Unsure what he could do to influence the molecular conflict in his blood, he tried to focus on Talina. On the root mat, the hanging vegetation, and any scent of vinegar that would warn of a bem or skewer. He followed her, mimicking her steps, echoing every move her supple body made. He stepped wide where she did, seemed to share her awareness of the dark holes, the curious and new vines that hinted of danger. Periodically she’d glance back, and he’d see the flash in her now-familiar eyes. And most of all, a new intimacy in the way she shared his glances.

He’d always had an attraction toward her, but after this day, he was falling hard. Dealing with feelings he hadn’t known since his youthful fling with Kalay. But Kalay had been about the heart-pounding passion of first love. That total commitment of raging hormones and all-consuming obsession driven by sexual novelty and the belief that their bond was unbreakable and eternal.

“What are you thinking?” Talina called over her shoulder as she skipped from one head-sized stone to the next where they protruded from the root mat.

“That it’s different this time.”

“What is?”

“Until I met you . . . No, wait. How do I say this? I’ve known a lot of women.”

“No shit? How’d I miss that?”

“Hey, cut the caustic. You never had to live as a pampered and frustrated Taglioni first-born son. That’s a lot to overcome in an entire lifetime, let alone a measly decade.”

“So? Have you?” Talina flipped out her knife. Like a blur, she severed a thick stem where a biteya bush that blocked the way grew from a crack in the rock. The vine immediately began to contort, fluids spattering this way and that. “Don’t get any of that on you. I think if we go back around that boulder, the rest of the vine is going to be so busy dying it will ignore us.”

“Dying does that,” Dek agreed, stepping back, leading the way around the boulder, making sure in the process that nothing hid on the stone’s opposite side. He got no quetzal warning as he winced and scurried beneath an outlying tendril of the contorting biteya bush. The air was ripe with its peppery odor.

Dek picked his way, taking his time before each step as he climbed. Through the thin branches of an aquajade, he could see the cleft toward which they ascended. The root mat was thinner here; the stuff squirmed under his weight and the grinding rock that shifted underfoot.