Talina sighed, studied the pile, and decided that digging out the splintered bones would be too much trouble. Just trying to pick the fragments from the hardened pile, she’d get the crap bit out of her by the angry invertebrates. The skull would be enough. Something to put in the cemetery beneath a marker. Liz deserved that, and as for what was left behind? Well, everyone on Donovan understood they could end up as quetzal shit.

Reaching up, Talina unhooked the heavy canvas sack. Looking in, she could see a collection of rough-looking almost frosted stones. A small fortune of diamonds, most of them the size of walnuts. One as big as a peach.

“Hell of a strike you had, Liz,” Talina thoughtfully told the skull. Then she placed it and the mandible in the sack with the diamonds.

Retracing her way back to the aircar, she laid the bag on the seat in the back, loaded the last of the tools, and stepped into the vehicle. Taking one last look around, she spun up the fans and lifted off, blowing sand and gravel in all directions.

“On my way back, Two Spot,” she called into com.

“Roger that, Tal.”

As she flew south toward Port Authority, she considered. For more than a year now, they’d had no sight nor trace of Whitey or his kin. Some had even started to think the fearsome quetzal was dead. Maybe killed by younger members of his lineage. Quetzals did that. That’s how they passed information from generation to generation. By ingesting their elders’ TriNA.

“But the way you killed Liz?” she mused. “You made a show of this.”

In her stomach, Demon snickered. Piece of shit that he was.

“You wanted us to know that you’re back.”

“Warning,” Rocket insisted from her shoulder.

“Why warn us?” Talina wondered. “We’ll be ready. And this time, forewarned. Whitey’s going to end up as steaks and leather.”

“You’ll see,” came Demon’s cryptic comment from down inside her.

Chapter 3

  3  

The airplane curved off to the southeast as it banked tightly over the deep forest. Where she sat at the controls, sixteen-year-old Kylee Simonov kept an eye on the screen set in the dash. The readings kept climbing, dropping, and then climbing again; different signatures for organic compounds appeared and then vanished. The data came from the sensor they towed on a two-hundred-meter cable behind and below the VTOL aircraft.

For the most part, her quetzal sense, that part of her personality that had grown up and merged with Rocket’s TriNA, was still. The human part of her had come to accept flying. Actually enjoyed it while the quetzal engrams in her brain went mostly silent.

“Get anything?” Dek Taglioni asked from where he sat in the passenger seat.