Chapter Text
The news reached Jake in pieces.
First was the sound.
He heard it before he saw anyone—an ululating cry echoing up through the marui levels, too sharp to be a call for dinner, too ragged to be kids playing. It cut sideways through the usual hum of Awa’atlu like a blade.
He was halfway down the woven walkway before he realized it was Ronal.
The Tsahìk was on the main platform below, standing knee-deep in water. Blood streaked one forearm where she’d wiped it on her skin. Her eyes were turned toward the open sea, jaw clenched.
Ronal didn’t make noise like that unless something had gone very wrong.
“Jake!” Tonowari’s voice boomed from another pod, then closer footsteps, the rush of bodies. “JakeSully!”
Jake hit the last rung, dropped into the water, and slogged for the gathering platform.
“Kiri and Lo’ak,” Ronal said, before he could ask. “They have not returned.”
Jake’s heart skipped once, then fell into a faster, harder rhythm. “They went out with Spider and Tuk,” he said. “Net-lanes, gathering kelp. They should’ve been back an hour ago.”
“They are not,” Ronal said. Her gaze snagged on something over his shoulder. “And they do not come home clean.”
Jake turned.
Two ilu were cutting toward the main dock in long, desperate strokes.
Three ilu had left earlier.
Lo’ak slid off his mount before it fully reached the platform. He almost missed the edge, catching himself on blistered palms. Water ran off him in sheets. His braid was half undone, beads missing. The entire left side of his face was swelling, a dark bruise spreading from his temple down toward his cheekbone.
Kiri came after, slower, as if her legs didn’t quite remember how to be legs yet. She stumbled, caught herself, then stumbled again. Her knees were raw, mottled with sand-burn and blood. Salt streaked her face, but her eyes were dry and too wide.
Tuk wasn’t with them.
Neither was Spider.
A cold pressure settled behind Jake’s ribs.
Neytiri hit the platform from the other side at the same time, bow already in hand like she’d sprinted straight from wherever she’d been. Her chest rose and fell fast. When she saw only two of her older children, her pupils blew wide.
“Where is your sister?” she demanded. “Where is Spider?”
Kiri opened her mouth. No sound came out.
Lo’ak swallowed. It looked like it hurt. “Tuk’s with Tsireya,” he managed. “They got back earlier. We—” He flicked a glance at Kiri, then away, shame written in the set of his shoulders. “They took him, Dad.”
The words fell heavy, like stones into deep water.
Jake felt them land in his chest, in the space that still ached when he heard Neteyam’s name spoken out loud. Another son. Another hole.
“Who?” he asked, though he already knew. His voice sounded too calm to his own ears. “Say it.”
Lo’ak’s jaw tightened. “Sky People,” he ground out. “RDA.”
Neytiri hissed, a high, vicious sound that made the nearest reef children flinch.
“Tell me exactly what happened,” Jake said. “No skipping. No edits.”
Lo’ak nodded once, fast. He started talking.
The details came in broken bursts.
English spoken through a helmet speaker where there should’ve only been reef wind and surf. A man with a visor and a voice that sounded like he was asking for directions, not issuing an order. Nets that weren’t woven from vine but from filament that crackled and shocked and tightened until lungs could barely move.
Kiri’s voice slid in where Lo’ak faltered, filling the gaps. Spider hitting the roots hard. The way his breath had hitched around the net. The sound he’d made when the tranquilizer bit.
Every time she said his name, Kiri’s throat tightened. Her hands twisted in the woven harness of her top, knuckles pale.
“They called him ‘asset’,” she said. “Into their radios. Like—like he’s not a person. Just…something they find and take.”
Jake could see it. Too easily. Spider wrapped in pulsing netting, eyes wide, scared because he knew what was to come. Lo’ak snapping, going for a kill and getting brained into a root instead. Kiri’s elbow slamming into someone’s throat, too small under rated armor. All of it happening in the fraction of a second between safe and not.
Neytiri’s hands shook on her bowstring. She didn’t draw, but it took effort.
Jake’s gut twisted. He’d seen those rigs back when his legs had still been meat and bone. Non-lethal capture systems. Designed to bring down dangerous things without killing them. Dangerous things like Na’vi.
Dangerous things like his kid.
“What direction?” Jake asked. “When they pulled out. Show me.”
Lo’ak pointed without hesitation, arm shaking only at the end of the motion. “West,” he said. “Toward the old human stuff. I saw one of their drones, low over the trees. They had him on a sling between two of them. He—” Lo’ak cut himself off. His voice had gone thin.
“He was alive,” Kiri said quickly, as if she’d heard the gap and tried to fill it. “When they put the needle in, he…slumped, but he was alive. I checked. I tried to pull him out of the net.” Her own breath started to hitch. She flattened a palm against her chest as if trying to steady it. “I couldn’t cut it. It it bit me.”
She held up her forearm. Faint, reddened tracks crossed the blue skin, already fading but still visible. Fine burns, like the kiss of a jellyfish.
Neytiri took her daughter’s arm and examined the marks with careful, shaking fingers. “Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Yes,” Kiri said. Then, quietly, “Not as much as watching him go.”
The platform around them had gone very still. Metkayina hunters, divers, children—everyone within earshot listened with barely-veiled fury or fear.
Tonowari came forward, his presence turning the crowd into a shape instead of a scatter. “Sully,” he said to Jake. “These demons come again for your family. For your son. They will not leave our reef alive.”
His words slotted into something in Jake’s spine that had been waiting for a target since the last RDA ship dipped over the horizon.
“We’re not rushing blind,” Jake said. The Marine in him spoke first, then the father. “We do this smart, or we don’t get him back at all.”
“That boy is not a thing to be bargained,” Neytiri snapped. Her eyes were bright with a wetness she refused to let fall. “They took one of our sons already. They will not have another.”
“I know,” Jake said solemnly.
Jake’s throat closed. For a second, he was back in the cove, Neteyam bleeding out under his hands, Neytiri’s screams tearing the air.
Spider’s face flashed over that memory uninvited: same age, same stubbornness, same stupid soft heart under all the bravado. Different blood, same son.
“We’re not burying anyone,” he said. It came out rough. “We’re getting him back. But we don’t do that by sprinting into a forward base without knowing where the guns are.”
Lo’ak’s shoulders hunched. “If I had just—”
Jake turned on him. “No.”
Lo’ak flinched.
“You don’t get to write this story as ‘Lo’ak screwed up and Spider paid,’” Jake said, voice hard. “You fought. They came prepared. That’s on them.”
Lo’ak’s jaw worked. The guilt didn’t vanish, but it shifted its weight.
Kiri drew in a tremoring breath. “What do we do?” she asked. “We can’t just stay here and wait. They—they’ll hurt him. You know they will. They’ll…cut. Or…poke. He told us what it was like in there. It was bad.” The last words came out like a curse.
Jake did know. Intimately.
If RDA had Spider, it wasn’t just because he was a convenient hostage. It was because of what was coursing through his body.
He looked at Tonowari. “I need a comm link,” he said. “Norm and Max. High Camp. If RDA’s moving something this big, they’ll be talking about it.”
Tonowari nodded once. “We have your machines,” he said. “The ones you insisted we keep even after the last war. Use them.”
Neytiri’s mouth tightened but she didn’t argue. Not now.
“Lo’ak,” Jake said, turning back to his son. “You’re coming with me to the comm shack. You saw their direction. You’ll help me map it. Kiri—”
“I’m not staying behind,” she said instantly.
“I wasn’t going to ask you to,” he said. “You’re with your mother.”
Kiri swallowed. Some of the paralysis left her posture. Tasks meant motion. Motion meant she didn’t have to sit and picture a lab.
Tuk appeared then, barreling through a pair of woven curtains, eyes huge and shining. “Kiri!” she called. “Lo’ak! Where’s Spi—”
Neytiri caught her before the question finished, folding her youngest into her arms so fast Tuk’s feet left the platform.
“Spider is…” Neytiri paused, choosing a word that wasn’t gone. “…taken,” she said. “We are bringing him home.”
Jake met her gaze over Tuk’s head. There was determination in her eyes. They were going to bring him back.
“Move,” he said.
The comm hut at Awa’atlu was a Frankenstein’s tangle of human and reef.
Jake ducked through a curtain of dried kelp and into a humidity-thick space where human consoles sat on woven platforms, their cables threaded through carved coral brackets. Someone had hung shell charms above the main transmitter; they tinkled faintly whenever a breeze found its way in.
Lo’ak followed, rubbing at his temple as if the bruise hurt worse now that the immediate danger was past.
Jake slid into the main chair, fingers already moving over familiar keys. The screen blinked awake with a brief protest, then stabilized on a RDA-standard interface that he and Norm had gutted and refitted post-war.
A ping went out on a secure frequency—a little ghost-knock on High Camp’s door.
It didn’t take long.
“Jake?” Norm’s voice crackled through after a moment. The audio quality was bad, but the stress was crystal clear. “Tell me you’re calling about anything except what I think you’re calling about.”
Jake’s gut went colder. “You’ve heard something.”
“RDA chatter lit up fifteen minutes ago,” Norm said. Behind him, Jake could hear the distant hum of human life at High Camp—murmurs, the clink of equipment, someone swearing quietly. “Forward lab bay, west corridor. ‘Asset acquired.’ ‘Entity A-01 host in custody.’ ‘Prepare respiratory mapping protocols.’” He spat the last phrase like it tasted foul. “They’ve got him, Jake. They’ve got Spider.”
Lo’ak sucked in a breath so sharp it almost whistled.
Jake clenched his jaw so hard his teeth ached. “Is he alive?”
“They wouldn’t be talking about ‘mapping’ if he wasn’t,” Norm said. “But they’re not exactly planning to give him a spa day. They mentioned…biopsy. And ‘separation models.’ Max is trying to piggyback on their internal medical telemetry but the encryption’s ugly.”
Lo’ak’s hands had curled into fists at his sides. “They’re going to cut it out of him,” he said. “What’s keeping him alive.”
“If they’re stupid,” Norm said grimly. “Which they are. But Kessler’s there.”
“Who?” Jake asked.
“Doctor Etta Kessler,” Norm said. “Xenobiology, atmosphere division. She’s…not the worst of them. She’s the one who kept pushing the ‘mutualistic’ classification up the chain. If anyone in that building doesn’t want to kill him outright, it’s her.”
“That supposed to make me feel better?” Lo’ak snapped.
“No,” Norm said, properly chastened. “It’s supposed to mean they’re going to try to keep him alive long enough to learn how not to kill him. Gives us a window.”
Jake latched onto that. Window. Time.
“How far is this bay from you?” he asked. “Old extraction corridors west. That’s your backyard.”
“Back when RDA still liked us, yeah,” Norm said. Paper rustled on his end—maps being dragged over, probably the old base schematics Jake remembered from his own human days. “They’re using Forward Research Bay Eight as intake. Ventilation feeds into the lower atmospheric sim labs. Only two viable ingress routes topside without getting atomized by automated turrets: service trench along the north ridge, or the old waste uplink chute. Your family knows the surface paths better than we do now.”
“We’ll handle the outside,” Jake said. “You and Max get airborne. Bring med gear. Breathing support, blood expanders, the works. Whatever they’re doing to him in there, it’s going to wreck him.”
Norm’s inhale hissed audibly over the line. “You really think he’ll make it out of that place in any state to walk?”
“I’m planning for him to make it out,” Jake said. “Because the alternative is not an option.”
Lo’ak’s throat worked. He looked like he wanted to say something, then swallowed it. Later, the look said. We can fall apart later.
“Okay,” Norm said. “We’ve got one Samson we can get in the air within the hour. Two if the second one’s willing to fly with a bad stabilizer. You’d better clear us a patch of sky, though. If their radar pings us, we’re cooked.”
“We’ll keep their eyes on the ground,” Jake said. “You just get there.”
“On it,” Norm said. “Oh, and Jake?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t let him die,” Norm said. “Spider is family. We need him to come home.” There was something devastating in the tone of which he said it. They had all lost so much.
Jake’s grip tightened on the comm handset. “I will.”
The line clicked off.
Lo’ak exhaled, the sound shaky. “So what’s the plan?” he asked. “You said we’d do this smart. How?”
Jake stood, the bone in his tail twitching with restless energy. “You’re going to take me back to where it happened,” he said. “Show me the exact spot. The tracks. The drone path. We walk it like a battlefield and find out how far a man can get carrying a netted kid before he needs a lift.”
Lo’ak’s eyes flashed. “You’re taking me?”
“You were there,” Jake said. “You know what they looked like, what they carried, how fast they moved. That’s intel. I need it. And I need you where I can see you. Besides, if I asked you to stay behind I know you wouldn’t.”
He didn’t say, I am not leaving you behind to marinate in your head and convince yourself this is all your fault until you do something stupid. He didn’t have to. Lo’ak seemed to hear it anyway.
Kiri appeared in the doorway, breath a little short from climbing up from the reef level. “What do you need?” Kiri always seemed to know where to be.
Jake reached out and squeezed her shoulder, the way he would with one of his war squad. “We’re on the clock,” he said. “Keep the line open with Norm. If RDA chatter changes, you tell us.”
She nodded, jaw set.
Outside, Neytiri’s voice rose in sharp, clipped Na’vi, organizing a hunting party. Arrows, knives, spears. No guns. The Metkayina didn’t like human weapons. It didn’t matter. Neytiri with a bow was worse than any rifle.
“Move,” Jake said again.
Lo’ak followed him out into the hard, bright Pandora daylight.
They found the grab site by the way the forest remembered violence.
Even this close to the reef, a belt of mangroves clung to the shallows, their roots like knotted fingers sinking into mud. Birds that usually screamed and argued over branches were conspicuously absent. The silence rang in Jake’s ears.
“Here,” Lo’ak said. His voice had gone low and flat.
There were scuffs on the roots where someone had slipped. A smear of blood across a bark edge where Kiri’s arm had clipped. Arrow shafts littered the ground, some snapped, some intact and still quivering faintly with residual energy from the shot.
Jake crouched and touched a scuffed indentation where heavy boots had torn the moss. Human, not Na’vi. Too narrow, too deep at the heel.
He followed the track with his eyes—drag marks in the mud where weight had been hauled awkwardly. A smear, darker than the surrounding earth.
Spider’s blood.
His stomach flipped.
“Dad,” Lo’ak said quietly. “There.”
Jake looked up.
Caught on a low-hanging root, half-melted at the edges, hung a strip of net filament. It was no bigger than his hand. It fizzed faintly when the breeze moved it, as if some residual charge still clung to the weave.
Lo’ak’s hands tightened at his sides. “It shocked him,” he said. “Every time he moved, it…bit. He tried to talk. He—” He cut off, breathing hard.
Jake didn’t touch the filament. He’d seen what those nets could do to nervous systems when misused. Instead, he followed the drag marks with his eyes.
“Direction’s consistent with west corridor approach,” he said, half to himself. “They didn’t take him to a ship. They walked him to a landing pad small enough for a shuttle or a low-hover rig.”
He rose, scanning the sky between the mangrove crowns. Through a gap, he could see the faint, straight-line scar of an old RDA flight path, invisible to most eyes but clear to him: a corridor where jungle growth was a little less thick, as if something large had moved through that slice of air too many times.
“They took him there,” he said. “Straight line. Minimal terrain. Easy to defend if we’re not careful.”
Lo’ak’s tail flicked. “So we’re careful,” he said.
“Yeah,” Jake said. He clapped a hand on his son’s shoulder. “We’re careful. And we’re fast.”
Because every minute Spider spent breathing filtered air in a white room with his chest wired and his lungs mapped was a minute closer to someone in a nicer office deciding he’d be more useful in pieces.
Jake straightened and looked west, toward the old scars in the cliff.
RDA thought they knew how to contain dangerous things. Labs, straps, masks. Numbers.
But Pandora had teeth too. And this time, the thing they’d caged had a family.
“Let’s go get your brother,” he said.
Lo’ak’s answering nod was sharp as a drawn bowstring.
They moved.