Mack was shouting in my head, and Askavor was sidling away from me.
Silly spider. As if I didn’t know the difference between arach and weaver! I stepped up onto the cephalothorax of my latest kill, and looked for more. Couldn’t see any. Sure, there were bodies, just nothing alive and kicking. I turned a slow circle, reveling in the slightly orange light playing across the walls, and then flinching from the sunlight glaring through a rent in the dwelling’s ceiling.
Man! Someone was gonna have to pay for that. And rebuilding was going to be a bitch, what with—
“Cutter!”
I turned toward Mack, noting the line of wasps standing quietly in the sunlight, their carapaces gleaming.
“Cutter!”
“What, Mack?”
“You need to stand down.”
I had to what? But what if there were more?
“Stand down, Cutter.” Mack’s voice shifted from demanding to almost calming. “Stand down.”
I took one more look around the damaged room, and saw that he was right.
“Fair call, Mack,” I said, and he frowned.
I ignored that, too. I figured he couldn’t be that mad at me, given I’d helped him get rid of the arach. I wiped my blades on the silken floor, and sheathed them—and then I went looking for my gun. It’d be nice to reload that.
I stopped, and blinked. Why had I thrown it away, again? I turned as Mack came up alongside me. He had his hands tucked into his belt. Man was not a threat.
“You okay, Cutter?”
Weird ass question.
“Yeah. Need to get my gun.”
“How about we get T’Kit and her friends to fly us out of here?”
“I need my gun, first.”
He sighed.
“Fine. Where’d you leave it?”
I scanned the site of my second… third… Fuck. How many of these things had I taken on? I felt T’Kit’s mind whisper across my own, and then the weight of Mack’s arm across my shoulders.
“Why don’t we let one of the vespis get your gun?”
“But it’s my responsibility.”
“Yeah, and you are mine, and you need to not be here, right now.”
“Oh.”
He was right. As I scanned the carnage around me, I felt a little light-headed.
“But Steppy will be upset with me.”
Mack’s arm tightened.
“Not this time, he won’t. Come on,” and he drew me back towards the vespis.
We passed across in front of Askavor, and the spider flinched away from me. I didn’t want to think of what I’d done to cause him to do that. I had a fair idea, but I didn’t want to think about that, either. If I wasn’t careful, I’d join the list of things that populated my nightmares, and I didn’t want to be afraid of myself that badly.
“You’ll get over it,” Mack said. “We all do.”
We did, hey? And just how the fuck did he know that?
He squeezed my shoulders again.
“Never you mind, Cutter.”
He brought us to a stop in front of T’Kit.
“Welcome back, little warrior.”
From the tone of her voice, she was smiling. And who was she calling ‘little’ anyway? I looked up at her, and stopped. Yeah. That would be why. Shutup.
“Turn around,” she said. “I will carry you to the ground.”
For a moment, I thought I’d be better off climbing down the webbing that Askavor had made his way up on, but T’Kit intervened.
“This structure is unstable,” she said, “and the lines connecting it to the buildings below were severed to prevent the arach escaping.”
I turned around, and Mack lifted his arm from my shoulders and went to stand in front of the vespis beside T’Kit. It was a short trip to the ground. Unfortunately, it was a short trip that ended where we’d started—in the middle of the stacked limbs of Askavor’s people.
T’Kit put me down and I heard Mack’s feet hit the ground not far away.
“Cutter…” he said, and I could feel the reproach he was directing at the vespis, could hear him asking them if they couldn’t have thought of a better place to set me down.
They were apologizing, even as I walked over to the nearest pile, and reached out to touch the closest long, smooth-shelled leg. Sadness welled up in me, but I knew it was not mine.
“My sister,” Askavor said, and I had not been aware there was more than one female in a nest.
“Not all are queens,” Askavor explained.
They weren’t?
Askavor descended on a line of thread he’d spun himself, and clung to the wall beside the pile.
“No,” he said, and his sadness washed over me. “The non-breeding females are needed for many things. My sister…”
And he stroked the leg under my hand.
“My sister was strong enough to direct the males in their work. A hand-maiden, if you would.”
Spider royalty, huh?
“She fought for her men,” Askavor said, turning the limb under my palm so we could see cracks forming a web of destruction over the limb…and the gashes that showed the corded muscle beneath it.
I reached out and traced the surface, not really seeing the injury, but feeling the destruction transmitted through my fingertips. My mind struggled to understand just how the she-spider had kept going after this.
“The Star-Eaters did not want to kill them. They needed them for their swarm,” Askavor’s revulsion was palpable through his grief and anger. “Some for their queen, and the rest to feed their warriors. They took the whole settlement.”
His mind voice lost some of its calm, cracking inside my head.
“My people fought them, until they could fight no more.” He turned the leg so that its injuries were once again hidden, but he did not leave the pile.
He took the limb, and laid it to one side before lifting another. This one, required pedipalps, and two sets of limbs to hold together, but he did not place it beside the first.
“Her consort,” he said, and agony
