It did feel good to be back in the sky, even if it weren't in the way Neteyam would have wanted. He didn't have the wind in his eyes or the beating of Pawk's mighty wings underneath him, but he could see the ground rushing by below and feel the giant machine rocking with the air currents. It wasn't the same, but it was something, like a distant memory of the familiar exhilaration. It made this all seem like less of a horrible dream. The real world was still out there. He'd only been shut away from it temporarily.
Across from him, Bohan was watching out the opposite window as the woman called Konstopoulos got dangerously close on her banshee before putting distance between them again. She was grinning, enjoying the agility of her mount. Bohan grinned back, as if the delight were infection.
"They roost in the..." it took Neteyam a moment to remember the name the humans used. "The Hallelujah Mountains. You have to climb the rocks and vines to get to them, and you bond with the first one to attack you." He sat up a little straighter. "Very few succeed on the first try, but I did."
"Congratulations," said Bohan. "Must be a hell of an experience."
"You can't know until you've done it," Neteyam agreed. He swallowed hard – he would never do that again. His father had been Toruk Makto and his mother had been the first to ever tame a thanator, but he, Neteyam, who'd bonded with Pawk on his first try, would never truly fly again.
He turned away from Bohan and looked out the other side, where Quaritch and Blackbird were also flying alongside. They weren't nearly so close, but the man caught Neteyam's gaze and acknowledged him with a mean grin and a wave, and Neteyam's regret hardened into anger. Quaritch, riding his own banshee, must know what Neteyam was thinking right then, and was mocking him for it. He, at least, knew exactly what the Sky People had taken from Neteyam by putting him in this body.
"Look at that," said O'Donnell, pointing.
Several more banshees had joined them, apparently curious about this odd group and where it was headed. Three of them were marked in the normal assortment of blues and greens, but the fourth was almost entirely black. Spots and stripes were still faintly visible when the light hit its skin just right. Neteyam had seen similar rare individuals among flocks of tetraptera, the odd one that was black instead of the normal purple. The human scientists had a word for it... melanism.
"Oh, he's gorgeous," said Bohan. "Like a panther! Neteyam, does it mean anything special if somebody manages to catch the black one?"
"Yes," he said. "It means he didn't eat you."
"Are you thinking of trying?" O'Donnell teased.
"I just might," Bohan replied.
Maybe she could. The banshees had been willing to accept Dad and even the recoms... Bohan could probably tame one if she tried. She hadn't earned it through a demonstration of hunting skill like the young warriors did, but none of these people could have done that. Bohan had as much right as any of them.
The little flock circled a few times and then, apparently satisfied, set out on their own again. The flying machine and the two mounted recoms continued on their way to the falls at Kilvanoro.
There was nowhere to land close to the river, so the pilot chose an open area about a kilometre away as humans measured distance. Hexapedes bounded into the foliage as the vehicle slowly lowered itself to hover about a metre off the ground. Bohan and O'Donnell hopped down and then helped Neteyam, for whom the distance was half his own height. He put his feet on the ground and closed his eyes as he breathed in deeply...
... only to realize that doing those things was entirely pointless. He couldn't dig his toes into the grass and soil because he was wearing thick, heavy shoes. He couldn't inhale fresh air laden with the familiar scent of the forest because he had to breathe the stale, recycled air in his respirator. He would never do either of those things again, and knowing that hurt even more than knowing he could never again ride a banshee.
O'Donnell put a hand to his choker. "O'Donnell, Bohan, and Sully on the ground," he said.
"Quaritch and Konstopoulos at the falls," the Colonel's voice came back. "We'll have the entrance secure by the time you arrive."
"Roger," O'Donnell nodded. "Okay, Short Stack," he told Neteyam. "You go in the middle, so Trouble and I can make sure you're not falling behind." He looked at Bohan with a toothy smile. "It's like hanging out with toddlers. Gotta keep in mind, they've got little legs."
Neteyam bristled. Bush was not allowed to give him a nickname. Neither was this man he'd only just met. "My name is Neteyam."
"Ignore him," said Bohan. "Tiny Tim here was five foot six in his previous lifetime. He's still learning what the tops of people's heads look like."
"You're in a damn good mood," O'Donnell observed, narrowing his eyes at her. "You up to something?"
"I'm thinking about punting one of the shrinks like a soccer ball. It's gonna be great," Bohan told him. Neteyam couldn't tell if she were joking or not.
"Am I going to have to listen to this all the way to Kilvanoro?" he asked the two.
Bohan cackled and started walking.
When Neteyam and his siblings had used to run around and play as children, Spider had almost always been with them. He'd been shorter than them from the start, and the height difference had gotten more and more pronounced as they all grew, but Spider had always been able to keep up, and the Na'vi kids had always taken it for granted that he would. Now Neteyam wondered if they should have been more considerate. O'Donnell and Bohan were moving slowly, but he still had to jog, taking two steps for each of the recoms' long strides.
As Nguyen had said, his new body wasn't used to this yet. Before long he was panting, and the faceplate on his breathing unit was fogging up. He held his breath and reached up inside to wipe the condensation away with his fingers. When he put the mask back and inhaled again, he got a brief whiff of a very unpleasant, sulfrous smell that made him gag.
"I remember that," said Bohan. She took a deep breath, herself, then shrugged. Apparently she smelled nothing.
Neteyam swallowed to get the scent out of his mouth. So... even if the air wouldn't have poisoned this body, Neteyam still wouldn't have been able to breathe it because of the smell. He was estranged even from the air. He'd known that already, and yet that fact, too, suddenly seemed all the more real.
As they made their way up the slope towards the caverns, the forest around them also seemed more and more alien. If Neteyam ignored his companions towering over him as if he were a small child, the canopy trees and the animals flitting between them looked quite normal. Their tops were so far away the scale didn't matter. But then the group would pass a stand of warbonnet ferns or helicoradians, or even a fan lizard on a branch, something he was used to seeing up close, and it would reinforce once again how small Neteyam was.
Had this been a big mistake? Was escape simply impossible, because he could no longer survive in this environment that had always been home? The thought made the corners of his eyes prick, and though Neteyam managed to take a few deep breaths and suppress the urge to cry, condensation started forming on his faceplate again.
Then the forest parted in front of them, revealing the rocky banks of the Noro river. They picked their way along the shore, sometimes having to step from stone to stone above the rushing water. O'Donnell and Bohan, with their longer legs, could cross gaps Neteyam could not, and several times they had to stop to help him.
After an uphill hike that no machine could have made, they arrived at the deep pool below the waterfall. Dad had a story about the time he'd had to leap from the cliff at the top to escape a thanator. As a child looking up at the tumbling water, Neteyam had thought it was an awfully long way to fall. At the time Dad hadn't known the caverns existed, and wouldn't have been able to avoid their dangers if he had. Now they were as familiar to him as they were to the rest of the Omatikaya.
Which made him think of something. "If we find people guarding the explosives, they may not speak English," Neteyam warned.
"It's fine," Bohan told him. "The Colonel's Na'vi is actually pretty good. Mine's not great... what's the word for friend?"
"'Eylan," said Neteyam.
"Then if we meet anyone, I'll say that," she decided.
Neteyam shook his head. "Don't. You're clearly not one of them. They'll know it's a lie."
"Yeah, you're right. The gun would be a clue, wouldn't it?"
The two banshees were perched at the top of the cliff on either side of the river, watching over the area. Konstopoulos was standing next to Maverick, the link between them still active so she could use the predator's keen eyes to look out for danger. Quaritch had left Blackbird at the top and climbed down, waiting now to the right of the waterfall. O'Donnell, Bohan, and Neteyam climbed the damp rocks to join him.
"We spotted a couple of points the natives could be watching from," Quaritch said. "Georgia's gonna stay out here and keep an eye on those, and call in reinforcements if they're needed. This is just a scouting party. The kid shows us around, we map the caves with a scanner, and come back with a bigger salvage party later. If you find anything, mark it on the scan and leave it alone. If you meet resistance, fall back. The scientists like reminding me that we're expensive to replace."
They started up to the cave entrance. Neteyam felt himself trembling a little, his heart beating hard in nervous excitement. This was it – this was the way to freedom. He hadn't felt like this since the day he'd climbed the floating mountains to tame his banshee. That had been a triumph. This... he wasn't sure. Could he do this, when he couldn't even climb a wall?
He stepped through the curtain of water where it was thinnest, and entered the cave.
The three recoms followed him in. Quaritch held up a lamp that gave off a blinding white light, illuminating the whole main cavern and the various branches that went off from it, throwing coal-black shadows on the walls. At the edge of the light, thousands of little legs could be heard as creatures fled back into the darkness. A dozen or so stingbats were hanging from the roof, and they squawked and stretched in annoyance as this intrusion disturbed their rest. Not far from Neteyam's feet, a sand eel slithered back into the pool.
Now Neteyam smiled. He knew exactly where he was, and exactly where he was going. "That top one's the dead end," he pointed. "On the right there you've got the well shaft. We don't want to go that way."
"Yeah, we do," said O'Donnell. We'll lower the scanner down there and get a map of the whole thing.
"And that way leads to the spiral pits, which will take us to the rest of the caves," Neteyam added. "That's where we'll want to go. There are a thousand hiding places in there." And he knew every single one, while these people did not.
O'Donnell took out a device that flashed beams of red light in all directions, and connected it to a holopad that somehow translated this into a wireframe diagram of the space, even the parts of it that were under the water. Bohan watched the display while O'Donnell walked around scanning every nook and cranny, and then they tied the little machine to a rope and lowered it down the well shaft. There was something hypnotic about watching it descend, the ring of red light it drew getting smaller and changing shape on the way. Bohan manipulated the tablet display, watching the map appear.
"Damn," she muttered. "That is deep."
While they pulled the device back up, careful not to get it caught on the rocks, Neteyam sat and watched the stingbats. One of the animals lazily snapped out at a passing insect but missed, and eventually the whole little flock crawled away across the ceiling, looking for somewhere darker. The light seemed so unnecessary, when the cave was full of glow-worms and bright algae that would make it easy to see if they only let their eyes adjust. Then again, perhaps driving the animals away was the point. If there were nothing here, none of it could threaten them.
"We done?" asked Quaritch.
"Yep. Ready to move on," said O'Donnell.
Glow-roaches scuttled out of the way as they climbed into the next cavern, then squeezed through a narrow passage into the spiral ramps. In the relative darkness before Quaritch brought the lantern through, it was possible to see the ribbons of bioluminescence from micro-organisms feeding on the minerals in the walls. Bohand ran a hand down it, and watched the light brighten under her touch.
"This planet is so beautiful," she murmured.
"You should behave yourself. They might let you look at it more often," O'Donnell said.
Quaritch had no time for such observations. "This is big enough to bring the explosives in... the individual packages would fit through that doorway. Be a hell of a job carrying it all down by hand, but those horses wouldn't fit."
Branching off from the spiral were dozens of other cracks, caverns, wells, and even an old lava tube, but Neteyam was looking for one in particular. There was a narrow shaft that led all the way to the surface, where it emerged under the roots of a tree. It was one of Tuk's favourite hiding places, because her brothers and sisters were too big to get into it. The only ones who fit were her and Spider... and any space Spider could fit into, Neteyam now could while the recoms could not. If he made it to the shaft, he could climb out and escape.
On the way, however, they had to explore the other branches. They made their way through methodically, stopping to map and mark, and sometimes to look at things like colourful fungi, or the place where people long ago had chiselled pictures of animals and celestial bodies into the stone. The petroglyphs had been in the caves when the Omatikaya had first arrived in the area, before the first songs were written, and nobody knew what they meant.
Finally, they reached a tight tunnel that contained a series of ledges that could serve as natural stairs, although the ceiling was so low the recoms had to climb it on all fours. Even Neteyam had to hunch, and the risers were of course higher than he remembered, making the ascent difficult and tiring. The stone here was damp, too, which wouldn't have been as much of a problem if he hadn't been wearing shoes that made it impossible for his toes to grip. Even without the opposable one, being able to bend them would have helped.
"I've got you," said Bohan when he began to slip. She grabbed him by the back of his shirt and pushed him up ahead of her, like a mother viperwolf carrying her cub. He scrambled to the top, and Bohan climbed out after him before turning around to help O'Donnell. Quaritch, last in line, brought the lantern in, and its light flooded a giant, roughly pyramid-shaped hollow in the earth.
This cavern was very different from the others. It was full of hexagonal crystals, some of them as big as a Na'Vi, with a shiny yellow metal that had formed around and inside them like moss, although it was not alive. Tuk's favourite tunnel was just beyond this and up a short vertical face. Neteyam stood on the side of one crystal that had fallen over and pointed up.
"See that?" he asked, as the light from their lamps shimmered off something in between the crystals, something translucent and in constant motion. "Those are the snotworms." He reached down and picked up a large insect that had been scuttling across the floor – the humans called them stone weevils, for their habit of drilling into soft rocks to make places to lay their eggs – and threw it at the ceiling. It didn't go as far as he expected, but that didn't matter to the stretchy snotworms. Several darted down, and one snatched the insect out of the air.
Neteyam was fairly pleased with this demonstration, but when he turned to see what the recoms thought, he found them distracted by the cave's mineral contents. O'Donnell had crouched down next to a crystal and was running a hand along the shiny metal.
"Do you guys see what I see?" he asked.
"I think I do," said Bohan. "I'm seeing a lot of it."
O'Donnell took another device out of his bag – this one projected a blue-purplish light, almost painful to look at and unpleasantly reminiscent of that blue light that had preceded Neteyam waking up in this human body. The machine made a burbling sound, and some information came up on its screen, all numbers that meant nothing to Neteyam, but must have meant something very important to O'Donnell, because he swore.
"Do you know what that is?" he asked Neteyam, pointing to it.
"Metal," Neteyam replied. "Some of the clans use it to make beads."
"Mark it on the map and let's move on," said Quaritch.
But O'Donnell was fixated on this discovery. "We gotta take some back with us or nobody's gonna believe it," he declared. He picked up a stone and tried to break a piece of metal-encrusted crystal off by hitting it. It took several blows for it to start coming loose, and he raised his makeshift hammer for another try, then suddenly dropped it and shrieked like a female thanator in heat. Bohan yelped in alarm and pointed at something, and Quaritch pulled out a large knife, meant for hacking through the jungle, and used it to spear a centipede-like creature as long as a Na'vi's arm.
Neteyam knew what that was, though not what the humans called them. They had pincers in front that they used to grab prey, but it was their venomous fangs that immobilized their victims. This one had bitten O'Donnell in the leg, its powerful jaws going right through the thick fabric of his trousers. He was gritting his teeth and whimpering as the pain crawled up his leg.
Neteyam's hand went immediately for his knife, but of course he didn't have it. They hadn't given him any weapons. Lucky the recoms had them. He squeezed between Bohan and Quaritch and tore O'Donnell's trousers to expose the injury, which was already swelling. The photophores around the bite were pulsing as the neurotoxin took effect.
"Cut it open," he told Bohan. "Don't let the venom get any further."
"We'll do a tourniquet!" Bohan was already taking her backpack off to find supplies in it, but then she got to her feet and pointed. "There's another one!"
Neteyam looked, and felt his stomach twist as first one, then two, then four more of the shiny black arthropods scurried out from under the crystal. That wasn't right. The only time these creatures congregated was when they were protecting their eggs, but that happened in early spring, and right now it was...
... he had no idea what time of year it was. He didn't know how much time had passed between the night his siblings had been taken prisoner and the day he'd woken up on that table. It might have been months. "It's a nest," he said. "We need to get out."
He stood and moved to grab O'Donnell's arm, intending to hoist the man over his shoulder and carry him out, but in that adrenaline-fuelled moment Neteyam had forgotten how small he was. He couldn't possibly do that. Bohan dragged the man to his feet and pushed Neteyam towards the opening they'd come in by.
"Get out of here," she said. "We've got him."
Neteyam went to start climbing back down, and heard a clang of metal on stone. More of the arthropods were scuttling over the crystals to face down what they believed were predators trying to dig up their eggs and larvae. Quaritch was fending them off with both his machete and his boots. Their shells made sickening crunching sounds when he crushed them, and their watery insides glowed green when exposed to the air.
"You heard me! Beat it!" Bohan repeated. She was holding O'Donnell up with both arms, so to get Neteyam moving she gave him a gentle but still forceful kick. He stumbled forward into the descending passageway.
His foot in the heavy shoes slipped on the first damp stone and he fell down several of the steplike ledges, banging elbows and knees on the rocks and scraping his shoulder painfully against the wall. As he righted himself, he heard O'Donnell cry out again. It sounded like they were right behind him, so he quickly scrambled down to the bottom out of the way. A moment later, Bohan dragged O'Donnell out after him. Quaritch came last, his machete smeared with the glowing insides of the arthropods.
"Okay," said Bohan, opening a first aid kit. "How many bites did you get?"
"Just the two," O'Donnell said through his teeth. In the harsh light of Quaritch's lantern, his face was contorted by pain. "Both on the leg." He took several deep breaths, trying not to hyperventilate, then suddenly screamed again and grabbed at his side. Bohan rolled him over and found another arthropod, which must have climbed his body or clung to his backpack. She kicked at it, but its many legs held on.
"Stop that!" Quaritch ordered, and drove his machete through the animal. The point clanked as it blunted on the stone beneath, and the blade barely missed O'Donnell's ribs. The arthropod continued to writhe and twitch for several seconds before it died.
Bohan leaned over O'Donnell again. "Tim, look at me," she ordered, as he struggled to breathe. "Eyes open. I'm going to give you an analgesic."
It was too late for that, though. The bits in the leg – those weren't necessarily fatal, although two of them might require an amputation. The one in the side, however, was paralyzing his diaphragm. His breathing got worse and worse, air squeaking in his throat as he fought to inhale.
"Eyes open!" Bohan repeated, fitting a needle to a syringe.
Foam bubbled up at O'Donnell's lips, and he went limp, his head sagging back into Bohan's lap. Neteyam looked away. O'Donnell was one of his enemies, and had insulted Neteyam a couple of times... but he hadn't done anything that deserved such a painful death, and Neteyam hadn't planned on any of these people dying. All he'd wanted to do was find Tuk's tunnel and escape, and he'd been so focused on that, he'd totally forgotten that the arthropods used the caves as nesting grounds. He should have asked about the season...
A large hand came down on Neteyam's shoulder. He paused in his thoughts and looked up into a bright light. It was Quaritch's lantern.
Quaritch seized Neteyam's arm and yanked him roughly to his feet, as if to pull his arm from its socket. "What did I tell you before we left?" he growled.
"I didn't do it on purpose," Neteyam said. "I didn't know they were there, and even if I had, he would have been okay if he hadn't started hammering on their nest!"
"Like hell you didn't know!" said Quaritch. "What did I say about bones, huh?"
"I didn't..." Neteyam started to repeat, then cut himself off with a sharp gasp as Quaritch took him by the wrist and twisted it. Something inside made a snapping sound, and a lance of pain slashed through it, almost as bad as the phantom pain in his tail. Quaritch let him go, and he took an involuntary step backwards before stumbling over something that turned out to be O'Donnell's limp arm. He fell onto his knees.
"I can do worse than that!" Quaritch told him. "Look at him. Look at him."
He was pointing at O'Donnell's corpse. Neteyam didn't look. He gripped his injured right wrist with his left hand, and raised his head to stare defiantly back at Quaritch, even though he knew that wouldn't help.
"We're leaving," Quaritch ordered. "Now. Bohan, can you carry him?"
"I think so," she said.
"Then do it. They'll want to extract any more memories they can before bringing him back." Quaritch pulled out his holopad and brought up the map they'd made so far, then shoved Neteyam ahead of them. "You go first. Then if you lead us into any more death traps, you'll be the one who has to step into them."
For a moment, Neteyam thought about just running. Having to carry O'Donnell would make them slow. They might let him get away in favour of saving their own lives. He couldn't go back to Tuk's tunnel now, though, because Quaritch was blocking the way. There were other ways out, but they didn't seem like good options, either. Neteyam could drop down the well shaft and let the river take him away, but that was dangerous at the best of times and he didn't know how long this body could hold its breath. He could scale the lava tube to where a crack let in sunlight, but not with only one functional wrist.
He felt paralyzed, as if he were the one slowly succumbing to venom. Nothing Neteyam had used to be able to do would help him now. He couldn't climb, he couldn't throw a ball, he'd slipped and fallen more than once in crossing a river and wandering through a cave he'd been exploring since childhood. He couldn't do anything except get up and lead the way out, as he'd been told.
Earlier they'd been moving slowly, stopping to scan, to make notes, and to point out dangers or items of interest. Getting out of the caves was much quicker. It seemed only minutes later they were at the exit, the sun now high overhead and the woman called Kontopoulos waiting for them at the waterfall. That had been enough time, though, for Neteyam's wrist to really start to hurt, and for the skin to get warm and tight as the inflamed tissues swelled up. He was going to need to see a doctor.
"What the hell happened?" Konstopoulos asked, as Bohan staggered out with O'Donnell's body on her back.
"Call the Kestrel, Georgia," Quaritch ordered, without explaining. "We're going back."
Those words made Neteyam's chest squeeze as he realized the ramifications – they were going back. He'd lost his only chance to escape. The Sky People would never trust him again, because Quaritch was going to tell them he'd led O'Donnell into the arthropod nest on purpose. Quaritch hadn't believed Neteyam when he'd said it wasn't on purpose, and neither would Bush or anybody else except possibly Nguyen, and even she was likely to say he'd done it subconsciously. They were going to keep him locked up and constantly supervised, like Bohan had said they did to her. He might never see the sky again.
Again, Neteyam thought about running, but Konstopoulos was following them with a weapon in her hands, and Quaritch was keeping on eye on Neteyam as he waved down the flying machine and he and Bohan heaved O'Donnell's limp remains into it. Running wouldn't get Neteyam far. They would shoot him down at once, or outpace him easily on their much longer legs. The time to flee would have been in the caves, but he'd missed it.
He couldn't go back, not to a prison he had no hope of ever getting out of again. Just thinking about it made Neteyam feel like he was suffocating. He didn't have a choice, though. Konstopolous and Quaritch were aiming guns at his back as Bohan reached down to take his arm – the left one, with the undamaged wrist – and helped him in. She strapped O'Donnell into a seat and sat down across from him, next to Neteyam. There she did not look at him, but stared over her left shoulder, away from the corpse.
The flying machine lifted off. As they rose past the branches, Neteyam could look down and see the other two recoms stowing their weapons before calling their banshees to follow.
Something nudged his shoulder. Bohan was offering him another set of headphones. Clumsy with only one hand, he took them and put them on.
"I didn't do it on purpose," he repeated into the artificial quiet. He hadn't tried to hurt anyone. He'd just wanted to escape.
"I believe you," said Bohan.
"You do?" he asked, surprised.
"Yeah," she said. "You were as surprised as any of us. Nobody else is gonna think that, though."
"I know." Neteyam looked out the window again, but barely saw anything. The ground was flickering by under them. It had been a fairly long flight out, but he had a horrible feeling that, like the trip through the caves, it would be much faster going back. "What are they going to do to me?"
Bohan shrugged, and looked out at the sky again. Quaritch was following on his banshee. The animal's wings came down in strong strokes, putting on speed to rise above the loud machine.
"You've ridden one of those," said Bohan. "You must know what to do if you fall off."
Neteyam sat up straighter. "Yeah," he said. Of course he did. Mother had taught him how to catch himself and reach the ground without major injuries. Could he still do that? With a broken wrist to demonstrate the truth of what Quaritch had said about brittle human bones, with a body now smaller than animals he'd once been able to overpower, without a weapon, not knowing if he were capable of even climbing a wall...
... the alternative, however, was going back to Site Nine, and he couldn't do that. This was the last chance for escape he was ever going to get. He took off his harness and pulled his headphones and com choker off. For a moment he met Bohan's eyes, and saw her finger flick a button on her handrest, unlocking the doors.
Neteyam threw them open and, without stopping to look down, threw himself out.
"Colonel!" he heard Bohan shriek. "The little bastard just com..." but the end of the sentence was ripped away from his ears by the wind.
The feeling of falling was almost like that of flying, and a thrilled rush passed through Neteyam's body for a moment before the things his mother had taught him took over. He could almost hear her voice telling him to spread out his arms and legs, give his body as much surface area as possible. Keep his eyes open despite the wind so he could see where he was going... that wasn't even a problem with the breathing mask on. Find a parachute tree, they were a particular shade of green...
There was one, its person-sized leaves swaying in the light breeze. Neteyam tilted his body to steer, aiming for the biggest and broadest of the leaves, the one best able to break his fall.
For a terrible moment he feared he was going to miss it. This smaller body didn't have as much air resistance as he was used to. He was falling too fast and he couldn't control his direction as well as he would have liked. At the last moment, however, he hit the edge of the leaf and rolled off it, falling onto the next one down.
Here, he impacted too close to the trunk, and instead of sliding off the leaf he tumbled into the crook of the stem, dislodging a bromeliad that was growing in the crotch. The stem snapped, and he was showered in the water and decaying plant material that had collected in the bromeliad's pool. From there he fell backwards onto another leaf, breaking that one, too.
On the fourth, Neteyam finally managed to catch a leaf properly and slide off, but then the whole broken mess came down on top of him. Something hit his wrist, calling him to hiss in pain, and he continued to crash through branches and scare flying animals from their roosts. Finally he hit the ground with the same bone-shaking impact as when he'd fallen from the climbing wall, landing in a patch of fungus that responded by throwing off a cloud of spores. He rolled out of the way, not wanting to breathe them in, and slid down a muddy hill to finally come to a stop among a patch of helicoradians, all of which immediately retreated into their shells.
There he lay for a moment, gasping for air. Somehow his breathing mask hadn't come off, although it was askew and he could smell a bit of sulphur. With his good left hand he reached to straighten it, and then let the arm drop across his chest as he passed out.