Kylee shifted, tossed another chunk of aquajade on the fire. “Guess your father’s going to have to rewrite his training program for the Taglioni kids. But you’re one up on Dek. He never killed mobbers with his bare hands. He just waited them out while a gotcha vine sent spines into his leg.”

“That hurt? As much as this?” Falise extended her ravaged hands.

“Worse by about a thousand times,” Kylee told her. “Well, maybe not a thousand, but yeah. If it had been a gotcha bush? You’d be screaming and begging me to shoot you.”

“And you people live here?” A beat. “On purpose?”

Kylee lifted a slim eyebrow. “You mean to tell me Donovan hasn’t been seducing you with its winning ways?”

Falise looked up at the star-encrusted velvet-black sky. “I can’t get back to Transluna soon enough.”

“What about Dek’s half metric ton of rhodium? Won’t it piss off your dad and Uncle Miko if you come home without it?”

Falise vented a humorless chuckle. “Kid, I’m soft meat, but I know how close we came to dying today. This place—this whole planet—is hell. I watched a quetzal eat Ednund. Wanted them dead. Extinct. And today one saved my life. May have sacrificed himself to do it. What kind of cucking frazy is that?”

“Welcome to Donovan.” Kylee smiled warily as she reached out to pull a sizzling and dripping carcass from the fire. “Never had mobber before. Guess you could say this is an eat or be eaten kind of world.”

“I don’t think I can hold even a chunk of meat.”

“It’s got to cool first,” Kylee told her, those eyes no longer conveying the alien threat they used to. “I’ll help you.”

“Then what?” Falise asked, glancing out at the darkness as something screamed out in the trees. “Tomorrow? It won’t be any different. Except that I can’t hold my rifle. And if those mobbers come back looking for their missing pals . . . ?”

Kylee sniffed the meat, gave a grunt of satisfaction, and propped it to cool while she reached for the second spit. “First we find Flute,” she said. “After that, we’re most of the way to Tyson Station. Just down the side of the mountain, and we should get there.”

“And then what?” Falise asked. “Hope the cannibals don’t eat us?”

Kylee turned, listening to the darkness as the chime shifted in key. “They won’t. But we use their radio. Got some unfinished business with that Corporate IG.”

Falise narrowed her eyes. “He’s mine.”

“I say we give him to Flute. See if the toilet-sucking slug-licker gives him indigestion.”