He didn’t seem to hear, weaving his way around the boles of aquajade beside the river and ducking wide of the tooth flower and bluelinda that grew down next to the riverbank.

How had he gotten down there? Somehow he’d found a path that led around the outcrop, circled wide, and made his way back to the water.

“Shit on a shoe,” Talina muttered, fastening the open front of her coveralls. “Idiot’s going to get himself killed.”

And, fact was, he clearly wasn’t in his right mind.

“My fault,” she reminded herself as she slung her rifle and studied on how to find a way down the outcrop. There, but it was dicey. She’d have to use the cracks and crevices, hope that nothing lethal was hiding in them, and work her way down.

Cursing and worried, she lowered herself over the edge, feeling the way with her feet, clinging with her fingers. Once upon a time, she’d never have had the strength or agility. TriNA might have ruined her life—and maybe Dek’s, too—but it did have its advantages.

Halfway down, she almost reached into a slug’s hiding place, saw it at the last instant, and swung sideways to grasp a different handhold.

Getting her heart to slow, she took a deep breath and, looking down, dared to drop the last two meters to a flat-topped boulder. But for a wild swing of her arms, she’d have fallen. As it was, she leaped, dropped, and hit the ground hard. At the impact, the rifle’s sling liked to have dislocated her shoulder. The roots underfoot went berserk, and she skipped quickly to a rock and jumped away from the questing tendrils. Looking back up the rock face, she shook her head and turned.

It took longer than she thought it would to wind through the predatory vines, avoid a skewer, and figure a way past a shallow pool where the outlines of slugs could be seen under a thin layer of mud.

What had it been? Fifteen minutes? Twenty? But she caught sight of Dek’s boot print in a small gravel bar beside the river.

“What the hell are you up to this time?” she groused as she unslung her rifle and hurried in pursuit. She’d left the guy half-comatose, strapped to the bed. If he was coming to and had enough of his faculties to extricate himself, dress, and charge off into the wilderness with a pistol, her containment strategy was going to have to be rethought. Or was it?

“Didn’t I just decide to leave?” She made a face.

“Can’t,” she shot back before Rocket could get the satisfaction of playing angel-on-her-shoulder.

But damn it, she couldn’t spend the rest of her life being nursemaid, chasing Demon Dek around the Two Falls Gap wilderness.