"I am not your sister."

He stared at her, at the faint irritation that clouded her glorious face. Helpless, he began to laugh. It rolled out of him, pumping up from the belly so that he had to bend over, brace his hands on his thighs as she cocked her head and studied him with a mixture of amusement, puzzlement, and impatience.

"I'm losing it," he managed. "Losing what's left of my mind." Even as he sucked in a breath, a spider the size of a Chihuahua pranced between his feet on stiltlike legs and gibbered at him. Harper yelped, whipping out his gun as he stumbled back.

But Kadra merely booted the enormous insect off the path. "That species is not poisonous," she informed him.

"Good, great, fine! It just swallows a man whole."

Kadra shook her head, then loped down the path. Keeping his gun handy, Harper followed.

Red sun, he mused as he looked up at the sky. Like, well, Krypton. If he followed comic book logic, didn't that mean that he, from a planet with a yellow sun, had superpowers here.

Concentrating, he took a little jump, then another. On the third, Kadra looked back at him, her face a study in baffled frustration. "This is not the time for dancing."

"I wasn't dancing I was just…" Seeing if I could fly, he thought, amazed at himself. "Nothing. Nothing at all." He heard the roar like a highballing train. It grew, swelled, pounded on his eardrums as he jogged after her. She swung around a curve on the path, and he looked up. In front of them, white water plunged from a height of two hundred feet or more. It screamed over the cliff, dived in a thundering wall, then pounded into the surface of a white river.

Flowers, some unrecognizable, some as simple as daisies, teemed along its banks. There, with the wild grass and wildflowers, with the sunlight spilling in rosy streaks through the canopy of trees, a unicorn lazily grazed.

"My God." The hand still holding the gun fell to his side. The mythical beast raised its regal white head and stared at Harper out of eyes so blue and clear they might have been glass. Then it went back to cropping the grass.

The beauty of it, the sheer wonder, wiped his temper away. Now I've seen it all, he thought. Nothing will ever surprise me again.

He realized the fallacy of that a second later when he glanced back at Kadra.

She'd stripped. The black leather lay piled on the bank, her sword, her dagger crossed over it. She'd pulled off her boots, her wrist sheaths, and was even now reaching up to lift the circlet from her hair.

She was, Harper thought, more mythical, more wondrous that the white-horned creature. Her body was curved and sleek, the color of the fresh honey she had poured over the breakfast bread. Her dark hair, arrow straight, rained over her shoulders, down her back, lay tauntingly over one magnificent breast.