This was a far cry from that hesitant, start and falter, forever-on-the-edge-of-disaster trip she’d made with Cap Taggart all those years ago. Not that anything about her passage was cavalier. Death lurked on all sides. Not just in the predatory plants, but in the ever-questing roots, in the hidden hunters that prowled the shadows.

“So how did Dek get past all this without being turned into a skeleton?”

“Made him quetzal?” Rocket suggested.

That scared, more than reassured, her. If Demon’s TriNA had that much control over Dek’s brain, was it even worth finding him?

Worst case, Demon would use the guy to toss her into a nightmare’s tentacles or shove her down in slug-filled mud so that she’d die horribly and in agony.

Best case? She’d find him a blithering idiot, or zombie-like under Demon’s control. And it would be her responsibility to put a bullet in his head.

“Either way sucks toilet water,” she growled as she slipped around a black hole in the roots that reeked of slightly different vinegar smell than she was used to. Something down there that she was unfamiliar with, not a skewer or bem. Her quetzal sense formed an image of a two-sword-clawed, blue, three-eyed thing in a hard shell. Weird how the image came clear with just the smell.

Skipping across a series of roots, she startled a collection of invertebrates on a fallen chabacho trunk. They scattered in an explosion of multicolored shells and buzzing wings.

By the numbers on her wrist unit, she’d been traveling west for twenty minutes when she picked up the first trace of Dek’s passage: a slight agitation in the roots off to her left. No telling if it was Demon’s influence or Dek’s previous experience, but he’d made a wide circuit around the stand of brown caps.

Then which way?

She frowned, couldn’t pick out any unusual activity in the roots beyond the brown caps, but a fallen aquajade trunk served as a ramp that led up to a bench on her left. Talina took it, racing to the stony outcrop’s top. Here she could see the thin root mat’s agitation where Dek’s booted feet had bruised them. Talina raced along in pursuit, and into the dense forest beyond where deeper soil allowed the trees to grow into towering specimens. Some of the boles were a good five meters in diameter, the roots snaking out beneath them like supple pillars.

Dek’s trail through the jumble let her make good time, proceeding almost at a run. Breath came easily to her lungs, the familiar weight of her rifle acting as a balance as she leapt from root to root, heedless of the disturbance she left by her rapid passage.

“Come on, Dek. Where the hell are you?”