Thanks to everyone who read and reviewed. Yes, Tsu'tey will be headed home shortly...there are a few more loose ends to tie up at the base, and then he's back to the village. Where there are more.

"Shit."

Tsu'tey paused, his arm half-extended with the treat he'd intended to offer to Denan in his palm, and turned back towards Jake. They gone out again after Mo'at had left—this time with the knowledge of the scientists, at least, if not their blessings or even any real approval—but they'd started losing light two mines ago and were going to have to go back to the Sky People's compound soon. He'd just set Jake down a moment ago, and he didn't think that anything could have come in to attack them this quickly.

"Stay back!" Jake snapped, before he could take more than a single step.

He hadn't heard that tone from Jake before, at least not since the fall of Hometree when he'd been yelling at them all to run, and Tsu'tey stopped moving immediately. "What's wrong?"

"This thing's shot." Jake started dragging himself backwards as he spoke. "Stay back where you are. And keep her still, if you can."

"Can you get—"

"I can get there. Just stay back."

Tsu'tey had become accustomed enough to seeing Jake moving around in his wheelchair, occasionally pulling himself into or out of it as necessary, that he didn't think much about it anymore. And up until this point he'd been setting Jake down next to the mine after Denan landed and picking him up again after it was disarmed so Jake's ability or lack thereof to move his legs hadn't really been an issue. But while he didn't doubt that Jake would do a great deal worse than yank his tail if he was stupid enough to show anything like pity—and rightfully so—it was obviously not easy for him to move like that, especially over any distance, and Tsu'tey didn't like seeing it.

Of course, the wary eye that Jake was keeping on the mine didn't make him feel any better either, but before he could do more than give it an uncertain glance of his own, Denan snapped the treat up out of his hand and brought him back to the present. He waited until she'd swallowed it before making Tsaheylu, asking her to remain very calm, and then moved forward. She was more than intelligent enough to recognize the urgency and do as he asked without him staying beside her.

Jake looked up and scowled at him, said scowl deepening as Tsu'tey moved closer and held out his—Jake's—bow. He wasn't actually stupid, though, and a moment later he caught the end and let Tsu'tey pull him the rest of the way over.

"What do you mean, 'shot'?" Tsu'tey asked as he swung Jake up onto Denan's shoulders and then mounted himself. It had to be another one of Jake's nonsense phrases; he couldn't see the Sky People actually shooting at one of their own weapons. Of course, they were occasionally insane, so it was entirely possible that he was wrong, but….

"There's a puddle of water right beside the mine, and half of the trigger mechanism is rusted right through. Try to point her wings that way for takeoff, would you?"

Tsu'tey shook his head but asked her to turn. She thought the idea was as ridiculous as he did, but it wasn't as though taking off in that direction was any more work than any other, so she did as he asked.

Jake shook his head, craning his neck to look back past Tsu'tey as Denan took to the air. "No way in hell I can even touch that thing without setting it off. A shake would be enough to do it." Another shake of his head. "We're lucky it didn't blow us both up when you set me down."

"So what do we do?"

"Get high enough to miss the blast and trigger it. No other choice. Can you hit it with an arrow?"

Tsu'tey looked down at the mine and then frowned at him. "That is a joke, yes?"

"No." He grinned slightly, twisting to look at Tsu'tey. "Guess it was a stupid question, though."

That was an understatement, and Tsu'tey asked Denan to level off before drawing his bow. "Does it matter where I hit it?"

"No. From this height, I'm thinking we're still going to get a decent heat blast, though."

"Heat is not an issue." Not after what he'd felt at Hometree, anyway. He released Jake and nocked an arrow. "Hold tightly."

"Yeah, that's not going to be an issue either."

Tsu'tey fired—the day that it required any effort from him to hit a simple stationary target from this short distance was the day that he would willingly relinquish the title of Olo'eyktan—and no sooner had the arrow struck home than a plume of fire shot upwards.

Denan shrieked and banked sharply upwards, away from the heat, which could certainly be felt even if it wasn't particularly severe, and Jake and Tsu'tey both swore and shifted their weight quickly to stay with her. Which resulted in the back of Jake's head bouncing off Tsu'tey's chest and extra curses from both of them, but at least they managed to remain on her back as two more explosions went off in tandem.

"Your day-see-chain again?" Tsu'tey asked, turning back to look at the damage.

"Daisy-chain, and yeah." Jake looked over Denan's shoulder at the new scorch marks on the land. "Damn."

He didn't sound any happier than Tsu'tey felt, and Tsu'tey shook his head. "It's getting dark. We should go back." And not risk another incident like that tonight.

"Yeah, that's probably a good idea. And heaven help us if anyone picked up that explosion on sensor."

The last had been muttered under his breath, but Tsu'tey nodded anyway. "I don't know what it is you swear by, but I believe I understand the feeling." No good could come from anyone thinking they had been in more danger.

"—m telling you, it had to have happened at or before the second bifurcation," Eric was insisting as Tsu'tey and Jake entered the cafeteria. Despite their mutual worries, no one had accosted them when they'd landed in the hanger, and they'd decided that it was best to carry on as though nothing unusual had happened.

"There just no other way that the neurological connections would be viable across species." Eric continued, just as emphatically, and then paused. "Well, unless you want to argue concurrent evolution of the biologics, in which case the statistics—"

Marie shook her head, cutting him off. "No, I'm not arguing concurrent evolution, we've been over that, but again you're basing your hypothesis on the rate of evolution that what we've come to accept for Earth-based life forms. From Earth-based studies. Given the fact that the Pandoran biosphere is totally alien, there's no way that you can definitively say—"

"I'm not assuming anything!" Eric stabbed sharply with his eating utensil at a screen on the table beside him. "You can read the spreadsheets yourself; the data doesn't lie."

Talia snorted, reaching out to wipe splatters of whatever off the screen. "Ninety percent of the data in those spreadsheets is based upon the embryophyte-P growth rates we've observed in the lab, which you know as well as I do don't always—hell, don't even often—cor—oh, hey, Jake," she said, breaking off with a wave as she finally noticed them. /Tsu'tey, I See you./

/I See you,/ he returned politely, including the other two with a slight nod.

"Sorry, we didn't mean to interrupt," Jake said, grabbing a tray and opening one of the cooling units. "We'll just grab some dinner and be out of here in a minute."

"No, no, take a seat," Talia said. "Actually, Tsu'tey, we've been trying to sort out the answer to this question for…well, quite awhile now. Maybe you can help us out. Or if nothing else, you might be able to give us a new angle to work from since we've about hit the wall."

Tsu'tey frowned at Jake as he shook his head quickly, the motion kept out of view of the scientists, before selecting a few pieces of meat and jerky that the healers had left for him and going to crouch by the small group. "I will try." There was no reason not to answer their question—unless, of course, it was completely unreasonable—since he would be here to eat anyway. "What do you wish to know?"

Marie swallowed a bite of whatever the mess on the plate in front of her was called and then nodded at the screen sitting between she and Eric. "Grace did some early work in plotting the evolution of all of the various mobile biologics several years ago, but unlike on our planet, on Pandora that includes both flora and fauna. And her primary interest was flora." She shook her head. "Which is fascinating, don't misunderstand, but when she began to do in-depth studies that's where she focused. With regards to the fauna, we've barely begun to scratch the surface." Another shake of her head. "We've got some basic observations, a few years of recorded field data—dietary habits, ranges and habitats, mating behaviors, that sort of thing—but Talia's thesis was on nonverbal intelligence, and the neural connections that all Pandoran species seem to share is a facet that doesn't have any direct correlation with anything anyone has studied before."

"We know that the typical configuration of the neural net extension is a dual whip," Talia said, taking over the conversation, "but the Na'vi have a single queue which is obviously quite an anomaly. Marie and I believe that the divergence had to have occurred fairly early in speciation, but Eric thinks it would have to have happened considerably later, perhaps even after full loss of the vestigial limbs—the transition from six to four—in order to let you successfully link with other species like the pa'li and the ikran. Is there any record among the Na'vi as to which it might be?"

All three of them looked at him expectantly, and he stared back for a minute. "What?" With Jake, he might not always understand why he used the phrases he did, but at least the words themselves were generally recognizable. He had no idea what this woman was even asking him.

Jake, sitting in front of one of the heating devices waiting for his food to finish, did a less than credible job of turning a bark of laughter into a cough, and Tsu'tey twisted to glare at him.

"You could be helpful."

"I could, but I didn't understand most of that either." He grinned. "I think what she—they—want to know is, why do Na'vi have a single queue while everything else seems to have two?" He paused, frowning slightly. "Or possibly when did it happen. That Na'vi ended up with one, I mean."

Talia glanced at the others and then back at him, her face creasing in a frown as well. "Right. That's what I just asked."

Tsu'tey was quite sure that the two questions had had absolutely no words in common, but after a minute, he decided that it wasn't worth worrying about and shrugged. If all they wanted was the answer to a nonsense question, he could certainly given them that. "We have what Eywa gave to us, as others have what Eywa gave to them. It has been the way of things since the earliest songs." And probably well before that. Where did these Sky People think their queues had come from?

"Yes," Eric said with a nod, "we understand that, but from what we've been able to determine, in the embryonic stage—"

The device in front of Jake beeped, and he pulled out a now-steaming food pack and put it on the tray in his lap. "Sorry guys, but I've got to go. Catch you later."

"Later," the scientists echoed and then turned back to Tsu'tey. Who suddenly wished that he knew where Jake was going so he could use it an excuse to leave as well.

"So, anyway," Marie started again, "like Eric was saying, in the earliest stages of development it appears that…."

"Come in," Jake called when Tsu'tey tapped lightly on his door, twisting to look back over his shoulder. "Oh, hey, Tsu'tey. You have fun talking to the scientists last night?"

Tsu'tey hissed and then decided that Jake had a thick enough skull that he wasn't risking much, moving close enough to smack him in the back of the head.

"Ow!" Jake's grin disappeared and he rubbed his head. "Come on, was that really necessary?"

"It took me nearly an hour as you measure time to escape them." He shook his head. "And I still don't understand what they were talking about. Why does it matter so much that we have a single queue?" He would understand if they were just jealous that they didn't have any—he'd be jealous if the situation was reversed—but the Sky People's lack of queues hadn't come up in the conversation at all. Well, as far as he'd been able to tell, anyway.

Jake snickered. "For the record, when you find a bunch of scientists sitting around waving spreadsheets and using words like 'bifurcation' and 'neurological connection,' the smartest thing you can do is get the hell away from them as fast as humanly possible. Na'vi'ly possible. Whatever. Just run."

Tsu'tey shook his head. "That would have been good to know before."

"Hey, I tried to warn you; you're the one who went and said you'd help them. Although the look on your face when she finished her question was kind of hilarious."

Tsu'tey hissed again—as far as warnings went, shaking one's head was not a good one—and then folded himself into a sitting position on the second bed. "We will go out after mines again when the rain stops?"

"Yeah, that sounds good. At some point I'll need to take an AMP out and collect all the pieces we've been leaving behind, but I won't have to get out of it to pick stuff up so that can probably wait until you're gone. But I am taking a better scanner from now on so we can check for moisture around the mines before landing, especially after a storm like this one." He shook his head. "I should have thought to do that before, but the one I was using originally was tied into the AMP's control panel, and it didn't even occur to me to grab a separate one aside from the locator."

Tsu'tey knew exactly nothing about scanners so he was willing to accept whatever Jake wanted to do and just nodded. "You didn't have trouble understanding the scientists last night," he said after a moment. Jake had said that he didn't understand them, but he'd managed to rephrase their question easily enough. Tsu'tey could have used him later in the conversation.

"What? Oh, translating what Talia was going on about? Call it practice." Jake shrugged. "Tommy used to talk like that sometimes when he got really into something. Or was trying to explain one of his experiments. He usually did try to stay away from the geekspeak when it was just the two of us, but it didn't always work so well. And after awhile I just kind of got used to it and learned to pick out the words that mattered." He grinned suddenly. "I think the least understandable conversation I ever had with him was when he found out he was one of the ones chosen to come here and was trying to explain to me some stuff about the Na'vi language. I'm actually pretty good with chemistry and tolerable at biology—or at least I can recognize which biology words are important, even if I don't know exactly what they mean—but languages are just not my thing." He paused. "And I was pretty out of it at that point too, which didn't help."

"What do you mean? And what is kem-is-try?" Biology was what they'd been discussing last night—or at least it sounded a lot like one of the words that had been used a few times—but that one was different.

"The science of blowing stuff up." He paused. "Well, there's more to it than that, but that was the part I really liked."

Tsu'tey opened his mouth and then shut it again. He had no trouble believing that. "What was he saying about our language?"

Jake frowned for a minute and then shrugged, twisting and activating something on the screen in front of him. His face popped up a moment later, and then the screen split to show…two of Jake's face?

/

"Jake, guess what?" the first version, the one that was sitting upright and alert, his hair just a little longer than Jake's was now, said, grinning widely.

"Hm?" This second version looked more than half-asleep, lying down on a bunk—one with a ceiling frighteningly close to his head—and his hair was cropped to nearly nothing. "Tommy?" He freed one hand to swipe at his eyes. "Do you know what time it is?" He yawned and didn't bother to hide it. "I thought you were supposed to be the smart one."

Not-Jake—Tommy—bounced a little in his chair. "Come on, twin, wake up. This is important. They just posted the results."

"Mm." Jake—real-Jake—put his head back down on the pillow.

Tommy leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest.

If Tsu'tey had seen that look on Jake's face, he would have known to expect trouble, and he wasn't surprised when Tommy began to speak again.

"Jacob, Jacob, Jacob, Jacob, Jacob, Jacob, Jacob, Jac—"

Jake lifted his head again. "Tommy, I swear to God, if you are not dead or dying, you will be the next time I get my hands on you."

"Jake…."

"Twin, I've been in the middle of a running skirmish for the past three days. Days. During which time I've gotten maybe four hours of sleep total, and none of it lasted more than half an hour at a stretch. More than half of my squad is injured in one way or another and damn near a third of the rest of the base personnel are out on maneuvers, which means I'm going to get woken up in about…." He looked to the side. "In about an hour and a half to cover someone's watch. If I'm going to be able to do anything but hallucinate purple cats, I need a nap."

"Purple…?"

Jake put his head down again. "Never mind. Shar's fault. Don't even get me started."

Tommy sighed, his arms still crossed over his chest, and stared at the screen in silence for several minutes.

"All right, all right, five minutes," Jake finally said with a groan, lifting his head slightly. "Just do me a favor and talk fast."

Tommy's grin returned in full force. "I got picked! First, if you can believe it! I'm going to Pandora!"

"That's nice. Congratulations." Another yawn. "Don't forget to vid me when you get there. And bring back something interesting."

"No, Jake, Pandora. You know, the planet? Well, moon, if you want to get specific—"

"No. Not at all." Jake put his face back down in his pillow.

"—but I'm going to get an avatar and everything," Tommy continued. "Man, I was worried sick about the language part of the exam. I mean, I know I can do the science, and I'm good with languages but it's just so different." He shook his head. "I tried to get a hold of you last week to talk to you about it, but you were…out." He paused for a minute and then shook his head again and continued. "It's completely human-pronounceable, which is kind of a miracle given the fact that it evolved on a planet light years away from Earth, but the structure is totally alien."

"You don't say," Jake mumbled into his pillow.

Tsu'tey snickered, but Tommy didn't even seem to notice.

"There's nothing gender-specific, but there's actually full encoded clusivity for small groups, and the way the sentences are structured there's no definite ordering with regards to word types in the way that there is in English or most other Earth-based language." He paused. "Jake are you even listening?"

"Yeah, sure. No definite ordering." He didn't even lift his head.

"I figured I'd do fine with the ejective consonants—the pronunciation is nastier than you'd think, but it's doable once you get the hang of it—but with all the infixes…man, I was getting them mixed up right up until last night. And it's a lot harder than I ever expected to keep the hard stops out." He shook his head. "Norm's better at it than I am, but he did part of his undergrad on this so I guess he should be."

Another shake. "And you wouldn't believe the lenition that can happen on the nouns; it's a really tricky one because it isn't technically wrong to forego it in most situations, but there's a definite difference between the formal and common versions, and which one to use is so situation-dependent that sorting out which one you want is almost an art form. And then it wasn't until halfway through the exam, right in the middle of the multiple-guess section, that I finally realized that I've been mixing up the accusative and ergative with respect to objects. I guess I'm lucky that I caught it before I hit the verbal portion, but with all the other questions to finish, I barely had time to get them all corrected. There were almost three hundred in just that section and I thought my fingers were going to go numb keying in all the—"

"Tommy," Jake interrupted with a groan. "You rock, I get it. Can I please go back to sleep? I promise I'll vid you for all the gory details when I'm a little more…conscious."

"Come on, Jake, be happy for me."

Jake lifted his head again, looking genuinely surprised at that. "Of course I'm happy, idiot, I'm just exhausted. And besides, I don't get why you're so shocked. You decided that you wanted to go to Pandora when we were like ten."

"Because I'm one of two, Jake. Two out of everyone who applied for the program. Do you know how many people that is? And not everyone else is my twin brother who thinks I should get whatever I want."

"Well, you usually d—" Alarms screamed suddenly, and Jake's eyes widened as he rolled out of the bunk, a weapon appearing in his hand.

It was stranger than Tsu'tey would have believed to see him standing easily on his own two feet. Someone else dropped down beside him, apparently from a bunk on top of his—did they really stack their sleeping quarters so closely?—slapping his arm and muttering something about 'going again' before disappearing from view.

"Jake?" Tommy asked, eyes wide and every trace of excitement gone.

Jake barely glanced back at the screen. "Tommy, I have to go. I'll vid you later."

"Jake—"

"Tommy, now's not the time."

"Just be careful, okay?" His expression was fierce. "I don't want the best day of my life to turn into the worst day because my idiot twin went and got himself killed."

Jake shot him a quick grin, although his focus was still clearly elsewhere. "Hey, your idiot twin is pretty good at keeping himself alive at this p—"

"Sully, move it!" someone barked from somewhere off the screen.

He twisted to look over his shoulder. "On it! Later, Tommy." He reached out, and then that side of the screen went blank.

/

Jake's gaze remained on the screen for a moment, until the other side went blank as well, and then he shook his head. "You're Na'vi. What the hell is an ejective consonant? Or clusivity or anything else he was talking about, for that matter?"

Tsu'tey shook his head. "I have no idea. Scientists are strange."

"No argument here."

Tsu'tey indicated the screens. "You looked alike. You and your brother. If you hadn't been saying names, I wouldn't have known which one was you." Well, at least until Tommy had started speaking, anyway.

"Yeah, well, that's how identical twins work." Jake shrugged. "Talking to us was always a pretty sure way to tell us apart—thirty seconds or so into a conversation and you generally knew exactly who you were speaking to, even when we were trying to fool people—but physically it was next to impossible."

"Why did he call you Jacob?"

Jake made a face. "Part of that funny Sky Person naming convention thing. We—Sky People where I'm from, anyway—generally have three names."

"You said two before."

"I said that's how we introduce ourselves. My full name is Jacob Aaron Sully, Jake Sully to most people. The only time all three names ever got used was when my mother was angry at me." He shook his head. "I think that's the only reason that people get three names, actually, so their mothers can use them when they're yelling."

Tsu'tey snorted slightly. "It rarely means good things for me when my mother uses my full name either."

Jake grinned. "Fair enough. Anyway, Jacob is just the formal version of Jake, which I guess is fair game if you're ever particularly pissed off at me. Or want to piss me off. I much prefer Jake."

That was actually useful information, and Tsu'tey nodded.

Jake looked back at the blank screen for a moment and then shut the screen off entirely and swiveled his chair around. "I need to go scanner hunting, and then get some breakfast. Meet you in the hanger when the rain stops?"

Tsu'tey nodded.