A LONG STORY: SKY

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The woman was very irritating, but Ree'ahn was too tired to make her leave.

His thin fingers skittered over his knives like a piano. Ree'ahn grasped the right-sized blade to finish a totem while he waited for the rain to end. He squared beside his warm fire and twirled to where he last ended on the wood. The rain made soft music to his ears and his mind fell quiet until he could imagine the demon was gone. Then, she whined:

"It's really, really dark."

Ree'ahn made a face at his ruined concentration and sighed, "aytswatute." Ree'ahn yanked the large article Victoria had first seen. The coven flooded with blue-grey light and wet air from a huge opening.

The warrior folded the drapes impatiently, stored them in a dry place, and then sat again. The rain was now a loud splatter in his ears, but it made a different music that energized him. Ree'ahn's eyes blinked in peace.

That's better, thought Victoria. Now, she could see more shapes and colors on his items. Oh, she noted. "Your knife is still stuck."

Long scrapes and frenzied scruffs answered her.

Victoria took notice of a halo of shaved and coiled branches. It had some bright flowers weaved to into it. The crown couldn't be his own-not in a million years. It had to be for someone else. Victoria's fingers felt a velvety-looking petal and imagined who it could be for.

She gasped at herself.

Ree'ahn left his things and called like a goblin for Tsu'tey.

Tsu'tey answered in a voice of irritation.

Ree'ahn started his tirade. He pistoned and threw his arms to the woman like Tsu'tey was right there in front of him.

Victoria, who twisted her hair from behind, could almost see smoke coming from the warrior's ears. When he was finally done, Ree'ahn fought for breath.

Tsu'tey's voice was indifferent when he called, "please remember to be respectful, Victoria. You will not have to leave."

Ree'ahn growled. Voices bubbled peacefully from below.

Ree'ahn took the crown and horseshoed it to a branch where the woman couldn't reach. "You will sit by me where I see you!" Ree'ahn bulldozed the Dreamwalker away from his artworks.

Victoria observed the giant, blue frog with a snakey tail and sleepy eyes. He squatted in an invisible bubble with three hollowed blocks of paints.

By the stormlight, Ree'ahn's Na'vi features, a resolute nose and chin and big eyes, looked boyish. Ree'ahn held his piece and eyed it like a scientist to a specimen. He swirled red paint on the totem's surface with a stone flint. He stilled with a new perspective.

Victoria couldn't see much when he leaned too far and his hair swept over the totem like a curtain. Then, Ree'ahn surfaced with clarity. The flint was now yellow.

While tendons rippled under his hands, wet bands of yellow curled around the etchings in the block. His hand stopped. Victoria concentrated hard for what would come next.

"You are making me afraid."

Victoria watched the rain and hugged her knees tighter. She could see the RDA base in a near distance.

Satisfied, Ree'ahn resumed. Ree'ahn preferred his privacy, but since he was waiting, he would pass the time. He painted and spoke.

"That one that you saw... it is for my tsmuke'tsyip. She is called Mi'nat. It will be for last rites. Women will show gift in front of Omatikaya and wear crown on head. Mi'nat...she will sing. After then, she will be a woman. A very...tiny woman."

Ree'ahn's sleepy English sent shivers through Victoria. His many pauses to think sounded snake-like, and, as in his own tongue, every "r" purred in Victoria's ears.

Victoria magnified Ree'ahn's smile and chewed her lip. His cyan lips peeked white teeth, and then they closed, stretched upwards, and then waned in concentration.

"What I really want to do to for it...I need other things. But, they are hard to find. Mi'nat and I work at place for Omatikaya to give and take things-I do not know English for that-and I hope to find what Ineed soon. With...a good offer."

Before he went on, Victoria whispered, "a trading post."

"What you demons call it, it does not matter." Ree'ahn frowned and continued to paint. "Our mother and father gave the place for us to carry on legacy of family. I work for here...I work for family; I am always so tired..." Ree'ahn felt like falling over right then. Reeahn's eyes became cold. He shifted. "The only place I can get those things for Mi'nat will be in reef clan-three days by water or less. But, I do not like them." Ree'ahn recalled one greedy trader of the reefs that he held to a grudge. "Hmmm. They do such...hard business," Ree'ahn purled.

Victoria felt tipsy. She listened to the Na'vi's voice like she was sipping a dark wine.

Below, Piral gobbled and wagged her hand at the other female. Itoyo admired Sky's jewel again and planned how he would steal it.

"Yes?" piped Sky.

Tsu'tey explained, "Piral asks you to now say how you meet me. Do not use riddles; Piral and Itoyo do not understand as much English."

The groups' eyes balled to Sky. Tsu'tey's voice dribbled under her own as Sky spoke.

Sky started from the day that the restoration of Pandora had began in a all-department briefing. She, the older sister to Maxpatel, had sat in the front row of a noisy room of RDA staff. She had watched Parker Selfridge, the CEO, flap his hands around like a bird in a human-cage of his bigwigs on the base.

Parker did the same fidgets as when Sky would be on the wining side of an argument: a scrub in his hair, a purse of his lips, a triple-blink, a seesaw of his penny-bright shoes, a grunt to clear his throat, a flex of his shoulders to make himself taller.

His address after the devastating war was supposed to be at 0800 hours sharp. Now it was 0859. Sky tapped her shoe and made waves in her long, multicolored skirt that she couldn't leave home. Her arms folded over a tanktop. Between her wavy, black hair, her deep-brown face moved idly from the bigwigs to the clock to the audience, who now all had ameobaed into groups to complain about getting up early. Sky's eyes, both big with dark pupils, blinked at the empty stage.

The stranger next to her also sighed. She and he glanced at each other.

The man looked deadly to a lanky, round-faced Asian girl on his other side, and the girl's lips thinned in empathy.

The man crossed his arms over themselves and extended his hands to both women. "I'm Tanner."

The Asian woman sunk her shoulders in a shy laugh and clenched the man's hand.

"Victoria."

"Sky Patel," said Sky. She clapped his hand and brightened easily at Tanner's medium brown face with laughing-wrinkles and long teeth. The top of Tanner's head was cleared in a buzzcut that was growing back. A dogtag whirled from his neck as he shook the hands of his fellow breakfast-starved comrades of the audience.

Now that the three weren't strangers anymore, Tanner had some questions.

"Where are you from, hippie-lady?" Tanner said to his left.

"India."

"Yeah, you sure sound like it. I'm from L.A. What do you even do?"

"I'm a veterinarian in the Avatar program for extra-terrestials. I didn't get to do much but research," said Sky. She almost wanted to call him a Jarhead so they were even.

"Hey, you're in my department! Have you used your Avatar?!"

"No."

"Me neither! Hmph."

"How are you doing, since, you know, all of that."

"Oh. I'm not really a soldier. I'm a field surgeon. But we have to train like soldiers, and look like 'em, too." He let Sky hold and read his dogtag.

Victoria nodded to herself and thought that made sense. She felt herself being softly nudged with Tanner's elbow.

"Where are you from? China? Japan?"

"Nigeria."

"Oh, I'm sorry. Cool. What do you do?" Tanner said. Only rookies still wore the company's unisex jumpsuit.

"I was just an intern." Victoria nodded quickly.

"Where?" Sky leaned over to ask.

"The Avatar program."

Tanner and Sky's laugh rang together. Tanner asked the inevitable: "Have you used your Avatar yet?"

Victoria's head shook.

"This program is a joke," laughed Tanner.

Sky agreed with a shake of her own head. Sky looked to Parker again. A bigwig in the circle had Parker close to her ear. The person patted him on the back and moved with the other empty suits to sit in chairs.

Sky watched Parker cross her way with a panel-thin device and their eyes met. His hair was gelled in spikes and his tuxedo looked expensive. He trots onto the stage.

"Here he comes." Tanner cheesed.

In front of twelve-hundred on and offsite staff and hundreds-of-thousands of investors watching from Earth, Parker's shoes stutter on air.

Tanner wheezed like a teakettle. Victoria pressed her lips and squeezed her eyes, but a "ptee!" blurts out anyway. Sky squirmed when she heard the whole room laughing.

Silence settled in the mass briefing room. The CEO's throat juggles. On the podium, his device shows the words he should start to speak anytime now. This was supposed to be the easy part to the rebuild after the war, but now Parker feels light and it's too quiet, and there's too many eyes on him and fingers drumming. He remembers he forgot to floss, and he sees the bigwigs starting to murmur. His tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth. He pulled it down, and an slimy echo reverberates through the room from the micro-speaker on him. The room leaned, and Parker's shiny, black shoe jerked back. His eyebrows tensed. He chuckled. Parker started to read. He finished with a somber, "wafflecoffee." He swiped on to the next page.

"Oh no," Tanner's mouth moves; he saw those frosty-eyes too many times before.

In slow motion, Sky throws her skirt over the stage. Men in black, on the wings, hesitate and then run. Metal screeches.

The room flipped over and Parker tasted wax.

"Lock the door," Parker had rasped to the person rushing in his office as he had rocked with breath in a shadowy corner.

Sky had embraced Parker from behind to ground him from his panic-attack. His hands had crushed hers on his stomach.

After a while, Parker made a sound like he birthed an elephant.

"I told you not to skip breakfast today," whispered Sky.

Parker's cheeks rose from behind and he laughed ruefully. "You don't get it! It's not like I can find a vegetable crate on the ground, stand on it and ring a bell about this! The speech had to be perfect-even if it took all night! I've already fucked up everything else!"

Sky thought Parker was a coward for letting this happen to Pandora. "You really did."

"I deserve that, I guess. Jesus. What am I supposed to say to these people?!"

"Parker. In one more minute, you're going to get back out there, stand on that stage and take control. Quaritch isn't here anymore. You are the CEO, and you make them give you respect."

Steadily, Parker rose. He and Sky looked at each other. Parker saw Sky's fiery will to build him up, and Sky saw Parker's resolve. The man that climbed the corporate ladder from underground, and the person that gave Sky butterflies whenever he swaggered into a room, returned when Parker straightened his clothes and smirked.

Parker touched his engagement gift that dangled from Sky's ear, a custom-made earring with real gold. His hands held Sky's face tenderly.

Parker huffed through his nose. "When we get back to Earth, I'm going on a long ass vacation. I don't care how much it costs. I'll go somewhere with a clean beach, and real palm trees. And you will drop everything and you are coming with me," Parker said. He hugged her.

Sky sighed from exhaustion at the scale of destruction they all now had to repair on Pandora because of what Parker had done. "I love you, Parker," said Sky. But I don't like you, she thought.

After a low-profiled speech that described the specific tasks of each department, Parker yelled at everyone to move their asses.

Sky and her two new acquantices had rose together to give him a standing ovation by themselves. The crowd had followed and had cheered and whistled. Then, the three had made plans to meet for breakfast and get to know each other better.

"You are taking too long, teacher." Sighed Tsu'tey. He did not care who Parker Selfridge was.

"I got sidetracked," Sky replied. She finally identified the day when she first saw Tsu'tey.

Meanwhile, Ree'ahn was doing all of the talking in his coven.

Victoria had listened for so long to tales of Ree'ahn's culture that she was drunk with the storm by her ears, sounds of stone dragging on wood, the smell of his paints, the hot, sweet, smoke from his fire that ribboned under her nose.

"And so now we...look now for new Hometree." Ree'ahn's eyelids felt heavy and he wished he was dreaming in his corner, yet he didn't want to ever let the demon out of his sights again. His face hardened in will. The totem in Ree'ahn's hands was now being ornamented with fine-lined shapes.

"It all could've been avoided." said Victoria.

"If Jakesewly never came to Omatikaya." Ree'ahn drawled with bitterness.

"No, if everyone moved when Jake and Grace told them to."

Ree'ahn finished a shape in confusion.

"We were trying to be peaceful. No one wanted the war to happen, but, you can't say that we are the only reason that it did. That's not fair."

Victoria felt uncomfortable that time when Ree'ahn looked her way in a strange humor. "Say to me, what that is not fair."

Victoria ruined the feeling of comfort that she believed was there in his room. She felt dizzy, sober.

Ree'ahn smelled her fear. "I do not see how fair it is that our body is your toy to play games, and lie and take-and kill!" Ree'ahn goes away from the girl and puts his items away. He had spoken to her so long; he had believed she was listening to what he had said. Ree'ahn wanted her out, now before his anger exploded.

Itoyo, Piral, Tsu'tey and Tanner listened to Sky describe a deserted and sunny hallway on the RDA base.

Sky had walked to her office at the far back of the base just before the large fields, gardens, courts, and barracks of the Avatar drivers. From behind, in a ratted button up and dark pants, Dr. Norm Spellman, the star anthropologist on the base and the name everyone now knows, had jogged to catch a woman in a rippling skirt and called out to her. They had greeted cheerfully.

Sky heard Norm beside her. "You didn't have to run."

"Yeah, I did. I had to catch up before I lost you!"

They mosey down a hall of windows that flashed bright daylight on them at every other moment.

Norm said, "I can't make it to the sanctuary tomorrow. Can you cover it for me? There's a lot more packing to be done in the lab and they need my help."

"Okay, whatever."

"Maybe you can also...take it over, from here on out?" Norm's face looked like its long and nerdy self when it smiled down to Sky's excited face.

"I just have a few changes we should make, hopefully right away," Sky said. Her ear piercings jingled when she lugged Norm forward to a window that overlooks the sanctuary past the driver barracks. "We need more volunteers, and we need some Jarheads to build some fences for the direhorses, and someone needs to cut the grass a little; you see how bored they all are? We should add an obstacle course or they'll all go mad walking in circles like that-" Sky shifts her head at a tall, blue being trotting in the window's view on a direhorse.

Norm notices Sky's fear. "That's just Tsu'tey; he's helping out." Norm whispers, "he thinks we're doing something to the animals, so he says he's watching us all of the time." Norm's shoulders shake while he looks down at the Na'vi beside Sky.

" You should have told him that is not true."

"I tried!" Norm said. "You think I'm gonna argue? With all of that?!"

"Hey," said a tired voice behind them. The two resume when they both see it's just Max behind them.

Max chimed in, "not too many other Na'vi chose post-trauma therapy. Tsu'tey heard about the sanctuary in one of the sessions, and now he's basically staff."

Sky had been intrigued by the colorful things on the native while Tsu'tey had promenaded the area.

"We didn't like each other right away," Sky remembered.

The following morning, Sky assembled a small flock of interns with uniforms and masks. Victoria was her first choice as assistant. Sky forgot all about the Na'vi until she came out from the field's restroom during a break and nearly died when she saw him in real life and looming over her with his giant eyes that recorded her face to memory.

Sky cornered the Na'vi while the girls cleaned waste. Tsu'tey knelt patiently and frowned while Sky assembled supplies around them like a picnic. Sky refused to let him arrange the Pandora-sized materials himself.

"Today, you can start with all of the injured viperwolves!" Sky shouted over the churning air from inside her mask.

Tsu'tey held a strange look: sadness. "It will be a task, but I will do it."

Sky gestured to the materials to use to bandage them and repeated the order he should follow.

"Understand?" Sky looked up and saw no one. Tsu'tey stalked towards the viperwolves with a knife. Sky sprinted.

Tsu'tey surveyed them all in a ring, and saw the aynantang mostly chaotic and well and trotting in circles. He thought he misheard the instructions and he stored away his knife. He felt four cold, flabby paws on his chest. Tsu'tey booted the nantang and it scampered away with a fast kahee-hee-hee-ka-koo!

Sky shreiked and yelled to him about abuse and being a legal witness.

"They are not baybees! They do not feel hurt." Tsu'tey saw the first one pause and stare at God-knows-what. He swatted a pouncing one on the jaw. Tsu'tey heard the alien scream.

Under the shade during the workers' rest, Sky said to Victoria, "He is such a brute!"

"Sky, I think you're the brute."

"Why me?"

"You're very controlling and naggy. And mean to him." Victoria said with her eyes to the grass.

"I smile at Tsu'tey all of the time!"

"That isn't enough. You should stop judging him, and let him help you more."

"I don't believe Tsu'tey has a doctorate degree."

"We're not talking about that. Sky, this isn't your home anymore. It's his. Look."

Sky heard Victoria but wished Victoria would stay quiet as usual. She noticed Tsu'tey toying with an ikran by himself in the field where the other colorful ones were coiled on the grass and sleeping or staring without movement.

"See? Does he look like he wants to hurt anything? He understands the animals differently than we do." Said Victoria.

Sky thought.

Later, Sky alerted Tsu'tey at the exit and started with an apology for calling him an animal abuser.

"I saw you playing with the ikran." Sky said during the high note of their conversation on the way out of the gate. She looked high up to see Tsu'tey chuckle. The Na'vi took on the appearance of a funny insect whenever he wore that thing on his forehead to fly home, Sky thought.

"He was so beautiful; I could not resist." Tsu'tey admitted. He makes a loud call for Unyu, for the second time. Sky uncovered boths sides of her head. "Maybe I have done wrong as well. I will trust your advice as my teacher."

They did an invisible handshake to work together from then on.

"There is...something that I also want to ask you," started Tsu'tey, who had a hesitant space in his English.

"Go ahead."

"I want to learn to read your books."

Sky leaned on the gate. Tsu'tey, a blue praying mantis in his maktoband, craned to his teacher.

"That's it?"

"If there are others, that can teach me your books before you all will go home, I want to see them."

Sky was pleased at his enthusiasm to learn. She told him something could be arranged.

During another break on another hot day in the sanctuary, Tsu'tey had been surrounded by interns who all had taken a selection from the depths of the library that had only twenty or less books that had survived from Grace's school. Tsu'tey had squinted at the aliens' microscopic scribblings in casings that had creaked with age. Victoria had reached for the ancient item from Earth and rotated it right- side-up. Tsu'tey had an epiphany and all of the girls had giggled. Sky had smiled above from her office window.

Victoria, currently cornered against a wall in Ree'ahn's coven, cowered from his angered face.

"My life has been ruined by you demons! I hate to look at you! I hate to smell you! Do you know how aytsawtute smell?" Ree'ahn bellowed in a voice from Hell, "Like dead animal!"

Victoria felt her heart skip four beats for the first time in her life.

"I hate your body! Your braids!"

Victoria flinched in the little space that she had left. The back of her head throbbed where Ree'ahn had just yanked her hair. She felt the warrior's eyes scrape her.

"You think you are nah vee?! Your kind will never See!" Ree'ahn's face contorted and he muttered, "why did you look always at me like that, like you want me to have you? Would you like that, Dreamwalker?"

Ree'ahn whapped her shoulder. She blubbered and blinked quickly.

"Kiss me; I can fulfill all of your human fantasies-and more, I promise you that!"

Victoria's face started to burn. Hot tears leaked from the Dreamwalker's eyes, her hand came to her mouth and she finally sobbed in front of him.

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