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“Okay, great,” Mel says. Snaps. “So that’s new and weird and I’m so not going to get into it. Grace took Kyle. We need to get him back.”
“What?” Becca says, startled, eyes flicking over us. She didn’t notice. Eyes only for Anthony.
“Grace took him? Then he was still with you?” I ask.
“We were by—I think it was the exit,” Trina says. “She made noise to make the spider come. We couldn’t get to him.” I expect her to crumble, but she’s angry instead. Sharp steel.
“She’d made the halls into a loop,” Mel said. “I think she could have just gotten right back behind us. If she was dragging Kyle with her—”
“Then she could get out,” I finish.
“You shouldn’t have trusted her,” Becca says.
“We didn’t have much choice,” Mel shoots back. She still sounds angry—angry at Becca? Why?
“There’s no point in arguing. We can’t let them get too far ahead,” I say. “We’re even, at least. We can all get through. Fast. Catch up. Get Kyle back.”
“What about that thing?” Anthony asks. “What if the spider’s back there?”
“I can stop it,” Trina says. We all look at her in surprise. She holds the book tight against her ribs, her knuckles white where she grips it. “The book is a weapon—or the words in it are. The words to unmake.”
“Where did you get that?” Becca asks, voice a hiss of breath between her teeth.
“He gave it to me,” Trina says defensively.
“The preacher in the town,” I explain.
“You can’t read the words,” Becca says. “They’re dangerous.”
“They can destroy the spider, can’t they?” Trina says. “I can feel the power in them. They want me to read them. They want me to speak them.”
“You shouldn’t,” Becca insists.
“How would you know?” Trina asks. “Have you even seen them?”
“I’ve been here a long time,” Becca says. “And I’m not the first. Neither was Grace. The people who came before wrote their stories on the walls. Whispered them in the shadows, and the shadows sometimes whisper them back. Some of them say the words are a weapon. Some of them say they’re a trap.”
“I don’t care,” Trina says. “We need to get Kyle back. I’ll take any chance we have. We’re getting past the spider, and we’re getting through the dark.”
“We don’t know what’s out there,” Becca says. Desperation makes her voice brittle.
“She’s right,” Anthony says, but I set my jaw.
“We do know what’s out there,” I say, meeting Trina’s eyes. “Kyle is out there. We have to go. And we’re wasting time.”
I step past Becca—between her and Anthony, really. I grab Mel’s hand. The motion has more meaning than I intend—or maybe I do intend it. Either way, we walk into the hall together. Trina follows. She’s limping but her lips are pressed in a determined line, the book gripped in one hand.
I realize I don’t know where I’m going. I glance at Mel. She shrugs.
“Not sure where we are anymore,” she says. “We need to do some wandering for me to figure it out again.”
“It’s this way,” Becca says, and my gesture of defiance loses some of its power as she and Anthony edge toward the head of the group, their hands entwined. He can’t look anywhere but her, it seems.
When we get to the exit, it isn’t the spider—either of them—waiting for us. It’s the woman.
She stands in the hall, still as stone, the candle guttering and the circle of light making wild judders around her. Something litters the floor at her feet. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s what’s left of the spider. Divided neatly. Sorted. Stacked. An eyeless head framed by six slender sections of rib. A leg, disarticulated at each joint and then arranged again in its proper shape. The spider, deconstructed, stretches the length of the hall.
The edge of the woman’s light touches the edge of the dark. There’s no getting past her.
