He sensed Bane’s presence at his back, the general’s overwhelming magic signature filling the room. All that Bane had just said in the car—and had not—pressed against Griffin’s awareness, creating questions he couldn’t ask.

The chief folded his hands on the table, the tips growing white from the pressure. He looked at them as he spoke, his voice hoarse, as though his fire had dried it out. “She will have headed northwest, along the coast. On foot. Her note said she was following the Queen’s path.”

Griffin scratched at his cheek and chin, nodding. “And she’ll want to do it exactly like the Queen did. No vehicles. Nothing the Queen didn’t have. That’s good. Tell me about this path.”

The chief fingered the stone at the base of his throat. “Legend says that the Queen had failed to find the Source after searching this island her whole life. Finally, in her old age, she gave this rock to a man she designated ali’i, told her people that she belonged to the Source now, and if she was truly meant to find it, it would guide her to it. Then she took her longtime partner and left this valley.

“Thirty-two days later, her partner stumbled back. He was old and weak, and he told the story of how his Queen carved her final prayer to the Source onto a stone in a small, dangerous valley along the coast. She carved it all throughout the day, the two of them fell asleep in each other’s arms, and when he awoke, she was gone. He guessed that sometime in the night the Source had answered her prayer and had guided her to its location. He searched but he never found her, and he assumed she was successful.”

“And no other Chimerans ever went after this stone prayer,” Griffin said, “if it supposedly revealed the Source’s location? Wouldn’t that be the prize of all prizes?”

The chief frowned. “Until Aya told us that thing about her people killing the last woman who went after the Source, we’ve believed that the fire took the Queen for its own. Before he died, her lover declared that no one should ever go after the Source, because to do so would be to claim yourself greater than the Queen. She is our goddess, so no one ever has. Until now.”

Greater than the Queen. Keko, what do you think you’re doing? What did you bring upon yourself? And why do your uncle and brother want such different outcomes?

“I’ll bring her back safe,” Griffin said to the chief. “The Source will remain untouched.”

He heard Bane walk away, the Chimeran’s signature trailing after him, the sound of the glass panes rattling in the back door as he made his exit. But Griffin didn’t go after him. If the general refused to give him any answers about his cryptic plea, Griffin didn’t owe him anything in return. Keko’s life was Griffin’s goal. His sole purpose.

The chief’s gaze drifted over Griffin’s shoulder and out the window that framed an overgrown garden. “Yes,” he murmured, almost to himself. “I’m sure it will remain untouched.”

And Griffin didn’t know what suddenly bothered him more: the troubled, conflicted look in the chief’s tired eyes and the anxious bounce of his knee, or the fact that his Chimeran signature was essentially nonexistent.

Griffin hiked out of the Chimeran valley on the opposite side from which he’d arrived. Even if he’d wanted to hop in a car and close the gap between him and Keko with an engine, there was no way even the best four-wheel drive could have managed on this landscape. It wasn’t vertical, but pretty damn close. He had to pay smart attention to where he put his hands and feet, the land soft from rain, the vegetation sometimes giving out and making him slide.

This terrain had probably been kid’s play to Keko. Her stamina and strength were already something incredible, a gift of her Chimeran blood, but she’d also grown up here, among the birds with their strange songs, and the ferns and vines that looked injected with steroids. A dangerous advantage for her to have, and he dared let himself worry that maybe he’d underestimated how far ahead she’d gotten.

But then, he had a damn good advantage over her.

When he was well away from the valley, heaving for breath on top of a rise that swept back down to the stronghold and even farther away to the ocean, he unzipped his pack and pulled out Adine’s sensor. A slim silver piece with a screen larger than most smart phones, it fit perfectly in one hand. He flicked it on and the screen jumped, coming to life as it slowly scanned and displayed in uneven, colorful circles the altitude pitches of this mountainous land. Red for the tops of the hills that faded into dark blue at sea level. A jumble of hills and crags, canyons and bodies of water.

He could feel the faint tug of the signatures of the collective Chimeran population far off to his right. There, on the screen, in blinking, shifting white, a graphic cloud echoed what he sensed.

Also, a thin, faint, white streak smeared northwest across the screen, zigzagging through the concentric, colorful circles, traveling down the slopes and back up again. Away from the valley. Away from the spot in which he stood now.

Keko.

He could not physically sense her signature anymore, but it was right there in brilliant clarity, in a visual form no Ofarian, or anyone else, had ever laid eyes on before. The perfect trail for him to follow.

He realized, with a cold feeling, that if this kind of technology should ever fall into the wrong hands, it wouldn’t just be Adine who would be compromised. Every Secondary would be vulnerable. He’d have to get her assurance that this particular device—since he had been the one to commission and pay for it—was the only type of tracker in existence.

But . . . one situation at a time.

Griffin stared at the device and memorized Keko’s path, intermittently dropping the screen to look up and match the digital signature trail with the topography spread out before him. Once he had it committed to memory, he turned off the tracker and stashed it in his pack.

He would never catch up with her on foot. Not with her physical ability, not with her two-day lead and knowledge of the landscape, and not with the day’s light starting to die.

But he’d close a good chunk of the distance if he used his magic.

He opened his mouth and filled it with Ofarian words. He threw out his arms, tilted back his head, and opened up his whole being to let his magic take hold. The language of his ancestors, the one that had originated on another world somewhere up among the stars, spun through him, taking his human body. It sank into him, shifting the molecules of his hair and bones and organs to water, to the element that defined his people.

In fiction, Primaries called magic “power.” He remembered that the first time he’d heard that term as a boy, he’d found it odd. But that was before his body had changed, before he’d actually wielded water and discovered how truly special he was. As soon as he matured he understood the synonym for magic as “power,” because that’s exactly how he felt. Powerful. It had never changed for him. Using it this time in the wet Hawaiian forest as a thirty-five-year-old was as humbling and wonderful as the very first time in his parents’ living room at age thirteen.

Opening his eyes, he looked at his arm, a translucent, shimmering appendage that defied the rules of this world. To transform his body entirely into water was simple and demanded little from either himself or his magic, but he needed his clothing and he needed what he carried on his back. That was a different process entirely, and it required an awful lot.

Digging deep, as deep into his powers as was possible, he centered his concentration, and then pushed his magic outward. It shot out from the confines of his body, stabbing into the cotton threads of his clothes and the nylon strands of his pack, and the many solid pieces of the contents inside. He changed everything, from Adine’s signature sensor down to his scant camper’s food.