For the first time, a spear of hope began to build. The guy was still alive. Protected either by incredible luck—or more likely, Demon’s guiding hand—Dek had crossed almost a kilometer of virgin forest. Unarmed.

“So, seriously, Tal,” she mused as she climbed up a three-meter-high knot of interlaced roots, “you like the guy. If he’s a blank-gazed automaton possessed by a demented quetzal, can you really make yourself walk up and shoot him in the head?”

Damn it, why the hell did these things always happen to her? Why was it she who had to make the choice? Chock it up to some cosmic injustice? Bad karma on her part? Or was Shig right, and her young soul had to pay a weird penance for sins committed in one of her earlier and even younger existences?

“Screw the Hindus. Or Buddhists. Or who the hell ever,” she muttered.

In her memory she could hear her half-Maya mother telling her, “The universe wouldn’t pick you if you weren’t strong enough to do what you had to.”

The way was steeper now, and she had to dig in with her toes to find purchase on the already irritated roots. She was gaining. Just minutes behind her prey if she were any judge of the roots’ activity. The light was brighter, indicating a break in the trees, probably a rock outcrop or one of the jumbled ridges abutting the mountain wall. She could hear the faint roar of whitewater tumbling down a defile somewhere beyond the steep incline just ahead.

Talina fought for footing in the roiling roots as she scrambled up the abuttal. She was on the verge of crashing through the screen of leaves and into the open when she heard the chittering, the tweeting whistles and harmonics. She didn’t need the panicked quetzals inside to bring her to a hard stop. Her own heart might have leapt from her chest.

Mobbers!

Talina immediately dropped to a knee, every muscle frozen.

The sound grew, ever louder.

And Dek had to be just on the other side of those leaves, out in the open.

“Think, Tal,” she managed through gritted teeth.

Dropping onto her stomach, she wiggled across the roots to peer through a gap in the leaves.

A wheeling, fluttering chaos of laser-flashing colors met her gaze. Mostly crimsons, stunning oranges, vermillion yellows, blinding greens, and pulsing blues, a riot of color in a whirlwind column that descended from above. For the briefest of instants, Tal fixed on the image of Dek Taglioni, lying flat, face-down and motionless on the bare stone.

Within seconds, Talina was going to bear witness as the beasts stripped Dek’s body down to bloody bones.

The scream of the quetzals inside her, the momentary paralysis they imposed, froze every muscle.

Dek is going to die!