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The metal door to his cell was closed. Spider preferred it that way.
Only bad things happened when the door opened. His food was delivered through a slot in the bottom, and so the only time the latch was thrown back and the door wrenched aside meant that the guards had come for him again. To bring him back to that machine.
Spider didn’t know how long he’d been here, or how many times they’d put him in the machine. It was hard to keep track. He felt as if he lived in a fog, nowadays — an effect of having his brains scrambled, no doubt.
It had started off with headaches. Spider could deal with those, with the stabbing, knife-like pain that drilled into his brain as though an arrow had been shot through his skull. It sucked, yeah, and his nose usually bled, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was the aching, confused fog that lingered for hours afterwards.
The first time they’d stuck him in the machine, with that blonde bitch standing in front of him, demanding information in that bored, monotone way she had, Spider had passed out. After the lights, and the wires, and the way the machine seemed to reach right into his head to twist what was inside — the blackness afterwards had been a relief.
Maybe it was because he’d passed out that he didn’t notice the fog, at first.
The second time, he’d managed to stay conscious for longer. It was almost funny to see the frustration begin breaking through the General’s stony expression. She probably hadn’t expected a feral little nothing-child like him to withstand interrogation for long.
The second time had hurt. He’d passed out, and they hadn’t even bothered to unstrap him. He’d woken up still in the machine. They hadn’t even bothered to stop , and the horror and terror that had filled him had been enough to make him cry, which was bad enough in front of the blonde bitch. But he hadn’t been able to wipe his face with his hands fucking strapped to his sides, and one of the soldiers in the room had pointed it out with a laugh. The interrogation had continued.
Then came the third session, and the fourth, and after a while Spider stopped counting. Or he lost track. The line was hard to define, sometimes.
Probably, people weren’t supposed to be exposed to a machine like that over and over. That was Spider’s guess, anyway. Was this what brain injuries were supposed to be like? Every time they pulled him out of the machine, it was harder and harder to focus. His feet stumbled beneath him when they led him back to his cell, and his hands would shake for hours afterwards. Talking had gotten harder — English and Na’vi tangling up on his tongue. Sometimes, he wasn’t sure what language he was speaking, if it was some strange mash-up of the two or if he was even making sense at all.
Spider was pretty sure that the machine was going to kill him.
But the door to his cell was closed right now, which meant that there weren’t any soldiers around to sneer at him, and no blonde bitch there to ask questions that he knew he’d never answer. No machine was going to tear the knowledge out of his head. Spider might not be one of The People, but that didn’t mean he was weak.
He curled up on his cot and stared at the doorway. Maybe, one of these times, the door would slide open and it wouldn’t be guards. Maybe it would be the rescue party that he prayed was coming.
~
The door to his cell slid open, and it wasn’t a rescue party.
“What’s up, assholes?” Spider greeted his guards like he usually did.
They didn’t respond, like they usually didn’t.
The one on the right jerked her head at him, and Spider reluctantly slipped off his narrow cot. Back in the beginning, he’d refused to move. He’d crammed himself into the tightest spaces he could, into the slot beneath the cot or the slim gap between the toilet and the wall. He’d made the soldiers come to him, and then he’d snarled and hit and scratched when they pulled him out, screaming at them to leave him alone.
They’d left him alone.
They’d also shut and locked the food slot. They’d turned off the lights in his cell.
Spider was pretty sure he’d made it three days before he’d been too weak to fight the soldiers that came. They’d hauled him out of his cell, trembling and blinking, and Spider hated himself for how he’d pressed into their warm hands. Even if he hadn’t been starving, he might’ve let them take him anyway, to be away from the dark. To be away from the silence, and the cold, and the frightening rasp of his own breathing which was his only company.
He didn’t fight the soldiers anymore, when they came to his cell.
Now, he just closed his hands into fists so they wouldn’t see his fingers trembling. He’d rather snap his own bow than let these monsters see his fear.
He stepped out into the artificial lights of the hallway, flanked by his two guards. Spider hated this light. It was bright, antiseptic white, like no natural color found on Pandora. There weren’t any windows here, and there certainly weren’t any windows in his cell either. Spider wondered how long it had been since he’d seen the sun. His skin had turned sallow and sunken in the days since his capture, and he knew he’d lost weight. He wondered what he looked like. Would anyone be able to recognize him, if rescue came? His blue stripes had rubbed off weeks ago.
The soldiers’ boots clanged off the metal walkways. Spider’s bare feet were silent in comparison as they made their way through the base, moving past the now-familiar corridors. They took a flight of stairs up, entering a larger hallway with high ceilings to accommodate recoms and skel suits. Spider felt his steps slowing. They were getting closer to the control room, and he hated himself for the numbing fear that crawled up his throat.
Apparently, his steps were too slow. One of the guards shoved him forward, and he whipped around to hiss at her, baring his teeth.
“I bet your mother is real proud of you, bullying kids like this,” he snapped in Na’vi.
The woman just shoved him again, this time with her other hand resting on the butt of her gun. She wouldn’t have understood him anyway.
Spider gritted his teeth and kept moving. He’d fought, the first few times one of the soldiers had manhandled him like this. He was pretty sure he’d broken one guy’s nose, which had been awesome until another guard hit him so hard that Spider nearly bit his own tongue off.
Afterwards, they’d strapped him into the machine anyway. The spinning lights plus the maybe-concussion they’d given him had Spider throwing up all over himself, only a few minutes into the session.
The General hadn’t even paused in her questions.
Spider hated himself for not fighting anymore. It felt like weakness. It felt like giving up and rolling over for the RDA, but Spider couldn’t help it. They’d get him into the machine one way or another, he might as well go without any of his teeth knocked out.
More of those stupid, white lights stung Spider’s eyes as they reached the console room. It was the usual bustle of people: technicians at their stations, tapping their fingers against numerous screens; an assortment of soldiers and recoms scattered around the room, looking at displays or strolling around various holographic maps; and there was the queen bitch herself, standing on the highest platform like some sort of viperwolf surveying her prey from a high branch.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Socorro,” she greeted him, inclining her head as if she wasn’t planning on ripping through his mind only a minute or two from now. Her hair was pulled back into its customary bun beneath her camo hat. She was a short woman. Spider didn’t understand how she packed so much sadistic superiority into such a small body.
Rather than answering, he spat on the ground at her feet.
“Still as cooperative as ever, I see.”
“Still beating the same dead Pa’li , I see,” Spider said, echoing her disdainful tone. “How many times do we have to do this before you believe me when I say I don’t know anything? ”
The General took a sip of her coffee. “As many times as it takes for you to stop lying,” she said. Then, to the soldiers at Spider’s back, “get him up there.”
Spider breathed, closing his eyes and focusing on the cool metal floor beneath his bare feet. He didn’t want to look over the General’s shoulder. He didn’t want to see the hulking mass of metal, with its strange cage of lights extending from the ceiling like crooked, grasping hands. He kept his eyes squeezed closed. An icy, frozen helplessness crept up his throat, making his lips numb and his breathing tight.
The soldiers took him by the arms and led him to the machine.
As his foot hit the first step up to the platform, some dam broke inside of him. The numbness vanished, replaced by a white, blind panic, and he lashed out, uncontrolled and explosive. He kicked the knee of the soldier to his right, just like he’d seen a recom do to Kiri however many weeks ago.
The soldier’s knee buckled, and the man fell with a bitten-off shout.
Spider’s punch took the other soldier by surprise. The woman’s head snapped to the side, and beneath his terror, he felt the satisfying crunch of the woman’s cheekbone. The soldier’s hands fell away.
Spider stumbled backwards. His eyes darted around the room, catching briefly on the General at her station. She didn’t look concerned. Why should she? Spider had nowhere to fucking go.
The second soldier was rising, recovering from the punch she’d taken. Spider wasn’t thinking, wasn’t planning beyond the rising static in his head, the hulking presence of the machine in front of him. The soldier’s hands were on her gun, and as she lifted it Spider threw himself forward, closing his own hands around the soldier’s grip and wrestling the gun down towards the floor.
She threw a knee up. It caught him in the ribs, and Spider coughed but didn’t let go. Instead, he smashed his forehead into her face.
She fell back with a spray of blood and a gasp of pain, and Spider had one clear, brilliant second of holy shit I have her gun— before a recom tackled him from the side.
Spider went down hard, skin scraping against the metal floor. The gun flew out of his hands.
Long, blue fingers wound themselves into his hair and jerked him upright.
“I’ll be damned, kid,” an amused voice said. “All these weeks and you’ve still got fire in ya.”
Spider craned his head back. He caught a glimpse of camouflage fatigues, a square jaw and a smile that might’ve looked like Spider’s own, in another lifetime and if Spider wasn’t a genocidal lunatic . Colonel Quaritch. Of course. The bastard that had kidnapped him into this whole mess in the first place.
The grip on his hair tightened and Spider was lifted off his feet.
“Let me go!” he shouted. “Let me go, asshole!”
Quaritch ignored him. “General, I thought you were supposed to be breaking the boy down,” he said. His voice was dry. He propelled Spider up the stairs towards the machine with the same amount of effort that Spider might shoo away a curious fan lizard. “Boy doesn’t seem all that broken.”
“It’s a work in progress,” the General said coldly. “We can’t dig too deep too quickly, or else we could fry his mind. Everything he knows would be lost.”
“I don’t fucking know anything!” Spider shouted.
Again, Quaritch ignored him. He dropped Spider roughly in front of the machine and held him still while two technicians pressed Spider’s shoulders back against the upright frame. Straps clicked into place on Spider’s wrists and ankles. Quaritch let go, and Spider writhed, snapping his teeth at the technicians as they locked his neck in place with a stiff, plastic collar.
“Seems to me you could afford to dig faster,” Quaritch said to the General, raising his eyebrows. “Every day we waste is another day that Sully vanishes deeper down his little bolt-hole. The boy’s mind isn’t anywhere close to mush yet, surely you can afford to lean a little harder?”
The General pursed her lips at him. She didn’t seem to appreciate Quaritch questioning her in front of the entire room.
Spider hated this. He hated them, the way they talked over his head as if he wasn’t even there. He hated the technicians, who had finished strapping him into the plastic restraints and were now lowering the cage of lights around his head. He hated this fucking machine. He hated himself for being a clumsy, stocky human, too slow to run with the rest of the Sully’s and too weak to escape from the General and her stupid, kewong base.
Better to be me , he told himself. He sucked in a sharp breath through his nose as the lights clicked into place all around him. Better me than anyone else . The thought of Kiri in his place, her long arms cinched into the plastic restraints, made him feel sick. He refused to even imagine Tuk in a place like this.
“This boy is the best lead we’ve gotten in months,” the General was saying. “I’m not going to waste an opportunity like this just because you can’t be patient.”
One of Quaritch’s ears twitched, and his face smoothed out into a sneer. “You think we got as far as we did on Pandora by playing it safe? You think those savages out there are pussyfooting around, waiting for us to come to them? I guarantee you, General, they are not. We need progress, and it seems to me that your machine isn’t doing the trick.”
The General’s flat stare could’ve made a Thanator tuck its tail and run. “With all due respect, Colonel , there is a reason that you’re in that body, and not a human one. The previous version of you didn’t want to ‘play it safe’ either, and look where that got him.”
Quaritch flinched back.
The General turned towards Spider, and the machine, raising her coffee to her lips. “I won’t burn an asset like this, not on a whim. We haven’t seen Sully in months. He hasn’t been spotted in any of the recent ambushes on our supply trains, and there’s been no sign of his wife either. Chances are, he’s not even in the forest anymore, which means he has dropped as a priority, in my book.”
At her words, something ugly and bitter squirmed to life in Spider’s stomach. He could feel his eyes going wide.
What did that mean, they hadn’t seen Jake in months? His head spun. Did that mean…? Jake couldn’t be dead. The RDA certainly didn’t believe that, even if they weren’t looking for him anymore. But Jake also wouldn’t sit by idly during raids on the RDA. He wouldn’t sit on the sidelines while his home was invaded.
Unless this wasn’t his home anymore.
Spider wanted to squeeze his eyes shut against the sudden, hot tears that threatened to gather, but the restraints wouldn’t let him. Wetness pooled along the line of his lower lashes.
The Sully’s couldn’t leave, could they? Would Neytiri ever consider an idea like that? But if it meant keeping her children safe…
Spider swallowed. Leaving was the smart thing to do after all, with the RDA hunting them. Especially after the RDA had almost caught Lo’ak, Kiri, and Tuk.
But—
They had caught Spider.
Spider wasn’t a Sully, though. He never had been. Jake and Neytiri had tolerated him spending time with their kids, but they weren’t— they weren’t family . They had never seen him as family. Spider knew that.
Somehow, the knowledge burned differently, when faced with the blunt truth that they’d left him behind.
He hadn’t even been aware of the thin thread of hope within him until it snapped. Jake wasn’t coming for him. There was no rescue. All of the half-formed daydreams that Spider had envisioned while he’d been left alone in his cell — his door sliding open, Jake or Neteyam or even Neytiri outside, bows in hand, come to get him out — they all dissolved like dew in the sun after Eclipse.
The General was still speaking, but her words were a buzzing nonsense in Spider’s ears. “Just because Sully has gone to ground doesn’t mean we can’t use the boy,” she was saying. “He knows the forest. He knows the weaknesses of the Na’vi. He knows where their camp is, and where their scientists operate, and what their strategies are. I’m not throwing that away.”
Spider barely heard her. He barely heard Quaritch’s considering grunt, and he didn’t see the tilt of Quaritch’s head as he looked Spider over, assessing. He barely heard Corporal Lyle join the conversation, laughing “ maybe the boy just needs a good, old-fashioned Marine crash course in serving his people. His real people.”
What Spider did hear was the whirring of the machine as it powered on. He was torn out of his thoughts by the monotonous whoosh-whoosh-whoosh as the lights around his head began to spin, slowly at first but then faster.
Then the General began her interrogation, he couldn’t afford to think of much at all.