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“Yes.” I had to admit it was disheartening. But they’d opted to take the first and second easiest entrances in, as a group no less. I knew they’d been using their drones for advance surveillance, probably with heat vision and sonar, but of course the unknown kidnappers were monitoring the most obvious paths into Threadstone...and probably the next twenty most obvious ones, too.
I closed the tablet. I would not be so foolish.
I’d spent the past two weeks marking the story of my people on my walls, as my mother had told it to me and her mother had told it to her. To everyone else it looked like a chaotic pattern, but to my kind it had deep meaning—it was a way for my spirit to find its way home.
And home was Threadstone.
I remembered all her stories of the place, and all of its creatures, all of the dangers and beauty it contained.
I thumbed through the rest of the information Roycehad provided, and then closed the tablet. “How much longer will the flight be?” I asked Ellum.
“Twenty hours. We’ll refuel while flying, Arcus’s people already have it set up.”
“Wake me up in nineteen and a half hours, then,” I said, crossing my arms across my chest and leaning back to rest.
Ellum twisted in his seat to give me a grin, with the wide snout of his kind, showing broad flat teeth. “Do spiders snore?”
“You’ll have to tell me.”
As I was capable of working for days without sleep, I never did on missions, and I’d never had any overnight guests to my nest in my apartment. I had been tired, though, of late—it was one of the ways I knew my life was coming to its final thread.
“Goodnight, Ellum,” I said, taking both the translator and the headphones off.
Three
NIA’N’AN
I woketo the helicopter swinging wildly. I picked up the translator and headphones at once. “What the fuck, Ellum?” I complained.
“Little busy! Dodging rockets!” he shouted, as the helicopter took another swing.
“They have rocket launchers?” It was night out, but now that I was awake, I could see the faint light of the rockets’ propulsion systems as they shot past, plus feel the slight quake of change in the nearby atmosphere as they shot through it, much different than the continuous thrum of the Sikorsky’s blades.
“Yeah, we’re just lucky they’re not heat seeking, but—fuck!” Ellum twisted us in the sky again.
“Set me down.”
“What? No—we’re seventymiles out.”
“Set me down,” I repeated, cutting myself free from the walls with my rearmost pair of legs.
“You’re not the only one getting paid here, Nine?—”
“I’ve met your children.” A suicide mission for me made sense, but I wasn’t taking Ellum down for this nebulous cause. “Get me over the tree line, or I’ll pry this door open and jump without you.”
“Royce’ll look at my flight logs?—”
“So? Tell him I made the call. And it’s better this way—they clearly know I’m coming, but if you let me loose earlier, they won’t know where to expect me.”
“You want to move through unknown deep jungle terrain potentially full of hostiles in the dead of night?” Ellum asked—but then twitched the helicopter away from another incoming rocket. “Okay, okay,” he said, answering his own question, circling back and swooping lower. “Your satellite phone is in that bag, all right?” he shouted into his microphone. “If you call us, we’ll come get you!”
“Understood,” I said, shouldering the bag, and opening up the helicopter’s cargo door. It was nothing to attach a thick streamer of silk from all of my spinnerets to one of the Sikorsky’s many sturdy internal fasteners. “Remember—I weigh two tons!”
“Got you!” Ellum tilted the helicopter away from the side I was prepared to jump from. “If you make it out, you’d better come by on Christmas Eve!”
Him saying that made me pause.
I’d been so ready to die I couldn’t imagine a world where I could have a future.
