Archive of Our Own

Grace first meets Trudy Chacon on a shit day.

She's fighting on two fronts to get the school set up. Mo'at finds English clumsy and lacking in nuance, and Grace is having issues explaining about CEOs and trustees and Anglophone privilege without using the word "bullshit" every two seconds; and Grace has just walked out of a meeting with Selfridge where he actually used the phrase "civilizing a bunch of giant blue cat-monkeys" and she nearly punched him in the mouth. She loves Pandora, she loves her research, but sometimes she fucking hates her job.

She gets Max to set her up and slides into a link, wakes up nine feet tall and blue and able to breathe deep - she's never smoked, in this body. The notification of field time was logged hours ago, so even if Selfridge wanted to, he can't take it back, and when she comes to the edge of the compound, a Samson's waiting.

"Hey," the pilot says, affable.

Grace swings into the back without replying. She's not in the mood for affable.

But the pilot doesn't get pissed, doesn't even look offput when she glances back over her shoulder. "Bad day, huh?" she says.

Grace snorts. "Understatement."

The pilot nods sympathetically. "Well, hey, your wish is my command," she says. "Where you headed?"

"Away," Grace says, a little too honestly.

The pilot just laughs, smile bright behind her facemask. "Away," she repeats. "I can do away."

And she does. They lift off from Hell's Gate and wheel out over the forest, toward the river, the opposite direction from the pit mines. The pilot's good: she gets close to the trees, dips down to weave between the trunks when there's enough space, skims low over the water. As a rule, Grace doesn't like SecOps; like she tells everybody in her department on a regular basis, they're brawn and guns and force without the brains to aim them right. But this woman - she gets it; she sees all the beautiful things about this place, or she wouldn't fly like this. Poel kameie, Grace thinks, because the sentiment is so much clumsier in English. She sees.

They fly and fly, and slowly Grace's anger seeps away, until she's back to her usual everyday level of pissed off. When she taps the woman's shoulder, the woman obediently lands the Samson in the nearest clearing, and Grace even gets some new botanical samples out of it.

When they land back inside the colony, Grace pauses after she gets out of the Samson. "Thanks," she says, grudgingly.

The pilot grins; still in her seat, she's temporarily taller than Grace's avatar, and she has to reach down to put her palm on Grace's shoulder. It's funny - most of the soldiers don't touch the avatars, don't even look Grace in the eye when she's in hers. The pilot's hand is warm. "No problem," she says. "I like a little flyabout myself, every now and then. You ever want to go again, just put Trudy Chacon in your appropriations request."

Trudy Chacon, Grace thinks later, jogging toward the dropbox where she'll leave the samples before she drops her avatar off. Maybe not all of SecOps is a total loss.

***

Trudy snags a seat in the mess a second before Parvaz can take it, bumping him out of the way with her hip.

"Cheater," he says, tone mournful, but then he grins, and slides into the seat across from her without delay.

"Hey," says Bisset from down the table, accent eliding the "h". "You took Augustine out this morning, and you're still alive?"

Trudy purses her lips wryly, and waits for the wave of chuckles to die away. "Yeah," she says, when it's quiet again. She shrugs. "She wasn't so bad."

"Was not so bad?" Maksimov says incredulously. "I took her last time, and Hong is the only reason my head is still on my shoulders."

Trudy laughs. "Okay, she was grumpy," she admits. "But, come on - you can't tell me you can work for Quaritch just fine, but Augustine's yelling scares you."

"Quaritch yells because he wants us to live," Bisset says. "Augustine yells because she wants us to die."

Trudy rolls her eyes as everybody laughs again. "Whatever," she says. "She may scare the rest of you, but she doesn't scare me."

"I don't know," Parvaz says, eyeing her closely. "You don't look like you've had a near-death experience. She must like you."

Trudy rolls her eyes again, shakes her head at Parvaz, and tucks in. Mashed potatoes, awesome, she loves mashed potatoes - even the reconstituted ones that come out of Hell's Kitchen. But some small warm thing hovers in her chest the whole rest of the day, and it's not the lingering aftertaste of mashed potatoes. Fucking Parvaz, she thinks sourly that evening, when she's lying in her bunk and she can't stop thinking about Augustine's shoulder under her hand, she must like you. Christ, it wasn't even Augustine's shoulder, Augustine was in her alien suit; what the hell is wrong with her?

She makes her brain shut up through sheer force of will; her dreams are the same random shit as always, but she thinks she remembers there being a river in there somewhere, edged with huge old trees.

Grace doesn't think about Trudy that often; just, maybe sometimes when she's angry, she closes her eyes and pictures herself on a Samson over the river, and maybe the pilot usually has long black hair. So what.

Things are good for a while. Even though there's no real need, though, she still finds herself wanting to ask for Trudy - which makes it a lot harder for her to convince herself that Trudy's only interesting because she can make Grace less angry.

But she gets the school, Selfridge makes some kind of clerical error and ups her budget, and they get word that the next wave is on their way. Grace's cigarette consumption even drops.

Possibly that's why she gives in one day and lets herself put Trudy's name on the form. It'll fix it, she tells herself, it'll get rid of this weird thing that's taking over Grace's brain. Last time, it was a bad day, and Trudy was the only good thing in it - of course she stood out. But now Grace will see her on a good day, and she'll be ordinary and unexceptional and just another dumbass pilot.

"More plant samples?" Trudy says, when Grace jogs up to the Samson.

Grace shakes her head. "Today's a school day," she says, swinging into the back.

Trudy flips a couple switches, but doesn't make a move for the steering yoke. "A school day?" she shouts, over the thrum of rotors turning.

Grace sighs. Interdepartmental communication in RDA is for shit. "For the kids," she starts, and then shakes her head - the rotors are too loud. "I'll tell you when we get there."

Trudy takes her to the clearing; Grace logged a flight plan along with the form, this time. She eases them down onto the moss like she's trying not to bend a single stalk, and then shuts the Samson down, lights dimming under her fingers, a bit at a time.

Grace climbs out of the bay and double-checks her bag. She's got a couple books for today, more to describe the idea of writing than anything else, and the right recorder - Yu Sung helpfully labeled it "#3 - ENGLISH ONLY, GRACE" with tape - stowed in the side, batteries full.

"So," Trudy says, "a school."

Grace glances sideways: Trudy has unstrapped herself and opened the cockpit door so she can sit with her legs to the side, looking at Grace through the gap next to the seat. She's got something like a smile curling the corners of her mouth, but she sounds honestly curious.

Grace steels herself for idiocy, and takes a chance. "What do you know about the Na'vi?"

Trudy shrugs. "Native population," she says. "Tall, blue, and they like giant arrows covered in poison. That's all they tell us when they brief us," she adds hurriedly, at the look that must be on Grace's face. "Our job's keeping the base secure and the miners safe, the first contact shit's up to you guys." She hesitates, then, for a second; and Grace is just about ready to write her off when she says, "But you - I mean - they go to school?"

Grace strangles the scream that wants to escape, and settles for a good long glare. "The only thing I can teach them that they need and don't know already is English," she says sharply. "But we do some other stuff - explaining the words for our numbers means a little basic math, that kind of thing."

"Cool," Trudy says, a little sheepishly, and then laughs behind her facemask, sudden and bright. "Sorry, I sound like a fucking idiot. I don't want to get shot, and I don't want anybody else to get shot, whether they're blue or not; and if you can make that happen, that's the best thing I've heard this whole year."

Grace swings the bag over her shoulder, and turns, stopping with her hand on the frame of the cockpit door. "I'm trying," she says.

"Good luck," Trudy says, and it ought to sound trite, except Grace is pretty sure she actually means it.

***

Fuck, fuck, Trudy is such a jackass. She can still hear herself - they go to school? Christ, she's lucky Augustine only glared at her.

She just - she hadn't ever really thought about it. She doesn't know anybody in SecOps who has; or maybe they do, and they all just keep it to themselves. The higher-ups talk about the Na'vi the same way they talk about the banshees: an unavoidable danger of the forest, so keep your eyes open or die. Like they're a force of nature, unthinking. It's an easy habit to fall into - and a stupid one.

But somebody in RDA must think of them as people, as worth talking to, or Augustine would never have come out with Wave One at all, never mind getting the funding for her gazillion-dollar genetically manipulated alien suits. And the arrows aren't just falling from the sky - somebody's got to decide to shoot them.

Trudy came with Wave Two, she's only been here a few months; it was Wave One that got the bad casualties, people spitting blood and dying mid-seizure on the hangar floor. Trudy's mostly just heard the stories, and she's been on both sides of that shit. For every bullet she'd fired to save her own life in Venezuela, somebody somewhere must have cursed and cried and called her a murderer, and they wouldn't have been wrong.

Trudy guides Maya low over the trees, and takes a deep breath. She's got a job to do, and she's going to do it; but if Augustine's got even the tiniest shot at making what Trudy does totally irrelevant, Trudy kind of hopes she can pull it off.

So Grace's grand plan doesn't work for shit. She thinks about Trudy about six times as often; she veers back and forth between hating her for that thoughtless little summary of a culture they've barely begun to understand, and something that feels almost like anticipation. That was real curiosity in Trudy's face, and she'd sounded - ignorant, okay, but she'd sounded sorry for it, too, which is more than Grace can say about most of the idiots she's met in her life.

Grace wrote the book mostly to get her own thoughts in order, to get everything they'd learned put down on paper and laid out; publishing it was an afterthought, as far as she's concerned, because Earth was six years behind her the second she set foot on this place. She doesn't give a shit whether they understand what she knows. But now she's experiencing the bizarre sensation of wanting to explain things to Trudy - wanting to see how much she could understand if she had the chance, whether the way she flies is a one-off or she really could see this place the way Grace does. It gets so bad that she even starts trying to figure out whether it's feasible to take Trudy to the schoolhouse for a day.

But then everything gets fucked up at once. She loses the school, but that's nothing when Mo'at has lost a daughter, and both are Grace's fault; she smokes an entire pack in a day and locks herself in her office, ignoring Yu Sung and Max and Farah and their increasingly frantic knocking. Then she gets a note from Selfridge, and it turns out the J. Sully on the Wave Three passenger list isn't a typo or a smudge on her screen - stupid too-clever Tom Sully and his crooked smile are dead, and they're sending her his jarhead twin brother like that's going to make up for it. They're, what, four, five years into the trip? No turning back now.

"Fucking fuck," Grace says, closing the tab with a stab of her finger, and she sets down her pad with a clatter. "Motherfucking fuck."

She chainsmokes until she feels marginally human again, and then picks up her pad and opens a new window. She feels a need for some more solo field time.

***

Trudy's heart doesn't beat faster while she waits in the Samson, because that would be incredibly stupid. She braces her feet against the frame of the cockpit door and fiddles with her facemask, because it beats tapping her fingers on the steering yoke. Christ, she's like a teenager waiting for her date to answer the door. It's been months between her trips out with Augustine; it makes no sense, that they hit her like this. What the hell is wrong with her?

Just like that first time, Augustine doesn't say anything in greeting; she just jogs up to Maya, tail curling behind her, and swings into the bay.

"Another bad day?" Trudy says; she'd like to say it gently, but she has to yell or Augustine won't be able to hear her over the rotors, alien cat ears or not.

"You have no fucking idea," Augustine shouts back, and there's a bang like maybe she kicked something.

Trudy flies a little more slowly than usual, a little more gently, and when the tap comes to her shoulder, she brings Maya down so light Parvaz would piss himself with envy if he could see it. Augustine's already out of the bay by the time Trudy unstraps herself, but she doesn't do anything; she just stands there in the middle of the clearing, staring down at her own giant blue ankles and breathing like she's just run a marathon.

"You okay, Doctor Augustine?" Trudy says carefully.

"Oh, yeah," Augustine spits, "I'm fucking fantastic," and she swings an arm around and punches Maya's side.

"Hey, hey, whoa," Trudy says, and darts sideways until she's between Augustine's fist and her baby. "Proportional responses are our friends."

Augustine snorts angrily; she hurt her hand, Trudy realizes, the red blood startlingly bright against her blue-green skin. "If I were responding proportionately," she says, "I'd have shot Selfridge in the head."

Trudy hitches herself up so she's sitting on the bay floor, and snags a spare rag from one of the open equipment crates. "Yeah?" she says. She reaches out for Augustine's hand; Augustine doesn't lift it up to make it easier for her, but she doesn't yank it away, either, and she watches Trudy clean the blood off with a look on her face like she's not really seeing it.

"Yeah," Augustine says, and nothing else. She lowers herself to the edge of the bay next to Trudy, hand closed loosely around the rag, which Trudy has wrapped around her knuckles; and they sit there, oh, must be at least fifteen minutes.

Trudy swings her feet and admires the way the light falls through the leaves. Facemasks are a pain in a lot of ways, but they really don't fog up much.

"I fucked up," Augustine says at last, voice rough like it hurts her throat to say it. "I fucked up, and somebody else paid for it." She bends to rest her elbows on her knees, curling her unhurt hand around the back of her neck; and she closes her eyes. "It should have been me."

Trudy gets that. Venezuela was a clusterfuck; that she's here at all says how lucky she was, how unlucky some other people had to be instead. For months after that, she felt guilty just for breathing - sometimes she thinks that's half the reason she let herself get posted here, like she was hoping for her chance to die and she thought Pandora would give it to her. She's better now; but she remembers what it was like. "I get that," she says.

Augustine snorts. "Really?" she says, snide. "Who'd you get killed?"

Trudy's more annoyed than she was expecting - more hurt by Augustine's snappishness than she ought to be. "More people than you have," she bites out.

She slides out of the bay, gets both boots on the ground, but before she can take more than a step Augustine's hand is on her forearm, long blue fingers circling all the way around. Trudy turns reluctantly; Augustine is looking at her with those wide gold eyes, and Trudy thinks maybe there's an apology in there somewhere, tiny and half-formed. "What did you do about it?" Augustine says.

Trudy looks at her face, and the anger slips away as fast as it came. "I tried harder," Trudy says. "I did better next time."

Augustine looks at her doubtfully. "And that helped."

"I don't know," Trudy says honestly. "Sure seemed more productive than punching things and hating myself."

Augustine stares at her for a long moment, and then her mouth curls into a rueful almost-smile. "Fair enough," she says. She looks at Trudy for another couple seconds, and then abruptly and visibly realizes she's still hanging on to Trudy's arm, and lets go.

The first person to say something about it is Yu Sung; she's there with a cigarette and Grace's coat when the clamshell opens, and when Grace takes the cigarette, she doesn't swear - a critical tactical error.

"Oh, so you had a nice field trip with your girlfriend?" Yu Sung says.

"Where's my goddamn datapad?" Grace says, instead of replying, because it wouldn't do any good. Yu Sung is a terrible person, which means she's a lot like Grace, especially the part where she never lets anything go. But if Grace were to argue with her, Grace thinks grumpily, she'd have a fucking awesome rebuttal. Fine, okay, so Trudy's managed to hang on somewhere in Grace's brain. She's been weirdly nice when Grace doesn't deserve it, and except for ten seconds today all Grace's sour anger has rolled off of her like water, and maybe Grace mentally lingers on the idea of water rolling off of Trudy for a little too long.

But it doesn't mean anything. They've only really talked twice now, for fuck's sake; the first time doesn't even count. It's been months - maybe a whole year, by now - and they don't even really know each other. Trudy's probably friendly to everyone, probably flies plenty of people out over the forest for - for recon, or whatever the hell it is SecOps grunts do with their time.

So Grace spends too much time thinking about the view of Trudy's shoulders from the bay of a Samson. So what.

"You have a girlfriend?" Max says, swiveling around to peer at her over his glasses. Grace knew she should never have requisitioned chairs that spin.

"Yes," Yu Sung says.

"No," Grace snaps.

"The pilot," Yu Sung continues, blithe. "The really hot one - you know. Chacon."

Max whistles. "Nice one, Grace."

Grace rolls her eyes. "Shut the fuck up," she says. She can't wait for Wave Three to get here - then maybe there'll be somebody in her department who's actually afraid of her again. "I need a Samson to take me out; she's a pilot. Do the math."

Yu Sung comes back, Grace's pad in hand. "Yeah, right," she says, "because you always used to request a specific pilot when you went out for samples."

Max sits up straight. "Wait, seriously?" he says. "You put her on the form?"

"She's competent," Grace spits. "It's a nice change from you idiots."

"Ooo, competent," Yu Sung says, sing-song, like Grace recited an ode to Trudy's eyes instead of giving her a marginal compliment. Which is stupid, because Grace has never paid the slightest attention to Trudy's eyes. Ever.

Grace rolls her eyes again and shoves past Yu Sung, toward her office. "Isn't there work you should be pretending to do?" she snaps over her shoulder, and she closes the door behind her before anybody can reply.

***

The first person to say anything about it is Lopez; she's not Trudy's BFF or anything, but they bonded over Stevens's assholery the third time he pretended he couldn't tell them apart. They sit together sometimes when he's at the table, insult him in Spanish and pretend they can't understand him when he tells them to shut the fuck up.

"They can say whatever they want, Stevens, fuck off," Bisset says, rolling her eyes.

"You don't give me orders, Haiti," Stevens snaps, but he doesn't say anything else after, just eyes them with a sour look on his face.

Lopez laughs and scrubs a hand over her head; she keeps her hair buzzed, she's told Trudy before that she likes the way it feels. Cooler under her helmet, doesn't get tangled in her exo-pack's strap. Trudy had asked her how they could ever have sleepovers when she couldn't braid Lopez's hair.

"So," Lopez says, when Stevens is paying more attention to cleaning his plate than he is to them. "You took Augustine out again, huh."

Trudy narrows her eyes. "You haven't been talking to Parvaz, have you? I swear-"

"No, he didn't let slip about your girlfriend," Lopez says, "he's been very good."

The word catches Trudy off-guard, makes something in her chest catch sharply. Girlfriend, jesus. She hasn't used that word since she brought Ana home to meet Mamá in tenth grade, clutching Ana's hands on the maglev, both of their palms sweaty with nerves.

Ana had been sweet, pretty, big dark eyes and a habit of grinning with her tongue between her teeth. It had been easy, to come up behind her and kiss her neck and whisper enamorada in her ear, querida. Trudy thinks of Augustine's bloody knuckles; of her eyes, alien gold unable to hide a certain sharpness that is Augustine herself, not the set of eyeballs she's wearing; and she almost laughs, thinking how badly girlfriend would fit the woman. She ruthlessly ignores the part of her that tells her to give it a try anyway, because that part is clearly not interested in helping her get a grip on this thing.

Lopez is watching her intently. "She's not my girlfriend, Christ," Trudy says. "I'm just nicer than the rest of you assholes."

"Nicer?" Lopez says with a chuckle. "Is that supposed to help your case? You remember Mason."

Mason is the baby among the pilots, the rookie; everybody looks out for him and his big brown eyes. Stevens, the guys who are worse than Stevens - even they don't fuck with Mason, it wouldn't be sporting. Mason went out with Augustine and the avatars once; and he came back with shaking hands and refused to go out with them ever again.

"I'm the right kind of nicer," Trudy amends. Mason is a sweetheart, but she can picture Augustine coming up against his naive bubbly small talk, and the picture makes her wince.

"Yeah, I'm sure you are," Lopez drawls, all insinuation, giving Trudy a slow onceover with one eyebrow high.

"Goddammit, shut up," Trudy says, laughing, and punches Lopez in the arm. Trudy's face is uncomfortably hot; but if Lopez can tell, she's merciful, and doesn't say anything.

Grace keeps going out, sometimes with a team and sometimes not; and she lets herself ask for Trudy again, and again, and it's about a third as often as she wants to. But then, at last, Wave Three arrives. As a rule, Grace doesn't like people; but Tom Sully was smart, vibrant, dedicated. He committed to three years of training and a six-year flight like he was surprised that was all she was asking, like he'd have given her fifty years of his life if she'd asked for it. Maybe she should have - maybe if she'd bundled him on the goddamn shuttle right that second, he'd have had the fifty years to give.

J. Sully - Jake - is an idiot. Grace doesn't give a flying fuck about the wheelchair; what matters is his brain, not whether he's had a spinal or not. And he's an idiot. Doesn't know a fucking thing about Pandora, the avatars, the Na'vi; hell, if he's ever even taken an anthro course in his life, it was 101 and he slept through it.

Norm, she can work with. Yeah, he sounds like he's got a stick up his ass the size of a Samson when he speaks Na'vi, but at least he speaks it. Understands it, too, and he's logged a reasonable number of hours in his avatar - or in the sims, at least.

Once she's done yelling at Selfridge and she comes back to the lab, they're both gone. Max gives her the hairy eyeball, and Yu Sung swings back through and throws Grace's lab coat at her head. "What?" Grace snaps.

"You lost a driver," Yu Sung says, leaning on the rail. "Okay. That sucks. That guy lost his twin brother. Come on, Grace, I know you've got a vestigial soul in there somewhere."

"Mm, wrong - it itched, I got an exorcism," Grace says; but two days later, when Jake comes charging out with his gown still on, wobbling like a kid and wiggling his new blue toes in the dirt, she smiles, and throws him a fruit. She remembers Trudy's voice: proportional responses. It's not Tom Sully's fault he got murdered; it's not Jake's, either.

Doesn't mean Jake's not an idiot, though.

The first day's just getting used to things - Norm hasn't been out before either, not on Pandora itself, and there's a lot of stumbling and laughter and big blue dick jokes. Avram and Tibby and Lanh are already out, Tibby and Lanh playing basketball, and Farah joins them after a while; she's tall already, so her avatar is especially huge.

Jake dunks whenever he gets hold of the ball - typical jarhead bullshit, Grace thinks sourly - until Farah takes it away from him and holds it over her head. Jake, laughing, refuses to promise not to do it again.

"Oh, go take a rest," Avram says from the sidelines, before it can turn into an actual argument. "It's your first day, dude, don't wear it out."

Which is fair enough; Jake's panting a little, his avatar body not used to being up and about. Of course, that means he decides to start wandering around exploring, and it's only a matter of time before he ends up on the porch with Grace.

"Everything working all right, marine?" she says grudgingly, when he stops beside her and leans on the railing.

"Yeah," he says immediately, "yeah, it's - something," but he's giving his own knees a weirdly long, thoughtful look.

Grace waits, eyebrows raised; and when he finally looks at her again, he sees her expression and shakes his head.

"I just," he says, and looks down again, touching a muscle in his thigh with the tips of his fingers. "I don't know. Never mind."

Grace rolls her eyes. "If you're worried I won't respect you in the morning, don't. I don't respect you now, so you can go ahead and say whatever idiot thing is on your mind."

He looks at her for a second. He doesn't give her the uncertain grin Tom would've, just stares at her steadily and then smiles with one side of his mouth, short and quicksilver and a little wry. "I thought it would be - like I was fixed, you know? Like, finally, I've got feet again." He stops, looks at her again; she hitches one eyebrow even higher, so he'll remember how many shits she doesn't give about this conversation. "It just - it means less than I thought it would."

"So who you are has nothing to do with whether you can wiggle your toes," Grace says, flat. "That's so profound. Someone get me a tissue."

He doesn't argue with her the way Tom would've; he snorts. "Sorry," he says, "all I got is a shirtsleeve."

"You revolt me," Grace declares. On the basketball court, Avram has Tibby in a headlock; time for somebody to break it up. "All right, that's enough rest - aren't you grunts supposed to be tough guys?"

"Oorah," Jake says, solemn, and jogs back down the steps.

Yeah, she doesn't like him.

***

Trudy likes him.

The story gets around, like everything does - the brilliant scientist who was supposed to come out, the mugging gone wrong, the jarhead brother getting dragged in to keep a few billion dollars from going to waste. Dramatic stuff, enough to feed the gossip mill for a little while.

"Wonder how he's liking your girlfriend," Bisset says one day, and Trudy just makes a face. It's not worth protesting anymore: it's been ages since Lopez, and not one of the pilots uses Augustine's name now, they just say Chacon's girlfriend and nod knowingly. Assholes. And Trudy's almost getting used to the way her stomach flips when they do, which is probably bad.

She got reassigned officially two days before Wave Three came along; she's the default for the science sorties now. Probably a reorganization thing, she tells herself over and over - Wave Three's here, they're making space, people are getting shifted around. It doesn't help: every time she thinks about it, she smiles.

But she's got a grip on it now. She gets called up to give the guy a quick tour, show him around the Samson bay before he has a chat with the colonel, and she tells him she runs the science missions without blushing or sighing dreamily once. And she likes him. He listens, asks good questions, doesn't get in the way, and he smiles when she and Wainfleet bark at each other. Plus he's got a good fistbump.

"See you on the flight line," she says, and she's kind of looking forward to it.

Like, even more than usual.

She feels like shit for it later, when he vanishes into the jungle with a thanator hard on his heels, and she stretches the flight out as long as she can trying to make up for it. But the sun starts to set, and she shakes her head. "I'm sorry," she shouts to Augustine over the rotors, "he's just going to have to hang on until morning."

"He won't make it until morning," Augustine says, and she sounds more tired than anything else.

That really makes Trudy feel like shit; and when she touches Augustine's shoulder as they're unloading, Augustine barely glances at her, mouth flat. Way to fly the science sorties, she thinks, fuck, and her stomach twists.

So she stows Maya, and for once she lets Wainfleet run the post-flight checks, so that she can get up to the science wing.

It doesn't cross her mind that this'll be the first time she actually sees Augustine in person until she's standing in front of the lab door, and she stops short like an idiot, right there in the hallway.

"... There something you need?" someone asks, and she looks over; it's a guy with his arms full of datapads, already pushing the door open with his elbow even as he raises a brow at her.

She doesn't know what to say, but it ends up not mattering, because somebody in the lab looks up when the door opens. "It's the boss's personal lady-friend!" the man in the spinny chair cries when he sees her, and at least three people grin.

Trudy blinks. How did the pilots' stupid joking bullshit spread all the way up here?

"Good, great, excellent," a woman on the upper walk says, and she hurries to the door and takes Trudy's arm. "She's been in a shit mood since you got back, hurry up and fix it."

Trudy considers protesting, but she does want to talk to Augustine, even if she doubts anything's going to be fixed because of it. So she lets the woman - Hong, probably, if she talks about Augustine's anger so comfortably - guide her back along the walk to Augustine's office.

"Special delivery," Hong says brightly when she opens the door.

"Yu Sung, I thought I said-" Augustine starts; and then she sees Trudy, twitches a little, and abruptly turns back around.

Not a promising start.

Hong smiles. "Don't fuck up," she says to Trudy, and then pats her on the shoulder and pulls the door shut again behind her.

"I'm sorry we couldn't keep flying," Trudy says after a moment, because if she keeps standing here staring at the lines of Augustine's back she's going to seem like a complete creep. "Colonel's orders-"

Augustine turns around, and Trudy gets her first proper look at the woman's actual face. Weirdly, her first thought is that Augustine looks exactly the same, except maybe her ears stick out less. "What?" Augustine says, and then her face twists. "You think I'm pissed at you?"

Trudy shrugs. "You look pissed, and there's only two people in this room," she says.

Augustine gives her an eloquent look. "Yeah," she says, "you're right," and she turns back to her desk.

"It's not your fault," Trudy says, a little louder than she meant to.

"Of course it is," Augustine snaps. "I knew he was an idiot, and I took him out there anyway." Her cigarette must have burned down; she's still facing away, but Trudy can see her yank it from her mouth and stub it out on the desk, her motions sharp and a little vicious. "I screwed up with the first one, too, but at least I managed to keep him alive for a couple years, instead of a couple days."

"The trip out was six years," Trudy says, "or are you not counting that?"

Augustine snorts and doesn't answer. She's still standing up, fists planted against the desk, and her head is bowed. Her stance does really unfair things with the arcs of her shoulderblades, but Trudy shouldn't be thinking about that when Augustine is so upset.

Trudy lets herself step a little closer, even though it's probably for mostly selfish reasons. She doesn't get quite close enough to touch, but she's definitely in Augustine's space, definitely closer than she ought to be standing. She leans until her thigh is resting on Augustine's desk, until the flat of her hand on the desk's surface is inches from Augustine's fist. "Augustine-"

"Grace, for fuck's sake," Augustine says. "I killed somebody in front of you today, call me Grace."

Trudy eyes her profile; Augustine - Grace - didn't even turn to look at her when she said it. "Okay, I'm calling you Grace," she says, "but, just to be clear, that's not why."

Grace does look at her, then. "Don't give me any bullshit," she says. "You know what's out there as well as I do. They'll have to drag my dead body off this moon before I'll leave it, but I'm not kidding myself, Trudy. He's fucked."

"You don't know that," Trudy says. "You don't know anything, yet. And you've still got his body - he's still breathing, isn't he?"

"For now," Grace says grudgingly.

"So worry about who killed him when he's dead," Trudy says. "He's not dead yet."

"Yeah, it's just a flesh wound," Grace mutters, and Trudy laughs.

"Seriously, Grace," she says. "Don't beat yourself up until you actually have something to beat yourself up for. You don't know - he might be just fine."

"Oh, shit, you're a fucking optimist, aren't you?" Grace says, with a theatrical roll of her eyes; but she turns around at last, and rests her ass on the edge of the desk, fishing another cigarette from her lab coat pocket.

"Hell yes," Trudy says, and tries to ignore how close her fingers are to Grace's thigh.

***

Trudy stays in the science labs all evening, poking fun at Yu Sung and stealing Max's chair every time he gets up; Grace suspects that she notices how many cigarettes Grace is going through, but she doesn't say anything about it.

The point is, she's still there when the computer signals a change in Jake's brain patterns at 23:37, and she's at Grace's shoulder, leaning so close she's nearly pressed along Grace's side, when the clamshell finally comes open.

Grace is clutching the flashlight and slapping Jake's cheek, trying to decide whether punching him in the face would actually help or just make her feel better, when he finally opens his eyes properly. At least six hands help him sit up, and two of them are Grace's; his skin is sweaty, clammy, but he doesn't seem to feel it. He just looks at her and smiles. "You aren't going to believe where I am," he says, and when he tells them, Grace almost doesn't.

But he knows so many things, describes Neytiri and Tsu'tey and Mo'at so perfectly. He doesn't know the words for any of it, but Grace can translate: "fucking bolas got me in the ankles" means Tsu'tey had a skxawik and used it; "almost trampled me with these six-legged demon horses" means they were riding pa'lis. After the pit mine massacres, kids pulled from the school so quick it was open one day and closed the next, she'd thought the Na'vi would never forgive anyone from the base for the things they've done on this moon. But Jake's gleeful face says she must have been wrong.

She wants to keep him there, trap him in the clamshell and make him tell her everything at once; but Trudy's warm hand catches her shoulder. "You've already had him for half an hour, Grace," she says, "it's past midnight. Let the guy sleep, Christ."

Grace wants to roll her eyes - he's a Marine, surely they can just fill him with coffee and keep going. Grace stayed awake for sixty hours at a time in grad school.

But Trudy raises her eyebrows before Grace can say anything.

Grace sighs. Yeah, okay, in grad school she hadn't usually spent her day sprinting away from enraged thanators and trying to keep up with Neytiri. Fine.

"Okay, but I want to see you first thing in the morning," she snaps at Jake, and she waits until he nods before she moves out of his way.

She doesn't see him first thing in the morning, but it's not Jake's fault. Quaritch calls him up to his stupid "command center" for some kind of extra orientation meeting or something; Grace misses the notification because she's ignoring her pad. Yu Sung used the admin login to program it with like a dozen reminders to sleep that go off every night, and Grace is shit at remembering passwords, so she just lets it bing at her and keeps working.

But the extra time means that when he does roll in, ready to link up again, she's got a plan. She's put together presentations, photos so he doesn't screw up their names and things he needs to remember to look for while he's there. And if she tells him to ask after Kxamiyat and Po'alamawn and Itatima for reasons that are less than purely research-oriented, well, he doesn't know it.

Yu Sung does, but she doesn't say anything; she only gives Grace a longer look than usual when she hands over the cigarettes.

Norm and Jake prod each other a little, but Grace breaks it up before they can really get going - now's not the time. Although Jake's choice of words is unintentionally hilarious; if he actually spends today doing anything remotely like being on a date, Grace will eat her datapad.

"Don't do anything unusually stupid," she tells him, in case it'll help, and then the clamshell closes over him and it's out of her hands.

***

Sully's already out there somewhere in the woods - or his avatar is, same difference. Point is, Trudy doesn't have to fly him anywhere, so she's sort of surprised when a science flight comes up on her duty roster.

"Your girlfriend must be missing you," Lopez says knowingly, and Trudy almost forgets to roll her eyes, she's so caught up wondering whether maybe it's true.

She guides Maya out of the hangar and over toward the avatar enclosure, hands deliberately steady on the yoke, and settles her down. Grace is already waiting, and she gives Trudy a nod before she swings into the back, absentminded.

She's jittery back there on the way out, turning back and forth in the straps, biting her blue lips and tapping her feet - Trudy can't hear it over the steady thrum of the rotors, but the floor vibrates against her heels with every thump. Grace is practically itchy with waiting; of course, Trudy thinks, it must be the next best thing to hell for her, being stuck in her office with nothing to do but hope Sully can hack it as a Na'vi.

When they land and she shuts Maya down, she broaches the subject casually, and is rewarded with a harsh snort. "Oh, it's like a dream come true," Grace says, yanking a handful of sample bags from her pack with a jerk. "What kind of idiot would fuck around with actual fieldwork when they could trust the opportunity of a lifetime to a jarhead a week old?"

Wave One habit, dating people by how long they've been on Pandora - like nobody was really born until they got off the transport. "Yeah, if only you'd pissed off a thanator sooner," Trudy says.

Grace sighs, and lets the wrist of one glove go with a snap. Not even her avatar's fingers get to contaminate her samples. "They wouldn't have let me back in anyway," she says, and her voice is quieter and sadder than Trudy's ever heard it.

Trudy looks at her. Technically speaking, it's years now that they've known each other, even if they started slow - and she still hasn't asked, because there's never a good time to ask about shit like that. But it's a pretty long way back without a Samson; Grace probably has the sense not to kill the only pilot around. "What happened?" she says, careful without quite crossing the line into pity. Although the subtleties might get a little lost on the way through her exo-pack.

Grace shakes out a sample bag, not looking up. "You know," she says.

Trudy frowns at her, but Grace still won't look up; and then Trudy remembers. Their third trip out together, Grace's narrow blue shoulders tight with anger, blood on her knuckles. I fucked up. Who'd you get killed? That had been three days after the pit mine massacres - Trudy'd had to hear about it second-hand from Parvaz, she'd been off-duty with a bad fever the day of. But surely that's not what Grace had been talking about. Her department hadn't been anywhere near the chain of command that led to that shitstorm.

"Grace-"

Grace rolls a shoulder, not just shrugging so much as shrugging something off. "He's an idiot," she says, like the last fifteen seconds didn't happen at all. "He doesn't know shit about this place, about them - he doesn't even know how to say hello, for fuck's sake."

Not a very graceful attempt to change the subject, but Trudy decides to be generous and let her get away with it. She hops out of the bay after Grace and follows her across the moss. "Neither did you, once," she says.

Grace sighs, bending over a tangle of roots. "I nearly forgot," she grumbles, "you're one of those assholes with an answer for everything."

Trudy grins. "I'm just saying," she says. "That girl he met, Neytiri - she's dealt with you guys a lot, hasn't she?"

Grace snorts, bitter again for a telling moment. "Too much," she says.

"So she's an experienced idiot wrangler," Trudy says.

Grace shakes her head, mouth pinching sourly, and slices a piece off a root; but Trudy sees something like a smile in the corners of her eyes.

Trudy tromps past her and settles down against the tree. "So," she says, "what are you going to do with this batch?" She understands maybe a quarter of the things that come out of Grace's mouth in answer; but that's okay. Grace needs something else to think about, and Trudy is happy to provide.

Besides, she thinks sheepishly, it's not like it's a hardship to watch Grace bend over a lot.

Miraculously, Jake doesn't get himself killed, by either the pa'lis or Neytiri; and Grace makes him tell her everything that happened, from the moment he woke up in Hometree to the moment he fell asleep again.

"Jeez, Grace," he says, when he's three-quarters done, rubbing at his eyes while he tries to remember the word Neytiri used for the dish they had for dinner. "Is it that important?"

Abruptly, she wants to scream at him; she wants to grab his shoulders and shake him until he understands. The last time she saw any of them, it was Neytiri and Kxamiyat and Iloawa, staring at her with wary eyes and closed faces. We can't come today. We have to help bury them, Kxamiyat had said, and Grace hadn't been cruel enough to pretend she didn't know what Kxamiyat was talking about. We owed you enough to tell you ourselves: we won't be coming back again. If Jake can't do this, there won't be another chance.

But she doesn't do it. She sucks in a breath and rubs her eyes, and then squints at the nearest monitor. 21:57 - not that late, except they'd started the day at about 04:30, and tomorrow will be the same way. "Okay, okay," she says, "I can get the rest out of you in the morning."

Jake follows her gaze to the time. "Shit, yeah, I have to - go," he says, and wheels himself hurriedly up the ramp to the door.

Fine, good; he can get some sleep, and she can turn the notes she just took into something someone else might actually be able to read.

"I know that face," Yu Sung says, on her way past with a datapad, "and I will lock you in your office and blow the fuse for the lights if that's what it takes to make you sleep."

"Pads glow for a reason," Grace says haughtily.

But just in case, she stays at the main desk, and she's still there when Max comes in at 22:38.

"Yeah, what?" she says, eyes still on her screen; but he doesn't answer, so she looks up.

He's frowning - and this is Max, who nearly always has a smile on his face. He shifts his weight, uncertain, and when he meets her eyes he bites his lip. "I think - I think there's something you need to know. Jake, he's - he's meeting with Quaritch. I heard them."

Grace rides the first wave of righteous anger all the way through to 05:45, when the clamshell closes over Jake and his mind zips off to the forest and leaves his brain behind. She thought about telling everyone first thing, but it took her almost half an hour to stop wanting to break things. It'll be a little tough to get him out there if everybody's busy glaring daggers at him, and they need him to go.

And that, right there, is the part that makes this stick so hard in Grace's throat. They need him, even if he is a two-faced asshole. He's their chance to salvage the program, the department - hell, the entire goddamn moon, depending on what exactly Quaritch is expecting to do with the info Jake's been giving him. As much as she'd love to boot Jake out the door and lock it behind him, she can't. She can't afford to.

So she tells them after he's gone; and she keeps it vague. "Micromanage" is a new level of bullshit-speak for "quite possibly use as an excuse to blow things up and murder people", but she works for Selfridge, she learned from the best.

It's Yu Sung who brings up the mobile linkup at Site 26. Grace had almost forgotten about it; it's been a while since they've gone into the Hallelujahs. Even with the alloy shield around the mobile sites, it's risky - the electromagnetic flux fucks up scientific equipment just as badly as navigational equipment. "Quaritch won't bother keeping an eye on you there," Yu Sung says with a snort. "You know he doesn't like having to look where he's going."

Tibby and Norm help her pack; the mobile linkup has all the equipment they need to drive their avatars, but not her notes, her files, or her latest botany samples. They're only about halfway done by the time Jake comes back in the evening, and he listens to Grace's explanation without even a twitch of guilt in his face.

What a jackass.

***

"I wish RDA paid me to go hang out with my girlfriend for three months," Parvaz says, and Trudy swats him in the head without looking away from her datapad.

"Wait, really?" says Pai. She's Wave Three, fresh out of Mumbai, but she's already doing it, too - hell, she might even think Grace really is Trudy's girlfriend, if nobody's told her different. Bisset probably made it part of her orientation speech, Trudy thinks grumpily.

"Let me see," Lopez says, not really asking, and Trudy's fingers tighten a second too late; Lopez has already snaked the pad out of her hands. "No kidding - twelve weeks at Site 26, with Spellman and Sully and Augustine." The tone of her voice goes all soupy on Grace's name, Trudy can practically see little pink hearts dripping out of it.

"Shut the fuck up," Trudy says, but without much heat; she's said it so many times, she can't really invest it with the proper disdain anymore. She snags the pad back from Lopez, and stares at the screen.

Her inner twelve-year-old is already skipping through fields of daisies - or helicoradians, scorpion thistles, whatever it is they've got in the Hallelujahs - but something about it fills the rest of her with misgivings. Why would Grace suddenly pack up and head off to the middle of nowhere, and leave her whole department behind? The connectivity's for shit in the mountains, even when the satellites are up; Grace probably won't be in touch with the rest of her staff one day out of every ten. Hong's clearly good at her job, or Grace would have gotten rid of her years ago; but Trudy's trying to imagine Grace cheerfully giving somebody else the reins, and it's not working.

Unless - unless it would be somebody she liked even less, if she stayed. Or something worse. A departmental audit? Is Selfridge screwing with her budget?

Away, Grace had said, that first time. What does she need to get away from now?

Trudy's on autopilot nearly the whole way out to Site 26 - not literally, of course, once they get into the vortex and the instruments start to go. She kind of loves taking the new kids to the Hallelujahs, it's fun to watch their jaws drop.

But mostly she's still trying to figure out what the hell they're doing out here; and she doesn't get an answer for hours.

The sound of the airlock closing is what wakes her up, and she squints blearily at her watch. 01:13, Christ, who'd go outside at that hour?

The second she finishes the thought, an answer presents itself, and she sits up and snaps her exo-pack on, kicking Spellman affectionately in the ribs as she climbs down from her bunk.

It's a little windy outside, but mostly quiet - fewer things live up here than down in the forest, and Maya coming in earlier probably scared most of them away. It's not exactly hard to spot Grace, with Polyphemus huge and blue in the sky. She's near the end of the flat ground, where it turns into something that's not quite steep enough to be called a cliff, and as Trudy watches, Grace kicks out and a rock tumbles over the edge.

"Hey," Trudy says, and Grace doesn't twitch, only heaves a sigh, the sound turned mechanical by her exo-pack. She must have heard Trudy coming. "Are you going to punch me in the head if I come closer?"

"If I say yes," Grace says, "will you go away?"

Trudy grins. "Nah. I'll just know whether or not I need to duck."

Grace snorts, and kicks another rock. "Fuck this fucking - fuck," she says feelingly, and turns. "Did Norm tell you anything?"

"Spellman's been a little occupied with the entire geological history of the Hallelujahs," Trudy says. The first half of the flight in, he'd barely even paused to breathe.

"That asshole sold us out," Grace says.

Trudy is lost. "Spellman?" He doesn't seem like the type.

"Jake," Grace says. "Max saw him, he's been telling Quaritch-" She breaks off, scuffs a boot against the ground.

"Telling him what?" Trudy says, and she keeps it gentle, even though there's something cold creeping down her spine. Sold them out - what the hell does that mean? Is Grace doing something Quaritch isn't supposed to know about? Trudy knows Grace doesn't like Quaritch, but he's Trudy's CO-

"God, fuck," Grace says, "I don't even know. Max said they had scans of Hometree, that he was telling them about the internal structure - and what the fuck would Quaritch need to know that for?"

The first thing Trudy feels is a wave of relief - Christ, she was starting to think she'd have to radio back and turn Grace in or something, which would make this officially the worst day of her life. But then she thinks about what Grace is saying, and she can't come up with an answer to Grace's question that means anything good. She looks at Grace, who's staring out over the mountains with her mouth tight behind her facemask, and she feels a rush of something she probably should avoid putting a word to. "You're worried about them, aren't you?" she says. "The Na'vi."

Grace sighs. "We've put them through so much bullshit," she says, "and that's not even counting the mass murder. And I shouldn't be saying any of this shit to you, but I don't trust Quaritch to do anything but kill people and blow things up."

Trudy feels like she probably shouldn't agree with that out loud, but she can't totally disagree, either; so she just stays quiet. Quaritch cares about his people, she knows he does, and he's not asking something she'd expect Sully to refuse to give, not yet. But Quaritch has been in so many wars that he can't tell they aren't - shouldn't be - in one here, and Trudy can admit to herself, if no one else, that it's made her uncomfortable before. And it probably will again.

The ground's soft out here - probably fluorescent Pandoran death moss or something, but she lowers herself down and lets her feet dangle over the edge. She hears another sigh, above and behind, and then Grace sits, too, closer than Trudy was expecting - their thighs are nearly touching. Trudy's heart thumps hopefully. "Nice night," she tries.

Grace snorts. "That the best you got, optimist?"

Trudy shrugs, casual. "Hey," she says, "we're out here; it's done now. All you've got left to do is wait and see whether it blows up in your face or what."

"And you know how I love waiting," Grace says, so hilariously sour that Trudy has to smile.

She's been so good, she's handled it so well: she's not expecting it to hit her like it does. They get up after maybe ten minutes, walk to the airlock; Grace looks drawn in the dim airlock lights, yanking her exo-pack off like it's personally offended her, hair mussed and bushy in the back from the strap. She's so utterly Grace that it winds Trudy like a punch in the throat, and before she's totally sure what she's doing, she has a hand curled way, way too gently around the curve of Grace's neck, the heel of it resting warm on Grace's collarbone.

Grace looks at her, eyebrows just starting to draw down into a curious frown.

"This is definitely going to blow up in my face," Trudy says, half to herself, "but apparently I'm even shittier at waiting than you are."

She's not stupid, or an asshole; she doesn't just lay one right on Grace out of nowhere. She draws in as close as she can, and then touches her mouth to Grace's cheek. She doesn't touch Grace's lips, but it's way too close to the corner of her mouth to actually be ambiguous - and it lasts way too long, because if Grace is going to kill her for this she's going to take her time.

Grace is still and quiet under Trudy's mouth for what seems like forever. Which, Trudy's not complaining, exactly; but she's trying to tell Grace something, not trying to be a complete creep, so she moves away first.

And Grace - Grace looks fucking ghastly when Trudy backs away; and something in Trudy's chest flickers sharply and goes out. "Funny," Grace says, too harsh. "Funny, Chacon, that's - Max put you up to this?"

And, okay, that wasn't Trudy's smoothest move ever, but it was sincere, dammit. What does Grace think, anyway? That Trudy doesn't kiss people unless she's messing with them? "No," Trudy says, calm as she can manage; and Grace laughs.

"Fine, not Max," she says. "I'll find out who and I'll kick their ass. Let go."

Grace doesn't knock Trudy's arm away, which surprises Trudy, as much as she can feel anything besides the dull sick heat in her face; but she doesn't have to. Trudy wouldn't hold on to anyone who was looking at her like that.

Grace yanks open the inner door the second Trudy lets go of her, and Trudy follows, hanging up her exo-pack with clumsy fingers. Good thing she doesn't have to fly anybody anywhere tomorrow. She'll be pretty goddamn shocked if she falls asleep now.

***

Grace doesn't believe in not clearing the air, in letting things fester because you're too much of a shithead to say what you're thinking; but god help her if she can talk to Trudy.

It's the embarrassment that's getting her - Grace isn't used to feeling embarrassed, and the unfamiliar way her gut lurches whenever she sees Trudy's face is throwing her off. If only she hadn't paused for so long, hadn't let herself be fooled by Trudy's stupid hand on her neck, stupid mouth on her cheek. If she'd been quicker, it could have gone off like the joke it was supposed to be; but she'd wanted it too much, she'd held still for it, and now she can't look Trudy in the eye without her ears burning.

Fuck Yu Sung anyhow, fuck her and Max and all of them. Grace shouldn't have let herself believe it for a second, no matter how many goddamn times they called Trudy her girlfriend.

Fuck.

She spends the next few days acting like nothing ever happened. She assigns Jake to Beulah - Unit 1, that is, because she's the least glitchy, and if his connection craps out while his avatar is a hundred feet up leaping branches with Neytiri, they're going to be out however many billions of dollars as surely as if Tom Sully had been an only child. Grace gets something of a kick out of forcing him to do his video logs every night, and the patter of his voice becomes a soothing murmur in the background while she slides sample after sample under her microscope and tries to pretend Trudy doesn't exist.

He's an idiot, that hasn't changed; but out here, he's her idiot, not Quaritch's. She checks the comm records every morning for the first couple weeks, but he doesn't even try to send out a signal or make a data transfer back to the base, and he sits through hours of Norm drilling him on vocabulary and syntax, grinding through the things he doesn't understand with something steady and determined that could almost be called patience. She stops checking after that; Yu Sung would be proud, after all the sarcasm she's expended telling Grace about this new thing they're calling "the benefit of the doubt".

She still doesn't like him, though.

She doesn't know what Trudy does with her time when one of them hasn't collared her to fly them out for samples - mostly she tries not to think about it. Trudy hangs out with Norm a lot, which is good, great; he should have somebody to talk to so Jake doesn't drive him nuts, and - and he does. Which is good. Great. Trudy even helps him explain things to Jake, when she can.

"Tell it to me so I can tell it to him," she says, the day Norm tries for like the eighth time to explain the verb "kame" properly.

"I don't know how else to say it!" Norm says, throwing up his hands in exasperation that's only half joking. "I see you, I perceive you, with more than just my eyes, you know? I'm not using long words, here-"

Jake reaches across the table and punches him in the arm, and Trudy laughs.

"I understand you," Grace says without thinking, eye still to her microscope, and then belatedly looks up.

Jake nudges one wheel, rolling his chair back a little so he can look at her over his shoulder, and beyond him, Trudy-

Grace isn't looking at Trudy ever again, she reminds herself. "I get you," she simplifies, and wonders whether Jake would understand her if she used grok in a sentence. "I see the things that make you who you are, I understand them, I respect them. I realize it's a little more touchy-feely than the way you usually interact with people-"

Jake rolls his eyes, grinning, and then looks at her again. "I get you," he repeats, studiously. "I know you, I respect you-" He breaks off, shakes his head. "I can't take this seriously, man, it's like I'm about to compliment them on their auras or something."

"That's because you're not ready, grasshopper," Norm intones. "You must use the Force, you must paint with all the colors of the wind - hey!"

Trudy draws back her fist and smiles. "I would dare you to sing the whole song," she says, "but you'd do it, wouldn't you?" Her eyes find Grace, which is when Grace realizes abruptly that she couldn't even not look at Trudy for thirty stupid seconds; but Trudy's face is open, the smile still lingering, and Grace is an adult, dammit, she can handle a little gut-lurching to see that again. They were friends, Grace thinks, before the stupid thing in the airlock, and Grace should probably be on good terms with at least one person in the universe before she dies.

"He likes to hum the soundtrack to himself when he's working late," she says, and keeps her hands steady by pressing them both flat against the microscope.

"Slander!" Norm says. "I don't hum. I burst into jubilant song, and you love it."

They're two months in, the day Sully comes back to the clamshell with a shit-eating grin on his face.

It's been good, Trudy thinks. Grace has stopped going grim every time Trudy looks at her, stopped avoiding Trudy's hands. She hadn't ever actually flinched, she was smarter than that; she'd simply found ways to always be more than an armslength from wherever Trudy was standing. Which made Trudy feel like shit, for a while there - but now it's better. She talks to Trudy again, snaps at her and yells at her and makes Trudy fly her down to the forest at ridiculous hours, and maybe it's pathetic but Trudy's glad for it. All right, so Grace doesn't want her, so she put herself out there and Grace thought it was a joke. That sucks; but it's no Venezuela, and Trudy's never been good at staying angry, at other people or at life. Shit happens. Grace is griping at her again and neither one of them is dead, which makes it a win on Trudy's personal scoreboard.

And then one evening Sully comes awake and shoves Beulah open, and catches Grace by the wrist before she can move away from the control panel. "You're going to love this," he says. "They want you to come back."

Trudy looks at Grace, expecting her to smile at the very least, or maybe even cry: but Grace just stares at him. "What, to attend your execution or something?" she says. "What the hell did you do?"

Sully shakes his head, still grinning. "I talked to them," he says.

"You," Grace says, voice practically dripping with doubt. "You talked to them."

Sully shrugs. "I'm getting pretty good at this treehugger shit," he says.

Grace snorts and rolls her eyes; but Trudy can see something like a tremor in her hands when she turns and heads back toward the bunks.

Trudy's never been accused of having much of a sense of self-preservation.

"Good news," she says, leaning against the end of Grace's bunk.

Grace looks up, startled - she didn't hear Trudy following her. "Something like that," she says dryly, and then looks down at her hands. "They shouldn't, you know," and she looks up again, something grim, self-conscious, in the slant of her mouth. "I don't deserve it."

"Well, they are anyway," Trudy says. "So get off your ass and boot up Isabel." After Beulah, Unit 8 is the next best; Grace has been using Isabel for most of her sample trips.

"Go warm up the car," Grace shoots back, and Trudy grins and goes to find her exo-pack.

***

Trudy can't just fly up to Hometree and drop Grace off - she couldn't have even before things had gotten completely fucked up. She brings Maya down in a clearing about three-quarters of the way there, and yells "Good luck!" over the hum of the rotors.

"Don't need it," Grace shouts back, and she can see Trudy's grin through the cockpit window before Trudy takes off again.

It feels like a long way to the village, a long way and not nearly long enough. She hasn't been this close to Hometree in over a year; she'd forgotten how it loomed overhead, how far the shade fell. She's missed it, even though her stomach won't stop lurching with nerves.

Jake's the first person she sees. He was waiting for her, she realizes, and can't decide whether she wants to roll her eyes. "Heya, Grace," he says, grinning, and then stands up straight and dips his head. "Oel ngati kameie," he adds, and his pronunciation might be shit but she thinks maybe he almost means it.

"Oel ngati kameie," she replies, and she kind of means it, too. He's still an idiot; he still went behind her back, talking to Quaritch like that. But she's starting to see that he didn't know it. He didn't understand, he didn't know what was at stake - and he's beginning to, now, even if he doesn't entirely get it. He still thinks everybody who works for RDA must be on the same side.

Hopefully he'll work it out faster than she did.

He grins at her, and then turns, and Kxamiyat is there behind him, with Iloawa and Po'alamawn. Their hands and shoulders and cheeks are painted with red, the color of blood and of family, and the patterns are spirals - the symbols of entry, of letting in. "Doctorgrace," Kxamiyat says soberly, and then, in Na'vi, "we're glad you've come."

She's gotten taller, Grace thinks, and Po'alamawn was always a weed. Iloawa looks nearly the same. They must have talked to Mo'at; they must have asked if they could be the ones to do the welcoming. Grace drops to her knees and touches the ground, the traditional gesture to appeal for Eywa's approval, and they all hold the formal poses for a moment - and then Kxamiyat's face breaks into a smile, and she takes the three steps that lie between them and touches Grace's hair with spiral-painted hands. "You haven't had anybody to braid it for you, have you?" she says, and beside her, Iloawa giggles.

"Jakesully's not very good at braiding," Grace confides.

"I can tell," Kxamiyat says sunnily. "It looks awful."

"What did you say about me?" Jake says, in shaky but passable Na'vi; and Grace grins at him, with teeth.

"Sorry," she says, "can't talk, I'm having my hair done," and she says it in English; ka'awalu doesn't mean quite the same thing, it's got a slightly more ceremonial connotation to it, and she's not sure he's even learned that verb. Neytiri's probably been too busy teaching him how not to kill himself to cover the intricacies of hair etiquette.

"You'll look like part of a clan again," Kxamiyat assures her, already sliding beads off the first braid. "Just give us a little while."

And it's stupid, it is, but she has to blink hard for a second - neat braids, here, mean you have somebody to look after you, somebody who wants to take care of you. Grace has written articles and papers and whole book chapters on the socio-cultural context of it, dissected it and pinned it down and spun out every hypothesis she could conceive of; but somehow that hasn't managed to stop it from meaning something to her, that Kxamiyat would cluck and scold and rebraid her hair.

"Me next!" Iloawa says, hands on his hips; and Grace gives him an arch look.

"Me first," she says.

Iloawa flicks his tail at her, which is something along the lines of sticking out your tongue. "Yeah," he says, "but me next," and when she stretches over to poke his belly he darts away, laughing.

"Hold still, Doctorgrace," Kxamiyat says, "you'll make me mess it up!"

***

Most days, Trudy just waits in the forest, but that wasn't really an option today; so they set pickup time for 19:00. It got boring, kicking around the site by herself - even Spellman was out today, doing the rounds at the remote recording sites to collect data and do minor repairs. But she knew a day wouldn't be half the time Grace wanted, so she made herself leave a little late. Which was probably a terrible idea, but she couldn't convince herself to regret it. She'd touched down in the clearing, and Grace had come charging up to Maya with a Na'vi kid clinging to her back and shouting with glee.

"So he did it, huh?" she says to Grace, when she's landed Maya back at Site 26 and shut her down.

"Turns out he does know how to ask nicely," Grace says, dry. "Trust me, nobody's more surprised than me," and she hops out of the bay. Which, that last is probably true; after that thing with Quaritch that drove them out here, Sully talking to Mo'at on her behalf is probably the last thing Grace was expecting.

"How'd it go?" Trudy says, swinging down out of the cockpit.

Grace has already turned to head toward the storage room, to leave her avatar before Trudy goes in and unplugs her; but she turns back, and leans against Maya's side. "It went great," Grace admits.

"So a little optimism wouldn't have been off track," Trudy says leadingly.

Grace sniffs, and doesn't take the bait. "It was good," she says instead, "it was - nice to see them," and she lets the edge of a smile escape. "Neytiri was out with a hunting party, but Jake's being assessed by Mo'at-"

"Neytiri was one of your kids?" Trudy says. She hadn't known that.

"Not a kid," Grace says, "she was fifteen when we started - she'd already passed motxikira and become a warrior." Grace shakes her head, remembering. "She missed the second week to go into the mountains and bond an ikran. She hated me for at least a month after that - she was a warrior, school was kid stuff, but Eytukan made her go so she could tell him what we were doing."

Trudy grins. She hasn't met any of the Na'vi, but she's seen their pictures, and she's watched one or two of the videos from before over Norm's shoulder; she's seen a couple of Grace's students, frowning and thoughtful, carefully describing how to string a bow in English.

"It was harder for her to pick it up," Grace says, "since she was older, but she hated letting anybody beat her at anything. She'd make me set up a recorder in the middle of the office, tape hours and hours of all of us talking so she could listen to it later and see how much she could pick out. Yu Sung figured she didn't need her vocabulary expanded too far, so she started a swear jar. We got eighty-two luxury ration chips in the first three days."

Trudy tips her head back and laughs at that. "What did you do with them?"

Grace grins at her. "Oh, they're still there," she says. "Max likes to give them to the tech support department whenever we call them in, he says it's positive reinforcement." Her smile softens a little, just for a moment. "It was good," she repeats, and Trudy has the sneaking suspicion that she's not talking about today anymore.

"See," Trudy says without thinking, "not everything blows up in your face," and fuck, fuck, that was so stupid; that's almost exactly what she said in the airlock, why did she phrase it like that?

Grace looks away, a little too quickly to be casual; they're definitely not in the clear yet, but at least she doesn't turn angry and silent again. "Fucking optimist," she says, and tugs her pack out of the bay. "Give me five to get put away, and then unplug me."

"Got it," Trudy says, and definitely does not at all run away.

Jake passes motxikira that same week, and he goes up to the mountains with the other young warriors for the iknimaya, to bond an ikran - Ngang, he calls it, and Grace snorts when he tells them.

"What?" Trudy says. "What's it mean?"

"Stomach," Grace tells her, and Jake grins.

"The first day," he says, "I took him back to Hometree and he just sat there and stuffed himself until the sun went down." He pauses for a second, poking the cold MRE Grace dumped in front of him, and then adds, wistful, "Flies like a dream, though." The look in his eyes when he tells them about his first flight, gesturing wildly over the table, almost makes Grace smile by accident. "And they're going to make me a part of the clan," he says at the end, shoving the last of the food in his mouth.

Grace rolls her eyes and pushes another MRE over. He's been spending hours in Beulah at a time; his human body needs to eat, too.

"He's done good," Trudy says later, looming over Grace's shoulder, when Jake's finally gone to sleep.

Grace sniffs. "It's ceremonial," she says. "When somebody from one clan does a great service for another, they can be inducted as a member. Not uncommon, at least in this region."

"He's done good," Trudy repeats, and now she sounds amused.

"He's done okay," Grace allows, and lets herself lean back in her chair, shoulder almost touching Trudy's thigh. It's the kind of stupid shit she used to do in middle school, nudging her chair "accidentally" before she sat down in it so her knees were nearly tangled with Mike Duchesne's.

Of course, that was before she'd figured out he couldn't even remember the steps in the Calvin cycle without writing them on his hand. Intro Biology had not been his strong suit.

Trudy laughs, a little puff of breath, and then leans down to rest her elbow on the back of Grace's chair. "What is this, anyway?" she says, and makes a little motion at Grace's screen.

"Scans of Hometree," Grace says, and toggles it back to the EM view, purple and white threading up through the trunk like roots in reverse. "We're still not entirely sure what's going on with her, and I'd like to have more data before I try to present anything to the trustees." It'll take a while, to put together a video, and she won't be able to answer questions for four months - eight months, really, with the time her answers will take to get back. She wants it to be as thorough as it can be.

"Her?" Trudy says.

"Eywa," Grace says, "we think," and turns in her chair: Trudy's expression suggests that illumination has yet to dawn. "Look, you've heard Norm explaining her to Jake, right?"

Trudy shrugs one shoulder. "God, sort of," she says. "Mother of everything, creator of the universe, the master weaver of fate, that kind of thing."

"Well," Grace says, "we think maybe she's real. Not precisely the way the Na'vi conceptualize her - not that the mythocultural construct is invalid, that's a stupid thing for an anthropologist to say, but the strictly scientific reality sort of precludes a loom that encompasses the universe."

"Of course," Trudy says, blithe, and blinks innocently when Grace narrows her eyes.

"It's not just Hometree." Grace gestures back at the screen. "All the trees are like that, and the vast, vast majority of them have forged connections with each other - tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, from every single tree. And our samples have been showing for years that Pandoran trees can conduct electro-chemical reactions in a way that is utterly unlike any tree on Earth."

"Wait, wait," Trudy says, "hold up - are you telling me the planet's a brain?"

"It's not a planet, it's a moon," Grace says crisply. "The number of junctions between these trees makes the human brain look like a twelve-piece set of Legos. We have no idea whether the network's actually supporting anything like a consciousness the way we understand it; but it certainly could, given its size. We don't know enough to be sure. Which is why I need more data."

"A brain," Trudy repeats.

"Will you stop that? It has storage capabilities, at the very least - I couldn't get samples, but Neytiri took me to an utral aymokriya once, and you can definitely hear something. It's even likely that this capacity's affected evolution, considering just about everything out there has a tswin." Grace sighs and touches the edge of the enter key, frowning at her scan. "What I really need is some way to record data off the utral aymokriya. That way we could determine whether the network genuinely stores memories, and how complete they are - whether they degrade the way human memories do if they aren't accessed regularly. And, of course, if I had permission to take expeditions outside this stupid 'secure radius' - to another continent, even, because who knows what effect this has had on culture and linguistics-"

"But that's - amazing," Trudy says. "You're saying the Na'vi can upload their minds to the - planetary server? Like they're saved forever; they never really die."

"Lunar server," Grace corrects, and stares at her hands. They look pretty pale, against the black keyboard. "They die."

In her peripheral vision, Trudy jerks, like maybe she was going to touch Grace's shoulder and then thought better of it. "Of course they do," she says, more quietly. "I'm sorry, that wasn't-"

"I know what you meant." Grace clears her throat. That came out sharp, everything comes out sharp; what she's not used to is wanting to apologize for it. Giving a shit whether people like you sucks. "The utral aymokriya, the trees of voices: hypothetically, those are like - like viewscreens, old style."

"You can see it, but not do anything with it," Trudy offers.

She still thinks Trudy's stupid for it, sometimes, but she really is lucky Trudy's so goddamn nice. "Hear it, in this case," Grace says, "but yeah. The vitraya ramunong - the tree of souls, that is - seems to be something different; possibly a genuine interface. But I've never been able to get close enough to figure it out."

"Well," Trudy says, and does touch her shoulder, clapping a palm to it. "Maybe Sully will be able to do it for you."

Grace gives her the dirtiest look she can muster, and she can hear Trudy laughing the whole way to her bunk.

***

Trudy was joking, but Sully nearly does do it: he comes back one evening saying Neytiri took him flying over it, and Grace spends the whole evening muttering things like "Fucking - lucky break," and "Didn't even have a video camera," under her breath. Grace does have video of the tree of souls, Trudy copied it for her from Maya's belly feed, but it's not exactly high def.

But then they hit August, and it seems like no time at all before they have to start packing up. It's weird, how much stuff they have; it feels like things have multiplied somehow, and the place looks depressingly bare when it's all stowed away again.

"It was nice to meet you," Spellman says affably, and gives the wall by the airlock a friendly pat.

Sully snorts at him as he rolls past, duffel on his lap; and Trudy gives Spellman a clap on the back. This is why no one gives him any real shit for his hundred-and-sixty-year-old kids' musicals: yeah, Spellman's a dork, but he's so unapologetic about it that it circles back on itself and almost becomes charming.

Grace doesn't say goodbye to Site 26, not out loud. But she pauses before she goes into the airlock, tilts her head back and spends a minute looking at something further away than the wall. "Should've asked for four months," she says, mostly to herself, and then ducks through the doors and puts on her exo-pack.

Trudy flies slow on the way back, and lets herself meander; this trip, Grace is the one beside her in the shotgun seat, and Grace glances at the instruments and then out the window, and doesn't say a thing.

"Nice day," Spellman yells from the back, the third time Trudy veers off the usual course to sweep low over the trees.

She peeks in the rear mirror: Spellman's touching the side of his nose and nodding soberly, and Sully, next to him, is chuckling and shaking his head. Sully's eyes catch hers for a second, and when the smile drops away, he looks almost uncertain. She watches him glance back out over the forest; it's more than just trees to him now, you can tell just by looking at him. His avatar's not in the back, strapped in next to Grace's and Norm's - it's out there somewhere, waiting for him to slide back behind a face that isn't his, wasn't even made for him. The optic feeds let him look at Neytiri's face, but she looks back at a combination of heavy genetic manipulation and his murdered twin brother. Can't be easy for him.

But then it wasn't easy for Grace, dropping a stranger with barely any training into a world she's been studying for years. Couldn't have been easy for Spellman, going through three years of training and a six-year trip to play second fiddle to some guy who isn't even an anthropologist.

And it's not easy for Neytiri, Trudy would bet, being saddled with another alien who's playing dress-up with a body and needs to be taught everything from the ground up. And after the mining and the school and the massacres - hell, Trudy's surprised Neytiri doesn't just spend their training days punching Sully in the face for fourteen hours.

None of this is easy for anybody.

If Grace had her way, they'd never go back to the base - they'd stay out in the middle of the Hallelujahs forever, and Quaritch would never touch them. Hell, if Grace had her way there wouldn't be a base at all, no RDA or SecOps or any of it, except maybe the UN installation that's supposed to get here in another decade or two. Linguists, anthropologists, diplomats; fuckups aplenty, no doubt, but not a single goddamn gun.

But being out of sight of Hell's Gate won't make their problems disappear, and if Jake isn't starting to change his mind about this place then keeping him out there won't do shit. Either he's getting the picture or he's not.

Still, it's weird to be back in the office. Site 26 had seemed loud sometimes, Jake with his video log and Norm singing, Trudy laughing; but it's nothing compared to her whole department shouting, tossing pads back and forth and playing audio samples for each other while they argue over transcriptions. But it's good. She missed it, even if she's never telling Yu Sung that.

"Where's my coffee?" she snaps instead, and Yu Sung hands over her lab coat with a roll of her eyes.

"Trapped inside the coffeemaker," Yu Sung says, "waiting for you to set it free."

Jake's clan membership ceremony is two days later, and Mo'at invites Grace herself.

"I shouldn't, I'm not-" Grace blurts, and then wants to slap herself; Mo'at's not an idiot, she knows exactly what Grace is and isn't.

"You're not," Mo'at agrees gracefully. "You aren't of the People, and you aren't from his clan."

"His clan?" Grace says. What the hell did Jake tell them?

"Jarhead," Mo'at says gravely, and Grace has to bite her lip to keep from smiling. "But you're the reason he came to us, the reason he's here."

"I know," Grace says, "I'm still surprised you haven't had me shot."

Mo'at grins. "There must be someone to stand in for him, to represent his people," she says. "You're something like his family, aren't you?"

Grace strains something in her throat trying to keep from laughing, and makes herself think about it instead. It's not true, but it's not not true. They lived in an enclosed space together for three months and didn't kill each other; and she made him eat and do his logs, and he made her referee his Scrabble tournaments with Norm - Na'vi vocabulary, they'd had to carve five extra X tiles for the plosives and six for glottal stops. Not family; but maybe something like it, just a little bit.

"Close enough," Grace says.

Neytiri's his - sponsor, maybe, is the best English word. She's the one who trained him, the one who's vouching for his worthiness, so she's the one who paints him with white spirals. Red was for Grace - for ties of blood, more literally than usual; but Jake gets white, for thought and words and names. He's been taught like an Omatikaya, he speaks their language - at least to some degree - and now they're going to give him their name.

When the painting part is done, he stands in the middle, right under Hometree's trunk - that's part of the ceremony, too, making him a piece of Hometree, one of many roots. Mo'at and Eytukan and Neytiri each say their bits, and then comes the gesture of acceptance: hands linking shoulders and arms and chests, turning the Omatikaya from many into one for just a moment. Into a network, even - like cloth, Grace thinks, because Eywa's a weaver, and isn't that just a perfect way to integrate the concept of a network into sacred symbology. Grace is never, ever going to run out of things to learn about this place.

Kxamiyat, not far away, turns and smiles brightly at her; and Grace looks at her, at Jake, at the linked hands all around her, and gets something in both of her eyes at once.

***

"Waiting for something?" Hong says knowingly.

Trudy jerks in Patel's chair. "Christ, Hong," she says, "tie bells to your wrists or something."

"Sorry," Hong says, looking distinctly unapologetic. "Got any more dodging to do before you answer my question?"

Trudy sighs. Sully's staying out tonight - there'll be a feast, according to Grace, and celebrations after, so he can't come back in for a while. But Grace should be done soon, she'll be back any minute, and Trudy wants - Trudy wants -

Trudy has no fucking idea what she wants. She puts her head down on Patel's desk and sighs again. Maybe she should have just quit, full stop. Not, like, ignored Grace in the hallway, she's not a complete dick; but quit coming around, quit hanging out in her department, talked in the halls and nowhere else. She's never been stuck in such a weird place: she knows kissing Grace is a terrible idea, she does, but she still wants to be around Grace all the time, wants to be there to hear every single irritated swear Grace ever shouts. "Death," Trudy mumbles into the desk.

"I know you guys are having a rough patch," Hong says, "but doesn't that seem a little extreme?"

Trudy has to sit up again so she can get a good look at Hong's face. Is Hong fucking with her about this girlfriend thing again, or is she just asking a question that came out a little funny-sounding?

"A rough patch," Trudy repeats experimentally.

"It's not like I've asked her," Hong says, "but it's not like it's hard to tell. Usually you couldn't pry her eyes off her pad screen with a crowbar, but this morning makes the fourth time this week I've found her in her office just staring at the wall. Sort it out and get to the make-up sex already, Chacon." Trudy blinks, and her mouth is half-open when something chimes on the other side of the room. "And here she comes," Hong says brightly, and hurries away before Trudy's even decided what she wants to say.

Trudy spins around in Patel's chair and watches Hong at the control panel; Hong's eyeing the brain scan and waiting for the green light to open the shell while she lights a cigarette. Hong makes it sound like Trudy's not the only one hung up on this, and even if Grace's reasons are different, that means something.

The clamshell comes open and Grace sits up with a grimace and stretches her back. Hong hands her the cigarette and then ruffles her hair, and Grace makes a face and slaps at Hong's hands. Grace closes her eyes for the first drag off the cigarette, and for just a second, she looks hard and tired and absolutely perfect.

"Hey, Grace," Trudy says gently. "How was it?"

"Good, actually," Grace says, eyes still closed. "He didn't have to talk much, he couldn't really fuck it up." She blows out smoke and then looks at Trudy, and smiles just a little. "It was good."

"That's good," Trudy says inanely, and Grace snorts a little smoke out her nose.

"And you hung around here for how long," Grace says, "just to ask me that? I thought you were-" and she's done it again, she knows she has, because she looks away to tap her cigarette studiously against the clamshell's edge, "-bad at waiting."

"I'm getting better at it," Trudy says, after a moment. "I've been practicing."

This is stupid, she thinks, watching Grace's fingers on the cigarette. Trudy was so grateful Grace was talking to her again, these small awkward moments seemed like nothing at all next to the silence; but this is stupid, both of them talking around it and not meeting each other's eyes. Grace hates being stupid, and Trudy doesn't like it much either. This has got to stop.

"Hey, Grace, you got a minute?"

It was pretty good, last night, even with Grace's little slip - she shouldn't have said it, but she'd been thinking about it anyway. She thinks about it too much; she'd be thinking about it too much even if Trudy had kissed her on the mouth, but she's definitely thinking about it too much considering it was just a cheek kiss. But Trudy had let it go, and Grace had figured it was okay and stopped worrying about it.

So Grace isn't sure what tips her off: the serious look, maybe, when Trudy's usually so close to a smile and a joke; or the way Trudy's standing, straight and orderly in her doorway, instead of a confident, casual lean. Whatever it is that tells her, she knows it's going to be about the airlock before Trudy says anything else, and she doesn't curb the urge to roll her eyes. Trudy's not going to catch her mooning again, she's learned her lesson. "Do we have to?" she says dismissively, turning back to her pad. What's Trudy even doing here, anyway? Surely she didn't get up this early just to have a chat with Grace.

"I think so," Trudy says, tone eminently reasonable. Why is it always the inconvenient people who aren't afraid of Grace? "I just want to stop - tripping on it, Grace. I want it to be okay because we've both said it's okay, not because we've just suddenly agreed that we're speaking to each other again."

"It's okay," Grace says, and raises her eyebrows at Trudy. Satisfied?

Trudy gives her a flat look, even though one corner of Trudy's mouth is creeping upward. "The talking about it part comes first," she says, and then hesitates. "I didn't mean to make you - uncomfortable-"

"You didn't," Grace says, leaning over her pad. "My own stupidity made me uncomfortable. Which was disconcerting, because usually it's other people's." She shrugs one shoulder. "It was a joke, it backfired, let's move on."

"Okay," Trudy says, "and that right there is my problem. Where the hell are you getting this joke thing?"

Grace snorts. It actually is a little funny, when she thinks about it. "Right," she says, "like you really-" She can't even finish the fucking thought, it's too ridiculous.

But Trudy's looking at her steadily, like she doesn't think it's ridiculous at all. "Why not?"

"I drink," Grace says bluntly. The truth has always been comfortable in her mouth. "I smoke. I'm old. I'm a cynical bitch, I have yet to meet the person I couldn't piss off, and I'm always right." She turns away to look at the wall. "Give me a fucking break."

There's a long pause. Grace hears shuffling - must be Trudy turning, heading out the door. Good. Grace will be able to get back to work.

"So, your critical flaw is that you're you," Trudy says dubiously, from a lot closer. "Is that the best you've got?"

Grace turns her head, involuntarily: the noise was Trudy coming to the spare stool and sitting down, leaning forward, settling her forearms against her thighs. She's still looking at Grace all intently, eyes crinkling with the almost-smile that's so comfortable on her face.

"I volunteered to get posted to an alien moon with poisonous air," Trudy says, "and you think I wouldn't want you because you smoke? Christ, Grace."

"Look," Grace says, "I fucking study how reality works, and this-" She motions sharply to the air between them. "This is not it."

But Trudy's not listening, not really; she's just looking at Grace, warm-eyed, with that expression on her face that says she's amused and a little fond and not even the slightest bit afraid. "But it could be," she says, and Grace is opening her mouth to explain just exactly how terrible an idea that is when the door opens with a bang.

"You need to get out here right now," Yu Sung says, and if that's Quaritch Grace can hear yelling behind her, then she's not kidding.

And yeah, it's Quaritch, yelling something about a smashed camera and slamming his fist into Max's desk. "Son of a bitch," he spits, and Max's keyboard trembles.

"Watch it," Max snaps, and Quaritch's face gets even redder.

"Hey, hey, whoa, what is going on?" Grace says, hurrying down the steps.

"That asshole smashed a goddamn dozer camera," Quaritch yells, "and if your goddamn team doesn't yank him out of there right now I'm going to tear this place apart."

"We can't just pull him out," Grace starts hotly, and then turns at the sound of the doors - it's Selfridge, arms crossed and eyebrows raised. "Look, whatever happened, whatever he did, I can figure it out-"

"We don't have time for this bullshit," Quaritch says, "and if you don't get out of my way-"

"If I don't get out of your way what?" Grace snaps. "You'll punch me? Shoot me?"

"How about both?" Quaritch says, and he's quieter now, almost smiling, but his eyes are flat and hard.

"Okay, whoa, hold on," Selfridge says. "Look, I get it," he tells Quaritch. "It's too bad the kid couldn't give you good news, and I meant it when I told you to pull the trigger, but let's try not to give the trustees anything to bitch about, okay?"

"Excuse me?" Grace says. "Pull the trigger, what the fuck does that mean?"

Selfridge turns to her and smiles, the same pinched little look of strained patience he gets when his coffee's cold or he misses a putt. "Look," he says, "you know there's a deposit under there."

Under there - under Hometree, he means, and Grace's heart was already pounding from her sprint down the steps, but now it's like thunder in her ears. Shit, shit, this is beyond not good.

Selfridge sighs. "We were all prepped to make a deal, but your guy told us himself it wasn't going to be an option," and he shrugs helplessly, like clearly he's done the most a reasonable person could expect. "Which leaves two choices: you get everybody out safely and we blow up an empty tree, or we clear whoever'll go with the tear gas and cross our fingers."

That's what this has all been about; Grace can see it now, as she looks from Selfridge to Quaritch and back again. She'd figured explosives would get involved somehow, but she hadn't worked out how, not until right this second. She was hoping Jake would start to understand, and he had, he had, because he'd told Quaritch the truth: the Omatikaya won't trade anything in the universe for Hometree, not in a million years.

She wonders when Jake figured it out. Is that why he smashed the camera - did he think it would slow them down, or was he just too angry not to do it when he saw that dozer coming?

She turns and glances up at the raised walk; Trudy's three steps from Grace's office door, and her expression is closed but her hands are gripping the rail so tightly Grace expects the metal to start creaking. Was it really only thirty seconds ago that they were sitting in her office talking about Grace's bad habits and wanting each other?

Right this second, what Grace wants is mostly to hit Selfridge, to slam his head against the computer until even a miniscule fraction of the knowledge she's collected in it penetrates his skull. But if he's already given Quaritch the order, then there's a deadline, and she doesn't have time for this shit. She can explain every single way in which he's fucked up when she's sure several hundred people aren't about to die. "How much time do I have?" she says, already stripping off her lab coat, and Yu Sung meets her glance and starts booting up Unit 7.

"Let's just say you'll know if you take too long," Selfridge says as she hoists herself up, and then Yu Sung closes the lid over her and she's gone.

***

Trudy checks over her gear on autopilot, barely feeling it against her fingers. Surely she misunderstood - surely she hadn't heard what she'd thought she'd been hearing. Clear them out, Selfridge had said, clear them out, like they were birds who'd nested in the wrong tree, and then we'll cross our fingers, what the fuck was that?

"Hey, Chacon - Chacon?"

It's Lopez; Trudy blew right by her without even looking up. "Hey, hey, sorry," she says, "sorry - you just got off duty?"

"Yeah," Lopez says, eyeing Trudy carefully.

"Good," Trudy says, "good," because she likes Lopez, she doesn't want Lopez to kill people, and if Lopez is off shift now then she probably won't get ordered to.

"You okay?" Lopez says.

"Yeah," Trudy lies, because she's not Lopez; she's on duty now, and in about forty-five minutes she's going to be a murderer or a traitor, one way or the other. Venezuela was seriously fucked up, but in some ways it doesn't hold a candle to this shit. At least everybody on the ground in Venezuela had known they were in a war when it started. Fuck.

"You're a shitty liar," Lopez says, and touches Trudy's shoulder. "What happened?"

"It hasn't happened yet," Trudy says, "but it will," and she reaches up and brushes two fingers against Lopez's wrist. "Sorry, I'm sorry," and she turns and jogs away toward the hangar, not fast enough to justify the way her breath is stinging her throat.

She's got a grip by the time she gets there, enough to smile when Wainfleet grins and says, "Hey, looks like we're getting some action."

"Shut up and finish the checks," Kim says from Maya's other side, before Trudy can say anything, and Trudy's free to yank the cockpit door open and heave herself into her seat.

Okay. Okay. They haven't decided anything yet, she reminds herself. By this point, Grace has probably been in Hometree for, what, ten minutes? Fifteen? For all Trudy knows, she'll get them all out, and the gunships'll be nothing but glorified chainsaws. It'll be bad, losing the tree, but the Na'vi will survive it; it'll make Trudy feel like shit, but at least she won't have killed anybody. She did enough of that in Venezuela, she's not going to do it again if she can help it.

"Okay, rear and mechanical checks are done," Kim calls from the bay.

"Main system checks on my mark," Trudy says, and fires Maya up.

Grace will get them out. Grace has to get them out.

***

There's no fucking way Grace is going to get them out.

There was a glimmer of a chance, right at the beginning - she couldn't speak in a clan gathering, obviously, but Jake could, and he was doing okay until the confessional urge hit. In general, Grace is a pretty big fan of telling the truth, partly because she's a pretty shitty liar; but he could just as easily have waited to confess his sins until they were sure there would be somebody left alive to hate him for it.

The second Neytiri's eyes widen in understanding, Grace knows they're utterly fucked.

"I fell in love with you," Jake is still repeating, and Grace wants to slap him. Seriously: I love you, but I lied to you anyway? Does he honestly think that's going to help at this point?

"I trusted you," Neytiri says, incredulous, anger beginning to creep into the edge of her voice.

"We're trying to stop it," Grace says, throwing the clan rules out the window - there's no point to following them now if Jake's just going to get them killed anyway. "Please, Neytiri, please, they're coming-"

"And you," Neytiri says in Na'vi, "you, Doctorgrace?" Again? she means. "You knew?"

"I should've," Grace says in kind. "I should've put it together sooner, I should've told you."

"No," Neytiri says, suddenly cold. "No, we should've known better." She grabs Jake's wrist, lifts his five-fingered avatar hand high. "Everyone belongs to a people, and we aren't yours."

"Please, Neytiri," Jake says in English, "please, you have to listen to me-"

"So you may lie again?" Neytiri replies. "So you may forget to say another thing you know that sets you against us?"

"Against you - Neytiri, I'm on your side-"

Neytiri's always been so quick with her knife; she draws it onehanded and touches the edge to Jake's throat in the time it takes Grace to exhale. "Enough," she says.

They shove Grace to the ground, Jake beside her, and tie their hands behind their heads. "You have to go," Grace says, over and over, "you have to run, now," but no one's listening, and she can feel the hum of nearby rotors in her bones.

***

Trudy flies steady. She always does; she gets nervous, just like anybody, but when her hands are on a throttle, they never shake.

She was hoping right up until the last second that the whole thing would get called off, but then Quaritch came striding through the airlock and she'd known they were going out. Now she's mostly hoping they'll somehow never get there, fly and fly and not find anything until Quaritch gives up and turns around.

But, of course, that's not what happens. It feels like no time at all before they're rounding a little rise and Hometree is right in front of them, their rotors ruffling the surface of the river underneath them - the Na'vi have a name for the river, Trudy thinks, they must, but she never thought to ask Grace what it was.

She can see right away that it hasn't worked - the Na'vi are still there, crowded around the base of Hometree with bows in their hands, and over the comms, Quaritch is giving the order to draw in low and close, so the guys running the Dragon can fire the gas canisters. Fuck.

Well, those orders aren't for her; it's the Dragon and the Scorpions that have the gas and the incendiaries. She keeps Maya in line with the other Samsons, and concentrates on not flinching when Hometree's root structure bursts into flames. Oh, Christ, the trunk is hollow, she remembers that from the scans. How many people are stuck in there who couldn't get down fast enough? Trudy's exo-pack is working fine, but somehow she still can't breathe.

The Scorpions draw back, suddenly, and Trudy's comm crackles.

"All call signs," Quaritch says, "switch missiles," and he sounds so goddamn calm. "Give me HEs at the base of the west columns."

Trudy swallows and flicks the switches, preps the launchers; her brain is one giant blank, and in the absence of actual directions, her hands know what they're supposed to be doing. She flicks the cover off the trigger like it's any other day, and her thumb is over the button.

Her thumb is over the button, and she put it there.

"Yeah, baby, get some!" Wainfleet yells from the bay, and in the rearview, on the other side, she sees Kim shake his head long-sufferingly.

"Bring it down," Quaritch says over the comm, cool and satisfied, and all along the line to either side, missiles scream out in low arcs, trailing exhaust.

Trudy looks at her own hand like she's waiting to see what it'll do, like it's not up to her. Which is the stupidest goddamn thought she's ever had, because it is up to her, her and no one else, if her thumb comes down on that button.

"Screw this," she says, and flicks the cover down on her way to the steering yoke.

"Hey!" Wainfleet yells, as she pulls Maya up. "Hey - what the hell are you doing?"

"I didn't sign up for this shit!" Trudy shouts, and turns Maya around.

***

"Doctorgrace - Doctorgrace!" somebody cries, and Grace turns just in time to catch Kxamiyat before she can fall. She's breathing raggedly, tears making clean streaks through the ash on her face, but there's not time to stop.

"Quick, quick, come on," Grace says in Na'vi, and helps her over the next log.

Iloawa and Po'alamawn are already with her, stumbling along with dazed eyes; Po'alamawn was by the roots' edge, but Iloawa was inside, and she's still coughing harshly from the gas.

Grace and Jake had been strung up outside, but Mo'at cut them free after the first round of incendiaries. "If you are on our side," she'd said to Jake, sooty face grave, "then help us," and then she'd drawn her knife and slit the ropes around their throats.

They'd been so close to the tree - they'd found Iloawa first, crawling away from the fire and wiping helplessly at her streaming eyes. Grace has no idea where Itatima is - or Tutsaku, for that matter, Liyawin or Ya'atseyn, any of the dozens of kids who came to the school in those first golden months. If she gets the chance, she's going to kill Selfridge with her bare hands.

"Come on, Grace, we've got to go faster," Jake hisses, glancing over his shoulder.

The first round of high explosives threw them all off their feet a few minutes ago, but Hometree's still standing - there's going to be another, and when Grace follows Jake's gaze she can see that the Samsons and Scorpions are reorganizing themselves, prepping to hit another set of columns.

"Hurry, hurry," Grace says to Kxamiyat, and then that shrieking metallic sound comes again, and she grabs Kxamiyat and Iloawa and curls her body around them. She's tall in her avatar, so tall, but what she wouldn't give right now for a torso with human-proportioned broadness.

The pressure wave hits them like - well, like exactly that: like a wave, smashing into them and shoving them down. Iloawa screams into Grace's shoulder, more grief and anger than fear, and Grace grimaces when something hits her in the back.

But worse than any of it, than the bits of branches flying or the wind or the heat, is that sound - that groaning, snapping sound, low beneath the crackling of the fire.

"Oh, god," Grace says, quiet.

It doesn't do shit, keeping her eyes shut; it's like an earthquake when the trunk comes down, the ground trembling and pitching under them. Po'alamawn is sobbing helplessly where he's curled against Mo'at, and Mo'at groans like-

Like she's just had her home blown apart and set on fire. Jesus, Grace thinks. How are they ever going to bear this?

"I'm so sorry," she says into Kxamiyat's braids, uselessly, "I'm so, so sorry-" and that's the moment they pull her out.

It's never happened to her before; everybody in her department knows better than to cut a connection during full consciousness unless they absolutely have to. But one second she's curled around the kids and the next she's blinking up at a closed lid.

She shoves the clamshell open before the first grunt's hand can land on the edge, and she punches before she even thinks about it, lands one right in the guy's eye. They've got Norm already, they've handcuffed him to the railing, and one of them is hauling Jake up and over his shoulder like a bag of potatoes, like his fucking chair isn't right the fuck there, what a fucking asshole-

Selfridge is still standing there with his arms crossed, looking up - looking at the ceiling monitors. He watched the whole goddamn thing in technicolor and didn't lift a motherfucking finger.

She throws herself at him, except Hit-in-the-Eye Guy is already recovering and there's two more of them at her elbows; they grab her before she can get more than about six inches. "You murderer," she yells, and keeps yanking - but they've dug another set of cuffs out from somewhere, and the rings click shut like closing doors around her wrists.

***

Wainfleet hurls himself out of the bay almost the second Maya touches down in the hangar. "What the hell was that, Chacon?" he shouts.

"That the hell was bullshit," Trudy snaps back. "We got sent out here to protect people, Wainfleet. There were kids in there, who the fuck were we protecting from them?"

Wainfleet's face always looks like somebody carved it out of granite, but he takes half a step back, and his fists drop to his sides. He's got twin boys, fifteen, and a girl two years younger - twice a year like clockwork, you can hear him recording a gruff rendition of "Happy Birthday" in the barracks, four months early so the transmission will get back to Earth on time.

"You're an idiot," he says, and shakes his head. "Those were direct fucking orders, jesus."

"I've got plenty of blood on my hands already," Trudy says. "I'm not going to add kids to that over a bunch of fucking rocks, and if you want to, you better find somebody else to fly with."

Wainfleet looks at her, and doesn't say anything; and then he turns back to the bay and motions sharply to Kim. "Hurry up," he says, "let's break something, before the rest of them get back. I don't know about you, but I'm not going down just because Chacon's a soft touch."

"Yeah, yeah, you're a badass," Trudy says, and punches him in the shoulder.

They've got maybe eight minutes, but luckily it's not that hard to loosen one of the locking collars on the front left missile launcher. That kind of thing happens sometimes, even if everything's fine during pre-flight checks, and you'd have to be suicidal to fire a missile through a loose collar.

They time it just right: they're still bent over the launcher array when the first Scorpion settles into the hangar with a low thrum, and Trudy slams a hand into Maya's side and says loudly, "Get it done, Kim."

"Hey, Chacon," Stevens says, swinging down out of the Scorpion and smirking. "Break a nail?"

"Oh, fuck off," Trudy says, and gives him the finger for good measure.

She still gets called up to the command center, of course; but the groundwork's all been laid, and it's surprisingly easy to look Quaritch in the eye and say, "A mechanical malfunction, sir. We couldn't fire - we'd only have gotten in the way."

Quaritch narrows his eyes; but Trudy thinks of children burning, and the icy rush of anger makes it easy to keep her gaze steady. She doesn't get to that place of cold rage very often, but it can be a big help when she does. "Tighten up your pre-flight routine, Chacon," Quaritch says at last, and turns away. "I don't want this happening again."

"It won't, sir," Trudy says to his back, and, when she thinks about it, it isn't even a lie. She'll shoot him in the face before she'll take Maya out on a mission like that again.

It's quiet as death in the holding cell, because there's nothing to say. Norm might not have been out there, but he saw the whole thing on the monitors in the office; he meets Grace's eyes every now and then, but he doesn't even start to open his mouth.

Somebody who was slightly less of an asshole than the rest found Jake's chair; he's sitting between them, and he hasn't looked up once. The only reason Grace knows that he was up all night like the two of them is because he moved his hands every now and then, clenched his jaw.

Grace has no fucking idea what to do. She was perpetually in motion, before, always more data to collect or another scan to run, hunting for the silver bullet that would convince all the right people and fix everything. But now - she doesn't even know how many people are dead, how many people the kids have to help bury this time.

She spent most of the night just replaying the memories, but she thinks if she does it one more time she's going to be sick. So she rewinds just a little further, and thinks about Trudy.

Trudy's SecOps, and Grace isn't an idiot; of course she wonders whether Trudy was up there, whether Trudy did her job and fired away. She can't quite picture it - she tries, but all she can come up with is ludicrous, cartoonishly un-Trudylike Trudys, laughing sadistically as Hometree goes up in smoke. Maybe she's already too goddamn gone on Trudy - maybe she wants it to be impossible so badly that she won't let herself be realistic. She knows how this shit can happen, how relatively decent people can do hideous things; but all the same, if she finds out Trudy was up there, she's never going to be able to look at Trudy again without feeling sick.

It's like she summoned Trudy with her mind: the doors to the cell block slide open, and Trudy's the one behind the food cart. They were given dinner yesterday, and breakfast this morning, but none of them ate more than a few bites of it.

"What's going on, brother?" Trudy says to the Marine at the guard station, smiling, and Grace's chest lurches uncomfortably. "Long time no see. You haven't been up to the pilots' barracks in a while."

The guy lets her in. "What do they get today?"

Trudy makes a face. "Steak - can you believe that? The assholes in the holding cell get steak, and we've got to make do with whatever slop the kitchen throws together."

"Oh, come on - you serious?" the guy says, getting up and rounding the security station. "Tell me you're fucking with me, Chacon."

"Would I lie to you, Evans?" Trudy says.

The guy groans, and leans down to slide the cart's side open. "You'd better be," he says.

Trudy's so fast - she reminds Grace of Neytiri, the quickness of her arms, except Trudy's hands come back with a gun in them. The guy freezes; he must feel the gun against the back of his neck.

"Yeah," Trudy says conversationally, "you know what that is."

"Trudy?" Norm says - he's pushed himself up from the holding cell cot and is staring out the door like a kid with his face to the window of a candy store.

"All the way down," Trudy says to the guy, and then, careful and calculated, turns the gun and slams the butt of it into the back of his head. She straightens up, looking satisfied, and then turns and smiles. Her eyes are on Grace's face as she whistles.

"Max?" Grace says, as he peers around the doorframe and then hurries in.

"Yeah, hey," he says, and rifles through the pockets of the guy on the floor. "Yu Sung wanted to come, but we thought it might be a little suspicious if both of us were gone at once, and she's the one who's interim director." He finds the guy's ID card and flips it over with a grin. "The security around here is really kind of lax."

One swipe of the card and the door opens; there's a woman guarding the corridor, but Trudy hits her sharply in the solar plexus and then knocks her into the wall. Jake grabs her sidearm and wheels along one-handed, and they make it to the nearest hangar-side airlock without running into anybody else.

This isn't the moment for any of the shit Grace wants to do, so she settles for knocking elbows with Trudy as they wrestle with their exo-packs. Trudy looks at her, the third time she does it; and instead of smiling the way Grace is expecting, she turns suddenly serious. "I didn't do it," she says quietly. "I was - close. But I didn't."

"Good," Grace says, "or I'd be morally obligated to kick your teeth in." But it comes out weird, gentle; and she can't stop herself from touching the back of Trudy's hand.

"Why?" Max says loudly, and Grace tunes back in.

"Somebody's got to stay," Jake says. "You and - and Hong, you can cover for each other, work together to help us-"

"To help us what?" Grace says. She figured they were running - getting away from RDA, maybe to a mobile site, and working out their next move from there. But Jake's face says different.

"I," he says, and then has to stop and swallow. "I told them about the tree."

"What?" Grace says.

He grimaces. "Neytiri told me about it before she took me to see it - before I even had Ngang, before I-" Knew better, Grace fills in. "I reported back, and Quaritch said he had them by the balls, he knew what to do if they ever tried to cause trouble-"

"Well, shit," Trudy says.

"We have to go to them," Jake says. "We have to tell them he'll be coming for it."

Grace looks at him. "They won't be happy to see us if we do," she says, testing.

Jake flinches and rubs a hand over his face. "Yeah," he says, "understatement. But we've got to do it. They got screwed, Grace, because of us. We can't just sit back and wait for it to happen again."

Shit, Grace thinks, he really is Tom's brother.

Trudy and Norm are first out of the airlock; they hurry out into the dim hangar, toward Trudy's Samson, while Grace helps Jake get his wheels over the airlock frame. Fucking crappy design for the airlock, jesus. Norm's ready when they reach the tilt-rotor, pulling Jake up and in and then reaching back for his chair, and that's the moment lights start flashing.

"I'm taking fire," Trudy shouts, "let's go!" That's what's weird about the lights - they're not the hangar lights, they're the command center lights, because - Grace squints through the bay. Because Quaritch left the fucking airlock open when he burst out to shoot at them. Of course. He's really going overboard with this whole tough-guy thing.

He keeps shooting - a lot, he must be using one of the big semi-automatics instead of his sidearm - but Trudy fired up the tilt-rotor back when Grace and Jake were still in the airlock, and she lifts off before Grace is even all the way in the bay.

"Shit," Grace says, clinging to the frame, and Norm leaves Jake's chair only half strapped in so he can grab her arm.

That's when it happens. She doesn't say anything, doesn't scream; Norm pulls her in and she concentrates on strapping in. It hardly even hurts, at first. Endorphins are one of the best things evolution ever came up with.

But then they pull out of the hangar, and curve up into the darkness outside. Jake whoops and cheers, and even Trudy laughs; and that's when Grace presses her hand against herself and finds a lot more blood than she was expecting.

"Everybody okay back there?" Trudy shouts, because she has the worst timing of anyone in the entire world, and two seconds later Jake turns around and sees Grace with blood all over her hand.

"This is going to ruin my whole day," Grace tells him, breathless, pushing her bloody hand back down against her belly. There's nothing quite like a bullet to the gut for sheer slow agony.

It's mostly a blur after that. Grace squints through her facemask at the trees speeding by outside, because, fuck, this might be the last time she ever sees them; and she keeps her hand pressed down tight, even though it hurts like a bitch and she's probably beyond helping anyway. Every pint of blood she manages to slow down on its way out is a few more hours, a few more minutes, to soak everything in: the pain, the sound of her own rasping breaths, the river splashing somewhere below them, Polyphemus hanging blue and silver in the night sky.

And Trudy. Trudy, strapped into the pilot's seat, dark hair spilling over one shoulder, gripping the controls with her lovely strong hands and cursing like music.

"Fuck, Grace," Trudy shouts. "Fuck, come on, hang on."

***

Fuck fuck fuck, Trudy thinks. It's the only word in her head the whole time. They speed out over the river, out toward the mountains, and Trudy pushes Maya as hard as she can, wind whistling through the bullet holes in the side. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

It takes hours to get out to the mobile site, but Spellman's ready when they get there. He leaps out and practically throws himself in the link, and it takes him maybe fifteen minutes to hook up the lift cables when he's in his avatar.

Once they have the module, Sully tells her exactly where to go - she's only been over it once or twice, but he's flown his banshee through every nook in the Hallelujahs. The tree of souls is in the worst part of the EM flux, the heart of it - probably not a coincidence, Trudy thinks, remembering Grace's scans, and then she has to squeeze her eyes shut for a second.

They don't fly right up to it; Sully stops her when they pass under the first giant rock arch, and she brings them down in a little clearing between two stands of trees. She barely waits for Maya to settle to the ground before she's throwing herself out of the cockpit.

Spellman's folded over Grace in the bay, long blue fingers curled gently around her arms; he found the trauma kit a while ago, got some kind of bandage set up, but she's still way too pale. It's been too long, Trudy thinks, and her heart is pounding.

"I could get in the link - bring my avatar back," Sully says, but Spellman shakes his head.

"Your avatar's at Hometree," he says, "there's no time for you to walk back - no time for you to fly back, even. We'll just have to talk to them. She's gutshot, Jake-"

"No, right - quick, quick," Sully says, and starts unfolding his chair.

Trudy leans into the bay and lifts Grace up, shifts her carefully toward the edge; she can't carry Grace anywhere herself, not without hurting her worse, but Spellman's busy climbing out of the bay, it'll be a minute.

"Careful, flygirl," Grace hisses. "I just got shot, you know."

"No shit," Trudy murmurs. "If you die before I get a chance to kiss you for real, I'm going to be pretty pissed."

Grace smiles, faint but recognizable even with her facemask on. "I'll keep that in mind," she says, and then passes out cold.

They landed relatively far back and to the side, Maya next to the module; but Maya's not exactly a stealth model, and the Na'vi are waiting for them when they draw closer, expressions angry when they aren't simply blank.

"You," Tsu'tey snarls, starting toward them suddenly; but Neytiri gets in front of him and shoves him back with one strong arm.

She says something to him in Na'vi, sharp, and then looks at them. Trudy is abruptly aware of just how tall Neytiri is, compared to them, and her expression is cool and hard. Not welcoming; but at least she doesn't look as angry as Tsu'tey. Trudy'll take it.

The clearing is relatively level ground, and Sully's wheelchair is badass; he rolls forward, bumps only jolting him a little, and says something through the exo-pack in Na'vi. Neytiri stares for a long moment, and then she says something, very low, eyes on the edge of the exo-pack facemask where it presses into Sully's cheek. She's never seen him like this, Trudy realizes.

Spellman steps forward, tail twitching nervously behind him, and Grace is pale and bloody in his arms. Neytiri's gaze moves to her immediately.

Sully switches to English. "Please - we escaped, we don't have anywhere else to go, and she's - you've got to do something for her, Neytiri. Crush our radios, ask us questions, whatever you need to do to be sure we're not trying to sell you out, but please-"

"Please," Trudy echoes, louder than she meant to even through her exo-pack, and her voice cracks like a kid's. Sully falls silent; it feels like everyone in the world is looking at her. "Please, please. I know we shouldn't even be asking - I was there, I flew-"

"You didn't fire," Spellman hisses, but Trudy ignores him.

"-I did. You can-" She swallows. "You can kill me, if you need to; but you've got to save Grace."

"You came here," Neytiri summarizes slowly, "to we who have the right to kill you, for the sake of her life."

Trudy nods.

Tsu'tey snorts, but Neytiri raises a hand without even looking at him. He says something, angry, and Neytiri replies evenly. Her eyes are still on Trudy. Then she looks back over her shoulder, at her mother, and says something that sounds like it might be a question.

Mo'at steps forward; her expression is smooth like Neytiri's, blank, with a little thoughtfulness caught in the creasing of her brow. She reaches out gently, ghosts one hand over Grace's stomach, lets the fingers of the other brush Grace's forehead. "And you would do what for us in return?" she says to Sully, warily. "You have something you think we need?"

Sully glances at Trudy, uncertain, and she knows how he must feel, because she can feel it, too, somewhere under the cold heavy fear for Grace. This is bullshit, this isn't how it was supposed to go - they'd meant to come here with a warning. Not a gift, that's the wrong way to say it, but something given freely, at least. It wasn't supposed to be a chip they could barter for Grace. But she's still losing blood, and they don't have time to do it any other way.

"And they say they have turned their backs," Tsu'tey says disdainfully, before Trudy can give Sully the nod.

"Even Tuatxeylat, whose tswin was cut, did not betray his clan when the time came," Mo'at says, with the sternness of someone reminding someone else of something they should already know. She looks back at Sully. "There is greatness in loyalty, even to an olo'eyktan who has lost the right to it. Jakesully cannot help that the Jarhead clan has no tsahik to call for wisdom."

Sully briefly makes a face that suggests he's trying not to snort into his exo-pack, before he gets his expression back under control. Just in time, too, because Mo'at eyes him carefully.

"But you are also Omatikaya, Jakesully," she says, "whatever body you are in. Or have you forgotten that?"

Sully's face pales behind the mask, his mouth pressing into a line, and he looks away, at the ground. "I haven't forgotten," he says, rough. "It's - I know I don't deserve it. I don't deserve your name. They - we killed many of your people, and there's - there's no fixing that. But we can help you, if you'll let us. We know-" He swallows. "We know something you need to know, too, if you want to come out of this with anything left. But, please, we need you to save Grace."

Mo'at touches Grace's stomach gently, touches the bandage where the blood has soaked through; and for a long moment, she simply looks at Grace's face. "We will try," she says at last, and she sounds so firm, so decided, that not even Tsu'tey tries to argue.

***

Neytiri understands why Tsu'tey is angry. Her father died groaning, right in front of her, the ash of what was once their home streaking his face; she is angry, too. But unlike Tsu'tey, she does not let it make her stupid.

The Sky People destroyed Hometree - Hometree, which has stood for five thousand years, since the day it sprang from the grass where the blood of Oma'kxata fell. The great tree, the vitraya ramunong Omatikayahu, could never die: this is what Tsu'tey thinks. But Neytiri would have said the same of Hometree not long ago.

It disturbs her, to look at Jakesully's face and think of how he lied, how he knew the danger they were in - his own clan, at least in name - and said nothing. She wants to retch, to scream; she wants, viciously, to hurt him, so that he will know what it is to weep the way she wept over her father's body.

But to do that would serve only herself, and she will be the tsahik one day - it is given to her to think of the clan, to put aside her own anger and see clearly even when all is uncertain. To lose the great tree would be to lose everything, and the Sky People could make that happen with an ease it makes Neytiri sick to think of. So they need Jakesully and the Sky People who have come with him to tell them whatever secrets they know, and for that, they need to save Doctorgrace.

Somewhere behind the anger, Neytiri can admit that it is not a hardship. It is a long and tangled thing, the path that she and Doctorgrace walked before Jakesully came; perhaps Neytiri cannot look at her with untainted joy, but she is far from wishing for Doctorgrace's death. Doctorgrace is not clan, but she is not the enemy either, and by the look of her wound, she has paid her debt to Eywa in blood twice over on the way here. If Doctorgrace can pass the eye of Eywa now, then Eywa has forgiven her; and even if Neytiri wanted to, it is not for her to punish what Eywa would forgive.

Tsu'tey would never argue with Mother aloud - he is not yet olo'eyktan, they have had no time for the ceremony to pass the bow. But he does glare, to see Doctorgrace brought to the foot of the tree; so Neytiri scowls at him until he subsides. No, he is not the olo'eyktan - and he never will be, if he cannot learn to put the clan ahead of his own desire to hate.

When he has looked away, she turns back to the tree, and follows Mother to the roots. Jakesully is there, so much smaller and paler than she is used to, rolling in his wheeled chair; but much as he may look like one, he is not a child, and she still feels that fierce, jagged urge to make him hurt. So she is careful in her motions, deliberate, and she does not look in his direction.

***

Trudy's no expert, when it comes to magical alien trees; she watches while Spellman puts Grace where Mo'at tells him to, and helps Spellman and Neytiri get Grace's avatar body up next to her. The mossy stuff glows wherever they touch it, bright as magic, and for the first time since Sully told her where to fly and why, she thinks maybe this is going to work.

Mo'at speaks for a short time; Trudy can't understand what she says, but she wishes she could, because whatever it is, it turns the expressions of the Na'vi gathered near them from angry to considering, at least, if not forgiving.

They arrange themselves around the tree in circles, and the moss, or whatever the hell it is - it grows to meet them, to find the ends of their queues where they sit. Everything is glowing; Mo'at begins a chant that spreads through the circles, and soon the air is humming with the sounds of their voices, the glow burning in the same rhythm as their swaying. Trudy's lapsed, she still wears her cross only for Mamá's sake, and her faith is mostly reserved for throttles under her hands and the thrum of Samson rotors. But this is something else. This - this is part of what Grace was talking about, when she told Trudy about Eywa and the links between the trees. This is real.

Trudy looks at Grace, and almost takes a step back in surprise. They didn't have time to do it right, undress Grace and wrap her with leaves like Mo'at said they should - she's in her bra with her pants rolled up to her knees like a kid who's about to go wading. Mo'at's been murmuring over her, moving her hands in slow patterns; and the tendrils have grown around Grace, too, around her avatar, up over the curves of her forearms and the knobs of her ankles. And, in a great thick rope, to the nape of her neck, just below the exo-pack's strap.

"Jesus," Sully murmurs next to her. "Look at that," and all Trudy can do is nod.

***

Pain, pain, pain - Grace hates pain, which is why she's so pleased when there's something else. A breeze, maybe, or a - a tingle, something, moving over her skin; and she swims up out of the dark to hear Mo'at's voice, calm and sure.

"She will pass through the eye of Eywa," Mo'at says - English, who is she talking to? Is Trudy there? Grace's eyelids feel heavy, gummy at the edges. "If she is strong enough, she will return, in this body."

Someone touches her - four fingers and a thumb, so definitely not a Na'vi, and too small for an avatar. "Hang on, Grace," Jake says, low and rough; and then there are other hands, strong and careful, on her shoulder and her cheek.

"Live, goddammit," Trudy says, barely more than a whisper.

And Grace, abruptly, really really wants to. She's a scientist, she's not afraid of death. Yu Sung and Max could manage her research, if they really had to; and any idiot can write a book, if not necessarily a good one. And yet. This is what it's like, she thinks dimly, to be irrational.

There's light coming from somewhere, bright enough that she can see it through her eyelids; purple above, green to the side and below. Mo'at chants, melodic sometimes, almost a shout at others, and Grace almost wants to smile. Mo'at is entreating Eywa on her behalf; this bullet is so fucked.

The tingle is stronger, spreading, and it's really more of a tickle now, like someone's laid a spiderweb over her like a blanket. The glow is getting ridiculous, but there's nothing Grace can do about it; her eyes can't get any more shut than they are.

Mo'at stops suddenly, like she can feel what Grace is feeling, like she notices the sudden starburst happening in Grace's chest. Suddenly Grace's eyelids don't feel heavy at all, and when she opens her eyes, she smiles. Trudy is in front of her, with the tree glowing overhead: the two things Grace most wanted to see before she went.

She pauses and considers that thought. Jesus, she must have lost a lot of blood.

"Grace?" Trudy says, hushed.

Grace can't move properly - something's around her arms, her shoulders, all over her - but Trudy's arm is right there by her hand, and she clutches at it convulsively, a second before the pull starts.

"I'm with her," Grace gasps, "she's real," and then there are no words for the place where she is.

***

"Grace? Grace!"

Trudy's about to shake her - it's fucking creepy, how still she is - but Mo'at catches her arm. "No," she says, and shakes her head. "She is no longer there."

"What do you mean-" Trudy begins, but Mo'at's already moving away, spreading her hands over the funky little tendrils on Grace like she's touching them from a foot away.

"We have succeeded," Mo'at says, and cracks a sudden, brilliant smile. "Doctorgrace," she says, a greeting, a moment before the avatar body twitches and opens its eyes.

***

"What the fuck," Grace says immediately with her new mouth - it's not new to her, not after the number of field hours she's logged in this thing, but. But it's not a thing anymore. It's her body now; barring something even more ridiculous than this, she's never going to leave it again.

She sits up abruptly, and the little glowing roots, the fingers of Eywa, snap off where they were connected to her neck - their task is finished. It's always a relief to not need the stupid exo-pack anymore, but the tail never stops being a little weird, and it's disorienting to be so much taller.

Somewhere nearby, Mo'at is talking - sharing the news, telling the Omatikaya that Eywa let Grace past, that their task is finished. There's a brief still moment, Grace staring out from her new set of eyes and trying not to give in to her sudden lightheadedness; and then there are arms around her neck. Trudy.

"Grace, Grace, Christ," Trudy's saying - gasping, really, and sort of wetly, like she's been on the edge of crying, which makes Grace feel guilty at the same time that it turns something in her gut pleasantly warm.

"Trudy," she says, and puts her newly large hands to Trudy's waist. They almost span the whole warm width of Trudy's back, now; and that's a thought Grace probably should have waited until later to have. But, hey, she thinks, she lived. She gets to indulge herself for a minute if she wants to.

She's still shaky; there's only enough space in her head for one thought at a time and it's all taken up by Trudy's shirt under her palms. So she's surprised when Trudy's hands - stupid distracting strong-fingered hands - come up to her face. They're small on her cheeks, but that doesn't stop Trudy from yanking her head down to kiss her mouth.

It's nothing like the first time, nothing like Trudy hesitant and gentle and Grace looking for a reason to doubt her; Trudy's mouth is human-small and warm, and her hands are hard against Grace's face, holding on like she thinks Grace is going to try to slip away.

Which, she's wrong - wrong, wrong, so fucking wrong; Grace is never moving again, except to open her mouth so she can finally taste the smirky smartass curve of Trudy's lip. Trudy sucks in a sharp breath when she does, surges up under her hands, and Grace is so not going anywhere-

Or at least she wouldn't be if it were up to her, which it isn't. She closes her eyes tight and tries to hang on, but her head is starting to spin and her cheeks feel abruptly cold against Trudy's fingers; and then Trudy breaks the kiss with a gasp and wraps arms like iron around Grace's back.

"Mo'at," she hears Trudy say, startled. "Mo'at, is she-"

"We were successful," Mo'at says reassuringly, and her hands on Grace's shoulders help Grace find which way is upright again. "But she has passed before the gaze of Eywa, a strain even to a trained tsahik; she must rest."

"Dammit, Grace," Trudy mutters; Grace wants to protest, but her eyes are mostly shut, and the best she can do is to flop a hand in Trudy's general direction. "Yeah, yeah, I'll stay with you," Trudy adds, and keeps her grip on Grace's wrist as Mo'at lays her down on the moss again. "And I don't care how many times you pull this fainting shit. One day, we're going to get to second base. You got me?"

Hell yes, Grace thinks; but she's already half asleep.

***

Trudy yanks her facemask back on and drops back to sit on a root. She's short of breath - well, of course she is, she took her facemask off. She's already got a searing headache from the CO₂. She's lucky Grace was too out of it to realize and yell at her. It would've been fine; even here, carbon dioxide poisoning takes a little time, and they weren't going to be kissing for more than thirty seconds anyway.

Probably.

"She will be well," Mo'at says, and when Trudy looks up, Mo'at's yellow eyes are fixed on her - yellow like Grace's, like Grace's avatar's - except, no, they really are just Grace's now. Trudy swallows a laugh that probably would have come out hysterical, and looks at - at Grace's body. The one she's not in. Christ, this is so fucking weird.

"We will bury her former self," Neytiri says, and she's relaxed a little, she's not so cold or far away - she's glad they saved Grace, too. "Eywa will accept it, even if there is - nothing there."

Beside her, Sully covers his facemask with his hands, and Spellman lets out a long breath and finally sits down. Trudy can see he's still got a little of Grace's blood on his hands and his forearm.

"Doctorgrace herself is safe," Mo'at says. "Now: tell us what you know."

Trudy glances at Sully automatically - he's the one who told Quaritch, he's the one who knows the whole story from beginning to end. But he's looking right back at her, hands tight on the wheels of his chair, and his lips are pressed into a thin line.

She can guess what he's thinking. She doesn't know all the ground security personnel, but she doesn't have to. Lopez, Bisset, Maksimov, even Mason - they'll be part of the fleet, when Quaritch comes for this place, and even if Neytiri turns down Sully's generous offer to smash their comm equipment, there might not be anything they can do about it. People are going to die, if they do this.

But people are going to die if they don't, too, and Trudy chose sides the second she pulled Maya up and away from Hometree instead of firing like she was supposed to. There's no undoing it.

Besides, it worked: Grace is alive. Looking at Sully's drawn face, Trudy feels suddenly merciful. "RDA's not going to leave this alone," she says, so Sully won't have to. "You've tripped Quaritch up a few too many times, and he's not a compromising kind of guy. He doesn't want to live and let live - he wants to grind you down so hard you'll never get up again. And he knows - he knows about this tree, what it means to you."

Mo'at closes her eyes for a second, hearing it, but Neytiri looks right at Sully. She must have figured out the only way Quaritch could know that; and she's shot right past cold anger to about an inch away from breaking Sully in half. Sully doesn't say anything, though, doesn't make a move to explain it away or make it sound like anything other than what it is.

"Then he will come for us," Mo'at says. "He will tear this place apart."

"Yeah, pretty much," Spellman says quietly.

"You have to leave," Sully says. "You have to leave, now - there are other trees, you have to go-"

"This is ours," Neytiri says sharply. "The tree of our ancestors, where we speak to our mother. How will she know our voices, in another place? We cannot go. If we cannot save this place, then we will have no place at all - we will be dead, whether we are still breathing or not."

"She's right," Spellman says. "I mean, the time it would take to regrow all the right connections in the root system - I don't even know how you'd do something like that-"

"You are not a tsahik," Mo'at reminds him, but she doesn't look any more flexible than Neytiri. "But my daughter speaks truth: we cannot go, not if there is still any other choice."

There's a pause, after that; no one seems to know what to say next. Spellman and Sully glance at each other uncertainly, Spellman's blue head a good foot higher than Sully in the chair even though Spellman's sitting down, and Trudy accidentally looks back at Grace's empty human body and has to swallow hard.

"The old alliance," Neytiri suggests at last.

Mo'at looks grim. "And why should they come to us?" she says.

"Hold up," Spellman says. "What are you talking about?"

"The great clans of the forest," Mo'at elaborates. "The four who share the trees and the rivers, from the edge of the far canyon-" and she motions off to the side, "-to the mountains. Omatikaya, Tsiriyan, O'aletu, Pxanganawa. We were as one people, for a time, until the day we rode against your digging places."

The pit mine massacres, Trudy thinks. Shit, there's no way this story has a happy ending.

"So many were killed," Mo'at says, and shakes her head. "We led them to disaster. They will not fight for us again."

"What else is left for us?" Neytiri says.

Mo'at eyes them all, and then turns: behind her, Grace's new body is still sleeping, cushioned by the moss that blotches the tree's roots. "Sleep, I think," she says. "The day is long gone, and we still have a little time, do we not? We will find another way."

Grace wakes to the sun, filtered to gentleness through the long translucent tendrils of the vitraya ramunong; she blinks twice, adjusting, and then sits up.

Yeah, no, all that definitely happened, because her head's already four feet off the ground even though she hasn't stood up yet. Also, she still has a tail.

Her - previous body has already been moved; it's weird, not knowing where it is. And everything feels just a little bit different. The technical side of the avatars' function is incredibly complicated, but even Jake knows there are some limitations. But she's in this body now. How the fuck is that even possible? How could the neurons inside this head ever have synapsed in the right configurations to hold her memories, her self?

She touches the back of her neck, remembering the fingers of Eywa snapping off there, and angles a glance up at the tree arching over her. She has so much data to collect.

The Omatikaya aren't the sort to sleep late, and there's already a hum of activity around her. A few steps away, Mo'at and Neytiri are deep in conversation with Jake and Norm, who are both in their avatars; Trudy looks hilariously short standing among them, but there's no discomfort or self-consciousness in her face.

She's the first one to see that Grace is awake, and the smile that spreads over her face then makes Grace - well, actually, it makes Grace incredibly nervous.

They didn't quite manage to finish that conversation in Grace's office, and judging by the kissing that Grace remembers happening in between then and now, Trudy has evidently joined the category of people who think they're girlfriends.

But just because she's willing to ignore all the reasons Grace is a mistake, that doesn't mean they're not valid. For this, Grace has all the data she needs. Even if Trudy does love her - love, shit, love is a little too much, like's not enough, fucking English and its limited romantic vocabulary - that's not likely to be enough to overcome the simple problem of Grace's Graceness. Grace knows herself: she's not a hospitable environment for positive emotions. And since Grace has somehow ended up in the grip of burgeoning romantic attachment - fucking English! - that lends itself to concern for Trudy's happiness, clearly it's up to her to choke this off before it can fuck either of them up.

"Hey, Grace," Trudy says, hauling herself up the side of the little stone rise below the tree. She's got the shortest legs of anybody within a dozen miles of here, but somehow she still got to Grace first.

She's got her facemask on, at least, so Grace won't have to fend off any more kissing - except, wait, Trudy kissed her right here last night. Trudy took her goddamn facemask off? Is she an idiot? There's fucking hydrogen sulfide in the air here, one breath could be enough-

"Grace?" Trudy says. "You okay?"

"Oh, awesome," Grace says, "fan-fucking-tastic. Have we figured out how to keep ourselves from dying messily yet?"

"Um, not really," Trudy says. "But we're working on it." She looks at Grace curiously. "You've only been awake for like thirty seconds, how are you already pissed off?"

"It's my natural state," Grace says sourly.

Trudy laughs, teeth bright in the sun. "Lucky it looks good on you, then."

Grace closes her eyes against the sight of Trudy's face, and shakes her head sharply.

"What is it?" Trudy says, and then something must tip her off; Grace still isn't looking at her, but she can hear the way Trudy's voice sharpens. "Oh, of course - thirty seconds, that's enough time to decide - what? I was just fucking with you, twice in a row?"

"It doesn't matter whether you were fucking with me," Grace says, and stands up, towering a good three and a half feet over Trudy's head. She shouldn't surrender to the impulse, she should just stop and walk away; but Grace has never been much good at not saying what she's thinking. "Look, I'm not kidding myself, Trudy. I'm an asshole and you don't deserve it - that's exactly why this can't happen."

"Whoa, whoa," Trudy says, eyes exaggeratedly wide. "Holy crap, Grace, you're stubborn and mean? Wow, thanks for the heads-up!"

Mo'at had hung back for a moment, saying something to Norm and Jake, but she's coming closer now - she probably wants to look Grace over, make sure everything really worked the way it was supposed to. So Grace doesn't say anything in reply; she lets Mo'at interrupt by calling her name, and she climbs down past Trudy without a word to let herself get checked over.

***

Trudy's going to tear her hair out by the motherfucking roots. Grace is beyond infuriating - and yeah, Trudy gets it, this is exactly the level of irritation Grace was expecting, except Trudy still wants her. So Grace is wrong, but Trudy's not going to be able to explain it to her without making it sound like she's right.

Not at this particular moment, anyway, because if Trudy tries to talk to Grace right now all that's going to come out is a scream. Jesus Christ.

Neytiri followed Mo'at, but Spellman and Sully are still standing a few yards back from the tree. Spellman's talking, waving his hands - something about the ceremony last night, Trudy thinks - but Sully is watching her stomp closer even as he keeps nodding at Norm.

"What'd she say?" Sully says, when she gets close enough.

Trudy sighs, and abruptly the worst of the anger drains away. "Some stupid shit about how awful she is," she says. "Like I don't know already."

"Ah, romance," Spellman says dryly.

Trudy snorts. "I'm just saying. Like I could somehow have made it this far without realizing that she likes to swear and call people names and yell a lot." She runs her hands over her hair. "Like I don't already love her anyway," she adds, more quietly.

"At least you didn't kill her father," Sully says, tired and sort of wretched-sounding; Trudy looks at him, but he's not waiting to be comforted or reassured. He twitches a cheek at her like he knows it would make sense for him to smile but he can't make himself do it, and then he looks at Neytiri like - like it's already done, like he's going to spend the rest of his life loving someone who hates him and he knows it.

Trudy's not going to tell him Neytiri will forgive him, not when she's not sure it's true - not when she's not even sure Neytiri ought to. But she reaches up to touch his elbow, which is about even with her face.

"Well, I don't think either of us can out-depress that," Spellman says, glancing at Trudy. "Time for an abrupt change of subject that we can all pretend happened naturally. Have we tried to raise Max on the comm yet?"

Grace will never be clan, and she hasn't passed any trials; but she can't help fight whatever it is Quaritch will be bringing without an ikran, and it's actually not as long a trip as it might otherwise be - they're already in the mountains. "There's no time for a proper journey with the young warriors," Neytiri says coolly in Na'vi. "I'll take you, and stand by you - that's the best we can do."

"I wouldn't want anyone else," Grace replies in kind, quietly, and she uses the most deferent register she can think of.

She pauses after she says it, feeling the sickening swoop of guilt yet again; there's a part of her that still feels like she should throw herself on the ground at Neytiri's feet and never get up again. Why did she even say that? Like it's going to help, telling Neytiri she wants her to be stuck with the job of taking the woman who killed half of her family through the iknimaya.

But when she glances up, Neytiri's just looking at her curiously. Neytiri draws in a breath, hesitates for a second, and then tilts her head. "It's done, Doctorgrace," she says.

Grace snorts, because she doesn't want to cry. She's failed Neytiri a hundred times over, barging in and trying to save her people with science and English when they'd never have needed saving if no one had come at all; and she's failing her again, right now, making her soothe Grace's guilt like that's the thing that matters most, like Grace is feeling even a thousandth as shitty as someone who left their home and their father's body in flames behind them just days ago.

"It's done," Neytiri repeats, a little more quietly. "Stop trying to figure out how to make it up to me. I forgive you - I forgive you now because I want to, not because there's any way you could earn it. It is for you to bear it, knowing that you don't deserve it."

Grace grimaces, because it's true; but, startlingly, Neytiri laughs, and reaches out to touch her shoulder.

"If you want to stop feeling like this, Doctorgrace," she says, "stop making the same mistakes."

Grace looks at her. They're just about on a level, now that Grace is Na'vi-height; Grace doesn't have to look up anymore.

She lets out a slow breath, and then clears her throat. "Mistakes?" she says. "Mistakes? I don't make mistakes."

Neytiri grins, and her hand tightens on Grace's shoulder. She opens her mouth and cries out, high and piercing, and Seze comes flapping down from the rocks. "Let's go," Neytiri says, and climbs on.

***

Sully and Spellman agree to see whether they can get a hold of Max with Maya's systems, and hurry off. Even they can operate a comm by themselves, though, so Trudy sighs and rubs a hand across her forehead - but she only gets a second to mope.

"Are you well?"

She turns around: it's Mo'at. Grace and Neytiri left, somewhere in there, and Mo'at's started working on something at the big standing loom the Na'vi have rigged up at the side of the clearing. She's looking over her shoulder at Trudy, even as she draws the shuttle along the row.

"You have - fought with someone?" Mo'at guesses, turning back to her weaving.

"Sort of," Trudy says sourly. It's not quite a fight when one of the people in it has already made up their mind.

"Ah," Mo'at says, nodding, "you have fought with Doctorgrace."

Trudy blinks.

"She is your - I do not know the word," Mo'at says. "Muntxiyante?"

Trudy covers her face with her hand. If that's the Na'vi word for girlfriend, she's going to laugh forever. Or maybe cry.

"There is a way to marry only to bear children," Mo'at explains, "which is muntxa'eveng; but there is also muntxiyan. Sometimes both at once, with the same person. But not always."

Not girlfriend - wife. Perfect. "Not exactly," Trudy says, and sighs into her exo-pack. Yeah, she's an optimist, but not even optimism can make a marriage out of a kiss and a half and Grace being stubborn.

Mo'at watches her for a long moment, and then smiles just a little, and turns her shuttle to begin another row. "My daughter once had muntxiyante," she says, quiet; and the tone of her voice makes Trudy think she doesn't mean Neytiri. "In the days of the school, before the end. Has Doctorgrace told you?"

Trudy tries to think. Grace has mostly talked around the school and its closing, has kept it vague, and Trudy hasn't really pressed her. She knows it has something to do with the pit mine massacres, with guns and Selfridge and a lot of dead bodies; but that's about it. "Only a little," she says.

"Kirey'atu," Mo'at says, and her voice when she says it gives it the sound of a name that's been wailed in grief many times. "She was very strong; she had the better of Tsu'tey more than once, and she might have been olo'eyktan." The shuttle slows in Mo'at's hands. "She led many of our warriors to the mines, before we fully understood your ways, and she did not come back." Mo'at glances at Trudy again, gold eyes wide and serious. "It is a gift from Eywa, to love so strongly. Do not waste it."

"I don't want to," Trudy says after a moment, feeling almost apologetic. "I mean, I won't - I promise I won't. If I can get Grace's head out of her ass, that is."

Mo'at blinks. "That sounds like a wise first step," she agrees gravely, shuttle flicking between the last few threads, and then she pulls the beater down against the weft with a thump.

In the interests of time, Neytiri abbreviated her training: Grace knows how to stand, how to swing and aim the skxawik, and the rest is up to her brains and the strength in her new body's arms.

Most of the ikrans scatter, which Grace remembers from before, the one time she managed to convince Tsu'tey to let her come along on one of these trips. Ikrans can be kind of confrontational, sure, but they also really like to lie around and sun themselves. Still, she thinks, they seem a little unsettled.

She shakes it off, and raises the skxawik, taking another step forward. The ikrans that aren't flying away are mostly backing off, shrieking defiantly to make sure she knows how scared they aren't; but there's one that's not going, crouching low against the rocks and hissing. That's the one.

Grace lifts the skxawik a little higher and begins to swing it, waiting; after a moment, the ikran turns its head to clack its jaws at her, and she lets the skxawik go at just the right point in its arc.

It catches perfectly, wrapping the ikran's jaws shut tight, and Grace leaps at the ikran, trying to grip its head without poking it in the eye.

Neytiri crows behind her, and Grace grins against the ikran's neck even as she struggles to keep it from knocking her out with the backwards jerks of its head. She's going to beat this thing; it's only a matter of time.

The ikran squawks deep in its throat and scrabbles at the rock, and Grace is so occupied that she barely notices the shadow that sweeps over them - until Neytiri shrieks. "Doctorgrace, quickly!" she cries.

She should know better, Grace thinks; damned if Grace didn't pick the stubbornest ikran on the whole moon. It's pinned one of her arms with the massive bony weight of its head, and she needs the other hand where it is to keep it from smacking her with its wing - she can't get to its tswintsyip yet, she needs more time.

She gets a knee over the ikran's wing and takes a second to look up, and fuck, fuck, it's a toruk, they're all going to die. But if she lets the ikran go now and tries to run, it's going to kill her, unless the toruk kills both of them first.

She grabs the ikran's tswintsyip, and yanks at her trapped hand; it stings like a motherfucker going over the rock, there's not going to be any skin left on the back once she finally gets it out, but it's working.

Not fast enough, though - the toruk is circling back, preparing to dive, and Grace closes her eyes and strains, desperate.

She hears Neytiri scream with anger, hears the whoosh of the toruk and the fast sharp snap of Seze's wings, and then the toruk shrieks and wheels. Grace's eyes are still closed, but she can feel it when the sunlight's suddenly blocked out. Neytiri cries out again, but her voice sounds different, triumphant and wide-open; Grace's fingers finally skid out from underneath the ikran's neck, and she grabs her own tswin and brings it up to connect.

She's ridden pa'lis before, she knows what it's like to bond, but she's never gotten over the feeling of it - a mind meld, her inner Trekkie wants to call it, but a little less controlled. It's shallow, with the pa'lis; she can feel them if she tries, match their breathing and know where they're hurt and think simple things at them. This is different.

There's another life in her mind, and for a second, Grace actually gets confused: she's hunted in these mountains for years, flown every curve and canyon, why is her brain telling her she doesn't have wings? But soon enough her mind gets oriented - these are not her memories.

In the space of three seconds, Grace knows the ikran under her as well as any ikran in his flock does - he is stubborn, she knew it, and she knows what she's going to call him.

"Up, Ekxan," she mutters, and pictures it, imagines what it's like to stand - which isn't hard when she knows what it feels like to be in his body, to feel his legs move. "Come on, up," and he struggles to his feet, twists his head so she can work the skxawik off his face.

She did scrape like half the skin off her hand, and it's bleeding, but it's not so bad - she's more worried about what happened with Neytiri and that toruk. She slides off Ekxan's back, keeping the bond intact just in case, and scans the rocks nearby.

Neytiri's not there, not anywhere Grace can see; but the ikran clinging to the far cliff with the saddle on its back, that's Seze, and Grace's heart jolts unsteadily. Fuck, fuck, she'd never have come here with Neytiri if she'd known Neytiri would die, fuck.

Ekxan catches the urgency of her thoughts, if not the full meaning, and scrambles with her to the nearest cliff edge - small odds, but maybe Neytiri got hold of a vine-

The orange-and-black-streaked back of the toruk rises toward them, and Grace stumbles back, reaching for Ekxan like there's a chance in hell a newly-bonded ikran can fly well enough to evade a toruk. But the toruk screams and folds up its wings, landing on the rocks beside Grace without dipping down to bite her torso off; and when it lowers its head, Neytiri slides from its neck and slips her tswin free.

Grace stares at her.

"It seems we are both new riders today, Doctorgrace," Neytiri says unsteadily in English. "Now - quick, quick, you must fly, or the bond will not be strong enough."

"Neytiri," Grace says - what the everloving fuck, she just flew a goddamn toruk, why does Grace not have her recorder - but Neytiri is shoving at Ekxan's side.

"Later, Doctorgrace," Neytiri says, "you must fly now."

Out of the two of them, Neytiri is clearly the expert on the care of giant airborne reptiles. Grace swings a leg over Ekxan's neck and wraps both tswintsyips around her arms. "Okay - okay, go," she says; Neytiri slaps Ekxan on the haunch and shouts, and Ekxan springs over the edge with a shriek.

***

Trudy winds the shuttle carefully through the last bit of the warp and pulls it out, and then glances back along the row and starts to laugh.

She'd started out trying too hard to keep it tight, but Mo'at had intervened - it's easy to see where, even, by the spaces along the row where the warp suddenly loosens. It looks hilarious, especially compared to the long even rows before it, and even pressing it down hard with the beater isn't going to fix it.

"Christ, take it out," Trudy says, still chuckling, and hands the shuttle back.

Mo'at doesn't look upset by the way Trudy's ruined her cloth; she's smiling, instead, and she takes the shuttle and winds it back through the warp, starting a new row. "Why should I, Trudychacon," she says, "when it pleases me?"

Trudy eyes the row, and then, more doubtfully, Mo'at.

"Neytiri has much anger," Mo'at says, drawing the shuttle along gently, "and I cannot say I do not understand it. I cannot say I have not felt it. But I think I also know something of what it took from you, to turn from your people and come to us when we have such reason to hate you."

Trudy swallows, and doesn't say anything.

"You are part of us, now," Mo'at says, "Sky People or not, clan or not, you shape our future alongside us. It is right that you should also have a place in our first weaving on the new loom."

"But - it's so awful," Trudy says sheepishly, and, appropriately enough, that's the moment someone behind them shrieks.

They both turn automatically, and then Trudy finds herself ducking reflexively, even though nothing's coming toward her but a shadow. A big shadow, a fucking enormous shadow, and Trudy looks up just as Grace comes down on a banshee.

Which was supposed to happen, Trudy's pretty sure, because that must have been where Neytiri took her - but she's pretty sure Neytiri didn't leave flying that gigantic black-and-orange monster.

"Holy crap," she says, and if she weren't already ducking she would have started. Christ, that thing is huge.

But Mo'at isn't ducking at all; Mo'at's walking right toward it, with a look on her face like it's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen in her life. "Toruk makto," she murmurs, looking up at Neytiri perched on the thing's neck, and she smiles.

A crowd has started to gather around them, the first wave of screams dying away as people begin to realize what's happened. Sully and Spellman push through to the front just as Neytiri's giant banshee leans down, and she slides easily from its neck and lands lightly.

"Of course," Spellman says, hushed.

Neytiri beams, and touches her mother's hand. "The clans will come to us now," she says.

Neytiri takes Jake with her when she goes to show off her toruk to the other clans of the forest; he looks shocked and a little bit afraid when she touches his shoulder, but she only looks at him calmly. "I will be tsahik," she says, "and I am the rider of the last shadow, but they will want to hear that we have information - that we will know things this time that we did not before. But I do not wish you to do it as penance; and if that is what it will be to you then you should not come."

"No," Jake says, "no, I - it won't, I won't do it for that. I'll come with you."

"Good," Neytiri says, and she doesn't smile; but her hand is gentle on his shoulder, and when she turns away, Grace sees Jake close his eyes for a second.

She can understand the feeling, she thinks wryly, because Trudy's coming toward her, and she really, really wants to close her eyes and possibly not ever open them again.

But Trudy doesn't scream at her or slap her, or even ignore her, all of which Grace would understand. She just looks at Grace, exasperated and maybe a little amused, and slaps Ekxan on the neck. "Productive trip," she says.

"You could say that," Grace says, a little warily. The other shoe's bound to drop at some point, isn't it?

Something of what she's thinking must show on her face, because Trudy snorts and says, "I'll yell some sense into you later. Right now, I wanted to tell you: Spellman got Patel on the comm."

Norm did get Max on the comm - he can only stay on long enough to say hi and then sign off, right then, but he radios them the next day around midafternoon. He doesn't have much for them, those first few days - he's not in SecOps, he can't tell exactly what preparations Quaritch might be making that he doesn't know about.

But on the fourth morning after Neytiri's departure, the first warriors of the O'aletu join the Pxanganawa and the Tsiriyan who've begun camping in the clearing; and that afternoon, Max's voice is harried and crackling over the comm.

"It's big," he says, nearly whispering. "I'm not sure exactly what they're doing, but it has something to do with the shuttles - there's not a transport scheduled for months, but people have been going in and out of that end of the hangar-" and then, suddenly, he goes silent.

"Max?" Grace says, after a long moment.

"Never mind, I thought I heard - no, wait - shit-"

There's a banging sound, like a door slamming, or - no, Grace thinks, like a door that's been shoved open, rebounding off the wall, and then somebody says, "What the hell is this?" Somebody who's definitely not Max, because the "h" has slid off "hell" like it was never there.

"Just - testing some equipment," Max says nervously, and whoever it is snorts.

Norm looks about as panicked as Grace feels, and Trudy - well, in point of fact, Trudy's frowning, eyes narrowed. "That sounds like-" she whispers, almost inaudibly.

"Oh, of course," the other person says, "because you think I can't tell that thing is on and transmitting? You're one of Augustine's guys, aren't you?"

By tacit agreement, everybody huddled up behind the cockpit is barely breathing, trying not to make any noises loud enough to carry over the comm - until Trudy leans in her seat, toward the mic, and says, "Bisset?"

There's a moment of silence, and then whoever it is says, "Chacon? God, he really is passing you intel under the table, isn't he?"

"I tried," Max says, "I did - I never transmitted from the same place twice, I kept moving-"

"Yeah, well, chak jou pa Dimanch," Bisset says, cool. "Someone would have found you sooner or later."

"Sorry, Grace," Max says miserably.

"No, really," Bisset says. "They would have. The extra signal kept showing up on our monitors, but nobody was receiving it, it was driving the techs nuts trying to figure it out. You still there, Chacon?"

"Yeah," Trudy says, and her tone is a little guarded but she looks like she's thinking about smiling. The expression makes Grace's chest clench, abrupt and annoying.

"So?" Bisset says, and, strangely, she sounds impatient. "What's he been telling you? He is one of your girl's people, isn't he?"

"Oh, Jesus," Grace mutters. Is there anybody on this entire goddamn moon who doesn't think they're dating?

"Can't imagine he's been getting much, outside SecOps," Bisset continues thoughtfully. "Probably won't, until it's too late."

"Wait, won't?" Max says, through a particularly loud crackle over the comm. "As in will not, future tense? You aren't going to kill me?"

"Well, I could if you like," Bisset says dubiously. "But I was figuring you could use some help. Am I right, Chacon?"

"What, really?" Norm says. "But aren't you-"

"Security is one thing," Bisset says. "Quaritch isn't doing security anymore, he's doing - something else. The opposite of security, you might say, since starting an all-out war with the entire native population of this planet probably isn't going to lower the miners' casualty rate."

There's another still moment, during which Grace can practically hear Max shrug.

"So," Bisset says. "What exactly do you need? Just intel?"

"Well, yeah," Norm says, "pretty much. He is planning to hit us, right? And something about the shuttles-"

"Actually," Trudy says slowly, "there is something else you could do."

***

Trudy doesn't know what she's going to say until she says it: "Patel, what exactly do you guys still have in the lab?"

"Uh," Patel says. "Like what? They took most of our files, Yu Sung was really pissed-"

"No, no," Trudy says, "like, stuff - chemicals for - for testing, or-"

"Phytohaemagglutinin," Grace says.

Trudy blinks.

"Of course!" Patel says joyfully over the comm. "Those bean things we tested for edibility, in '51 - they had everybody throwing up for like three days straight."

"I hadn't realized you scientists lived lives of such glamour," Bisset says.

"No additional severe reactions," Grace clarifies. "Shouldn't set off anyone's allergies, nothing like that, and as long as you're careful about when you add it to the food, you can be sure the medical wing will have enough staff to handle it. We could cut Quaritch's numbers in half."

Trudy's used to the feeling of wanting to kiss Grace, and getting pretty good at strangling it, so she doesn't do anything rash; she just stares over the comm controls at Grace's new blue face and lets her heart flip over as slowly as it wants to.

Mo'at is greeting the O'aletu outside, one by one, but they explain the plan to her over the welcoming feast. When Grace gets to the part about the bean things, Mo'at nods knowingly. "Of course," she says. "Cooked improperly, they will cause - I am not sure of the word."

"Vomiting," Trudy contributes.

"Vomiting," Mo'at repeats pleasantly, and smiles. "But enough - it is up to your people in the Sky place now, is it not?"

It is. Bisset can't do the entire thing by herself, but she'll have Patel and Hong to help her with the lab end, and some of the pilots have buddies in the kitchen. Trudy can't imagine a situation where Bisset would ask Lopez or Maksimov for help and not get it. Together, they'll be able to handle it.

"Very well, then," Mo'at says. "And how much time is left?"

"Two days, Bisset said," Grace says.

"Then it is time we called on our mother," Mo'at says.

Trudy stands with Grace and Norm, off to the side. Neytiri and Jake got back just in time for the welcoming feast, and when Jake makes as though to stand with them, Neytiri takes his hand and pulls him toward the tree. "You completed the ceremony," Trudy hears Neytiri say. "You are part of our clan. We do not take that back just because you are stupid," and then, so quietly Trudy almost doesn't catch it, "Pray with us."

The Na'vi gather around the tree of souls - all of them, not just the Omatikaya, but they don't sit down this time. They wait, in loosely-arranged circles. Mo'at and Neytiri and Jake are in the first circle, and they each take a tendril of the tree in hand and lift up their queues.

Grace is next to Trudy; all day, she's been rabbity and skittish, like she knows all her bullshit reasoning would fall apart if Trudy got the chance to talk to her for five minutes, but now she's leaning against the nearby rock face and watching raptly.

"What are they saying?" Trudy murmurs.

Grace glances down at her, and then looks back at the tree. "Invoking her aid, most likely," she says quietly. "I've never - I've never seen anything like this before, but Mo'at's told me a little about the traditional prayers. It's unusual, to let another clan use your vitraya ramunong; but in this case, it's probably doing a lot to communicate Neytiri's sincerity."

Trudy smiles despite herself: it's so easy to get Grace going, sometimes, and so nice to hear her talk with that particular tone in her voice, that gentle note that falls somewhere between lecturing and wonder. Grace, she thinks, is never going to hit that place some people do when they study a thing for years and years, that place where they lose the awe and just recite facts. For somebody who likes to rag on Trudy for being too optimistic, too naive, Grace is living in an awfully reflective house.

Mo'at winds back toward them when she's finished, and as packed as the space around the tree is, she has no trouble at all reaching them. She touches Grace's hand, when she gets there, and starts to pull; and Grace stares at her with wide eyes.

"What, me? No, I'm - I haven't even-"

"You fly an ikran," Mo'at says placidly. "You are a warrior, if of the tongue rather than the arm. And you have passed the gaze of Eywa and returned. I do not think she would object to hearing your prayers."

Grace pauses, swallows, and looks down for a second. "You're the tsahik," she says.

"I am," Mo'at agrees, and leads her back through the crowd to the tree.

"Bet she wishes she had her video camera," Spellman murmurs in Trudy's ear, bending down so she can hear him, and Trudy barely stifles a chuckle.

Their day of grace passes way too quickly; Grace spends it meeting the clan leaders and helping the kids paint Trudy's Samson with war colors. But when they all crowd around the comm equipment at 04:30 on the morning of - they moved it to the Samson's bay so they'd have room - Max reports that they're ready to go. "They're heading out at 13:00, according to Nathalie," he says.

Grace glances at Trudy and mouths: Nathalie?

Bisset, Trudy mouths back, but she looks amused.

"We've slipped some raw bean things to the guy who's ladling out this morning's side," Max continues. "They're actually not all that different-looking, but the color's a little weird, so he'll be able to tell them apart enough to be sure nobody gets more than one or two. We don't want anybody projectile-vomiting, you remember."

Grace does, vividly.

"So the first symptoms should set in around 10:00, maybe 10:30," Max concludes. "Plenty of time for people to start getting pulled from duty."

It's good news - great news, the best, but Grace still feels strung weirdly tight. Her tail keeps twitching; not reflexively, more like a new brand of nervous habit, like tapping her fingers. She really wants a cigarette.

"I swear," Trudy says, as they climb out of the Samson, "this thing is becoming part of my face." She runs a finger around the seal on her facemask and sticks out her tongue.

"It's an improvement," Grace says, even though it isn't true; and her stomach clenches for a second after she does. Is she allowed to tease Trudy about shit like that yet?

"Har har," Trudy says, grinning, and lifts her hands to the strap. "Hang onto it for a second, will you? My hair's getting stuck down the side."

Grace doesn't want to do it - if she could, she'd solder the damn thing to Trudy's head. She still can't believe Trudy actually took it off and breathed the air here, just to kiss her.

But Trudy sucks in a breath and then slides it off her head like it's nothing, shakes her hair out over her shoulders and redoes her ponytail like she's standing in the middle of Hell's Gate with airlocks all around. She takes the opportunity to rub her face, too, and Grace reaches without thinking about it and touches the mark where it crosses one of Trudy's cheeks.

Trudy looks at her gently, like Grace's complete inability to make a fucking decision and stick to it is really charming; and she takes the facemask back when Grace hands it to her and slides it on. "It's okay," she says.

"No," Grace says, "it's really not. I don't know what the fuck is wrong with me."

"It's not you," Trudy says solicitously. "I'm irresistable; a few more near-death experiences, and you'll be falling into my do not move."

Grace blinks. That's not how that sentence was supposed to end, she's almost sure of it.

"I'm serious," Trudy breathes, and she's not looking at Grace anymore, she's looking at something over Grace's shoulder. "Don't move," but the expression on her face is like Darwin and Einstein and Curie are all standing right behind Grace, possibly with chainsaws, and Grace isn't a saint.

She turns her head, as slowly as she can, and in the end she doesn't even have to turn it all the way. Maybe there is something else behind her, but there's also an angtsik, a titanothere, right next to her, stepping out from between the trees that surround the Samson.

"What the crap," Norm stage-whispers, somewhere off to the side, and behind Trudy, a palulukan crushes a fern as it leaps over a downed branch. "Oh my god, oh my god, there's a thanator right there-"

But it doesn't charge. None of them do. A wild ikranay swoops down over the clearing and lands on the Samson's roof, a sleek mountain pa'li steps out boldly by the Samson's tail, but none of them make a move to attack. It's like they're waiting, too.

"Grace," Trudy murmurs warningly, "Grace-"

"A few more near-death experiences, you said," Grace says softly, and steps toward the angtsik.

It doesn't look quite as huge to her as it must to Trudy, but it's still nearly twice her height, looming in the early morning dimness; it stands there and watches her come closer, and doesn't even flare its shoulder fan to warn her off.

She doesn't say anything to it - that's as likely to piss it off as it is to soothe it, and it already seems disinclined to kill her, even if she has no idea why. She reaches up carefully and flattens her palm against the side of its leg; it shifts its weight, but she makes herself hold still, and it settles again almost immediately.

"Oh my god," Norm says again, hushed.

Angtsiks have tswintsyips, just like everything else on Pandora; Grace reaches for the nearest, which drapes down the angtsik's side, and there's something tangled in it. An organic filament, she realizes, gently picking it free. A pale little new-grown root.

It wasn't precisely an act of faith for Grace to lift her tswin to the vitraya ramunong. The mythocultural construct wasn't hers to touch, but that had still left her with the scientific reality, the verifiable potential for a mind the size of a world, and given the opportunity, she'd gone ahead and asked for help just like everybody else.

But somehow she still hadn't expected any of them to get an answer.

"It was Eywa," she says, lifting the little length of root so Norm and Trudy can see it. "Eywa told them to come to us, to help us save this place."

There's a rustle at the other side of the clearing, and Grace turns; the Samson's between her and Mo'at, but that doesn't matter when Mo'at is sitting easily astride another angtsik, a good twenty-five feet in the air. "Our mother provides," Mo'at says, and smiles.

***

Trudy understood what had happened the second Grace lifted that little root - she remembers what happened when Mo'at was saving Grace, those tangles of thin white strands that grew up around the Na'vi queues, and the back of Grace's neck. There had been a full day between the prayers to Eywa and this morning, and most of the animals must have slept for at least part of that time. It couldn't have taken long for Eywa to grow a few roots around their queues as they rested.

But it's still immensely fucking weird. They leave the clearing and Maya behind, and when they step out into the stone area around the tree of souls, they're surrounded by a scene that would have had Quaritch firing every bullet he could find. Thanators, giant direhorses, banshees, titanotheres - the whole place is full of squawking, shrieking, growling xenobiology that could kill Trudy by stepping on her accidentally.

It's beautiful.

Most of the Na'vi already have mounts, of course - banshees and direhorses, mostly - but they can still link up to the wild animals, tell them to follow such-and-such a direhorse and slam their head into anything metallic. The banshees are already gathering around Neytiri's leonopteryx, which is crouched to the side, black-orange markings dramatic in the rising sun, nearly as tall as the tree of souls itself.

Quaritch is intending to come at them with quite a lot - the shuttles have no real armament to speak of, but according to Bisset he's willing to settle for literally dropping blocks of TNT on their heads. But they don't know how much he'll actually have, once the Pandoran bean things have begun wreaking havoc on his ranks; and they won't know until the very last minute, if Bisset even manages to get a last report in to Patel.

Still, they don't really want to have this showdown right over the tree - they want to make Quaritch fight to even get close enough to make the drop on it. So Trudy fires Maya up about an hour ahead, and lifts up just behind the rows of banshees arrayed like a flock of birds behind Neytiri.

This, she thinks, is by far the coolest thing she has ever done.

The time goes by fast, and it's not long at all before Trudy spots the first ships - VFR, her instruments are almost entirely useless this far into the mountains.

They passed out all the personal comms Maya had in the back; Neytiri has one, and Tsu'tey, plus Putuakan and Mi'kxal and Yalawey, the other three clan leaders. "I see them," Trudy says into the radio, and hears Neytiri like an echo, translating into Na'vi.

Once they're visible, they come up fast. It looks impressive, whole long lines of Scorpions and Samsons with Quaritch's gunship in the middle, and one of the shuttles hovering low behind them; but Trudy can spot a dozen empty bays from here, Samsons with no door gunners and Scorpions with nobody to work the flank missile arrays. Apparently not a lot of SecOps passed on the baked bean side this morning.

But the tilt-rotors are still heavily armed, and the missiles they can launch are nothing to sneer at. Quaritch's Dragon fires a couple when he's still pretty far back; there's no way they can reach Neytiri or the banshees, but they curve down and smash into the trees below, and Trudy would be shocked if the warriors on direhorses and titanotheres managed to avoid them completely.

When they get close, they split up; the Scorpions and Samsons begin firing in earnest, and the Dragon drops low, unloading dozens of SecOps in AMPsuits into the forest. Banshees die shrieking in the air around Trudy, but she closes her ears to it and focuses on the Dragon.

Neytiri's in the front, and her leonopteryx hits an unlucky Scorpion with a roar that shakes Trudy's bones; the animal literally grabs a rotor in its claws and tears it off the Scorpion, and the ship spirals down and crashes hard into one of the floating hills before it can even reach the ground.

"Christ, that thing is awesome," Trudy murmurs, and then jerks Maya sideways, just in time to avoid the missile that's come screaming toward her bow.

Quaritch has spotted her, and he's not happy about it - apparently he doesn't care for the Omatikaya warpaint covering Maya's hull. Trudy grins with teeth, and drops back behind another drifting mountain, dipping down long enough to fire a missile of her own before she slips away again.

Somebody's yelling over the comm - not Neytiri or Tsu'tey, and it's in Na'vi, but a few more seconds of it and there's an explosion somewhere on the ground, the updraft making Maya rock a little. The shuttle has slowed to a crawl, but it's still advancing steadily, Scorpions and Samsons fending off most of the banshees that get anywhere near it.

But there are so many banshees, so very, very many - there's a rider for every five or six wild, that Trudy can see, and it might be a contest if everybody had door gunners, but they don't. Two skid across the top of the Dragon with a screeching of claws, and a Scorpion shoots one of them off, but the other sticks for a second. Trudy takes the opportunity to fire at the other side, as far from the banshee as she can when she's aiming with nothing but her eyes, and the Dragon has to pitch hard to avoid it, the weight of the banshee making it nearly slam into the Samson on its other side when it does.

Three Scorpions come around from the side, but - Trudy laughs when she sees what it is, a short startled bark. Neytiri got dozens of banshees to cling to the sides of a floating mountain, her leonopteryx perched triumphantly on the top, and it's losing altitude steadily. Even when Neytiri takes off, the banshees following like huge startled butterflies, inertia has its way, and the mountain slams into the Scorpions like - well, like several hundred tons of rock. Two of the Scorpions are crushed against it like tin cans, bursting into flames, and the third banks hard enough to nearly flip over and then slams into the Samson behind it.

The leonopteryx screams with satisfaction somewhere overhead, and then comes abruptly back into Trudy's view. Which she can see because she's let herself come all the way over the other mountain, she realizes, a second before another missile shrieks toward her from the Dragon.

She pulls Maya hard to the side, but it's not quite enough, and she ducks away from the boom and creak of metal, the sudden heat. It was a light blow - she thinks maybe the missile glanced off before exploding - and the rotor on that side is still spinning, but it probably won't be for long.

She takes the opportunity to fire twice at a Scorpion nearby, and then tries to bring Maya around; the damaged rotor's fighting her, but her baby's doing the best she can. "Good girl," Trudy tells the control yoke, "you're my very best girl," and then grits her teeth through a bout of turbulence.

She's surprised Quaritch hasn't smashed her into pieces, but it may have something to do with Neytiri having landed on his ship; the leonopteryx is clinging to the side of the Dragon with a foot and one clawed wing, and it's yanked an entire gunnery station off the side with the other foot, leaving a massive ragged hole in the hull.

The rotor makes a grinding noise, and Trudy's panel lights start going from amber to red. She's pretty definitely going down; all that's left to do is to decide where, and the Dragon's right in front of her.

"I'm sorry, baby," Trudy says gently, "you were so good - I need you to do one last thing for me," and she sets the heading and then locks the yoke. The two lights she really, really needs are still glowing brilliantly green; she times it just right, careful not to cut it too close, and just as Maya starts to really dive toward the Dragon, Trudy reaches down beside her seat and pulls the lever.

***

Grace knows what the explosion is the second she hears it, even though she's not facing the right way, and she yanks up so hard on Ekxan's tswintsyips that he shrieks at her. The bow of the Dragon is one big ball of flame and twisted metal where Trudy's Samson rammed it, and Neytiri and her toruk have already taken advantage of the opening to slide by and land square on the back of the shuttle.

There's slag falling to the forest, fire everywhere, the Dragon's nose dipping - and there, behind it, a single white parachute. It's the first time in years, Grace thinks, that she's smiled to see something with "RDA" emblazoned on it.

But Trudy's not out of the woods yet, if she made it through the ejection and the explosion - there's bullets and explosives flying everywhere, ikrans and Scorpions both dropping from the sky like stones. And Trudy's just one little human in a flightsuit.

With the Dragon out of the way, the ikrans are swarming the shuttle, three of them already hanging off the rear and scrabbling into the bay. They don't need Grace.

Ekxan wheels almost the second she thinks it, urgent by proxy at the idea of Trudy drifting through an aerial battlefield, and they dart up and over the other ikrans, curving around the nearest floating mountaintop and back, back toward the parachute.

Grace is stupid with fear for a second as they get closer, her mind filled with dramatic images of Trudy with a snapped neck from the velocity, Trudy bloody from ejecting through a jammed cockpit window, Trudy blue with cyanosis from a cracked facemask. But Trudy looks up, facemask intact, and before Grace can even yell at her to not be stupid, she's unstrapping herself from the seat.

"Are you trying to fucking fall?" Grace shouts, trying to get Ekxan closer without snarling his wings in the chute's lines.

Trudy laughs like the idiot she clearly is. "You'll catch me."

"You're an idiot," Grace says, just in case Trudy hasn't realized it. "Hold still, don't panic-"

Ekxan's faster than she intends him to be, snatching the thought from her mind and darting in to grab Trudy around the middle. But Trudy doesn't tense at all; she lets the giant toothy flying alien snag her in his claws and yank her into the air.

Time to fly yourself, Grace thinks at him, and then tightens her knees around his neck and leans, down and back. "Give me your hand!"

Trudy does, instantly, and Grace would never have been able to pull Trudy up in her old body, but to avatar arms Trudy's weight is perfectly manageable. She hauls Trudy up one-handed, forward on a diagonal, and Ekxan's quick to let go; his talons only tear her flightsuit a little bit.

With human-sized legs, there's only one place Trudy can really go where she'd have a decent chance of keeping herself on Ekxan, so Grace grits her teeth and helps Trudy settle between her thighs, chest to Ekxan's neck. So she made her choice and she's been kind of shitty at sticking to it; she'd be less shitty at it if the universe would stop punishing her like this.

Ekxan's busily making up the height he lost catching up to the parachute, wings pumping furiously, so the battle's mostly below them when Grace looks around. And it's mostly over, judging by the giant flaming wreck in the middle of the mountains. Jesus, how much TNT had Quaritch put in the shuttle, anyway?

Neytiri's circling overhead with the toruk, ikrans a mass of living color around her; and on the ground, Grace can see the vivid flare of angtsik fans, which means a couple dozen AMPsuit drivers are about to have a really rough time.

"Take that, motherfuckers," Trudy yells into the wind, and then reaches up and wraps a hand around Grace's elbow. "Compared to this, I think being girlfriends would be a piece of cake."

Grace isn't going to dignify that with a response; but she doesn't shake Trudy's hand off, either.

After all, Trudy's not entirely wrong. That was a pretty fair helping of TNT they just blew up, which means RDA doesn't have a whole lot more to spare trying to do this again; and it'll take six fucking years for them to get more out here. It'll take six fucking years for them to get anything out here, bombers or missile launchers or whatever they'd rather have instead of a shuttle with no targeting system at all - and Grace doubts the board of trustees is going to spring for the kind of resources it would take to wage a war six years away. They've gotten used to a reasonably steady supply, to having SecOps be enough to take care of it; and corporations that big tend to have correspondingly immense philosophical inertia. They're going to want a way to get back to equilibrium more than they're going to want to firebomb Pandora.

Which means that, impossibly, beautifully, they've kicked RDA's ass and they're probably going to get away with it. If there were anything Grace would have identified as less likely than managing to hang onto Trudy for the rest of her life, that would have been it; and yet there's a Valkyrie shuttle smoking on the ground behind her and a clear sunny sky full of ikrans ahead of her. Trudy is safe between her knees, and Grace's heart feels like it's cracking open - either she inhaled some toxic fumes back there, or she's turning into an optimist.

The space around the vitraya ramunong isn't the only rocky clearing around here; Grace lands Ekxan a safe distance from the fiery remains of the shuttle, a second before Neytiri comes down on an outcropping ahead with a sweep of massive wings. She throws a fist into the air, dramatic in the sunlight. "Victory!" she shrieks, through a throat that must already be pretty raw, and on every side of them ikrans and riders rear up and shout wordlessly in response.

Trudy turns and swings a leg over so she's sitting sideways, one knee curled warm over Grace's thigh, and she looks at Grace expectantly.

Grace hesitates.

"I'm nine feet tall," she says. "I'm blue. I'm still old."

Trudy laughs. "Yeah, well," she says, "the wrapping's brand new."

"Technically, not really." Grace clears her throat. "They made the avatars using our current DNA at the time, so this body has all the genetic damage I accumulated-"

"Grace," Trudy says. "You're still you. Hell, this is exactly how you looked the first time I met you. I don't give a shit about any of that stuff." She looks up at Grace, and her dark eyes are wide and clear behind her facemask, no hint of a lie in them. "Besides, you still have a pretty decent rack."

"And that thing where we can't breathe the same air at the same time?" Grace says.

"So we won't get to mack a lot," Trudy says. "Facemasks are sexy. We'll handle it."

"We'll handle atmospheric toxicity," Grace says, but she can feel the side of her mouth tugging upward. It's the most ridiculous set of obstacles in the world - in two solar systems, even - and yet so very Trudy to dismiss them all at once, blithe and easy, like they're nothing at all.

"More like hyperoxia, for you," Trudy says brightly, and then sobers a little. "I liked you before I kissed you the first time, and I liked you when I thought I was never going to kiss you again, and I like you now."

"But do you like like me," Grace says, dry.

"What, you want to take all the mystery out of our relationship at once?"

Grace looks down at Trudy's smiling face, and feels something in her chest like the edge of a shadow passing, like sunlight where there wasn't any before. "Kissing's a relatively recent romantic convention anyway," she says.

Trudy grins at her, and then laughs aloud. "There you go," she says. "Talk anthropology to me."

"Hey, Grace," somebody says, and Grace turns: it's Jake, face painted with green and blue and black in fierce angles, and he's almost on a level with them because he's perched comfortably on the back of a palulukan. He must have sent Ngang to follow Neytiri into the sky. Grace remembers that first trip, the way he'd vanished into the brush with a palulukan hard on his heels, and almost laughs; she'd felt like shit about it then, but the contrast is sort of hilarious. "Mo'at wants to talk to you, I think - she's got some questions about taking Sky People prisoner, something like that."

"Sure thing," Grace says; "I was just having a chat with my girlfriend."