Chapter Text
---
They didn’t cut him.
Not at first.
They scanned him.
Ultrasound, CT, functional imaging that made the back of his skull buzz. Machines Spider had no names for hummed to life around him, each with its own complaint: a high electronic whine, a low subsonic thrum that he felt more in his teeth than his ears, the rhythmic clicking of processors sifting through his insides pixel by pixel.
They wired him—small adhesive electrodes dotted along his rib cage, his back, his neck, each one a cold thumbprint against skin. Thin leads ran from them in loose arcs to a monitor that turned his breathing into neon lines and numbers.
They clipped a probe to his finger. Every time his heart jumped at a noise or a sudden movement, the display responded with ruthless honesty: HR 118, 124, 132. SpO₂ a steady, smug 99% thanks to the mask’s relentless hiss.
Kessler narrated, not to him but to the record. Her voice had flattened into that particular cadence scientists used when they wanted to pretend there were no humans in the room.
“Entity A-01 shows diffuse integration along distal bronchioles and alveolar sacs,” she said. “Activity appears coupled to host respiration rate and stress markers. Note the increased luminal reflectivity along modified segments.”
Spider clenched his jaw hard enough that his molars ached.
The probes moved along his side, cold and impersonal. A tech guided the ultrasound head in careful strokes under his ribs, the gel slick and icy. He could feel the symbiote reacting under the contact—tiny flickers of tension along the inner lining of his lungs, like something coiling tighter with each pass.
His breathing hitched, almost in spite of him. The mask fogged with each hard exhale, clearing just in time for the next inhale.
“Note sympathetic activation,” Kessler said. “Increased tidal volume, accessory muscle involvement.”
“I can hear you,” Spider muttered, breath gusting against plastic. “You don’t have to talk like I’m not here.”
She glanced over, as if surprised he’d decided to participate.
“Would you prefer I didn’t narrate?” she asked.
“I’d prefer you let me go,” he shot back.
“That’s not on the table,” she said, like she was reciting lab safety protocol. “Slow breaths, Mr. Socorro. You’re skewing my baseline.”
He shut up because the alternative was shouting and shouting meant less air. The cost-benefit analysis hurt.
The probe slid lower, tracing the costal margin. The symbiote went very still, as if listening. A prickle of dread climbed his spine.
“Look at the segmental distribution,” one of the techs murmured, awe bleeding into his voice. “It’s not random—that’s a vascular map.”
“Arteriolar adjacency, yes,” Kessler said. “But no direct penetration. It doesn’t breach the endothelium. It’s respecting host boundaries…for now.”
“Kind of it,” Spider said, dry. Talking bought him a fraction of control, even if every word scraped his throat.
Kessler made a small noise that might have been amusement, might have been annoyance. “Contrast that with invasion models from—”
She broke off as a tone chimed from the console, a low, insistent beep. On the monitor, a coloured overlay pulsed brighter where the probe passed closest to his lower ribs.
“We’re seeing higher density here,” the tech said, tapping the screen. “Anterior axillary line, eighth intercostal space. The tracer’s binding deeper.”
Kessler leaned in. “Zoom resolution. Overlay mechanical index.”
The image sharpened, grey and false-coloured blues and greens. To Spider it was just static and shapes; to them, it was a map. He felt not so much examined as reverse-engineered.
“That’s a cluster,” Kessler said softly. “Maybe a node. If we could isolate even a tiny sample of that—”
She didn’t finish the thought aloud.
He didn’t need her to.
The window in the wall clicked softly, the sound of a line opening. A voice slid into the room, disembodied and sour with impatience.
“Progress report, Doctor.”
Ardmore.
Spider didn’t see her, but he could picture her perfectly: jaw set, hands in pockets, eyes doing math with other people’s lives.
Kessler straightened fractionally, gaze still on the monitor. “We’ve confirmed full integration of the entity throughout the distal lung tree,” she said. “There’s a denser locus along the right inferolateral field. I believe we can collect a micro-sample there with minimal host compromise.”
“Then collect it,” Ardmore said. “We’ve burned enough time watching it breathe.”
Spider’s heart tripped. The monitor tattled immediately: 127 → 138.
“No,” he said. His voice came out thinner than he wanted. “No stabbing.”
“Micro-sampling,” Kessler corrected, clinically, though her jaw tightened. “Like a skin biopsy.”
“In my lungs,” he snapped.
“In your pleural surface,” she said. “We won’t breach parenchyma. We don’t need to. If the symbiote extends to the visceral pleura, we can—”
“You poke near it,” he said, “it reacts.”
“That’s what we’re quantifying,” Ardmore cut in. “Do it, Doctor.”
There was a pause. The kind that held the weight of a hundred unspoken arguments and exactly zero power to change the order that had just been given.
“Prep the sampler,” Kessler said at last, quietly. “Real-time monitoring, all channels. If his resistance spikes, we abort.”
Her eyes flicked to Spider’s. For the first time, he saw something almost like apology there.
“Breathe normally,” she said, as if that were still an option.
He wanted to spit at her. The strap across his chest and the mask on his face made that logistically impossible.
“Define ‘normally,’” he muttered instead.
---
They didn’t roll in a big scary device for the sampling. That almost made it worse.
It was a small thing—a slim, gunmetal cylinder no bigger than a drill handle, attached to a thin, flexible line that ran to a sealed collection cartridge. The business end was a narrow cannula with a retractable cutting edge, barely visible until the tech thumbed the safety off and the tip winked silver.
Spider watched it approach with a cold sweat crawling under his skin.
“Local anesthetic,” Ramirez said, his voice a little too bright, like he’d dialled his bedside manner up two notches to compensate for his nerves. “You’ll feel some pressure but no sharp pain.”
“You rehearsed that in the mirror?” Spider asked.
“Yes,” Ramirez said, surprisingly honest. “Didn’t help much.”
Kessler stood on his left, close enough that he could see the tiny pulse in her throat. “We will not proceed if your airway becomes compromised,” she said. “You have my word on that.”
“You say that like you’ve got veto power,” he shot back.
Her mouth compressed. She didn’t answer.
Cold swab. The smell of antiseptic—sharp, chemical, nothing like the medicinal tang of crushed reef herbs the Metkayina used. He flinched as the swab touched his side, low and a little back from his nipple line.
“You’ll feel a sting,” Ramirez said. “One, two—”
The needle slipped under his skin. It pinched, then burned in a spreading arc along his ribs. He gritted his teeth and forced himself not to breathe in reaction, counting silently until the fire dulled to a distant heat.
“Okay,” Ramirez said. “That’s in. Give it a minute.”
Spider lay rigid against the chair, staring at the ceiling. The mask hummed. His breath bounced off it in shallow, rapid bursts. He tried to slow it. Failed.
Underneath the numbness, the symbiote was already moving.
It wasn’t something he could see or fully feel, but awareness had sharpened since the last time he’d been on a table like this. There was a tightening in his chest, a drawing inward like the ocean sucking back before a wave. Fine threads along his lower lung seemed to cluster closer to the site of contact, like seaweed tangling around a rock.
“It knows,” he whispered.
Kessler heard him. “I know,” she said.
“Contact threshold reached,” another tech said from the monitors. “Tracers densest at target.”
“Proceed,” Ardmore’s voice snapped through the intercom.
“On my mark,” Kessler said, overriding the impulse to rush. “Ramirez?”
He swallowed. “I’m good.”
“Spider?” she asked.
He almost laughed. “Oh, I’m fantastic,” he said. “You should see my review for this place.”
A tiny smile ghosted across Ramirez’s face, then vanished as he focused. He positioned the cannula against Spider’s numbed skin, just above the eighth rib. The ultrasound probe returned, angled to guide the depth.
“Remember,” Kessler said, low. “Pleural surface only. No deeper. We’re sampling the interface, not the core.”
“Copy,” Ramirez said.
Spider shut his eyes because watching wasn’t going to help. He felt the pressure of the instrument against his side—a firm, steady push, nothing like a stab. The anesthetic held; there was no sharp pain. Just a deep, unnatural awareness of something invading space it didn’t belong in.
On the screen, the cannula’s shadow advanced between two ribs, down through the soft tissue, toward the bright line of the pleural surface.
The symbiote went from uneasy to alarmed.
Spider’s next breath hitched hard, cutting off halfway. The mask hissed obligingly, but his chest refused to expand.
“Hold position,” Kessler said quickly. “Sympathetic spike. His HR’s at one-forty.”
“I haven’t even breached the pleura yet,” Ramirez said through clenched teeth.
“Entity A-01 may be responding to sheer stress,” Kessler said for the record. “We proceed in micro-increments.” To Spider, she added, “You’re okay. Nothing’s cut yet. Breathe with the mask.”
He tried.
He couldn’t.
The cannula nudged forward another millimeter. That was all it took.
Something inside him snapped tight.
The sensation was impossible to map to anything mundane. It wasn’t like choking on food or inhaling water. It was more internal, more total. One moment his bronchial tree was a set of branching tubes; the next, every small airway slammed shut in surreal unison.
The symbiote siezed the system.
His lungs locked.
He tried to inhale and hit an invisible wall. Air hit his throat, but it stopped there, blocked by muscles and membranes no longer under his control. His diaphragm jerked, a reflexive spasm under his ribs that had nowhere to send the effort.
A dry, abortive sound escaped him—more a bark than a breath.
“Airway resistance spiking,” someone said. “Flow down fifty percent—no, eighty—”
He didn’t hear the rest.
Panic wasn’t a thought; it was a full-body electrical storm. His vision narrowed with brutal speed, the edges already darkening. His hands clawed at the restraints like they belonged to someone else. His legs strained against the cuffs, heels scraping uselessly on the chair.
The room roared around him—every machine’s hum magnified, every beep a distant siren in a world that had shrunk to *no air, no air, no air*.
“Stop,” Kessler snapped. “Stop, pull back, you’re triggering a defensive response—”
The cannula backed away. It didn’t matter. The symbiote had already decided: breach threat = seal.
Spider’s chest refused to open. His trachea felt like it was being crushed from the inside by invisible hands. His throat muscles contracted without his consent, constricting around nothing.
He tried again to suck air in. His whole torso shook with the effort. Nothing moved. A thin, strangled wheeze squeaked past his vocal cords and died there.
Tears burned at the corners of his eyes, spilling sideways into his hairline in hot, humiliating tracks. He couldn’t even cough.
His heartbeat hammered against his ribs like it was trying to punch its way out.
“Bronchospasm?” someone offered, voice tight.
“It’s not bronchospasm,” Kessler said through her teeth. “This is coordinated—look at the EMG. It’s clamping the entire tree.”
“SpO₂ dropping,” the monitor tech said, too quickly. “Ninety-two…eighty-eight…”
“Spider, look at me,” Kessler said sharply, moving into his field of view. “Hey. Right here.”
He couldn’t focus on her. His eyes rolled past her, looking at nothing.
“We’re going to override this,” she said. “But I need you to stop fighting the mask. Let it seal.”
He couldn’t do anything she asked. His body didn’t care about plans. It cared about the primal fact of empty lungs.
“Bag him,” Kessler barked.
Hands descended on his face. The mask was shoved tighter against his skin, cutting briefly into the tender flesh under his nose. A manual valve clicked. Then a rush of cold, pressurized oxygen punched into him.
The first forced breath collided with the symbiote’s resistance like a battering ram. Every small airway screamed. The sensation was white-hot, stretching and burning and tearing at the micro-level, like forcing open a fist that had already cramped tight.
Somewhere in that pain, the symbiote yielded.
The air crashed past the block, shoving into starving alveoli. His chest expanded in a jagged, involuntary arc. The sudden stretch made his back arch off the chair. If his arms hadn’t been restrained, he would have ripped the mask away.
A grotesque, honking wheeze erupted on the exhale, raw and wet. Colour splashed back into the edges of his vision—first grey, then pale, then the sharp, ugly white of the ceiling.
Again—another squeeze on the bag, another pressurized breath rammed through half-reluctant airways. The symbiote resisted fractionally less. His alveoli opened wider, the ache across his chest shifting from pure suffocation to a deep, bruised burn.
“Ninety,” the tech called. “Ninety-four—”
“Slow it down,” Kessler said. “Let his CO₂ come back up. We don’t want him seizing on top of this.”
Spider couldn’t have seized if he wanted to; every muscle already felt blown out, buzzing with the aftershock. His fingers tingled and then went numb. His legs trembled without pattern.
The third breath was marginally easier. His body had remembered how cooperating worked. The symbiote seemed to be recalculating, internal threat algorithms reweighing *foreign object* against *host mortality*. The clamp loosened.
He dragged in a breath on his own between bags—tiny, ragged, but his. It squeaked into him, high-pitched, then juddered out. He coughed once, a painfully weak, tearing cough that made his side scream where the anesthetic had already started to wear off.
He didn’t care. The cough meant things were movable again.
“Baseline restoring,” someone said. “SpO₂ ninety-seven. Heart rate down to one-ten.”
On the wall screen, his respiratory graph, which had flatlined into a series of frantic, abortive spikes, began to normalize. Jagged at first, then less so, the peaks climbing toward something approximating a full breath.
His muscles gave up. He slumped back into the chair, restraints now more hammock than prison. Every inhale made his chest shiver.
Kessler’s exhale was as shaky as his. She peeled one glove off with her teeth, flexing fingers that had gone white at the knuckles.
“It shut his airway to prevent tissue breach,” she said, voice hoarse but steady enough for the record. “The symbiote reads mechanical intrusion as threat. It would rather suffocate the host briefly than allow extraction.”
Spider coughed again, less violently, and licked dry lips. The mask made everything taste like rubber and processed air.
“Told you,” he rasped. The words scraped like broken glass. “Interdependent. You kill it, you kill me.”
She didn’t argue this time.
She just looked at him.
Not like he was a specimen, not entirely. Not like he was just a boy strapped to a chair, either. Something more complicated, more dangerous: a problem with teeth.
Under the fluorescents, Kessler’s face looked years older. The thin, brittle scientist composure had cracked at the edges. She was shaking, just enough that Spider could see it in the fine tremor of the glove still on her right hand.
The intercom crackled again.
“Report,” Ardmore said. Her voice was cool, clipped. “Did you get a sample?”
“Negative,” Kessler said.
There was a pause long enough for Spider to imagine her calculating the value of disappointment vs. dead asset vs. paperwork.
“Explain,” Ardmore said.
“The entity induced total airway closure in response to the sampling attempt,” Kessler said. “Full bronchial clampdown, coordinated. We forced ventilation through it, but another attempt at that depth risks cardiac arrhythmia, hypoxic injury, or worse. It will suffocate him before it lets us peel it off.”
Silence from the speaker. The kind that meant nothing good.
“No one back home cares how gentle you were,” Ardmore said finally, voice like dry ice. “They care whether we bring them something they can use.”
Kessler’s jaw flexed. Her gaze flicked to the monitor, where Spider’s heart rate hovered in the low hundreds, not yet calm but no longer trying to beat its way out of his ribcage.
“With respect,” she said, and Spider could hear the effort it took not to spit the words, “if we push it like that again and his heart stops, we bring them a corpse. A very expensive, very useless one.”
“Corpses can still be dissected,” Ardmore said. “We’d have full access.”
Spider’s skin went cold. He swallowed and almost choked on his own spit. The mask caught the tiny sputter, feeding his stumble of a breath back to him with relentless neutrality.
Kessler’s eyes flicked to him. For a heartbeat, he thought she might look away, preserve that clinical distance.
She didn’t.
She stared right at him when she said, “If we kill him, we lose the one thing making the entity behave like anything other than a hostile invasive. It is cooperating because he’s alive. You remove the host, you may get a mass of tissue, but you lose the adaptive integration. And, General, you lose your testbed for atmosphere conversion. This isn’t a lab rat. It’s a living interface.”
It was the first time anyone had argued for his life in terms that made survival sound like a business strategy.
He hated that it might be the only language that worked.
On the other end of the line, Ardmore breathed out slowly. The sound fuzzed through the cheap wall speakers.
“Fine,” she said at last. “No more ‘brute biopsies.’ But I want progress, Doctor. Blood data. Metabolic data. Gas exchange tables. Something I can send to a board of people who think me trusting your instincts is a liability.”
“We can do that,” Kessler said. “But we need new tactics.”
“You have forty-eight hours,” Ardmore said. “After that, this goes above both our heads.”
The channel cut out with an ugly click.
The room exhaled as one. Someone swore softly under their breath. Ramirez leaned his forehead against the wall for a second, then straightened and began disconnecting the sampling line with hands that were still visibly shaking.
Spider let his eyes fall closed. The inside of his chest felt raw, as if every tiny tube had been sandpapered. Each breath dragged a phantom itch along places he couldn’t scratch.
He could feel the symbiote, too—not as an alien mind, but as a pattern of sensation. It pulsed along his lungs like a wounded animal surrounded by traps. Not calm, not panicking—coiled. Waiting.
He wasn’t sure which of them he was feeling more.
The gel on his side had gone clammy. The numbed zone it had marked was starting to twinge, a distant ache that promised bruising by morning. He rolled his head a fraction toward that side, enough to tug at the strap across his chest.
“Don’t,” Kessler said quietly.
He opened one eye. She’d stepped back, but not far. Her hands were off him now. The ultrasound probe sat abandoned on its tray, gel drying in uneven streaks.
“You stay away from that region for at least the next twelve hours,” she said. “It’s on a hair-trigger now. We poke it, we end up bagging you again.”
“You say that like you’re not the one holding the stick,” he croaked.
She winced, just barely. “Point taken.”
He forced in a shallow breath and let it out slow. It still felt wrong, but the edge of sheer, animal panic had dulled. In its place was a bone-deep exhaustion that made his limbs feel waterlogged.
“So what now?” he asked. “You keep me on a leash and run me on a treadmill?”
“More or less,” she said. “We adjust the air. We see what it does. We watch your blood gases. No more stabbing. Not unless something changes dramatically.”
“That supposed to make me feel better?”
“It’s supposed to make you feel alive,” she said. “The rest is optional.”
He stared at her. There was a thought behind her eyes she hadn’t voiced yet, a line she hadn’t drawn out loud.
“New tactics,” he said slowly. “Meaning what?”
She scrubbed a hand over her face, smearing a streak of gel along her cheekbone before she caught herself. It made her look momentarily human in a way that had nothing to do with species.
“Meaning,” she said, “we work with it instead of against it. We turn the mapping inward.”
She nodded toward the imaging screen, where his lungs still glowed faintly with tracer and symbiote activity.
“It’s already optimizing your gas exchange,” she said. “We change the mix, it adapts. We watch how. That tells us more than carving it ever will. Think of it as…functional mapping under stress.”
“You mean you’re going to suffocate me nicer,” he said.
A corner of her mouth twitched. “I mean we’re going to tiptoe up to suffocation and then back off. Repeatedly. Until I understand its curves.”
He let his head thump back against the chair, a small, defeated sound sliding out of him on the exhale.
“Great,” he said. “Love being a graph.”
She didn’t say *I’m sorry*. She didn’t say *I wish this were different*.
She just said, “You’re still breathing. That’s what we build on.”
It was nowhere near enough.
It was also the only thing he had.
---
They kept their distance from his side after that.
The probes came off, one by one. The sampling gun disappeared back into its case. Ramirez busied himself with coiling lines and disinfecting surfaces like his life depended on the angle of every wipe.
Kessler adjusted the ventilator settings down by the tiniest fraction, just enough that Spider could feel the machine yielding some control back to him. His next few breaths were mostly his own, with the mask stepping in only when he stumbled.
He tested his limits cautiously. A slightly deeper inhale here, a slightly slower exhale there. Each time, the symbiote responded—not with a clampdown, but with a wary flare, as if checking: *Is this you, or are they pushing again?*
He found a narrow strip of rhythm both of them could live with.
Minutes—hours—he lost track—slid past under the fluorescent hum. The room’s activity shifted to quieter tasks: data exporting, muttered arguments over calibration, a low-volume call between Kessler and someone in a different wing about “secured atmospheric chambers” and “longitudinal data.”
Spider floated in it all, tethered to the chair by straps and tubing and the simple fact that, for now, staying here was the least deadly of his options.
At some point, Kessler came back to his side. Her hair had slipped from its knot, a strand stuck behind one ear with the absent-minded imprecision of someone who’d been too busy to care.
“We’re done cutting you for today,” she said.
He huffed a sound that might have been a laugh. “What a treat.”
She ignored the sarcasm. “We’re going to move you to a different chair.”
“Why?” he asked, suspicion rising instantly. “This one’s not tortury enough?”
“This one is a scanner throne,” she said. “The next one is just a chair. With wheels. And fewer knives.”
He narrowed his eyes. “If you’re about to tell me this is physio, I will find a way to bite you through the mask.”
“Sadly, not physio,” she said. “We need you conscious for some of this. And upright.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. Before he could object further, the techs moved in—still cautious, as if any sudden movement might set off another internal revolt. They loosened the chest strap, the wrist restraints. His skin prickled with the sudden absence of pressure.
When they unfastened the ankle cuffs, his feet felt strangely light.
“On three,” Ramirez said. “We’ll swing your legs off, then pivot. Don’t try to stand, just…go with it, okay?”
He nodded—not because it was okay, but because gravity was an argument he’d already lost once today.
They lifted him in a practiced maneuver, turning his body just enough that his legs dropped over the edge. The shift made his lungs twinge; the symbiote did a little internal flinch. Air rose up into his head in a rush. For a second, the room wobbled.
Then he was in the other chair, lower and more ordinary, the kind you could roll someone down a hallway in. The mask remained, the wires remained, but the big apparatus arm over his chest swung away.
The small change—angle, leverage, autonomy—felt disproportionately huge.
“Better?” Kessler asked.
He considered. “Less like a dissection,” he said. “More like a hostage negotiation.”
“I’ll take it,” she said.
She nodded to the door. “We’re moving you to a different bay. Gas-mix lab. The hardware there is better suited to what we need.”
“You mean you’re taking me deeper,” he said.
She didn’t lie. “Yes.”
They rolled him out of Forward Bay Eight under the watchful eye of a security cam that hummed faintly as it tracked his passage. The corridor beyond was a long, white artery with glass windows opening onto other rooms—most empty, some with equipment, one with a tank full of some pale, twitching vine-analog that recoiled from the movement of his chair as if it could feel him.
He looked away.
Every RDA hallway smelled the same: recycled air, plastic, cleaning chemicals, a faint metallic tang of old blood and older ozone. Under that, always, the ghost of Pandora trying to creep in—sour jungle damp, salt from the sea, whatever spores and particulates managed to slip past the filters.
His lungs ached for the heavier mix outside these walls. The symbiote pulsed once, like it remembered too.
“You know they’ll come for me,” he said, not looking at Kessler as they wheeled him along. “Jake. Neytiri. The others. They’ll notice the kid with the space lungs went missing.”
“I know,” Kessler said.
“You’re betting you get what you want before they get here,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
He appreciated the honesty, even as he hated the truth of it.
“Bad bet,” he said.
She didn’t disagree.
They turned a corner. A set of doors ahead slid open with a thump of equalizing pressure.
Above them, a sign read: **ATMOSPHERIC SIMULATION — SECURE ACCESS**.
New tactics, he thought, as they pushed him through.
Different room. Same problem.
They weren’t going to stop poking. They were just going to do it with air instead of metal.
And somewhere deep under his ribs, the symbiote—wounded, wary, still coiled from the biopsy attempt—lifted its metaphorical head and paid very close attention.