Talina took a deep breath, tossed a triangular chabacho limb onto the fire, and seriously contemplated the sleeping man. The night chime was rising and falling, the stars partially obscured as the clouds drifted in from the east. Out in the forest, something screamed. On Donovan, the hunters never slept. She could hear the soft rustle of the leaves as they shifted out in the deeper forest. There the trees wrestled with each other, repositioning their roots. Far off, she thought she heard a distant crash, the kind made when a group of the forest giants toppled one of their foes.

“And you chose this world?” she asked Dek. “Knowing it’s going to kill you?”

She reached down, ran her fingers through his hair, felt the tingle inside her.

“Yes!” Demon hissed down in her gut. But the thing had always been intrigued by human sex.

Reproduction was a lot less complicated among quetzals; three of them shared TriNA through an interchange of saliva. The TriNA was sucked into the reproductive tract where it recombined with strands from each of the donors. The new TriNA was incorporated into a prokaryotic germ cell that began dividing, developing, and a couple of months later a juvenile quetzal was popped out the reproductive orifice atop the tail. The whole process held no emotion, no agonizing choice of mate, none of the drama characteristic of human sexual relations.

At times, Tal envied the beasts.

Talina could feel Rocket’s presence shift on her shoulder. Like Demon, Rocket was no more real than a feeling. Was it something in the human psyche that insisted on giving her infection a physical presence, a manufactured identity? But then, Shig would say that all identity was maya, a form of trickery or illusion.

“And what do you think?” she asked Rocket.

“You are tired of being alone.”

“I’m never alone. Half the time I’m sharing your dreams. Same with that piece of shit in my gut.”

“You know what I mean.”

That was the thing about having an intelligence inside her. Dek’s pheromones might give away his sexual interest, but the damn quetzals knew her innermost thoughts.

“Yes!” Demon insisted.

Before being infected by quetzals, she could tell herself any damn thing she wanted. Pretend she believed it. Having intelligent molecules that knew better running around in her blood really sucked toilet water.

Yes, admit it already. She was lonely. The quetzal molecules in her blood, the physical changes in her body, her almost superhuman strength, reflexes, and senses, made her suspect. And there had been some pretty rocky incidents while Whitey’s molecules were trying to manipulate her body into becoming a weapon. Like the time she thought she was shooting Sian Hmong. Thank god it was only a hallucination. But she’d still blasted a damn hole in a shipping container.