The first trackers found the blood before they found the prints.
It had fallen in small drops across the ash, dark at the centre and red at the edges where the dust had not yet swallowed it. One hunter crouched low, two fingers hovering above the mark without touching it. Another stood nearby, head tilted, nostrils flaring as he tasted the air.
The wound had made Nussudle easier to follow.
The cut across his face had not stopped bleeding. Every few steps, another drop fell from his jaw or neck and struck the ground beneath him. He had tried wiping it away. He had pressed ash against the wound until it burned. Nothing stopped it fully.
Behind him, the Ash Na'vi read the trail like scripture.
Footprints in softer ash.
Blood on stone.
A smear where his hand had touched a burned trunk.
A snapped piece of dead branch where he had pushed through too quickly.
Nussudle knew they were following. He did not need to see them to understand it. The land itself told him. The distant calls changed direction. Hooves moved where they should not have moved. Ikran cries circled wider overhead, searching, tightening.
He kept running north.
He did not know why at first.
The volcano loomed ahead, its broken peak coughing smoke and sparks into the morning sky. Every instinct should have told him to move away from it. The air grew hotter in that direction. The ground became rougher, cut by old lava stone and unstable ridges. There would be fewer places to hide and fewer living things to use as cover.
Yet something pulled him onward.
Faint at first.
Then stronger.
Nova.
The connection between them was no longer just pain and noise. It had begun to take shape. Not words. Not direction exactly. More like pressure inside his ribs, a pull through the bond that grew steadier each time he stumbled northward.
Nussudle clung to it.
He passed through a field of dead saplings, then dropped into a shallow depression where ash gathered thickly at the bottom. He cursed under his breath as his feet sank and left clear marks behind him. There was no time to cover them.
He pushed through.
Then he stopped.
A thought struck him.
If he kept running straight north, they would catch him. Blood and footprints made a line too clear to ignore. Even a poor hunter could follow that. These were not poor hunters. They were born into a land that wanted everything dead.
Nussudle turned sharply left.
He moved across a belt of exposed stone, careful to place each foot where no print would hold. Then he doubled back behind a row of burnt trunks, ducked under a fallen branch, and crossed his own path again at an angle. Blood still fell, but now the trail became confused, broken by stone and overlapping lines.
He moved faster.
The effort nearly broke him.
His lungs burned. His ribs stabbed with each breath. His legs trembled from hours of running and little food. Still, he forced himself through the loop, making a wide curve through a cluster of dead trees before turning north again.
For a few moments, the sounds behind him changed.
Shouts.
Short. Angry. Uncertain.
The trackers had reached the broken trail.
Nussudle felt a flash of fierce satisfaction.
Then a cry came from above.
He looked up.
An Ash rider swept low through the smoky morning, his ikran banking hard over the dead forest. The rider's head snapped toward him.
Their eyes met for half a second.
Then the rider screamed.
The sound cut through the wasteland and answered itself in several directions.
Nussudle ran.
The sky exploded with movement.
Two more ikran dropped from the smoke, then a third from the eastern ridge. Their riders leaned forward, weapons in hand, howling down at him as if the sight of him had fed the whole hunt fresh blood.
Nussudle threw himself between two dead trees as the first arrow struck the ground beside his foot.
Another hissed past his shoulder.
A spear followed, thrown from above. It punched into the ash ahead of him, buried deep enough that the shaft snapped from the force. Nussudle veered right, nearly fell, caught himself against a burned trunk, and kept moving.
Hooves thundered behind him.
Direhorses.
The sound grew louder with terrifying speed, pounding through the ash fields, accompanied by chanting and drumming. Somewhere behind the riders, others were beating hollow bone drums as they advanced, the rhythm matching the chase.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
The Ash Na'vi cheered as they hunted him.
Not with fear. Not with urgency.
With joy.
Nussudle ducked beneath a low branch as another arrow carved through the space above his head. Splinters burst from a trunk to his left. He did not look back. Looking back stole time. Looking back killed prey.
He ran harder.
The bond pulled.
North.
Stronger now.
Nova was closer.
Pain answered from somewhere through the connection, but beneath it came recognition. Rage. Fear. Need.
"I'm coming," Nussudle rasped.
His voice barely worked.
The ground began to rise.
The dead trees thinned in some places and thickened in others, gathered into knots of black branches twisted together by heat. The volcano dominated the horizon now, its slopes broken and glowing in places where magma still crawled through stone channels. Ash fell lightly from above, settling over Nussudle's hair and shoulders.
An ikran rider dove too close.
Nussudle felt the wind of its wings strike his back. A hooked weapon swept down, missing his braid by a handspan. He dropped, rolled across the ash, and came up limping.
The rider climbed again, laughing.
Nussudle staggered toward a line of black stone half-hidden by dead trees. The pull through the bond sharpened suddenly, so intense it nearly dragged a sound from him.
There.
He did not know what there meant until he saw it.
A narrow slit between two leaning slabs of volcanic stone, almost invisible beneath a mesh of collapsed branches and ash-coated roots. It was not wide. Barely enough for a body to pass through sideways. From the air, it would look like nothing more than shadow beneath dead wood.
Nussudle changed course.
The rider above saw him turn and screamed again. A spear struck the ground behind him. Another arrow cut across his back, slicing skin but failing to stick. The direhorses were closer now. He could hear individual breaths, the snorts of animals, the slap of feet and hooves against ash.
He reached the dead trees.
A hunter on a direhorse burst from the smoke to his right, spear lowered.
Nussudle threw himself forward.
He hit the stone opening shoulder first, pain flashing white behind his eyes. For one awful moment, he thought he would not fit. The slit was too narrow. His ribs screamed as he forced himself sideways, one arm ahead, one pressed tight against his chest.
The direhorse rider reached him.
A spear thrust through the branches and scraped along the stone near his face.
Nussudle dragged himself deeper.
Ash filled his mouth. Rock tore at his skin. He pushed with his feet, clawed with his fingers, and slid through the gap as the spear stabbed again behind him.
Then the world narrowed.
Stone closed around him.
The sounds of the hunt became muffled, distant, distorted by rock.
Nussudle crawled until the passage widened just enough for him to breathe without scraping both shoulders. He collapsed there, chest heaving, blood dripping steadily from his face onto the stone beneath him.
Outside, the Ash Na'vi arrived.
He heard them shouting.
Feet moved over the rocks above him. Ikran wings beat overhead. Direhorses snorted and stamped. Someone tore at the dead branches covering the entrance, but the gap was too hidden, too tight, and too broken by shadow for them to see clearly.
A voice snarled close enough that Nussudle held his breath.
Another answered from farther away.
They began searching.
Nussudle pressed himself flat against the cold stone, every muscle locked, every breath controlled. Blood ran down his chin and onto his chest, but he did not move to wipe it away.
The bond pulsed again.
Nova.
Closer.
Somewhere beyond the stone.
Somewhere north.
Nussudle closed his eyes.
He had escaped them for now.
Not for long.
But for now.