Avatar is the property of people who aren't me. This work of fiction is not authorized by those people.

Tseyo was feeling like a child again. Whereas in earlier instances he was made to feel like a child because the Sky People, whether by design or by their inability to grasp the concepts they tried to teach him, left him at times feeling ignorant and confused, now he had a boundless depth of curiosity.

The night before, Natalie had given him a sample of her people's capacity for greatness, and he had found it enough to calm his fraying spirits. Today, with Norm out of the home, Natalie was indulging his desire to know more about the Sky People's arts. He sat cross-legged on the floor while she sat in a chair next to him. Last night, she had used a device that could only play sound; but in the morning, once everyone was awake, she used one that could display images as well.

First, Tseyo wanted to hear the songs from last night again. Natalie spoke some words in her own tongue, and a singer appeared before them. The singer transitioned seamlessly from one song to the next, and he would have been content to listen to her for the rest of the day, if not longer; but, in his curiosity, he asked Natalie if Sky People were familiar with drums.

As before, she spoke some words, and there appeared a line of drummers. They tapped out their music with speed and precision that he was unsure of having ever heard inside his home.

The morning passed quickly as Tseyo asked for samples of music from each strange instrument that he could identify. When they took a break later in the day for a meal, Tseyo asked, "What about your dances?"

While Tseyo had taken a liking to Sky People's music, he was somewhat off-put by the rigid choreography that seemed common across their dances. Even their looser forms were too clearly planned. The constant symmetry of forms seemed cold against the freeform, almost chaotic dances that were most familiar to him.

Natalie must have sensed his disapproval, but she handled it with a smile. "I'm not much of a dancer, so I might not be able to show you our best examples."

He smiled back. "Dancing is something you shouldn't watch to learn. It is something you should do to learn. You can't dance if you don't feel it."

She laughed. "Like I said, I'm not a very good dancer."

"Everyone is a good dancer."

Natalie laughed more. "If you had ever seen me dance, you would know better."

"So then show me," he said with a broad smile. "I cannot believe what I can't see."

Her smile faded as she appeared to balk at the request, but she said, "I can, but this isn't the best place to dance."

Tseyo frowned and looked around the room he was in, and he the feeling of confinement which he fought off this morning as he sat enraptured by the music began to return. He frowned, but he understood what she meant. Tseyo nodded and said, "Whatever you can show me, I would like it very much."

Natalie bit her lower lip. "There might be a way we can go to a better place, but I don't know if it will work, and I'm worried that you won't like it."

"Oh?" He smiled and added, "You'll know if I don't like it."

Natalie seemed to hesitate before she walked to a box in the corner of the room. Opening it, she withdrew a device that looked like the eye protection worn by someone flying an ikran except, like with most everything made by Sky People, it was bulky and metallic. "This will allow you to go to another world – it's like a dream world – where almost anything you want can be found."

Tseyo latched onto a single phrase. "A dream world?" he asked. She nodded. "You mean I will become uniltìranyu?"

Natalie furrowed her brow. "What do you mean by, 'uniltìranyu?'"

"The ones of you who take our bodies to walk among the people," he replied. "Is that what they use to do it?"

She shook her head. "No, the world that this takes you to isn't real," she explained. "You do take a new body, but it's not real. It's like a dream. You can wake up and leave it whenever you want."

Tseyo leaned forward to take the device from her hands. He spent a few moments inspecting it before he returned it to her. "Show me," he said.

Natalie went into her room and came out with the same kind of tool Norm had used to teach him. She returned to her seat and, after quickly passing through a series of odd ciphers and images, showed the image of a woman. "This is my avatar," she told him. "When I put that device on my head, I can control her in the dream world."

"How?"

"The device takes what I'm thinking and makes the avatar respond."

Tseyo had a moment of clarity. "Ah," he said with a nod. "This is your way of making tsaheylu."

She did not respond right away, clearly trying to process and respond to what he said, but then she nodded and said, "Close enough, yes."

He looked at the woman more closely and said, "She looks like you."

Natalie smiled. "I did my best," she replied. "I even got the hair color from pictures of me when I was younger."

The hair on Natalie's avatar was long, straight, and golden; although as the avatar turned about as Natalie moved her fingers over the image, there were moments where Tseyo saw reddish streaks. He looked at Natalie and asked, "Why don't you have hair like that now?"

Her smile faded. "It was the medicine I had to take," she replied. "Then when I became a swimmer, it made sense to keep it cut."

Tseyo wanted to ask how medicine, a healing agent, could make her hair disappear, but he looked again at her sad expression – an almost longing gaze at the avatar – and he decided not to press the point. Instead, he returned to the original topic. "So I would need to be put in there in order to see the dream world?"

"Not your actual body," she replied. "We would create a body for you to control."

Natalie tapped on the image device, and her avatar was replaced by a disturbingly featureless form of a person. It had the proportions of a Sky Person, but it had no eyes, no mouth, and sickly gray skin. Before he could react to it, however, she raised the device, turned it towards him, and pointed at a small, polished black stone at the top. "Look in here," she said.

He leaned forward to look inside, causing her to chuckle and correct herself. "Sorry, I meant, 'Look towards this.'"

Tseyo glared at her, but grinned as he returned to an upright sitting position. "You were doing so well," he said. "I haven't had to correct you most of today."

"Talking with you has brought back a lot of my lessons," she replied. Natalie had him correct his posture a couple of times before she tapped on the device again. "That was good," she said, and then rotated the device so he could see the image again.

Next to the white body was his image. Its clarity took him aback. Tseyo was more accustomed to seeing his reflection in muddy pools after a rainstorm, or in a running river as he bathed. This was the first time he had seen so clearly how gaunt his face was, or how delicately stripes crossed over his features.

From a young age, he was told that paying too much attention to one's image was an undesirable trait. Painting oneself outside of any ceremony was wasteful of the plants and seeds which were ground up to create the pigments; and weaving lavish clothes for the sake of vanity was a sacrilege against the flesh of the animal which had been taken to make them.

Shapes began to appear over his face – a mix of circles and triangles, at least to start with – and then those shapes were repeated over the blank face of the body. Soon, its face became gaunt, the sockets of its eyes widened, and the bridge of the nose widened. Once the face had been formed, the avatar's skin darkened to a deep brown, and that caused Tseyo to balk. "Why has it made its skin like that?"

"It compared your skin to our common skin colors," Natalie replied. "We can fix it, though." She brushed her fingers over the body, and a circle with an array of colors, based on a brown palette, appeared. "Which would you like?"

He looked again at the image which Natalie had captured of him, and he wanted to complain that he could not choose to have his own. Though the colors she was offering him might be natural to her, they were all displeasing to him.

Tseyo eventually settled on a deep tan pigment. "It makes me look like I'm made out of wood," he said. He raised his brow and asked, "Why do you have these colors for your skin? Eywa painted her people to be able to fade into the jungle when we hunt, but you don't seem to have a reason to look like you do."

Natalie chuckled and replied, "I don't think I have the right words to explain it."

He smiled. "A lot of your world is not described in our words." Tseyo nodded at the person they had created and asked, "Are we done?"

"Only if you want to be bald like I am," she replied with a grin. "But I think I already know what kind of hair you'll want." With far more speed than he had shown in selecting his skin, Natalie found for his avatar a long, black braid. Tseyo nodded with a wide grin.

"Do you always have to go through this much to see dances?" he asked.

"No," she replied. "Normally we would just go outside, but I don't think Norm and my father would approve of that."

Tseyo sighed. "I hope they do something soon," he replied. "Staying down here for long would be too hard, I think."

"Even with me keeping you company?" she asked, her eyebrows slightly raised.

He smiled and replied, "I like your company, Natalie, but I didn't come here to be trapped." He rubbed his cheeks and added, "At least I don't have to wear that mask."

"I'm glad for that, too," she said. "You look much better without it on."

"I hope so," he replied, his smile becoming more of a grin. He looked again at the avatar. "So that's what I'll look like in the dream world?" She nodded.

Natalie was about to say something, but she was interrupted by the sounds of an argument coming the top of the stairs. Tseyo discerned the voices of his teacher and T'ngyute as they came down the stairs, arguing with each other as they turned the corner. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Natalie turn the screen black. She looked at him and said quietly, "We'll finish this later."

Her posture and tone made it seem as though they had been doing something illicit, although he was not sure what that could have been. Tseyo only nodded in response.

Norm and T'ngyute were each holding several bags, and in a hurried conversation in their native language, T'ngyute sent Natalie away. While T'ngyute laid the bags' contents out on the floor, Tseyo looked to Norm and asked, "Is something wrong?"

"Abe wants to do something stupid," Norm replied. "And it's going to put you at risk."

"Aren't I – all of us – already at risk?"

Norm sighed in apparent exasperation and said, "Yes, but this is unnecessary. He wants to talk to you about it, but I don't think he's going to give you a choice."

"We'll see if it's really unnecessary."

Norm and T'ngyute had a side conversation, and then T'ngyute stood before him and spoke. Tseyo looked to Norm for a translation. "You remember why you're here, right?"

He looked back to T'ngyute and replied, "I'm here to fight for the people, to bear witness, and to tell your people to leave our home in peace."

"You're also here because my people may not believe me and Norm alone," he replied. T'ngyute grinned and said something else, which caused another small argument between him and Norm, but eventually he translated, crudely, "People here often think that I don't do the things I do for the reasons I say I do them."

If that was meant to keep Tseyo from becoming confused, it did not help. He furrowed his brow and asked, "Do you?"

T'ngyute shrugged and replied, "Sometimes."

Tseyo shook his head, sighed, and asked, "So what is it that you want to do – or say that you want to do – that has him upset?"

"I'm trying to have the three of us meet with other people who can help us defeat the ones who are preparing to attack your home."

"Why does this upset you?" he asked Norm.

"Because the people he wants us to meet are crazy."

Tseyo grinned and replied, "I think you're all crazy. What's the difference?"

Norm tried, and failed, to suppress a laugh, and then he shook his head. "These people are crazy and dangerous. We don't know what they'll do when we meet, or even if they'll help us."

T'ngyute appeared to grow impatient with their side conversation, and so forced himself back in. "I hope this meeting will take place tomorrow, but it may be longer away. If it is, we won't be able to go through with our plan for a much longer time."

"How much longer?"

"Many, many days."

Tseyo thought about what that meant, and he sighed. "I would have to stay down here for many more days?" T'ngyute nodded. "How long am I supposed to be here, anyway?"

"Until we're ready."

"But if we meet with these people tomorrow, we'll be ready sooner?"

"Maybe."

Tseyo sighed again. He had only been in this room for two days, but the confinement was wearing on him. The idea that he would have to be kept hidden for what could be an indefinite amount of time, given T'ngyute's vague responses, was less than appealing. However, he did not yet have any reason to believe that his having been brought to this place was one of T'ngyute's cases of saying one thing and doing another – and if that were the case, what recourse would he have?

"Why are these people so important?" he asked.

"They've been enemies of the people we're fighting for a very long time," T'ngyute replied. "If they come to our side, when others see what we've done, they will be more likely to support us."

"I thought that because you were a leader among the people we're fighting, that would be enough to convince others," Tseyo said. "When olo'eyktan came to us as Toruk Makto, we forgave him of his transgressions."

T'ngyute scoffed. "My people – and these people – aren't so forgiving."

His personal servants had just finished cleaning up the last of the lunch when the AMIS chief entered his penthouse. "How was your lunch with the judge, sir?" Franklin asked.

"Not as productive as I hoped," Savage replied. "There isn't a lot he can do to put the bureaucrats in line, not immediately anyway. I hope your day was more productive."

"It was, Mister Chairman," he replied. "The New York regional headquarters was able to identify an asset without ties to the local community. We put him on the first high-speed out of New York, so he'll be in place here this evening."

"Who is he?"

"I think it would be better to keep his details known to as few people as possible," Franklin said. Before Savage could pull rank and demand more, Franklin added, "He's helped us on some high profile assignments along the East Coast and in Europe, all of them resolved satisfactorily."

He did a quick run through of some of the recent cases RDA had to combat in those areas – a few attempted extortions, threatened worker strikes, and government investigations. If the asset Franklin was bringing in had been involved in quashing those, he was satisfied to not know anything more.

"Have any of your assets around here raised flags on Abe, yet?" he asked instead.

Franklin shook his head. "We've seen some chatter about the crash, but nothing that indicates they know anything more than we do."

Savage nodded. He knew the media blackout was not going to hold up forever. There were too many pieces of the story floating around that they did not have control over. "When your man finds Abe, what are his orders?"

"Track him, find out whom he might have made contact with already, and then hand the information over to us so we can have Abe and his conspirators put in custody – which is what we expected to do anyway, but without all this trouble."

He took a deep breath. "The problem with these kinds of trials is that people pay attention." He paused and added, "We're trying to prevent Abe from getting a platform, not give him one."

Franklin hesitated before he responded. "You want him to disappear."

Savage shrugged. "He wanted people to believe he died in that shuttle crash, right? Well, maybe he did, and we're just chasing a ghost."

"We're also assuming that he's, at the least, made contact with his family by now."

"His wife's old and has her own job consulting for disreputable people, and his kid has cancer. This doesn't seem hard to me."

"The devil's in the details, sir," Franklin replied.

"The details are your job."

"Sir, we also have to identify just what it is that Abe is planning to come at us with," he said. "If he were to 'disappear' with that information, others may find it on their own. And if it was powerful enough to make Abe turn…"

"There may be nothing there that we don't already know," Savage interrupted. "Abe's not unlike everybody else out there looking for a chance to get ahead. He's just better at spotting opportunities. Parker's stupidity gave him an opportunity, and now he wants to cash in."

Franklin shook his head and replied, "If he just wanted to extort us, why would he have taken the risk of sabotaging our Pandora operations?"

"Maybe so he could look like the good guy to the public if we were – when we would – call him on his bluff," Savage said with a curled lip. "Who cares? The point is that he's presented us with a threat, and we need to find a long-term solution."

"I agree, sir, but…"

"No," Savage interrupted again. "All I need from you is, 'I agree.' It's like the guy said, 'Yours is not to reason why, yours is to get this done.'"

"And then the light brigade was slaughtered."

"Exactly," Savage said, not noticing the slight rise of Franklin's brow. "They got the job done, and that's what I need you to do."

Franklin paused, and then he replied, "The asset should be here this evening. I'll brief him, and we'll get a plan put in place. Do you want me to brief you tonight?"

"No," he replied. "Again, the details are your job."

"Understood."

Once Franklin left the penthouse, Savage settled into his study and half-heartedly parsed through the last report from Pandora. It was more of the same: delays, insufficient supplies, and fighting off incursions.

Savage sighed. It had been almost twenty years since Parker's message that the mining operation had collapsed. Those first years had gone by with a great deal of uncertainty: How great was the catastrophe, and how long would it take for RDA to recover? Then there was the uncertainty about Abe's recovery mission: Would it be enough to pull Pandora back from the brink?

Back then, Savage had not been convinced that sending an armada to subdue the entirety of the alien populace, consequences be damned, was the proper course of action. However, now that the armada was on its way to do just that, long after the first opportunity had presented itself, Savage could not help but feel angry at himself for not acting more decisively at the onset of the crisis.

He was acting decisively now. "Consequences be damned," he said to himself. "We're going to solve these problems. We're getting back on top."

Abe was helping Krysta in the kitchen make the final dinner preparations when the guardhouse at the gated community's entrance called the house. Krysta answered while Abe and the others made sure they were out of sight of the video phone. On its own, the contract-security uniform that the guard wore would not have been intimidating; but that the guard had an exopack mask on did make him appear to be a much greater force to reckon with than he might be otherwise.

"There's a Doctor Tom Walsh at the gate to see you, Ma'am," he said, his voice garbled by the combination of the exopack's and video phone's microphones.

"Yes, I'm expecting him," Krysta replied. "Thank you." The call ended, and the others came out of their hiding places. Krysta turned to him and, grinning, said, "I never thought I'd see the day that you'd be hiding from a rent-a-cop."

"Even a rent-a-cop might get suspicious about how a single mother could be hosting a dinner party when nobody else has called on the house," Abe replied. He nodded towards the basement door and added, "I'm also sure a ten-foot alien might tip him off."

Shortly after he briefed Tseyo about the meeting he had requested, Tseyo began to complain of dizziness. Norm, Max, and Matthew were quick to respond, and they were keeping him under observation.

Krysta shook her head. "You're going to give Tom a heart attack."

Abe snorted and said, "I think he'll be fine. Truth be told, I'm surprised he's still alive." She gave him a cross look, so he added, "What? I mean it as a compliment. He was seventy-one when I left, so he's way past expectancy now."

"Genetic therapy helps," she replied, to which Abe could only shrug.

A minute later, there was a knock on the front door. Although he was more than confident it was Tom at the door, Abe still felt compelled to stay concealed in the case that a double-cross was in the works.

Vertex barked from upstairs, while Krysta went to answer. "Thank you for coming by on short notice," she said as she hugged their visitor.

"I'd never turn down your invitation," Tom replied, giving her a kiss on her cheek. He closed the door behind him and promptly asked, "All right, where is he?"

Abe stepped around from behind the wall, and he was immediately struck by the correctness of Krysta's earlier comment. Tom had been keeping up with his genetic therapy, as he looked barely aged from when Abe had last seen him. Tom must have held the same impression of him, because he said, "Not that I should be surprised, Abe, but you're still as ugly as when you left."

"Pandora isn't what you would call a beauty retreat," he replied, and then stepped forward to embrace him. "It's good to see you again."

"Likewise," Tom said with a pat on his back. "You made a hell of an entrance, though. I didn't think setting a wildfire was your style."

"These are special circumstances," he replied with a grin.

"And I'm sure the chairman is working to make your circumstances particularly special if he ever gets a hold of you," Tom said. "He was expecting you to come home quietly with an armed escort."

"That's his fault," Abe said as they walked into the dining room and sat at the table. "How is the chairman?"

"Agitated, I assume also because of you. Whoever that woman is you have reading from a script back on Pandora is driving him up a wall."

Abe kept his composure as he felt an uncommon nervousness take hold. "Is the script that obvious?"

"No," Tom replied. "The chairman's buying it, but she almost blew it a couple of years back. I got her in a one-on-one session and straightened her out." He chuckled and added, "She almost didn't cooperate – she really hates you."

"I won't be signing a recommendation letter for her, either."

Natalie emerged from the basement and immediately went to Tom. "Hey, Doctor Walsh," she said as she gave him a hug. "How are you?"

"I'm good," he replied with a smile. Then his tone became more fatherly, "How're you doing?"

"I'm fine," she said. "I've still got everything I need." She looked over at Abe and added, "Although all of the recent 'changes' have been a bit more than I expected."

Tom chuckled and said, "I don't know how much you remember of your father from when you were a kid, but I guess you were always destined to see him in action."

She nodded, her eyes still fixed with his. "I'm learning a lot." Although her tone was innocent enough, Abe tried to read her intentions from her eyes. Unfortunately for him, she had inherited her parents' ability to keep the human body's usual tells in check, exuding seriousness and candor at all times, even if her thoughts and words were detached from each other.

"How's Tseyo?" Abe asked.

"Doctors Spellman, Cook, and Patel think he's okay," she replied. "He's had his mask on for the last few hours, so he's been getting fresh air."

"If you could let them know that Tom's here, I'd appreciate it." Natalie nodded and headed back to the basement.

"Who's this, now?" Tom asked.

"You'll see in a second," he replied casually. "So, the chairman's agitated. How'd you survive the purge of all things reminiscent of me?"

"Purged?" Tom said with a snort. "Hell, Abe, I got my benefits package expanded. Like Pandorium, 'smartest man in the world' is a finite resource," Tom said. "He sure as hell doesn't want me running somebody else's R-and-D program."

"Maybe he's just biding his time until your clone comes online," Abe said with a grin.

"There are only seven labs in the world with the capacity to sustain human cloning, and RDA – or, more precisely, I – run four of them," he replied. "Besides, for all of our efforts, we can't reliably clone intelligence. It's the damnedest thing."

Abe sighed and said, "I was joking, Tom."

"Then your sense of humor hasn't improved much."

Abe heard the group coming up from the basement. He grinned again and said, "Well, see if you find this funny."

When Tseyo, wearing his exopack, emerged from behind the others, Tom's eyes widened, his jaw dropped, and he almost fell out of his seat as he hurried to his feet. "No!"

Abe stayed in his chair and replied, "Oh, very much, 'Yes,' Doctor."

As though every year he had tried to hide with genetic therapy had been wiped away, Tom's walk over to Tseyo was shaky at best – even Natalie was compelled to help him across the living room. Tom turned and said, "This isn't your infiltrator, is it?"

Abe shook his head. "Devon didn't make it. Tseyo's an original, Tom."

"My God, so it is," Tom replied as he looked over Tseyo, much to the Na'vi's confusion. "You know, I was there with Cordell when the first avatars became viable. We burned through so many samples, almost bankrupted the whole department, just trying to get one." He laughed and said, "And you just went and kidnapped one."

"He volunteered, actually, if you can believe it."

Tom nodded. "I can. But what happened to your avatar? You said he didn't make it. Did the consciousness transfer not work? We've improved it considerably since ten years ago."

"It worked, but the body didn't survive," Abe said, hoping that Tom would pick up on his waxing over of the details and drop the subject.

He did not. "Didn't survive how?"

"He died." Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Norm grinning, while Tseyo appeared to be getting annoyed by the obviousness of being the subject of a conversation he could not follow.

"Did the Na'vi find him out?"

"Tom…"

"Find who out? You said 'infiltrator'?" Natalie asked. Before Abe could respond, she said angrily at Krysta, who was in the kitchen pouring wine, "I could hear you when I was in the hospital, and I'm smart enough to know that you two," indicating himself and Norm, "are trying to protect me from something. I'm tired of literally being the only person at the table to not know what happened on Pandora."

Tom took a deep breath, and then walked to the kitchen to get a glass of wine. Abe heard him mutter, "It's Sarah and Michael all over again."

Abe also took a deep breath before he replied, "A lot has happened on Pandora, and not all of it was good."

"I'm not naïve, Daddy," she said. "But what did you do?"

"Now really isn't the time…"

"When is it going to be the time?" she interrupted. "I'm not going to let one 'later' bleed into another until you guys hope I'll forget." Natalie looked at Tseyo and said, "Maybe I'll just ask him directly."

"No," Norm and Abe said at the same time, to their and everyone else's surprise. "That's not a good idea," Abe added.

"So then you should tell me why, Daddy."

Abe looked around the room. Although he was certain that his teammates, who were failing to pretend that the conversation was not happening, would be more than willing to oblige his request to keep the details of the Pandora operation a secret, he knew there were no such assurances from Norm and his people.

He sighed and said, "We had an avatar on our team whose job it was to monitor Tseyo's clan to ensure that the measures we were taking to keep the peace were working, or to alert us to problems…"

"Abe?" Norm interrupted. "You're going to lie to your own daughter?"

"Believe what you will, Norm, but that's not a lie," Abe snapped back. "Your friend shut down the first program, and I needed to know if he was going to shut it down again."

"Of course he was," Norm replied. "Jake's their leader, and they weren't going to stand to have you back and doing the same things as before. You didn't want to monitor him, you wanted him out of the picture."

"Then I'd have just bombed him!" Abe said. "I'd have come in, killed your people off, taken the remaining military hardware, and killed them all – which, right now, is what we're trying to stop, in case you've forgotten."

"Wait," Natalie interrupted. "Okay, I know you two don't like each other, but you're losing me. What about the avatar?"

Abe looked towards Dawn and said, "Somehow he got the impression that it would help his cover if he mated with one of the Na'vi." He sighed and looked at Tseyo. "His sister, in fact."

"With all due respect, Boss, I'm getting tired of being the scapegoat for the failure of the operation," Dawn replied. "If he had followed your orders, like a good soldier, my suggestion wouldn't have mattered."

"You mean your psych screening didn't root out a fetishist?" Tom asked with his lip curled. "We practically built the evaluation program around disqualifying those people."

Abe waved him off and said, "Regardless, it happened."

Tseyo looked across the table and asked Norm a question, which Abe assumed was to inquire about the increasingly hostile conversation. At first, it appeared as though Norm tried to deflect his curiosity; but when that seemed to fail, he provided what must have been a quick primer, for Tseyo crossed his arms and turned to stare at Abe.

When their side exchange was over, Natalie said, "So your spy mated with one of the Na'vi, and then what?"

"I don't know the details," he said. "Maybe it was bad pillow talk, but she found out who he was, and he overreacted."

"He murdered her," Norm said flatly.

Natalie's eyes went wide. "What?!"

Abe threw out his defense. "I want to say again what Dawn said, that if he followed my orders, it wouldn't have happened."

"And like you said," Norm interjected, "'Regardless, it happened.'"

"I hope the reason why he's dead is because you killed him for it," Natalie said.

Abe nodded at Tseyo and said, "No, he did." He paused to consider whether or not he should continue on with details, but he settled for saying, "From there, things went downhill."

"SecOps showed up and attacked their home," Norm said.

"Because of Parker!" Abe replied. "Again, if people had just done what I told them, we wouldn't be here right now."

"No, we wouldn't," Natalie said. "You'd still be up there exploiting their home and doing who knows what else – oh, sorry, you do know what else."

"I thought you said you weren't naïve," Abe retorted. "You've known about the mining, just like everybody else on this planet, since you were young."

"And like everybody else, I thought you were being honest when the company – when you – said you were taking care of the Na'vi, that you didn't want to repeat the same mistakes that happened here."

"I was trying to take care of the Na'vi," he said. "I tried to do everything to make sure that the same mistakes that Parker made wouldn't be repeated." He sighed in exasperation and looked across the room. "Back me up here, Tom."

Tom nodded and said, "Natalie, I worked closely with your father when he developed the plan to go back to Pandora. He was not setting out to hurt the Na'vi. But I share with your father one very simple rule: We have to do whatever we can to ensure our own survival. Humanity has to come first."

"And that worked out so well for Earth, didn't it? Why wouldn't it work out for Pandora?" Natalie shook her head and walked off.

Abe began to walk towards her, but she turned around and said, "You know, it's not like I've lived in a bubble of blissful ignorance. I read and hear the stuff people say about RDA, but I figured they were all whackjobs who just had an axe to grind. I didn't think the people I loved could actually do the things they talked about."

"Those people aren't always telling the truth," he said. "If you want to know…"

"I don't," she said. "You were right. It wasn't a good idea to ask about what happened up there."

Abe wanted to go after her as she retreated downstairs, but he also had a good sense that anything he might try to say would be a waste of time. It also struck him that she was being immature in her response to the information, and then he had his own, terrible revelation: This was a part of her life he had missed.

When Natalie was young, he and Krysta would, when she was healthy, often bounce around scenarios about how they would respond as parents when she became an obstinate, emotional teenager. They imagined her reaction of being kept in the house on curfew, or punished for unseemly behavior, and the shouts of, "I hate you!"

Those years had come and gone while he had been a distant stranger to her, left to Krysta to manage on top of everything else. Natalie had thrown down the gauntlet that, until now, had only been a scenario to him, and far from being over an issue of little consequence, was about a fundamental part of who he was.

He sat down, defeated. That's when he noticed Tseyo's attention had remained on him throughout the exchange. Abe took a deep breath and said, "You think she hates me? Why don't you go tell her how you had me tied to a post for an execution over something I didn't do? Tell her about the guy's teeth you're wearing on your arm!"

Tseyo's expression seemed little changed, and Norm said, "You know he doesn't speak English, Abe."

"So translate it," he replied, his eyes still locked with Tseyo's. When Norm hesitated, he turned and yelled, "Translate it!"

Norm did, and Tseyo had a lengthy response. "He wants to know when you're going to take responsibility for what happened," Norm translated. "He says you're too quick to push responsibility onto other people, but you still want to be a leader. He says he can't trust someone who does that, and you shouldn't be surprised that your own daughter won't trust you, either."

Abe was ready to respond, when the phone in his pocket began to ring. Among the errands he and Norm made while they were in the city, he purchased a number of burner phones. The call he was receiving was an auto-forward from a routing service that he set up for another pre-paid phone – and that phone was taped to the undercarriage of a garbage truck that had been parked outside a diner when he and Norm left the pedestrian-only zone.

If somebody were to trace the call to get Abe's location, they would be following some hapless waste management employees – if they didn't get lost somewhere in Korea, first.

As the phone was new, he knew there was only one person who had its number. "Pablo?"

"Eric," Pablo responded. "Listen, that girl at the bar? She thinks you're crazy, but she said she's willing to give you a shot. She's working tomorrow morning at the Java House in Modesto."

"Thanks, Pablo. I owe you."

"Yeah, actually, you do." Pablo hung up.

Despite his hope that the call would provide a convenient, if not messy, break from the preceding events, after Abe returned the phone to his pocket, he saw that he was still very much the focus of the others' attention.

He sighed and said, "We're going to have to pick this back up later." He looked at Norm. "We got our meeting," Abe replied flatly. He took a long look towards the basement stairs, then to Tseyo, and then finally to Tom. "I need to talk to you before you go."