Without speaking, Dr. Nguyen finished her coffee, then set the mug on the floor and pushed it under her chair. Then she sat back, folding her arms over her chest.
"I'm sure you can guess how this is supposed to work," she said. "Bush has done the 'bad cop' half of the routine, yelling and threatening. I'm here to be the 'good cop' and try to persuade to tell us something after all, to save yourselves from him. He doesn't actually want to send you to Bridgehead for the Neurosect people to work on. That'll just make him look like he couldn't handle you himself. It's embarrassing. He likes to be a big man who can do anything. Fragile masculinity. Every man on this planet thinks he's expected to be a hero."
That included Neteyam, didn't it? – and like the rest of them, he couldn't measure up. He would have dwelt on it, but then he felt Lo'ak, sitting next to him, shudder. Neteyam looked up at his brother.
"Neurosect," Lo'ak said under his breath. "That's what they did to Spider." He did not elaborate, but the implication was that he knew what was coming.
Nguyen went on. "That's my whole thing," she said, "is figuring out what's wrong with people. I listen to them talk, and then I try to help them with their problems. You know what, though?" She leaned forward a little. "Nobody ever listens to me. So now I've got a captive audience, and I'm gonna tell you about my problems.
"My problem," she said, "is that I hate my fucking job."
Nobody said anything. Bohan was frowning as she studied Nguyen's face, trying to figure out where this was going, while Lo'ak and Prisha were merely puzzled. Pa'ay was curled in Lo'ak's lap, eyes shut. Neteyam wondered if this were another way of tricking them into saying something.
"I worked on Mars for years," Nguyen explained, "and Mars sucks. It's cold as hell, you can't go outside, orange dust gets into everything, it's terrible. My job was to help people cope with that. I would remind them that we weren't there to make our lives better. We were trying to build a world where our children and grandchildren could live. I liked that job. It made me feel like I was making a difference. Then they said to me, hey, do you want to do that same thing on Pandora?, and I did. I wanted to help people, and I wanted to see something green again. So I came here."
She paused there. Neteyam saw her eyes flick from his face, to Lo'ak's, and on down the line. He couldn't tell what she was thinking. None of them knew what to make of this.
"Then, after I signed all the nondisclosure agreements, they told me what I was really going to be doing: talking to recoms who started getting antsy about the idea that they'd been brought back to life as weapons, not as people." Nguyen nodded at Bohan. "But I told myself that surely they had some kind of plan for what to do with them after we won this fight. They wouldn't create all these sentient beings just to put them down like lame horses, would they? So I kept at it."
Nguyen looked then at Neteyam. "When you came along I asked them, what's gonna happen to that boy after? Bush brushed me off a few times, but eventually he old me they were gonna get you some education and give you a job, and let you live your life. I don't know if I believed him, but I wanted to. Now, though..." she gestured to Pa'ay. "There's you. I told him this was a war crime, and you know what he said? We're at war, Dr. Nguyen. If that means committing war crimes, then so bet it. They're not even bothering to lie to me anymore."
She sighed.
"So I'm gonna sit here, and you can talk to me, or not. I really don't care anymore. I got that off my chest, and now I'm going back to Mars. I hate Mars, but at least there I felt like a human being. He longer I spent around monsters, the more I become one."
After that there was a long silence. Neteyam looked at his companions again. This time, Bohan was looking back at him. He saw her eyes flick over to Nguyen... what was she thinking? Was it the same thing Neteyam was thinking? It wasn't as if they had anything to lose.
He stood up and went to the thick transparent panel that stood between the psychologist and the prisoners. "The code is five-six-one-two," he said.
Nguyen sat up a little. "Excuse me?"
"The code." Neteyam pointed to the keypad. "It's five-six-one-two. I didn't see anybody change it."
"You think I'm gonna get myself shot by letting you out of here?" Nguyen snorted. "What will you do after? You've got nowhere to go."
Neteyam put his palms on the panel. "We're going to destroy this place. We'll use the stolen explosives and blow up the fusion reactor. No more recoms. No more people like me or Pa'ay."
"You're gonna get killed," said Nguyen.
"I'm already dead," Neteyam said.
"Me, too," Bohan agreed. "Him, me, and Pa'ay will get the kids out, and then we'll come back and do the job. You said it yourself, we're weapons, not people. What happens to us doesn't matter."
"How are you planning to..." Nguyen frowned. "You know what? Don't tell me. If I don't know, they can't pry it out of me. I wish you hadn't told me anything, but... you swear? You're gonna do your damnedest to burn this place down? Even if I'm still in it?"
"Yes, Ma'am," said Neteyam.
Nguyen started to get up, then paused and stayed perfectly still for a few seconds, as if time had stopped. She was there long enough that Neteyam started to wonder if something were holding her. The Sky People could do so many other bizarre and terrible things that paralyzing somebody in mid-move didn't seem beyond them. But then she got up, murmured something in a language Neteyam didn't understand, and punched the buttons.
The door slid open.
"Don't stop for anything," said Nguyen. "I'm already regretting this, and they're gonna know the door's up."
"Thank you," Neteyam told her. "I owe you my life, and I hope to repay it someday." The same thing he'd said to Pa'ay, with about as much chance of ever keeping that promise.
"Forget it. Get out."
Bohan cracked her knuckles. "Sorry about this," she said, "but you need plausible deniability, and I still kind of hate you." She lifted Nguyen off her feet, and threw into the cell. Her body hit the wall with a thud, and then she rolled off the little bed and fell onto the floor, where she lay staring at them in a daze. Prisha shrieked in dismay.
Neteyam punched the buttons to close the cell again, then grabbed Prisha's hand. Lo'ak scooped up Pa'ay again, and they ran.
The guards were waiting in the room outside. They'd heard Nguyen hit the wall and had been on their way in to investigate. They weren't expecting to be met by the prisoners on the way out. Bohan took the lead, kicking one in the face, and yanking the gun out of another's hands. Lo'ak punched the third in the face, while Bohan gave the gun to Neteyam, who shot the fourth one.
The weapon was surprisingly familiar in his hands. He'd used the ones that had been made for avatars and recoms before, and this was so similar it was almost spooky. It fit to his shoulder the same way, and the recoil felt about right. Of course it did – this gun was the right size for a human, just as those had been right for a Na'vi. They were made to feel the same so recoms who used to be human could use them. It worked both ways.
Prisha ran ahead and pressed the elevator button. One set of doors opened immediately, and they crowded into. Seconds later, the other elevator also opened, and a dozen soldiers poured out and headed for the cells, only to stop short as they realized, one by one, that the escapees were now behind them. The men in the back turned around and started to approach them, but by then the elevator doors were already closing. Neteyam heard Bohan laughing out loud at the sight.
The elevator car began to rise smoothly, but it hadn't gone far before there was a groaning sound, and they came to a stop. Somebody had shut down the elevators.
Bohan seemed to have a plan for this, though. There was a square hatch in the ceiling, which opened with a lock and key. She examined it a moment, then just punched the lock as hard as she could. This must have hurt – her knuckles were bleeding when she pulled them back – but it worked to break the lock. She ripped the door open and climbed through.
"Lo'ak! Hand them up!" she ordered.
Lo'ak passed Pa'ay up first, then Prisha, and then let Neteyam climb onto his shoulders to that Bohan could drag him through. It was very dark in the elevator shaft, with only a few narrow beams of light piercing it from in between the closed doors on each level. This must have been enough for the Na'vi to see, though. With Pa'ay in one arm, Bohan started climbing the access ladder three rungs at a time. Prisha and Neteyam followed her, with Lo'ak bringing up the rear to catch anyone who slipped.
They knew there would be soldiers waiting for them on the top floor, so they did not go that high. Instead, Bohan stopped a couple of levels down, handed Pa'ay to Prisha and Neeyam, and forced her already bloodied fingers into the crack to wrench the doors open.
There were humans in the hallway beyond, who stopped and stared as they watched this odd group climb out. It seemed they didn't know there was an emergency in progress, because one either brave or foolish man came hurrying up and said, "Ma'am, do you need help?"
Bohan grabbed him by the collar and threw him down the elevator shaft. Other people shouted out in alarm, and Bohan left Lo'ak to pull the rest of them up while she dropped into a crouch and hissed at the humans. A few people edged away, but most just stood stock-still and stared. They weren't used to the idea of a recom turning on them. When Bohan stood up and kicked a woman into the wall, however, they got the idea and fled. Alarms began to blare.
"Come on, come on, hurry, hurry," Bohan urged them.
She herded the young people into a stairwell. They ran up the last few flights, and burst out into the top level, where the hangars were.
Now everybody in Site Nine knew there was a problem. Civilians and scientists were taking cover, while guards had arranged themselves around the hangar doors, ready to take down the rogue recombinant. They raised their guns as Bohan approached them, but then she dropped to the floor, and Neteyam shot three of them in quick succession. While they were still recovering from that, Bohan rushed the rest of them, throwing them aside like dolls. A couple ran. A few managed to get shots off, but these seemed to miss, at least as far as it was possible to tell in the melee. Bohan punched the button for emergency airlock release, and scrambled inside to grab the emergency masks as the doors opened.
Lo'ak had Pa'ay riding piggyback now. Neteyam passed the first mask to him to put on her. The second went to Prisha, and the third, with his chest bursting and his eyes watering, Neteyam put on himself.
Tìtstew saw them coming and immediately climbed down from his roost, upsetting the other banshees all over again. Lo'ak climbed onto Tìtstew's back and made tsaheylu , but Bohan held up a hand.
"Don't leave until we do!" she ordered. "It'll make you harder to hit!"
The others scrambled aboard the nearest Kestrel craft, the same one they'd hidden in earlier. Prisha ducked under the control console and removed an access panel so she could get it started, while Bohan tried to get through the door into the cockpit. After several attempted contortions, however, she was forced to admit she wasn't going to be able to do it.
"No good. I can't bend over far enough," she said, and Neteyam saw what he'd somehow missed before – there was a dark stain spreading across her clothing. She'd been shot on the lower left side of her chest, from such close range that the fabric of her t-shirt was burned. For a moment, she looked out the hangar doors at the distant jungle, and Neteyam knew she must be wondering if Ukyom would hear her if she called. At this distance, there was no way.
More soldiers ran into the room through the airlock. Neteyam shot two of them, then tossed the gun on the floor of the passenger compartment, and climbed into the pilot's seat. "Tell me what to do," he said.
Bohan started to protest, but then she looked at the soldiers, and at Lo'ak – he'd turned Tìtstew to scream at them, partly to try to frighten them, and partly to keep his own body between them and Pa'ay. He pulled Konstopoulos' gun out of its holster on Tìtstew's harness, and checked to see if it was loaded.
Bohan climbed into the passenger compartment and pulled the door shut. "Open the throttle," she said. "It's the stick down by your left. Twist until it reaches ORPM. You don't need to know what it means."
Neteyam did as she was told. He half expected nothing to happen, but he machine responded immediately, growling to life. Displays below and around the windshield came on, and music began to play from a speaker on the dashboard. Neteyam didn't know how to turn it off, so he just ignored it.
"Got it!" he said.
"Now pull the lever up, that's the collective, and press the left foot pedal. Don't do anything too fast or we'll go through the roof."
Soldiers were arranging themselves to fire on the craft. Lo'ak and Tìtstew had to give up and fly away. Neteyam obeyed the instructions, and felt the entire vessel tilt forward and rise into the air. His heart was hammering. Bohan had said to go slow, but how could they? One bullet in the right place would kill them all. He'd seen that forhimself, when Lo'ak shot down a similar vehicle at Kilvanoro. The frame of the craft began to shudder.
"Joystick on the right is the cyclic. Push that forward."
Neteyam did. This time, he used too much force and the Kestral went screaming out of the hangar, taking part of the overhang of the roof with it. It started spiralling up into the sky as shots from the anti-aircraft guns whizzed past it.
"The faster you go, the more lift we get!" Bohan shouted over the engines. "Go slow and stay close to the ground! It's harder to hit you there, and there won't be as far to fall if we have to bail! Pull the cyclic back!"
In the gunner's seat, Prisha was curled up with her hands over her head.
Neteyam tried to control the vehicle, but every movement had an unintended consequence. They dropped too fast, and he could barely rescue them before they hit the ground. He didn't understand any of the displays, but he knew the ones flashing red must be bad. Now they were too high again, and Bohan was still shouting in his ears while the stupid music blared. He was going to fail again, just as he had with everything else he'd tried...
Do or do not , said Dad's voice in his head. There is no 'try' .
He took a deep breath, and tightened his grip on what Bohan called the cyclic. Obeying her instructions, he managed to make them stop spinning, and Neteyam wrestled the machine into a slow descent, heading for the trees.
It was absolutely ridiculous how difficult this was. Flying was supposed to be easy, intuitive, Na'vi and banshee merged into one mind that knew exactly what it was doing and where it was going. This was ridiculous . And yet... as Neteyam began to get the hang of it, there was something thrilling about it. This machine was something designed on an alien world, a thing that ran on brute force and fire and violence, and yet here he was in command of it . The problem wasn't that it didn't do as it was told, the problem was that he didn't know what he was telling it. Once he got a feel for what his movements did, it started to calm down and become an extension of his body, somehow both like flying with Pawk and yet completely different. He'd taken something huge and monstrous and terrifying and he'd tamed it.
He wondered if Dad had felt this way when he'd become toruk makto .
Suddenly, one of the windows shattered into a spiderweb. Neteyam turned to look, and saw a figure on a banshee – Quaritch. He raised his gun to fire again, but then looked up as a bullet whizzed by his own head. A moment later, Lo'ak and Tìtstew dived on him from above, and he was forced to take evasive action.
Quaritch was not alone, however. There were now half a dozen others all around them. Neteyam couldn't go down because they were over the forest now, and he could vividly remember the last time he fell out of a tree. So instead, he thrust the controls up. Maybe this machine could fly higher than the animals.
Another banshee swooped past with a recom on its back, a guy with a shaved head and sunglasses. He, too, had a weapon and took aim, but then he, too, was attacked by another banshee. This one was immediately identifiable, for there were no others like him – it was Ukyom. The two animals locked talons and spiralled down to the trees below.
"Ukyom!" Bohan opened the door and leaned out to call the banshee's name again into the roaring wind. Neteyam doubted Ukyom would be able to hear her, but apparently he could, because a moment later he rose back into view and hooked his claws onto the side of the Kestral to perch.
The machine lurched to the side under this added weight. Neteyam yanked the cyclic to the other side, worried they would roll over and fall – he'd seen enough battles to know that vehicles like this could not fly upside-down. They started going in circles, descending towards the treetops.
"Prisha! Come on!" Bohan reached for Prisha's hand.
Prisha was still curled up, too terrified to look. Neteyam had to nudge her with one elbow, as both his hands were busy flying this machine. "Go with her! I can't do this with Ukyom on the side!"
With her whole body shaking and her eyes firmly shut, Prisha got up and squeezed between the seats. As soon as she was within reach, Bohan grabbed her. Neteyam turned to look where he was going again, and a moment later the extra weight was gone as Ukyom and his passengers leaped into the sky.
A second window shattered as a shot hit it. Now Neteyam could barely see what was in front of him, and there was nobody to tell him how to land. Taking off had been complicated and flying was very complicated; he had no reason to think landing would be anything else. He would just have to slow down and let the trees catch him, and hope he did better this time.
The third bullet blew the window out completely, showering Neteyam in cubes of polycarbonate. It was a good think he hadn't taken his mask off. He forced himself to think. If to take off he'd had to pull the collective and press the left pedal, maybe the right one would allow a safe descent...
It happened far too fast, and once again he was forced to pull out of it before he crashed. As the Kestrel rose again, two or three more banshees swooped by. With a missing window, their riders had a clear shot at him now.
But the banshee that suddenly landed on the nose of the vehicle did not belong to a recom. It was Lo'ak and Tìtstew, with Pa'ay still hanging on tight to Lo'ak's clothing.
"Brother!" Lo'ak shouted, extending a hand.
Neteyam let go of the controls and grabbed it. Lo'ak yanked him through the window and draped him across Tìtstew's shoulders like a prisoner on the rump of a direhorse, and they went up. Neteyam could see the Kestrel drop away below them and vanish, followed by the fireball as it collided with the trees.
They hadn't escaped yet, though. When Neteyam managed to sit up and get one leg on either side of Tìtstew's neck, he saw that they were still surrounded. A dozen recoms were circling them, Quaritch and Blackbird among them. The pair were bloodied, but still in the air.
They dove for the trees. Unlike a Kestrel, Tìtstew and Ukyom knew where they were going, and could weave and dart between branches faster than a hand on a joystick would have been able to react. The recoms followed them. Prolemuris screamed in alarm as they passed. Clouds of flying creatures took off, shrieking, and a startled slinger let go of its branch and dropped to the forest floor. One recom got too close to a tangle of vines and was jerked to a halt. His banshee screamed and flailed as it tried to escape, but none of the others stopped to help.
Up ahead, the land suddenly fell away on a slope too steep for most trees. Tìtstew and Ukyom emerged into full, blinding sunlight and kept going, desperate to make it to more cover on the other side. Shadows flicked by overhead, and Neteyam looked up to see more banshees...
... but these ones weren't wearing the green camouflage gear the recoms' mounts did, and their riders were in leggings and visors, feathers and beads. These were the Omatikaya.
"Yeah!" exclaimed Lo'ak. "Hell, yeah!"
Most of them streaked straight past the fugitives to take on the recoms, but a blue and purple banshee slowed down to circle them.
"Dad!" Lo'ak called out.
Neteyam's heart had been pounding this whole time, but now he was suddenly aware of it, because there was Dad. He was right there, only metres away, with nobody and nothing to keep him from seeing Neteyam anymore – and he was looking right at him .
Their eyes met for only a moment, though, and then Dad waved to the group to descend. "Get to the trees, we'll drive them back!" he said.
"Yes, Sir!" said Lo'ak. Tìtstew pumped his wings a little harder, and they swooped down the slope to where the forest began again. There they landed in a big tree. Neteyam rolled off and crouched on the flat upper surface of the branch, panting, while Lo'ak helped Pa'ay down.
There were plenty of things Neteyam could have been thinking about in that moment. In a few minutes, he was going to have to face Dad and explain this to him, not only why he looked the way he did but why he'd done all these ridiculous things. He could have wondered if Prisha and Bohan were all right, and how Pa'ay was doing. He could have thought about the idea of destroying Site Nine and how they were going to make that happen, or even whether Dr. Nguyen was going to be punished for helping them. But the thing that kept flashing in front of him was the feeling of flying the Kestrel.
That had been... it wasn't like riding a banshee at all, of course, but it was different in quality , not in degree . If he could learn to do that properly, it would be amazing . The way that inert lump of metal had come to life under his hands...
"Captain Bohan?" asked Lo'ak. "You need to sit down."
"Yes, I do," said Bohan. She disconnected from Ukyom, and eased herself into a sitting position where she could lean against the tree trunk. The stain on her shirt was much larger now, dark and sticky, and she grimaced as she let her head rest on the bark. Ukyom lowered his head to sniff her injury, and put out his tongue to lick it, but Bohan gently pushed him back. "Sorry, sweetheart," she said, patting his snout. "It hurts too much."
"Is there anything we can do?" asked Prisha.
"Probably not, but thanks for the thought," Bohan told her.
Prisha sat down, in between Bohan and Neteyam, and reached to take Neteyam's hand. "I can't believe we're all alive," she said, although the way she glanced at Bohan left the words so far hanging in the air. "That was the worst thing I ever did. Ever ."
"What? You didn't like flying with me?" asked Neteyam.
She stared at him, and then burst out in half-hysterical laughter. Neteyam laughed, too, although it really wasn't that funny. Maybe it was just the relief.
"Hello!" a voice called out from below.
Everybody jumped, but they were only startled, not frightened, because in the next moment they all recognized the voice.
"Dr. Spellman!" Lo'ak shouted.
"Lo'ak! Thank god!" On the ground, some twenty metres below them, the bushes parted and a direhorse emerged with Dr. Spellman's avatar on its back. He still had a brace on his injured ankle, but otherwise looked all right. He counted the figures he could see, then grabbed at his comm choker. "Jake! Max! I've found the kids! They're all here, the boys and Prisha!"
Lo'ak got Pa'ay to cling to his back again and started climbing down. Neteyam took Prisha's arm to help her, then looked past her, at Bohan and Ukyom. Bohan was still leaning against the tree with her eyes half-open, one hand under her shirt to apply pressure to her bullet wound, and Ukyom's head on her other shoulder. She met his gaze, and smiled.
"Go home, kiddo," she said.
Neteyam straightened up, and said the same formula again: "I owe you my life, Captain Emily Bohan. I hope to repay it someday." With Pa'ay it had been a formality, which he had no expectation of ever living up to. With Nguyen, it had just been polite. Now he absolutely meant it.
She just shut her eyes.
"Who's this?" asked Dr. Spellman, taking in the child clinging to Lo'ak's back like a baby prolemuris.
"This is Pa'ay," said Lo'ak.
"Oh," Dr. Spellman said. He opened his mouth again to ask a question, but then appeared to change his mind, and instead reached up to catch Prisha as Neteyam let her down ahead of him. Once her feet were on the ground, Dr. Spellman knelt to hug her.
"Your parents have been going nuts , young lady," he said, giving her a gentle shake. "What are they supposed to think when you get dragged off like that?"
"I'm sorry!" said Prisha, then changed her mind. "I'm not sorry, actually. Neteyam needed my help."
"Yeah?" Dr. Spellman glanced up at Neteyam. "Well, your Mom's been saying she's going to kill him. Viraj keeps telling her he wouldn't have hurt you..."
"He didn't!"
"... but the last thing anybody saw of you, he was holding a knife to your throat!"
"He apologized!"
"I did!" Neteyam dropped onto the moss beside them and stood up as tall as he could, but it was not tall enough. In the past few days, Neteyam had once again started to get used to how big he was. He knew how much shorter than him Prisha was, and how much taller Lo'ak and Bohan were. He'd started getting accustomed to the sizes of the animals and of objects in the human environment. Seeing somebody familiar again seemed to start the whole process over. Neteyam wanted to duck away from Dr. Spellman, as if afraid this towering being would topple over on him.
"Are you okay?" asked Dr. Spellman.
"Yes," said Neteyam. "Mostly." He was pretty sure he would never really be okay again, but for the moment he was close enough.
Dr. Spellman reached out and put a large, heavy hand on Neteyam's shoulder. "Okay," he said. "I'm sorry we knocked you out without listening to what you had to say. It would have saved a lot of trouble."
Neteyam didn't know how to reply to that, but fortunately there was a distraction within easy reach – a very important one. "We need to get Bohan."
"Yeah," Lo'ak agreed. "She's been shot. I don't know if she can climb down on her own."
He was right – Bohan was not capable. Lo'ak had to hold her in front of him on Tìtstew and fly down, while Ukyom followed them, making worried noises. On the ground again, Lo'ak, Prisha, and Neteyam helped her get off the banshee and settle down against a giant mushroom, while Dr. Spellman watched, holding Pa'ay.
"Captain Bohan, is it?" he asked. With Pa'ay in one arm, he knelt down and patted the woman's face, trying to make her keep her eyes open. "Stay awake, they're gonna want to gauge your level of consciousness." Dr. Spellman took hold of his choker again. "We've got an injured recombinant... the kids say she's a friend. Bullet wound, bottom of the rib cage. And there's also..." he looked down at Pa'ay in his arms.
"No," said Neteyam. "She doesn't want anybody to know."
Dr. Spellman looked uncertain whether he would allow that, but the Bohan spoke.
"Hey," she said. "You're Norman Spellman, yeah?"
"You've heard of me?" asked Dr. Spellman, surprised.
"Yeah. They told us about you in that little history lesson we got... the guy whose avatar got shot, so he popped out of link, grabbed another gun, and went right back into the fray. Legend."
Dr. Spellman blinked. "Reet had a different word for that," he said. He ran a hand over his chest, feeling the scars from his own war wounds. "You're gonna be okay. The avatar doctors know what they're doing. They brought me back from that, they can help you, too."
Bohan nodded and closed her eyes again.
"No, no, eyes open." Dr. Spellman patted her face again. "Keep talking. Recite the times tables."
But Bohan did not answer him. Neteyam nearly panicked, thinking she'd died right there, but her chest was still moving – she was breathing. He took her hand and turned it over, feeling for the pulse in her wrist. It was slow, but it was still there, and he squeezed her fingers. Pa'ay would be allowed to die, because she had no future in the form she was in. Bohan had to live. He owed her that.
The sound of wings made everybody look up. Another banshee was circling – a familiar one, blue and purple. It came in for a landing next to Ukyom, who lowered his head and hissed at the stranger. The new arrival responded with a feinted snap, asserting his dominance. Tìtstew bowed his head, accepting his subordinate status, and seeing this, Ukyom backed down.
The banshee, however, was less important than his rider. Dr. Spellman stayed kneeling, with Pa'ay in his arms, but Neteyam, Lo'ak, and Prisha all got to their feet as Jake Sully stepped down.