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Prologue

When I was lying there in the VA hospital, with a big hole blown through the middle of my life…
I started having these dreams of flying.
"A pilot, dreaming about flying?" you may wonder, "Doesn't that happen all the time?"
But in the dreams, I wasn't at the controls of an aircraft.
No stick or yoke, no yaw pedals, no thrust levers or instrument screens.
I was just...flying. I was free.

Sooner or later though, you always have to wake up.

- — - — - — - — -

"Don't worry, I'm going!" she shouted at the slab of meat impersonating a bouncer.

Her left wheel banged into the doorframe. She cursed, readjusted, and rolled out into the rain. This made four dive bars she'd been kicked out of that week.

She turned around, preparing to hurl an insult at the bouncer, just as the scowling bartender appeared at the door and flung her card and jacket at her. She didn't catch either, and they fell to the ground, landing in a puddle. The bartender and bouncer both gave her disdainful looks as they turned to go back inside.

"Hope you know you just lost yourself a customer!" she hollered as the door closed behind them.

She closed her eyes and leaned back as much as she could, tilting her head back and letting the rain wash over her face. It was technically a bit unhealthy, but she didn't care. There hadn't been much she had cared about for the last six months—ever since the VA doctors had told her there was no chance of her spinal cord healing on its own.

They could fix a spinal cord injury. But not on veterans' benefits, not in this economy. A VA check and twelve bucks would get you a cup of coffee, and what they called "waitlisted". The waiting list was years long, constantly growing, and frequently had wealthy (or just lucky) individuals jumping the line, pushing everyone else farther out. Realistically, she was probably looking at decades in this damn wheelchair.

And the damned dreams weren't helping.

- — - — - — - — -

"Kenneth Simmons?"

She opened her eyes. Two men in cheap suits and overcoats, both remarkably bland in appearance, stood a few feet away. "You didn't get the memo? It's Kate." She frowned and turned her face back to the holo-ad-covered sky, half-expecting a repeat of the event that had led to her getting kicked out of the bar. "Now step off, you're ruining my good mood."

The two men glanced at each other, then turned back to her. "It's about your brother."

- — - — - — - — -

Toni was dead.

They'd given Kate the details in the car on the way to the morgue. They were from the Resources Development Administration, the megacorp that had hired Toni for her genetics expertise. They told her that Toni had been mugged, fought back, and been stabbed. The only detail they hadn't known was that, like Kate, Toni was also transgender—not that they cared. They weren't paid to care, and Toni had kept that part of herself more private than Kate did.

The strong prey on the weak. A guy with a knife took all Toni would ever be, for the paper in her wallet.

"We're looking for Simmons, T.?" one of the suits called as they strolled into the morgue's massive crematorium, Kate rolling along behind them in her wheelchair.

Half a dozen workers were pushing flat-topped stainless steel carts around the room, some of which carried seven-foot-long cardboard boxes. One of the workers raised a hand, beckoning the suits over.

Kate stopped next to the cart. The worker pressed a switch on the side of the cart, lowering it to knee-height. Then he pulled the lid off the cardboard box and drew back the black plastic sheet inside, revealing Toni's face, pale and still.

Kate's heart felt like a lump of lead in her chest. "Jesus, Toni."

The suits gave her a moment, then gestured for the worker to get on with it. As he closed the box—"casket" seemed far too generous a term—one of them spoke up.

"Your brother represented a significant investment," he said. "We'd like to talk to you about taking over his contract."

"And since your genome is identical to his," the other suit spoke up, "you could...step into his shoes. So to speak."

"Sister," Kate said forcefully. "Her. Hers."

If the suits cared, they didn't show it. "It'd be a fresh start," the first one said. "On a new world. You could do something important. You could make a difference."

The second one chimed in, "And the pay is good. Very good."

The suits' words echoed hollowly in Kate's ears as she watched the morgue worker slide the box into the cremator and close the door. Toni was the scientist, not her. Toni was the one who wanted to get shot lightyears out into space to find the answers. Kate was just another dumb grunt who'd get sent someplace she was going to regret.

The worker pushed a button, and the cremator roared to life, the orange glow of the flames shining through the small window and playing over Kate's face. Her thoughts were having trouble getting any traction, like tires spinning in mud, digging holes without going anywhere.

Finally, one thought caught and surged forward. Fuck it. There's nothing for me here now. What the fuck else am I going to do?

Author's note:

Playing Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora has kicked my brain into a major Avatar ADHD-obsession-of-the-month. I've put 40 hours into the game, rewatched both movies a couple of times, and started listening to a couple of Avatar-related podcasts.

And then I got ideas for two different Avatar fanfics. This is the first one.

I got 4,200 words written that night, and another 2,000 last night. How the heck I managed that, I have no idea.