Talina studied Dek where he sat in the firelight and used her knife to sharpen the end of an aquajade sapling. The poor aquajade had been a youngster a little over three meters tall when it was uprooted by its neighbors and tossed out onto the bedrock. There it had withered, desiccated, and died. Dek had claimed it for a spear and was whittling the end into a lethal point that he occasionally fire-hardened in the flames.

Maybe it wasn’t the perfect weapon for Donovan, but it beat nothing. After the trip up the cleft, anything was an improvement. The miracle was that they had made it.

Talina sat cross-legged, studying her scabbed and raw hands. Some of the places she’d scaled defied description, let alone belief. Then she’d glance at Dek. All through that hard and dangerous climb, he’d been a perfect companion. Not quite as adept at spotting danger as she, he’d nevertheless saved her from disaster more than once. Asserted to by the fact that her pistol was now three rounds shy of a full mag. And that last shot had been made by a hair’s breadth. She had no clue what to call the snake-like creature that had shot out of a dark crack in the basalt canyon wall. It had been big, three-eyed, and had a lot of teeth in a triskelion-jointed jaw.

Dek’s warning had barely been in time.

The thing would have killed me, and I’d never have seen it coming.

Nor would she have been able to make that climb without a second person to lend a hand, to lift her up, and to steady her as she eased her way across the treacherous gaps. A couple of times, she’d been scared to the core; he’d given her that reassuring smile, his odd Taglioni eyes looked even more odd as the quetzal TriNA continued to modify the receptors in his retina.

“He’s never going back,” Rocket told her from his perch on her shoulder.

She chewed on her lip, realizing that with Rocket’s declaration, she felt a curious sense of relief. Some part of her had expected him to eventually leave. The man was a Taglioni. One of the elite ruling class. And, from the perspective of a woman raised in Chiapas, almost an Olympian god. A sort of magical and mythical being who would ultimately be called back into the clouds.

Or Transluna. Essentially just as unreachable.

Fact was: Rocket was right. Donovan had taken Derek Taglioni for its own.

She asked, “What do you want, Dek? Assuming that is that Demon doesn’t win, and you don’t kill yourself.”

“Nothing like sugarcoating a question, is there?” He sliced off another long shaving of white wood with the gleaming blade.