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It felt fitting to go to Threadstone before I died—assuming I survived the journey.
And there was the slightest possibility that there were Arachnaea there still.
If there were . . . maybe I could find a mate for me.
That was the whole reason I was dying. Lack of companionship. It didn’t matter what my human-appearing half thought—my spider body was starved for something that I had not managed to give it. And while I had met other Arachnaea in passing, it seemed none of them were appropriate for me.
I knew when I met the right mate I was supposed to know, which meant I hadn’t found them yet.
“You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”
“Probably to my detriment, but yes.”
“Good.” He took another look around at his surroundings. “I assumed you’d already said all your goodbyes, so I took the liberty of booking you passage from the helipad atop Arcus’s tower in the financial district in an hour. You don’t even need a go bag—everything, including a dossier of what we know about Shiranak’s orcs’ failed attempts—will be provided for you.” He stood and offered me his hand. “And I swear to you, Nine, if for some reason you diebefore you get there—they’ll bring back your body and we’ll put you in here for your interment.”
While Royce and I had had our differences—he was entirely human, how could we not!—he had always treated me fairly, so I believed him.
“I promise not to clip my thread before its time,” I said, taking his hand and shaking it.
Two
NIA’N’AN
I madesure to duck down beneath the whirring blades of the waiting Sikorsky. When I got myself inside and secured with my own webbings, a familiar pilot twisted back to give me headphones.
“Yo, Nine! I thought you were dead!”
I tapped the translator once my headphones were on. “Nice to see you too, Ellum.”
Ellum was a minotaur I’d gone on several missions with in the past. He’d sawed off his horns to make it easier for him to function in crowded situations like the helicopter’s cabin, but he’d been known to screw attachments like tactical lights or communication gear into them instead—or mistletoe, which he would then use to hassle his wife for kisses endlessly, at their annual Christmas parties.
“For reals, though,” he went on, as the helicopter began to take off. “What happened?”
I reached forward to open the bag at my feet, which Royce had left for me. On top was a tablet, which I knew would hold all the information Royce could give me.
He wanted me to succeed—but he wasn’t willing to risk the rest of my old crew on it, which was something I appreciated.
“It’s complicated,” I told Ellum, as I began thumbing through screens full of data on the mysterious Sloane Marlow.
All of the information on her had clearly been filtered through her father’s PR team. I knew because there wasn’t a single useful item in it. Knowing her height and weight were useless to me. I didn’t care that she had three Russian Toy dogs named Mercy, Love, and Fire, respectively. I didn’t need to know that she was an “ambassador” for her father’s many humanitarian endeavors.
Those were all stupid things designed—theoretically—to make me care about rescuing her, versus giving me the information I actually needed to know.
Could Sloane physically withstand two weeks underground? While she was fiercely posed in several of the photos, she was also wearing outfits that barely covered her sexual attributes, making it clear she was fully human, and had no intrinsic armor of any kind. Her body did not appear to have a high enough fat content to sustain herself with for long. Were they feeding her? Giving her enough water to drink? I tucked the tablet under my arm and went through the rest of the bag Royce had provided. He’d put in high-energy fluids and provisions for me—although I’dstopped eating two weeks ago, once I’d accepted my fate—but would her stomach be able to take them, when and if I found her?
And then, emotionally—not everyone was suited to live in the dark. There was a good chance that the terrorists that had captured her had placed her into a pit and thrown away the key. I’d seen more than one human lose their mind in psychologically difficult situations before—and also some few monsters. Nothing in the dossier made me think she was equipped to handle it, on top of the trauma of her own kidnapping.
Last but by no means least, I needed to factor in whatever her kidnappers had been doing to her in the meantime. She might be broken when I found her. Even though I suspected she had not earned her place in human society as fully as some others had, no one deserved torture.
The kidnappers first few communications with Arcus had featured grainy photos of her, that’d been stripped of all their geolocation data.
Arcus’s men had been able to hack these back to where they originated from, however, with the almost-infinite amount of money he had at his disposal, and that was when Shiranak had come in.
Shiranak’s orcs ran a tight game, and they’d had bodycams and drones when they’d entered Threadstone. I watched the video of them maneuvering through the caverns for long enough to know they were competent, then fast forwarded until they were cornered, cut off from the surface by an explosion that created a cave in, and thengot surely slaughtered on the far side. Only one drone—operated by someone outside of Threadstone—managed to get out in time.
But before it’d lifted away, it’d lingered, swooping back and forth in front of a fresh rock wall, recording staccato bursts of gunshots and the bellows of orcs shouting as they were all mowed down. Their next attempt was much the same, only this time the drone got footage of two of the bodies, prior to retreat.
“Crazy, right?” Ellum asked, having twisted back to read my face.
