Chapter Text
If I had to catalogue one more fucking thistle bud, I was actually going to go insane. They’d ship me back home, and when I popped out of stasis, they’d ask why I was cursing and dancing around like a madwoman. Then they’d find out that it was because I counted one too many thistle buds on Pandora.
I had a PhD in astrobiology and a masters in exoplanet botany. I came here to 1) make a lot of money fast to pay off my school debt, and 2) to experience the legendary flora of Pandora.
So far, I’d made it through four pay periods and hadn’t ventured beyond the razed landscape just outside base camp. Hence, the endless amount of thistle bud cataloguing and no real floral progress to show for my weeks on Pandora. Though I’d received a dozen emails from old colleagues begging for updates, I would be a laughing stock of the astrobiology community if all I told them I learned was that thistle buds were edible shit. Seriously. They tasted like bland shit and offered no real nutritional benefits. That’s if you got all the spines off first and didn’t accidentally lacerate your throat.
The upside? I got an avatar body, which was pretty sick. We’d been training with them for weeks—me and the three other scientists they brought in from a rare job posting. I never signed up for anything so fast in my life. Granted, I’d just gotten off a hellish internship on a hostile planet and would have taken any job that came my way. It was a miracle I happened to land the one that was a biologist’s dream.
Now if they would just let me see the fucking planet… I was sick of walls, and guns, and more walls, and more guns. The only natives I’d seen were our expensive imitation avatars, so although I was used to the blue, I still felt like an alien on a planet that was supposed to be my home for the next decade of my work contract.
The day my superior called me into his office and offered me the chance at an inland mission, I spit out my coffee and practically vaulted over the desk to shake his hand.
“It’s a dangerous opera—”
“Yes, yes. Thank you so much. I won’t let you down.”
“There’s a risk you’ll come into contact with the hostiles—”
“When do I leave? Should I pack now? What should I pack?”
“Nora, I don’t think you’re listening—”
“I hear you, sir. I really do. But if I had to sit on a plot of dirt and dig up dry thistle buds and bladder polyps for one more hour, I was going to become a liability.”
His brows rose high to kiss his hairline. “I see… Well then, I’ll let the higher ups know you’re on board. According to the briefing I just received, you leave at 0900 tomorrow. You’ll be accompanied by armed guards, and your mission is to collect whatever samples you deem necessary. I’ll send you the itinerary.”
I should have asked more questions. I should have wondered why I needed armed guards if we were supposedly at a peaceful standstill with the natives. I should have read the history of the planet a little more closely instead of geeking out over the articles about Eywa and the planet’s vast biological network that many scholars theorized was microbial.
But I wasn’t aware, so I didn’t worry about why the pilot steering us through the Hallelujah Mountains the next morning kept shouting out a countdown every minute, starting at ten.
“Are we not supposed to be here?” I yelled. I wasn’t used to the headset yet.
The armed avatars in front of me winced at my volume. Then, in a normal voice that I heard perfectly fine in my headset, one of them answered, “If you weren’t briefed, it’s confidential.”
I fixed them all with withering stares, but they had nothing more to tell me.
Guess we’re not supposed to be here, I deduced.
With five minutes to go according to the pilot—five minutes to what, I had no clue—I racked my brain for what I remembered about the planet’s history. Vague article headlines came back to me, but unfortunately my memory files were stuffed full of latin names for a gajillion plants, leaving room for little else.
I knew the colonization process had been delayed because of the unexpected presence of native inhabitants. Things shifted then, budgets expanded, and the plan had to change. Conflicts had arisen, but I couldn’t recall any concrete details about those shared with the public.
Last I heard, one of ours had assimilated with the Na'vi and was the reason we had any sort of relation with the natives at all. There was still tension, naturally, because who really wanted to share their planet with aliens, but I figured after six decades they’d have figured that shit out. The last conflict I knew of had been ten years ago.
I just didn’t have a good feeling about the guns. Or the countdown.
The drop off was quick. The helicopter set down our trailer with our link pods inside, then they hightailed it out of there, leaving me and a handful of lug heads with guns behind.
As soon as the wind died down, the sound of whirring blades receding, a trickle of excitement rippled through me. Finally.
I didn’t know where to start. As I looked around, I saw at least a dozen species I wasn’t familiar with, and I wanted to take samples of every single one.
Dropping to my knees, I pulled my bag around to rifle through. The second I had hold of a pair of trimming shears, rough hands hauled me up by my arms.
“Hey!”
“We don’t have time to stop and smell the roses,” one of the soldiers barked.
“Are you kidding? That’s the whole point of this mission, isn't it? I’m here to take samples. So let me do my jo— Hey! Hey!”
They’d begun to drag me along, moving deeper into the forest. We passed by a plant with the oddest vibrating tentacles, and they wouldn’t even let me stop for that.
“Shut it!” the corporal hissed.
With a huff, I demanded, “If we’re not here for the mission I was told about, then why are we here?”
No one answered.
“Let me guess. Confidential.”
“Bingo.”
Throwing up my hands in defeat, I asked, “So what the hell am I here for?”
With a cold smirk, the soldier dragging me along said, “You familiar with what a scapegoat is?”
“Can it, Bowing,” the corporal barked.
Too late, I realized I should have asked so many more questions. As dread sank heavy like ice cold lead in the pit of my stomach, I came to understand that we weren’t here as friendlies. We were here to spy, or worse, and I was the “scapegoat.” The thing to point at and claim innocence. Because on paper, it looks fine if you say you were attacked in the open on a sample collection mission. Nothing ethically corrupt about that, and you’d be well within your rights to fight back. But a mission where you deliberately went where you weren’t welcome with nefarious intentions?
No wonder the news coming out of Pandora seemed so vague. They were rewriting history to suit their narrative and keep up funding.
And now I was caught in the middle of it.
𓂃˚｡𖦹
Despite keeping up with all the avatar body training they recommended, I was thoroughly out of shape for actual Pandora traversing. After only an hour, I was a panting wreck. Bowing—or Mister Handsy as I’d come to refer to him as—got rougher with his dragging since I kept falling behind.
Eclipse fell over the planet suddenly, and the flora lit up in bioluminescent splendor. “Please,”I begged, my dry throat cracking. “Please let me study at least one plant. You’re killing me.”
Bowing forced a water bottle in my face. “Drink. No plants.”
I whimpered around the opening of the bottle. No plants was like a death sentence.
“Eyes and ears sharp now,” said the corporal. Lyle, I think they were calling him. “Things might get dicey.”
As soon as he said it, I realized how much louder the forest was. The hum and trills of local fauna had increased tenfold.
Suddenly, the corporal put up a fist, and we all held. I did my best to be silent, even held my breath, but the pounding of my heart coupled with the droning of the forest drowned out any subtle noise the corporal had picked up on.
The arrow came out of nowhere.
Bowing’s grip on my arm tightened, slackened, then disappeared entirely when he fell to the wayside with a glazed look over his eyes and a feather-tipped arrow sticking out of his chest.
I wanted to scream, but nothing came out. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the first death I’d witnessed either.
“Move! Move!” Lyle bellowed.
Doing my best to keep up, I leapt over logs and ferns and things I really wanted to stop and study, but due to the sudden barrage of arrows piercing through the trees, I had no room to feel anything other than blinding fear. Training my gaze on Corporal Lyle’s kuru, I ran as hard as my new body would allow.
Terrifying calls that seemed more animal than human echoed all around us. I didn’t have a clue where they could be or where they would come from.
I tripped, flagged, and suddenly my body didn’t want to continue any more. I doubled over with my hands on my knees, breathing hard.
Lyle and the others were gone. Except for Bowing. He was dead half a mile back.
I wondered optimistically if the natives would take off after the soldiers and forget about me. I didn’t know which way would take me back to the link pod trailer or the helicopter pick up zone. I was all turned around and scared out of my mind.
None of that mattered though, because I’d been optimistically stupid. The Na'vi warrior had come out of nowhere, his footsteps utterly silent. As soon as I lifted my eyes, the tip of a blade slid under my chin and raised my head the rest of the way up.
“You’re not a soldier,” came the rich voice with a funny accent. He was speaking English, but it wasn’t his first language.
I gulped, and my throat bobbed against cold metal. “No. I’m a scientist.”
The Na’vi man had intense eyes that narrowed as they studied me as closely as if I were a potentially lethal plant. His ears were flat against his skull in obvious distrust. No doubt he wondered if I was lying. I was the scapegoat, after all.
“Please. Don’t kill me.” I closed my eyes, whispering my plea to him. “I’m unarmed. I didn’t know… I didn’t know what this mission was.”
“Show me your hands.”
I put them out, splayed wide so he would see I wasn’t hiding any small weapons up my rolled sleeves either.
“Hmph.” He made a sound that wasn’t good or bad, but at least he retracted the blade from my throat. “My people won’t like you. You have Sky People hands, but ice Na’vi hair.”
“That was a mistake—” I started to explain the intricacies of a lab error that was too expensive to fix, but the man didn’t want to hear it. Of course he wouldn’t care that my naturally fair human hair had interfered with the gene splicing, and one careless, overlooked mistake led to me coming out with white tresses instead of black to blend in. I'd braided the mass around my snow-white kuru and thrown it over my shoulder, calling it a day.
The warrior put up a hand to stop me, and I snapped my mouth shut.
“My father though… He’ll judge you more fairly.” His head listed to the side. “You’re lucky he’s Toruk Makto.”