“How’s that work?” Kylee asked. “You two seem to just click into place, like matching pieces of a puzzle. Me and Tip? It’s weird.”

“You’re only . . .” Dek chuckled. “Sorry. You still fool me with that body of yours.” A beat. “So, what’s up with you and Tip?”

She shook her head, felt the frown line her forehead as she watched the data scroll across the dash screen. “He’s not growing up, Dek. He’s becoming someone . . . um, something I don’t know anymore. Like the TriNA is making him into a new kind of organism that’s . . . well . . .”

“Can’t put words to it?”

Kylee took a deep breath. “No. And I was trained as a biologist. I haven’t even seen Tip. Like for three months. It was after we started having sex. Changed everything. He’s just . . . gone.”

My fault, she thought. But then, it usually was.

“Broke his parents’ hearts. Madison thinks that somehow she failed him. Chaco? He’s more philosophical about it. You know Tip best, Kylee. What do you think’s going to happen to him?”

“Nothing good,” she told him. “Even Flute’s given up on him. In Flute’s own words, he says that Tip’s ‘spoiled meat.’”

“Yeah, that’s quetzal for wasted and fit only for invertebrates.” Dek slapped his knee as if in disappointment.

“Got to reel the probe in,” she told him, one eye on the charge level. “We’re at the safety limit to get back to the claim and recharge the powerpack.”

Dek nodded, reached down and flipped the switch that would reel the probe in.

Kylee made a one-hundred-and sixty-degree turn, taking a heading back toward Dek’s claim. Through the side window, she watched the forest pass below. From the sky, it looked almost like a soft carpet: bunched canopies, greens, blues, turquoise, teal, all thickly packed and soft-looking.

Call that an illusion or what? That peaceful carpet of trees was anything but soft and peaceful. Looking closely, she could see the holes where forest giants had uprooted and toppled a rival. And here and there, a lollipop tree stood alone in a clearing it made by whacking and beating its neighbors. The very idea that a tree could be a mobile predator just wasn’t in a terrestrial human’s cognitive framework.

“So, when are you and Talina having kids?” Kylee wondered.

Dek shrugged. “Don’t know that we are. Hell, we don’t even know if we can. We’re both hybrids. Even if we conceived, there’s no telling if a fetus would be viable, or what it would come out to be if it was. Would the kid even look human? Or would it be some weird chimera that was a mish mash of human and quetzal? You don’t realize, but there are huge moral implications. We’re off the map, Kylee.”