Chapter Text
Earth was not beautiful. It was hazy and overbright and overpeopled, and it kicked and screamed in its longing to be rid of them — flooded, stormed, spited city disaster controls so perfectly it was if it had woken up, thousands of years too late, with fifteen billion people on its face.
Nadia hated it. She hated the TV, her 2:45 alarms, white lights, politicians, the sound of the police officer’s “She died,” and her “Thank you”. She hated it with her sister and without her. She hated it so much she signed with the RDA (in bold: PROGRAM - AVTR; ATYP. - SUB/ALTERNATE), blacked out for six years, and woke up on a planet with a much bolder impulse to kill her — lethal air, thanators, the eclipse — such that she has totaled, on Pandora, thirty-seven hours of not fighting for her life.
This is not one of them. In this one, Nadia is lost in the dark, and she is not a zoologist — she wasn’t even a grad student — but she knows: viperwolves.
She stabs the first and kills the second by luck. The third’s momentum shoves her onto her back and it snarls in triumph, clawing at her wrists, jaws just missing her face, eyes pitch-black and shiny, and Nadia imagines her sister’s avatar dead because of a dog—
A shout to her right, not canine at all, and the eyes go dark. The viperwolf stops, a blue-violet arrow in its back, and Nadia stares, dumbstruck, as a Na’vi — tall, powerful, graceful — fights off the viperwolves like it’s nothing, his bow a blur, his knife so much sharper than hers they’re gone in twenty seconds, all of them, terrified even of his shadow.
God from the machine. A god from something, knife flashing to stop a viperwolf’s cries, his Na’vi sad and songlike, arrows extricated with ceremony. He has no violence to him. He loved what he killed.
“I’m sorry,” Nadia says, and the god from something’s tail whips, eloquent and angry, and he looks at her, and he is beautiful.
“Be sorry with your people.”
She has no people to be sorry with — she is not a SciOp, in Grace Augustine’s empiric opinion, she is a “corporate sacrificial lamb” whom only the RDA accountants like and who only passed college bio by calling her sister, who was the SciOp, who was shot, whose avatar looks so much like her Nadia had to hold back tears in the bio lab — not that she’d admit that to a god from something, and he’s gone, regardless, lost to the bioluminescence, his bow taut over his back.
But she can’t lose him. This is all she has, the last good her sister can ever do. “Wait,” she calls, pink and blue and white shimmering in the blood on her arms, “please. I can’t—I don’t know where my people are.”
The Na’vi makes a sound, a so? and says, “Kezemplltxe.”
“What?”
“What.”
“You—” Wow. “Thank you. For saving me.”
“Tsa-hey, faysawtute,” he says, in a tone of holy fuck, “you don’t thank for that. That was sad. Only sad.”
“I’m sorry.”
He stops, his finger under the string of his bow like it’s the string of a harp. “Sìltsan. You should be. It was your fault.”
“My fault?”
“Yes,” obviously. “You are like a baby. Loud. Don’t know what to do.”
“Is that why you saved me?”
“No.” His tail lashes. “Not...pity. I saw you. You have a strong heart. No fear. But like a baby.”
And he stalks off, as if annoyed to have said she has a heart at all. She says please, he says go back, tawtute, she says, “I can’t, I’ll die,” and he is not moved. He only saves her because of the atokirina’, descending like tiny swimmers in a Polyphemus-lit pool onto Nadia’s palm, her forehead, her shoulders, sainthood borne on hydrogen sulfide.
“What are they?”
“Atokirina’,” the god from something says, gold eyes shining back silver light. “Seeds of the Sacred Tree.”
“‘A-to-kirina’’?”
“Srane.” He grins. He might be laughing at her. “Pure spirits.”
Pure spirits. This can’t be the bold impulse to kill her. Nadia laughs, soft as she can, and the atokirina’ flit up, off her, past her, to whoever they have to make pure next. The god from something stares. Her smile fails. He clasps her wrist, slender fingers luring a shudder up her back, and says, “Come. Come on.”
So, for five minutes, Nadia is not fighting for her life; she is admiring Pandora like she did this morning, before the rhino/peacock/hammerhead shark, the thanator, the dusk, the god from something, laughing at the shy helicoradians and at Norm being an even worse assistant than Grace thought Nadia (POS. – ASST., AUGUSTINE, GRACE) would be. Pandora was pretty in the daylight; at night, flowers flicker pink under her fingers, ferns flash viridescent, and Nadia smiles like she hasn’t since she was nine. This is what she saw on the nights Silvia recited from Encyclopedia and Atlas of Pandora, her voice serene over the air conditioner: “All organisms on Pandora are bio-lumin-escent. Bioluminescent,” This is what she saw from Hell’s Gate at 22:00 last night, at the second Norm said to her, “Jesus. Your smile is exactly like Sil’s.”
The snare hits Nadia as pitilessly as “is” and “Sil”. She falls twenty feet onto her back, pain — whiplash, concussion — hot and bright in her head, and she would die with an arrow in her heart if she didn’t have the one thing they don’t: a god from something, saying, “Mawey, Na’viya, mawey,” annoyed but not angry. What she has wins. No one shoots. The majestic, sharp Na’vi scowls, at him and at her, but rides off, shouting, “Makto ko!” Someone shoves Nadia on by the braid. The god from something looks at her over his shoulder, pitiless, and then, under the impossibility of their tree, in alarm.
The tree, though—their tree touches heaven, as Nadia’s father said once of the Empire State Building, lit by holographs of iPhones and exotic hotels and hiring for PANDORA: THE NEXT FRONTIER. It didn’t look heavenly, but Nadia believed him at six like she believes at twenty-one: the luckiest places touch heaven. This one is jewel-like in the dark, sapphire to emerald to topaz, beautiful and hostile, shy children and the hunters’ yips and a man who must be their chief, his circlet like a hand uplifted, a hand saying stop.
Nadia stops. The god from something disobeys it with conviction. “Ma sempul,” he says, fingers to his forehead, “oel ngati kameie.”
Kame. That was in Norm’s dictionary, underlined, starred, noted: to see INTO; a spiritual knowledge; what the soul knows.
The chief’s smile does not light in his eyes. Nadia looks to the god from something on instinct — viperwolves, atokirina’, “strong heart” — and he isn’t smiling. She copies him. She knows him. She wishes she knew Na’vi, as the people laugh and the majestic one smirks and the god from something’s tail flicks her thigh.
“What’s he saying?” she whispers.
“He’s saying, should we kill you.”
“Say no.”
“Shh. I can’t.”
He’s done saving her, then. Fine. Nadia shoulders by him and says to the chief, loud and last-gasp, arm long in an invocation: “Please—”
“Kehe—”
They all move at once. The hunters hiss, the knife hot at her throat; the majestic one snarls; the “Kehe” was the god from something, holding Nadia by elbow, his gold eyes critical, dilated, afraid.
“No,” he says. “You—”
“Tsaswiräti lonu! Aynga neto rivikx!”
They — the god from something, the knife, even the chief — fall back like Nadia’s on fire, but they don’t do it for her; they do it for the woman on high, adorned in ruby-red beads and an authority so absolute Nadia, who knows who she is as much as she knows what she’s saying (“Fìketuwongti oel stìyeftxaw”; so, not at all), bows her head. She is as tall as this woman, but years and years younger — a girl, a baby, ruby-red only for the blood on her arms.
The woman judges her braid, her tail, and asks, “What are you called?”
“Nadia Solana.”
People murmur. The god from something does something — touches his bowstring, blinks — and Nadia looks at him, and the woman stabs her.
Not stabs; it’s a prick, like the ones doctors do on Earth, and Nadia’s pain is soundless. She annihilated her ACL, once, at nationals, and her lip bled from biting it; her blood on this woman’s tongue is not that bad.
“Why did you come to us.”
A thanator. My sister. The RDA. Him, she could say, of the god from something, atokirina’.
“I got lost.”
“You are lost still,” says the ruby woman. “This is not a place for sky people to be found.”
Nadia looks to the god from something—she should stop looking at him; she can’t—and he looks at her, a look that says, holy fuck, fine. “Za’u aungia ta Eywa, ma sa’nok,” he announces to the ruby woman. “Atokirina’.”
“Sìn fìketuwong?”
“Srane.”
Kame. Nadia is given the most ceremonial once-over of her life. “We have tried to teach other sky people,” the ruby woman enunciates. “It is hard to fill a cup which is already full.”
“My cup isn’t.”
“No?”
“I—I’m not a scientist.”
“What are you?”
A corporate sacrificial lamb, a sister without a sister, but, “I don’t know. That’s why I came.”
The woman’s hands come up to Nadia’s face, careful, callused but not unkind, a mother with her worst child, and she says, “You are young. You may learn.”
Not you may live.
“Fkol pole’un fì’ut. Poe ’ayì’awn.” The chief’s voice is powerful. The people whisper; only the god from something opposes it, once the ruby woman says, “Ma ’itan,” but she is too absolute, too authoritative. He loses. He glares at Nadia, who blinks at the ruby woman, lost.
“It is decided,” she says. “My son will teach you our ways.” The god from something. Nadia is so sorry. “Learn well, Nadiasolana. Then we will see if your insanity can be cured.”
The god from something reacquires Nadia’s arm. She says, “Thank you,” to anyone, everyone, and they vanish into the sapphire.
(“This will not last long,” Tsu’tey says to his olo’eyktan. “Him with the dreamwalker.”
“Ah,” says Eytukan, “but it is Tsyeyk. Even the Great Mother cannot know.”)
“Wait here.”
Nadia stands in the alcove, the god from something by the exit. They’ve been in here for less than a minute, and he has not smiled once, and she is not confident he will come back to her.
“For what?”
“Clothes,” obviously, he says. “Fkxile, tewng.” He points at her T-shirt. “You can’t have this.”
“Why not?”
“Because. It’s bloody. And it is not the way.”
The way is to flash his ass at her as he exits, so Nadia looks off at the bioluminescence, the lushness shot with silver, the salve and binding and the cloth he got with a dictate for her to not touch.
Then it’s You will have to change, first, into feathers and a G-string.
“Wow,” she says.
“I will—fta sayi. Tie,” he says. “If you want.”
“I don’t.”
“You know it?”
“No, it’s—”
“You want a woman for this?”
“I’d love one. Please.”
“Fine.” Holy fuck. “Do not go anywhere.”
The woman he finds is their age, also in feathers, unmoved by Nadia’s alienness. She exiles the god from something with a smiling “Wrrkä, skxawng,” says to Nadia, “I will hold those,” and averts her eyes expressively, G-string pendent on her fingers.
“Thank you,” Nadia says, self-consciously.
“Yes. I am Ayä.”
“Nadia.”
“I know. Nadiasolana.”
Of the G-string — tewng — Ayä says, “Under, around the tail, over hips,” places the fkxile over Nadia’s front, and with a last redress of feathers and a call to the god from something — “Skxawng! Hasey!” — she is gone.
Nadia and the god from something lock eyes. His fall from her face to her fkxile to her stripped-off clothes, and he says, “Good.”
The cloth is soft on Nadia’s cheek, her brow, her arm, over her ribs. Any higher than that, he asks, “You will do it?”
“Thank you,” she says, and he moves so he’s at her back.
“What did this? Before the nantang?”
“Before the viperwolves?”
“Yes.”
“A thanator,” says Nadia, and his hand stops on her shoulder blade.
“Palulukan?”
“I want to say yes. Yes.”
“And you are alive.”
“Sorry.”
“Why, did you kill it?”
“No,” Nadia says, in a voice she recognizes as that of the younger sister. By five minutes.
“Kehe,” says the god from something. The blood is off her back, the salve is on his fingers. “Sky people say ‘no’. You have to say ‘kehe’.”
“...Now?”
“Now.”
“Kehe.”
“’Ak,” he says. “You have to practice.”
“It was that bad?”
“It wasn’t that good.”
Nadia smiles, at her fkxile, not at him. She asks, “What’s ‘srane’?”
“‘Yes.’”
“What’s ‘skxawng’?”
He laughs. “Kehe. You can’t say ‘skxawng’.”
(The dreamwalker is graceful. It strikes Ninat as Tsyeyk comes up to the ylltxep, Nadiasolana in his shadow, with her arm bound and all the grace of a winzaw.
“She does not look like a sky woman,” Ninat whispers to Mo’at, “in this light.”
“No.” Mo’at smiles that tsahìk’s smile. “Her people must be very proud.”)