“Not that it will be the rest of my life,” she muttered, skipping wide around one of the black meter-in-diameter pincushions with its hundreds of deadly spines.

As good as Demon was at making Dek think he was a quetzal during these jaunts, just like the other day, mobbers, brown caps, a sidewinder, slugs, or one of the predatory vines was going to kill the guy. Hell, for all she knew, she’d round the next bend of the river and see him speared through by a bem and being engulfed. Not to mention that this was nightmare country. And though the mundo trees grew back from the river on better-drained soils, odds were that one or two of the local trees had to have a fricking nightmare living in it.

The sound of the waterfall had grown louder; now it almost drowned out the chime.

Talina clambered over a two-meter-tall knot of roots that followed a cleft in the underlying gabbro and broke out onto bare rock. Not more than ten meters beyond, the rock ended in a cliff. The river beside her flowed over the edge, curled, and the clear water vanished into the depths below to roar and thunder, mist rising from the thirty-meter drop.

To her right, bare bedrock extended some fifteen or so meters before a low growth of something resembling ferngrass clung to the thin soils. Behind it, a kind of brush Talina had never seen slowly gave way to a tangle of vines with huge scarlet flowers sprouting long whip-like tendrils. The stuff just looked deadly, which, on Donovan, meant it was.

More to the point, however, Dek was standing at the edge of the falls. His head tilted back, and Talina could see his face, sweaty, expression pained. The veins in the man’s neck were sticking out. His left hand knotted into a fist, the tendons hard under his skin.

“Dek?” she called softly, stepping carefully onto the bare rock.

He didn’t answer, but as she came closer, she could see tears streaking down his face.

“Dek?”

A hard swallow ran down his throat. Soundlessly, Dek’s lips worked, as though he was in dialog with himself.

Only as she stepped wide did she see that he had his pistol up, the three rails braced on the side of his head.

“Dek, you don’t want to do this.”

“Can’t.”

She barely heard his whisper over the thunder of the falls. “Can’t what, Dek? Hey, listen, we’ll find a way through this.” She lowered her rifle to the stone, hands out in a gesture of surrender.

For the first time, his eyes flicked her direction. “It just keeps pulling horrible things out of my memory, Tal. I won’t live that shit. I won’t be that man!”

“If you shoot yourself, Demon wins,” she told him in her best calm-the-situation voice. “Dek, there’s got to be another way.”

“Yeah,” he told her. “There is.”