The pain in her ribs grew worse with every breath, or so it seemed.

At least the thanators hadn't been waiting at the bottom of the pinnacle for Janelle to descend and provide them with a nutritious breakfast. Thank heaven for small mercies, she managed to think between the each stabbing pain. She checked the position of the sun again to make sure she was heading in the right direction. Janelle had no intention of running around in circles – she wanted to make the best time possible to get clear of the thanators hunting range.

She had spent a quarter of an hour planning her optimal route back to Hell's Gate, until she realised the best outcome would be making directly for the Omaticaya school. Grace was there almost every day teaching her little grommets, and although it was not in the same direction as home base, she could cut at least three days journey out of her survival attempt. If, of course, she didn't collapse from starvation or get eaten by the local predators or plant life – she had almost stumbled directly into a scorpion thistle plant as it was.

Her stomach again reminded her that it would appreciate being filled with something tasty and nutritious. Unfortunately, it would have to wait, and she regretted that the Na'vi carried little energy reserves in the form of fat – unlike her human body, which had provided her with a constant struggle to maintain a healthy weight since she was fifteen, at least until she arrived at Hell's Gate. Janelle could not see how anyone could gain weight with the gloop the Hell's Gate commissary fed everyone.

She had to stop running, if only for a moment. There was a trumpet flower plant here – she could drink from that, and use it to fill her drained water bottle.

The taste of the water she drank was somewhere between lemon and lime cordial, the sweetness of the clear liquid refreshing her mouth. Janelle was careful not to take too much from any one bloom – over indulging would kill the flower, and another traveller might need this plant sometime.

After she drank her fill, she squatted with her hands on her knees, trying to ease the tightness in her legs, when there was a soft thud of something falling to her left. Janelle's head swivelled to see the delicious purple promise of an utu'mauti fruit, just lying on the ground for anyone to take. Her hand snatched the fruit from the ground without thinking, and she gorged on the delicious fruit. Someone up there must like her, but she doubted it was the Sky-father. It was a very long way from the mountains of her childhood.

As she licked her fingers clean of the sticky pulp, she reflected that the events of the last day seemed to be like a rite of passage, a replacement for the spirit journey that she had never taken. When Janelle was fifteen, she was supposed to spend the summer school holidays with her father. Janelle had let slip to her mother that she was to undertake her spirit journey alone through the wilderness, when her mother hit the roof and called Social Services. They granted an intervention order that prevented her father from ever contacting Janelle, on the grounds that he was endangering her mental and physical health by subjecting an impressionable child to obsolete patriarchal cultural practices.

Janelle had been locked up in a 'juvenile rehabilitation clinic' that had tried to 'normalise' her to the standard cultural milieu, but she had refused to cooperate with any of her so-called counsellors. Instead, she escaped and contacted a tribal lawyer, who managed to emancipate Janelle from her bitch of a mother, only for her escape to be too late. Her father had walked out into the mountains and had never been seen again.

She had never forgiven her mother.

Ever since, Janelle had tried to live according to the values her father had taught her - to walk over the earth leaving no trace of her passing, to speak the truth and always keep her word, and to honour the beliefs of her ancestors. Even now, she hoped he would proud of her.

Perhaps the Na'vi deity – Eywa – was granting her need for a spirit journey, and providing a little helping hand. But the imaginary bitch wasn't going to make it too easy for Janelle, either.

Taking a deep breath, Janelle allowed the air to trickle slowly out of her lungs. The Na'vi sense of smell was far more sensitive than the human nose. She had often used it to hunt down her quarry, and it had proven a valuable tool in keeping her alive during her study of Pandora's apex forest predator, never letting her down. Janelle had made sure that she fled downwind from the pinnacle, even though it was going to add quite a few extra clicks to her route. There was no sign of thanator scent in the air, but she had learnt from experience that thanators were the among the most cunning and persistent predators ever encountered by Man. Or Woman, for that matter.

Janelle pulled out her data tablet and called up the mapping function. While the RDA monitoring satellite coverage didn't provide anything like the accuracy of the GPS network, as long as she could pick up the signals of a couple of satellites she could localise her position to within half a click or so. Based on her knowledge of thanator hunting territories, Janelle thought she had travelled far enough to be clear, assuming that the territory approximated a circle and the nest was in the centre.

If Pandora had taught her one thing it was that assumptions could kill. She decided to travel another five clicks in her current direction before she doglegged for the school, just for safety. And then she cursed under her breath. Why the hell hadn't she activated the tracking implants? That was what they were there for. Muttering, "Stoopid, stoopid, stoopid," Janelle clicked on the icon to activate the implants, and about ten seconds later data flags flicked into existence on her map screen – four in a clump at the nest site, and one over twenty clicks away on the other side of the range. It seemed that the male thanator was hunting for prey on the upwind side of its range.

"I really am an idiot," she said, wondering if talking to herself was a sign that her sanity was slipping. Quickly, Janelle scrawled out an e-mail detailing her location and sent it to Grace. A minute later, she got a reply, but not the one she wanted – the automated reply was that her security credentials had expired, and the e-mail had been bounced back to her inbox, recommending that she place a call to the IT Service Desk to renew her access. "Fuck!" she yelled out loud. This was too much. The Hell's Gate IT department had screwed up yet again. This was the fifth time this year her access had been revoked for no reason. She almost threw the data tablet out into the forest in frustration, barely able to control her temper.

Still, there was one thing she could do to help her situation – she had the time to safely redress her wounds. There was only one problem – she had used all her first aid supplies already. Thank the Sky-father that Grace had insisted on loading the Na'vi survival database onto all the data tablets issued to Avatars. Janelle entered a query on field dressings, and sure enough – up came a number of entries on use of plants to dress wounds.

Half an hour later Janelle had gathered the required plant materials. She ground ithem up on a smooth rock, adding water to produce a resinous, jelly-like mass, and quickly peeled off the chitin dressing. Spreading the orange-looking resin with her knife while keeping the edges of the wounds together was tricky, but she seemed to do a reasonable job. As it hardened into a flexible plastic-like material, she noticed that the dressing had a mild anaesthetic effect, the hot throbbing from her wounds easing substantially. In the survival notes, Grace had commented that the capabilities of many of the local materials used for first aid far exceeded their human equivalents. It seemed she was right, and she could look forward to the wounds healing in four or five days.

Now what? The best course of action was to run the next five clicks, and try to find a place to spend the night. She had no intention of staying at ground level, and becoming a midnight snack for a pack of viperwolves.

And tomorrow? She would hunt. She needed the protein to ensure that her wounds healed properly, and she would have enough energy to make the Omaticaya school.