The unreality of it continued to haunt Falise. She sat with her butt propped on an oddly shaped basalt rock. The notion of compassionate sensitivity must have gone missing in her long-lost brother; Derek couldn’t have cared less. He crouched like a satyr as he ministered to her lacerated hands. Behind him, the fire—snapping and crackling—shot occasional sparks into the star-choked night. Up there, patches of black denoted clouds. Differentiated as they were from the blotchy dark nebulae only by the fact that the latter didn’t move.

She gasped, crying, “Damn! That hurts!”

Dek—looking up with feigned surprise—gave her a chiding look. “Don’t be a pussy. Think what Father would say.”

“He can go screw vacuum.” She clamped her teeth shut, tears straining at her lids as Dek used an astringent salve on the most egregious of the cuts on the back of her right hand.

“For once, Little Sister, it seems we agree on something.” His smile hinted of amusement.

“Don’t be such a baby!” Kylee’s words carried frustration.

Falise looked past Dek’s shoulder to see the girl; she squinted in the firelight as she dabbed at a wound on the big quetzal’s shoulder. Flute had sprawled on his belly, head out, jaw resting on the basalt; all three of his eyes rotated around to keep track of Kylee as she ministered to his wounds.

To Falise’s amazement, Kylee had walked out into the dark, used her knife to hack off a tooth flower pod, and, one by one, severed the long and deadly thorns from the rims. These she’d used as needles, slipping them through the edges of the long cuts. After that she employed thread torn from her shirt to bind the wounds together with a tight figure eight, sort of like winding a nautical line around a cleat.

In response, Flute expanded his lungs, then blew that flatulent rasping from his tail vents.

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Derek called over his shoulder.

Kylee finished, patting the quetzal and stepping back to survey her work. “For the time being, those cuts are going to play hell with your more conversant side. I guess, given the way that’s going to scar, you’re going to have the quetzal equivalent of a lisp.”

Falise watched the yellow, green, and pink patterns for an interrogative color on Flute’s side, the pattern broken by the wounds.

“Yeah,” Kylee told him. “My point exactly.”

Derek was grinning as he turned back to dab more salve on Falise’s hand. “You want me to tighten those sutures? You’ve only got a nine-hour window before the edges of the laceration die and you’ll need surgery to—”

“God, don’t tell me that.” She stared at her slashed hands. “Just get me back to Port Authority.”