Hollow Air, Shared Blood

by natnatwood

Summary:

Max and Norm made it clear that trying to separate the symbiote from Spider would be catastrophic. The RDA doesn't care as long as they can meet their goal.

Notes:

Takes place after Fire and Ash (aka Spider is an airbreather) with some tweaks such as Ronal and Ardmore still being alive.

Chapter 1: Classified Asset

The first time Spider’s name appeared in an RDA briefing document, it wasn’t under “hostile.” It was under “infrastructure.” The file opened in a muted blue glow across the conference holo-table, projected above the polished surface of the RDA forward ops room. Outside the thick glass, Pandora’s sky rolled black and alive with distant lightning. Inside, the air smelled like recycled oxygen and cold metal.

“Subject: MILES SOCORRO,” the header read, in sharp clean type.

Underneath, smaller, bolder:

ALIAS: “Spider”

STATUS: High-priority adaptive asset

THREAT LEVEL: Moderate

STRATEGIC VALUE: CRITICAL

“You have got to be kidding me,” one of the junior analysts muttered, squinting at the holo. “The feral kid?”

General Ardmore didn’t look away from the projection. “Not feral,” she said. “Adapted.”

The holo shifted with a hand swipe, revealing medical scans—lung images, bloodwork comparisons, before-and-after respiratory profiles. Two silhouette outlines appeared side by side: baseline human, standard exopack dependency; and Spider, post the second Tulkun incident, walking through Pandoran air with nothing on his face but dirt and attitude.

The difference wasn’t subtle.

On the “baseline” model, red crosshatching marked everything from trachea to alveoli: lethal environment without filtration. On Spider’s model, those same pathways glowed in an eerie, muted teal.

Someone had overlaid faint branching structures along the bronchi and pulmonary vessels, like coral grafted to a tree.

ANNOTATION:

“Foreign biological integration observed along airway epithelium and alveolar surface, consistent with symbiotic xenobiology.

Preliminary hypothesis: off-world symbiote (designated ENTITY A-01) performing active gas exchange and/or buffering hostile atmospheric components.”

A biologist at the far end of the table leaned forward, eyes bright behind her lenses. “Entity A-01 appears to metabolize atmospheric toxins and facilitate Oxygen delivery while protecting host tissues,” she said. “We’re seeing stable arterial blood gases in atmospheres that should destroy unmodded human lungs in minutes.”

Another slide: Spider on a grainy feed—bare chest streaked with mud and sea salt, hair wild, laughing at something one of the Sully kids had said. He turned his head; behind him the air shimmered in the heat. No mask. No exopack.“Respiratory rate: slightly elevated but stable,” the biologist continued. “No cyanosis. No structural lung damage. No fibrosis. No exopack. He is—by every metric—breathing this moon like a native.”

A low whistle went around the table.

“And he’s human,” the analyst said. “Full human genome. No avatar.”

“That,” Ardmore said, finally turning toward the group, “is why you’re all here.”

The holo zoomed back to the twin outlines.

“We tried to tame this rock with hammers and bombs,” she said. “Didn’t work. We tried reshaping it with bulldozers and climate towers. Not fast enough. Meanwhile, the locals—” a flick of her fingers, a Na’vi silhouette flared briefly above the table, bow raised “—have biological advantages we can’t outgun without bankrupting Earth twice.”

She gestured back to Spider’s model. The teal branching flared, pulsing faintly.

“But this,” she said, “this is different. This is the first time one of ours has something like what they have. Atmospheric compatibility. Native survivability. If we can separate that thing from him, replicate it, control it…” She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to.

No more fragile masks. No more workers dropping dead if a seal cracked in a corrosive pocket. No more soldiers ripped apart because their air went out eighteen seconds too soon. If they could pull the symbiote out of the boy and force it into others, Pandora would stop being a hostile environment and start being… property.

A nervous cough broke the silence. “There is one complication, ma’am,” the biologist said carefully, tapping her tablet. “The field reports—Sully’s human scientists—have identified the relationship as…mutualistic. Interdependent. They claim removal would likely be fatal to the host.”

“Quote it,” Ardmore said.

The holo shifted again, this time to a transcribed audio log. The time stamp placed it in High Camp, not long after the events now classified under the codename FIRE & ASH INCIDENT.

DR. MAX PATEL: “Look, I can’t stress this enough. The symbiote and Spider are keeping each other alive. This is not plug-and-play. You pull it out, you don’t just kill it—you kill him.”

DR. NORM SPELLMAN: “Yeah, and it’s not just his lungs. It’s integrated into his cardio-respiratory system. Maybe deeper. Maybe neural. You try to reverse that without understanding it, you’re committing murder.”

Under that, in RDA red:

ANALYSIS:

LOCAL SCIENTISTS COMPROMISED / BIASED.

MORTALITY RISK TO SUBJECT: HIGH.

STRATEGIC REWARD POTENTIAL: EXTREME.

The room held its breath.

“And there it is,” Ardmore said, almost conversational. “The line between ‘biological curiosity’ and ‘worth losing sleep over.’”

One of the military liaisons shifted uneasily. “Ma’am, with respect, if they’re right—”

“If they’re right,” Ardmore cut in, “and we do nothing, then the advantage remains with the Na’vi and their pet human. Earth’s governments will ask what we did here, and our answer will be ‘we let a miracle stay in the jungle because we were afraid of getting our hands dirty.’”

She let that sit for a beat.

“Make no mistake,” she added. “I am not planning to kill the boy. I’m planning to understand the thing keeping him alive. Big difference.”

The biologist held her ground. “If mutualism is that tightly integrated, separating it might not be technically possible without—”

“Is a surgical transplant ‘technically possible’ if you refuse to pick up a scalpel?” Ardmore asked.

“You’re researchers. Research. Find the margins before you tell me where the line is.”

Her gaze swept to the tactical side of the table. “In the meantime,” she said, “we need him on a table. Alive. Relatively intact.”

A new holo pane flicked on: movement vectors, probable waypoints, rough maps of the Sully clan’s relocation zones. The Metkayina reef systems glowed in oceanic blues, dotted with labeled marui structures and hunting channels.

“Intelligence confirms he spends significant time between High Camp and the reef village known as Awa’atlu,” said one of the operations officers. “Rides with the clan, sleeps in their pods. Often in open structures. Security not designed for human-target snatches.”

“He’s planetary famous now,” another analyst added. “Half the Na’vi call him ‘the air-breather.’ He’s…visible.”

“Good,” Ardmore said. “Visibility means predictability.”

She zoomed in on the small human silhouette among taller Na’vi forms.

“Draft two operational pathways,” she said. “One covert, one opportunistic. No open engagements unless absolutely necessary. We don’t spook the Sullys before we have to; they’re useful locators for the subject.”

“And if they resist?” the military liaison asked.

Ardmore smiled, thin and humorless.

“They will,” she said. “They always do.”

She turned the holo back on and zoomed in, this time on a cluster of bright teal along Spider’s bronchi.

“Which is why we don’t start with the heart,” she added. “We start with the air.”

Chapter 2: The Grab

Summary:

Lo'ak, Spider and Kiri run into trouble.

Notes:

Takes place after Fire and Ash with some tweaks such as Ronal and Ardmore still being alive.

The first RDA signal didn’t come as a bullet or a drone or a roar of engines. It came as a sound Spider hadn’t heard in months: a human voice speaking English into open air.

“Kid. Over here.”

It floated through the mangrove roots on a warm afternoon when the tide was low and the saltflies were irritating enough that even Lo’ak had stopped talking.

The three of them - Lo’ak, Spider, and Kiri - were picking their way across the slick roots back toward Awa’atlu, their catch bags half full and Tuk already home helping Ronal clean fish.

Spider froze midstep. Standard English didn’t belong out here. It didn’t melt into the waves or bounce off mangrove bark. It felt like metal in the mouth.

Lo’ak’s head snapped up. “You hear that?”

Kiri heard it too—her pupils went huge, scanning the treeline. The air suddenly tasted wrong.

Spider swallowed. “Who..?”

“Over here,” the voice called again. Smooth. Measured. Not a yell, just someone who expected compliance.

Lo’ak reached for his bow without drawing. His whole posture shifted, relaxed shoulders gone tight, weight balanced on the balls of his feet.

Kiri put her hand on Spider’s arm, inching him behind her. “That’s not one of ours.”

“Yeah,” Spider breathed, heartbeat kicking up. “No shit.”

There was a swish of brush, then a man stepped out from behind a tangle of roots. Exopack, matte-black suit, weapon down but visible. Not shooting, yet. His visor glinted like a shard of sun.

Spider’s mouth went dry.

“Relax,” the man said through his speaker, like they were in a grocery aisle on Earth. “We’re not here to fight.”

Lo’ak barked a bitter laugh. “Oh yeah? You guys forgetting what happened last time you said that?”

The man’s gaze slid past Lo’ak and landed on Spider. Not hostile. Worse. Assessing.

“We need to speak with you,” he said. “Just you.”

Kiri’s hand tightened on Spider’s wrist. “He’s not going anywhere.”

The man didn’t look at her. He kept his visor on Spider like a scanner.

“We know what happened during the Ash event,” he said. “We just want to know how you're breathing the air.”

Spider’s skin went cold. He felt suddenly exposed and under the type of scrutiny that brought back memories of different kind of scanners and needles and tubes. He shivered while stepping closer to Lo’ak without meaning to.

“What makes you think we're going to tell you?,” Kiri snapped.

The man ignored that too. “We want to help you. There are labs. Scientists. People who understand your condition.”

Condition. The word tasted like sickness. Spider felt something coil tight in his chest; it felt like anger or fear or maybe both.

“I don’t need your help,” he snarled. Why was it always some bullshit about “wanting to help”?

The man tilted his head. “Maybe not today. But things change. You’re different. And difference is…isolating.”

That one landed like a dart.

Spider opened his mouth, but footsteps thundered from behind and Lo’ak moved so fast Spider barely registered it until there was an arrow aimed at visor-glass.

“Back,” Lo’ak snarled, fangs bared, tail rigid. “Now.”

The man raised one gloved hand in a slow placating gesture.

Then three more emerged from the foliage—silent, smooth, practiced. Two in full tactical plating, one carrying a compact net launcher that made Spider’s stomach drop. Kiri hissed through her teeth.

Lo’ak pulled the string tighter. The line trembled with barely-contained fury.

Before anyone fired, the first man spoke again—this time into his suit comm. “Asset located.”

Spider didn’t have time to flinch.

A high-pitched *pftht!* snapped the air and something wrapped Spider from shoulder to ankle. It was sticky, constricting and electric. He hit the mangrove roots hard, breath punched out of him in a soundless grunt. The net crackled, making his muscles spasm, his fingers seize around nothing.

Lo’ak shouted - raw and wordless - and fired, but one of the plated soldiers slammed a ballistic shield up, arrow skittering harmlessly off polycarbon.

Kiri lunged for Spider, but another net snagged her leg. She dodged it, ripping it off before it fullydeployed, shrieking a curse that Spider had never heard from her before.

Spider tried to speak (anything) but the net tightened with each breath, squeezing his ribs. His lungs stuttered, panic spiking fast and ugly as his diaphragm fought the shock current.

“Lo—” he choked, but it came out a strangled bark.

Lo’ak went feral.

He didn’t shoot, he *leapt*, slamming into one of the soldiers with enough force to crack the visor. They went down in the roots, tangled in limbs and curses. Kiri drove her elbow into the throat of another man, knocking him sideways, but there were too many. Spider’s ears rang with shouts, the whipping hiss of taser lines, Lo’ak’s snarling voice.

The first man approached Spider, stepping over roots and bodies like he was stepping off a curb. “Easy, kid,” he said, kneeling. “This will be faster if you don’t fight.” Spider fought anyway. He jerked and twisted, but the net cinched tighter, the electric current making his jaw clench so hard his teeth ached. Air burned going in and didn’t want to go out. His heart slammed against a ribcage that wouldn’t expand right. His vision frayed at the edges—white noise and salt and breathlessness.

Someone shouted his name, Kiri, breaking on the vowel but a soldier hauled her back with an armacross her chest, dragging her into the roots as she kicked and clawed.

Lo’ak broke free long enough to grab at Spider’s ankle, “DON’T TOUCH HIM!”, but two men tackled him from the side. His head hit wood with a sickening crack and he went slack.

Spider tried to scream but no sound came, his throat seized around dry air and static. Tears, stupid and involuntary tears blurred his vision.

The man leaned close, pressed something cold against Spider’s neck. A hiss from what could only be a tranquilizer.

Spider’s muscles liquefied. His thoughts scattered like startled birds. Every inhale felt thinner, edges fraying, gravity tugging at his limbs. The mangroves tilted sideways. Kiri’s voice twisted into something distant and underwater.

His last coherent thought was stupid and small: Please don’t let them take me. Please don’t make me go back to that.

Then everything went black.

Chapter 3: Containment

Summary:

The RDA has Spider. What kind of torture are they going to put him through in order to get to the mycelium running through his body? How does pressure on the host affect the symbiote?

Notes:

I know we got an idea of what the mycelium does to Spiders system during Ash and Fire butttt I reworked it a bit.

Longest chapter yet and and I know I mentioned, 10K but this will probably be a bit longer. Enjoy!

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.

Chapter 4: Mapping

Summary:

More experiments, pushing Spider's system to the limit.

Notes:

Takes place after Fire and Ash with some tweaks such as Ronal and Ardmore still being alive.

---

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.

Notes:

The next chapter is going to focus on the Sully family and their panic around Spider being abducted. Thanks!

Chapter 5: Pursuit

Summary:

Spider has been accepted as one of the Sullys and the Metkayina people. When one of their own is gone, they do whatever it takes to get them back.

Notes:

Takes place after Fire and Ash with some tweaks such as Ronal and Ardmore still being alive.

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.

Chapter 6: Staging Ground

Summary:

Rescue planning.

Notes:

Takes place after Fire and Ash but I've taken liberties with who survived.

By the time Jake and Lo’ak got back from the mangroves, Awa’atlu had shifted into something else.

The sun still sat high enough to glitter on the water, but the village moved like a body bracing for impact—voices lowered, paths clearing without anyone being told, the usual laughter thinned into a tight, watchful quiet. Even the ilu in the shallows clicked and snorted under their breath, restless at the tension hanging over the reef.

Jake tasted it the way he’d tasted a battlefield before the first shot.

He stepped onto the main platform and felt a dozen eyes land on him in the same heartbeat—Metkayina and Sully alike. Tonowari was already there, broad shoulders squared. Neytiri stood a half-step behind him, bow in hand, her stillness more frightening than any pacing. Ronal was on the edge of the water.

Tuk hovered close to Tsireya, smaller than usual, fingers hooked into the weave at Tsireya’s hip like an anchor. Her eyes tracked Jake’s face, searching.

Jake didn’t slow. He didn’t let himself. If he stopped long enough to feel, he’d break something he couldn’t afford to break yet.

“West,” he said the moment he hit the center of the platform, voice carrying just enough to cut through the murmur. “Drag marks. Net filament. They moved him on foot to a pickup point, not a ship.”

Lo’ak stayed to Jake’s left, jaw tight, bruise blooming along his cheekbone like a storm cloud. He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. His whole body was an apology he refused to say out loud.

Tonowari’s nostrils flared. “How far?”

Jake flicked a glance at the reef line—measuring time and distance the way his old training still did automatically. “Not close,” he said. “But not Bridgehead. Forward lab. Old scar territory.”

Neytiri’s fingers flexed on her bowstring, silent tension in the cord. Her eyes didn’t leave Jake’s face.

Ronal took one step forward. “They will hurt him,” she said, voice flat and certain. Not dramatic. Just truth. “They always hurt.”

Jake didn’t argue. “We’re moving,” he said. “But we’re not running blind.”

Jake looked at Tonowari. “I need the comm hut.”

Tonowari’s gaze snapped to him, then he nodded once. “Go.”

Neytiri moved with Jake without being asked.

They crossed Awa’atlu’s woven walkways at a purposeful pace, ducking under hanging nets and shell charms that tinkled faintly in the salt breeze. People flattened out of their way without instruction. They knew what the Sullys looked like when they were going to war.

The comm hut sat tucked into the marui like a secret—human hardware lashed to reef architecture, cables threaded through coral brackets, old consoles humming under a canopy of dried kelp. The air inside was thick with humidity and faintly metallic, like storm air trapped in a box.

Kiri was already there.

She knelt by the console with the headset crooked over one ear, braid slipping loose down her back. Her hands were steady on the keys, but her shoulders were rigid in a way Jake didn’t like. Her eyes lifted when he stepped in—too bright, too sharp, like she was holding herself together by force.

“Norm’s on,” she said. No greeting. No wasted words.

Jake slid into the chair and keyed the mic. “Norm.”

The response came fast, crackling through static, Norm’s voice clipped tight with strain. “Jake.”

“Talk to me.”

Paper rustled on Norm’s end—maps, old schematics. Jake pictured him hunched over a table at High Camp with Max at his shoulder, both of them looking at the world like it was a math problem with a dead kid as the penalty for getting it wrong.

“They’re using Forward Research Bay Eight as intake,” Norm said. “Ventilation ties into lower atmospheric sim labs. Ardmore’s people are treating this like a time-sensitive project.”

“What’s their security profile?” Jake asked.

“Not Bridgehead,” Norm said, as if reading Jake’s mind. “But not soft. Roof turrets. Drones. Rotation of armed security. Main access is a raised corridor. Two viable ingress routes topside without getting turned into paste—service trench along the north ridge, or old waste uplink chute.”

Jake’s eyes flicked once to Neytiri, then to Lo’ak. Lo’ak was leaning against the frame like a caged animal, arms folded hard across his chest.

“Blind spots?” Jake asked.

Norm exhaled through his nose. “East side faces a cliff drop into a ravine. They never armored it properly. No one expects anyone to come from that direction. Too steep, too loose. Your best bet for staging.”

Jake didn’t hesitate. “Copy.”

Kiri was already shifting, rising as if her body couldn’t tolerate being still. “I’m going,” she said, voice low, fierce.

Jake turned his head toward her. The look was enough to make the hut feel smaller.

“You’re not breaching,” he said.

Kiri’s eyes flashed. “Dad—”

“Listen.” Jake’s voice stayed quiet, but it had that steel in it—the tone he used when he needed people to obey without breaking. “When we get him out, he may not be okay. He’s going to need you to steady him.”

Kiri’s throat bobbed, anger and fear tangling so tight they almost sounded the same.

“You want to do something that matters?” Jake continued. “You go to Norm. You make sure the Samson is where it needs to be. You make sure Max is ready. You make sure we don’t lose him in the last five minutes because we didn’t have the right equipment at the right time.”

Kiri’s hands curled into fists at her sides. She looked like she wanted to rip the headset off the wall and throw it.

Jake leaned in a fraction, lowering his voice further. “You will be the handoff,” he said. “You will be the reason he makes it home.”

Silence stretched thin.

Neytiri watched Kiri’s face like she was memorizing the expression.

Kiri’s jaw tightened. Then she nodded—sharp, once. “Fine,” she said, and it didn’t mean fine. It meant *I hate this and I understand why you’re doing it and I will carry it anyway.*

Jake reached out, squeezed her shoulder once—hard and brief—and turned back to the console before any of them could soften.

“Norm,” Jake said. “You and Max get airborne. Low and quiet. Kill your lights. Stay below their radar sweep. I’ll give you a signal when we’re ready for pickup.”

Norm’s voice dipped. “We can be wheels up in under an hour. We’ve got med gear—portable oxygen rig, seal kits, blood expanders. Everything we can carry.”

“Good,” Jake said. “We’ll clear you a patch of sky.”

Lo’ak’s voice finally cracked the air, rougher than usual. “They started yet?”

There was a beat on the line.

Norm didn’t lie. “They moved him into the atmosphere suite,” he said. “They’re doing gas challenge protocols. Trying to map what the entity does under stress.”

Lo’ak’s hands clenched, knuckles going pale.

Kiri went very still.

Jake felt something tighten behind his ribs—cold pressure and heat at once.

Norm’s voice softened a fraction. “We’re coming too,” he said. “He’s not alone in there.”

Jake killed the line before his throat could betray him.

He stood. “We meet at the water in ten,” he said, already moving. “No more than we need. Fast and quiet.”

Lo’ak followed. Neytiri followed. They didn’t discuss it. They didn’t have to.

---

At the ilu pens, the reef wind hit them clean—salt and sun and the slap of water against woven platforms. Skimwings cut the surface farther out, long bodies slicing through the swell with impatient grace. The ocean beyond the reef rolled heavy and open, deep-water swells lifting and dropping the horizon like a slow breath.

The hunters were already assembling.

Onsu stood nearest the waterline, tall and scarred, his gaze sharp and steady. Beside him were four other Metkayina—Tsyeru and Kalek, both with the look of experienced warriors Jake had fought alongside before, plus two more hunters Jake didn’t know by name but recognized by posture: shoulders set, eyes clear, movements economical. Their spears were checked and rechecked, bone tips wicked and clean. Their ilu waited in the shallows with reins coiled neatly, sensing the urgency and holding it in their bodies like coiled spring.

Tonowari arrived with them, presence filling the space like a tide. Ronal followed—silent, jaw clenched, eyes hard as reef stone.

Tsireya stood a little apart with Tuk.

Tuk’s fingers were twisted in Tsireya’s harness, small knuckles white. She didn’t cry. She didn’t speak. Her eyes stayed locked on Jake’s face like she was trying to count the minutes there.

Jake crossed to her and dropped to one knee so his face was level with hers.

“Hey,” he said softly.

Tuk swallowed. Her lower lip trembled once, then she pressed it flat, stubborn. “Bring him home,” she whispered.

It wasn’t a command. It was a prayer she was shoving into the air with everything she had.

Jake nodded once. “We’re bringing him home,” he said.

Ronal’s hand settled briefly on Tuk’s shoulder, grounding her. Tsireya’s gaze flicked to Lo’ak—quick, bright with fear—and then away again, like looking too long would break something.

Jake stood and looked at Onsu. “You know the scar territory,” Jake said.

Onsu nodded. “I have swum the old metal coast,” he said. “The places where the sea tastes wrong. We know paths the demons do not watch.”

Jake’s jaw tightened. “Good. We stage at the ravine. East side. If the sky gets loud, we go up, not back.”

Onsu’s mouth curled in a brief, fierce grin. “Go where they cannot,” he said.

“Exactly.”

Jake turned his gaze across his team.

Neytiri had painted herself—dark streaks across her cheekbones and eyes, the pattern she wore when it was personal, not just war. Her stillness was absolute. Every movement she made was a choice.

Lo’ak stood with his hand on his skimwing’s neck, murmuring low in Na’vi. The animal’s eyes rolled once, then steadied. Lo’ak didn’t look up, but Jake could feel the storm inside him like pressure before lightning.

Jake’s gaze sought the empty space where Kiri should’ve been.

It hit him like a missing tooth.

Then, as if summoned by the thought, Kiri appeared—fast and silent, slipping through the crowd with a coil of human cable in one hand and a battered comm tag in the other. She shoved it into Jake’s palm.

“For Norm,” she said, voice tight. “If the signal dies, I’ll find another way.”

Jake closed his fingers around her wrist before she could pull away. His grip was firm, not painful. A stop. A tether.

“We'll get him,” he said.

Kiri’s throat bobbed. “I know you will,” she whispered.

He released her. She was already turning, already gone—moving with that sharp, purposeful speed that wasn’t running so much as refusing to stop.

Lo’ak watched her go, something raw in his eyes. Then he looked away, jaw clenched harder.

Jake lifted his chin, took in one last sight of Awa’atlu—the marui clustered like living shells over the water, the reef glittering, the people watching with quiet, contained fury.

He clicked his tongue to his skimwing.

“Mount up,” he said.

One by one, they moved into the shallows. Water climbed Jake’s thighs, then his hips. The skimwing surged under him, eager for speed. He slid onto the saddle, hands settling into familiar grips, body adjusting automatically to the animal’s rhythm.

Neytiri mounted Sa'ata without a sound. Lo’ak followed on his ilu. Onsu and the four Metkayina hunters took position around them, formation tightening, purposeful.

They didn’t wave. They didn’t call out. Calling to hunters as they left felt like bad luck.

The moment Jake leaned forward, the skimwing launched.

Water exploded behind them. They cut away from Awa’atlu in a tight wedge, skimming along the reef edge before angling outward into deeper swells. The ocean lifted them and dropped them again, heavy and rolling—open water that made the reef feel suddenly small.

Salt spray hit Jake’s face like needles. The wind tore at his queue, at the loose ends of his top, at the thin edges of thought he couldn’t afford.

Somewhere beyond the horizon, Spider was strapped down in a white room being experimented on.

Jake kept his eyes on the dark line of distant coastline where the old human scars still cut into Pandora’s living shape.

Hold on, he thought, and the words didn’t feel like prayer so much as order. Hold on.

---

High Camp’s Samson lifted under the canopy on a low, careful roar.

At the controls was Mansk - an experienced pilot who stayed calm under pressure - hands steady on the yoke, eyes cutting between treetops and terrain like he’d flown this moon’s bad intentions before. Behind him, the cabin was dim—med cases cinched where troop benches used to be. Oxygen rig. Medication. Fluids. Enough to matter and not enough to feel like safety.

Max checked tubing by touch, jaw set. Norm worked a tablet, old schematics and dirty intercepts layered into one ugly map.

“Keep us low,” Norm said.

Mansk didn’t look back. “Already am.” Mansk banked lower. The canopy rushed up. The world narrowed to speed and shadow.

---

Across the water, a skimwing’s back rose and fell beneath Kiri as she cut through reef channels toward the ravine, braid snapped tight against her spine. Salt stung her eyes. She didn’t blink it away.

---

The reef fell behind Jake’s team and the swells turned mean, lifting the skimwings and dropping them again in slow, gut-deep lurches. Light flattened toward evening—gold thinning into something harder.

Above the coastline, Sa’ata banked wide and silent on cliff updrafts, wings carving air cleanly. Neytiri rode her like a drawn blade—still, balanced, gaze locked inland.

No chatter. No wasted signals.

Just movement and intent, and the knowledge that somewhere behind metal and glass, Spider was running out of time.

Chapter 7: Extraction

They staged the atmospheric suite the way you stage a mistake you can’t afford to name.

Pressure stable. Mix queued. Console awake but untouched, nothing yet turned against him. The room was too bright, too clean in the way RDA clean always was: surfaces wiped, corners sharp, a thin chemical smell that never quite covered what lived underneath.

Spider lay strapped to the transport bed at center, wrists and ankles, a broad belt across his hips. Bare-faced with air that tasted like nothing and a throat that didn’t trust it.

Under his sternum, the thing granted by Eywa that let him breath Pandoran air initiated irritated pulls, like a fist testing a grip. It wasn’t panic. It was awareness.

Kessler stood at the main console, tablet in hand, her other hand moving through checklists with clipped precision. Ramirez hovered at a counter laying out sealed packs and sterile lines. Two techs checked valves, ports, seals. Everyone moved like they’d rehearsed this with mannequins.

No one looked at Spider longer than necessary.

The intercom clicked.

“Doctor Kessler.”

Ardmore’s voice came through clean. flat, controlled, as if she were reading an inventory list instead of speaking over a 17 year old's body.

Kessler didn’t turn. “Suite staged,” she said. “No challenges initiated. Host stable.”

A beat.

“Good,” Ardmore said. “Then adjust. Corporate has advanced the deliverable.”

Kessler’s fingers paused above the tablet for the length of a breath.

“How advanced?” she asked.

“One hour,” Ardmore said. “Thirty minutes to prep. Then you begin.”

Ramirez went still with a sterile pack half-opened. One of the techs stopped mid-check, hand on a pressure gauge. The room held itself, listening to the sentence settle.

Kessler’s jaw flexed once. “General, we are not at a point where invasive sampling is—”

“You’re at a point where you either produce something,” Ardmore cut in, “or you get replaced by someone who will.”

Kessler’s voice sharpened. “If we breach near the interface, it will clamp down. We risk a total loss.”

“Then you learn faster,” Ardmore said. “The board isn’t paying for caution. They’re paying for results.”

Spider stared at the ceiling panel seams and tried to keep his breathing even—slow in, slow out—like he could control the shape of the next hour by refusing to give them fear on a platter.

Under his ribs, the symbiote tightened again, as if it heard "breach" and disliked the taste of it.

Kessler didn’t yield immediately. She leaned into the fight like it was the only leverage she had left.

“We can give you data,” she said. “Mapping. Blood gases. Gas-exchange curves. But if you force a cut attempting to extract Entity-01, you’ll get a dead host and a defensive collapse. You’ll get nothing usable.”

“You’ll give me something usable,” Ardmore replied, calm as a knife.

Kessler’s voice dropped—controlled, but edged. “You want product, General? Then you want the host alive long enough for the interface to behave.”

Silence on the line for a beat.

Then Ardmore: “Thirty minutes, Doctor.”

The channel cut.

The room exhaled. Not relief. Just motion restarting.

Kessler turned to her team. “Transfer,” she said. “OR suite.”

Ramirez blinked. “We haven’t—”

“We don't get to run the tests,” Kessler snapped. “Not now.” Her eyes flicked once toward the bay door, toward the corridor beyond as if she could feel the facility shifting. “Move.”

They unlocked the bed. The wheels whispered.

Spider’s shoulders pressed into the thin padding as the room slid past above him—lights, vents, a camera eye in the corner that watched without blinking.

They reached the airlock threshold.

And the intercom clicked again.

Sharper this time. No wasted syllables.

“Kessler.”

Kessler stopped them right there, before the inner door could cycle.

“General,” she said.

Ardmore didn’t bother with corporate vocabulary now. Her voice carried a new pressure, a quiet urgency that wasn’t fear—it was calculation.

“Sully is inside my facility.”

The air in Spider’s lungs seemed to thin on the words.

Ramirez’s face drained, as if someone had pulled a plug.

One tech’s hand went to the edge of the counter, steadying himself.

Kessler didn’t flinch. But Spider saw the shift in her eyes—attention narrowing, options collapsing.

“Confirmed?” Kessler asked.

Ardmore’s reply was immediate. “Confirmed enough.”

Then, as if she’d been waiting to say it:

“Host viability is no longer the priority.”

Kessler’s voice went hard. “If you kill him, the interface—”

“I don’t care,” Ardmore said, and the bluntness of it was its own kind of violence. “I want tissue. Anything Entity-01 built. Anything it leaves behind. If Sully takes the host from us, I want something on my desk when he does.”

Spider’s throat tightened. His fingers twitched against the restraints.

Under his sternum, the thing in him drew tight like a threatened animal.

Kessler stepped closer to the bed, but she didn’t look down at Spider—she looked at the airlock door, the corridor, the unseen paths Sully would have to carve through to get here.

“General,” she said, controlled, “you push invasive sampling right now, it will trigger a defensive response. You will get—”

“A dead host?” Ardmore cut in. “Fine. A dead host that leaves me a specimen is still better than an empty lab.”

Ramirez sucked in a breath and didn’t let it out.

Kessler’s mouth went thin. “You’re ordering me to do a rushed cut in a corridor bay.”

“I’m ordering you to move him to the surgical suite and begin,” Ardmore said. “Now. Security is already moving to your wing. If you delay, you will be reprimanded and I promise, it will not be pretty.”

Kessler held the silence for half a second longer than she should have dared.

Then she spoke like someone sliding a blade into a seam—stalling without looking like she was stalling.

“Understood,” she said. “We are moving him.”

“And Doctor,” Ardmore added, voice almost bored again, “don’t mistake my patience for yours.”

The channel cut.

For a heartbeat no one moved.

Then Kessler turned—sharp, economical. “Cycle the lock.”

The airlock hissed. The inner door unlatched.

And they rolled Spider out of the atmospheric suite into the facility’s throat.

---

The hallway was just hallway. Only the sound of wheels, the quick cadence of boots on polished floor, the deeper, softer pad of Kessler’s steps keeping pace at the head of the gurney.

Two armed security met them at the first checkpoint without a word and fell into formation—one in front, one behind, rifles carried ready but angled away from the bed like that mattered.

Kessler didn’t look at them. She didn’t need to. She looked forward, eyes pinned on the next door, the next badge scan, the next lock.

Spider watched ceiling lights drift overhead like a slow strobe. He tried to count them to keep his mind anchored.

One. Two. Three...

A distant thud trembled through the structure, faint enough that the guards pretended not to notice it.

Spider noticed it anyway.

The thing in his chest tightened again, like it recognized vibration and didn’t like what it implied.

They passed through the second checkpoint. A decontamination corridor with sealed vents. An inner door that opened into bright surgical light.

The OR suite sat nested behind reinforced frames, steel, glass, and clean surfaces that felt like a lie. A place built to keep contaminants out and secrets in.

The bed rolled in.

Spider’s eyes caught on the operating table and his stomach dropped.

They transferred him with brisk hands—lift, slide, strap. Wider restraints now, placed with purpose. Arms out. Palms up. Presenting him.

A monitor snapped to life with a series of crisp beeps.

Numbers climbed into place.

**HR 128**
**SpO₂ 95%**
**RR 20**

Kessler leaned in at his head for a quick assessment—eyes, jaw, the tension at his throat.

“You’re going to feel heavy,” she said, low enough that it was just for him. Information. “Fentanyl.”

Spider swallowed. His mouth was dry.

Ramirez was already drawing up the dose, hands too steady for how pale his face looked.

Kessler didn’t waste words. “Small dose,” she said.

Ramirez nodded once. “Copy.”

The IV line flushed.

And then the drug slid in.

At first Spider didn’t feel anything.

Then his limbs started to sink.

Not asleep. Not gone. Just…heavy, as if gravity had doubled and nobody told him. His eyelids wanted to close. His chest felt warmer, slower. The room’s edges softened.

His breathing changed before his brain fully noticed it.

The next inhale was smaller.

The one after that smaller still.

The monitor beep stayed steady, indifferent.

**RR 16**
**SpO₂ 94%**

Spider tried to pull a deeper breath and found his body didn’t want to spend the effort.

A thought arrived, slow and sticky: That’s bad.

He couldn’t make his hands clench properly. He couldn’t make his tongue shape words fast enough to matter.

Under his sternum, the symbiote pulsed once—tight, irritated, like it didn’t like this slow-down. Like it didn’t like anything that made breathing feel optional.

Kessler watched the monitor for half a second, then leaned in to Ramirez. “Hold there,” she said. “Don’t stack.”

Ramirez nodded, eyes on the numbers.

**HR 118**
**RR 14**
**SpO₂ 93%**

Spider’s eyes drifted. The surgical light above him looked too bright and too far away.

He tried to think of the reef—the taste of salt, the sound of water, the weightlessness of floating.

His mind kept sliding sideways.

A door clanged somewhere outside. Far enough that it might have been nothing. Close enough that everyone in the room stiffened.

Kessler’s voice cut clean through the tension. “Prep suction. Get the laryngoscope ready. We are not paralyzing until we’re at the point of no return.”

Ramirez glanced at her. “We’re really doing this?”

Kessler didn’t blink but added quietly. “We’re doing what keeps him alive long enough to stop being alone in this building.”

She didn’t say "Sully is coming". She didn’t say "please".

But Spider heard it anyway, in the way she kept her hands busy, in the way she didn’t let Ramirez reach for the next syringe.

His breathing went smaller again.

The beeps tightened slightly as the monitor updated.

**RR 12**
**SpO₂ 92%**

A tech murmured, “He’s dipping.”

Kessler’s hand moved—fast, practiced—reaching for an oxygen mask.

Then she stopped herself.

Because a mask meant equipment. Equipment meant time. And the room felt like it had stopped having time.

She did the simpler thing: “Jaw thrust,” she ordered.

A tech stepped in, hands at Spider’s jaw, lifting gently. Spider’s airway opened a fraction, enough that his next breath didn’t scrape.

The thing in his chest loosened, just slightly.

Kessler leaned in close enough that Spider could see the fine tension around her mouth. “Stay with me,” she said—quiet, with no emotion. A command to his biology.

Spider tried.

He really tried.

His eyes slid.

His thoughts came slow.

He caught fragments: a hand on his forehead—no, that was earlier, that was memory—Kiri’s face by water—Jake’s voice like thunder—

A distant alarm rose, not yet screaming, just waking up.

Then the sound that changed the room:

A blunt, concussive impact closer than before.

The OR’s door handle jerked once.

The security outside shouted something Spider couldn’t parse through the syrup in his skull.

Kessler’s head snapped up. Her eyes met Ramirez’s.

“Do not push the paralytic,” she said.

Ramirez’s hand froze above the tray.

The door slammed inward under a second impact, hard enough that the reinforced latch screamed.

A third hit—metal complaining, bolts shearing—

And then the door blew open.

Not fire. Force.

The first guard in the doorway didn’t get to raise his rifle.

An arrow took him in the throat and pinned him to the frame like a sign.

Neytiri came in behind the shot like the arrow had opened the air for her.

Not frantic. Not wild. Precision rage held in a shape sharp enough to cut.

Onsu was at the edge of the breach, spear already wet, his eyes cold and unblinking. Two Metkayina hunters flowed with him, low and fast, clearing angles like they’d been born into corridors. Tsyeru and Kalek were creating distractions on the other end of the compound.

Jake hit the room like gravity.

Bare feet on clean tile, silent and lethal. No hesitation, just a straight line to the table.

Lo’ak didn’t crowd. He did what a kid raised in a war does when the door becomes a threat—he spun to the doorway, shoved a cart hard into the opening, and turned the entry into a choke point. He planted himself there, blade out, eyes furious and bright.

He wasn’t there to talk.

He was there to make sure no one got past him.

Jake reached Spider in three strides.

Spider tried to speak.

He couldn’t.

His body was too heavy to carry words.

Jake’s hand landed on his forehead—firm, grounding, real.

“Hey,” Jake said, low. “I’ve got you.”

Spider’s eyes found Jake’s face for a second—just a second—and something inside him unclenched in a way his lungs understood better than his mind.

Kessler lifted her hands—empty, visible. “He’s dosed,” she said quickly. “Fentanyl. Opioid. Small, but he’s drifting. Breathing’s slowed.”

Jake’s gaze flicked to the monitor in a single, sharp cut.

**HR 110**
**RR 10**
**SpO₂ 91%**

Jake’s jaw tightened. “Can you reverse it?”

Ramirez swallowed, voice thin. “Naloxone. Yes. But—”

“But if we give him too much, his heart may give out,” Kessler finished, and her eyes flicked to the chaos at the door. “He's exhausted and reaching his limit.”

Jake didn’t argue with maybes.

“Give him enough to get him out of here,” he said. “No more.”

Kessler’s eyes held his for half a heartbeat, surprised at the precision.

Then she nodded once—fast. “Push.”

Ramirez moved like his life depended on it, which it probably did.

A tiny dose pushed into the IV.

Spider’s chest twitched.

His next inhale came a fraction deeper—still small, but his.

**RR 12**
**SpO₂ 92%**

Jake was already cutting straps—blade flashing once, clean and efficient. The restraint across Spider’s hips snapped free. His wrists loosened. His arm slid heavy off the table.

Jake hauled him up against his chest, one arm locked under Spider’s shoulders, the other under his knees—carry position that kept Spider’s airway open, kept his head from lolling back.

“Move,” Jake said.

It wasn’t a request.

Onsu and one hunter flowed out first, clearing the corridor. The second hunter stayed close to Jake’s shoulder—shielding without touching. Neytiri pivoted to the OR door, arrow already nocked, body angled so she could see the hall and still see Jake in peripheral.

Lo’ak held the choke point.

A rifle barrel shoved through the gap beside the cart.

Lo’ak’s knife flashed. The barrel dropped. A man shouted. Lo’ak didn’t wait—he kicked the cart forward hard, crushing fingers against the frame, and the scream that followed was cut off by another arrow from Neytiri that didn’t miss.

Brutal. Clean.

Jake didn’t look back.

He carried Spider out.

They didn’t run down the main artery.

They cut into service corridors—narrow, unglamorous, built for staff movement and equipment transport. The kind of place a big force hated because it turned numbers into useless noise.

Onsu signaled turns with a flick of two fingers. This was a tactical and precise exit.

Spider’s head lolled against Jake’s shoulder.

The world came in frames: ceiling lights…Jake’s braid…a smear of blood on tile…Neytiri’s silhouette behind them like a blade guarding the retreat…Lo’ak’s breath, ragged and furious, just behind.

Spider tried to stay awake.

His body wanted to sink.

He felt the drug still sitting on him—warm heaviness at the base of everything, like sleep with teeth.

Another breath came shallow.

Jake adjusted his grip without slowing, angling Spider slightly more upright.

“Breathe,” Jake said, low in his ear. “Come on, kid.”

Spider tried.

The thing in his chest pulsed, tight, annoyed, as if it could feel that the drug had its thumb on the scale.

His next inhale was still small, but it was there.

Behind them, the facility finally found its voice.

Alarms rose. Doors cycled. Boots thundered.

Neytiri answered with silence and arrows.

Lo’ak answered with teeth.

Onsu answered with spearwork that didn’t waste motion.

Jake answered by not stopping.

By holding Spider like the only law that mattered was home.

And Spider—heavy, half-drifting, lungs working on a thread—clung to the one clear thing left in his smeared mind:

They came.

The corridor turned.

Light shifted.

Air changed.

And somewhere ahead, the facility’s walls began to tremble with the larger response closing in.

Jake didn’t slow.

He carried Spider into the next stretch of shadow like the world owed him this one thing back.

Notes:

I hope you're liking the story so far :)
There is something so fulfilling about the last few lines ❤️
Comments and Kudos are appreciated!

Chapter 8: Lifeline

The corridor spat them out into machinery.

Not the clean, bright arteries of the medical wing—the back end. Service passage. Cooler air, rougher walls, pipes sweating faint condensation. Every sound echoed wrong: boots and bare feet, metal ringing, the thin wail of alarms bleeding through layers of concrete like an animal trapped under floors.

Jake moved like he could see the building’s bones.

Onsu and two Metkayina hunters flowed ahead, low and fast, taking angles without words. Lo’ak stayed tight to Jake’s flank, blade still in hand, eyes scanning corners like he’d decided there was no such thing as “clear” anymore. Neytiri hung back just enough to turn pursuit into consequence; every time the corridor behind them coughed up a shout or a shadow, her bow answered. Tsyeru and Kalek were creating distractions on the other end of the compound.

Spider rode in Jake’s arms, limp in a way that was not sleep.

His head lolled against Jake’s shoulder. His mouth hung slightly open. Every so often his chest tried for a breath and came back with a shallow, reluctant pull—as if his body was negotiating with the air instead of taking it.

The world arrived in pieces.

A harsh light strip overhead.

A drip of water somewhere.

The smell of antiseptic giving way to damp metal.

Jake’s heartbeat, steady and violent against Spider’s cheek.

And underneath all of it, the quiet, stubborn presence in his ribs—warmth that flared when the building shifted, then pulled in tight again. Clinging, braced, like something small and furious trying to keep its hold when the ground kept moving.

A junction opened ahead.

Onsu lifted one hand for them to stop. The Metkayina hunters split without hesitation, one taking the left alcove, the other dropping into the shadow of a maintenance bay. Lo’ak’s tail snapped once, tension telegraphing down his spine.

Jake didn’t stop. He adjusted Spider higher, forearm locked under Spider’s thighs, other arm across his back and ribs like a harness. The way he carried him wasn’t gentle. It was absolute.

A drone’s rotors whined somewhere overhead, searching for which they could not find.

Jake angled them under a pipe run and into a gap between stacked storage crates, then across open floor before the machine could find line of sight. Neytiri crossed last, silent as a blade sliding back into its sheath.

A door ahead pulsed amber.

Locked.

Lo’ak surged past Jake without thinking. He drove his knife into the access seam and leveraged hard. The panel shrieked. The lock resisted, then gave with a snap that vibrated through the wall.

Onsu was already through, spear up.

Beyond: another narrow corridor, darker. Air colder. A faint, stale taste that suggested this route didn’t get used unless it had to.

Behind them, the building roared again—gunfire, distant, chaotic. It sounded less like a coordinated response and more like people crashing into each other in panic.

Good, Jake thought, and kept moving.

---

They reached the waste uplink chute the way you reach a lifeboat: with your teeth clenched and your hands already bleeding.

A vertical shaft dropped away behind a grated hatch. Damp air rose up from it, carrying the sour tang of old runoff and metal. A ladder ran down into darkness; below, faint green emergency strips marked the descent.

Onsu went first, disappearing into the shaft with the ease of someone who’d climbed cliffs his whole life. The hunters followed. Jake stepped up to the hatch, peered down once, then shifted Spider’s weight.

Lo’ak’s hands came up immediately. Not asking. Just there.

“I’ve got him,” Lo’ak breathed.

Jake’s eyes flicked to him. A decision made in a blink.

“Support his head,” Jake said. “Don’t let him fold.”

Lo’ak nodded, jaw tight. He took Spider’s upper body carefully—one forearm behind Spider’s shoulders, the other steadying his head so it wouldn’t snap back. Spider’s throat made a wet little click as he was moved. His eyelids fluttered once. Nothing focused.

Neytiri watched, still, eyes flat and bright.

Jake dropped into the shaft with one hand on the ladder, the other gripping Spider’s belt and hip to keep him from swinging. Metal rungs bit into Jake’s palms. They descended fast—controlled speed, no wasted motion.

Halfway down, Spider’s breath hitched.

Lo’ak felt it immediately. His whole body went rigid for a second.

“Dad—” he started, voice cracking on the word.

Jake didn’t look up. “Keep him upright,” he ordered. “Talk to him.”

Lo’ak leaned in close to Spider’s ear, words coming out rougher than usual, urgent. “Spider. Hey. Stay with us, bro. You hear me? Don’t—don’t you do that.”

The only response was Spider’s mouth twitching and that would have to be enough for now.

Down below, the tunnel widened into a concrete channel that sloped away toward the ravine side of the facility. Old drainage route. Forgotten by anyone who trusted walls more than terrain.

They hit the floor and moved immediately.

Onsu took point. Hunters behind him. Jake and Lo’ak in the center with Spider. Neytiri pulling up the rear.

The tunnel ran low and narrow at first, then widened enough for them to break into a sprint.

At the first access grate, Onsu stopped, listened.

Above: wind.

Far-off rotor noise—higher outside.

He pried the grate open.

Cold air spilled down into the tunnel, salted and alive. It hit Spider like a cue his body didn’t know how to follow anymore.

His chest tried for a deeper rise and couldn’t finish it.

Under his sternum, the living interface inside him flared—sharp irritation, then a hungry pull—as if it recognized the outside and wanted it and still couldn’t quite reach for it without cost.

Lo’ak hauled Spider up and climbed first, Spider’s weight awkward and slippery in the damp. Jake followed, palms scraping rock and metal. The hunters flowed out behind them.

They emerged onto the ravine side—steep cliff, wet stone, a shelf of rock half-hidden by hanging vines and thin mist. Above, the facility’s outer wall rose like a blunt knife. No easy door. No obvious path. Just the drop, the wind, and the fact that someone had always assumed nobody would come this way.

Jake took Spider fully back in his arms, as gentle as he could cradling the kid against his chest. Neytiri tilted her head, listening. Her breath stayed quiet but her gaze flickered to Spider.

A drone swept past the ravine lip above and didn’t angle down. It kept searching the obvious routes.

Jake’s gaze snapped outward to the ridge line beyond the ravine.

A low green blink answered him from shadow.

Samson. Waiting.

---

The helicopter sat tucked into a scar of terrain where rock broke the wind and tree cover hid the silhouette. It wasn’t parked; it hovered low, rotors feathered, sound minimized by distance. A small miracle of restraint for an RDA machine.

Mansk held it there like it weighed nothing.

Inside the open side door, a dim red light glowed. A figure leaned out, scanning the ravine with a hand braced on the frame.

Kiri.

She saw them and went still for half a second—like her brain refused to accept the shape of Spider’s body in Jake’s arms—then motion snapped back into her limbs.

“Here!” she called, voice sharp enough to cut wind.

Norm’s more controlled voice came right behind her. “Jake, bring him in on your left! Max is ready.”

Max’s head appeared behind them, human mask already sealed, exopack hose tucked tight so it wouldn’t snag. His eyes were narrowed in that familiar medical focus that meant he’d shoved everything else into a locked drawer until the patient was stable.

Onsu whistled once—low.

Two shapes moved out of the ravine’s far shadow like they’d been cut from it.

Tsyeru and Kalek.

They came in fast and quiet, wet hair braided tight, spears in hand, chests rising hard from the sprint. The Metkayina hunters peeled away as planned. Onsu met Jake’s eyes once.

“You have him,” Onsu said.

Jake nodded. “Go.”

The hunters slid down toward the water path that would lead back to the reef, ilu waiting out of sight. They vanished into mist like they’d never been there.

Jake turned and sprinted the last stretch over wet rock toward the Samson’s shadowed pocket, Lo’ak and Neytiri flanking. Neytiri’s ikran, Sa’ata, was tethered to an outcrop nearby, wings folded tight, eyes bright and furious. Sa’ata watched Spider with that unsettling animal intelligence that always felt like judgment.

Kiri scrambled down from the Samson’s doorway, feet splashing through shallow runoff. She met Jake halfway.

Her hands reached for Spider and stopped—hovering.

Because he looked wrong. Too pale. Too slack. Too quiet. Spider was never quiet.

His blue marks—those streaks and stripes he wore like armor—were faded and washed out, smeared thin by sweat and grime and whatever rough handling happened inside those halls. For a second, Kiri stared at his face like she’d lost her bearings.

Like if he didn’t look like himself, the world had permission to keep him.

Her throat bobbed. She swallowed hard and forced her hands to move.

Jake didn’t slow. His voice stayed tight, tactical. “They dosed him—fentanyl,” he said. “Respirations were dropping when we cut him loose.”

Norm heard as he landed behind Kiri—big blue avatar body making the rock shelf look too small. He took one look at Spider’s face and the slack pull of his breathing, and something in his eyes tightened fast and silent.

“Okay,” Norm said, and the word was steady because he made it steady. “Max—ready. Kiri, help me get him up moving him too much.”

Kiri slid an arm under Spider’s shoulders. He was dead weight with occasional twitches of reflex. The contact hit her like a shock. She didn’t let her voice shake.

“Spider,” she said low, close to his ear. “I’m here. You hear me? I’m here.”

Spider’s eyelids fluttered. A faint crease formed between his brows like he was trying to find her voice through water.

Norm took Spider’s torso and braced him against his own chest. Max guided legs and hips into the cabin. Kiri supported Spider’s head and shoulders, keeping his jaw from slumping too far.

Lo’ak hovered at the door, knife still in hand, eyes scanning the ridge line like he wanted to fight the whole moon if it would buy Spider one more minute.

Jake snapped at him. “You and your mom—now.”

Lo’ak’s jaw clenched. He looked at Spider once—raw, guilty, furious—then pivoted.

Neytiri didn’t look back. She would face what comes next when they were safe. She vaulted onto Sa’ata with fluid certainty. Lo’ak swung up behind her and gripped the harness.

Sa’ata launched off the rock face in one powerful shove—two wingbeats and they were a dark shape cutting toward High Camp, faster than any rotorcraft could match.

Jake climbed into the Samson after Spider without wasting a breath.

Mansk didn’t ask questions. He didn’t need to.

The moment Jake slammed the door and gave the signal, Mansk pulled them up and out, banking hard enough that loose straps snapped and gear clattered.

The cabin smelled like dirt, antiseptic, and fear.

Spider was laid semi-reclined on the bench, body angled so his tongue wouldn’t fall back if his reflexes slipped. Max clipped a pulse ox to Spider’s finger and strapped the compact monitor to the bench rail.

Digits flickered with the aircraft’s vibration.

HR 126
SpO₂ 93
RR 10

Norm knelt at Spider’s head like a guard and a family member all at once. His voice stayed clipped—professional first. “Jaw position. Chin up.”

Kiri hovered close, braced against a bulkhead strap, one hand on Spider’s shoulder like she could keep him here by contact alone.

Max’s eyes flicked to the monitor, then to Spider’s mouth and the shallow rise of his chest. “Opioid effect,” he said, already reaching. “I’ve got naloxone.”

Max drew up a small dose—hands steady, movements quick. Norm held Spider’s head in neutral, keeping the airway open, watching for the tiny signs that meant the next minute could tip.

Kiri’s mouth moved without sound.

Prayer.

Not loud. Not performative. The kind you say when there isn’t anything else left to bargain with.

Eywa… please.

Spider’s lashes trembled. His eyes cracked open a sliver—awareness leaking through.

His gaze slid across Norm’s face like it was trying to match an old map to a moving target.

Norm leaned in a fraction, voice lower. “Hey. Stay with us. You’re here.”

Kiri’s thumb pressed lightly at Spider’s shoulder—anchor point. “Spider,” she said again, a whisper. “It’s me.” His gaze drifted to Kiri and held, blinking slowly.

Max pushed the naloxone then pulled a compact mask from the med kit.

Not a full human O₂ rig—something smaller, mobile. He connected it to a canister of mixed gas. The kind they used at High Camp for short support in sealed human spaces for the Na'vi: not pure oxygen, not full Pandora—an in-between that didn’t shock the body.

Max sealed the mask to Spider’s face.

There…a shift in the numbers and the effort.

Spider’s chest rose a little more fully on the next breath. His brow furrowed. A faint grimace tugged at his mouth as sensation sharpened around the edges.

Digits climbed and steadied.

SpO₂ 95
RR 12

Max exhaled once—controlled. “Better.”

Norm’s hand, careful and deliberate, rested at Spider’s hairline to keep him oriented, to keep him from falling away inside himself.

Spider’s fingers twitched weakly, trying to find something to grab. They brushed Norm’s forearm, then slid off like his body didn’t have the strength to hold its own intention.

Norm didn’t flinch. He pretended it didn’t hit him. His hand stayed where it was.

Kiri’s prayer kept going, lips barely moving. Her eyes were fixed on Spider’s face like if she watched hard enough, she could keep the light in him from dimming.

Jake loomed close enough that his shadow cut across Spider’s cheek. Rage sat in his jaw like a stone he couldn’t spit out.

Spider’s eyelids drooped again.

Too heavy.

Too soon.

His mouth opened like he meant to speak and nothing came out but a small, wet sound behind the mask that didn’t quite become a cough.

Digits wavered with the movement, then held.

HR 132
SpO₂ 94
RR 11

“Okay,” Norm said, voice steady. “Stay in it. Just—stay in it.”

Spider tried.

He really tried.

But the drug sat on him like waterlogged cloth. His body wanted to fold. His brain kept slipping sideways, losing edges.

The world broke into fragments:

Rotor thrum.

Metal vibration under his spine.

Kiri’s voice—close, close.

Jake’s grip earlier—hard, sure.

Norm’s hand at his head like a line he could hold.

And under his sternum, that living interface felt…worked over. Not pain exactly. More like a thing that had been forced to clamp, forced to yield, forced to recalibrate too many times in too short a span. It kept pushing, trying to make breathing happen like a reflex again, and Spider’s own body kept lagging behind it.

Like they were out of sync.

Stop… a thought surfaced, smeared and slow. Not a request to anyone else. A request to his own muscles. I’m trying.

Another breath came—small, but there.

Then another.

And then—despite the better numbers, despite the hands on him, despite the voices—his eyelids sank with decision his body made without asking his mind.

I can’t hold it.

The last clear thing he felt was Kiri’s hand tightening on his shoulder and the steady pressure of Norm’s palm at his hairline, holding him in the world by the smallest, most stubborn points.

Then Spider passed out. A quiet surrender of awareness while the body kept doing the bare minimum.

Kiri made a sound in her throat and swallowed it down so hard it looked like it hurt. Her prayer turned sharper, desperate but still quiet.

Great Mother please...please.

Norm didn’t panic. He checked what mattered with his eyes and hands, quick and practiced.

Digits continued to scroll.

HR 128
SpO₂ 93
RR 11

“Keep him positioned,” Norm said. “Max. increase the flow on the mask.”

Max nodded, turning the knob on the tank. He glanced once toward Jake. “He’s not crashing yet,” he said, factual. “But he’s running on fumes.”

Jake’s gaze didn’t move off Spider’s face. “Then we get home faster.”

Spider's family continued to keep him tethered as they barreled towards their safe zone. Each minute that passed was spent watching numbers or the chest of the boy in their charge.

Mansk’s voice crackled over the intercom, calm as a metronome. “Ridge line in two. Going low after. Hang on.”

Jake keyed his mic once. “Copy.”

The Samson dropped lower. Outside the small windows the world became streaks of dark rock and dusk—early evening flattening the light into something harder, cooler. High Camp’s perimeter resolved ahead—structures tucked into cliff and foliage, hardened after too many wars, but alive with people who belonged there.

Kiri leaned closer to Spider, forehead nearly touching his. She didn’t care that he couldn’t hear. She spoke anyway because it mattered.

“You’re with us,” she whispered. “You’re safe. You’re not alone.”

The Samson swung into the landing pocket with practiced precision, rotors clipping the air close enough that the sound felt like it shook bone.

When they touched down, it wasn’t gentle.

It was fast.

The side door slid open and Pandora’s damp night air rushed in—thick with stone and wet leaves and the kind of air that didn’t taste like plastic.

Norm and Max moved in sync, lifting Spider together. Kiri climbed out with them, hand still on Spider’s shoulder like she couldn’t let go without something breaking.

Spider’s head lolled against Norm’s shoulder.

His eyes didn’t open this time.

But his chest still rose, small and stubborn. And the thing under his sternum held to its work like it had decided it didn’t get to quit either.

They moved toward the med bay, an enclosed, reinforced space built into High Camp’s structure where lives were saved.

Jake walked beside them, silent, protective.

Kiri’s prayer didn’t stop.

And Spider, held between all of them, made it across the pad on numbers that were still his. Home enough to fight for the next minute.

And the minute after that.

Chapter 9: The Slide

Summary:

They have him. They need to get him to stay in this world.

The med bay seal flexed as it closed—clear membrane snapping tight in its frame—turning the room into a lit box inside the rock.

Jake stopped on the outside of it.

He’d carried wars on his back and still found new ways to be useless.

Inside, Spider was transferred fast. Bed locked. Mask kept on. Max’s hands moved like the only language he trusted: leads, pulse ox, lines. A tech hovered at his shoulder with the bag-valve mask already unhooked, already ready.

Kiri was there at the bedside, close but not in the way. She had her hand placed near his ribs, not touching but enough to remind his body he was not alone.

Across the room, Norm in his avatar body took one sharp look at Spider’s color and chest movement, then turned and was gone down the corridor without a word.

Jake stayed where the seal put him. Lo’ak was a shadow near Jake’s shoulder, silent and rigid. Neytiri stood to Jake’s other side as a strong, unwavering presence.

Max didn’t glance up. “Naloxone.”

A tech passed it into his hand and he pushed it through th eline

For a heartbeat, nothing changed, then Spider’s body jerked like it had been yanked up from deep water. His eyes snapped open, bright and lost. A sound tore out of him—raw, half-swallowed, not a word so much as an alarm his throat didn’t know how to translate.

His hands twitched toward the mask.

Kiri caught his wrist, enough to stop him stripping his help away.

“Spider,” she said, low, steady. “It’s me.”

His gaze hit her and held like a cloth in a hook.

Jake watched the shift happen in Spider’s face—confusion flattening for a second into something almost relieved. The muscles at Spider’s mouth softened. His eyes flicked past her, toward the seal, searching the room for the shape of a person he couldn’t name cleanly in his head. Their eyes locked for a short moment.

“Jake,” he tried.

It came out ragged. More breath than syllable.

Even through the plastic, Jake could see Spider searching for him and he stepped closer to the seal without realizing he’d moved. His hand lifted, stopped against the barrier, palm hovering a centimeter from the plastic like that mattered. Their eyes locked for a short moment.

“I’m here,” Jake said, voice rough. “You’re at High Camp. You’re safe.” 

Spider couldn't hear him but it didn't matter. 

The naloxone had hauled him awake, but it didn’t give him strength. It gave him sensation—too much, too fast—on a body that had already been dragged raw. His chest started working like it couldn’t decide whether to fight or run. The mask fogged in quick, thin bursts that didn’t reach deep enough.

Max’s eyes narrowed. He leaned in, watching Spider’s mouth, the shallow rise under the blanket.

“Not moving air effectively,” Max said, and it was the first note of a different kind of urgency.

Spider blinked slow, and heavy—then blinked again, slower.

Kiri leaned in closer that Spider could find her without chasing.

“Stay with me,” she said. “Just stay. Max is helping. Max will help you.”

Spider’s eyes drifted toward her again like he was trying to follow a rope through fog. He held for a fraction of a second and then the fraction broke.

His breathing stuttered. The mask fogged and cleared and fogged again. His mouth parted behind it like his body was reaching for more air and couldn’t afford the effort.

Max’s fingers went to Spider’s neck.

Pressed.

Shifted.

Pressed again, harder.

“Bag.” Max said.

The room snapped into motion.

The tech sealed the bag-valve mask to Spider’s face, hands firm. The first squeeze lifted Spider’s chest with borrowed air.

Up.

Down.

Spider’s eyes rolled, not dramatic—just unfocused, sliding away from the room like a camera losing its track. His lashes fluttered. His pupils drifted, then drifted again, never quite catching.

Inside Jake’s head, something cold and old stood up.

Memory.

The sound of a monitor changing its mind.

The way a body can decide to quit without asking anyone’s permission.

“Come on,” Max muttered under his breath, not to anyone in the room.

Kiri’s thumb pressed at Spider’s wrist, searching for that small insistence of life.

For a moment it was there faint, stubborn.

Then it thinned, like it was walking away.

Kiri took a deep breath and leaned close enough that her voice could be the last clear thing Spider had.

“Spider,” she said, and the word broke slightly on the edge. “Look at me.”

Spider’s eyes shifted. Tried to comply. Failed. His gaze floated past her, past Max’s face, past the ceiling light.

Like the room was too bright to hold.

The monitor tone stretched.

Max’s jaw went hard. “He’s fading.”

Another squeeze. Another lift of the chest that should have been reassuring—because the lungs were moving, because the air was going in.

But Spider didn’t take it back on his own.

He just…let it happen to him.

Kiri felt the pulse under her thumb blink out.

Her breath caught sharp. “Max...”

Max was already there, fingers digging at Spider’s carotid, eyes never leaving Spider’s face. “Thready,” he said. "Kiri I need you to move out of the room".

Kiri’s head lifted like she’d been struck but she understood. She swallowed hard, eyes still on Spider as if she could anchor him by sight alone.

Spider’s lashes fluttered again. His gaze lifted—vague, searching—finding Kiri like she was the last shape the fog would allow him.

For a heartbeat, he was there enough that it hurt.

Then his lids drooped half-mast, as if even holding them open cost too much.

The techs tore open the sterile pack. Plastic and metal flashed. Suction set. Scope ready. Everything moving in tight lines because there wasn’t time for anything else.

Max’s voice cut through without rising. “Kiri.”

She backed away a step, hands still open at her sides like she’d left something on the bed and didn’t know how to pick it back up. She didn’t argue. She didn’t make Max spend breath on her when Spider was spending his last.

The second she cleared, the door on Jake’s side hissed.

Norm came in.

Human, masked, moving with the kind of speed that meant he’d been sprinting before his brain finished forming the plan. He went straight to the bed and the bag.

“I’ve got ventilation.” Norm said, and it landed in the room like a brace.

Max didn’t look up. “Good.”

Norm took the bag from the tech without ceremony and started squeezing—steady, controlled, eyes on Spider’s chest and the seal of the mask.

Up.

Down.

Up.

Down.

The rhythm wasn’t mercy. It was work.

Spider’s body responded with absence. His mouth hung slack behind the mask. His eyes drifted with no focus at all now. His lashes fluttered once, then stopped.

Max’s fingers stayed at Spider’s neck like he was trying to hold the pulse there by force of will.

“Still losing him.” Max said, and for the first time his voice had a razor edge.

The occupants on the outside of the room heard him loud and clear. “Then we don’t,” Jake said, so low it was almost nothing. He didn’t realize he’d spoken until Neytiri’s shoulder brushed his—solid as ever.

Lo’ak shifted forward instinctively, then froze. He didn’t touch the seal. He didn’t move. His whole body was held breath.

Inside the room, Max made the call with a hard stillness in his face.

“Induction.”

A tech pushed the sedative—fast and clean—because no one in that room was going to let Spider be awake for what came next if there was any choice. Not after everything.

Max followed without hesitation. “Paralytic.”

Norm kept bagging through it, steady hands, jaw locked.

Spider didn’t fight. He just…let go.

And Jake—watching through the clear sheet—felt his own body respond like it had been punched, like the ground had shifted under his feet.

Because there’s a moment when a person stops being a person and becomes something you can lose in a blink.

Max lifted the jaw, slid in the scope, and passed the tube with quiet certainty. The clean, ruthless precision of someone who refused to fail.

Cuff. Secure. Connect.

The ventilator took the next breath for Spider.

Spider’s chest rose and fell to a rhythm that wasn’t his own.

The monitor tone tightened—still low but no longer drifting toward silence.

Max exhaled once, controlled. “Good placement.”

Norm eyes didn’t soften. He leaned in, eyes on Spider’s face like he could call him back with attention alone.

“Stay.” Norm said, barely audible. Not a plea. A directive.

---

Jake didn’t remember stepping away from the seal, but suddenly he was two paces down the corridor with Neytiri, out of Kiri and Lo'ak's sightline because some things couldn’t be shown to the kids without costing them more than they already owed.

The light here was softer. The air smelled like damp metal and antiseptic.

Neytiri’s hands were clenched so tight her fingers trembled.

Jake’s voice came low. “You okay?”

Neytiri let out a breath that wasn’t a laugh. “No.”

Jake didn’t push. He knew better.

Neytiri stared at the nearest wall like it could hold her upright. When she spoke, her voice had been stripped down.

Jake’s throat tightened. “You don’t have to carry it alone,” he said quietly.

Her gaze cut to him, fast. Defensive by instinct.

“Do not—” she started, and the words caught.

Jake lifted a hand to signal he understood. 

“I know,” he murmured. “I’m not trying to make it easier with words.”

Neytiri swallowed. Hard. Her jaw worked like she was forcing a door open inside herself.

“He is…” she began, and the rest wouldn’t come. 

Jake didn’t fill the silence. He stayed inside it with her.

Neytiri’s eyes shone in the low light. She didn’t wipe them away. She refused to pretend they weren’t there.

“I do not want to lose another,” she said, and the simplicity of it hit like a spear because it was truth, and truth didn’t soften itself for anyone.

Jake’s breath left him slowly. “Neither do I.”

Her gaze flicked toward the sealed room—toward the rhythm that wasn’t Spider’s, the machine doing what lungs could not.

A tremor moved through her, small and furious. “Eywa…” she said, a name spoken into a wound.

Then, quieter—almost disbelieving:

“She gave him breath.”

Jake stilled.

Neytiri’s voice sharpened on the edge of grief. “Eywa gave him the gift so he could live here, with us. So he would not choke on our world.” Her throat worked. “Why give that…only to take him now?”

Jake didn’t have an answer that wouldn’t insult her faith.

So he didn’t pretend.

“I don’t know,” he said, and it came out rougher than he meant. “But I know what I’m doing anyway.”

Neytiri looked at him then like she was measuring whether his will could stand next to hers without trying to replace it.

Jake held her gaze. “We stay.” he said. He swallowed hard. "We stay and we be there for him in all the ways he is going to need us. 

For a second, Neytiri’s breath broke—silent, controlled, devastating. Then she closed her eyes for one beat, as if listening for something deeper than ventilator tones and human voices.

When she opened them again, the blade of her was back. The resolve that was so Neytiri.

She nodded once—small, final.

And they went back to the med bay together.

---

Inside, the room held steady.

The ventilator kept its rhythm. Max checked lines, listened to the chest, adjusted with small, precise movements that meant everything and looked like nothing.

Norm stayed near the head of the bed—close enough to take over in a second, not so close he got in the way. His attention was relentless. Protective. Quiet in the way real fear gets when it refuses to spill.

Kiri stood outside the bay, hands pressed flat to the plastic. She watched Spider’s chest rise and fall with the machine and tried to make herself believe that rising meant he would be fine. Because he had to be.

And in the bed, Spider didn’t fight anymore.

He rested in the only way left to him—body surrendered to the hands that knew what to do, mind drifting in and out like a tide.

Deep under his ribs, the warmth that had been flaring and clenching all day finally pulled back, quieting into shadow.

Because for the first time in too long, nobody in this room was trying to cut it out of him.

And for now just for now that was enough.

Notes:

Almost done with this story folks. Thanks for sticking with me!

Chapter 10: After

Summary:

In the immediate aftermath of struggle, there is only stillness from the one that matters most in the moment.

Notes:

More emotional angst from the Sully family as they attempt to tether Spider to this world.

The vent gave Spider a breath with the same steady patience it gave anyone.

In.

Pause.

Out.

The rhythm was mechanical, but it held the room the way firelight holds a circle—something everyone kept glancing at to make sure it was still there.

Spider lay slack beneath a thin sheet, the tube taped clean at the corner of his mouth, a clear line of condensation blooming and fading with each cycle. One side of his face was smeared with dried salt and grit; the other had the faint print of adhesive where someone had ripped something off in a hurry. His lashes didn’t move. His throat didn’t swallow. His chest rose because the machine insisted it would.

The monitor didn’t offer comfort. Just truth in bright digits that kept changing.

Norm stood at Max’s shoulder, present in the way he always was when something mattered enough to get quiet about it. Eyes flicking between his patient and the numbers.

A tech handed him a syringe with dark blood in it.

Norm glanced once, then nodded. “Run it. Now.”

The tech disappeared to the counter. A printer chirped somewhere in the back like it was trying to pretend this was routine.

Max didn’t look up from Spider’s face. He watched the skin at Spider’s mouth, the movement under the tape, the way the vent’s breath made the throat shift. He adjusted the mask seal at Spider’s cheek—habit more than need—then checked the tubing line again like the line could betray him if he trusted it.

Through the clear seal, Kiri pressed both hands flat to the barrier, her palms leaving faint fog marks as she breathed.

Lo’ak stood beside her, close enough that their shoulders brushed, gaze locked on Spider’s chest like staring hard could make it rise by itself.

Jake and Neytiri waited a step back from them. Because the front line belonged to the kids right now, and everyone knew it without saying.

Norm raised two fingers in a small, sharp motion toward the Sullys—*hold*. His attention didn’t lift from the murmuring with Max.

Max’s voice cut low. “He’s maintaining.”

No victory in it. Just a status report that wasn’t terrible.

The monitor tone stayed tight and even.

Norm finally looked up and walked over to the entrance.

His eyes met Kiri’s through the plastic—one beat of shared understanding, then he turned to the latch and opened the seal.

“Two,” Norm said. “Then switch.”

While this was not a hospital on Earth, it was a way to ensure the space stayed manageable, the only way Spider didn’t end up drowned in bodies and grief.

Kiri went in first.

Lo’ak followed her like he’d been tethered.

The seal hissed shut behind them with a clean, final sound that made Kiri flinch anyway.

Inside, the air felt different—neutral. 

She didn’t go straight to his face. She went to his hand.

Spider’s fingers were bruised at the tips where the pulse clip had been moved and moved again. There was a faint line of dried blood at his knuckle, like he’d scraped it on a strap or a rail. Kiri slid her hand under his and held it gently, palm to palm, like she could remind his body what it belonged to.

Lo’ak stopped at the foot of the bed.

He looked like he’d been punched again.

Spider wasn’t just pale. He was utterly washed out—the blue marks Lo'ak had always associated with Spider’s stubborn, feral insistence on being seen were faded down to ghost-traces, smeared thin by sweat and grime and whatever they’d done to him in bright rooms. It made him look younger and wrong, not the free spirit he really was.

Lo’ak’s eyes flicked up the tube, the tape, the vent line, then snapped away like looking too long might make it true forever.

“You look…stupid,” Lo’ak said under his breath.

It should’ve been a tease. It came out ragged.

Kiri squeezed Spider’s hand once. “He doesn't look like him.” she whispered.

Lo’ak’s laugh was a sharp exhale. “Yeah. I know.”

He stepped closer, stopping himself before he crowded the head of the bed. His fingers hovered near Spider’s shoulder, then lowered to the sheet instead touching the blanket. He pressed down like he could anchor Spider by sheer force.

Kiri leaned in until her forehead almost brushed Spider’s wrist.

“Hey,” she said softly. “We made it back.”

Spider didn’t move.

But Kiri swore swore something in his hand answered. Not a squeeze. Not even a twitch she could prove. Just a minute change in warmth, as if her skin had found his through the fog and he’d recognized it on instinct.

Kiri’s eyes burned. She blinked hard and kept her voice steady because the room didn’t have room for her breaking yet.

“We’re at High Camp,” she told him. “Lo'ak's here. Norm and Max are here. Dad’s here.” A pause, then, like admitting it mattered: “Mom’s here.”

Lo’ak’s throat worked. He looked up at Kiri like he wanted to ask her if Spider would understand that last part.

Kiri didn’t answer the unspoken question. She just kept holding Spider’s hand like it was her job.

Behind them, Norm moved around the bed with controlled speed, checking what mattered without making it a show. He adjusted a dial. Checked the condensation line. Leaned to read the monitor, then looked at Spider’s still body like the numbers didn’t count if he didn’t see it with his own eyes.

A tech came back with a printout and held it out.

Norm took it, scanned it, then nodded once. “Okay.”

Max’s shoulders eased by a fraction. Not relief but a little bit of permission to breathe without holding it.

Lo’ak caught the shift and flinched like he didn’t trust it. “What does that mean?” he asked, voice too sharp.

Norm looked up and answered softly. “It means he’s not falling off the cliff right now.” 

Lo’ak swallowed hard. The anger in him didn’t disappear. It redirected toward waiting, which was worse.

Kiri looked at Norm. “Will he..” Her voice caught, then she tried again. “Will he be okay?”

Max answered without dressing it up. “If we keep him supported and nothing throws a complication at us, he’s got a real chance.”

Kiri hated the word keep. Like Spider was something you had to keep from slipping out of your hands.

Lo’ak’s gaze snapped to Spider’s face again. His voice dropped. “I thought he was—” He couldn’t finish it.

Kiri did. Quietly. “Gone.”

Lo’ak nodded once, hard.

Norm didn’t look away from Spider when he spoke again. “You did what you were supposed to do,” he said to Lo’ak. “You got him out.”

Lo’ak’s mouth twisted. “I tried so hard to stop them from taking him.” He let out a sound of frustration.

Norm’s eyes flicked to Lo’ak. “No,” he said, and the word landed like a hand on a shoulder. “They’re the reason. Don’t carry their work for them.”

Lo’ak stared at him for a beat, like he didn’t know what to do with a sentence that wasn’t punishment.

Then his gaze dropped to Spider again.

“Okay,” Lo’ak whispered, like he was trying the word on. Like it didn’t fit yet.

Kiri leaned closer to Spider’s hand. “Do you hear hear us?,” she asked, even though she knew he probably didn’t. “You always do.”

Spider’s lashes didn’t flutter. His face stayed slack under tape and sedation.

But Kiri kept talking anyway, because talking was the only thing that didn’t feel like helplessness.

“I’m going to be annoying,” she murmured, almost smiling through the burn in her eyes. “I’m going to talk at you until you come back just to make me stop.”

Lo’ak made a sound that could’ve been a laugh in another life.

Max glanced between them and finally spoke the word that mattered most in this moment.

“Switch,” he said gently.

Kiri’s fingers tightened around Spider’s hand.

Norm held her gaze without blinking. “You did good,” he said, and then because he knew her added, “You can come back in later.”

Kiri nodded once, sharp.

She leaned down and pressed her forehead to Spider’s knuckles; careful, brief, not tugging anything that mattered.

“Come back to us.” she whispered into his skin.

Then she stepped away, forcing her feet to move.

Lo’ak lingered half a second longer, staring at Spider’s face like he was trying to memorize it the way it was now, in case the world stole him again.

“Don’t be a dick, Bro.” Lo’ak muttered, voice breaking on the last word. 

Then he turned and followed Kiri out.

---

The seal opened. Kiri didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until it escaped in a shaky rush.

Lo’ak’s hand shot out and gripped her shoulder to steady her.

Jake’s hand found Kiri’s upper arm at the same time, steady and warm. Kiri leaned into it without looking, like her body knew where safety was even when her head didn’t.

Neytiri didn’t rush them.

She watched Kiri’s face, watched Lo’ak’s posture, watched the way both of them tried to look like they were fine and failed.

When the seal closed again behind them, Neytiri stepped in close to Jake—just close enough that her shoulder brushed his.

Her voice was barely audible. “Now.”

Jake nodded once.

They went in together.

Inside, the room felt smaller with them in it—not because of their bodies, but because of what they brought with them.

Jake moved to Spider’s side and stopped.

For a long second, he didn’t touch.

He looked.

It was the same thing he’d done in other wars, other bedsides—take inventory, take in damage, let the truth land before you tried to do anything with it.

Spider looked like he’d been carried through hell and set down gently at the end of it.

His lips were dry. The tape at the tube pulled one corner of his mouth up in a grimace he hadn’t earned. The faded blue markings on his cheek made his face look unfamiliar, like the kid had been rubbed down to the base layer.

Jake’s throat tightened.

He put his hand on Spider’s shoulder, careful not to jostle anything. The contact was solid. A father’s weight. A promise made with skin instead of words.

“Hey, buddy,” Jake said, quiet.

His voice didn’t crack. It did something worse—it went soft.

Neytiri stood on the other side of the bed and stared at Spider’s face as if he was a question Eywa had asked her and she hadn’t known how to answer.

She didn’t reach for him right away.

Her hands curled at her sides, half flexed, like touching him might make her lose control of whatever line she’d been walking for months.

Jake glanced at her, just once.

Neytiri’s breath came shallow.

She stepped closer.

Her gaze dropped to Spider’s hand—thin, bruised, Kiri’s warmth gone from it now.

Neytiri’s fingers hovered there for a heartbeat, then settled lightly on the sheet beside it.

Contact, close enough to say *I am here* without risking that her voice would betray her.

Jake’s hand tightened slightly at Spider’s shoulder as if he felt it too.

Behind them, Norm didn’t intrude. He stayed at the head of the bed with Max, watching the tube and the vent line like a hawk watches wind.

After a beat, Norm spoke low, steady. “He’s exhausted,” he said. “This is the best thing to give him body a break.”

Jake didn’t look away from Spider. “He's always been stubborn.”

Norm’s mouth twitched, like that almost hurt to hear. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “He is. He's also just a kid.”

Neytiri’s eyes stayed fixed on Spider’s face. Her voice came out rougher than Jake had heard it in a long time.

“He does not look like himself.”

Jake’s jaw tightened. “They tried to take a part of him. I just hope they haven't succeeded in some way.”

Neytiri swallowed. Something bright sat at the edge of her eyes, refusing to fall.

Jake shifted closer to her.

Neytiri spoke again, and this time it wasn’t anger.

It was fear stripped clean.

“I thought…,” she started, then stopped like the words were too big.

Jake waited.

Neytiri’s breath shook once. “I thought Eywa would take him before I could decide what he is to me.”

Jake’s eyes flicked to her, sharp with emotion. “You don’t have to decide it alone.”

Neytiri’s fingers tightened on the sheet until the fabric wrinkled under her hand.

For a moment, she looked like she might step back, like she might put the walls up again.

Instead, she leaned forward—slow, careful—and touched Spider’s knuckles with two fingers.

A feather-light contact.

Her voice dropped to almost nothing. “You live,” she whispered in Na’vi. It was a half prayer, half command, like she didn’t trust the world to do the right thing without being told.

Spider didn’t move.

The vent gave him another breath.

In.

Pause.

Out.

The rhythm held.

Max cleared his throat softly. “We’re going to keep him like this for a bit,” he said. “Let him rest while we watch the numbers.”

Jake nodded once. “We will be here.” A promise to to his surrogate son.

Norm’s eyes didn’t lift from Spider as he said, “I wouldn't expect anything less.” 

Jake looked at Norm and saw the crease between his eyebrows, as if Spider was a puzzle that he couldn't figure out. They sometimes forgot that Norm helped raise the kid.  

Neytiri didn’t move away from Spider’s hand.

She simply stayed there, fingers resting like a prayer that didn’t need words.

After a few more breaths, Norm shifted his stance and nodded toward the seal.

“Let him settle,” he said quietly. “Then we’ll let the kids back in.”

Jake’s hand slid from Spider’s shoulder to his forearm, a last grounding touch. Then he stepped back, because he knew the drill: you don’t get greedy with time at the bedside when the line is still thin.

Neytiri withdrew her fingers last.

She looked at Spider’s face one more time, as if imprinting it.

Then she turned and followed Jake out.

The seal closed again, leaving Max and Norm and the techs with the machines and the careful, unglamorous work of keeping someone alive.

Outside, Kiri was waiting like she’d been holding her breath the whole time.

Jake barely got the seal open before Kiri surged forward and grabbed his wrist—tight, desperate.

“How?...”

Jake nodded. “He’s still here.” It was the only comfort with words he could give. 

Kiri’s eyes closed for a beat like she couldn’t afford to look at anything else. Then she opened them and stared through the plastic, watching the rise of Spider’s chest like it was the only language she trusted.

Lo’ak stayed beside her, silent, knuckles white on the strap he was gripping.

Neytiri stood on Kiri’s other side, not touching her, but close enough that the warmth of her presence could be felt.

For a second, Kiri leaned sideways until her shoulder brushed Neytiri’s arm. Kiri knew her Mom was trying and she would allow the comfort being offered.

Neytiri didn’t pull away.

Jake watched that small contact happen and felt something in his chest crack open in the quietest way.

They stayed there, the four of them, facing the med bay. Facing this the only way the Sully's knew how—together. 

Notes:

The mention of the blue marks that litter Spider's skin is symbolic. It's been a repetitive point since they got him back. I'll leave you to come up with your own reasons why ☺️
Thanks for sticking with me! Epilogue coming next :)

Notes:

I hope you enjoy! Please leave kudos and any comments. Thanks!