Irritated, Talina started forward, her vision adjusting to the darkness as she slipped into the forest’s shadowed depths. Here, beneath the thick overstory, the visibility was little better than in starlight; Capella’s angle remained too low to shoot even refracted rays through the higher branches. Thick root mat squirmed slowly under Talina’s weight as she scented the air, her wary gaze taking in the surrounding vines, looking for the lethal predators.

Dek’s track had been in a straight line from the dome. West. Toward the mountain wall. But once he was in the trees? Picking and holding a direction was nigh on impossible without a compass or global positioning aid, not that Donovan had anything like the latter.

She searched for any sign of Dek’s passage, any difference in the movement of the roots. And saw nothing but the constant slow writhing normal to a forest floor.

How much lead did he have? And more to the point, why in hell had he wandered off into the forest? Soft meat he might be, but it just didn’t make sense. He was smarter than this. Nothing would have been tempting enough to lure him into the bush without his rifle or his . . .

“He’s not in his right mind,” Rocket told her from her shoulder.

“Demon’s got him locked in a hallucination,” she agreed, her hopes dropping.

Had to be.

“So, Demon, you piece of shit, what’s your game? If you wanted him dead, you could have just hallucinated him into shooting himself.” A pause. “Or could you?”

No answer came from down behind her stomach where her hated quetzal seemed to crouch in anticipation.

“This is a game, isn’t it? There’s no fun or payback in killing Dek fast. That’s too easy. I’d just grieve for a bit, load up, and head back to my life. No, you’re going to try and make the two of us suffer. To do that, you need to keep him alive. Make it a challenge.”

She could feel the quetzal shift in her gut, as if delighted that she’d caught on so quickly.

“West.”

How in the hell would her Demon know what Dek’s Demon was planning? But then, it was the same intelligence. And who knew how that worked?

Toward the mountains? Where the forest was thicker, the land more rugged and broken as it rose toward the sheer cliffs?

Talina checked her wrist compass, and—focusing on her surroundings—started forward into the hidden depths. It came to her in a curious revelation that she did so with an uncanny ease. Almost a feeling of being at home, moving with a surefooted speed. She sidestepped the biteya bush and thorncactus, gave wide berth to the pincushion thing, and instinctively leapt from root to root, secure in her understanding of which roots would support her weight with the least amount of disturbance.