“I mean it. Oh, I know, there’s the claim out west, your rigged poker game at The Jewel on those rare nights when you can get there. But be real. The claim will make you rich, granted, but it’s small-time. Just gold, some silver, a little platinum. To really make it pay, you need equipment. Some way to transport the ore to Kalico’s smelter. That’s where the real money can be made. In the beginning, I thought the claim was a way to kill time. Get your feet under you. I figured that eventually you were going to hook up with Kalico. Broker some partnership with her that would get you an interest in Corporate Mine, but now, after being with you out here, I’m not sure.”

A flicker of a smile crossed his lips. “Kalico? She and I will always be confidants. It’s a measure of the kind of woman she is that she could look beyond the man I was back in Solar System. And I’ll always owe her for that.”

Dek frowned into the flames as some night creature screamed out in the trees. The night chime answered, and back in the forest a ululating call carried on the still air.

“So, you didn’t plan to make a play for Corporate Mine?”

“I might have. But it was a fleeting notion that died within days of leaving Port Authority that first time. Kalico Aguila is never, ever, under any circumstance, going to surrender so much as a share of Corporate Mine to anyone. Not ever her old sponsor, Miko. She’s bled too much, sacrificed too much. And if Miko should show up and try to claim it out from under her?” He gave Talina a conspiratorial wink. “God and the universe help the man. She’ll gut him.”

“So, back to the question. What do you want?”

“Right now? To keep a lid on these quetzals.”

“Wish you’d never shared Flute’s TriNA?”

He shook his head, looking perplexed. “You and me, we’re alive today because of this TriNA. Without it, you’d have died when you hit the bottom of the waterfall. Impact would have killed you. But for quetzal sense, I’d have died a horrible death four or five times climbing up out of that dark fissure. I’m soft meat, Talina. I could not have known about that nightmare, the three-eyed snake in the crack, those green-shelled invertebrates, or that creepy white-thorn vine. After ten years of atrophy in Ashanti there’s no way I could have clung to that cliff as we climbed around that patch of tentacle bushes.”

“Hence my original question. What do you want, Dek?”

He lifted his spear, tested its point with the ball of his thumb. Then he gave her an eerily intent stare. “I want to be with you. Do what we’re doing. I want to join my life to yours.”