from sitting down completely. The stones under his feet were smooth enough for him to take a seat; he could shuffle around, move a few, create a spot to zone out in. The cut on the back of his leg temporarily vanished under the water’s cool lick, making the desire to lie back in the current all the more tempting.

Despite the chilled, fresh water and the clear air, Wainfleet was tired of the outdoor cat washes. What he’d give for a blob of that RDA-branded shower gel he used to have at Hell’s Gate the first go around. A hot pelting from one of the three working spray heads in the communal showers and that basic-ass shower gel sounded heavenly. He closed his eyes and played a walkthrough in his head. He entered the showers, tossed a towel on the bench, headed straight for the one which reached max temp the quickest, jabbed the side of his fist into the button too many times, tilted the shower head because the guy who’d used the stall before him was Fike-short, stripped, hopped two steps back until the water ran red hot, then took as long as he liked because he was the Corporal, second under the Colonel. His mental walkthrough glitched for a second. Was it wait for the water to run red hot and then strip? Why had he forgotten which way around those stages went? He shook his head, ears twisting and flinging droplets. Didn’t matter. Wasn’t anything.

His queue, at least, enjoyed the scrub. He held it in one hand, using the other to scratch off all the shit and dirt it accumulated overnight. The nasty thump it took against the concrete when he’d slipped in the armor bay had opened the cut back up, and now, with all of the hair unbraided, he could see the injury in direct sunlight. The old, brown blood and greenish-yellowish flaky gunk were gone, leaving it with a clean slice as long as his palm and pinky combined. There was a small urge to pull apart the flesh and take a peek at the wires inside, but if the whole thing split down the middle like a peeled banana he’d be in even more trouble, so he left it alone. He wondered if he’d ever get it fixed, wondered if it was the one part of the shiny, new bodywork which couldn’t be repaired. What if the Bridgehead med techs said: ‘ Nope, sorry, Corporal, gonna have to lose it. It’s just too fucked. ’?

Like the rest of his scrapes, the queue cut had tried to heal over between all the abuse, but it needed stitching up. Too bad the needle and thread from the medkit he’d used up on Mansk would never cut it, literally. The tiny point of a needle designed for human flesh wouldn’t get through their tough hide, and the suture wouldn’t hold a wound closed for five minutes even if there was enough. It all sat there still in the plastic box, mocking the both of them. The medkit they really wanted lay at the bottom of the ocean strapped to Alexander’s waist. One more sweep of water down the queue’s flesh was the best he could do. Again.

He sloshed water up his arm and realized he had already washed that arm twice. Wainfleet was stuck repeating, stuck thinking and going over the same clean spots with hands so clean they squeaked over wet skin. He stopped when he noticed he was rubbing blue skin pink.

It wasn’t as if he’d stamped all over the viperwolves’ nests or smashed the stingbats’ eggs or flapped a red cape in front of the thanator. They’d started it. The pads of Wainfleet’s fingers and toes pruned as he crouched still in the shallow water and played back the night before’s events just like he’d played back that luxury Hell’s Gate shower, allowing a new layer of sweat on the backs of his shoulders to develop. The v-dogs padded all the way up to the condos on their hunt for him. And the thanator, sure, it threw Mansk like a doll across the cafeteria, but it hadn’t chased after him and chowed down. The stingbats he’d seen in the day flew away when disturbed, not bashed their brains against glass to peck his eyes out. They’d all gone for him, not Mansk. Animals making it personal? Insane. Impossible. He shivered in the cold water, the same chilling feeling he’d experienced in his Hell’s Gate bunkroom creeping an icy hand up his back. That roaring of a huge creature right on top of him, its giant feet crushing, squashing, crunching, hurting. What was that?

Wainfleet blinked and clenched his teeth. Maybe Mansk started it by giving him shit in the longhouse about na’vi stuff. Maybe the noise of that childish fight had attracted the animals. Wainfleet splashed his face to wash off new sweat, spitting when the handful of water jumped into his mouth. Mansk never argued with him before. He’d questioned orders, made faces, but that was the extent of it, and only ever since the SeaDragon. Mansk was the unreasonable one. Who the hell got pissed off over a floating plant? If he hadn’t been such an asshole and driven his Corporal off, nothing would have happened. It was Mansk’s fault. Nothing to do with Lyle Wainfleet.

With a renewed dislike for Mansk in his mind, Wainfleet roughly tied his damp hair back around the queue. It was easier doing it with wet locks, but not by much. Again, unsurprisingly, his braiding job was wonky; he’d started too low and was forced to leave the hair over the swollen part loose to accommodate the inflamed flesh. But it wasn’t like there was anyone he was looking to impress with a neat braid, girly-ass shit that it was. It wasn’t fair to give a guy who’d lived half his life without hair all those thick, sleek strands which reached down to the top of his legs and on top of that , expect him to know how to take care of it. Not that he was doing a bad job. He was doing a great job. Still unfair.

Wainfleet’s ears shot up, erect against the sides of his head, at the same time a shudder of goosebumps prickled his arms and neck. His gaze ran along the trees, up and down and back again. Something had its eyes on him. He couldn’t tell what, or where, but something somewhere out there in the droning dark of the forest was watching, and with an intelligent intent.

He lifted himself out of the stream into a half-crouch. A shake traveled from his flipping ears down his back to his tail, which coiled through a rollercoaster corkscrew, the sodden tuft slinging water. Now he was up, he felt heavy again. The round, smooth stones under his feet clacked against each other with his movement and he stuck his tail out horizontally to stop himself slipping over them like a kid’s movie villain suffering a marble-fall gag. He couldn’t give himself away to the thing watching, so he put one hand down into the cool stream and used the other to scoop water over his neck, face down but eyes up.

After a minute passed and the back of his neck was cleaner than any other part of him, too many branches snapped all at once. Too many to be a small animal. His stalker had moved back into the jungle, the rustle of leaves and sticks and stones under their feet giving them away until the sound petered out.

He waded to the bank and whipped his dried pants from the log, yanking them up hard over soaking legs. Redressing cost him time, but there was no sense risking running into a Pandoran fly which had evolved specifically, like the ass-crawler he’d invented, to zip into pee holes. And what if it had little legs with barbs which only faced backward, so once he was in, he was in? And what if the pee hole-crawler also laid eggs the size of lightbulbs before they-

That noise again. Sounded like a pair of feet, not six. Wainfleet grabbed the hunting bow and pulled one of the arrows out of the ground. He left the rest there, unable to see a way he could have an arrow ready to go and also hold the rest in the spare fingers. Would have been handy if they’d found one of those arrow holsters in the armor bay, too. Not that he’d ever seen a na’vi use one in the disagreements he used to get involved in back in the day. Weird-ass people. Obsessed with bows and arrows but hadn’t invented a way to stash them when on the move.

An arrow nocked, Wainfleet crested the muddy bank, his feet instantly dirtied again, and headed into the treeline. He kept the bow low, slipping silent and alert into the undergrowth. The bow was no AR, and he wasn’t good with it, but it was reassuring to feel the smooth grain of the wood against the heel of his hand and the scratchy feathers between his fingers. He used the pale, bone arrowhead to push aside larger ferns, moving deeper and trying not to think about how useless a bow and arrow would be in close quarters if something jumped him. Wainfleet breathed out, turning a static cloud of tiny insects into a whirlwind around his head. Easier and quicker to squeeze a trigger than pull back the string of a bow. But there was a bow in his hands, not an AR, so he decided to suck it up and stop being a little bitch about it.

A shaft of sunlight through the dark trees above lit orange a cluster of strange plants resembling a bunch of rusty trumpets shoved mouthpiece first into the dirt. He couldn’t remember the name of the plant, but he knew if he touched one it would wrap up with a fwoomp into itself and disappear into the ground, triggering the rest. Hilarious to fuck with, but not when he needed to remain unseen. He slipped past the trumpets, keeping his elbows and tail tucked close to his body, and pressed on.

He knew this jungle. Or he knew it from an angle three feet four inches lower. It hadn’t been deadly back then, patrolled and trodden down and monitored, and definitely hadn’t been as loud in his ears. Felt like old times. It was easy to pretend there was a Samson ten meters back, its rotors still winding down with a low whirr. Easy to pretend the bow was a CARB AR. Easy to pretend there was a real mission to complete.

Swinging lemurs chattered overhead in the lower canopy and showered a swirling rain of leaves down through the hot air. They had names, too, those lemur creatures. The Doc tried her best with him at the start when he’d taken Garcia’s place as Augustine-escort, he’d give her that. Thankfully his disinterest in anything which didn’t have teeth like circular saws cut her dull schooling short. He could still recall the disappointed face she used to make when he shot her down with a remark or a laugh. She would tilt her head, raise her brows, then take one of her hands away from her hips to dismiss him with a noise. Her fault for bothering. Her fault for assuming her boring science bullshit and Eywa mumbo-jumbo was worth his precious time.

The call of a banshee wailed somewhere above the dark canopy. With a sharp breath in, Wainfleet aimed his arrow high to face the ceiling of shadowy branches, his grip tightening on the fletched feathers scraping his cheekbone. He heard the rush of its wings and saw a black shadow blink over spots of sunlight. It must have been his banshee, or Mansk’s, going on a hunt or whatever those things did on their own. That was the good thing about the birds; no need to feed them kibble or let them out into the yard to do their business. He lowered the bow and continued.

Wainfleet strayed from Hell’s Gate. He pushed through the rainforest’s vegetation and avoided the plants he’d learned from his jungle recon days would give away a man’s position with noises or movement, traveling farther than he knew he should. The smell of the place. It was foul and fresh at the same time. The odors which made his nose twitch were strong. One of the weirder changes he was still getting used to was being able to smell where animals had been. A blue deer had trotted the same path he walked now. He could smell its musty, leathery skin, its feet, knew it had something unpleasant stuck to the underside of a hoof. There was a smell he’d come to know as na’vi, but it was faint, as if this na’vi knew how to cover their scent. Tracking them was useless; they were also skilled at keeping their feet from leaving prints. The na’vi was likely traveling by tree, hopping from limb to limb.

The trees grew less dense and he slid down into a small, grassy valley, arrow still tensed against the bowstring. His ears were starting to mistake the shuffle of small animals snuffling in leaf litter for footsteps and he was sure his route had turned from straight line to bowl of spaghetti. The throat comms might have been back around his neck for emergencies, but with Mansk down, it was just an expensive strip of black webbing belt.

He stopped in the middle of the glade. All around was that same hissing, whooping, cawing, buzzing. The forest never shut up. Wainfleet swiped at a humming bug making tracks over his neck and took a seat, unhooking the bow and letting it drop to the dirt. He could afford five minutes, and visibility around him was 360. Sitting in the center of the clearing he’d easily see anything heading his way.

His legs used to be able to go for days, no problem, but now a twinge at the back of his head dictated where and when his energy ran out. He was heavy. His queue was still damp, weighing him down further. He was tired. Wainfleet lay supine in the strangely spongy, soft grass and caught breath he didn’t realize he’d been losing. Flat on his back in pain. Like Mansk.

The canopy above swayed and leaned with the wind. Branches clacked, sword fighting. A flock of large long-legged birds, or something like them, burst up through the leafy roof, punching a hole in the dark. A circle of white light landed in the grass beside Wainfleet. It warmed his left set of toes. He spent a long while cooking his foot in the sun before rolling into the light. The sun heated his already hot skin and baked his dog tag until it was scalding to the touch. At maximum temperature, he stretched his long arms high over his head and popped as many rigid joints as he could. He felt that stretch team up with a wide yawn and reach down the rest of him until every toe was parted from its next door neighbor and his calves ached in the best way with the tension. Even the cut on his leg had nothing to say.

His heart rate crawled almost to a stop, went along at the slowest beat he’d felt in two weeks. The grass tickling his flickering ears was soft, fluffy, not a single sharp edge on a single blade. He took a deep, sternum-straining breath and let it go in a long sigh. His closed eyelids glowed red under the sun’s beam. Every muscle tried to sink into the earth. His tail circled in on itself as far as the bones allowed and then flopped onto the ground, enjoying the occasional lazy swish through the plants.

Wainfleet relaxed back in the grass and pulled his queue to his front, resting it in a coil on his chest to dry. As soon as it was, he undid the lower third of his braid and retied it a little more neatly, impressed he could do it by feel now. Would he have to help Mansk with his? Was Mansk bad enough to need help washing? Jesus, he’d abandoned the guy lying in a cot covered in blood. He’d be sticking to the blanket. He’d stink. Wainfleet’s eyebrows met in a frown. Mansk was lying half-dead on his own in the longhouse and Wainfleet was worried he would need to look after him beyond just leaving him to heal alone.

Enough time-wasting. Up, soldier. He could almost sense the sharp kick of a boot knocking him in the ankle. He eased open an eye, just in case the Colonel loomed over him, but he was alone. Wainfleet groaned and got to his feet, fatigue returning and pressing down onto him like a ten-ton backpack. The bow and arrow were more like lead in his hold than light wood. A short trudge brought him to the other side of the tiny valley. He freed one hand and climbed the low slope, continuing his… what? His walk in the park? Why was he wandering so aimlessly? He wasn’t even hunting his invisible quarry anymore. Was it the fear of Mansk, the fear of Mansk’s condition, keeping him from turning back?

Dead ahead between the trees was a tiny encampment.

Wainfleet fell into an automatic crouch and crept forward, the point of the arrow and his eyes watching for anything in cobalt blue, an arm, a leg, a face, a tail. Nothing so far. On the edge of the camp sat a lean-to structure made of bowed wicker and tanned, dyed animal skins stretched tight. He stayed back, circling the area in a wide sweep, eager for a look inside from afar in case a na’vi warrior was taking a catnap in its dark recess. It wasn’t a big shelter, and judging by how clean of moss and bird shit the hide walls were, hadn’t been there for long. There was no growth of plant life on or around the setup to suggest it was abandoned. Place was clean, not even a spiderweb strung between mud pots.

When it was clear the camp was unoccupied and its perimeter unguarded, Wainfleet looped the bow over his head, the string digging into his bare chest, and sneaked into the camp, arrow in hand ready to be used as a baton. He didn’t want to spend too much time poking around, so he allowed himself five minutes total, just to assess the threat level, and then he was bailing.

There were no weapons, unless pots and hollowed-out gourds and wicker baskets were classed as dangerous by the na’vi. Probably were. He smirked and nudged those aside as he first explored the shelter, double checking there was nothing lurking. Na’vi were pretty talented at folding themselves up before they sprung. There was, luckily, a lack of the enemy waiting in the dark. It was simple inside; a patterned mat coiled and propped against the wall, more pots and bowls, cups and baskets, a satchel or belt hanging from a handy pocket sewn onto the inside of the skin wall.

This was a camp for a single na’vi. Wainfleet was no na’vi expert, but he had never seen one on their own. They always traveled in packs, attacked in packs. This Na’vi was a loner, and couldn’t be too far away. Nothing was packed up. The camp’s owner intended to stick around another night.

Outside the lean-to, he stepped onto the smooth, colorful reeds of a weaved mat. It was similar to the kinds he’d seen clashing with each other in Selfridge’s condo, but this one was worn, the brightness of its red and yellow shades fading in the center. His damp feet tracked mud across it. Beside the mat was a small cook fire. Wainfleet dug a toe into the surrounding ashes. Cold.

A scent drew his attention to a large leaf beside the fire. Salty, heady, rich. Wainfleet put his arrow between his teeth and crouched, touching the leaf. The surface was plastic-smooth. He lifted it by the tough stalk and revealed, sitting on top of another huge leaf, mathematically-chopped squares of cooked meat in two neat rows. Wainfleet took the arrow from his mouth and let it roll forgotten across the dirt. He raised his head and stuck his tongue out between his teeth, holding it there, watching the forest for movement. Nothing.

He was quick to stuff three cubes into his mouth at one, chewing as fast as he could, aware the chef might be on their way back, rubbing their hard-worked hands in anticipation of eating the delicate meal they had created. It melted on the tongue. A squishing chew released cook fire smoke clinging to the meat’s soft surface. The amount of rock salt used would have taken the head off a human but to something like him, it was subtle. Wainfleet had already used up all of his adjectives for good food, so he ate three more, then another two after that. He’d tasted this before, and not just in the last six months he’d spent running around in blue skin.

While he gorged, he spotted one thing made of metal in the camp.

“No way,” he said through his mouthful, stepping through ferns and stiff grass toward a tree with green scaly bark. Propped against it was an AMP knife. Blood dried black and brown along the blade. After running his hand over the warm metal, Wainfleet looked around again, expecting to catch sight of a thanator with a hole in its cheek, but he saw and heard nothing but the glimmer and sizzle of the green jungle. The knife’s new owner had given it a fresh paint job. Gunmetal gray was now scarlet and mustard. Wainfleet scoffed and gave the blade a flick with his finger.

He finished off the rest of the cooked meat, sucking salt from underneath a nail as he stood back and surveyed the camp for anything he might have missed.

Growing from the dirt to one side of the shelter was a bloom of arrows in red and yellow. Wainfleet frowned, gnawed off the nail with the salt stuck under it, spat it into the grass, and stepped around the cook fire to reach them. They weren’t AR mags, but ammo was ammo. He ripped the whole bunch from the grass and clutched them in a clammy hand. He had to hand it to the na’vi, they were good at the caveman stuff. The arrow shafts were even and smooth, precisely whittled or stripped or carved or whatever it was they did to make them so thin but strong. The fletching was neat, the red and yellow feathers alternating in such a way he nearly wondered what the bird the na’vi plucked them from looked like. Bone arrowheads, like the ones he’d recovered from the hangar, were expertly fitted to the ends, their bullet points deadly sharp. He squeezed his fingers around the wood and took them all.

It was a longer trek back to the stream than he’d have liked, but his short rest and the snack thanks to their mystery guest helped with the energy levels. He couldn’t tell Mansk about it. Couldn’t worry the poor guy. The enemy camp was tucked far enough away from the compound not to cause a significant problem, plus, if the na’vi had wanted to show their face or worse, they would have done it already, would have pounced on him while he meandered looking for them. This was just a solitary loser looking for themselves in the trees.

At the stream, Wainfleet sloshed through the running water one last time to clean his feet and legs and wrapped the arrows in his dry shirt to carry them home to the longhouse.

Mansk was still alive when he returned to the avatar hut.

Wainfleet slung his bow and the bundle of new arrows onto his bed as he passed it, half of them rolling out of his shirt, and tossed his heavy vest onto the next bed along.

The rise and fall of Mansk’s chest was steady when Wainfleet leaned over him. He did the hand under the nose test again, as hard as that was with how tiny those catlike na’vi nostrils were. Breathing was good. Slow and deep. It was difficult to tell if Mansk had woken up at any point in his absence. Wainfleet hoped he had.

He waited for the Colonel to perch himself on the bed next to them. Easy enough to imagine the approaching clomp of boots or the quiet thump of bare soles on floorboards. Easy enough to picture everything; how he would sit, whether he would sigh or make one of those pondering-old-man noises, where he’d put his arms, the angle of his head, where his ears would be positioned. Wainfleet had been getting pretty good at reading those stupid twitching things on everyone. Helped him to work out where his squad’s morale was at toward the end. Even Z’s huge deer ears spent most of their time horizontal before the eclipse.

Now would be a good time for the old bastard to impart some good ol’ boy wisdom (he’d take a fun fact about na’vi ears at this point) but the beds on either side remained empty. Because Colonel Quaritch was long gone. Under the SeaDragon with Alexander and Prager and Z-Dog.

Wainfleet took a seat on the bed next to Mansk’s leg and checked his poor attempt at wrapping up the Private’s wounds. Nothing was undone, but if Mansk stood up and lifted his arms the bandages would unravel like spilled guts onto the ground.

The three hooded death figures of Mansk’s tat peered over the highest gauze strip and watched him, the trio tucked under red covers and looking none too happy about it. Or maybe they were pleased about being covered in blood and grinning their skulls off under their black cowls. Wainfleet hoped he’d get the chance to ask about that ink one day. Had Mansk gotten it to remind himself of something? To commemorate something? Had he gone alone to the parlor, or was someone out there wearing the design’s twin?

Wainfleet smiled and ran a hand down his dragon. Fike chose the other dragon, the one with the big wings, slapped onto the top of his forearm. So they could bump them together when they’d healed up, Fike said. Stupid as fuck. He smiled wider.

The big, blue na’vi guide lay on the floor, half under the cot. Wainfleet sniffed, ran the back of his thumb over his nostrils and leaned down to pick it up, kicking it to himself with his foot. He scooped it up in one hand and shuffled backward onto the bed properly, trying his best to avoid crushing Mansk’s leg at his back. Wainfleet scratched a tickly itch halfway down his tail and opened the book.

“What’s our favorite chapter, Private Mansk?” he asked Mansk’s sleeping form, lifting a leg up onto the bed and flicking through the book’s pages. In human hands the book would be nearly as heavy as the giant magazines the poor assholes born in the twentieth century used to find phone numbers. In his hands it was as light as a birthday card. He flipped through the pages a chapter at a time, half-afraid to separate the book’s leaves in case he ripped them. “Oh, yeah, mating rituals,” he said again, with that kind of voice, stopping at a bold header.

The mating rituals section was the least titillating thing he’d ever read. It went on and on about the brain-braid bond and how deep and spiritual and unknownable to humankind a head-tentacle-touch was when a na’vi girl and a na’vi boy liked each other very much. The book had a massive amount of prudish respect for the whole thing. Mating. He snorted a laugh to himself. Please. ‘Mate’ was a native Scoresby word, and the last thing he wanted to picture that dude doing.

Wainfleet looked across the bed at Mansk. Mansk’s complexion was pale, the stripes running from his neck to his cheeks standing out a darker blue. Wainfleet lowered the book onto his thigh and averted his eyes to the floorboards. Circles of blood like red pennies led from the gate to the cot, dropped spare change. No wonder Mansk told him to fuck off in that polite manner of his.

Hell’s Gate had been his bright fucking idea. Detour for a day or two, rest up, freshen up, get their shit together ready for reporting to Bridgehead. Look their best for the General. A couple of days wasted at the old base and he was rotting from the inside out worse than ever and Mansk was immobilized. Bright fucking idea.

A piece of gristle from the salted meat was stuck between his teeth. He’d felt it for a while, but no amount of wriggling his tongue around it to push it out was working. He dug a rough fingernail into the gap between his incisors and went to close the na’vi guide and throw it onto the bed, but he froze when the tiny sliver of meat issued a tinge of that salty, rich flavor again, his nail still wedged in the gap in his teeth. The taste of it reminded him there was more to eat out there, that his diet didn’t have to consist of weird, lumpy pink fruit and vegetable-passing plants every day.

Still trying to get at the scrap irritating his teeth, Wainfleet flopped all of the book’s pages to the index, scanning the columns for the word he was looking for. It was on the tip of his tongue. Literally.

There he was. The ugly little pig-elephant-bug thing called tapirus. Wainfleet knew he recognized that flavor. He flicked to its page and skimmed the intel. Easily hunted, no stingers or claws or teeth or venom. Easy to chop up, too. Not much armor, no spikes or spines, no feathers to pluck or fur to rip off. His machete could take care of chopping bone and one of the sharp arrowheads he’d brought back could slice the flesh more finely. He smiled, scouring the page and hungrily taking in the image of the tapirus. They could barbecue that little bitch real nice.

But Mansk couldn’t cook if he could barely move. Wainfleet flicked to another section of the book. It was so damn fiddly turning the pages, and the writing was tiny. The past half a year was a bad Alice In Wonderland themed dream. He couldn’t blame Alice for being such an almighty bitch when all that weird shrinking and growing shit happened to her. No drink me magical return-to-your-original-height cure for a recom. He just had to narrow his eyes and lift the book up close to his nose.

It was called a dapophet, and he was sure he’d forget that the second he stopped reading the name, so instead Wainfleet committed the photo of the plant to memory. Weird thing, with a head like a cactus fucked a sparkler and a fat body covered in little water-filled lumpy leaves. The book didn’t describe it like that, but if it had, maybe he’d have given it a read earlier. He paused to stare down at Mansk’s still face. Mansk had said something about giving the book a read during their fight. And he’d been shitty back about it. Paying big time now, Lyle . Back to the book. Back to the mission. He bent the guide’s spine until the front and back covers touched and settled it on his knee. The plant could grow nearly as tall as he was, so it wouldn’t be hard to find out there. He needed the stuff inside the cactus sparkler at the top; a jello for burns and cuts.

A bigger plant went on the list. The fungus on its roots was good shit, the book said, antibiotic. He’d take anything which would get Mansk back on his feet. The more time they wasted, the more likely they’d be written off as KIA. 

Wainfleet stood from Mansk’s bed and grabbed the blanket from his bed, tied the corners together to turn it into a loose sack for plant-carrying. He re-wrapped his shirt with the arrows slotted through the collar and tucked the blanket inside, shoving the whole bundle under his arm. Old bruises and cuts pulled as he strained to keep it secure, forcing him to quickly sit on the nearest bed and ride out the hot and cold shakes. He wasn’t good, and that was just the external stuff. There was a high chance he was going wrong inside, too.

He had the thought to clip his vest back on, but without a shirt beneath he knew it would chafe, plus every pouch was empty. It was pointless bulk - he didn’t need that getting in the way if he was going hunting. The bow went back over his head, the bowstring cutting less into his skin than before. Tough skin. Or soft, shitty string. He’d soon find out.

The datapad sitting on his bed made Wainfleet stop on his way to the gate. The battery needed recharging. He stared at it, then glanced across the other cots to locate Mansk’s. It was still over on the desk by one of the windows. Idea. Wainfleet crossed to the desk, picked up Mansk’s datapad, then his own, and headed outside.

 

 

---

 

 

Pain kept waking Mansk up.

If he was lucky, sheer exhaustion pushed him with a hard hand down into fitful, sweaty sleep, but a sharp stabbing always wrenched him right back, like jumper cables clamped to his heart, his lungs, his gut, his brains, shoved into every bite wound on his front and back. The teeth might as well have still been in him.

He was only vaguely aware of himself. A kicking leg was someone else’s, the tail was just something to go numb under his body (his body? Was it his? Oh, God, was it his? ) and tossing and turning were part of the dream. He was floating in something, convulsing, spasming, far from where he was, or close to where he was. Where was he? He was here.

Mansk flipped over to lie on his other side, sweating through the blanket. His limbs were hot, useless tubes. He wanted to rip them off. Or maybe he didn’t. His heart thumped too hard lying on his right shoulder, so he flipped over again, knowing he’d raked his toenails down a leg but couldn't feel where. His ankle? The inside of his knee? Where were all those parts of him? Was he going to throw up? Should he? Just to see if it did anything?

He waited it out, breathed hard, then made himself breathe deep, through his nose, through his mouth, kept alternating until he was dizzy and collapsed onto his side and slept again.

It was a heavy thump and crash which woke him this time.

Gummy eyes snapped open and Mansk’s stomach muscles clenched when he half-sat hearing the noise and in an instant the thanator’s teeth were back in his flesh. Hands bouncing with tremors reached over his front, desperate to clutch at his ribs and chest, but he stopped them, his arms stuck there like a marionette shaking and swaying under its strings.

An ikran screamed and more clattering followed, like the animal was batting its wings against the roof, unable to lift off. Was it hurt?

His eyes were blurry when he looked around the longhouse. He saw smudges of browns and greens and white light from the windows. Nothing blue. No Corporal. Good. But no, that was bad. Mansk’s ears, stuffed full with invisible cotton wool, twirled on the sides of his head and picked up thumping and pattering and scraping overhead. He had to check the gate, check the perimeter, check the roof. There was something on it. There could be something in the room he was missing. Had to get up. Get up!

“Corp-?” he said through a cough, giving in and clutching at his searing side.

No answer meant no Wainfleet. Unless the Corporal was childishly ignoring him, of which there was a hefty seventy thirty chance. Mansk realized Wainfleet had done it again - proudly stormed off in an embarrassed, shameful huff because he’d fucked up and knew it. If the Colonel was around he’d never dare.

Mansk rolled, crushed his face into the hard mattress, squeezed all of his features together hard enough to hurt every part of them. And then he thought about the why. The why he was lying in a cot with a dozen punctures, the why a thanator slid all of its teeth into his chest, the why he’d been standing in the deserted Hell’s Gate commissary, the why he’d made his way out there from the safety of the longhouse. The why who’d disappeared to brood somewhere.

What if that why had tangled with Pandora again and now lay in pieces on the roof?

Mansk wrinkled his nose into the blanket, pulled his eyebrows together into a frown.

Why should he give a shit?

The wrinkles on his nose slackened. His eyebrows rose, relaxed.

Why did he give so much of a shit?

Mansk wiped his forehead down the coarse blanket and uncoiled himself, peeling his hands away from his chest. A little fresh blood on his hands. Just a little. That was okay. He was okay. He licked his palm to clean it and saw old blood drying flaky down both of his arms.

Sitting and leaning forward on the edge of the bed made the bandages come free. They were too thin, too narrow, too short, designed to be wound around a human-sized patient. Pulling them from the shitty knots the Corporal had tied ripped the fabric. Mansk crushed the stiff, brown gauze into a ball and put it on the bed for washing later. When he wobbled to standing (it took a couple of painful tries) his shirt slipped down his back and dangled from his wrists. Christ. The Corporal hadn’t bothered to remove it. He’d spun tiny bandages around him, left him wearing his reeking, blood-encrusted shirt and thrown him onto the cot. Of course he had.

Mansk slowly pulled his shirt cuffs over his hands. He did it one after the other, making sure not to twist his body too much. Walking was worse. He couldn’t do it. One slide of his foot forward became the jaws of the thanator closing back around him, but there was no time to move at a single step per minute just because he was feeling bad. Something was on the roof, and it very easily could have been the Corporal after missing the grass in front of the hut and fucking crash landing because he couldn’t fly for shit anymore. The footfalls were heavy, the ikran was scratching and squawking, a dismayed, low voice spoke words which couldn’t fit into his ears. Was it Wainfleet swearing to himself in that growly voice of his?

Mansk forced himself to go to the longhouse gate. He clung to it for a second, bent over, unsure if he was going to gack something up, then, when nothing burned its way up his throat, righted himself and wobbled outside. Another scrape on the roof, another call from an ikran, then its wings beat against the timber.

Pandora’s sun hovered low and red. Mansk reckoned on his eyes looking pretty similar. He blinked and resisted the urge to take a deep breath of the rainforest’s warm wind. Air on his exposed bites felt oddly soothing, but as he stumbled forward into the breeze, there was also the strong feeling it was gusting right through him, whistling out of the holes in his back.

To distract himself, Mansk took in the view. The jungle canopy stretching beyond the compound was a wall of pink clouds sticking to the dark trunks and branches beneath it. Nearly time for the light show. Worth sleeping through the day for, however enjoying the glorious Pandoran evening would have to wait. The mission was to scope the area. The longhouse’s front yard was clear. No sign of anything unusual. Mansk headed down the stairs, using the rail like a feeble old man, hoping for a better view of the roof from further out.

At the foot of the steps, almost completely hidden by whipping blades of purple grass, sat the Rubik’s Cube, a half blue, half yellow side facing the sky. Mansk didn’t pick it up. Leaning down to pick it up would have him leaking blood like a water barrel full of holes. He couldn’t work out why it was outside in the first place. Hadn’t he completed an all-blue side and placed it on a bed in the longhouse?

Mansk held his hands against his hips when he leaned back for a look at the top of the longhouse. He was on the brink of teetering. He could feel it. Sweat heated his chin crease. It was when he lifted his head back to wipe it away with a finger that he saw it.

Rolling down one of the sloping shutters was a thick glob of glistening red.

Mansk followed a falling drip with wide eyes and shortening breath under stinging ribs. There was so much it splattered with loud plp plps in fat drops from the shutter’s edge onto the veranda boards.

“Corporal!” Mansk called up, regretting the shout, bending in half to recover from it. He couldn’t smell the blood, but if his hearing barely worked it was no surprise the rest of his senses were malfunctioning.

Gasping through a wince, Mansk stepped a foot up onto the wooden railing after a couple of experimental hops. He needed to get up there, check Wainfleet wasn’t dead. Again. Every tensed muscle shot agony right through his trunk and he cursed himself. Here he was, bitten in half, chasing after the Corporal because he was hurt, too. He jumped, turned a 180 on his heel before he lost balance, and leaped to slump onto the lowest, sloped corner of the wooden roof, clawing and wriggling until he was on all fours and using his clammy palms and feet to stop himself sliding off.

Something told Mansk that the painful struggle to climb up onto the avatar longhouse roof would have been far worse had he been human. He was no field medic, but the injuries around his middle and along his back weren’t crippling him with the level of agony he expected when he lifted his leg to haul himself up toward the point of the roof. The climb still disturbed his wounds, stretched them, made him cry out. A quick check with a worried, trembling hand when he was balanced confirmed nothing was freely bleeding.

The roof timbers were warm under his feet. Mansk worried he’d end up stranded if he climbed higher, but he needed to see. There was no ikran, no Corporal, but plenty of streaks of still-wet red lines striping the wood. The wings on those huge birds were hard to miss, so he kept moving up in case its body was hanging from the back of the longhouse on the other side. Maybe they’d both slipped off the roof completely and he was wasting precious time clambering around like a one-armed prolemuris.

Mansk’s foot slipped on blood as he reached the apex of the roof and he fell hands first onto it. He whipped his head up before he cracked his nose on the point, stayed stock still, panting, trying not to let his wounds take over. It wasn’t a long fall from the roof to the grass, but shit would kill anyway no matter how he landed. Mansk’s nostrils were an inch from the hot timbers, a smoky aroma rising from splinters and gouges scratched by the weather. He could smell the blood too now, but there was nothing metallic about the flavor at the back of his throat. It smelled closer to the scent of the wood grain, or plants. Dirt? Flowers? Rock?

He picked himself up (it took three tries) and stepped back. It wasn’t just red splashed across the timber. Swathes of yellow curved through scarlet lines. Together, the two colors seemed to form symbols, crude drawings. Something about them, the way they had been painted, tickled a shiver up Mansk’s back. The book said na’vi didn’t use letters. This was older than letters and words. Eerier.

An ikran screeched. Another shudder between his shoulder blades.

Mansk lowered himself to sit on the roof and scanned the skies.

A small, dark blob wobbled high in the thin, orange clouds like a blemish on the red circle of the sun. The slim, flapping ends of the shape looked like wings. Mansk watched until the heat haze swallowed it.

Looking across more of the roof solved the mystery of how the Corporal had charged his datapad in order to watch his videologs. Mansk dragged himself across to one of several solar panels stuck to the top of the longhouse and brushed his fingers along the cables and wires Wainfleet had pulled from under and inside it. Two old datapads sat under the panel, shaded from the day’s heat and baking sun. Mansk pulled one of the datapads toward him. The stranger had fingerpainted red and yellow over the glass. Vandalism or curiosity?

A loud crunch made him lift his eyes and raise his chin to stare down at the ground. The slight increase in heart rate hurt. The noise turned out to be the ikran hopping and scrabbling around in the remnants of the avatar obstacle course. Over the course of two or so days, rubble and broken posts were transformed into a circular, walled nest. They’d made quite a cozy home out of rot. He could see in the growing dark evidence the ikran brought their kills home and ate together in their little fort, so happy were they at Hell’s Gate. Swinging his legs around and leaning his elbow on his knee, Mansk made good on his promise to himself to enjoy the glorious Pandoran evening.

The visitor to the roof concerned him. A natural-born na’vi leaving sigils all over their base in war paint colors was not something to ignore, but he was tired, and even if the stranger brought back Sully’s army from the mountains, it wouldn’t be tonight.

The ikran fluttered below him, their glowing dots beginning to flash as night chased navy into the sky. He could see them well from up on high. The patterns on their backs and wings had a symmetry which reminded him of an extinct Earth bug which now only lived as untitled drawings on kids’ tablets. The similarity, if he could trust his knowledge of that Earth bug, stopped there. Mansk half-closed his eyes and idly cast his gaze over the ikran as they chattered and swept their tails over their nest.

The ikran were dancing.

Mansk widened his eyes and leaned forward until his sliding feet reminded him he was on a slope. He looked on with his hands braced against the roof as the ikran swung their tails, flared their wings with dainty wiggles of translucent fingers and bobbed their heads in front of each other, circling and circling. They did it for long minutes. Sometimes one, his green bird, snaked its dragony head along the ground, churning dirt, and then Wainfleet’s blue ikran would copy. Finally, with a last, long call and their throats together, the ikran curled around each other and lay with linked necks.

He sat back and rubbed his cheek, stunned that his pulse was racing. He bet not even Hell’s Gate’s xenobiologists had seen anything like that. Nor the people at Bridgehead, shit, not even half the na’vi population. With an annoyed click of his tongue it dawned he should have filmed it with his datapad, the thing was sitting right there behind his tail. Idiot. Still, his hurting chest swelled with the privilege of having seen it. And he was a little glad that was all he’d seen and the ikran chose to doze rather than the alternative. Maybe it was just a friendship dance. That was all Mansk was good at, too.

Absently scratching at an itch on his shoulder, Mansk supposed he ought to start his search for the Corporal, loathe as he was to begin the clumsy climb down, loathe as he was to see Wainfleet’s face. He scratched an itch on his opposite shoulder. Wainfleet had to have been patrolling. He was paranoid about barely making it through the previous night and wanted to make their surroundings safe. Mansk could understand that, and was glad in some way that Wainfleet’s guilt manifested itself into something useful, though a sorry wouldn't hurt. He dug a finger into another tickle by his elbow. Not that Wainfleet knew what he’d done to trigger the swarm in order to say sorry about it. Mansk wasn’t sure if he knew either. He flicked his wrist, the fine hairs there sensing movement.

Something bright lit the corner of his eye.

An atokirina drifted around Mansk’s head, glowing like a mini-lantern, riding the cooling night wind. Its feathery little leg-arm-tentacles brushed the air as it floated. Mansk turned around and staved off a grimace. It must have risen from the overgrown garden he often raided, and as he looked down at the thicket of wild plants down below, he saw the sprite’s siblings gliding up and down through the vegetable patch, gentle and lazy, as if they were browsing supermarket shelves and had all the time in the world with no spouse waiting furiously by the car.

He switched his gaze back to the sole atokirina which had decided to join him on the roof. It was bright as a datapad flashlight, and didn’t seem to want to go anywhere, had appeared to have made the choice to hang around near him. It hovered. Seemed expectant, almost.

Mansk tilted his ears down and flipped his tail, eyes on the sprite. Gingerly, he raised a hand. The sprite puffed, spun, and slipped down a waft of wind to sit in his palm. Mansk watched it flutter and spin and twirl. Was it thinking? Could it see him?

Wainfleet had done this, Mansk remembered with a tightening of his jaw, not twenty four hours ago. Or the Pandora hours equivalent. Wainfleet had gotten the chance to see one of these things up close and decided instead of understanding it, to extinguish it. He’d have chased away the ikran, too, if he’d seen them. Son of a bitch. Mansk relaxed. He had to chill or the sprite might sense it, freak out, sting him if they possessed that ability. The book had no solid answers for what they could do, or what they were in the first. Seeds, feelers for the planet, messengers, guardians, eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Mansk said as he blew the sprite from his hand and sent it up into the air. “About your brother.”

The sprite pulsed its glowing tassel skirt and disappeared.

Bushes beyond the rusted, half-collapsed perimeter fence swished. Too much movement to be a breeze. Mansk sat forward, one hand on his side, and narrowed his eyes. A slim, blue body emerged, freckles gleaming. Mansk could just about make out a bow in the figure’s hand and a lumpy, gray shape slung over its shoulder. Na’vi. Armed. Mansk went to lie flat on his belly on the roof to remain out of sight, but na’vi didn’t walk like this dope, all swinging shoulders and long, exaggerated strides. The closer the figure moved, the more obvious the limp in its gait.

Mansk stayed sitting. A second later, the blue figure shielded its eyes with the hand holding the bow and then pointed up at him, waving the bow in greeting. Mansk sighed and lifted the hand which had held the sprite, looking away.

Wainfleet threw the tapirus carcass with a heavy slap onto the grass in front of the longhouse.

Mansk made his careful way down to the veranda to investigate, realizing that climbing onto the roof in his state wasn’t a smart move. Something else the Corporal would never thank him for.

Wainfleet was ripping out arrows from the animal’s flabby flank when Mansk reached him. Arrows. Plural. It had taken more than one shot for expert sniper Corporal Wainfleet to bring down a slow terrestrial pig. Mansk hid his pleasure at that and tilted his head to inspect the kill. That was the nice thing about a kill with an arrow; nothing was left behind in the meat. The tapirus would be easy to eat, no need to chew carefully to avoid crunching teeth on frag round shrapnel.

“Took your bandages off,” Wainfleet said, wiping the flat of an arrowhead over the tapirus’s body.

“Need cleaning,” Mansk said, looking the Corporal over, who himself was looking remarkably dirt-free. He could actually see his stripes in the orange light of the evening.

“Right, yeah,” Wainfleet said. Wainfleet avoided facing him. Coward couldn’t even make himself look at what he’d done. “What were you doin’ up there?” Wainfleet added, waving the arrow in his hand. It was fletched with red and yellow feathers.

Looking for you because I thought you’d gotten your stupid ass hurt again. “Taking point.” Mansk had to actively will his ears and tail to remain motionless. It took a lot of mental power, he was amazed to find.

“All right.”

Mansk could tell Wainfleet was waiting for an impressed comment about his successful tapirus hunt. He wasn’t going to get one. If Spider was right about tween na’vi kids capturing fully-matured, murderous ikran, a grown man shooting a scuttling little pig wasn’t the mind-blowing feat Wainfleet thought it was.

“You think you can cook this?” Wainfleet asked. Another hint at his fantastic achievement.

“Yeah,” Mansk said, deadpan, scratching his chin, “I think you can.”

Mansk saw straight through Wainfleet’s plan. The Corporal thought he could proffer an olive branch in the shape of a Pandoran branch with a funny name and healing properties, then lo and behold, Private Mansk would be feeling better enough to cook the beast the Corporal had worked so hard to hunt. Who was more the caveman now? Why couldn’t Wainfleet have flicked to the page in Palmer’s book which went into great detail about how the na’vi shared labor?

Still, Mansk wasn’t about to reject what Wainfleet brought back. He didn’t mention it, didn’t want to sour the mood further, but it was clear the Corporal had read Palmer’s book, or possibly looked at the pictures and captions with handy pointing arrows. That was more Wainfleet’s speed.

 

 

Mansk felt as bitter as the sharp tang of the mashed goblin thistle under the flat stone in his hand. He sat on the lowest longhouse step and used his tail as a bookmark to keep the page on the thistle open, following the instructions on how to create the salve to the letter. At the same time he was keeping an eye on Wainfleet’s attempt to roast the tapirus. Chopping the animal up hadn’t been a problem, it was reminding the Corporal to keep turning the meat over the fire which was causing issues. The tapirus’s rump was already inedible. They were both a little too used to food being served, even after a few months in the wild. Rations were always consumed first before hunting was considered. The Colonel and the Corporal had been very good at instructing the likes of himself, Lopez, Prager, Alexander, to not tear the animals up with too many AR rounds. It had been a good job animal faces weren’t eaten. Even Mansk, with all his careful aiming, managed to explode a couple. There had been a lot of head jokes. A lot.

It was Pandora’s brand of night when the food was ready. Three legs each and a part of the flank was all they could rescue. Mansk sensed Wainfleet wanted to say something about the flavor while they ate in silence. There was a look on his face which said he’d sampled the same meal but tastier, and at a better restaurant. It lacked something. But it was filling, and even the crunchy, chewy parts counted as fuel. He needed it. The muscles in his arms were turning wiry.

“There’s paint on the roof,” Mansk said through the bone of his second tapirus leg.

“Huh?” Wainfleet said, picking burnt skin from his tongue. Something about the huh was off. It was the kind of huh someone hummed when they hoped the subject moved on if they pretended they’d not heard anything.

“Roof. Paint. Red and yellow. Was still wet when I was up there. Know anythin’ about that?”

“Hmm, no,” Wainfleet said. He drew out the ‘o’.

"You find anythin' out there while you were scouting?"

"Nah. Just trees 'n shit."

Mansk said nothing. Mentioning the ikran and its unknown rider to the Corporal wouldn’t get him closer to an answer about it. He did however, make a note that Wainfleet hadn’t chided him for not telling him about the paint sooner. Wainfleet's shiny new red and yellow arrows had already done all the talking.

Wainfleet carried on chewing, choosing to keep up the innocent pretence.

 

 

Wainfleet politely waited until Mansk applied his Pandoran antibiotics and was nearly finished with rubbing it around the last bite to talk to him next. Mansk would thank Wainfleet for getting hold of the stuff. Not now, but he would.

“Wanna watch somethin’?” Wainfleet asked. Both hands were hidden behind his back and his tail was whirling.

Mansk grunted as he wound the mostly-useless bandages back around his torso. He’d cleaned them with great difficulty alone in the stream Wainfleet told him he’d languished in for an hour. “Like what? The wall?”

“Nah, I got a couple movies saved.”

Mansk turned his head and narrowed his eyes, halfway through looping a knot in the gauze and trying to be mindful not to snap the fabric. He timed a sigh at the same time as tugging the knot tight.

“I ain’t lyin’, man, I got a couple. Hey, one’s Dead Air 3 .”

There was no way the Corporal had movies on his datapad. Mansk twitched a nostril. “Bullshit.”

Wainfleet raised nearly-bald brows and produced his datapad, holding it out in front of him like Mansk was a kid about to be shown something spectacular. Mansk folded his arms, fought off a wince half-successfully, and watched Wainfleet’s forefinger shake with excitement when he tapped the screen. The glass bloomed a blue and green glow, Wainfleet typed his old passcode in (the biometrics were, not so surprisingly, unable to register a fingerprint three times the size it should be) then eagerly flicked through the menu of his datapad to reveal that he really did have Dead Air 3 downloaded onto it.

Mansk leaned in to check the thumbnail, just in case it was a bootleg copy which played company logos on loop for an hour and forty minutes, but that was a pretty clean screenshot preview.

Wainfleet left Mansk holding the datapad and busied himself shoving a cot over with a kick, then another, lining all three up together to form one, wide bed. There was a mischievous smile on the Corporal’s face as he did it, like he was getting away with some out-of-bounds naughtiness. Showy. Mansk knew, and Wainfleet knew, he was acting cheerful as part of a longer performance.

Wainfleet took back the datapad from Mansk’s limp hand, clicked it against the second one, gave it a couple of seconds to register the connection, then stood them on their ends to make the screen bigger. The second datapad, Mansk’s, had been cleaned. And in the last few seconds. With spit judging by the smears. Wainfleet had licked the glass and wiped off the red paint left by intrigued na’vi fingers while facing away without comment.

Even with the two datapads stuck together, the movie was still tiny. Wainfleet dragged over his discarded vest and used it to prop up the datapads before rolling and taking his place lounging at the foot of the beds. One of his big ears was in the way of the screen, but Mansk possessed no energy to complain. He noticed Wainfleet deliberately draping his queue as straight as it could go alongside his body. Hurting, huh, Corporal?

While he was still sitting, Mansk experimented with the limitations of his breathing. His ribs felt torn out and put back in the wrong way. Shallow breaths for now, then.

Mansk always forgot Dead Air 3 started its amateurish story in the Mariana Trench.

“With all due respect, Captain, you don’t know what’s down there!” said the cute blonde woman with the curls and khaki shorts as she slapped her research down onto the holotable of the sub. “The institute never signed off on descending this far down!”

Mansk settled back against the wall with a blanket bunched up behind his shoulders. The mosquito net blowing in the evening breeze over his head reached into the room as if it, too, wanted to watch some low-budget schlock. “Jesus, that greenscreen,” Mansk commented through a yawn. Great camera angle up the girl’s shorts when she leaned over the table, though.

“She can descend this far down, know what I’m sayin’,” Wainfleet murmured with a gesture, snorting a chuckle.

“And with all due respect, princess, I know for a fact the only thing down here is you, me, and my team. So, if you want your photos, I suggest you button your lip, or the only thing down here is gonna be just me and my team, if you get me,” said the Captain, raising his eyebrows and spinning the blonde chick’s files back over to her.

“This dude is funny as fuck when the thing gets on the sub, you remember? Funny as fuck,” Wainfleet said, pointing and clicking. He shuffled on his elbow and grinned over his shoulder back to Mansk. Mansk watched Wainfleet’s eyes turn into yellow half-moons over his smile, which pushed up his lower eyelids in that familiar scrunched-up way. The gleaming CGI sea in the movie on the tiny screens behind Wainfleet’s face lit up all the teeth in his head. Mansk tightened the fold of his arms against his painful middle. All the age fell away from the Corporal. All the stress. The pressure. Right there, in that stupid open-mouthed smile, Lyle Wainfleet was twenty years old, enjoying watching a favorite movie.

It was handy the room was dark enough to hide Mansk’s spiteful refusal to return the smile. When the Corporal turned his head to continue watching the movie and let out a long laugh at a particularly badly-acted moment, Mansk covered his crumpling face with a tired hand and closed his eyes.