Chapter Text
He came back to himself as if dragged up through ice water.
Sound arrived first: a steady hiss of air through vents, the hum of electronics, the faint clack of shoes on polished floor.
Then cold bands around his wrists, ankles, a wide strap across his chest. Then light, sharp as a knife behind his eyelids.
He tried to breathe and something answered him—not the warm, heavy Pandora air that tasted like ocean and soil, but something thin and metallic and dry. Filtered oxygen, compressed and rationed. His body hiccuped around it, the symbiote under his ribs flaring in confused protest.
“Subject responsive,” a voice said, too close.
Spider opened his eyes.
White room. Not sterile white—not perfectly clean; nothing RDA touched stayed that way—but white enough that the scuffs and old stains stood out. Reinforced glass window. A reclining chair—not quite a bed, not quite a gurney. His ankles were cinched to the frame. His wrists were velcroed down. A soft band held his chest like the the strap of a crash harness.
There was a mask over his lower face—clear plastic, soft edges pressed against his nose and mouth. Tubing snaked away to a humming machine.
He jerked once on instinct, enough to jangle the restraints.
“Easy,” a woman said not unkind, just…clinical. “You’ll hyperventilate.”
His breaths were already coming fast—short pulls that didn’t feel like enough. Each inhale hit the back of his throat wrong, too dry, too cold. The symbiote stirred, tasting the air and faltering like it was reading the wrong script.
“Where—” he rasped against the mask. The sound of his own voice startled him—thin, sandpapered.
“Forward Research Bay Eight,” the woman said. “You’ve been under sedatives for approximately one hour. Hemodynamics stable. Symbiote baseline elevated, but no major shifts.”
Symbiote. Hearing the word in an RDA mouth made him feel naked.
He focused on her face: late thirties, hair pulled back in a low knot, dark circles like bruises under sharp eyes. ID tag: **DR. E. KESSLER — XENOBIOLOGY**.
He hated her instantly.
“Kiri...Lo’ak...” he forced out.
Kessler finally met his eyes directly. There was no malice there just a hard, harried intelligence and mild impatience with anything not data.
“Your companions aren’t my concern,” she said. “Right now my concern is that you keep breathing. The rest is logistics.”
His chest tightened in a way the mask couldn’t fix. “Take it off.”
“The mask?” Her brows lifted. “You know you can’t breathe our ambient for long without that thing in your lungs doing tricks we don’t fully understand. I’d rather not stress it before we even start.”
“Take it off anyway,” he snapped, panic curdling his voice. “I can breathe.”
“I’ve seen the telemetry,” she said, and something like curiosity flared. “That’s what we’re here to explore.”
She turned away, talking to someone behind him. “Begin mapping protocol. Keep O₂ at baseline. No boluses unless his sats drop below ninety.”
Spider swallowed hard, the motion grinding his throat against dry plastic.
He tried to drag in a slow breath to calm down and hit the edge of the mask’s flow. The inhale stopped too early; his body wanted more but the machine refused to give it. His diaphragm fluttered in protest, muscles firing against a hard limit.
The symbiote stirred—one of those not-quite-sensations, like warmth under bone, like his blood moving thickly through new channels. It tasted the air in his lungs and hesitated.
Spider hated that he could feel its hesitation.
“If you kill it,” he said, voice shaking, “you kill me.”
“I’m aware of Dr. Patel’s opinion,” she said. “I’d like more than one data point before making that assumption gospel.”
She didn’t sound cruel. She sounded tired. That somehow made it worse.
Cold gel touched his side. He flinched.
A tech murmured, “Ultrasound probe engaged.”
On the wall screen, a gray, grainy image of his ribs and lung field flickered. Kessler leaned in, eyes bright.
“Hello,” she breathed, more to the strange branching patterns lacing his alveoli than to him. “Aren’t you beautiful.”
The symbiote pulsed faintly at the attention, like an anemone shifting when light moved across it.
Spider closed his eyes.
He concentrated on the only thing he had left to control: breath in, breath out, ignoring that the air was wrong, the place was wrong, all of this was wrong.
---
They didn’t leave him alone with his breathing for long.
“Hold still,” one of the techs said, as if he had a choice. They moved with quick, economical efficiency, like a crew that had rehearsed this on simulations a dozen times. His hands, his chest, even his throat grew new attachments—soft adhesive pads under his ribs, a cuff on his arm, a flimsy cap with contact points that made his scalp itch.
Kessler watched the monitors while the tech with the ultrasound traced the probe along his lower ribs. The image on the screen trembled with his respiration: bright arcs of bone, the dark smear of lung beyond, and along the inner surface of his alveoli, the faint, fibrous glow of something that didn’t quite match any human anatomy textbook.
“Baseline strain pattern is holding,” she said. “Note those branch vectors along segmental bronchi. They’ve thickened since his last scan at High Camp.”
“At least someone’s been reading my charts,” Spider muttered into the mask. The words fogged the plastic for a second, then vanished.
Kessler’s mouth curled, just barely. “I read everything.” She gestured at the screen. “Including the part where your friends claim removing this organism would ‘break you in half.’”
He hadn’t said it exactly like that, but close enough.
“It’s not an organism,” he said. Talking hurt; he did it anyway. “It’s…both of us.”
Kessler tipped her head, considering. “That’s one model.”
He dragged his gaze to her, anger making his fingertips twitch against the restraints. “It’s the only one that doesn’t end with me dead on your table.”
“No,” she said calmly. “There’s also the model where we learn how to interface with it without killing you. That’s what I’m betting my career on.”
It took him a second to process that.
“You’re using me as a research grant,” he said, incredulous.
“You’re using it as a life support,” she countered. “We’re both exploiting what we can.”
The tech at his side cleared his throat, uncomfortable. “Probe off, doc. I’ve got enough imaging for the first pass.”
Kessler nodded, eyes still on Spider. “Good. Phase two.”
The gel cooled on his skin as they wiped it away. He shivered, partly from that, partly from the creeping, bone-deep awareness that his life had been reduced in their eyes to “phase two.”
“Phase two is what?” he asked, even though he knew he wasn’t going to like the answer.
“Gas mix challenges,” Kessler said. “We need to see how your respiratory system—and the symbiote—respond to changes in partial pressure and composition.”
“You’re going to screw with the air,” he translated.
“Yes,” she said. “Gently. Incrementally. You won’t like it. If I do my job, you won’t die from it either.”
That was meant to be reassuring, apparently.
They didn’t change the mask; they changed the numbers. Somewhere behind him, fingers tapped a console. The hiss from the machine altered pitch by a hair’s breadth—no louder, no softer, just a different tone, like a held note on a flute.
He wouldn’t have noticed it before. Now he felt it.
The next breath slipped into his lungs with a different weight. Slightly more dense, slightly colder. Leather-tight along his bronchi. The symbiote reacted first—heat pushing under his ribs in a slow, searching wave, like it was tasting the shift and adjusting its own chemistry in response.
His diaphragm lagged the change by a beat. The inhale over-shot, too forceful for the new mixture, and he coughed once, hard, the sound scraping his throat and fogging the mask.
“Sats?” Kessler asked without looking at him.
“Ninety-eight and holding,” a tech replied. “Heart rate up. One-thirty.”
“Expected,” she said. “Subject—Spider—take three slow breaths. In through the nose, out…well, through whatever that mask allows.”
Her attempt at humour landed like gravel.
He glared at her, but he did it. Partly because not doing it felt like letting them win, and partly because his body was already desperate to find something like a rhythm in this new environment.
In. Out.
In—
The third breath snagged halfway. Not blocked, exactly, but like the air thickened just beyond his throat. His neck muscles picked up the slack automatically, tendons standing out subtly as he fought to drag the volume in.
The symbiote flared again, a spiraling warmth along the lower edges of his lungs. The tingling it sent into his blood felt like very mild pins and needles running up his forearms.
Kessler watched the monitor with a hungry focus. “There it is,” she murmured. “Look at that. Peak uptake shifts by two percent and the branching network compensates without a drop in delivered oxygen. It’s not just living there—it’s regulating.”
He could feel it regulating, which was the worst part. Each inhale came with a fractional delay now, his own respiratory muscles and the symbiote arguing for a microsecond over who was leading. If he chased the breath too fast, the delay stretched and his chest clenched. If he slowed down, let the machine and the symbiote set the pace, it eased.
Trust the thing in your lungs, or suffocate.
He bared his teeth behind the mask.
“You’re treating it like a toy,” he said, words thin. “Like something you can take out and pass around.”
Kessler glanced at him. For a moment, very brief, he saw something like honesty cross her features.
“I’m treating it like a once-in-a-species event,” she said. “Because that’s what it is. You’re breathing through the single most valuable biological interface ever recorded by human science. Of course I want to understand it. Of course the RDA wants to own it. Of course that puts you in danger.”
She didn’t soften the last sentence. Just laid it out between them like another instrument on a tray.
“Good to know we agree on that,” he said. His chest began to ache with the sustained effort. Not sharp, not like broken ribs, but a slow, dragging burn along the intercostals that told him these muscles weren’t built to carry this alone.
He looked at the ceiling, because looking at her made something in his throat close. The overhead panels were yellowed at the edges, a hairline crack running along one. Someone had patched it with clear tape. Everything here was held together with tape and willpower and corporate money.
“Reset to baseline,” Kessler said briskly. “We’ve got the first curve.”
The hiss shifted again. The next breath slid in smoother. The symbiote uncoiled slightly, settling like warm sand in his chest.
He exhaled as slowly as he could, trying not to think about how much of that wasn’t his anymore.
---
They let him rest ten minutes. Fifteen, maybe. Long enough for his pulse to settle into a fast but not frantic rhythm, long enough for the burn in his muscles to fade to a background throb.
Long enough to remember he was alone.
He could see movement through the angled glass—labs beyond labs, people in uniforms and cheap jumpsuits walking past, occasionally glancing in. He was a specimen in a display cage. It shouldn’t have been a surprise; he’d grown up around RDA halls, watched scientists peer through glass at things in tanks. Norm and Max had been anomalies—soft voices, messy desks, candy wrappers and contraband data chips. This felt more like the other rooms, the ones they never let him into when he was little.
Now he was the thing on the other side.
“Hydration,” someone said.
A straw touched the edge of his mask. They slid it under the flexible seal, nudged it between his lips. The water tasted faintly of plastic and metal, but it cleared the grit from his throat.
“Slow sips,” Kessler said. “We’re not intubating you unless we have to. I’d rather avoid that.”
“Big of you,” he muttered, but he obeyed.
The water went down unevenly. He felt it drag along his esophagus, felt his overworked respirations stutter around the swallow.
When the straw withdrew, he licked his lips and stared at Kessler.
“Why now?” he asked. “You’ve known about me for months. Why grab me now?”
It was a risk, asking. It meant acknowledging that they’d been watching, that this whole time he had been under some invisible scope.
Kessler rested her forearm against the back of a chair, fingers drumming lightly on the metal. She looked tired in a way that went deeper than the dark circles. Fine lines at the corners of her mouth, like she’d spent the last decade clenching it.
“Because there’s a memo,” she said at last, “floating around executive channels that uses the words ‘deployable asset’ and ‘breathable atmosphere conversion’ in the same sentence. Because right now, I am the thin, underpaid line between you being mapped and monitored”—she gestured at the equipment—“and you being cut into sections and flash-frozen.”
The room seemed to tilt slightly. That might have been his blood pressure. It might have been rage.
“You expect me to thank you?” he asked.
“No.” She met his gaze, steady. “I expect you to cooperate enough that I can keep you classified as too valuable to kill.”
The worst part was: it tracked. He’d seen enough of human systems to know that safety was rarely a right and more often a side effect of value.
“Good news,” he said, “you don’t have to do anything. I already breathe whether I want to or not. You get your data. I get to keep not dying. Everybody wins.”
“‘Not dying’ is a sliding scale,” Kessler said. “Let’s see how far we can stretch it.”
---
Phase three wasn’t labeled out loud, but he felt the shift.
They dimmed the main lights by a fraction, brought online another machine he couldn’t see but could hear—a faint, high-frequency whine that set his teeth on edge. One of the techs—wiry, early twenties, name patch reading **RAMIREZ**—wheeled a cart closer to the chair.
On it: a tray with syringes, sealed vials, a small box with hazard markings.
Spider’s stomach went cold.
“No,” he said, before anyone had explained. “No needles.”
“You’ve already had several,” Ramirez pointed out. “You slept through those.”
“That was different,” Spider snapped. His breath flared against the inside of the mask. “I didn’t know about those.”
Kessler stepped into his line of sight, blocking the tray from view with her body. “This is contrast agent,” she said. “Tracer molecules. They’ll bind preferentially along symbiote-modified tissue. We need them to refine the mapping.”
He stared at her. Every instinct in him screamed *poison*.
“You’re going to inject something into it,” he said slowly, “and see what lights up.”
“That’s the gist,” she said.
“And if it doesn’t like that?”
“We’ll see,” she said. “That’s the other gist.”
His heart thudded painfully against his ribs. The symbiote flickered, uneasy, like an animal scenting something it didn’t recognize.
“Kessler,” he said, because saying her name made this feel a fraction less like being operated on by a machine. “If you stress it—if it thinks you’re attacking—it pushes back. It can change the air. It can change me. You poke it wrong, you might not be able to undo what happens.”
She held his gaze for a long, long moment.
“If it’s that integrated,” she said quietly, “we won’t survive it trying to leave you. That’s what I’m trying to prove to people who…don’t care as much about your continued presence.”
It was the closest she’d come to saying *I am on your side as much as someone in this building can be.* It wasn’t enough. It was still more than nothing.
“Fine,” he said, because what else could he say, strapped down with the hiss of clean air in his face and nothing to bargain with but his own biology. “Do your science.”
Ramirez swabbed the inside of his elbow with alcohol. The chill of it cut through the warm fog in his head. Spider stared at the ceiling and tried to imagine he was somewhere else—floating on the surface of the cove, sky huge overhead and lungs full of heavy, forgiving air.
The needle slid in. A pinch. A pressure. The warmth of the tracer followed the vein up his arm in a creeping line, like a line of embers under the skin.
The symbiote noticed.
The warmth reached his chest, and the network under his ribs convulsed—not physically, not so anyone could see, but in sensation. For a heartbeat his breath caught entirely, lungs suspended half-full as everything inside him paused to taste this new element.
Alarms did not go off. The monitor kept beeping in steady rhythm. But Spider’s entire attention tunneled down to that one internal conversation: foreign molecule vs. resident system.
Then, slowly, the tension eased. The symbiote accepted the tracer the way a body accepted dye in a medical scan—folding it into its architecture, letting it highlight structures without actually changing them. A strange tingling spread up into his throat, like he’d inhaled cold fog.
“Any discomfort?” Kessler’s voice came, closer than it should’ve been.
He exhaled shakily. The air rattled faintly on the way out. “Define ‘comfort’.”
She watched his chest rise and fall for another few breaths before nodding to Ramirez. “Bring up imaging.”
The wall screen changed. His lungs ghosted into view again, this time in false colour—normal tissue muted; symbiote-laced areas brightening in shifting blues and greens as the tracer bound.
Kessler’s shoulders straightened slowly, her whole posture changing as the internal picture resolved.
“There you are,” she whispered. It wasn’t reverent—nothing about her was—but it was close.
The pattern was intricate. What had once been patchy branches along his alveoli had grown into a web—fine filaments penetrating every usable space. Not replacing lung tissue; sitting alongside it, wrapped through it. At the hilum, near the bigger vessels, the colour deepened where the symbiote had built thicker cords, like roots around a tree trunk.
“It’s everywhere,” Ramirez said under his breath.
“Not everywhere,” Kessler murmured. “It respects boundaries. Look—no infiltration into the heart muscle. Nothing crossing into major arteries. It knows where to stop. It’s selective.”
“And if you try to pull it?” Spider asked, throat raw.
She didn’t look away from the image. “We’re not going to rip it out.”
“That’s not ‘no.’”
“It’s ‘not today,’” she said. “Today is mapping, respiratory challenge, and neurological baseline. Tomorrow is someone from corporate screaming at me about timelines. We live in the world we have.”
He hated that that made sense.
He closed his eyes for a moment, exhaustion rolling over him like a wave. Breathing in this air, fighting this machine, carrying this network inside him—it was all work. All cost.
He imagined, faintly, Jake’s face if he could see this screen. Norm’s. Max’s. The way their mouths would tighten. The way Neytiri’s gaze would go flat and dangerous, like the moment before she loosed an arrow.
*Find me,* he thought, not sure who he was directing it to—for a second he wasn’t entirely sure whether he meant the family or the planet itself. *I am here. I am here. I am here.*
The symbiote pulsed once under his ribs, as if in answer.
---
Neurological baseline meant more wires.
They removed the tracer line, taped down the site. Swapped the cap on his head for a more elaborate rig, thin semi-flexible prongs resting against the base of his skull, along his jaw, over his upper spine. Each contact point cooled the skin it touched, then warmed faintly as it activated.
“EMG and brainstem mapping,” Kessler said, mostly for the recording system. “We want to see exactly where interface signals are strongest.”
Spider swallowed. “You want to listen to it talking to my nerves.”
“Yes,” she said simply. “And maybe hear what it thinks of us messing with its air.”
He snorted—a pathetic little puff that fogged the mask. “You go first.”
He could feel it, now that he was paying attention—not just as a lump of warmth, but as a pattern. The symbiote’s activity wasn’t random; it pulsed in time with his heartbeat and his breaths, flaring slightly on each inhalation, dimming as oxygen saturated and carbon dioxide washed out.
As Kessler turned on the mapping array, another layer appeared on the monitor—a series of shifting lines and coloured patches along a schematic of his spine and brainstem. Spikes rose and fell in rhythm with each assisted breath.
“There,” she said. “Look at the C3–C5 region. Phrenic nucleus. Symbiote activity spikes half a second before the nerve does. It’s anticipating.”
“You say that like it’s cool,” he said, watching the arc of colour brighten along his neck with each inhale.
“It is cool,” she said. “It senses gas composition changes before your chemoreceptors do. It tweaks the signal. You’re not just breathing on your own anymore—you’re breathing with training wheels.”
“That’s one word for it,” he muttered. Another would have been *leash*.
“How aware are you of it?” she asked abruptly. “Subjectively.”
He hesitated. Anything he told her would go into a file. Into a briefing. Into some executive’s presentation deck.
“Too aware,” he said finally. “It used to be just…there. Background. Now I feel it every time the air changes. Every time you make this thing—” he jerked his chin minutely at the mask “—decide how much I get. It reacts. And I feel that.”
“Is it uncomfortable?” she pressed. Not out of concern; out of precision.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s like…having someone else’s hand on your chest from the inside. Deciding if you’ve had enough.”
Ramirez made a face. Kessler’s expression didn’t change, but her jaw tightened.
“Any sense of it having its own…intent?” she asked.
“You mean, does it talk to me?” he said flatly.
“Yes.”
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t send me little love letters. It just keeps me from dying. That’s enough of a conversation.”
Kessler nodded slowly. “Okay. That answers one memo. They can stop asking if we can download it.”
He stared at her. “They asked *what*?”
She waved a hand, as if batting away something annoying. “Somebody in Strategic floated the idea that if it’s interfacing with your nervous system, maybe it stores information we could extract. Turn it into a…bio-drive.” Her lip curled, just slightly, like even she thought that was a stretch too far. “I told them we’d be lucky if we can keep you alive through a chest cold.”
That was the first thing she’d said that genuinely comforted him.
“Great,” he said. “Love being the underwhelming deliverable.”
“Trust me,” she said dryly. “You’re overwhelming enough.”
---
At some point, the edge came off his anger, worn down by repetition and lack of oxygen-rich insults. Rage required energy. Right now, most of his energy was taken up by the next breath.
They cycled him through another gas challenge, this one subtler—minor shifts in CO₂ fraction while they recorded nerve activity. His head grew heavy. His muscles buzzed. The line between *lightheaded* and *too far* blurred, and he watched Kessler’s face more than the monitors to track how close he was to the latter.
She never looked alarmed. Focused, intent, sometimes quietly delighted by a new data point—but never scared. Whatever thresholds she’d set, he stayed just on the safe side of them.
It pissed him off that part of him trusted her to do that.
When they finally eased everything back to baseline again, his body sagged like a deflated skin. The ventilator still did part of the work, but even being carried took effort.
The room had thinned out. A couple of techs rotated out, replaced by others. Kessler remained, a constant point in the shifting landscape.
“Are we done?” he asked hoarsely. His throat felt raw, each word scraping. “For today. For this week. For this lifetime.”
“Almost,” she said. “We need one more set at rest.”
He huffed a laugh that turned into a cough. “I am literally tied to a chair. How much more ‘at rest’ do you want?”
She considered him. For the first time since he woke up here, she looked—not at the monitors, not at the glowing map of his insides—but at him. At the kid under the mask, bruised along the jaw where someone’s rifle butt had connected, dark smudges under his eyes that had nothing to do with tracer dyes.
“How much do you remember,” she asked quietly, “about being in RDA facilities before?”
He blinked. The question came out of nowhere, and he hated that it landed.
“Enough,” he said. “Why? You planning a nostalgia tour?”
“I’m trying to figure out how much of this is new trauma,” she said, “and how much is…continuation.”
He stared at her. “You want me to help you profile my own PTSD?”
She didn’t flinch at the acronym. “If I know how close you are to breaking, I can keep you just shy of it. Broken subjects don’t give good data.”
“Wow,” he said. “You really know how to make a guy feel special.”
“I don’t have time to be gentle,” she said, and there was no pride in it. “But I am trying not to be stupid.”
A humourless smile tugged at his mouth. “That line work on your other prisoners?”
“You’re the only one with anything like this in your chest,” she said. “Everyone else here is much more…replaceable.”
The casual brutality of that statement made his skin crawl. Not because it was surprising, but because it was honest.
He let his head fall back against the padded support, staring up at the cracked ceiling again. The mask forced his breath to stay in its set rhythm. The symbiote hummed along, adjusting to the ebb and flow, an invisible, tireless partner in a dance he’d never chosen.
Containment, he thought, didn’t just mean walls and straps and glass. It was this too: being reduced to variables, to protocols, to how much air he was allowed to take in before someone decided the numbers were wrong.
He pulled in another breath, slow as he could manage. It hit the end of the flow, clipped off. A fractional ache spidered through his chest. He exhaled carefully, counting heartbeats.
In.
Out.
For now, the only rebellion he had left was to keep doing it.
As long as he was breathing, the story wasn’t over. And somewhere beyond the glass and white walls and humming machines, there were people who knew how he breathed when he was free.
They would notice he was gone.
He closed his eyes and let the wrong air in, again and again, until even that felt, briefly, like something he could survive.