Chapter Text
The first thing Adrian Cross came back to was noise.
Not sight. Not memory. Not pain, even though pain was there somewhere, folded into everything else like wire inside a wall. Noise got there first.
It came in layers.
A shoe sole squeaking once on deck plating and then stopping, as if whoever made the sound regretted being heard. A wheel somewhere that needed oil. The faint wet click of something dripping into a tray. Cloth moving against cloth. A monitor ticking out a slow pulse. Another one answering at a different rate. The far-off industrial thrum of ship engines working through vacuum, deep enough to be felt more than heard.
Breathing.
Too much breathing.
Human breathing.
Someone close to his left trying to keep their inhale quiet and failing. Someone farther back with smoker’s lungs and old patience. Someone through a mask. Two people whispering through their teeth, trying to keep their voices below the level of command and not managing it.
And behind all of that, horribly near and horribly intimate, the pounding rush of blood inside his own ears.
For a while that was all he had.
Sound.
Pressure.
The sensation of lying under something bright enough to flatten thought.
Then smell arrived, and if the noise had been bad, the smell was worse.
Antiseptic bit first. Sharp, cold, chemical-clean. Then heated plastic. Rubber. Human sweat held under fabric and nerves. Saline. Metal. Powder from gloves. The faint ghost of citrus from whatever cleansing solution they’d wiped the bay down with. Something sweeter under all of it too, wet and organic and wrong, like tissue thawed out of a tank.
It hit him all at once.
His stomach rolled. His throat worked around a breath that came too big and too deep and too hungry, and for one panicked second he thought he was choking, except that wasn’t right either because whatever lungs were drawing air into him now were bigger than the ones he remembered owning and seemed determined to drink down half the room at a time.
A voice said, very close, “There. There he is.”
Another answered, brisk and irritated. “Don’t crowd the table.”
He tried to move.
Nothing listened.
That was worse than the smell. Worse than the noise. Worse than whatever chemical swamp still held half his mind underwater. He was in his body, obviously, because the blood in his ears was his and the drowning breath was his and the nausea was his, but the wiring between thought and action had gone soft. He tried to curl one hand and felt the command vanish somewhere far away before it reached his fingers.
Panic came hard and stupid.
His pulse kicked higher. The monitors around him reacted. Someone muttered something technical he couldn’t hold onto. A gloved hand touched his wrist, and the contact was enough to send raw alarm shooting through him from throat to spine.
He still hadn’t properly opened his eyes yet. Or maybe they were open and the light above him was just that strong. Everything behind his lids or through them was one great white blur, all edges washed out, the world pressed flat by glare.
“Easy,” someone said.
Not to him.
About him.
That made him angrier at once.
He dragged in another breath and immediately regretted it. Too much air. Too much everything. Even his mouth felt wrong. Tongue too broad. Teeth too present. His own jaw too heavy. His chest rose too high and too far.
He wanted to say **what the fuck is happening** and all that came out was a scraped animal sound in the back of his throat.
Then the blur above him shifted, and a shadow moved into the light.
Big.
Blue.
His mind recoiled from it so hard it almost stalled out again.
Blue skin should not have been skin. That was the first absurd thought. Blue was paint, bruise, toy plastic, reflected light off a bad screen. Blue was not a face leaning down over him, blocking the glare, breathing warm human breath in a mouth full of too-sharp teeth.
The face swam closer in broken pieces.
Jaw.
Mouth.
Nose.
Eyes.
Yellow.
Soft.
Concerned.
Army-green tank. Gray sweats. Wet hair. Huge shoulders. Skin like dusk over bruises.
Then the mouth grinned, and the grin punched a hole through the strangeness.
“Hey, kid.” Rough voice. Familiar voice. Stupid fond voice. “Hello. You with us, son?”
Adrian hit him.
It wasn’t a decision. It happened below decision, in the part of the body that still believed waking up beneath a threat meant violence first and understanding later. One moment he was flat and strapped and half-drowned in anesthesia fog, and the next the whole table was exploding under him.
Plastic tore. Leads snapped. The oxygen line ripped sideways across his cheek. The disposable gown twisted around his thighs. Something metal shrieked against its bolts. Human voices shot upward in alarm.
His fist connected with that blue face, and the impact ran up his arm like he had just punched a wall that bled.
The big blue man staggered back with a grunt and caught himself on the frame of the table.
Adrian didn’t stop.
He tore one wrist free hard enough to rip tape off skin. An IV line came with it, spattering clear fluid. He lurched half-upright, then fully, one leg still tangled in the sheet, one shoulder dragging oxygen tubing with him, and launched himself off the table on nothing but panic and bad instinct.
He wasn’t dressed.
That fact didn’t exist yet in his head.
The disposable scrub gown had come open at the back somewhere in the struggle, one side half off his shoulder already, ass hanging fully out, one thigh still striped with adhesive marks from monitor pads. He hit the deck anyway with all the useless dignity of a sedated animal trying to kill the vet.
A technician screamed.
A nurse ducked so fast she nearly took a cart down with her.
Adrian barely saw them. The humans at the edge of the room did not feel like the problem. The problem was the blue bodies around him—tall, fast, moving with predator economy under the surgical lights.
Na’vi.
That part his mind gave him instantly.
Not right. Not safe. Not supposed to be on a ship this close to him.
He swung at the nearest one.
A compact, broad-shouldered figure caught the punch on her forearm with a grunt and turned the force aside instead of trying to stop it head-on. Gold eyes. Flattened nose. A hard square set to the jaw that his body recognized before his brain did. He threw an elbow toward her throat and she dropped under it, drove a shoulder into his chest, and sent him reeling sideways into a tray stand.
Another body hit him from behind.
He kicked back and connected with a shin or knee. Somebody swore. Good. He spun, snarling now, or something close enough to it to count, and went for the next face because faces were where you ended things.
“Watch the line—”
“Don’t let him pull the queue—”
“Cross!”
His own name in that room made everything worse.
He hit somebody else—caught cheekbone, then mouth, split skin, tasted blood in the air that was too sharp and too sweet and too immediate—and then there were simply too many of them.
One arm got pinned behind his back.
Not sloppily. Cleanly.
Another hand caught his free wrist and bent it down before he could turn the movement into a strike. A body braced his spine. Another came in low to catch his legs before he could get leverage. They were restraining him like trained soldiers restraining someone they did not want to hurt, which was somehow more frightening than if they’d just dogpiled him.
He fought anyway.
He nearly broke loose anyway.
That scared him almost as much as the blue skin did. His body was stronger than his mind knew how to inhabit yet. When he twisted, the one behind him had to adjust. When he kicked, metal rang. His breath was coming in huge furious bursts that made his ribs feel too large for his skin.
His own voice came out rough and low and not even remotely human.
Somewhere near his left ear, somebody said, “Jesus, kid, would you quit making this harder than it has to be—”
The voice hit him before the face did.
That voice.
He jerked his head up.
The first blue man stepped back into view, one hand braced against his own jaw. Blood marked the corner of his mouth, nearly black against blue skin. His lower jaw sat crooked in a way that should have made speech impossible.
Instead, with casual irritation, he shoved two fingers against it and snapped it back into place with a wet little pop.
Adrian froze.
Not because he was calm. Because horror had finally outrun adrenaline.
The big blue man rolled his jaw once, spat blood off to the side, and leaned in again like none of that had mattered.
“Hey,” he said, softer now, crooked grin back where it belonged. “Cool it. It’s just us.”
Us.
Then, like he was handing Adrian a grenade and expecting gratitude, he said, “It’s Price.”
For one second the whole room went thin.
Adrian stared at him.
The face was wrong in every way.
Blue.
Striped.
Yellow-eyed.
Broad-featured, built over a skull that should not have carried Nolan Price’s expressions and somehow still did. The same grin. The same ugly warmth. The same way he looked half-amused by disaster and half-ready to punch through it.
No.
No, because Price had died in the mud with his body opened under a hammerhead’s skull. Because Teague had found what was left. Because that was finished. Because death, at minimum, was supposed to have the decency to stay where it was put.
Adrian stopped fighting for one fatal second.
It was enough.
The others tightened and re-positioned around him, not rough, not loose, just competent. Someone pinned his right arm higher. Someone else shifted their grip at his wrist. The body at his back adjusted its balance in a way so exactly, infuriatingly familiar that his skin crawled.
Price saw the recognition hit and gentled by a fraction.
“There you go,” he said. “Yeah.”
Adrian looked at the rest of them and the floor dropped out from under reality.
Mara Sato held his right arm. Blue now. Huge now. But still Mara in the set of her shoulders and the flattened old break of her nose and the look in her eyes that said she could handle his panic but would not respect it.
Imani Cade had his left wrist. Too still. Too exact. Her gold gaze didn’t blink.
Elias Venter was the body behind him, correcting everybody else’s positioning by pressure alone, even now somehow making restraint look like command.
Teague Ardan stood just out of range, weight forward, eyes narrowed, body poised like he was deciding whether Adrian would run or bite if they let go.
Len Duvall had blood on his mouth and looked personally insulted by it.
Rafael Viera stood near the med cart with adhesive seal strips already in hand, calm as triage, like chaos merely moved him into the right lane.
They were all there.
His dead were all there.
Wearing Na’vi bodies.
Not avatars. That thought tried to climb up through the panic and then stalled out halfway because avatars needed drivers and the people these bodies belonged to were dead. Dead. He had the memories. Price. Mara. Venter. All of them gone at different moments, in different awful ways. That knowledge hadn’t gone anywhere.
Which meant these things around him were not avatars.
Which meant they were something worse.
That told Adrian more than any introduction would have.
Venter’s hold changed by some fractional amount that Adrian would have missed in his old body and couldn’t miss now. Tiny muscles shifting. Readiness hidden under stillness.
Adrian turned his head, trying to find anything that could tell him where he was, and saw his reflection in the dark glass of the bay window.
For a second he didn’t understand it.
A tall blue thing half-wrapped in a ripped disposable gown, wires hanging, oxygen tubing dragging, chest heaving, eyes wild. Not a person. A badly drawn memory of one. Tail lashing hard enough to slap the table leg behind him. Ears high and sharp. Face all wrong.
Then the reflection moved exactly when he did.
Adrian made a sound so raw it barely counted as speech.
“What did they do to us?”
Nobody answered.
Not because they didn’t hear him.
Because every single person in the room was still trying to live inside the same question.
He twisted hard enough to tear one arm partly free and yanked the front of the scrub gown up.
Instinct.
Not thought.
Straight to the chest.
His hand went under the fabric and found flatness.
Flat.
Still flat.
The relief that hit him was so savage it nearly doubled him over. Scars there too, not his old exact lines but enough of them, enough to feel right under his palm. They hadn’t taken that. Whatever corporate godless laboratory nightmare had happened, they hadn’t taken that.
He kept checking anyway, both hands there now, breath sawing out of him, scrub top bunched under his chin and the back of the gown still hanging open enough that he was giving the entire med bay a much more complete anatomical introduction than anyone needed.
There was a stunned beat of silence.
Then Price said, through what had to be pain in his jaw, “Kid, I’m glad you’re feeling yourself, but maybe quit mooning the nurses.”
One of the nurses behind the glass made a noise halfway between a gasp and a laugh.
Duvall snorted bloodily through his nose.
Even Mara’s mouth twitched.
It was such an idiot thing to say that it yanked Adrian back from the edge for exactly half a second.
He dropped the gown.
His hands were still shaking.
His chest was still flat.
His reflection was still blue.
All of those truths sat together inside him like a structural failure.
He looked at Price again, then Mara, then Venter.
“Are you avatars?”
The question sounded stupid the second it left him, because no. No. He knew better. Avatars needed operators. Link units. Human bodies alive somewhere else. These people had died. He had watched some of them die or lived in the aftermath long enough for it to harden into certainty.
Price’s expression changed first.
Not surprise.
Something heavier.
Adrian heard himself stop halfway through his own thought.
“There’s no way,” he whispered. “You were dead.”
Rafael was the one who answered.
“So were you.”
It landed cleaner than the punch had.
Adrian stared at him.
For one long second he forgot how to fight.
One by one, the holds on him eased. Not gone. Just not necessary at the same intensity now. Venter loosened from behind him. Mara kept a hand on his arm anyway. Cade released his wrist last.
He stood there panting, shirt crooked, scrub gown half hanging open, barefoot on cold deck plating, staring at the room like it might yet admit to being a prank.
Price rubbed his jaw once.
“We all woke before you,” he said. “Not by much.”
That was the closest anyone came to explanation before the door opened.
Everything in the room turned toward it at once.
Two humans stepped in wearing black Project Phoenix insignia and the kind of professional neutrality people practiced when they needed to survive their own language. One carried a tablet. The other carried himself like he expected rooms to give way around rank.
Price went still in a different direction.
Mara dropped her hand from Adrian’s arm.
Venter straightened.
Ward didn’t move at all.
The older of the two humans took in the scene—blood, ripped gown, human staff hiding behind the glass, an entire blue dead platoon in tanks and gray sweats and raw knowledge—and still had the gall to look pleased.
“Excellent,” he said. “Final activation is complete.”
Duvall laughed once, no humor in it at all.
“Excellent.”
The man ignored him.
“Project Phoenix welcomes Unit QTZL-9 to continuity service.”
Nobody moved.
Nobody saluted.
Nobody stood to attention.
That was the moment, Adrian thought later, that the human in black recalculated how much control he actually had.
“What the fuck is Project Phoenix,” Price said.
The human turned to him as if the answer were obvious and therefore offensive to have to repeat.
“Project Phoenix is the RDA’s classified continuity preservation initiative. All of you were selected as viable recombinant military assets prior to the deaths of your human originals.”
There was a weird little pause after *human originals*, as if he expected the phrase to slide neatly into place.
It didn’t.
Adrian stared at him.
“No,” he said.
The human finally looked directly at him.
“Yes.”
The younger aide lifted the tablet and began, voice clipped and bloodless, like she was reading procurement specs.
“Recombinant combat bodies generated from hybridized human and Na’vi genetic matrices. Memory continuity restored from archival cognitive capture. Delayed synchronized wake following maturation and cryogenic hold. Mission profile: deep-environment pursuit, interdiction, reconnaissance, and hostile target acquisition under conditions unfavorable to baseline human deployment.”
It slid off Adrian like oil.
Words like *generated* and *maturation* and *baseline* had no right being used about him. About any of them.
Price said, “You’re telling me you turned us into fucking avatars?”
That made everyone look at her.
She kept her gaze on the administrator. “They are telling you they made copies.”
The room changed around that sentence.
Not loudly. More dangerous than that. Like a bolt going under tension.
The older administrator’s expression hardened.
“Operationally,” Duvall said, “you can go fuck yourself.”
“Enough,” Venter said.
It wasn’t loud.
It still reset the room.
The administrator looked at Venter, found command there, and chose his next words accordingly.
“Your human bodies are gone,” he said. “Project Phoenix preserved what could be preserved.”
Mara said, very flat, “What could be used.”
He didn’t correct her.
That was correction enough.
Adrian looked from face to face and found that none of them had known this either. Not really. Maybe fragments. Maybe guesses. Enough to make them dangerous, not enough to make them steady. Price looked furious. Duvall looked like he wanted to dismantle the room with his teeth. Rafael had the expression of a medic hearing a diagnosis he already suspected and still hating the confirmation. Teague’s eyes had gone far away in the way they did when he was suddenly, violently deciding where all the exits were.
The administrator kept talking.
“Prior to your deaths, each of you was required to record a contingency archive under casualty protocol. Those recordings, along with terminal mission footage, are part of your continuity review.”
Price frowned. “You mean our last wills.”
“In part.”
“Our estate files,” Mara said.
“In part.”
Venter’s voice went cold enough to frost the room. “And you’re about to show us.”
“Yes.”
It was not phrased as choice.
The glass darkened.
The human staff disappeared beyond it.
The bay lights lowered.
Nobody sat the way civilians sat. They arranged themselves by old instinct.
Venter remained standing.
Mara took the wall near the door.
Cade folded into stillness beside her.
Teague stayed back where he could watch every angle at once.
Rafael drew a rolling stool over near Adrian but did not force him onto it.
Duvall perched on the edge of a cabinet like contempt needed better elevation.
Price stayed nearest Adrian in the casual, obvious-not-obvious way he did when he’d decided proximity was a kind of duty.
The first archive came up.
**CAPTAIN ELIAS VENTER — CASUALTY CONTINGENCY RECORD**
Human Venter sat at a desk under bad office light, old scar along the jaw, shirt sleeves rolled, one hand flat on the table like he was anchoring himself there by force.
He looked tired.
Human.
Older in a way blue skin had erased and memory hadn’t.
“This is Captain Elias Venter,” he said. “If this recording is being reviewed, then either legal has decided to satisfy protocol, or command thinks posthumous testimony is cheaper than proper explanation. I expect the second.”
Price huffed softly.
Human Venter continued as if he had heard him.
“To my sister, if this reaches you: the storage unit key is taped beneath the bottom drawer of the steel workbench. Sell the motorcycle for parts. Do not let Dan from the old neighborhood tell you he can restore it. He can’t. He never could. If Dana asks after me, tell her she was right in at least three separate arguments and I resent all of them.”
That changed something in blue Venter’s face.
Not much.
Enough.
Human Venter spoke about practical things. Accounts. Papers. What to burn unread. What not to let his father claim if command tried to default next-of-kin to the wrong person out of laziness. No mention of Phoenix. No mention of copies. Just a man assuming death meant paperwork and someone he loved having to clean it up.
Then, after a long pause, he said, more quietly, “There are worse ways to spend a life than being useful, but there are easier ones. I knew that before I signed. I signed anyway.”
The footage followed.
Dragon gunship.
Retreat.
Broken comms.
His own voice ordering through blood.
The crash.
Pinned wreckage.
Fire.
One lung gone useless.
Static full of Adrian asking what to do.
*Live.*
The word seemed to hit blue Venter harder than the crash footage did.
He didn’t say anything after. Just, “Continue.”
The next file came up.
**CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER MARA SATO — CASUALTY CONTINGENCY RECORD**
Human Mara sat on an equipment crate with one ankle over the opposite knee, black hair tied back hard, bruised knuckles resting on her thigh. She looked directly into the camera with the expression of a woman already annoyed that this had been scheduled.
“This is Mara Sato. I am recording under protest.”
Price’s mouth twitched despite himself.
“If this is for legal,” human Mara said, “you can tell them most of what I own isn’t worth cataloguing. Send my bike tools to my cousin Emi. She’ll use them. If Misty at Lowlighte is still on Earth when this gets processed, and if anybody at this company has the courage to forward a message to a place more decent than they are, tell her she was right. I should’ve stayed.”
That one landed.
No one in the room moved at all.
Human Mara went on, and for the first time Adrian heard that old life from her own mouth instead of the fragments Quetzal had held between them like smuggled contraband.
She talked about the club in clipped pieces. The alley out back. Drag queens in smoke-break robes and compression socks and false lashes half peeled off after a set. Misty in cardigan and sequins, cigarette in one hand and a bent business card in the other, offering work because Mara had put two drunk men on the pavement before they could finish making a threat. She talked about a girl covered in glitter crying in the alley because she didn’t know what she was doing with her life, and the cab ride home, and the smell of cheap perfume and lipstick and old bass through bathroom walls, and how safety was work, not luck. She didn’t sentimentalize any of it. That made it worse.
“At Lowlighte,” human Mara said, “if somebody was in trouble, you put yourself between them and the thing coming at them. That was the job. Some jobs are better than others.”
Then the footage.
Flooded mangrove route.
Power flicker.
Her voice over comms: “MESH? MESH, respond—”
The carrier rolling.
The AMP going over.
The suit not opening.
Black water climbing in a metal coffin while she fought every mechanism to the end.
When it cut, blue Mara stood with her arms folded so tight it looked painful.
Price looked at the floor.
After a long moment Mara said, “Misty was right.”
No one answered that either.
**STAFF SERGEANT NOLAN PRICE — CASUALTY CONTINGENCY RECORD**
Human Price leaned too close into the frame from the start, freckles, tired eyes, hair buzzed too short, one hand braced on his knee.
“Well,” he said, “this is morbid.”
The room breathed a little easier just from that, like old gravity was still working.
“If this gets to Mara, you tell her the kitchen light’s still too yellow and I was right about that. If it gets to Lucy, tell her she does not have to act older just because everybody thinks she’s good at it. If it gets to June, tell her the dragon voice was different from the pirate voice and she was wrong.”
A laugh cracked out of Price before he could stop it. It hurt his jaw and he winced.
Human Price talked about home in small domestic cuts that made Adrian’s throat tighten. Burnt pancakes. School permission slips under fruit bowls. June climbing the counter in mismatched socks. Lucy crossing her arms when she was scared. Mara stealing food out of the pan with her fingers. The stupid chain with the girls’ initials on it. The hope that the money from Pandora would buy insulation, time, a better house, some gentler future.
Then, quieter, he said, “I left because I thought I was doing math. That’s what people tell themselves when they choose the job over the room they actually want. They call it planning instead of fear.”
The death footage rolled.
Support route.
Damaged rainforest.
Hammerhead bursting through the tree line all armored panic and weight.
The hit to the AMP platform.
Harness failure.
Then impact.
Not glorious.
Not meaningful.
Just force.
Too much of it.
A body opened on the way to the part history would bother naming later.
Blue Price’s face went still.
He touched the place at his throat where the dog-tag chain had once sat under human skin.
Then he said, very quietly, “That was supposed to buy them a fucking bathroom remodel.”
The laugh Duvall let out this time was one breath away from grief.
**GUNNERY SERGEANT IMANI CADE — CASUALTY CONTINGENCY RECORD**
Human Imani sat in a bare room with a rifle laid across her knees. Shaved scalp. Narrow mouth. Eyes like she had already considered every possible way this recording might be misused and decided to give it to them anyway.
“This is Imani Cade. If this is reaching family instead of legal, that means somebody on the back end developed a conscience or a clerical error. I’ll take either.”
Her file wasn’t about the unit. It was about rooms.
Curtis and floodplain maps. Learning exits before she learned comfort. Her grandfather’s hands on paper. Her Marine years rendered without glory. The private contractors. The habit of measuring the geometry of every space before she sat down in it. Then Noor, brief and careful, not rendered like some grand lost romance, just the memory of someone who knew how to wait through her silences without trying to fill them.
“She once told me being understood quietly still counted,” human Imani said. “I didn’t answer her well enough at the time.”
Her death came after.
Shuttle compartment.
Pressure shift.
Breach.
Her seeing it before anyone else.
Getting someone else strapped down.
Then the sudden argument with air and the sky taking the rest.
When the clip cut, blue Imani didn’t move for a very long time.
Then: “Next.”
Not harsh.
Not soft.
Just the only possible answer.
**PETTY OFFICER LEN DUVALL — CASUALTY CONTINGENCY RECORD**
Human Len looked as sleep-deprived and annoyed as Adrian had always known him: sharp nose, barbed wire tattoo visible where his sleeve had ridden up, monitor light painting him into bad health.
“This is Len Duvall, which I assume you already know because presumably someone labeled the file instead of leaving me to die in metadata.”
Price’s busted grin flashed for a second.
Human Len talked like someone who had been told this was for estate and legal and deeply resented the waste of time. He talked about heat lightning over the marsh near his mother’s place. About fixing the weather radio on the kitchen floor while she told him most kids did sports. About the motel night shifts, the Gulf heat, the power grid, old storms, broken radios. He talked about his mother, his sister, his nephew, and—surprisingly, awkwardly—Colin.
“There is an amp in the hall closet that is not worth restoring,” human Len said. “If Colin says otherwise, that’s emotional fraud and he should be ignored for his own good.”
Blue Duvall looked away so fast it was practically violent.
Then came the relay tower.
The first flicker.
Len already knowing something had gone bad before the room did.
The Samson wreck through the wall.
Equipment pinning him.
The hard backup stack still blinking.
Water spreading.
Power changing pitch.
Human Len reaching for the data instead of the exit.
Then the room becoming white-blue arcs and seizure and heat.
When it ended, blue Duvall sat very still on the counter edge.
Then, to nobody in particular, “I hate that he was exactly the sort of idiot I’m still being.”
Mara didn’t look at him when she answered. “Good. Keep hating it.”
That, from her, sounded almost maternal. Duvall looked more offended by that than by anything else that had happened.
**CORPSMAN RAFAEL VIERA — CASUALTY CONTINGENCY RECORD**
Human Rafael sat in a med bay with one sleeve rolled, curls shaved close, eyes tired and kind in that ruined way they had when he’d already worked too long but still kept looking.
“This is Rafael Viera. If this gets to Lucia, the paperwork for Mateo’s school account is in the blue folder, not the white one. Mom will say the white one. She’ll be wrong.”
That got a short, surprised laugh out of Price.
Rafael’s whole file felt like being steadied by someone who knew panic better than you did. He talked about the kitchen over the laundromat. His mother holding pressure on a neighbor boy’s split scalp with a strawberry-print towel. Mateo asking if blood could think. Lucia yelling from the stove that he worked too much. The aloe plant on the windowsill. The fact that he’d joined up because somebody always had to be useful inside the lie even when they knew it was a lie.
“I know,” human Rafael said after a pause, as though continuing a conversation nobody else had heard, “that being useful and being loved are not the same thing. I picked useful anyway. That’s on me.”
Then the medevac.
Three wounded.
Chaos in the air.
Rafael refusing to strap in.
The arrow through the wall and into his throat.
Blood flooding everywhere.
Still working.
Still instructing.
Still moving other people’s hands where pressure needed to stay.
Blue Rafael bowed his head once after the footage ended.
“He kept triage order,” he said.
No one else tried to dress it up.
**SERGEANT TEAGUE ARDAN — CASUALTY CONTINGENCY RECORD**
Human Teague recorded outside, wind chopping the mic, green-gray eyes narrowed against bad light.
“If this gets reviewed by anybody who didn’t know me,” he said, “that seems like a design flaw.”
His file was the least sentimental and maybe the most revealing because of it. He talked about old documentary footage. Extinct animals. National Geographic magazines spread over a cheap carpet. Anti-poaching work. The simple honesty of wild things. He talked about how people always wanted animals to symbolize something for them instead of letting them be what they were.
“If anything I own is worth sending back,” he said, “give the field notebooks to the sanctuary archive. The boots can go in the bin. They were shit.”
Then the route after Price.
Blood.
The chain with the girls’ initials.
The wrong hush settling over the clearing.
The thanator stepping out of the brush like a judgment the forest had been saving.
Human Teague lowering the rifle.
“Easy,” he said. “Not here for you.”
The branch snapped.
The launch.
Knife.
Mud.
The whole terrible collision of hunter and thing bigger than the story either one of them was in.
When the clip ended, blue Teague stared at the dark screen with something close to disgust.
“It was hungry,” he said.
Nobody argued.
Nobody could.
And then, finally:
**ADRIAN CROSS — CASUALTY CONTINGENCY RECORD**
The room changed before the screen did.
Price stopped making jokes.
Rafael shifted the med stool closer to the table without comment.
Venter stood at Adrian’s shoulder now instead of across the bay.
Mara stayed where she was, but every line of her body had sharpened.
Even Ward, separate as she was, watched properly now.
Human Adrian sat on a crate in old SecOps gray, dog tags looped around one hand, shoulders a little too tight, face young in a way blue skin had somehow erased.
“Uh,” he said. “Okay. This is weird.”
Nobody smiled.
They could have.
Nobody did.
Human Adrian kept going because he always did.
“If this gets to my parents,” he said, “they’ll probably tell themselves it makes sense. So maybe don’t.”
The line hit Adrian so hard he almost missed the next one.
He talked about being an army brat. JROTC. Gifted kid programs. The RDA noticing him because institutions always noticed the parts of you that obeyed before they noticed the parts that were dying quietly under the uniform. He talked about transition in a voice gone flatter from effort. About binders. Packets of tape. Top surgery. Relief so violent it had felt like another injury. He did not make it noble. He made it true.
“I got my body,” human Adrian said, looking briefly away from the lens. “Not for long. But I got it.”
Price bowed his head.
Just once.
Quick.
Human Adrian talked about Quetzal without pretending not to love them. Venter. Sato. Price. Cade. Duvall. Viera. Ardan. Not categorized, just named like home. Then he looked back at the camera and said, very quietly, “If any of them are there and I’m not, don’t let them act like it doesn’t matter. It matters.”
Then the footage.
Not the end first.
The dining hall.
The empty chair at the table.
The argument with Havel.
Rain beyond the lights.
The stupid patrol.
The creek line.
The first click in the dark.
Blue Adrian’s body knew before his mind did. Everything in him locked hard. Price’s hand landed on his shoulder in the same instant.
“Easy, kid,” Price said.
This time it was almost a prayer.
Onscreen, human Adrian kept moving into the wet black jungle. Another click. Then another. Then the pack. The first hit. Knife. Mud. His own breath going from anger to terror in one staggered fall. Fighting too hard because of course he did. Getting one good blow in, then another, then the weight on him, the tearing at his throat, the awful intimacy of dying to teeth in the dark while no one heard in time.
The footage cut before the very final body-ruining part.
Not mercy.
Just data loss.
Just damage exceeding usable record.
Adrian didn’t realize he was on his feet until the stool went over backward.
His whole body had gone cold, then violently hot. Every sound in the bay sharpened until he could hear the humans on the other side of the glass stop breathing for a second. The remembered snarls still lived somewhere in his ribs.
A broken sound came out of him.
Price’s hand stayed on his shoulder.
“Easy, kid.”
Not joking.
Not now.
Not ever again in quite the same way.
Adrian stood rigid, eyes locked on the dark screen, and couldn’t unclench his hands. Viera moved once and stopped. Mara shook her head minutely. Let him survive it standing if that was how he needed to do it.
When Adrian finally looked away, it was to find all of them watching him without looking like they were.
That was Quetzal.
No speeches.
No one saying *I know*.
Just the hard company of the similarly ruined.
Price righted the stool one-handed.
“The first time you jumped at a viperwolf training clip,” he said, voice forced casual, “I called you easy, kid.”
Adrian blinked.
“Second time nobody laughed,” Price went on. “Third time it stopped being a joke.”
Something in Adrian’s chest hurt worse than panic.
Names made people too real.
Quetzal had always preferred useful things to honest ones.
But the nickname sitting between them now felt like structure instead of mockery.
Venter broke the silence when it had stretched exactly to the point before it would turn unbearable.
“Now,” he said, “we know.”
The administrator stepped back into the soundless dark bay like a bad thought.
“You are all now in possession of continuity confirmation,” he said. “Tactical familiarization begins in six hours. Planetfall to Pandora follows.”
Adrian looked at him.
Not at the screen.
Not at Price.
At the man who had put brochure language over all of this and expected them to salute.
“What did they do to us?” he asked.
The administrator met his gaze with the kind of practiced neutrality that only made the cruelty underneath it cleaner.
“We preserved operational value.”
Duvall made a sound like he was about to climb down from the cabinet and strangle somebody.
Price beat him to the line.
“No,” he said, low and ugly. “You butchered a platoon and taught the pieces to breathe.”
The room went still again.
The administrator’s jaw tightened. “Your purpose is mission continuity.”
Venter stepped forward before Price could.
Command reclaimed the room by one pace.
“You have the unit,” he said, voice flat as steel. “Give us parameters.”
And because corporate men always preferred structure when the alternative was being hated honestly, the administrator gave him the details.
Pandora.
Phoenix subdivision.
Detached tasking authority.
Environmental adaptation.
Deployment.
All the words that meant they were going back.
When it was done, the humans left.
The glass stayed dark.
The bay stayed quiet.
No one reached for comfort. That wasn’t their style. Mara went to the door and stood there like ballast. Cade folded back into stillness. Teague kept his eyes on nothing anybody else could see. Viera picked the fallen oxygen line up off the deck and hung it carefully back where it belonged because order mattered. Duvall stared at the dark screen like he wanted to hack death a second time out of spite.
Adrian sat back down on the edge of the table because if he didn’t, his new body was going to keep standing out of sheer offended momentum.
Price stayed nearest.
Of course he did.
For a while nobody said anything at all.
Then Adrian looked at his own blue hands, flexed the bandaged knuckles, felt the ache in them and the ache in Price’s jaw and the old impossible gravity of a unit still arranging itself around him, and said very quietly, “I want my body back.”
No one tried to fix that.
Price only bumped his shoulder once, gentle for him.
“Yeah,” he said.
Beyond the darkened bay glass, space waited.
Black.
Endless.
Somewhere ahead of it, Pandora waited too—too vivid, too sharp, too alive for men trained for distance and control.
Quetzal Squad sat inside the afterlife the RDA had built for them and listened to the ship breathe around their new bodies.
Then Price, because it had to be Price, looked over at Adrian’s half-ripped gown, one corner of his mouth lifting despite the bruise, and said, “Next time you have an existential crisis, kid, try it with your ass covered.”
This time the laugh that moved through the bay was small, brief, and horribly human.