“I want it off. You do it. Cut it off!”

“Hey! Look at me!”

An iron grip tightened on his wrist. He felt the knife wrenched away as it was peeled out of his trembling hand.

He blinked through the tears, managed to fix on her face where it was lit by the dying light as Capella sank below the canyon wall to the west.

Talina? Here? Yes. It had to be Talina. A whimper broke from his throat as a wave of pain sent him into a spasm.

How did Talina get here?

Through glazed eyes he glanced around. Chabacho trees and aquajade. Sunset. He could barely hear the chime, rising, mocking. He couldn’t feel the rock he lay on. Pain. Only the blasting damn pain.

Rock? Basalt? How did he get to the cap rock? He now lay at the edge of the canyon. Could see it drop off into a wilderness of trees no more than a meter from where he lay. Last he recalled he’d been under the canyon rim. Below the capping strata of basalt. On the steep slope. Surrounded by plants. Picking his way along the vein. Found a chunk of quartz that gleamed with nodules of gold. And then. . . . And then . . .

“I climbed,” he whispered, remembering. If only his thoughts weren’t wheeling and reeling.

Focus. It’s Talina.

Talina Perez filled him with awe; the most exotic woman he’d ever known. Quetzal genetics made her that way, TriNA, or trioxynucleaic acid. The Donovanian analog to terrestrial DNA. The stuff had turned Talina into a hybrid. One mostly human, but her angular cheekbones, the large dark eyes, and the intensity with which she watched him most assuredly had an alien quality.

“I’m not cutting your leg off.”

He fixed on her voice, an anchor in a burning sea of misery. Somehow he got a swallow down his throat. Yes, look at her. Concentrate.

She had the richest black hair. Thick. Pinned behind her neck, it still spilled down her back.

“This is going to hurt,” she told him. Capella’s sunset light had turned her skin into gold, shot fire along the edges of her black coveralls.

Hurt? Too late for that. He’d have laughed if the mind-killing agony had left him any wits.

He screamed as she lifted him. Tossed him over her shoulder. Screamed some more as Talina pounded down the trail. She dodged the sucking shrub, veered wide around the tooth flower, ducked the blood vines with their crimson tentacles, and hammered her way heedlessly across the writhing roots. With each step, his leg exploded anew. Kept bursting, the meat blasting away from the bone. Nerves splintered into an infinity of fire. Time after time.

The world started spinning, his vision a blur of aquajade, squirming roots, reaching branches of green and turquoise leaves blurring as they whipped sideways.