She nodded. The same thoughts had kicked off in her own head the first time she’d ovulated. At the time, the only eligible male had been Tip. Having “inherited” a lot of Talina Perez’s memories when they exchanged TriNA years back, Kylee had grown up with the memory of Talina’s relationships—good, bad, and worse—as if she’d lived them. It was like having access to an entire life’s experience. But none of Talina’s lovers had ever reacted as sullenly or defensively as Tip had.

When she’d tried to tell him how a man should behave with a woman he was copulating with, he’d just gotten mad and stomped off. Gone.

“What’s that look?” he asked.

“Trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my life.” Kylee set her airspeed, relaxing in the seat. “Where do I fit in the world? If Rocket hadn’t been killed when I was a kid, it would have been him and me. Like a sort of symbiont, I guess. With Flute, I never bonded that completely. We’re sort of best friends who live in each other’s heads. Hard to put the intimacy of that link into words. But Dek, I was raised human, surrounded by people until Mundo Base was abandoned. And yes, I bear the guilt and shame for what I did to Rebecca and Shantaya.”

“You were a wounded nine-year-old girl.” Dek squinted through the windshield. “Looks like a flight of mobbers.”

Kylee followed his gaze to the column of multicolored fliers that rose, swirled, and dived down into the top of a towering stonewood tree. “Mobbers all right. Looks like they’ve got some poor creature trapped down there.”

“God help it.” Dek had had his own close shaves with mobbers. The winged death came within a whisker of killing him twice.

Kylee said, “Grief and rage lead people into some pretty bad mistakes. When Spiro shot Rocket, his death ripped a gaping hole, one that took years to come to terms with. I might never have, but for Flute and Talina. At least I can understand the pain, even if it will never go away.”

She hooked a thumb toward the forest they were flying over. “That’s part of what drives me to find and kill that treetop monster that killed Mom and Mark. I was just starting to atone for what I’d done at Mundo, and that thing killed them. It just made the guilt and grief worse, you know?”

“Yeah, I know. I have my own burdens to bear. I told you about some of the things I did and regret.” Dek shared a conspiratorial wink. “Living is all about making up for past mistakes. What you and I know is that we can make decisions about who we want to be and then dedicate ourselves to living that kind of life.”