“Still no guarantee that we’ll live through this.” Rocket sounded unsure.

“Welcome to Donovan,” Dek chided.

Rocket responded with that chittering that served for quetzal laughter.

Nothing from Demon. Dek imagined that all through his brain and blood, Demon’s TriNA was separating, recombining, and spitting molecules back and forth.

Good, let the evil little son of a bitch think it through. It wasn’t just Dek’s resolve that he was betting on. Demon had been living inside Talina. It had experienced Talina’s victory over one quetzal after another—ever since she’d killed the one that had infected her in that canyon in the Blood Mountains. Then there was the one she’d killed by dropping a front-end loader’s bucket on its neck. And the one from Whitey’s lineage she’d shot in PA. Not to mention that Demon had to have been affected by the TriNA from all those other lineages. The stuff learned from other molecules, right?

“That’s right, boys. And I’m as dedicated to success as Talina.”

Dek trotted across the root mat—heedless of the way it squirmed in protest—and tackled the next head-high tangle of barrel-thick roots. Scrambling to the top, he caught the faint scent of balsam as an eddy stirred.

“Close,” Rocket almost shrilled.

Dek stopped short just below the crest of interlocked roots. Flipped the safety off. His heart began to hammer in his chest, adrenaline charging his muscles. That full-body tingle—called buck fever—ran through his muscles and blood.

“Show time, boys,” he said as forced himself to peer over the edge, the rifle at the ready.

The real thing was one hell of a lot more intimidating than that hazy image in quetzal memory. The monster might have been twenty meters in length. It didn’t have legs as such but was propelled by double lines of paddles on either side of its belly. A third line—like fins—ran down the length of its back. A stalk-topped eye swiveled around, fixing full on Dek. The thing stopped halfway up the root ball across the flat.

“Pus in a bucket,” Dek whispered. Made himself clamber over the top of the roots when every sensible nerve in his body was screaming, “Shoot!”

Trembling, his mouth dry, Dek carefully felt his way down the root tangle, rifle at the ready.

“Just like Tyson Station,” he told himself. “If you can take out a drone with a snap shot, you can kill this thing.”

That didn’t mean that now, seeing the size of the beast, he forgot to flip up the velocity to a thousand meters a second and wish he’d loaded a two-hundred-fifty-grain bullet.

“Hey! Monster!” he yelled, more to assert his own flagging courage than to piss the beast off.