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A pull like a tender tug on loose thread draws her together, weak tendrils of thought and feeling coalescing into something resembling a consciousness. The woven veil of black fades into grey and then is pulled away. Bright light guides vision into focus before sound arrives, something like a shrill heartbeat echoes around her head. If colour has begun to ebb into what she imagines is a world around her, she has not seen it yet; the expanse behind the light is a sterile white. A name is shouted from across a great distance, wind-lost and vaguely familiar. She wants to sit up, to search for its source. The sensation of a warm hand, tiny like a child’s, blooms across her shoulder and forearm. Someone touches her face and forces one of her eyes wider. The world is entirely too bright and blurry, too loud and muffled to be comfortable.The voice asks a question but another answers it before she can try to push a word from her mouth. Sensation awakens further and alerts her to the presence of wires attached to her arms and head, a cool surface beneath her, and some kind of gown over her body.
Her body.
Why do her ears feel out of place? She can feel them flickering like a horse’s. Something inside of them aches. Her tongue glides around its home and finds teeth sharper than they ought to be. She tries to roll onto an elbow and sit up, but the hands are at her shoulder again and trying as they may to keep her down. This time, she turns her head to their source and finds a medic speaking some kind of trite reassurance to her. He looks further away than he feels. Another medic flanks her and assists her in craning her head up high enough to see what she assumes is an infirmary.
Did she get hit by one of the insurgents? How long-
Something is inserted into what feels like an ear and sound is crisp enough to comprehend. A warm fluid pours out, much to her relief.
“...hear us, Kalandra?” One of the medics speaks clearer now. “Sarge, can you hear us okay? Sergeant?”
Kal nods away their concerns, still foggy from whatever comatose state she had been in minutes before. A new light flashes between her eyes and she blinks away the spots, irritation curling her lip. The medics speak positively of her response just as her vision begins to clear. The urge to sit up hits again and she concedes, supporting her weight on quaking forearms. The medics suddenly seem far away, as though she sits a good foot and a half above them. Her brain struggles to comprehend it before one of the medics comes back to touch her arm as if in warning to slow her movement.
And then she sees it: blue.
Her arm is blue. Her arm is blue, covered in faint striping patterns and much longer than she remembers her arm ever being. She bolts upright, the room spinning as she does, and examines her arm. Movement blurs around her and she takes it in. To the left, another set of medics work around equipment and an avatar body. The avatar looks familiar, but she can’t place it now. The three of them are looking at her, her own medics trying to calm her as her mind reels.
Kal looks at her hands; they are blue like the Na’vi and without any of her scars. It could be an odd dream if not for the tattoos anchoring her to this form. They’re hers; she hazily recalls sitting in the studio for them, the runes at her left forearm and the black bands on the opposing bicep.
“It’s okay…” One of the medics, a young man, speaks softly and puts himself in front of her. “Just take it easy, Sarge.”
Failing to heed instruction, the reincarnated sergeant pushes herself up from the table, but loses her momentum and falls back against the table. The two men rush to her sides and speak more urgently to her. Kal swats them away. She feels something lashing at her leg and colliding with the medic to her right. In trying again to raise herself from the bed, she spies what she can barely believe is a tail. It must be hers, flickering about in agitation.
Panic seizes her chest, a horrid spiky thing preventing her from drawing adequate breath. A new figure, a woman in scrubs hurries into the room with a mask in her outstretched hand.
“Hey! It’s okay, you’re safe!” She speaks reassuringly, but firm. Kal recoils at her approach. Her arm blocks the woman’s attempt to wrap the strap over her head. She casts it aside and holds her hands out to advise a calmer behaviour. “This is new, it’s different. This is the Phoenix Project, remember? Bringing back our security personnel. That’s you. You’re in a new body.”
Kal’s eyes flit about the room, over her new body, and come to land on an unnoticed reflection across the way. She sees herself now, sitting taller than any of the humans in the room could stand. The scars at her face are gone, the flesh there free of the tension of scar tissue.
The medics behind her back away, the sergeant noticing a needle being placed back into a metal tray. The woman in scrubs pats her arm, a gesture Kal is too overwhelmed to notice. She sees the Na’vi woman in the mirror squint when she does, tilt her head when she does, even whip her tail about in time with her own. It must be her.
A blue phoenix rising from Pandoran ash.
“Welcome back, Sergeant.”