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What kind of useless mate was I?
All I could do was hope to get her out of Threadstone safely and apologize.
She was curled up into a ball again, in the center of my thorax. I found her weight there comforting—I liked it when she was against me.
I just wished she felt the same.
Ten
SLOANE
I wokeup being rocked from side to side.
I didn’t even remember falling asleep—but I had.
And the spider-dude hadn’t eaten me. Congrats, Sloane, way to stay alive.
There was a weird sound around us, and I realized what it was.
“Water?”
The spider-dude lowered himself and tilted to one side. He turned the light of the lantern up again and swung it forward, so that I could see a river in front of us.
“Oh, fuck,” I said.
Last I recalled, spiders didn’t float.
“That seems, like, super unsafe,” I said, but now that I was up, he shimmied harder. “Fine, fine, I know when I’m not wanted.”
I made my way down to the ground, using his legs forsupport. I realized he’d moved so that I could lean against a wall when I got there, and then he took off his bag, setting it beside me, giving it a pat with one hand, perhaps suggesting I should sit on it.
“I’m good,” I said, and then he sidled away at a startling speed.
Up until then I could’ve convinced myself the spider part of him wasn’t scary—like, maybe it was just a thing that he had, like people had things, like my friend Bruno always had a parrot with him, like he was a fucking pirate. You put up with it because he was always holding, and you didn’t ask questions or get your fingers too near its beak.
But watching spider-dude move in a spider-fashion frightened me, on some incredibly deep level, like my hindbrain was all, GTFO.
NOW.
Then he set down the lantern and spun up the wall opposite me, and climbed past the lantern light.
I stared into the darkness after him, suddenly deeply unhappy.
Had that motherfucker just gone and abandoned me?
“What the fuck!” I shouted after him, only to hear it echo.
Minutes passed—then it felt like a fucking century.
“Are you kidding me?” I said. I would’ve kicked the bag, only I was worried about hurting my foot.
Then, just as I got as pissed as pissed could be, he swung back into the tunnel.
Literally.
Swinging.
Like all eight legs and two arms and huge-ass body, right inside the entrance of this cave, where he landed like an eight-legged gymnast. I yelped and tried to jump back, and he looked incredibly disappointed with me again, as he did some work with his spinny bits, picked up the bag to shoulder again, and reached for me.
