“This is taking too long,” Kylee growled under her breath as she pulled the last knot tight on the section of fiber. She’d used claw shrub—cut from crushed plants in the shuttle’s debris field—to bind sections of triangular chabacho branch into a crude litter frame. A battered tarp, with holes cut for the litter poles to fit through, had been fastened by long thorncactus spines.

The sun had slid closer to the horizon, the temperature was somewhere in the high thirties, the humidity thick. On the sialon, it was like working on a baking tray with the oven set to simmer.

But at last, they were ready to go. Kylee stood, wiped her mouth. Wished for a drink of water. But it had already been established that the shuttle’s small reserve tank had ruptured in the crash.

Falise was giving her a skeptical gaze where she sat looking hot, sweaty, depressed, and fatigued, on the wing next to the perspiration-soaked and panting Soukup. The woman’s once-fancy streaked hair was now hanging in an unruly tangle.

“We ready?” Bogarten asked where he was propped on the wing’s trailing edge; his splinted foot was dangling.

“Yeah,” Kylee told him. “We’re barely going it make it by sundown as it is. We get stuck out there in the dark, we’re dead.”

“What about Flute?” Falise asked. “Won’t he protect us?”

At mention of his name, Flute extended his head out from where he crouched in the shade beneath the wing. Quetzals, it seemed, didn’t worry about invertebrates biting them or toxic chemicals from broken vines.

“How’s a quetzal going to protect you from roots?” Kylee asked, standing and slapping at her filthy fabric pants.

“I didn’t think of the roots,” Falise looked away.

“Yeah, well, you’d better. Out here, you get no second chances.”

The three left of the Four just watched with those emotionless eyes; they might have been unconcerned. Unfazed by the fact that they could be dead within the hour.

Kylee pulled the litter over to Soukup; the guy didn’t look well. He was obviously thirsty and in pain; each breath he took sounded ragged. His normally piercing black eyes lacked luster, seemed to have trouble focusing.

“All right, let’s get you on the litter,” she told him. When he didn’t respond, Kylee reached down, and as gently as she could, started to lift.

“Stop!” The scream was torn from his throat. Tears collected like diamonds around the pinched black eyes. Beads of sweat rolled down his sun-reddened skin.

Kylee stuck her face in his. “We don’t have a lot of time. I don’t care if it hurts like a motherfucker! If we don’t get you up to the airtruck, you’re dead anyway. You get that, soft meat?”

He jerked a slight nod, and Kylee, with Falise’s help, got him laid out on the stretcher.

“Flute!” Kylee called.