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The scent of blood hits her first thing when Neytiri touches down on the rocks. It is everywhere, metallic and the richest type of bitter. The very air is coated in it. It’s stronger than the smell of smoke from burning Sky People ships, it intermingles with the scent of saltwater all around them. Teynu, her ikran, screeches when she lands, ruffling her wings anxiously. Neytiri breaks the bond and stumbles forward, eyes searching.
Her eyes zero in on Neteyam sitting alone on the rocks, clutching his upper arm with his left hand. Blood runs down his skin and seeps through his fingers as he trembles.
“No, no, no, no. Neteyam!” Netyiri exclaims, falling down next to him. Please Great Mother, not him. Have you not taken enough from me?
She runs her hands over his face, ignoring Neteyam’s protests that he’s fine. She feels along his skull with deft fingers as she checks for worse injuries. When she finds none, she gently lifts his hand from his arm. The cut is deep enough that it will probably need sutures, but it is a surface wound. The scent of blood is much stronger than it should be for that. Which means it must be coming from someone else.
Seeing the question in her eyes, Neteyam says, “It’s not— it’s not me. It’s Spider.” His voice hitches on the boy’s name, and he looks over Neytiri’s shoulder.
She turns around and for the first time she actually sees her surroundings before her. Jake, Lo’ak, and the Metkayina girl, Tsireya, are all sitting close together a few paces away. Their heads are bent as they hover over someone. How she didn’t notice before, she isn’t sure. She must have been so worried for her family that reason completely left her when she spotted the blood on Neteyam.
Creeping closer to the others, she picks up on several sounds. Jake’s quivering breaths as he tries not to cry, Lo’ak’s muttered words of reassurance, and the whoosh of an exopack filtering air. Spider’s exopack. But the breaths are too fast, not enough air coming in or going out. Dread pools in her stomach. The group parts for her and she kneels down gingerly before Spider.
The boy is sprawled out on the rocks, his chest rising and falling laboriously. Lo’ak is applying pressure to a wound on his chest, but it is fruitless. Scarlet red bubbles up between the gaps of Lo’ak’s fingers, just as it had for Neteyam, but this is different. This blood is an ocean in its own right, drenching Spider’s shoulder and the rocks beneath him, running in rivulets down his stomach. Lo’ak is up to his wrists in it. Spider’s lips are moving like he is trying to speak, but no sound comes out beyond his wheezing breaths.
Lo’ak, without lifting his eyes from Spider, says “Netyeam cut me from the ship. I wouldn’t leave without Spider, he said we should go but I—I insisted. The avatars were shooting at us.” A startled sob escapes him. “ Why? Why did you do that? ”
It’s unclear if Lo’ak is directing the question at himself, or the dying boy under his hands. Because Spider is dying. There’s no way around it. He is losing too much blood, his gasps are too great to mean anything else. Knowing this is different from understanding it. Neytiri feels…unsteady. This boy, this stray always accompanying her children, is dying. She watches it happen as an outsider, a stranger to her own body.
Netyeam comes up next to her. “He pushed me over the ship railing before him. I felt pain just before I hit the water…the bullet went right through him.”
The gravity of her son’s words hit her like she’s in the middle of a pa’li stampede. Neteyam’s injury is from a grazed bullet, one that hit Spider first. She gasps quietly, looking between him and Spider. The boy’s eyes are searching wildly, jumping between Jake, to Tsireya, to Lo’ak. They settle on Neytiri, and a shiver runs through her body. His gaze pins her in place.
Why is she feeling this way? The blood permeating the air and spilling into the sea is demon’s blood, she should be rejoicing that it doesn’t belong to one of her family members. But right now Spider looks so lost, so small. He is so small . In that moment Neytiri remembers that he is just a child, barely older than her own kids.
She remembers just after the Assault on the Tree of Souls, when the enemy Sky People were sent back to where they came from. The human base left in their wake was a yawning, terrifying shell of hatred and destruction. Her footsteps echoed through the halls, bounced off the gray floors and ceiling. She and some of the others were searching for the source of an awful sound. Crying, wailing, young and afraid and alone. A baby had been left behind by the humans somewhere inside Hell’s Gate.
In the end, Norm was the one who found him. Spider was an ugly thing, shriveled up and pinkish-red, snot and tears covering his face. He was wearing nothing but a soiled t-shirt held together with safety pins as a makeshift diaper, and a tiny necklace around his neck reading the name “Miles.” Norm said the jewelry looked to have been 3-D printed on base, some Sky People technology she did not understand nor care for.
His crying was so loud . It was piercing, unending. Like the world was caving in around the baby. In a way, she supposed it was.
The most peculiar thing about the moment was not that he was crying, or that they’d recovered a human infant hidden in a wall vent inside the women’s sleeping quarters. It was that when Neytiri stepped up to inspect the baby, Spider looked right at her, and his crying stopped at once.
The silence rang through the labs, everyone’s shock palpable. After what must have been hours of the child wailing non-stop, painful and headache inducing, one look at Neytiri and he was fine? Norm huffed an astonished laugh as he looked down at the baby in his arms.
“Well what do ya’ know? Looks like you have an admirer.” He said. Then he looked at Neytiri, a gentle question in his eyes. “Do you want to hold him?”
Neytiri was frozen. She had no kids of her own, her life with her mate had barely just begun. And here was this human baby, abandoned, filthy, and staring at her like she held the stars in her hands. What could she say to that? Nothing.
So she turned tail and left the human base without looking back.
It was a move driven by fear. By pain. Humans had done nothing but hurt her, her people, and now she was supposed to hold one in her arms and pretend none of that had happened? All humans did was bring death and ruin. They killed her sister, her father, her friends, all in pursuit of their bottomless greed.
( That’s not true , a voice whispered in her mind while she ran. The humans brought you Jake. They brought you the truest love you could ever have dreamed of. Surely if that’s the case, they cannot all be bad. )
A few days later the DNA test results came back for the baby’s parentage. A deceased pilot was his mother, which explained the mystery surrounding where he was discovered. The revelation of his father’s identity almost felt like the Fall of Hometree all over again. Miles Quaritch, the man who had been behind so much of Neytiri’s loss. She could not be rid of him even in his death, because now there was this demon spawn.
She vowed never to touch the baby lest she be infected by the evil that ran through his veins. She would never hold him in her arms or so much as brush past him when he grew big enough to constantly be running around the village. He was like a pest, always popping up and taking everything from the land without giving back. Even when he cried and cried, and Norm complained about being up all night trying to soothe him, she would not offer her assistance.
Once, Norm asked if she would come to Hell’s Gate just to see if Spider would calm down a little. He was a toddler then, and was throwing tantrums left and right that the scientists raising him were not equipped to handle. The boy was lonely, and grieving the absence of a mother he did not even have the mental or emotional capacity to know about yet. Neytiri doesn’t remember what she said to him then, only that whatever it was must have been bad, because Norm did not come visit the village for a month afterwards.
Now, she looks at Spider and sees the eyes of that lonely baby boy from sixteen years ago.
Spider finally finds enough air to speak. Through desperate, pained gasps, he says, “I’m sorry. I’m so—I’m so sorry.”
Jake shushes him, runs a hand over his matted hair. Strained, holding back his own grief, Jake replies, “You have nothing to be sorry about, boy.”
Spider coughs wetly, and Neytiri winces at the sound. He looks at Jake. “I didn’t tell them anything. They tried– yeah. They…but I didn’t break. I’d never give you up.”
The desperation in Spider’s every word is what pushes Neytiri over the edge. She makes a strangled noise in the back of her throat. Spider looks at her again. His eyes are watery, but there is strength in them as they pierce into her like they had the first time they met. He is begging them, begging her to believe him. And she does.
Spider has never done anything to hurt her or her family. He cannot help his lineage, or the planet they hail from that he has never even stepped foot on. His whole life, in all his short, sixteen years, he has only wanted to be accepted. He speaks the language of the Na’vi, respects the wildlife and tries to participate in their traditions as best he can. Eywa’eveng is his home just as much as it is Neytiri’s, or her children’s.
All children are a gift. How could she have let grief and fear get in the way of her realizing that? How could she have let this sweet, innocent soul that chose her the moment they locked eyes, slip out of her grasp? Since the beginning he has only wanted to belong, to be welcomed by the people he grew up around. He craved love, and she pushed him away because of the ghost he carried around with him.
Even her own children saw the good in him that she turned a blind eye to. They knew he was not like his father, and pulled him in with open arms to play with and care for. He belongs with his own kind , she’d told Jake years ago. Well, he’d been with them for months, and look where that got him. Bleeding. Dying.
She Sees him now. She understands Spider for all that he is. But she is too late. His death is not her fault, but it will be on her hands regardless.
When Spider whimpers a little, Neytiri realizes she has been silent for too long. She jerks back to life, reaching forward to put a hand on his head. Belatedly, she acknowledges the fact that this is the first time she has ever touched him. Spider trembles under her hand.
“Of course you did not tell them anything. You are loyal. Brave. You would never betray the Omaticaya.”
Everyone looks to her in varying stages of wonderment and curiosity. These are the first words she has ever addressed to Spider that were not tinged with animosity and bitter hatred. She resents herself for that. She wants to run her hand over his cheek, across the faded, painted-on blue stripe on his forehead, but the mask separates them. Instead, she puts her other hand on top of Lo’ak’s where they rest over Spider’s heart.
“I’m sorry,” Spider says again, weaker and more breathless than all the rest.
Neytiri shakes her head at the apology, pressing down on his chest in hopes that he can feel her intention through Lo’ak’s hands. If only she had more time to get him to understand how much she regrets the way she treated him. As if she deserves any of this boy’s kindness, even a shred of his forgiving spirit after all she has done to him.
“You…” Her voice cracks but she powers through anyway. She needs him to hear what she has to say. It isn’t fair to him to say this now, she knows, but she is selfish like that. “You are one of The People.”
The words elicit a tiny gasp from both Jake and her two sons. Lo’ak twitches like he is trying to pull away from Spider, but Neytiri’s own hands trap his between them. Spider’s eyes widen just a fraction. Is she imagining that she can feel his racing heartbeat?
Spider opens his mouth to speak, but words have escaped his grasp once more. His gaze darts between all of them, then he looks up to the sky.
Eclipse is coming.
He is still wheezing, limbs shaking like he can’t get warm. But his expression shifts, pain and distress melting away into something a little lighter. A tiny, relieved smile quirks up the corners of his lips. He blinks, and a full body shudder wracks through him. Then he goes still.
He does not move again.