voice of his, matter-of-fact as if he weren’t delivering the best compliment she’d ever had in her life.
Did your mother garden? she asked. He knew a lot about flowers, or he was very good at making things up.
Eliza loved flowers and planted them all around the place we lived. I remember the smell of them. And yes, she particularly loved what she called the classics, so we had peonies. After she was gone, I worked for a nursery that grew flowers and sold them to flower shops. I liked getting my hands in the dirt. There were rows of flowers, and the peonies had a delicate perfume that called to me. Some of the other flowers had nice scents, but I couldn’t work in the rows for too long without the smell being overpowering. I could work in the rows of peonies forever.
He’d given her a piece of himself so casually, throwing the information out there as if it didn’t matter when she knew it did. From what she knew of them, none of the GhostWalkers were the kind of men to reveal personal information about themselves or anyone else. She thought it odd that he referred to his mother by her first name, but she didn’t pry.
I’ve never smelled a peony, she admitted. Whitney grows flowers, but most of them are exotic.
Classics are far better than exotics. Nothing rivals a cut peony. Seriously. They have a beauty about them no other flower has. And longevity. They look delicate and elegant, but they’re strong survivors.
She knew he was trying to tell her not to give up. She wouldn’t. It wasn’t in her nature. Maybe I’m more like a peony than I realized.
I saw the resemblance immediately. He paused. Perhaps not the scent at this precise moment.
Shylah muffled the laughter welling up. She ran along the branches, switching from one tree to the next in the way a cat might. She knew when to duck to avoid getting hit with other branches and several times she forgot to warn Draden. He read the route in her mind and had no problem maneuvering, making her believe he had been genetically engineered even better than she had been.
They covered several miles before she began the descent to the forest floor. They were inland, away from the river. She would rather rely on the trees instead of water as an escape route.
You set up camp quite a distance from the MSS.
It was an observation, not a judgment. Shylah liked the way Draden seemed to reserve his conclusions until he had the facts. I’ve never met a man like you before.
Have you met a lot of men?
I was in one of Whitney’s compounds. Sometimes he moved us from place to place. There were always soldiers around us. Yes, there were a lot of men.
From the tone of your voice, I’m grateful you don’t think I’m anything like the others.
Shylah stopped the continual flow of conversation in the branches of a thick dipterocarp tree, holding on to the limb above her while she took her time scanning the area carefully.
It was an observation, Shylah admitted. A good one. If I’m going to die a really ugly death, it’s nice to like the person I’m going to share that with. She made every effort to sound impersonal. He was dying too. She wasn’t looking for sympathy.
Let’s hope my friend Trap is as brilliant as I think he is.
She glanced at him. He was looking at the forest floor, toward their back trail. No one could have followed them through the arboreal highway other than another trained GhostWalker. That was one of the many reasons she chose to go high.
“I think we’re safe enough to talk out loud,” she decided. A part of her wanted to continue to use telepathy and keep him in her mind, but it felt too intimate. “The reason my camp is a good distance away is because I wasn’t looking for the terrorists. I was looking for the three virologists who designed the virus as a weapon. I thought they would have set up shop in the city, but they didn’t.” She began the climb down to the forest floor. “They felt safer out here and thought their experiments wouldn’t draw any notice.”
Draden followed her lead, staying just behind, climbing instead of jumping across the expanse—and she had the feeling he was very capable of jumping long distances without getting hurt. She liked that he didn’t try to take over because they were