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Grandmother crushes the herbs carefully, delicately, the same hands that can snap a neck or skin a kill breaking down green threads between her fingers. Her head is bowed in concentration, lips moving silently as she counts.
Kiri sits crosslegged in front of her, taking deep, slow breaths of familiar smells, feeling familiar currents brush over her skin. Sometimes the sheer amount of presence that gathers around Grandmother is hard to deal with, overwhelms Kiri in a way that nobody else quite seems to understand, but other times, times like this, it helps her feel sane again.
She watches Grandmother gather the herbs into a bag, tying the strings tightly. Kiri's fingers flicker at her sides, thinking of all the times her mother and grandmother guided her hands through the same patterns.
"Did Beyral have the new baby yet?" she asks. "I know she was worried."
Grandmother's head snaps up. "Eh?" Her eyes dart around the room, narrowed, back tight, hand shifting to the knife strapped to her thigh. Her eyes skip over Kiri without seeming to see her, like she can't see her.
"...Grandmother?" Kiri asks slowly. It's dawning on her that she doesn't remember coming in to visit her grandmother, that she doesn't remember sitting down, that the last thing she does remember is being with the Metkayina. Their tree. The bond. Her bloodmother. The light...
"Kiri?" Grandmother's eyes narrow, squinting just to the left of Kiri's head. "I--" She shakes her head suddenly, rubbing her eyes. "Oh, I must be going mad. Foolish old woman, your grandchildren are far from here, and they live. " She says the last few words firmly, giving herself a little shake.
The man sitting beside her, the man who was definitely not sitting there a moment before, puts a soothing hand on Grandmother's shoulder. He's got a face Kiri's only seen in old pictures on a datapad, a face attached to a name she's only heard in stories and song.
"Grandfather?" she asks. "Wh--what's happening to me? What's going on?"
He just sighs and reaches out, brushing a callused old palm down her cheek. His skin feels rough and gentle all at once, like
leaves brushing over her face, tickling her skin. Kiri turns and the branch creaks underneath her, stars twinkling overhead. Hometree--the old Hometree, the one that fell before she was born, but feels as familiar as her own reflection--pulses and shudders with life, buzzing in her ears.
"This has happened before, you know," the girl with her mother's cheekbones and her grandmother's mouth and Tuk's chin says. She stands on the branch nex to Kiri, shading her eyes as she scans the horizon. "I read it in the books your bloodmother brought."
She raises her hand, pointing towards the stars. One winks, brighter than the rest, a glint like a fire or a bullet. "What's happening to us has happened before, to other peoples, other lands--so many other lands. It happened and it's still happening there, even when they pretend the battle's over. It's been raging for centuries. They burn and steal everyone they can and spit on the survivors for the crime of doing what it took to survive."
Kiri shivers, hugging herself. Wind scrawls over her skin like fingers, pulling her hair from its braids. She can see a clump of shadows coming up over the horizon, approaching fast and hard.
"Are you scared?" her dead aunt asks. Her eyes shine, fire twirling in their depths.
"Yes." The word feels shameful in her mouth, but she can't lie, not here, not now.
"Good." In the distance, metal screams as it rips through the atmosphere. "If you're afraid, you've got something to be afraid for," Sylwanin whispers. "Which means you've got something to fight for."
The world explodes and they're falling, falling, falling, fire sucking the scream from Kiri's mouth. She gasps, stunned by heat like a fallen sun, plummeting down and down into nothing until
she feels the wing of a Samson humming under her feet. Kiri crouches the way she would on an ikran, flexing her toes lightly against the sun-warmed metal. She can see the forests spreading about below her, leading to the ocean; she can see a woman sitting in the cockpit beside her, long dark ponytail spilling out from under her helmet.
"A friend of mine said an open sky helps you think," Trudy Chacon says, seemingly unperturbed by the girl on the wing of her plane. Her voice echoes easily through the cockpit glass, clear as if they were sitting on the ground together. "'Bout where you've been, where you're going."
She laughs, bright and merry (she had a nice laugh, Norm told Kiri once). "At least, I think that's what he said--we were both fucking wasted. Maybe he just meant that the brain shuts down in cryosleep."
The plane backs away from the ocean, weaving through the floating mountains. Wild ikrans flap by, watching them with beady eyes.
"I don't know where I'm going," Kiri admits. "I barely know where I've been."
"Yeah, because you're fucking fifteen." Trudy smiles reassuringly, blue paint wrinkling around her eyes. "Not that growing older means automatically figuring everything out, but you get better at winging it, if you'll excuse the pun. Even if shit still comes along to trip you up."
Behind them, the engine explodes. "Speak of the fucking devil," Trudy mutters, and they drop out of the sky. Kiri grits her teeth and sinks her fingers into the metal as they spiral through the air.
She looks back at Trudy--only it's not Trudy, not anymore, it's another woman with Spider's eyes looking at her from the cockpit. "He has to die," Paz Soccoro rasps, fingers pressed against the melting glass as flames nibble at her flight suit. "You have to kill him, Augustine. If not for me or yourself, then do it for Miles, do it for what he did to our son."
"What--" But the impact tears the plane apart before Kiri can get the second word out. She's flung clear, soaring through emptiness once against before she hits
the ground running, following the nantang pack through the trees, sprinting at their side like she's been doing that for a lifetime. She feels exhilaration racing through them, the need for the hunt, howls tearing out of their mouths like explosions.
Then another noise rumbles across the sky, like a mocking answer, bright searing above. The pack skitters to a stop, yipping and whimpering, some covering their ears against the rumble of engines overhead.
Kiri looks up, squinting at the incoming ship flowing across the sky like poisoned water. It heads towards the buildings crouching in the distance, Bridgehead looming like a monster with steel bones and hollow eyes.
Kill, the pack whispers, voices scraping through her brain. Tear. Every creature on the planet murmurs in agreement, even the ones born to eat grass and berries (war changes all of us). Make them bleed. Make them pay.
"I know," Kiri says softly. "I know, but..." She can see the steel would just break the pack's teeth, that even their mighty bodies cannot outlast gunfire forever. "But not now. We gotta go, all right?"
She turns and they follow, pounding at her feet, their hunger rushing soothingly through her blood. Kiri picks up speeding and so do they, cresting ground her like
waves rushing around as she stands in the shallows of a small, secluded cove. When she looks over her shoulder, she can see the same horizon that's greeted every day since they came to Awa'atlu, painted by gold by the sun dancing along its edge.
The sound of crying draws Kiri's attention back to shore. Tsireya's on the beach, curled up in her father's massive arms and weeping like her heart's broken clear in two. Tonowari rocks her back and forth, making soft soothing sounds.
"I led them down there," Tsireya sobs. "This is all my fault, I should have done something, I should have known--"
"How could you have known, my daughter?" Tonowari says, smoothing Tsireya's hair. "You did all you could." Tsireya just cries harder and Tonowari keeps rocking, looking down helpless. Kiri swallows, keenly aware that she's looking in on a private moment, but still desperate to do something, anything.
"Tsireya," she says helplessly, already keenly aware that no one can hear her. "Tsireya, please, it's not your fault." She reaches out, pushing with all her might, and for a second she thinks she sees Tsireya raise her head, eyes glinting
as Dad looks at Kiri, or at least in her direction, from where he sits outside their marui with a hollow look in his eyes. Norm sits besides him in his Avatar, the ocean breeze tugging at his clothes and splashing them with salt.
"Epilepsy," Norm says. "It explains the symptoms, the religious delusions..."
Epilepsy. Kiri turns that word over in her head; she has only the barest idea of what it means, but it seems to make sense, at least as much as anything does right now. And yet...delusions?
"You believed me," she reminds her father. "Dad, you said you believed me, you said I wasn't crazy, you said--" She stamps her foot with a cry of frustration. "Fucking look at me!"
He doesn't. He's still looking at Norm, who's still talking, still saying terrible things that make no fucking sense.
"Ever?" Dad breathes.
"If she has another seizure underwater, it could kill her."
"No." Kiri shakes her head wildly. "No, I, I just found my bloodmother again, I can't, I can't--" She drags shaking hands over her skull, yanking at her hair until it hurts. Water boils around her legs, shining a dark, heavy red.
"You can't do this to me," she sobs, not sure who or what she's talking to. "You can't do this, you can't--" She slips in the surf, falling with a strangled cry. The ocean rushes into her mouth with the taste of blood and gasoline and sizzling, burning her from the inside out as she scrabbles
at cold tile, the freezing floor slamming into her cheek. Kiri pushes herself to her feet with a grunt, blinking around her and pushing hair out of her eyes. She's in a laboratory like her mother's, only this one is brightly lit and bustling with activity, Sky People in white labcoats hurrying everywhere she looks.
Lined up against the wall she can see cages holding different animals, Eywa's children, pacing, matted, filthy, half-starved, sensors buzzing against their skulls as they stare with hollow eyes. Kiri grits her teeth.
"I don't think 'hive mind' is the correct word," one doctor is saying, addressing a gray-haired Sky Woman in fatigues. "The planet's inhabitants act too independently for that, even the lower life forms we've been studying here. The different groups of humanoids have different traditions, different means of reacting to the same presence."
"Presence." The woman taps her fingers against a table.
"It's a kind of--network. A World Wide Web, if you will." The scientist laughs nervously, although Kiri doesn't find it funny, and neither does the Sky Woman if her stony expression is anything to go by.
"A web." She traces her fingers along the table, her voice low and thoughtful. "Does it come with a spider?" Kiri bites her lip at the word.
"General?" the scientist asks.
"Never mind." The general tucks a loose hair back into her bun. "The word 'network' suggests it can be hacked."
"Well, the Na'vi--"
"I'm not talking about that." The general spreads her hands wide. "Is there any way to exert influence over a wider scale? Gather it all under one point of control?"
The scientist shuffles his feet. "We retrieved some of Dr. Augustine's recordings from the evacuated enemy camp, and there are a few where she discusses--"
"I was under the impression that Grace Augustine went clinically insane during her time planetside." The general's voice is as crisp as her uniform.
The scientist lets out another nervous laugh. "I mean, you know what they say about broken clocks being right twice a day."
Kiri hisses at that, and the animals all perk up their heads at the sound, eyes flicking in her direction. The general stiffens, her hand going to the gun at her side.
"The hell?" The scientist leans over, poking at some buttons on a console. "They've never done that before..." One button lights up, flashing like
the glint off a strange object held in the hands of a Recom soldier lying in his bunk, tucked up next to a window opening upon Bridgehead's cold gray walls. Kiri recognizes his thick black hair from the woods, the memory of cuffs digging into her hands and her family's terror heavy in the air, thick on her tongue.
"What the hell're you doin' with that shit, Prager?" one of the other Recoms asks, snapping that weird pink stuff in her mouth.
Kiri cranes her neck to gain a better look--the object is a piece of wood, one piece laid across the top of another. She can see the image of a tiny Sky Man attached to it, tiny nails glinting in his hands and feet, face twisted in an expression of agony. Kiri shudders at the sight.
"It's familiar," Prager says, tracing his thumb reverently over the Sky Man's tiny torso.
A third recom barks a laugh, adjusting his sunglasses. "Martyrs and messiahs? Miss me with that shit."
Prager hums. "It's not like death is a big issue for us anymore."
"Yeah," the one in the sunglasses retorts, "but what the hell does getting back cost?"
Silence, stretching on for a heartbeat too long, and then the female soldier rolls her eyes. "What-the-fuck-ever. We left Christ behind with the rest of the old gods. I've got more important shit to do, like kicking your asses." She adjusts her cards and reaches down
for water from the sink, big hands splashing it onto the face of the one recom whose name Kiri remembers on sight. Chills race through her blood and she backs up against the bathroom wall, taking shallow breaths.
He can't see you, she reminds herself, just as Miles Quaritch inhales sharply.
Kiri looks and there are two faces reflected in the mirror before them. One's a redheaded Sky Woman wearing a labcoat and a pissed-off expression, the other a gray-haired Sky Man with three long scars running down one side of his head.
Then she blinks and they're gone, just Quaritch's blue face and emptiness where Kiri's should be. Quaritch breathes a sigh of relief, and so does she.
"Goddamn ghosts," Quaritch mutters, drying his face.
"Fuck you too," Kiri shoots back, following him out of the bathroom.
The room he leads her into has a bed, and on the bed lies a small figure, curled up so tight that all she can see is tanned brown limbs and a fall of golden hair. He's taller than she remembers, hair longer and unbraided, stripes replaced by faint bruises, but she knows him.
"Monkey Boy?" Kiri breathes, climbing onto the mattress beside him. He doesn't respond, of course, but his eyes are still open, gazing into the distance through his mask.
"Hey, tiger," Quaritch says. There's a strange clacking noise, one Kiri doesn't recognize until she turns and sees him slithering his belt through the loops. "We got some downtime before the boat comes in. Wanna keep the old man company?"
He's pulling the blankets away, settling onto the bed and lifting Spider into his lap and Spider. Spider is. Spider is naked except for the mask and bruised all over and no no no no no
"Get away from him!" Kiri screams, clawing for Quaritch's face, throat, anything she can reach. Her hand closes around his tswin and she doesn't think, she just yanks. Quaritch hisses in pain, hand flying to his temple, head arching out of her grip; Kiri snarls and lunges again, reaching
into nothing, hands clawing at air as she stumbles forward and crashes to her knees in the grass. A field she's never seen before stretches out at her back, a tall hill looming in her way.
"FUCK!" The ground shakes at her scream, as she hits it again and again with furious blows, dirt shaking around her fists. Kiri howls louder than she knows her own vocal cords should be capable of, louder than than an ikran's scream or an 'angtsìk's bellow, endless and unheard.
When she has no air left, Kiri sinks back onto her heels, panting. Grass shivers around her, tickling skin.
It dawns on her, slowly, that there is no wind, nothing pulling at her hair and clothes. She looks at the hill in front of her and the grass there trembles even harder, the energy she can usually only feel pulsing over its surface like swirling lights.
"...Mom?" She's not asking for Neytiri te Tskaha Mo'at'ite or Grace Augustine.
Eyes open in the hill in front of her, two gigantic yellow eyes shaped precisely like Kiri's own. They regard her with an expression so old, so pained, so impossibly tender, that Kiri has to look down. She weaves her hands into the grass, burying her fingers under dirt.
"Why?" she asks Eywa. It dawns on her that this could mean any number of things, that she could spend a century listening to the potential answers. Kiri clears her throat and tries again, grabbing for the first thing that comes into her mind. "Why me?"
Silence. She can feel the Great Mother looking at her, feel her presence more keenly than she ever has before. It's somehow both soothing and overwhelming, a blanket of sensation pressing down heavily enough to steady or crush.
"I don't want to be..." She runs the different words through her head. "A messiah. A martyr. A spider. A miracle." She lifts her hands, flexing her fingers, trying and failing to rub off the dirt. "I want to be me. Isn't that enough?'
The grass ripples, humming with a trillion lost voices, blades growing themselves long enough to wrap gently around her hand and caress her palm. Kiri closes her eyes, feeling tears slip down her cheek, struggling to keep from shattering completely in the face of Eywa's love.
"I don't want to be a hive mind," she whispers. "But I don't--I can't--be alone, either. And I don't wanna be crazy. I just--I want it all to make sense." She lifts her hand, rubbing her eyes with the back of her palm. "I want...I need..."
But the words are stopped in her throat when she sees the hill in front of her. Those eyes are fluttering, like they're trying to stay awake, and there are shadows racing over the crown of the hill, great racing swaths of emptiness heading Kiri's way.
"Shit--" She lurches to her feet, but they're already upon her, wrapping around her ankles and dragging into the nothingness where solid earth used to be, a cold hollow like the way Dad always described cryosleep.
"Mom!" Kiri screams it for the second time today, and it works about as well as it did the first time. She hears Eywa call for her, the very fabric of the earth shaking, helpless, furious, and then she's falling down
and down
and down
and down
and heaving for breath on a cold cold table, blades skittering across her skin. Eyes with no life in them watch her from above, seeing only something to be cut open, flayed, stripped down to nothing. She screams, thrashing futilely against her restraints, hears her own voice screaming,
"Get away from her, you bitch!"
Hands knock the blades away, ripping off Kiri's bonds and lifting her up, up. She gasps for air, clinging on for dear life, and her mother's strong blue arms pulls her up, up, out of the empty. Light sears her eyes and she cringes, burying her face in her mother's chest like a little girl.
"There, there," Grace Augustine's voice is soft as a lullaby in her ear. "It's okay, my love. You're safe."
Kiri over her mother's shoulder, but can't see anything except for a soft haze of color and song. She swallows and presses her hair into her mother's braids, feeling them tickle her skin.
"Mom," she whispers. "Mom, am I dead?"
What she means is, did I ever come back?
"You're alive, honey." Her bloodmother rubs her back soothingly. "You're alive. You've always been alive. That's all that matters."
Around them, the light shifts, the noise shifting to the familiar rasp of waves. Mom shifts her into a bridal carry and Kiri lets her head lean back, blinking at the shores of Awa'atlu passing around them. An ikran she recognizes as Lo'ak's alights on a rock to study them, passing ilu poke their heads out of the water to look, but no one else seems to notice them moving by.
Mom carries her towards the marui, setting Kiri lightly on the ground outside. She places a hand on Kiri's shoulder, helping her stand on wobbly legs, and guides her inside.
The first thing she sees is the girl lying on the floor, eyes closed and breathing gently, as if she's dreaming of the most peaceful things. Looking down at her own face, for a second all Kiri can think is Lo'ak can go eat a dick, I don't snore.
Then she sees Mom--her other mom, or one of her other moms--kneeling next to the sleeping girl. Neytiri's face is worn with exhaustion, looking down with an expression of love and pain not unlike when Kiri saw in Eywa's eyes.
Ronal kneels opposite, one hand resting against sleeping-Kiri's forehead while the other braces against her own stomach. Kiri tenses on instinct, shoulders raising.
"Easy," Grace soothes. She's standing next to Kiri, wearing her human skin now; it's jarring, seeing an uncovered human face outside like that. "I know you guys had a rough start, but she's been helping your mom look after you, see?"
Grace gestures across the floor--Kiri can see a tangle of forest herbs and sea plants, tools from different clans mingled together on a blanket. "I never would have found you or been able to bring you back without them," her bloodmother says. She pats Kiri's shoulder. "Things change, you know? I mean, look at me and that dumbass marine!"
Kiri's eyes flick out towards where Dad and Norm had been sitting--they're both gone, now. "He's still a dumbass," she mutters.
"Yeah, but he loves you, babygirl." Mom kneels on the ground, gently pulling Kiri down with her. "We all do. That's why you have to come back."
Kiri leans forward, looking into her own face. It occurs to her for the first time that the only thing scarier than being stuck outside her own body forever is the idea of going back in.
She looks down at the body lying there, tracing a finger along the shoulder. She thinks of Spider lying somewhere else, even more helpless. She thinks of creatures in cages and fleeing through the woods, Grandmother's pain, terror sinking through the world like a virus--
"Hey, none of that," Mom cuts in. "You can't help everyone else if you don't look after yourself first, all right?" Kiri nods slowly, trying to believe, to focus on that.
"Will I..." She can't form the question. "I mean, if I go in, will I be able--"
Her mother strokes her face. "You'll see me again."
"But if I can't use the Soul Tree--"
"You will." Her bloodmother looks her dead in the eye, face taut with determination. "I don't know how, but you will. Believe an old ghost when she says the future is limitless."
"Even gods can't do everything, though," Kiri points out.
"True," Grace admits. "That's why you're lucky that you're a person, too, not a body on a cross." She presses her lips to Kiri's temple, mouth humming with a power vaster than either of them. "Now, come on, hop back in there before those parents of yours collapse from exhaustion."
Kiri bites her lip. "How..."
"The normal way, of course." Grace gestures to the braid laid out neatly at sleeping-Kiri's side. Kiri reaches for her tswin and slowly, gingerly holds it out, fingers shaking ever so slightly.
"I love you, Kiri," Grace whispers, and her voice carries an unstoppable wind.
Kiri squeezes Grace's hands, looking over at Neytiri. "I love you, too, Mom." Her voice shakes when she says it, and she swears she can hear all three of her mothers sigh in response.
The tendrils unfurl, weaving together, and
she wakes up, gasping for air, light shining bright in her eyes as her hands skitter across the mat. She hears Neytiri calling her name, hears Ronal yelling for Dad, hears the pounding of her brothers and sister's running feet.
A sob tears out of Kiri's mouth, relief and loss raging in her throat. Strong arms pull her close, hair tickling her cheek as Neytiri's warm breath brushes across her face.
"There, there," Mom whispers, soft in her ear. "It's okay, ma Kiri. You're safe. I see you, I see you, hush, shhh. You're safe."
Kiri reaches up, clinging to her mother with all her might, and tries her best to believe.