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and give the customer five minutes to decide. Come on, Alex, do you think I can’t see through that?
    She motioned toward the canyon walls. “By all means. Don’t let me stop you.”
    He frowned, regarding her with those intensely blue eyes.
    She waved him on. “Go ahead. But thanks for the warning.”
    “Those things will kill you, miss.”
    “I’ll take my chances.” Callie headed toward the trees, feeling his eyes on her back.
    Ahead, the pale blob fluttered and rippled.
    Avoid all distractions , the manual said. Don’t leave the white road .
    Except . . . he was right about the first branching. She’d avoided the whiter path because of her fear of heights. A fear Alex must have known about, since she’d mentioned it to the receptionist.
    She glanced back, but the stranger was gone.
    Surprise gave way to smug assurance. See? He was a distraction. If these things were as bad as he said, he wouldn’t let me walk right into them .
    She’d nearly reached the grove now, the gray blob differentiating into pale lavender wings and flat manta-ray bodies. Layered onionlike, they slid over one another in a writhing mass, a translucent wingtip occasionally stretching out from the huddle. The sphere began to pulse. She slowed, staring up at it. Fear needled her extremities. Her intended route passed directly beneath the throbbing mass.
    So what’re you going to do? Go back? Callie chewed on her lip, waffling again, her stomach quivering. Irritation overwhelmed her fear. He was just trying to scare you off. Now get on with it .
    Resolutely she forced herself forward. A comb-and-waxed-paper trilling danced around her, and the breeze carried a sweet, musty odor. She walked faster.
    The old cottonwood loomed above. As she drew under it the trilling mounted. Then the quivering blob contracted, throbbed, and burst like a grenade, flinging pale, purplish manta shapes into the air. They flapped up through the branches to the open sky, whirling like debris in a dust devil.
    Callie wanted to run for the rocks, fifty feet away now, but that would take her off the path. Doggedly she followed the pavement as it curved away from safety. Her scalp prickled, and her hands shook. She broke into a trot, rounding the hollow and coming out into the flat.
    The stranger’s voice rang out from the rocks across the clearing. “Here they come!”
    A pale shape dove by her. She dodged sideways, glimpsing shiny, jointed appendages dangling wasplike from its posterior. A turquoise beam shot from the rocks to the beast, now a yard in front of her. Thwip, thwip, thwip . Its body deflated in a puff of purple smoke, fluttering to the path like an empty sack. Two more beams burst from the rocks, downing two more harries as they swooped.
    Ahead, the stranger rose from his hiding place and told her to run. Again she was tempted to leave the path. But nothing had touched her yet, and she wasn’t convinced anything could.
    A series of beams slit the air in a succession of rapid thwips. Callie was aware of more hits, more puffs of purple gas, more falling sacklike bodies. Car-sized boulders loomed ahead on the left. Maybe they would afford some protection.
    But then a harry caught her from behind, tentacles slapping along the left side of her back in lines of tingling heat. She staggered, crying out more from shock than pain.
    The lavender shape skimmed by and imploded in a puff of purple. She dodged the plume as best she could, coughing on the sickening-sweet smell.
    But I’m on the path , Callie protested, looking down through watering eyes to be sure. Nausea and dizziness churned in her. The heat on her back gave way to numbness.
    More thwips. More beams. Tentacles came at her face. She spun away into another attack, and fire tracked along her upper arm. After that, reality devolved into nightmarish chaos. Shadow shapes whirled around her—malevolent wing flaps, hirsute tentacles, bulbous bodies bursting into purple at the ends of blue-green lines of