The Weight of Water

The deck of the demon ship had stopped being a deck, and become a wound.

It hung at an angle no floor was built to hold, and everything not bolted down was already moving: crates, cable spools, a human body with its arms flung wide, all of it sliding toward the place where the hull had opened like a mouth in the water. Rain came sideways. Fire burned somewhere aft. Smoke swallowed clean air, and every step carried the vibration of the great ship groaning as it took its dying breaths.

Neytiri had Kiri's wrist in her left hand, gripped so tightly it felt as though her daughter might vanish if she loosened even one finger.

Her eyes were on the smoke where Jake had gone, on the grey that had swallowed him and Quaritch both, until she could no longer see him or hear him over the crash of metal and water.

He had said something before he went—get them off, I'll find you—and she had not answered, because there had been no time to answer. The fire had been climbing across the water. She had been so focused on grabbing the girls and keeping them close that, by the time she turned back to him, he had gone into the dark and she had let him, and she was still watching the place where he had disappeared when Kiri's hand jerked in hers.

Neytiri turned.

Her youngest had lost the rail. The sea had come across the deck in a broad grey sheet and taken her feet out from under her, and now her little body was being dragged backward on her belly, fingers scrabbling for a seam in the steel, and behind her the deck opened into a large hole that was quickly swallowing everything it could grab, water, furniture, bodies.

Neytiri did not think.

She went low, drove off the slope, and got her right hand around Tuk's arm above the elbow. The water shoved, the current tearing around her. She braced her heel against a bracket and hauled with everything her back and shoulders had ever been good for—one violent wrench, the kind that tears meat from a bone.

It worked.

Tuk came up out of the current like a fish coming out of a net, folded into Kiri, and Kiri's arms closed around her sister. Neytiri saw it happen. She had one clear instant to know it had worked, one moment of relief before her own feet were dragged out from under her.

The force did not stop when the work was done.

Kiri's fingers tightened, then dragged, then failed. Something—a cable, a strap, the sea itself—took her at the hip and turned her, and Neytiri went backward down the metal on her shoulder, fast, with the current.

No one screamed in time.

That was the thing she would remember afterward. Not the fall. The silence of it. Tuk's mouth had not finished opening. Kiri's hand was still closing around the space Neytiri had been. Nobody had time to make a sound, because nobody had time to understand.

The last of the world was a stripe of grey daylight and two reaching arms.

Then the ship took her.

Cold shut over her head and the noise of the world went out like a snuffed fire.

Under the water everything was pressure. The roar was not loud; it was inside, in the bones of her skull, in the sockets of her teeth. She turned over twice without meaning to. Her hip struck an edge. Her tail lashed and hit a wall she had not known was there.

She kicked for the surface and found nothing but endless noise and water and steel.

Her knuckles cracked against metal. Something sharp struck her hip and then her side, sending pain up her body in a bright line.

Her mouth opened around it and water rushed in, bitter with chemicals.

Her hand struck something hard, flat.

Not the surface. A ceiling.

Neytiri went along it with both palms, looking for the break, and found rivets. Rows of them, evenly spaced, cold as stones in a riverbed. Metal above. Metal to the left. The current pulled at her legs from a direction that made no sense—sideways, and slightly up.

The floor was a ceiling.

She was not in the sea.

She was in the ship, and the sea was coming in with her.

Her chest began to hurt. She turned herself over, felt for the highest angle of the metal, and pushed her face into it.

Air.

A hand's depth of it, trapped against the corner of two plates.

She breathed and it was foul. Diesel. Rust. Something sweet underneath, sweet the way a carcass three days dead is sweet. She gagged, breathed again anyway, and the second breath was worse because now she knew what she was tasting.

Then the pocket widened.

She reached into the dark and her fingers closed on a lip of something—a bracket, a step, the place where one wall crossed another and left a ledge the width of her forearm. She hooked both elbows over it and pulled, and her shoulders came up out of the water.

Her feet found somewhere to stand. It was a floor at a bad angle, and it was under a hand's depth of water, and it was the first solid thing she had stood on since the deck had opened. Her whole body took it the way a dry mouth takes water.

Neytiri stopped moving.

She hung there on her elbows and let it happen—the coughing, the shuddering, the long ugly work of getting her breath back down out of her throat where it had lodged. Nothing came at her. Nothing pulled. The water sat against her ribs and lapped and, for as long as it lasted, did not rise.

It was not safety. She knew that even while she was taking it. It was a corner of a room inside a thing that was going down, and she could not say whether she had found it or been put in it.

But her heart slowed. Her hands quieted on the ledge. And in the small clear space that opened up behind all of it came the first whole thought she had had since the sea took the deck and her with it.

Kiri had her. She had seen Kiri's arms go around her. That was the one solid thing she owned and she held it the way she would have held a branch in a flood.

Something touched her shoulder.

She turned into it with her hand already up, and her palm found hair.

Then a forehead. Then the crooked rubber edge of a mask, shoved up out of place, and under it a mouth open wide enough to put two fingers into.

He was floating face-down in the pocket with her, held up under the ceiling by the same trapped air she had been breathing. Small. Human. One boot on. His arms hung straight down into the water beneath him like a man asleep on his front.

Neytiri did not cry out. She pushed him away, and the water brought him back against her, and she pushed him harder, and he turned over slowly and drifted along the ceiling until the current pinned him in the far corner.

So that was the sweetness.

She had been breathing it and calling it air.

The small safety she had been given had been given to someone else first. He had found the high corner of this room, exactly as she had, and put his mouth in it, and it had not been enough for him.

She pressed the back of her wrist to her nose—an old habit, older than thought, the way any hunter checks herself before she reads anything else.

Nothing.

Not sweat, not the leather of her strap, not the crushed-green smell that lived in her skin after a day in the canopy. The ship had covered her over. Oil and salt and death, and her own body somewhere underneath, unreachable.

Above her, the metal groaned.

Not a creak. Something longer, and lower, that came up through the plate against her forehead and went down her spine and out through her heels. A sound with a throat behind it, like the groan of a great beast.

Neytiri filled her lungs with the poisoned air and went under.

She followed the ceiling. Her fingers found a frame, then a gap. A doorway, standing open at an ugly angle. She turned her shoulders sideways and forced through it, and her queue floated forward past her cheek like something else in the water with her.

Beyond, the space held air, poisoned with chemicals, but still enough to breathe.

She came up on her knees. The water sat at her waist. The ceiling stopped her head before she was halfway upright, and she stayed there, hunched, coughing, one hand braced on a wall of pipes.

Cold, white light stuttered on.

For three heartbeats she could see, and what she saw was a corridor made for something else. Narrow. Low. Doors set into both sides at even intervals, all of them shut, all of them the same. Cables sagging out of a peeled ceiling panel like insides spilling from a body. Floating at her thigh: a boot. A metal cup. A mattress, half sunk, still holding the shape of the body that had slept on it.

Then the white light died.

It did not leave her in the dark. Something else came up to take its place—rising out of the walls in a low bloom, the whole length of the corridor at once, and staying.

Red.

It pulsed. On, and off, and on, in a slow rhythm like a heartbeat beating through the walls, painting every surface black and red.

In it, the water at her thighs was black, and the walls were the colour of the inside of a wound, and every doorway she passed looked like a hole opened in a body. The boot and the cup and the half-sunk mattress turned past her in the same colour, and the cables hanging out of the ceiling panel were wet with it.

She would rather have had the dark. The dark took things away. This showed her the place she was standing in and made it look like death.

Neytiri put her shoulder to the nearest door.

It gave a finger's width and stopped.

She set her feet on the tilted floor and pushed until her vision sparked. The door bent. It did not open. On the other side something pressed back at her—not a bolt, not a lock, nothing with a mechanism she could find and break, just an enormous flat patience.

Water. All of it. The whole sea standing behind that panel and leaning.

She left it and went on.

The next door opened onto a room already full to its ceiling—and in the last hand's depth of air beneath that ceiling, faces.

Four of them. Five. Crowded up into the only part of the room the water had not taken yet, cheeks flat against the metal, mouths at the seam, laid out as neatly as fish beneath a blade. They had done the clever thing. They had found the highest corner and put their mouths in it and waited, and the sea had come the rest of the way regardless.

One of them turned toward her when the door moved.

It was the current. She knew it was the current. She shut the door fast, choking, before the room could empty itself into the corridor. The one after that would not move at all. The fourth swung wide and showed her a stairwell that went down.

Every time she learned the ship, the ship changed. Every time she opened a door hoping to find escape, she found only more red.

It was listing further as she worked. The floor tipped under her by degrees, so slowly she did not realise it was happening until her footing became unsteady and her hands had to grab at whatever was closest to keep herself upright. Halfway along the corridor the floor was a ramp. At the end of it, it was very nearly a wall. She stopped walking and began to climb, hands and feet, while the cup and the boot and someone's folded shirt went sliding past her down into the black water below.

Not only the cup and the boot.

A man came down past her as well, on his back, unhurried, one arm trailing above his head as though he were reaching for something he had left behind, and he went into the black at the bottom without any sound she could hear over the ship. Below him another was jammed in a doorway with only his legs showing, turning slightly, the way weed turns in a slow river.

The red light found all of them and made them the same colour.

She had killed men on the deck of this ship tonight and wanted every one of them dead. Down here none of them looked like demons.

The corridors were too small.

Her shoulders touched both sides. She could not lift her head. Where two passages met she had to fold herself down onto her elbows and turn her hips to get through, and a fitting caught her thigh and opened it, and she felt the warm line of blood only because everything else was cold.

She was not inside a building.

She was wedged up under the ribs of an animal that had swallowed her with its last breath.

Something grabbed her ankle.

Her whole body answered before her mind did—she wrenched, kicked back hard, twisted her shoulders around—and in the stuttering red she saw the hand.

It had come up out of the black water at the low end of the corridor, and it was holding on to her, and it was not the ship, and it was not dead.

A face followed it, barely. It broke the surface at the angle a face makes when the neck has stopped being able to choose: chin up, mouth working, eyes wide and pale and finding her. Actually finding her. A young one. The beard on him was hardly there yet. His mask was gone and one side of his jaw was black with blood.

Neytiri was down on her knees in the water before she had decided anything.

She got her hands under his arms and pulled. He came a finger's width and stopped. She changed her grip, braced her heel against a bracket, and pulled again with the same wrench that had brought Tuk out of the sea—the one that tears meat from bone.

He screamed, his hands landing on her arms and digging in.

Something below the surface had him from the hip down. A plate, a beam, the whole weight of a wall that had come in on top of him. It refused her exactly the way the doors had refused her: no bolt, no mechanism, nothing to find and break. Only weight, and water, and patience.

He said the same word four times, then a different one, twice, his eyes on her face the whole while. A name, not hers, asked for as though she could hand it back to him.

"I cannot," she said, in her own language, because it was the only one she had. "I cannot lift it. I cannot—"

He did not let go of her wrist. His grip was not the grip of a man being pulled out. It was the grip of a man who had stopped asking for that, and wanted only the hand.

So she gave him her hand, and she held on. She had put arrows through men who had done less to her forest than this one, and felt nothing. She felt something now, far too late to be of use to either of them.

His breathing changed. Quick, then shallow, then wet. The water climbed his throat and there was nowhere higher to put him.

"Look at me," she said. "Not at the water. At me."

He did, gasping, taking in more water than air with each breath. She would have put a blade in his chest then, had she still held one. Anything to make it quick. She had no weapon. She had only her hand, and the water climbing inch by inch.

The red went out, and came back, and he was gone: his head swallowed by the deep, his body wrenching once before going slack, then sinking back beneath the surface. She forced her eyes away before the sight could wake the terror beginning to bloom beneath her ribs.

Neytiri sat back on her heels.

She had not saved him. She had not eased him. She had not even held on to his name. And she had watched all of it, from the outside—so that now she knew, exactly, what the last of it would look like.

Like that.

She got up. Her legs took some persuading. She went on.

Ahead, high on the tilted wall, a service hatch hung half off its hinge. Behind it, a shaft. Up.

Neytiri got one arm through, then her head, then her shoulder, twisting, exhaling to make herself thin.

Her queue snagged on the metal frame.

The pain arrived white and enormous at the back of her skull, and her body did what bodies do—it pulled.

Something let go with a soft, fibrous sound.

She made a noise she did not recognise.

It was the hair. Only the hair. The braid had caught and the woven length of it had come apart against the metal, the strands ripping away from the sheath along a hand's span, taking skin off her scalp as they went.

She got her arm back and up and found the place with her fingers, and stopped.

Where the hair had been, the tendrils lay bare in the water.

Bare, and moving. Turning slowly against her knuckles, blind, feeling for something to know. Wet and alive and entirely exposed to a corridor made of torn steel. It was wrong for them to touch this water. Oil, grime, chemicals—the ship's filth sliding over the part of her that should have known only living things.

Her hand shook so hard she had to press it against her chest to feel each breath.

A finger's width further and the frame would have gone through the sheath instead of the hair.

Her stomach turned over and she pressed her forehead into the metal until it passed.

Then she gathered the queue forward over her shoulder, all of it, and closed her hand around it, and held it against her collarbone the way she would have held a wounded bird.

The ship boomed, far below, and the shaft shuddered around her, and there was no room in it to grieve. She dragged herself through one-handed, the other hand still shut around her queue, and loose hair drifted past her cheek in the water. She did not look at it.

On the far side of the hatch, the red was weaker.

It buzzed. One fitting let go overhead with a flat pop and dropped sparks that died as they touched the water. The rest dimmed together, and brightened, and dimmed further, and the slow heartbeat of it began to lose its count—two beats close together, then a long nothing, then three in a rush.

Then the red began to stutter.

It caught things in pieces. A chair, upside down, sliding. A cloud of paper, unbound, turning in the water like fish. Her own hand, ahead of her, further ahead than it should have been able to reach.

And—for a quarter of a heartbeat, in a doorway—a mirror.

A small human mirror above a small human basin, bolted to a wall that was now almost a floor, and in it a face. Wide-eyed. Yellow-eyed. Bleeding at the temple. Tilted at an angle that made no sense, because the mirror was wrong, because the room was wrong, because nothing in this place agreed with itself.

It took her a full breath to know it was her own.

Then the room went dark, and the red heartbeat came to a stop.

Neytiri stood still and waited for her eyes.

They had always come. All her life, in the deepest hours under the deepest canopy, she had only ever had to wait and the world would arrive: the blue veins of the moss, the pale breathing lamps on the trunks, the pulse of small things going about their small business in the dark. Night on Pandora was not the absence of light. It was light of another kind, softer, and it was always, always alive.

She waited.

Nothing came.

She brought her hand up and stopped it a finger's width from her own eye and could not tell it was there.

This was not night. Night was a place where life still moved beneath the cloak of darkness. This was a place with nothing in it to see—no glow, no living thing, no least thread of Eywa anywhere in it. She had never in her life been anywhere the Great Mother had not already been.

The dark was not empty. She could still feel the ship tearing itself apart around her, the water coming in, the brush of furniture and bodies moving past her. It was the dark you felt from inside some great stomach.

Neytiri put out her hand until she found metal.

Then she went on, blind.

Twice in the blind part she put a hand out for the wall and found a body instead.

The first she knew by the hair. The second by the way it gave. After that she learned to lead with her knuckles rather than her palm, the way you test something whose shape you would rather not learn.

Blind, she learned the ship's voice, and the ship had more than one.

The first was the long one. It moved somewhere under her, far under, deeper than she wanted to think about, and it climbed slowly through the whole body of the vessel until the wall under her palm was humming with it. It went on too long to be a machine. Machines were quick and stupid and repeated themselves. This rose and fell and bent, the way a pa'li bends its cry when it has broken a leg and knows.

Every time it came, something in her tried to answer it, and had nothing to answer with.

The second voice was the booms.

They came without warning from nowhere she could point to. A slam like a hide drum struck once, hard, and then the water around her legs would jump, and the corridor would move a finger's width and stay there. She flinched every time. She could not stop flinching, and she could not learn the rhythm, because there was no rhythm—only the space between them getting shorter, and every one of them arriving with the same question attached.

The third voice was the worst because it was the one that was winning.

Water, behind the walls.

She could not see it and she could not reach it. It moved inside the ship the way blood moves inside a body that has been opened: finding the low way, finding the split seam, pushing through where the flesh is thinnest and then widening the hole it made. She heard it arrive in a room she had walked through a while ago. She heard it take that room. She heard it come up against the wall beside her shoulder and begin, patiently, to look for a way past.

And under all three, constantly, small sharp sounds—rivets letting go with a pang like a cracked knuckle, glass going somewhere ahead of her in a bright spray of noise. The skin of the animal splitting where it had been stretched too far.

Her ears hurt.

She swallowed, and they eased, and then they filled again, and she swallowed again.

Her own body was telling her how deep she was.

That was the thing that broke through the discipline she had been holding since the water closed over her head. Not the dark. Not the doors. Her ears, doing quietly and steadily what her ears had done in the deep pools of her childhood, only there had always been a bottom and a bright surface and a way back up.

A boom came so close that she felt it in her sternum, and the whole corridor flinched, and something enormous shifted its weight above her head.

His name was out of her mouth before she chose it.

It came out full-voiced, and it filled the corridor, and it was not a plea. It was the call she used across a canyon, across a burning village, across a hundred running bodies—the one that cut. She had never in her life used that voice and not been answered.

She listened.

Water hissed behind the wall.

The sound did not carry. That was the obscenity of the place. In flooded steel a shout goes nowhere; it hits a plate a body-length away and dies there, flat, without an echo, as though the ship were eating the words rather than passing them on.

But he was alive. She held that the way she had held the image of Kiri's arms around Tuk. He had gone after Quaritch and Quaritch was only a man in a borrowed body, and Jake—Jake came back from things. He came back bleeding and stupid and grinning. He came back with his ribs cracked. He came, when she called, always, from the first year she had known him, when he had been the loudest thing in the forest.

Say it again, he used to say, when she corrected his mangled Na'vi. Not embarrassed. Delighted. Say it again, I almost had it.

The walls swallowed it whole.

She went on. The water was at her ribs now and it had begun to do something to her breathing—a hitch every time it rose against her, a small betrayal she had to keep correcting.

And because there was no one left in the dark to be proud in front of, she started giving reasons.

"He must live," she said. "Do you hear me? His daughters are up there in the water. Tuk cannot sleep unless he is in the room. Lo'ak will not be told anything by anyone else."

She did not know, precisely, who she was speaking to. Jake, somewhere. Eywa, everywhere. The dying thing around her, which had no ears.

She kept stacking them anyway, the way you lay out an offering, one thing and then another thing, in the belief that a sufficient number will be enough.

"Great Mother." Her voice had begun to shake and she made it steady, deliberately, because a prayer should be said properly. "Hear me. Bring him back to them."

To them.

Not to me.

She heard herself leave it out, and kept moving, because the alternative was standing still in the dark with what the leaving-out meant.

A doorway. She felt for the frame, went through, and the floor was not there.

The room beyond had gone almost to its ceiling. She got her arm over the lip of the frame as her legs went out into nothing and hung there, shoulder screaming, feet turning slowly in cold water that wanted to take her down into a box with no air at the top of it. Her fingers began to slide.

This one broke in the middle.

She got her knee up. She got her hip over. She rolled back into the corridor and lay on the sloped metal on her side, coughing, tasting oil, with her heart going like something trying to get out.

When it eased, she said his name again.

There was no sound in it this time. Only her mouth making the shape—two movements, one small breath—not to call him, not any more, just to have it in her mouth. It was the last piece of him she could still produce herself.

Then she stopped.

The quiet that came after was much worse than the booms had been.

She did not get up.

And there, in the quiet, with no one left to call to and nothing left to hold up as a reason, Neytiri prayed for herself.

She had not done it once. Not tonight. Not, when she looked, ever—not properly. She had asked for rain and for clean kills and for her children's bones to knit and for her mother's spirit to find the roots. Twice already tonight she had put Jake's name in front of the Great Mother and built him a case out of his daughters, carefully, the way you argue for someone who cannot argue for himself. She had never once asked for the other thing, because the other thing came out of the mouth like a child's noise, and because there had always been somebody standing in front of her who needed the asking more.

There was nobody standing in front of her now.

"Great Mother," she said. There was almost nothing left in her voice.

The ship groaned somewhere above her, long and bending, and she waited for it to finish the way you wait out someone else speaking.

It came out flat and plain and without any decoration on it at all, and it was the truest thing she had said since the deck opened, and it shamed her, because it was so small.

"Not here. Not in this thing. Anywhere else." Her hand tightened around the queue held against her collarbone. "I do not want to go where you cannot see me. I do not want to be in the water, in the dark, with none of you in it."

Her mouth stopped. She made it go on, because she had decided to say this properly.

She said it out loud to the metal, and the metal took it exactly the way it had taken his name.

"I have carried what you gave me to carry." Her voice went somewhere in the middle of that and she kept going through it. "I gave you my son. I did not ask for him back. I am asking now. Ask me for anything else—only not this. Let me see the sky. Let me put my hand on something that is alive. Let me—"

There was more, and she heard how it sounded and stopped: a woman at the bottom of a hole, offering the same worn goods over and over to a wall.

"See me," she said. "Please. See me."

She listened for far longer than she had meant to.

Nothing came back. Not a change in the sound. Not a shift in the water. Not one thread of light, anywhere, from any direction.

And something in her set itself down, quietly, the way you put down a thing you have carried a long way and have finally understood you will not be needing.

The cold had been working on her since long before she noticed it. It had started, she thought, back at the doors, and it had come in without hurry, and it had taken her fingers first. Now she pressed her thumb hard into her own palm and felt only that something was happening, somewhere, to a hand that had been hers earlier tonight.

She should move.

She knew that clearly. Her mind was working perfectly, which was, she was beginning to understand, the cruelty of it.

She listened instead. And because she had been trained by her mother and by her father and by twenty years of hunting to make sense of what she heard, she began—without deciding to—to count.

Her hands were no use for it. She had learned that at the doors—too numb, trembling and beginning to fail her. So she used the parts of her that were still telling the truth.

The wall beside her carried a row of rivets, a hand's-width apart, and she found them with her mouth: turned her face to the plate and touched the cold heads of them with her lips, which had not yet gone as useless as her fingers. From the one at her cheek she counted down to the one where the water tapped and sucked.

Four.

Then she stopped touching it and listened, which was better anyway.

Water moving along a plate under a low ceiling has a sound, and the sound tells you how much room is left above it. Wide space, and it gives a slow hollow slap. Narrow, and the knock goes tight and quick and high. She had known that since she was a girl with her ear laid against the hull of a canoe, and the ship was saying it now, all along the corridor, in a voice that climbed by very small steps.

And she could feel it on herself. Not with her fingers. With her ribs, and the inside of her arms, and the skin of her back against the metal—the line where cold water stopped and cold air began, moving up her body one thin band at a time.

She counted her own breaths. At forty, the line had reached the fifth rivet, and the knock of the water had gone up with it.

A boom, somewhere aft.

She counted to the next. Twenty-two.

The next. Fifteen.

The next. Nine.

And there it was, laid out in front of her as plainly as tracks in mud: not slowing. Tightening. A wound bleeding faster, not slower. She had knelt beside enough dying animals to know what that rhythm meant, and roughly how much of it was left.

She put two fingers against her own throat and could barely feel the pulse there, and could not tell whether that was the pulse failing or her own fingers.

The animal was her.

She made herself do the whole of it, because half a calculation is a lie you tell yourself.

If someone had seen where the current took her—and no one had; Tuk's mouth had not even finished opening—and if Jake had lived through Quaritch, and if he had come down at once, into a ship with no lights, that was still turning, whose corridors had already changed three times since she had come through them, whose doors were being held shut by the sea itself—

The water reached the sixth rivet. She felt it arrive under her ribs and heard the sound of it tighten another degree.

Thirty-one breaths.

—then he would arrive after.

That was all. It was not despair and it did not feel like despair. It felt like reading a track and knowing the animal was four hours ahead and would not be caught. There was no argument to be had with it.

Her whole life she had been the one who could read the world faster than anyone around her and act before they had finished looking. Here, in the gut of this thing, that gift had one use left, and this was it: to tell her precisely how long she had.

Neytiri let her head rest back against the wall, and dragged in the bitter, thin air.

Her hands had stopped shaking. That should have frightened her. It didn't, and that was the frightening part.

The memories did not come as a flood. They came slowly, like droplets filling a bowl—one, then two, then more than she could count.

Sunlight, moving, laid in bars across Tuk's back while she slept in the afternoon.

Lo'ak, twelve years old, furious, trying so hard not to laugh that his ears shook.

Kiri squatting at the edge of a tide pool with her hand flat on the water and her head tipped, listening to something that had never once bothered to speak to anyone else.

Neteyam.

Neteyam turning around when she called him. That was all. Just the turn of his head, his eyebrows already going up, already about to be reasonable about something. It hurt, and it hurt cleanly, without any of the wreckage the daylight version of that grief usually dragged behind it, and she was grateful for the mercy and did not examine it.

Her mother's hands braiding. Her father's bow across his knees, and the smell of the oil he used on it, which she could not summon here, because the ship had taken that from her first.

The forest before the fire. Green over green over green, and the light coming down through all of it in long soft columns, and mist in the columns, and everything breathing.

And Jake.

Not as she had last seen him going into the smoke. In better light, in the earliest days, absurd and enormous and brand-new, looking at her like a man who has been given something he knows he has not earned. Jake under the Tree of Voices. Jake asleep sitting up with an infant on his chest and his mouth open. Jake's hand finding hers in the dark of the night after they had left her home, and holding her because he knew that there were some hurts that could not be solved with words.

Everything warm and living was somewhere behind her eyes.

Hearing was the last thing left to her and the ship had all of it. There was no room in her ears for anything else. Only that long bending groan, coming up out of the deep, over and over, closer each time, and it did not sound like metal any more. It sounded like something enormous down there that had smelled her and was working its way up.

She tried to pray.

The words came out wrong. Her tongue had gone thick and slow, and the shapes she needed would not form properly. She stopped, swallowed, and tried again.

Before, in the corridor, she had bargained. She had laid out reasons and expected them to be weighed. And after that, in the quiet, she had asked once for herself, and nothing at all had come back.

She expected nothing now.

She said it anyway, badly, because to stop would be to give up twice, and she had only agreed to do it once.

Her teeth knocked together. She could not hear the sound of it under the ship.

No.

No. Eywa did not carry messages between a mother and her son. If the Great Mother was on the other side of this metal, then Neytiri would say it herself, in a very short while, with her own mouth.

The thought was so enormous that a sound came out of her that was almost a laugh.

Neytiri went through her children one more time. Not their deaths, not her failures, not the fear. Just the four of them the first time each had been laid against her chest, and how each one had smelled, and how she had known already, every time, exactly who they were.

Then she found Jake's face and held it.

"I am sorry," she said, in the shape of words rather than words.

For going. For making him bury someone again. For whatever the last thing she had said to him had been, which she could not now remember, and which was going to have to be the last thing.

The wall lurched under her palm.

Her hand slid off it.

She did not put it back.

The water had her at the waist. The dark had all the rest.

☾─────•──•°•𖥸•°•──•─────☽

She did not know how much time had passed. It might have been seconds, or hours. There was only the water, still climbing, and the place in her chest where the fight had been.

And then something came into her ears that was not the ship.

It had edges.

She stopped breathing.

It came again, a voice, far away or maybe close, she could not tell the difference anymore.

Neytiri did not move.

Of course. Of course it would do this. A mind that is about to end reaches into its own storeroom and brings out the last kind thing it can find, and it had found his voice, which was the kindest thing she owned.

It cut through the groan of the metal. Roughened, half torn, the voice of a man who had been shouting for a long time already.

She pressed the back of her head harder into the wall and tried to lift her hand up, but all her strength had gone.

A light moved.

It was nothing. A stain, a smear, orange-white, wobbling somewhere off to her left. A human lamp, and a poor one, going in and out behind whatever stood between them. But in the dark, it might as well have been the sun.

Water broke. Something large came up out of it and began to come toward her, and it was too big for the corridor, and it was moving badly, and one of its arms was not doing what it was told.

She watched without believing it.

He reached her.

Hands closed on her upper arms and the warmth bloomed from the contact like fire, so sharp and raw that a low hiss pressed between her teeth.

Not metal, not water, not the slick cold of a wall—a palm, hard-skinned, shaking, rubbing roughly up and down her arm as though it could scrub her back into the world.

"I'm here." His face came in close enough that she could see the shape of it. "Hey. Hey. I'm here. I found you, baby."

Jake pulled her in against his chest.

He was warm. His heart was hammering, right there against her cheekbone, far too fast. The sound of it pulsed into her ear like a drum, loud enough to block out the dreadful groan of the ship.

She dragged in a breath, expecting the sharp, toxic scent of fuel and death. Instead, under the blood, under the diesel stink of this place that had scrubbed her own scent off her skin in the first ten minutes—

Him.

Jake. Exactly him. Unmistakable and alive.

A sound came out of her, wrecked of all the bravery she once held.

His arms went tight enough to hurt.

"Yeah," he said, and his voice came apart on it. "Yeah. It's me."

Relief opened in her so hard and so fast that it was indistinguishable from injury. She collapsed further into him, trying to burrow as deeply into the warmth of his body as she could manage.

Then her mind caught up to the shape of him.

Jake was here.

Jake was here, in the dark under the water, with his arms around her, and that meant he was not above.

Neytiri dragged her head back from his chest. It took more strength than she wanted it to. One of her hands stayed locked in the strap across him, but the other found his face, not gently, turning him toward what little light there was.

It was hardly a word. It tore out of the place where her breath should have been.

Jake's mouth moved.

Neytiri shook her head once, hard, because she could not hear him over the sudden rush inside her own skull.

"The children," she said again, and this time her hand went to his jaw, not gently. She turned his face toward her as if the answer might be visible there. "Jake. The children."

Above.

The word hit some shut place in her and did not open it.

"No." She did not know what she meant by it. No to the ship. No to him. No to any answer that was not all of their bodies in her hands. "All?"

The sound that came out of her was almost pain.

She saw again the little body sliding backward across the deck. Kiri's arms closing. Kiri's fingers tearing out of hers.

"Kiri," she said.

Jake swallowed. His hands tightened on her arms, too hard and then not hard enough. "Before I came down."

Before.

Before was a useless country. Before was where Neteyam had been breathing. Before was where a hand could still hold. Before was not now.

Her fingers dug into his face.

"Yes," he said.

The word struck her so hard she almost did not understand it.

Neytiri stared at him.

"Yes. Safe." His hands tightened on her arms. "I made sure."

The ship groaned, and the sound went through both of them. Jake glanced once into the dark behind him, then back at her, fast, as though even looking away from her cost him.

"Kiri had Tuk. Lo'ak was with them. I got them together. I saw them moving. I saw them go." His voice was breaking apart under the need to make her believe him. "I did not leave them scattered. I didn't. I waited until they were together."

The relief went through her so cleanly she wanted to sob, but her body had no strength left for crying. She pressed her cheek against his shoulder, and the trembling grew more violent against the warmth of him.

"I'm so sorry." The words sounded strange coming from him. "I took so long."

Neytiri shook her head weakly against his shoulder. There was no accusation in the motion. Only exhaustion, and the small, aching relief of a debt already forgiven.

She made a sound at that. A broken thing, too small for all the places it hurt.

For a moment she could only hold his face and breathe at him, short and ugly, like an animal dragged from a snare that still felt the wire in its flesh.

Her hands slid from his face to the straps across his chest and closed there, but there was no force in them. Only the weak, terrible need to keep him in one piece beneath her fingers.

It came out small, almost breaking on its own shape.

"No." It was not anger. It was pleading. "Do not say my name. Tell me."

The lamp guttered between them, thin and failing, and in that poor light she finally saw him properly.

No mask. No line. No bottle. No txampaysye. No rope trailing behind him into anywhere. Nothing on him but his knife and a dying lamp. Blood dark at his temple and his shoulder. His chest moving too fast, too shallow, a man who had spent air he did not have to spend.

She looked past him. Black water. Bent metal. No path opening behind his body.

"Where is it," she said. "The way out."

His silence came first. Then his face, trying to be brave and failing so completely that she understood.

He had not come with a way out. He had not come with air. He had not come with anything.

The horror did not arrive hot. It came softly, opening under her ribs like something giving way.

He had come to die with her.

"No," she whispered, and shook her head, small and useless, unable to stop. "No, ma Jake. You should not be here. You should be above, with the children."

His mouth trembled once before he mastered it.

"I saw you go under," he said. "I couldn't leave you."

"You could have." Her hand went flat over the hard, frantic beat of his heart, and she nearly came apart at the feel of it. "You should have. I was—"

Dead. The word waited in her mouth and would not leave it.

"I was gone," she said instead. "I had already let go."

His face broke, fully, as if she had put a blade between his ribs.

"And now you are here." Her eyes burned, and there was no room in this place for tears, and still they came, or tried to, thick and useless in her throat. "There is no way out. I have to lose you too."

He did not try to soften it.

"What were you going to do?" The question came out almost gentle, because there was no strength left in her for anything sharper. "When you found me."

A sob broke out of her, and her hand rose to strike him and landed instead as nothing more than a press of her palm against his chest.

"You only came," she said. "Why?"

"Because you were down here." He said it plainly, roughly, as if he had to force it through his teeth before the water took it. "Because you were down here on your own."

It undid her more thoroughly than anything the ship had managed.

Because it was not a mistake. It was not panic. It was Jake looking at a sinking ship, understanding perfectly well that there was very likely no way back out of it, and coming in anyway, because the alternative was her being alone in the dark.

And some terrible, selfish part of her had wanted exactly that. Not his death. Never that. But his hand. His voice. His warmth in the dark. Someone to come after her, even if coming after her meant there would be no one left to go back.

The thought was unbearable.

A sound came out of her, small and cracked and almost lost under the ship. She folded forward into him before it could become a sob.

Jake caught her. Of course he caught her. That was the grief of it.

She went into the side of his neck and stayed there, shaking without tears, breathing him in because he was warm and alive and had ruined everything by coming, and because some weak, hidden part of her was grateful she would not meet the end alone.

Her hands were still knotted in his straps. She tried to open them. They would not.

Jake covered them with his hand.

"It's all right," he said, voice scraped thin.

She shook her head against him. "It is not."

"No," he whispered. "It's not."

She thought of Tuk on the deck with her mouth still open.

She thought of Kiri holding her, up there in the light, safe, with her hand torn.

She thought of Lo'ak, alive because Jake had made sure.

And of all of them above the water, moving away from the ship, while their father chose the dark anyway.

As though his life were the one that could be spent.

She did not say it. It went into her like a splinter and stayed where it landed.

"Hey." Jake's hand moved up and down her back, slow, unhurried, as if there were all the time in the world in a corridor with water at their chests. "Stay with me."

A sound came out of him that in any other hour would have been a laugh.

He went to work on her the way he would have worked on a cold-stunned animal. He took her hands and folded them between his own and breathed into the gap, his mouth so close to her knuckles that she felt the shape of the words before she heard them. He rubbed her forearms hard from elbow to wrist, then her upper arms, then her shoulders, and when his palms slowed there instead of moving on, his thumb finding the curve of her collarbone and staying there, longer than warmth required.

His forehead came down against hers. Just that. His breath, and hers, sharing the same small pocket of air, and for one long moment neither of them moved to break it.

When the shivering finally arrived—violent, whole-body, her jaw clacking—he only tightened his hold and rode it out with her, saying there, there it is, that's good, that's good, because the shaking meant she was still in there.

Her hands began to hurt.

She had never in her life been so glad of pain.

"Talk," she said.

So he talked. Not promises—he did not once tell her they were getting out, and she loved him for that too. He talked about Tuk trading her fish for Lo'ak's and thinking nobody had noticed. About the time Kiri fell asleep in the roots and they searched half the night and she woke up annoyed at them. About Neteyam's first clean shot and how he had pretended not to care.

His voice was low and close.

That was the difference. Everything she had listened to for hours had been enormous and empty—a sound with no one making it. Every word Jake said put one more living thing back into the world, and stacked them, and built something she could stand on.

The ship groaned. She felt him flinch, and it startled her more than the sound did.

She lifted her head to look at him.

The lamp had almost nothing left. In what it had, she read his face the way she read everything: the split at his temple still leaking, the swelling closing one eye, the bruising in the shape of a hand around his throat, the way he kept his left arm tucked against his ribs. He had fought Quaritch and he had won, or at least he had survived it, and then he had thrown himself down a hole in a sinking ship on the strength of nothing.

And now there was nothing here for him to fight.

Her thumb was on his cheek before she decided to put it there.

"I told her to keep you," she said.

"Eywa. I asked her." Her tongue was still slow. She took the words carefully. "I asked her to bring you back to the children."

Jake's breath caught somewhere in his chest.

"Guess I came the wrong way," he said, trying to make it a joke, and it cracked halfway out of his mouth, grief rising up under it before he could stop it.

She made a sound that had a sob in the middle of it and hit him again, weakly.

"And after," she said. "When I had stopped calling you."

It was harder to say than any of it, harder than the arithmetic, harder than the queue, and she said it into his shoulder so that she would not have to watch it land. "I asked her to see me. I have never asked her for that. And nothing came."

Jake's hand came up and closed around the back of her head.

"Something came," he said.

"Yeah, well." His voice had gone rough at the edges. "Ask again sometime. You're allowed to want things."

His thumb brushed once along her jaw, unhurried, as though he had all the time left in the world instead of none of it.

His hand travelled up her back and into her hair, and stopped.

She felt him find it: the stripped place, the raw span where the hair had been torn off and the tendrils lay uncovered.

He went very still.

"A hatch." Her mouth was slow. She made herself say the rest of it, because she needed one other living person to know it had not happened. "The hair only. It did not go through."

She felt him understand, and his whole hand went careful.

His fingers moved over it and stopped short of the wound itself, so gently that she had to close her eyes.

"I'm here now," he said.

She leaned into it and let it hold her.

Her queue lay curled at her collarbone where she had kept it since the hatch, tendrils drawn in tight, guarding themselves against anything else the ship might do to them.

She unfolded her fingers.

"Not like this." She found his hand where it rested near the wound and drew it lower, to the place at his own collar where his queue lay coiled, damp, unused since before the fire had started. "If this is the end of it, I do not want to spend it only holding your hand."

His breath caught. Whatever he had braced himself to say, it had not been that.

"I know what it is." Her own hand was already moving toward the wound, toward the bared tendrils that had flinched from everything since the hatch—oil, grime, even his own careful fingers. "It will hurt. Do it anyway."

He freed his own queue with hands no steadier than hers, and for a moment they only knelt there in the rising water, two ruined animals working themselves open in the dark.

The first touch of it went through her like the hatch again, white and total, and a sound came out of her with no shape to it. Then the tendrils found each other properly and the pain resolved into something else entirely.

She was in the water, and she was also, at once, inside him: a boy learning to walk again on legs that were not his own, and grief worn smooth the way a stone goes smooth in a river that has had a very long time to work on it. And under all of it, plain, without decoration: the fact of him, wanting to be nowhere else in this drowning place except exactly here, joined to her.

"I see you," she said, and this time it was not only words.

"I see you," he said back, and she felt him mean it in the same place she meant hers—not behind the eyes, but lower, load-bearing, the place a keel sits inside a hull.

"If we go," she said, "we go like this. Not holding hands. Like this."

"Like this," he agreed, and drew her in against his chest so the bond did not have to reach any further than skin already touching skin.

The ship groaned around them, and for once it did not sound like the voice of the thing trying to kill her. It sounded very far away.

The water was at their chests. Jake tucked her head under his chin and kept talking.

Then the wall came in.

It did not burst. It bowed—a long shriek of stressed steel, the plate belling inward beside them, and then water arrived in a solid grey rope across their shoulders. Jake turned his back into it and got her higher on the slope. There was nowhere higher. The ceiling was a hand above their heads.

He braced one palm on it and held her with the other arm and looked at her, and she saw him decide to say something final—and this time she felt it arrive before his mouth had shaped it, the bond carrying the words ahead of his voice, blunt and terrified and true.

"No." She got her hand around the back of his neck. "Do not say it. I already have it."

His face broke.

"Then hold onto it," he said, wrecked. "Because I don't know how much longer I've got."

The lamp gave out.

For one breath there was nothing at all, and it was the old nothing, the total kind, the withdrawn world.

Then the water lit.

Blue.

Not a lamp, not a flare, nothing electric. A soft moving blue coming up through the flooded corridor from somewhere beyond the doorway, and in it, faint threads and pulses—living light, in this place, where nothing lived.

Jake turned his head.

Neytiri forgot to breathe for an entirely different reason.

The glow strengthened and gave her back the world in pieces: the bowed plate, the surface of the water shivering, Jake's shoulder, her own hand. Then a shape came through the doorway ahead of the light—small, drifting, opening and closing, its tendrils spread like something blooming.

Behind it came Kiri.

She was not searching.

That was the first thing Neytiri understood, and it went through her like the light did. Kiri did not look down the branching passage. She did not hesitate at the junction. She came through the drowned corridor and up out of the water directly to them the way water itself finds the low ground—because something had been pulling her, and she had simply followed it.

The word went through Neytiri like a hand closing on her heart.

Kiri's face, in the blue, was terrible. There was no relief in it yet. Her eyes went over her mother—the grey skin, the bared queue held against her collarbone, the arms that would not lift—and then to her father, bleeding, empty-handed, with no mask on his face and no line at his belt, and Neytiri watched it land on her daughter's face: two parents, folded together in the dark at the top of a flooding corridor, waiting.

She should not have had to see that. Not that. Not either of them like that.

Kiri took her mother's face in both hands. Her palm was bandaged. "I found you," she said, fiercely, as though someone had argued with her about it.

"I knew where you were." She was already pulling something up out of the water. "Here. Both of you. Now—we have to go under."

Two txampaysye, held in her hands, tendrils curling and glowing against her wrists.

Jake stared at them.

Hope, arriving in a man who had already laid himself down, hurt his face more than despair had.

The command in her voice was Neytiri's own, and Jake obeyed it as fast as he had ever obeyed anything.

Kiri fitted the second one against her mother's mouth herself, one hand steady at the back of her head, and Neytiri's whole body recoiled from the seal—a lifetime of instinct saying not while you are in the water—and Kiri held her through it.

Neytiri breathed.

Air came in.

Cool, clean, faintly green-tasting. Not the poison in the pocket. Not a measured mouthful stolen from a shrinking space with a ceiling on it. Air with no end attached to it.

Her chest convulsed around the first one and she nearly lost it, and Kiri's hand stayed where it was, and the second breath went down properly.

Somewhere in the scramble their queues had already come apart—she did not remember choosing to let go, only that the white-hot thread of him was gone from that part of her, and colder for it. But his hand found hers under the water, and closed there, and did not let go again for the rest of it.

The blue light turned the dead corridor into a place with a direction in it.

For the first time since the deck had stopped being a deck, there was a way forward.

It was not a way that wanted them.

Neytiri went under and told her legs to kick, and her legs gave back nothing. She sank. Jake had her before she had dropped a body-length, hauling her up against his chest with his good arm, and she felt his ribs jump when he took the weight.

She pushed at him. Let me—

The txampaysye took the words and gave back nothing but a vibration.

Jake shook his head once and got his arm across her chest and under her opposite shoulder, the grip they teach for towing, and started after Kiri's light.

The corridors had been too small for one of her. They were an insult to two.

He had to go through the first frame sideways, twisting, and her hip caught, and he had to back out and come at it again. Her shoulder struck a rail. His back scraped a length of exposed conduit and left a dark thread of blood turning slowly in their wake. Every doorway had to be negotiated like a knot.

Kiri went ahead and came back, ahead and back, the little drifting creature keeping station near her hand, and in its light the wreck was finally visible—and being able to see it was no better. Bulkheads bowed inward like a ribcage taking a blow. Rust standing in the water in brown clouds. Severed cable hanging in loops. Nothing in it had ever been alive and all of it looked like the inside of something.

And the drowned, hanging wherever the water had set them down. In doorways. Up against ceilings, in rooms whose last air had gone. One turning slowly in the middle of a cabin with both arms out and his head back, as though something above him had finally been worth looking at. Kiri's light passed over them and moved on. Neytiri watched her daughter's face and saw her decide not to look, and was sorry for it, and could do nothing about that either.

At the third hatch, Kiri pulled and it did not move.

Jake passed his wife across to his daughter.

The moment his chest left her back, panic came up in Neytiri so fast and so stupidly that she got her numb hand around his wrist and would not open it.

He put his face close to hers. Mouthed it: right here.

Then he set both feet on the frame and drove his shoulder into the hatch.

It gave a finger's width and slammed back. The sea, leaning. Still leaning, on the other side of everything.

He went at it again. And again. The cut on his shoulder opened wider and lifted a dark ribbon into the water. On the fourth try the gap held—a hand's width, then two.

Kiri pushed the small glowing creature through. It went, circled, came back.

She pointed up.

Jake widened the gap until the metal screamed, and Neytiri felt that sound in the roots of her teeth, and Kiri folded her mother's arms in and drew her through first. The edge caught her hip and for a heartbeat she was wedged there, useless, with the hatch straining shut against Jake's shoulder.

He shoved. She came free.

He came through behind her and the hatch crashed closed on the water where his leg had been.

The slam threw them apart.

She went end over end in a cloud of rust. The light vanished. Something struck her ribs. Her hand closed on nothing, and nothing, and nothing, and the old dark came back with all its old authority and told her that none of this had happened—

Fingers locked around her ankle.

For one whole heartbeat it was the other hand. The young one's, come up out of the black water to keep her.

Then Jake dragged her back in against him, and she clung to him without a shred of shame about it.

Ahead, the blue reappeared, jerking urgently.

The passage forked around a collapsed bulkhead. One way climbed steeply into black. The other fell away, hung with drifting wire.

Kiri looked between them. The little creature drifted toward the upper way, and then the ship convulsed, and a ceiling panel came down behind it, and the water went opaque with silt.

There was no time to try one and come back.

Jake looked at Kiri. Kiri looked at the walls. Neytiri tried to read the current the way she had read everything her whole life, and her body—numb, borrowed, hers only by paperwork—told her absolutely nothing.

Another second with no choice in it.

Another path that would turn out to have been right or wrong only after a body had already committed to it.

Jake took the upper one.

He pulled her in and kicked hard, and Kiri came after them, and the passage narrowed, and narrowed again, and his shoulders jammed. He shoved Neytiri ahead of him and Kiri took her arms and pulled from the far side, and metal opened her forearm from wrist to elbow, and her bared queue snagged and she screamed into the txampaysye, a sound with nothing in it but terror, until Kiri's fingers found the place and freed it.

Behind them, the junction let go.

The force of it came up the passage after them like something making a grab.

Water punched through. Neytiri hit Kiri; Jake hit them both. For several turning seconds there was no direction anywhere, only noise and the blue light wheeling.

The current found an opening and took them at it.

And Neytiri, upside down, half blind, saw a torn edge of plate swinging in toward her daughter's head.

Her body did it without asking her.

She twisted inside Jake's hold, got her ruined arm across, and hauled Kiri in against her chest. Jake turned with the motion and took the plate across his own shoulder blade.

The three of them went through the gap together.

And then there were no walls.

For one long stunned moment Neytiri could not understand the absence. Open water, on every side, and space above, and space below, and nothing at all pressing on her.

The ship hung behind them, enormous, going down and away at a steep angle with the last of its lights failing along its length. Its groaning came through the water at them, but from outside her now, no longer in her bones—just an animal noise receding into the deep where it belonged.

Kiri's light swept upward.

Jake tightened his arm across her and kicked.

They rose, and it took a very long time. The dark was above as well as below and the surface refused to arrive. Jake's rhythm went uneven, then bad; his left arm had stopped doing anything at all. Kiri swam back down to them twice, pulling.

Neytiri told her legs one more time.

One kick. Feeble. Then another.

Jake felt it and looked at her, and she held his eyes and did it again.

They went up together.

Black became grey. Grey became a shivering silver skin above them.

They broke through.

Air hit her face and it was moving.

That was the thing that undid her—not the light: the movement of it. Wind. Spray. Rain coming down and the sea coming up and everything in motion at once. She tore the txampaysye off and dragged in a breath that tasted of salt and smoke and rain, and it went into her like something being given back.

Sound arrived from every direction at once, and all of it was alive: ilu calling, someone shouting orders a long way off, water slapping her shoulders, Tuk—Tuk, somewhere close, screaming for her mother in a voice gone completely to pieces.

There was nothing to hold. The sea under her had no floor and no wall and no rivets to count, and her legs would not answer, and her body went rigid and began to climb Jake, clawing, trying to get out of water that had nothing to get out onto.

"Easy—easy—" His own voice was shredded, and he held her anyway. "I've got you. I've got you."

She could not.

So he took her hand and pressed it flat over his own heart and held it there.

The same words. In the corridor they had meant while we die. Out here, under moving air, they meant something else entirely, and her body understood the difference before she did.

She found his heartbeat, and held on to it, and slowly the rigidity let go of her.

"Mom." Kiri came in on her other side and took her jaw. "Look at me."

Neytiri opened her eyes.

Her daughter's face: wet, alive, furious with love. Beyond her, Tuk was half off the back of an ilu with both arms out. Beyond Tuk, the sea ran with light—fire on the water, stars behind the cloud, and threads of pale blue where living things had come up to see what had happened. And above all of it, sky. Enormous. Open. Full of weather.

Eywa's world, on every side of her, the way it had always been, the way it had not been for the length of that ship.

And below all of it, going down with the ship: a room with faces laid out along its ceiling, and a young man with his hand open.

Neytiri took one breath she chose to take.

"Thank you," she said.

Quietly. Deliberately. Two words, and she meant them completely, and she did not know and did not need to know whether she was speaking to the Great Mother, or to her daughter, or to the man holding her up.

It was the first prayer of the night that she trusted had been heard.

Jake's forehead came down against her temple.

And only then, with all of them alive and the sky over them, did the other thing surface.

If Kiri had not been pulled through that water. If the light had gone to the wrong corridor. Then Jake would have died in there, holding her, and she would have gone with him—or worse, been dragged out afterward and made to live—carrying the knowledge that when he had come down into that dark with nothing, some small part of her had been glad.

She had wanted him there.

She had hated what he did and she had needed him to do it, and they had survived, which changed nothing about the fact.

Neytiri closed her hand over his heart until she could feel it against her palm.

There would be time for that. There would be nights when she woke hearing metal bend under quiet water, and a smell of fuel would take the whole forest away from her, and a dark room would have a mouth in it again. There would be nights when a hand closed around her wrist in her sleep and she would not be able to tell whose it was. And there would be a conversation, someday, that she did not yet have the words for. The sea had let go of her body; it had not finished with the rest.

But his hand was still in hers.

Kiri was shouting for Tuk to bring the ilu around, her voice cracking on the command. Tuk came low over the water, both hands out, screaming something that might have been her mother's name or might have been no word at all. Jake's grip on Neytiri slipped once, caught, held. Someone threw a line, and it slapped the water beside them, and Kiri seized it before Neytiri's numb hands could try and fail.

The sky held.

Behind them, far down, the ship gave one last long bending groan and the water closed over the place where it had been.

Neytiri watched the black shut.

Then she turned her face toward the living light.