The lab was too quiet.

Grace hated the stillness. On Pandora, silence was a myth—a thing drowned out by the shriek of hexapedes, the sigh of wind through helicoradian leaves. But here, in the sterile belly of Hell's Gate, the only sounds were the arrhythmic beep of Norm's EKG and the hum of the neural interface cradle above his bed. His human body lay motionless, skin waxy under the fluorescents, IV lines snaking into his arms like translucent vines. His avatar was gone. Reduced to ash in some RDA ambush Grace still couldn't stomach recounting.

Trudy's boots clanked against the grated floor as she entered, steam curling from the mug in her hand. "Brought you diesel," she said, nudging the coffee toward Grace. The gesture was routine, but her voice wavered. They'd all seen pilots die—bullets, thanators, bad intel—but this? A driver stranded between bodies, neither here nor there? It crawled under the skin.

Grace accepted the mug, her thumb brushing the faded "Cup of Liberty" slogan etched on the side. Norm's mug. She wondered if Trudy knew. "Thanks," she muttered, though the coffee tasted like acid.

Trudy hovered, arms crossed tight over her flight suit. "How long's it been? Four days?"

"Five."

"And he just... doesn't wake up?"

Grace stared at the monitor. Norm's brain scans flickered—sharp, frantic peaks, like he was dreaming in overdrive. Or trapped. She'd seen drivers disoriented after sudden disconnections, sure. Headaches, nausea, phantom limb twinges. But this? His synapses were firing as if his mind were still there, still sprinting through the jungle in a body that didn't exist anymore.

"The link wasn't cleanly severed," Grace said, more to herself. "His avatar didn't just drop. It was destroyed. The psionic shock..." She trailed off, recalling the way Jake had described it—like getting sucked into a tornado while still half in the plane.

Trudy grimaced. "So what do we do?"

We. Grace almost laughed. As if there were a protocol for this. As if the RDA's manuals had a chapter on "How to Stop a Man's Soul From Vaporizing." She reached out, adjusting Norm's blanket with a roughness she didn't intend. "We wait. Monitor the synaptic decay. Hope his nervous system doesn't burn itself out chasing a ghost."

Trudy's jaw tightened. "And if it does?"

Grace didn't answer. Norm's fingers twitched suddenly, a jolt that nearly knocked over the IV stand. Running, she thought. Or fighting.

Outside, a distant shriek echoed through the compound walls—a banshee, maybe, or a warrior's ikran. Norm's eyelids fluttered, as if he'd heard it too.

"He's in there," Trudy said, fierce. "I know he is."

Grace sipped the coffee again. Cold now. Bitter. "Yeah. But for how long?"

The machines hummed. Somewhere, a valve hissed.

Trudy turned to leave, pausing at the door. "You need anything else?"

Grace glanced at the cradle—the empty neural headset dangling like a gutted spider. "More coffee," she lied.

Alone again, she leaned back in her chair, the cold seeping into her bones. Norm's chest rose and fell, steady as a metronome. Five days. She'd seen coma patients surface after months, but this wasn't a coma. This was a man split at the seams.

Her hand found his, calloused fingers brushing pale knuckles. "Come on, Norm," she whispered. "Don't make me write your eulogy. You know I'll botch the jokes."

The EKG stuttered. A blip. A maybe.

Grace held her breath.

The line flattened again.

SCENEBREAK

The pain didn't stop when the link severed.

Norm's human hands clawed at his throat, nails drawing blood as if he could scratch out the memory of talons shredding his avatar's neck. His lungs burned, though the lab's oxygen-rich air flooded his nostrils. His skull throbbed with the phantom weight of a head that no longer existed—couldn't exist, not after that bastard thanator had ripped it clean off.

"Breathe, Norm. Breathe." Grace's voice cut through the static, sharp but fraying at the edges. She'd unplugged him minutes ago, but his nerves still screamed.

He gagged, spitting bile into a steel basin. The taste of Pandoran soil lingered, coppery and sweet, though his human tongue had never touched it. Synesthetic feedback, Grace called it. A polite term for hell.

"I felt it," he rasped, staring at his shaking hands. Human hands, pale and soft, not the cerulean fingers he'd grown so used to. "The mandibles. The—snap—of my own spine. I felt everything."

Grace hesitated, her usual steel replaced by something raw. "The psionic link doesn't just transmit sensation. It rewires." She gestured to his brain scan flickering on the monitor—a storm of red and gold where his parietal lobe lit up like a supernova. "Your neurons don't know you're human anymore."

Norm laughed, a broken sound. "Tell that to my neck."

He lurched upright, ignoring the black spots dancing in his vision. The lab's fluorescents glared too bright, too wrong, after months seeing the world through Na'vi eyes. His reflection warped in the glass of a reagent cabinet: gaunt, sallow, a ghost of the wide-eyed biologist who'd first jacked into an avatar.

Trudy hovered in the doorway, her flight helmet dented from yesterday's skirmish. "You look like shit, Spellman."

"Feel worse," he croaked.

She tossed him a canteen. "Drink. Before you pass out and Grace blames me."

The water tasted stale, but it grounded him. Sort of. His fingers kept drifting to his throat, probing for the gory stump his mind insisted should be there. It wasn't real, he told himself. But the thanator's stench still clogged his nostrils—rotting meat and musk. Real enough.

Grace gripped his shoulder, her touch clinical but trembling. "We need to run more tests. The synaptic—"

"No." Norm shoved her hand away, too harshly. He regretted it when her face tightened. "No more tests. No more probes. I'm done being your lab rat."

"This isn't about science," she snapped. "Your amygdala's firing like you're still in fight-or-flight. If we don't stabilize you—"

"What? I'll die?" He barked another laugh. "Too late."

Silence fell, heavy with what they all knew but wouldn't say: No driver had ever survived an avatar's violent end. Not intact.

Trudy cleared her throat. "Jake's back. Says the Omatikaya found a... a flower. Some Eywa voodoo that might help."

Norm's head snapped up. "An atran'isi?"

"The 'soul-root,' yeah."

He'd studied it years ago—a parasitic bloom said to tether shattered souls to their bodies. Superstition, he'd thought. But now, his fingers itched for the weight of a bow, the press of a banshee's flanks between his legs. Na'vi instincts, surfacing in a human skull.

Grace stepped between him and the door. "You're not going anywhere."

Norm met her glare. "Try stopping me."

He staggered forward, legs buckling, but Trudy caught him. "Easy, cowboy."

"I'm fine," he lied.

"Sure. And I'm the Queen of England." She slung his arm over her shoulders, nodding to Grace. "We'll take the Samson. Be back by sundown."

Grace didn't protest. Just pressed a hypospray into his palm. "For the pain. When it gets bad."

Norm pocketed it, jaw set. The thanator's roar echoed in his bones, but beneath it, softer, he heard the pulse of Pandora—the whisper of roots, the sigh of wind through Home Tree. Calling him home.

Or taunting him.

He wasn't sure yet.