Talina grinned as she turned the wheel, heading for the broken uplift where Liz had her claim. This was epic country, great blocks of quartzite, slate, and schist that reminded Talina that she was seeing the very bones of the planet. These formed the resistant core of the Blood Mountains along with younger sandstones, shales, and mudstones higher back in the range.

As Talina approached, Capella’s light caught the red and black quartzite ridge above Liz’s camp, giving it an almost vitreous gleam.

Talina slowed, scanning the low forest at the mouth of the draw where an alluvial fan spilled out of the deep drainage. She saw no sign of a camp. But according to Step’s information and the claim location, this had to be it.

“Careful.” Rocket’s voice came from her left shoulder.

“Waking up now that we’re this close to the ground, huh?”

She could feel Demon stir down behind her stomach. Spectral. Imaginary. Knew it was all in her head. As if her brain had to give them a physical location and identity when in reality they were just molecules floating around in her blood: TriNA. The Donovanian version of terrestrial DNA. It was a three-stranded deoxyribonucleic acid that carried three times as much information as DNA. An intelligent molecule, the stuff thought. Used RNAs and recombination to exchange and process information. That she was so infected made Talina a hybrid, a mixture of human and quetzal.

I just want this shit out of my body. Didn’t matter that it had been years. That her features and anatomy had been forever altered. She was and would remain a freak, though Shig and the rest never referred to her as such.

“Careful?” she replied. “This is the bush, guys. Out here, I’m never anything but careful.”

As she drifted closer to the canyon mouth, she saw it. Liz had made her camp on a rocky prominence at the base of a stony slope leading up to the exposed quartzite on the heights. Here, layers of kimberlite lay interbedded with the country rock. And given the rocky soil, it was a smart location. Not the sort of place where slugs would be found. Additionally, the more noxious of the vegetation had been cleared away and piled in a semicircle around the camp to create a kind of protective barrier, like the traditional African boma. Outside of that, twine had been strung, to which tins, bits of foil, a couple of bells, and tinklers had been attached. It might have been low-tech, but quetzals had never been known to figure out how trip wires worked. Anything approaching the camp would run afoul of the strings, send the whole thing crashing down in a noisy alarm. That it was still up was an encouraging sign.