Valdez tossed a glance back over her shoulder. “Screw vacuum! The fucking roots have gone apeshit!”

“Yeah,” Dek told her. “Now magnify that by about a thousand times. The entire forest goes bonkers. You should see it from the air.”

“Fuck the air,” Talina told him. “Nothing, ever, in our entire lives, had Kylee and me as scared as we were trying to outrun that last attempt at killing a treetop terror. Valdez, pay attention here. But for sheer stupid blind luck, we barely—and I mean barely—made it out alive. Here, in this forest, unknown as it is? Taking that chance would be stupid.”

“And what’s stupid?” Briah asked, leaping down off the roots and pelting across the flat.

“Stupid’s dead,” Valdez snapped. “Then why’d we bring the boom tubes?”

“Because if we’d been after a scimitar, or some big hulking land-lubbing creature,” Dek told her, “you and Briah could have blown the sucker in two. We could have backed off, and the roots would have delighted as they chowed down. Blow a hole in the branches up top? The shit hits the fan.”

“So, what does it mean?” Valdez asked. “That thing just gets away with killing Xing, Radagan, and Cantos?”

“Naw, we’ll get it,” Muldare told her.

But Talina could hear the frustration in her voice. They hadn’t gotten the last one that had killed their people. Wounded it, yes, but they hadn’t seen its corpse.

She barely heard Dek, the words mouthed under his panting breath as he ran. “Nothing in life’s fair.”

That’s when Talina tossed a glance over her shoulder. In the dying light, she could see the high branches. See something moving up there. Something that bent branches, shifted them, and blurred their image as it passed between her and the upper story.

They had to get out of the deep forest. Onto the shallow soils.

“People!” Talina cried. “It’s following us! Move it! Or we’re dying next!”

“Tell me you’ve got a plan, Tal!” Muldare called over her shoulder.

“Yeah,” Talina muttered under her breath. “I wish I did.” Then, at the top of her lungs, she yelled, “Run!”

Chapter 64

  64  

Dusk was falling. The Inspector General’s Four were down to One. Only the Recorder was left. For Kylee, the trip had become a desperate race. One she was losing. Not to mention that quetzal strength or not, her body was flagging in the unrelenting heat and dehydration.

They had lost the Third when she had stepped mindlessly into a hole in a knot of roots she had tried to climb over. Her leg had plunged in all the way to the crotch. When she’d tried to pull it out, nothing had happened. Her only words were uttered in a dispassionate monotone. “Help here.”