Neteyam woke up very early the next morning. The sun had not yet risen, but its light reflected from the giant planet to light up the jungle almost as bright as dawn. The titanotheres had left hours ago, but other animals were rustling and calling in the foliage, and there was the familiar sense of peace that Neteyam always felt when waking up early, before the village truly came to life.
Into that moment of tranquil comfort came the unpleasant memories. The village was in ruins, half of it burned to bare ground, and remembering hurt almost as much as it had the day he'd first learned about it. The People had gone to High Camp, where not much light got into the caves and the only animal noises were those made by the banshees. Somehow, Neteyam still had to get there.
Before he could do that, however, he had to find water and food. He began to sit up, and groaned out loud. Everything hurt.
When he'd come to at the base of the parachute tree the previous morning, Neteyam had been in some pain. All those injuries seemed to have doubled overnight. His right wrist was uncomfortably swollen, the skin tight and flushed. Moving it was out of the question. His scraped shoulder felt unnaturally warm. His forehead and temples ached, and the places were the straps of his breathing mask rested were itchy. Neteyam reached with his good hand to scratch, and found the skin on his forehead unexpectedly tender. The same was true of the back of his neck, and the tops of his shoulders and arms – the areas that had been warm and ruddy yesterday now stung when touched. When he sat up, his ribs felt like they were stabbing into him. His tail still hurt, and his stomach was so empty that it, too, felt painful.
Even so, he said a thanks to Eywa for his survival through the night. Then he struggled to his feet and tried to stretch, but couldn't do so because his ribs hurt too much. His head swam a bit as he straightened up, but that went away after a few seconds. Neteyam was grateful for that. He had a long way to go today, and he wouldn't be able to climb the floating mountains while dizzy.
The idea of climbing still made him shiver. Neteyam told himself that Nguyen was probably right: he just hadn't taken proper precautions in climbing that stupid wall, and if he tried again, he would do much better. But he hadn't been able to try it, and after fumbling and barely surviving his drop from the flying machine, he felt worse about it than ever. What if he tried and he failed, again and again and again? Lo'ak often failed at things on the first try, but he would succeed on the second or third. Neteyam had always been the one who got it right the first time, and the idea of never getting it right made him feel sick.
That moment of nausea reminded him that he was hungry – food and water would settle his stomach and help his headache. He could worry about that now, and the rest later.
There was a pitcher leaf plant growing not far away. Neteyam bent the stems to drink the water that collected there, as Mother had taught him. Water was not a problem.
Food might be. When Neteyam thought about it, he was pretty sure he'd seen Spider eat fish with them. Catching fish was one thing Neteyam knew for sure he could do – he'd been doing it since he was very young. That had been part of his dreams last night, hadn't it? He'd dreamed that he was standing on the stream bank with Dad, shooting fish. Dad had towered over him... was that because Neteyam in the dream had been a child, or had he been a human?
It didn't matter. Neteyam didn't have a bow now, but he had the knife he'd borrowed from the village site, and he could use that. He'd have to do it with his left hand, since his right wrist was now absolutely useless, but it couldn't be that hard.
He followed the sound of moving water to a stream, and found a place where it pooled enough for fish. There he crouched for a while, letting his eyes learn to ignore the reflections on the surface in favour of the weeds and creatures moving around beneath. He could soon make out the fronds of charniamorphs and the little insect larvae scooting around, and then spotted something more like what he was looking for.
It was a creature the humans called a legged eel, long and flat but with six tiny limbs that it used to cling to the reeds it liked to hide in. They had a fierce bite, but their meat was flavourful and full of vitamins – as Mother had used to tell Kiri when she'd refused to eat it as a child.
Neteyam moved a bit so he wouldn't cast a shadow on the water to warn the animal of his presence, and tightened his grip on the knife. He'd done this before, though with a spear rather than a handheld blade. That was fine, he would simply have to adapt the technique. When catching something that wriggled, a hunter had to get it near the mouth so it couldn't bite. If Neteyam could get a finger in the eel's gills, he could hold onto that and it wouldn't be able to reach him with either its teeth or its tiny legs. Then he could cut its head off and bank the rest in the embers of a fire.
The eel dashed out and snapped up an amphibian, then retracted itself into its hiding place by tugging on the weeds with its little legs. Now, while it was subduing its struggling prey, was the perfect time. Neteyam's hand darted out.
In his head, the strike was perfect – he caught the eel by the gill, dragged it out onto the shore, then pinned it with a foot and cut its head off with the knife. All one, fluid, easy motion, just like he'd done a thousand times before.
The reality didn't work out quite so well. He grabbed the eel as he'd planned, but it was bigger and stronger than he remembered. Twisting against his grip, it ripped itself free, then turned around and sank its fangs into his hand. Neteyam yelped and kicked at it, which unbalanced him and he fell on his side in the water, his ribs feeling like he'd fallen on thorns. The splash was enough to scare the eel into letting go, and it flashed away through the weeds, leaving Neteyam knee-deep in the pool with his hand bleeding from several long, raking slices.
He said several words Mother would not have approved of, and squirmed back up on the bank to try to do something with his hand. He should have kept the shirt he'd been wearing – he could have torn it into bandages. The fabric of his tank top was all wrong for that purpose. All Neteyam could do was wash the wounds in the water, moving quickly so that the taste of the blood wouldn't attract more eels, then pull his face mask up to lick the wounds clean as best he could.
He'd been an idiot again. Of course the eel seemed abnormally large and powerful. It was the ordinary size, but Neteyam himself was half as big as he'd used to be. As when he'd tried to climb the wall and failed, he hadn't taken account of his new body before trying to do something that normally wasn't dangerous. Now he was injured in both hands, which was going to be very bad if he needed to defend himself from something larger than an eel.
Neteyam sat there on the moss a lot longer than he should have, scowling at his injuries and at the sting where the rising sun shone on his arms and back. He remembered now why those were painful – he'd been thinking about it just yesterday. The azuline in the People's skin reflected away the bad parts of sunlight that would otherwise have burned them. Dad had explained once that humans didn't have that, and so had to be careful about spending much time in the sun. Spider painted himself with woad partially so that he would look more like the other kids, but also partly so he wouldn't get sunburned. Neteyam had forgotten that, too.
It was something he wouldn't have allowed himself to feel back in Site Nine, where he was always being watched and he wanted the humans to think he was tough. But here, alone in the middle of the jungle... Neteyam felt small. He felt useless. He couldn't do the simplest damned things. Neteyam wanted to go home. He wanted his old body back, he wanted to be able to do stuff again, and the emotion almost overwhelmed him. He reached up to swipe away the tears in his eyes, only to realize he couldn't even do that because of the breathing mask.
Neteyam took a deep breath and pulled the mask off so he could wipe his face and nose, then put it back on again. A deep breath gave him another whiff of sulphur. Even the air, he thought again.
He sat there for a long time, taking deep, shuddering breaths and trying to ignore the pain of his various injuries. He was the oldest. He had to act like it. He couldn't cry, not even out here with nobody watching, not even when he'd failed at what should have been an easy task and now he was going to have to go hungry. How was he ever going to get to High Camp when he couldn't climb, couldn't feed himself, couldn't even fall out of a tree? It would have been so much easier if there'd still been friendly humans at Hell's Gate.
But there weren't. The only alternatives to going on were either letting the people from Site Nine find him – and they'd surely never let him out of their sight again – or just sitting down right here and starving to death. Neteyam was not willing to do either of those things. That meant he had to go on, and just figure things out as they came.
He got to his feet and washed off his injuries one more time. The eel was no longer visible among the plats in the pool. Either it had left, or it was watching him from hiding. His stomach gurgled, but he had nothing to give it. He returned to the sacred tree and took its tendrils in his hand one last time, then set off towards the floating mountains.
A kilometre or so from the tree, Neteyam found himself in a familiar place again – a Sturmbeest migration route, where the ground had been pounded bare by countless centuries of lumbering feet. Trees could not take root here despite the fertile droppings, leaving a wide trail through the jungle, coated with ferns, grasses, and other small, resilient plants. That led in roughly the right direction and was easier to navigate than the woods, so Neteyam followed it, though he kept to the shade of the canopy on the edges so as not to be seen from above. It wasn't just the Sky People and their machines he would have to worry about. An individual walking in the open would be a target for aerial predators as well.
As he walked, he noticed a plant with thick, flat leaves – another familiar sight. Grandma Mo'at had taught the children to squeeze the centres out of those to relieve the pain of wounds. Applying the sap smarted terribly for the first few seconds, but then the pain would ease and the area would go numb for a while. Neteyam moved towards it, thinking the poor plant might not have enough leaves for all his injuries...
... then he stopped.
Had Spider ever used this stuff? There were surely forms of medicine Neteyam would no longer be able to use, any more than he could eat anything the People ate, because his body was different. He remembered an incident when Kiri had tried to treat an injury on Spider and it hadn't turned out very well... but once again, Neteyam couldn't remember the details. Had that been this plant?
After a few reluctant moments, he decided to leave it. It wasn't worth the risk. Neteyam turned away, only to realize he was about to step on a very large forest centipede. Those were not only venomous, they would crunch unpleasantly under bare feet. He tried to avoid it, but the twisting motion involved pulled on the muscles attached to his sore ribs, and he stumbled and fell, banging one knee painfully on a stone. It was all Neteyam could do not to swear out loud. He put out his hands to catch himself, but did so on his bad wrist, and that hurt so badly his vision went white.
The world swam back into view a few moments later. The centipede was gone, and Neteyam's injuries hurt worse than ever. He picked himself up, and went back for the numbing plant.
When he squished a leave experimentally between his fingers, the pulp inside oozed out, shiny and transparent from the dark green tissues. It looked harmless enough. Neteyam got some on his fingertips and smeared it over his aching ribs. As expected, both those and his fingers stung at first, and he waited to see if it would go away.
It did not. In fact, within seconds the skin began to itch fiercely and turn red. He tried to wipe it off on his trousers, but that didn't seem to help, and horrifyingly, within a few minutes the skin on his hand and chest had started to blister. Neteyam threw the leaf away and found a puddle of water to try to wash the sap away. Even then, the itching remained.
He was starting to wonder if he were going to make it anywhere near the floating mountains.
After that, Neteyam decided he was definitely not going to try touching any plant or animal again. Apparently this body was just not capable. What were his parents going to say when he got back to them? Their eldest son, who'd always made them proud, could no longer do anything. Even if they believed it was him, even if Mother didn't look at him with the same distaste as at Spider, would they really want him back when he was clearly going to do nothing but disappoint them?
Even so, as he'd already observed he had no other real choice but to keep going, so he did. Several times, as the day passed, he noticed small animals he could have tried to catch, or fruit that was dangling there temptingly, but he always resisted. Right now Neteyam needed human food and nothing else, at least until he had a good understanding of what would and wouldn't hurt him.
The itching from the sap began to subside a little as he got into the foothills, where the terrain was rougher and the going harder, though the blisters remained painful. By sunset he was ravenous, thirsty, and his muscles were burning. He kept thinking back to Nguyen telling him that he had to build up to more strenuous activities because his body was still new... she would be shaking her head in disgust right now.
The most sensible thing for him to do now would be to find somewhere safe to spend the night. The hills below the floating mountains were full of caverns and cracks that predators might find it hard to get into. He knew Eywa was looking out for him. That was probably the only reason he'd made it this far. As long as Neteyam didn't do anything remarkably stupid, he ought to be fine.
Then again, over the past couple of days he'd done a lot of things that had turned out to be remarkably stupid once he'd actually tried them, or once his memory was jogged, starting with thinking he was going to Hell's Gate. There was no telling when the next mistake would be his last.
The mountains themselves were so close. A few of the smaller outlying peaks were right overhead, jagged black shapes against a sky bright with sunset. If Neteyam kept going, he might make it to High Camp by morning. There he would find help: food, medicine, rest, and a place where he could take off the increasingly uncomfortable breathing mask.
Of course, he might also fall to his death. There was still a long way to go, and unlike parachute trees or climbing walls, the mountains were in constant motion.
Neteyam decided to keep going. The climbing was hard work, especially with only one hand able to grip tightly, and he was soon breathing hard. This body had lived all its short life at Site Nine, which was not far above sea level. Neteyam had been gaining altitude all day, and the journey was getting steeper and steeper. His breathing apparatus couldn't extract oxygen as efficiently up here. Stopping to acclimatize would be a good idea.
But he continued. It was as if climbing were the default, and stopping something he would have to put effort into, rather than the opposite. Neteyam knew the mountains well, so it didn't take long for him to find one of the paths the young warriors used when heading up to tame their banshees. The ledges they had to climb were wider than he remembered, but for once that size difference worked in his favour – the extra space made it harder to fall. At the same time, the stone was much harder on his feet than the soil of the forest, and they were soon hurting worse than ever.
When he sat down for a rest, Neteyam checked the soles of his feet. They were soft, with the skin of a body that had always worn shoes. More blisters were coming up, on the heel and the ball of the foot. These were bigger than the ones on his fingers and his side from the medicinal plant, but at least they did not itch.
As he stood up again, the muscles in his arms and legs protested with twinges of pain. Neteyam felt like he was physically falling apart. Nothing in his life had ever been so difficult or painful for him, and he hated it. His old body was dead, but wasn't there any way he could get back to one like it? There had to be. If the Sky People could make him this one, if they could make avatar bodies for Quaritch and Bohan and the rest of them, there had to be away they could make another body for Neteyam – they simply wouldn't. Nguyen had said there were rules against it, and Neteyam dimly remembered Prisha Patel telling him that the humans at High Camp weren't capable. They hadn't even been able to do that when they were at Hell's Gate, because if they had, Spider would surely have insisted on having an avatar.
That was a gloomy thought. Even when he was out of their direct control, Neteyam was still very much the Sky People's prisoner.
Despite his protesting muscles, Neteyam continued on up as the sky grew darker. The planet was setting – tonight one be one of the rare, dark nights when the gas giant passed between Pandora and the sun. People on the far side of the world would see the great eclipse, while the ones on this side would have only the stars, the aurora, and the bioluminescence. That was still more light than Dad had said humans got on their home world, where there was only one dim moon, but it was less than Neteyam would have liked. He was aware that humans didn't see very well in the dark.
The climb took much longer on foot than it would have by direhorse, and longer still on feet that hurt, but after hours of exertion Neteyam reached the top of the last spire. There, the floating mountains truly began. Small boulders tangled in vines were making endless lazy circles in the magnetic field overhead, like vulturehawks circling a carcass. Despite the gaps in his memory, Neteyam could remember with great clarity the running leap he'd taken to grab a vine on his way up to tame Pawk. There was no way he was going to be able to repeat that feat now. Not with shorter legs, both hands hurting, and blistered feet. He would have to wait until one got really close.
His opportunity came when a knot of tangled vines slid directly across the top of the spire he was standing on, momentarily catching on a twisted tree. Neteyam braced himself and flexed his good wrist, timed it as best he could, and threw his arms and legs around the dangling plants. For a moment his grip slid, and the memory of landing on his back on the mat below the climbing wall seemed to run through his body like a physical impact. He tightened his grip even as his abused muscles protested, and then he was dangling in space, the bottom of the vine swaying like a pendulum below him with the bioluminescent forest spread out beneath.
A moment of sheer exhilaration passed through him, temporarily washing his exhaustion away. He'd done it! He could still do things! He just needed practice, needed to remember how long his limbs were and how high he could jump. He was getting better!
It was a good thing, too, because there was nowhere to go now except up.
The large slab of floating stone at the top of the first vine rocked back and forth under his weight as Neteyam scrambled up on top of it. A tail would have been very helpful in getting his balance there, but Neteyam eventually stood up straight and was able to look down at the landscape slowly rotating below him. Feeling on top of the world, he pumped his good arm in the air and let out a whoop of joy. It might take him all night to get to the top, but he was going to do it. He was closer than ever.
Neteyam waited for another vine to pass by and then grabbed it, less clumsily this time. If he paid attention, he could learn quickly. He headed up.
Progress was now even more painfully slow, partly because it really was painful. Neteyam's right wrist was only getting worse, swelling up so that he could not bend the joint or even wiggle the fingers. The best he could do with that arm was to clamp his elbow around vines, or wedge it into a crack in the stones so tightly it cut off the circulations and lever himself up. His shoulders, both the injured and uninjured ones, quickly became sore from the exertion.
He really should have tried that climbing wall. Rather than rushing to escape as quickly as possible, Neteyam ought to have heeded Nguyen's advice that his body was still new, and spent some time practising and building up his strength. Too late now.
He climbed from boulder to boulder until he reached a relatively stable line of larger rocks, like beads on a string. The vines here were broad and woody enough to walk along the tops of them, and that, too, was actually easier in this smaller body. He began to hop from vine to boulder to vine with something approaching his familiar agility.
Finally he found himself on one of the mountains proper, one big enough to have a name – the People called it Zekwä, the Finger, because it was long and narrow. It hung in the sky at a steep angle, so that he had to crawl along it on all fours as he went higher and higher. From its peak, cold high-altitude winds whipped Neteyam's hair and made his skin, damp with mist and sweat, prickle. Ahead of him, lit by the auroras, were the rest of the mountains, rippling with bioluminescent vegetation. After watching for a few moments, he realized there were also tiny points of light that was warm orange instead of cool blue-green. Those would be fires, not from High Camp itself, but from sentries posted in the surrounding mountains. He was almost there.
The moons drifted slowly across the sky as Neteyam continued. Sighting the fires had given him a second wind, but it didn't last. In the high thin air, he just couldn't keep up the pace he wanted. More and more often, he was having to sit down and spend a few minutes taking the deepest breaths his breathing mask could provide him with while the ache slowly leeched out of his muscles. These little breaks would make him feel better, but the pain and breathlessness seemed to return right away when he stood up. It began to feel like he was making no progress at all, and Neteyam started counting his steps – he had to take at least forty, he decided, before he could sit down again.
On the last of these rests, he had to sit there for what seemed like an awfully long time with the taste of blood in his mouth, breathing hard and yet unable to get enough air. Something in him desperately wanted to just rip of the mask off and breathe real air, and as much as he knew that was impossible it was a difficult urge to fight. Maybe he should just find a place to sleep and carry on in the morning.
But when he looked up and saw the fires again, Neteyam knew he couldn't do that. Stopping now would be almost like giving up. He didn't have to make it all the way to High Camp. Getting the attention of one of the sentries would be enough. Provided the lookout didn't shoot him on sight, he would be able to ask for help.
"Come on," he said aloud to himself. "You can do it. You're so close." Maybe when he arrived, somebody would be impressed that he'd managed it, alone and in this unfamiliar body. He heaved himself, slowly and stiffly, to his feet, and squinted at the flickering of the nearest sentry fire. The orange light appeared and disappeared again as the rocks moved around in the magnetic field, and it was hard to tell how far away it was. Was he close enough to call out to whoever was there?
It was worth a try. He tried to cup his hands around his mouth, but the mask was in the way, so he simply shouted at the top of his lungs: "Hello! Hello! Can you hear me?"
He heard a distant echo from the rocks, but no actual reply. Too far, then. He would just have to keep going.
Neteyam took several deep breaths in preparation, and was about to keep climbing when he heard the thunder of wings. He spun around, automatically dropping into a defensive position, and pulled the knife from his belt – just in time, as a banshee landed behind him.
He had seen the banshees in the hangar at Site Nine, and had watched them interact with the recoms, but at no point had Neteyam been close enough to get a real sense of how large they were. Banshees were a little bigger than a direhorse. When they they were on the ground or perched on a tree, their heads were higher than a person's, but not by much, and even knowing he was smaller, he still thought of them as that size.
The one that had alighted behind him now was enormous. It seemed as big as a sturmbeest, and it didn't help to think about that and realize how monstrous a real sturmbeest would have looked from this new viewpoint. The spiracles around its neck flared as it crawled towards him, extending a head that could have bitten him in half. It was like being face-to-face with toruk.
"Get back!" Neteyam ordered, holding up his knife, but he felt foolish doing so. He was so tiny, this creature would never be scared of him. "I said get away!"
Then he looked again. The banshee was a female, the green and yellow colour morph – and the shapes picked out by the photophores on its wings were curiously familiar. A sudden, vivid memory of running his fingers over them, connecting the dots into constellations, made the hair on the back of Neteyam's neck stand up.
"Pawk?" he asked.
The banshee snorted and opened its mouth to let scent into the vomeronasal organ, and Neteyam's heart quickened. It was Pawk! Did she recognize him? She must – she'd appeared after he'd shouted. She'd heard his voice! What was she doing here? Hadn't Neteyam taken her with him when he'd gone with his family to the eastern islands? Or... after his death, she must have returned to her flock, and now here she was.
"Pawk." Neteyam lowered the knife. "It's me. You know me." He put the knife back in his belt and reached out with his swollen left hand, not wanting to risk the right.
The banshee came a tiny bit closer, then flinched away, then leaned in again. She breathed in Neteyam's scent and tilted her head from side to side, taking in this strange creature that spoke like her partner.
"Mawey," said Neteyam gently. "Mawey, ma Pawk."
He wasn't sure what he planned to do next. He couldn't ride her when he couldn't make tsaheylu to tell her where to go. The thought of that made his heart feel like a knot in his chest, as when he'd realized he could no longer connect to the Sacred Tree. But Pawk was here, and Neteyam was longing for some kind of link to his old life. If he could touch her, if he could make her understand that it was him... she seemed just on the verge of getting it...
Then she suddenly reared up, trumpeting like the instrument he'd named her for. Neteyam stumbled backwards in surprise, and dropped to the ground moments ahead of Pawk lashing out with her teeth. She was confused. The being in front of her sounded like Neteyam but did not look or smell like him, and had not offered his queue. She didn't know what to do about it.
"Stop!" Neteyam ordered her. "Ma Pawk, ftang!"
Pawk appeared to balk, but then crawled towards him again. Neteyam realized he was perilously close to the edge of the mountain, and rolled forwards, trying to go underneath her. He hissed in pain where his injured shoulder hit the rocks.
Movement towards her startled Pawk, and she hopped into the air with a shriek. Neteyam sat up and watched her silhouette climb into the brightening sky. Was she leaving? He knew that was safer, but part of him desperately hoped she would stay. Unfortunately, she did. She wheeled around and dove at him again.
Neteyam scrambled away, but he was not fast enough. She came down on top of him, and pinned him with one wing. Her entire weight went right through his chest onto the sharp rocks under him, and the big claw on her thumb, while not a sharp talon, dug into him painfully. He could barely breathe. His ribs were on fire. Pawk leaned down, and he could feel the hot breath from her spiracles.
"Pawk, stop!" he ordered, just begging her to listen. With his chest compressed and painful, the words came out in a whisper. Neteyam could not die here, he thought, crushed by this creature he loved. He could not.
Then he heard the sound of gunfire, loud and terrifyingly close. Pawk squawked in surprise, and the weight was off Neteyam's back as she turned to face this new threat. He took the deep breaths the pressure had denied him, and then tried to get up and confront whoever had found them.
He found, however, that he could barely move. He wasn't injured any worse than he had been, besides possibly being badly bruised, but he was exhausted and hungry and breathless and in pain, and somehow being forced flat on his face on cold stone a kilometre up in the sky had been the last straw. His body simply refused.
"Stop, stop!" he pleaded as the gun fired again. He tried to shout, but the words came out in a hoarse whisper "Don't hurt her!"
Neteyam felt the rocks shake as another banshee landed. From his viewpoint lying on the ground, he could see tails and wings moving and hear snapping and hissing, but couldn't make much sense of it. A voice shouted similar words to ones he'd been saying a moment ago: stop, go away, leave that alone! With a shriek, one banshee and then the other leaped into the air again, and they were gone, leaving Neteyam lying there in the full light of the rising sun.
A pair of bare blue feet appeared in his field of vision, walking towards him. Their owner knelt down, and a hand touched Neteyam's back.
"Are you alive?" a voice asked in awkward English. "Can you hear?"
Neteyam's eyes didn't want to focus, but he forced them to take in the speaker's face. It was familiar, but he couldn't put a name to her at first, other than a feeling it started with a p sound. She must have been one of the sentries. Maybe she'd heard him after all.
The woman put a hand to her neck – she was wearing a comm choker. "This is Pa'ay," he heard her say in Na'Vi. Of course, he knew Pa'ay! She was Va'ru's mate, and one of the best far-seers among the Omatikaya. She hadn't heard Neteyam, she'd noticed Pawk taking an interest in something unseen, and had gone to investigate. "I've found a human child in the mountains," she said. "It is alone and injured."
Neteyam could not hear whatever reply was made, but Pa'ay promised that she was on her way. She knelt down and picked Neteyam up, slinging him over her shoulder like a hexapede carcass. Then she whistled, and her own banshee returned to let her climb onto its back.
"I will take you to your own kind," she told Neteyam.
Terror sliced through him. Did that mean back to Hell's Gate, or somewhere else where he'd be a prisoner again? He couldn't allow that. "High Camp," he rasped out. "I need to go to High Camp!"
He felt a twitch run through her as she was startled he knew the place – or perhaps just that he spoke the language. "Srane," she said. "I'll take you to High Camp."
The banshee launched into the air, and Neteyam closed his eyes. He was safe now... he'd just have to explain to the humans at High Camp who he was and what he was doing here. That was a terrifying thought, but he knew that they, at least, weren't going to hurt him.