Helixweaver (The Warren Brood Book 2)

by Bartholomew Lander

“I think I was wearing the robe this time. That’d be some justice, wouldn’t it?”

  Kara slipped off the couch and set the Leng kitten down on the hardwood floor. “You’re the last one up, you know.”

  “Seriously? What time is it?”

  “One.”

  “Ahh, shit.” Spinneretta glanced about the living room. The unfamiliar lighting at once reminded her how far from home she was. “What’s lunch?”

  “Annie brought us some more McMuffins.” Her eyes glinted mischievously. “But you can eat later.”

  “Mm? Is something going on?”

  Kara smiled wide enough that Spinneretta thought she resembled one of the adult Leng cats. “Kyle’s examining Arthr in the study.”

  “Wait, what? Really?”

  Kara began to laugh, and Cinnamon seemed intent on copying the noise in a series of gasping half-coughs. “Yeah, it looks hecka embarrassing! Wanna go watch?”

  She rolled the thought around in her mind for a moment as she stretched and curled her spider legs. “You know what, I think I do.” Could use some lightening up, I guess. The dream was still sitting just out of reach, and she wondered if it wasn’t best that she couldn’t recall.

  “Heck yeah, let’s go!” Kara hopped from one foot to the other and then started for the stairs. Spinneretta groaned as she made to follow.

  The upstairs study was larger than the one at home, but far more cluttered as well. Disheveled bookcases lined the walls, and several filing cabinets and half-sized writing tables took up the space between. The whole room was lit by an overhead hanging bulb and a flickering fireplace, which invoked the old idiom about the lipstick and the pig. The whole room could have looked incredibly high class had its owner the slightest interest in appearances.

  When Spinneretta and Kara arrived, everyone else was already there. Arthr, looking lost and confused, stood beside the desk in the center of the room, spider legs outstretched. Kyle seemed to be measuring the distance between leg-joints with a pair of calipers. Against the opposite wall, Mark leaned with his arms crossed and eyes closed. Beside him, Annika was fiddling with or cleaning her revolver. Seeing the two of them so close together filled Spinneretta’s gut with an irrational loathing.

  “Good morning,” Mark said.

  She faked a smile to hide her discomfort. “Morning.”

  “Ahh, Jesus,” Arthr said. “You’re coming to watch, too?”

  “When Kara told me what was happening, I knew I couldn’t miss it.” She slipped into a luxurious chair in the corner. Her wounded arm pressed into the leather and she cringed.

  Kyle did not acknowledge their arrival. He was too focused on his subject. With a clinical attention to detail, Kyle manipulated his calipers and measured the length of the lowest of Arthr’s leg segments. After taking the measurement, he jotted it down in a notebook upon the desk. “Fascinating,” he said. “Could I get you to take your shirt off?”

  Arthr seized up. “I, uhh . . . ” he glanced over at Spinneretta, and then over his shoulder at the others. Spinneretta stifled a chuckle when she saw the timid look on his face. After a moment’s hesitation, he sighed and pulled his shirt off, revealing his toned physique and giving Kyle an unobstructed view of where his legs met his back.

  “Wow,” Annika said from the other wall. “Someone works out.”

  Arthr crossed his arms but said nothing. His face blazed red.

  Now with full access to the mysterious structures, Kyle began to inspect them. He started from their very base, where the dark sheen of chitin vanished into the subsurface tissue. “This is incredible,” he said. “This can’t just be a random defect.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Arthr said.

  Kyle worked his way up one of his upper legs. He bent the leg, checked it again with the calipers, and inspected the joint where two segments of chitin met. After a few moments, he grabbed an LED flashlight and shined it into the tight crevice. “Can’t believe I’m asking this, but can you breathe with your legs?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  Kyle began to laugh. “I can’t believe it. You have spiracles, too.”

  “Spiral-what?”

  “They’re the holes that you breathe through,” Spinneretta said. Her own spiracles seemed to tingle as she said it.

  Kyle nodded. “Correct. Exoskeletal holes that take in oxygen. That’s strange, though. Most arachnids have spiracles in their abdomen. The only ones I know of that have them on their legs are the opiliones, but these legs don’t resemble any that I’ve seen before.”

  “Your problem is you’re trying to apply logic to something completely insane,” Annika said. Her dismissive tone of voice made Spinneretta want to punch her in her beautiful face.

  Kyle looked up at Annika in confusion. “What do you mean?”

  “Just because they have spider legs doesn’t mean that they’re related to any spiders you’d be familiar with.”

  He considered the point. “A spider I’m not familiar with. Now that’s something I’d love to see.” He quietly continued to examine the hard material. Then his curiosity seemed to come alive, burning away the resentment and apprehension he’d shown them the previous evening. “Do you all, by chance, molt?”

  Arthr stiffened. “Y-yeah.”

  “Fascinating,” he said under his breath. “How often? I mean, do you fast before you do it? How long does it take?”

  “I’d, uhh, really prefer not to talk about that right now,” Arthr said through his teeth.

  “Nothing to be embarrassed about,” Kyle said. “It’s just a natural part of growing up, isn’t it?” Even Annika seemed to be considering Arthr with a more obvious interest. “When did you last molt?”

  He fidgeted. “I dunno, eight months ago?”

  “Eight months,” Kyle repeated. He scribbled it into the margins of his notebook. “How about you, uhh, Spinneretta?”

  She closed her eyes. Who the hell do you think you are? Asking some girl you just met when the last time she molted was. “I think it was around my fifteenth birthday.”

  Arthr chuckled. “Funny. It’s like you just stopped growing after that, right?”

  She flashed him a glare for the low blow. But then it turned into a grin. “Kyle, be sure to look in his mouth. We’ve got fangs, too.”

  Kyle paused as that thought sank in. “Fangs? As in, venom fangs?”

  “What the hell, Spins?” Arthr growled. She gave him a placid smile and shrugged her shoulders.

  Kyle turned Arthr’s shoulders to face him. “Let me see.” After a reluctant pause, Arthr obliged by opening his mouth as wide as he could manage. Kyle shined the flashlight inside and began to glance about. “Where?”

  “Just behind the canines,” Spinneretta said. “He’s probably keeping them retracted. Be a good boy and flex for him, Arthr.”

  He vocalized two inarticulate syllables. But when Spinneretta heard a sharp gasp from Kyle, she knew he’d obeyed the command.

  Kyle muttered under his breath in wonder. “And . . . you have venom?”

  Spinneretta rested her head on the arm of the chair. “Mmhmm. There’s venom, and then there’s digestive acid.”

  “Do you ever use them?”

  “We both used to,” she said. “We couldn’t eat solid food for quite a while, but there’s not much reason to use them now.” Saying it aloud invoked embarrassing memories of her not-date with Mark at the diner from hell. “Kara still uses them, though.”

  Kyle tapped one of Arthr’s hollow fangs and then withdrew his implements. “Well, that’s proof that this is all a dream, I guess.”

  “Oh, my turn, my turn!” Kara exclaimed, jumping up and down. “Look at my fangs next!”

  Kyle nodded. “Certainly.”

  As soon as Kyle turned away from him, Arthr threw his shirt back on and was at the door to the study. “So, uhh, I guess let me know later if you want to look again, alright?” His face was still bright red. “Later, I guess.” And with that, he vanished down the h
all, not even waiting for a response from Kyle.

  “Well, that was entertaining as hell,” Annika said with a petulant giggle. “Thanks for the show Kyle. Marky, would you watch over Kara for me? I need to eat something.”

  Mark nodded, eyes still firmly shut. “Aye.”

  Stop calling him Marky, Spinneretta’s mind hissed. At once, the sound of that thought ringing through her head startled her. What’s going on with me? It wasn’t like her to act so touchy, but ever since she’d first met Annika she found herself becoming more and more distrustful of her, more and more afraid of just how close she was to Mark. It was an emotion that she had never experienced so strongly, nor so irrationally, in her life.

  “Yo, Spinzie, you hear me?” Spinneretta looked up to find Annika peering at her from the door. The woman gave her an impatient look. “You hungry? I think you’re hungry. Let’s lunch.”

  She desperately wished she weren’t. “Yeah,” she said, hating the idea of the woman’s company. “Coming.”

  “Incredible,” Kyle muttered when his flashlight glinted off Kara’s extruded fangs. They were a deep brown, approaching black in color. “Do these fangs molt too?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It sucks, it makes me scared to eat for a few days.”

  “Mm.” He shakily scratched the fact into his lengthening set of notes. “And after you molt, your chitin is soft, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How long does it take to harden?”

  “Uhh . . . ” Her spider legs unfurled, and she started to rub them against one another as though the sensation would jog her memory. “Three days, maybe? Around that?”

  “Three days.” He wrote it down. “What about your sister and brother? How long for them?”

  “I dunno?”

  “How often do you molt?”

  “I dunno. Two or three times a year? Not as much as I used to.”

  “As I thought.” He wrote a fraction next to his sloppy diagram of her fangs. It was an expected answer; the frequency of molting was of course linked to their rate of physical growth. As their bodies grew, so too must their chitin. The oldest of the children molted less frequently than Kara, who was growing the fastest. There was nothing mind-blowing about that correlation, save for the fact that it occurred in what were otherwise human beings. “Okay, just wait a second.” He cracked the first aid kit beside his notebook open and, after sifting through the unkempt gauze and medical tape, found the old stethoscope he was after. “Okay, okay. Just relax.” He placed the bell against the chitin plating of one of her legs. “Now, I want you to do me a big favor, alright? I want you to curl your leg for me. Slowly.”

  She complied, bending the leg until it was clenched into a tight coil in front of her. He nodded a bit. “Okay, good. Now, I want you to extend it.” She again did as instructed, and when the leg reached its full length he could only nod in wonder. “No increased blood flow,” he said. “This is . . . ”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. It’s just incredible is all.” No unusual blood flow within those legs. It was ironically unusual, for it defied even his tentative understanding of their spider-like forms. At this rate, he was going to fill the entire notebook with amazing discoveries—not only about the children, but even regarding the evolution of spiders themselves.

  “Hey,” the girl said, excited. “Want to see a cool trick?”

  He watched as the girl leaned her head back and opened her mouth. For a moment, he thought she was going to let out a huge burp, but then two of her spider legs reached into her mouth and pulled out what looked to be a gob of liquid amber. His jaw dropped. “What the hell?”

  Kara’s remaining legs joined the others and began to stretch out the small gob of viscous fluid, pulling it into a thin, shimmering strand. As the silken web began to take shape between her legs, she started to laugh. “See?”

  “Dear God,” was all he could manage under the circumstances.

  She giggled a musical song and began to weave the strands into a cat’s cradle. “I’m the only one who can do this.”

  He just stared in disbelief as she twisted and wove the web into different, impossible shapes and patterns. He was going to need another notebook.

  After Kara had run off, Kyle pulled a second composition book from his desk. He tore out the old, unneeded pages that cluttered its contents and began to write a cleaner draft of his discoveries so far. While looking over the crowded lines and ungainly script, he started off with a bullet-pointed list of the children’s oddities, then tore out the page and started again. There was no way any of this was happening; these sorts of semi-human hybrids only existed in movies and comic books. To think that these amazing children could have actually been here, been alive, been real! He tore out the page again, finding his loose scrawl unsightly next to the sloppy diagram of the boy’s back. His pen etched harsh angles across the pages, where he wrote the children’s names in a table. He felt a slithering wave of guilt in his chest as he penned the name Spinneretta.

  “May I have a word?”

  Kyle jumped in fright and jerked his head around behind him. The young man leaning against the wall had been so silent that he’d forgotten he was even there. Breath returning to normal, Kyle nodded. “Of course.”

  “I want you to call your employer,” Mark said, “and inform them you will be taking a vacation.”

  “What?”

  “Forgive me for speaking so bluntly. But we must keep an eye on you. Whatever connection you have to the children has nothing to do with me. And that makes you an unsolved variable in our equation.”

  Though the comment was ominous, Kyle discarded it. “Yeah, that’s fine, I guess.” He was far too concerned with putting to paper the facts concerning the wonder-children to care. “Classes are out until fall, so I don’t need to ask anyway.”

  “You’re a teacher?”

  “Professor,” he corrected. “Biology. Marlin College. And you don’t have to worry about me leaving for work or anything else. I’ve got more than enough to keep me busy here.”

  “Yes. About that.”

  In a haste, Kyle grabbed a handful of volumes of the Journal of Arachnology from his bookshelf. “Web patterns, chemical structures, growth rates, anatomy. Evolution, dimorphism, venom types. Piece by piece, I’m going to crack this. Do you even understand how incredible it is? These children, they open the door to questions we’ve never even dreamed of. How did you come across them?”

  Mark ignored the question and crossed his arms, giving Kyle a hard look. “I recommend you give this research of yours a rest.”

  “Rest?” He guffawed. “I can’t rest. There’s too much to do, too many questions and theories to build. How did this happen? How did they . . . Never mind, I’m sure you have no idea. But imagine what this could mean for everything. Everything we thought we knew about genetics could be overturned by this! Not even just for mankind, but what they could mean for evolution, for life itself! This flies in the face of everything!”

  Mark’s gaze was steady, stoic.

  Kyle flipped back to an earlier page of his notes. “Okay. For example. I listened to her legs, right? Here’s the thing: spiders only have one set of muscles in their legs, and those are flexors. Spiders don’t have extensors. That’s why they curl into a ball when they die. When they extend their legs, they do it by forcing blood through them at high pressure, hydraulic force. But with these kids, there’s no change in blood flow. That means they must have antagonistic extensor muscles! How does that make any sense?”

  He flipped a few pages back, restudying the initial sketches he’d made. “Their features are obviously arachnid; that goes without saying. But it seems that the specific features they display come from all evolutionary branches of the arachnid class. No spiders that I’ve ever seen have had spiracles in their legs. Even opiliones, that is, harvestmen, don’t have them in their joints for God’s sake. Their legs all have the wrong number of segments, they’re far harder than they
should be, and stronger to boot. And Kara, that girl—I don’t even know where to start with her. It’s like . . . ”

  Mark narrowed his eyes at him but said nothing.

  Kyle took a hasty sip from the mug of coffee beside the notebook, and in the process splattered some upon the unspent whitespace in the margins. “It’s almost like they somehow evolved on another line of arachnids, parallel to the creatures we know and yet totally separate. I know that sounds completely nuts but . . . what kind of spider can produce silk from their mouth? Well, let’s be fair. Here’s the thing about Kara. What she has are, well, they’re called spigots. She doesn’t have spinnerets.” He fumbled over the treacherous word. “That alone should rule out her ability to produce silk. But, I’ve read about an ancient order of fossil spider that, like her, didn’t have spinnerets. They were called the uraraneida.” He raised his hands making vague, shapely gestures in Mark’s direction. “Early Devonian period, close to four hundred million years ago. They just had one spigot for silk. Current thinking is that they just put out unspun silk to line their den. Then again, what she puts out doesn’t seem to be silk but some kind of protein-based precursor for—”

  “Forgive me,” Mark said in an impatient tone, “but is there any point to this?”

  “What? The point is I’m trying to come up with some rational explanation for them. And failing that, some rational explanation for this gaping hole in our understanding. You can’t possibly be blind to their value to science, what they could mean for—”

  Mark’s face scrunched a little. “They are not your specimens!”

  Kyle started, and a bit of his coffee spilled over the edge of his mug.

  The young man’s cold gaze pierced him. “If it is for your own curiosity, then I will forgive your probing inquiries and examinations. But if you think for one moment that I shall allow you to market them as some scientific novelty for the sake of your own career, then you are mistaken.”

  “My career? This has nothing whatsoever to do with my career!” The words felt hollow as they came out; even he didn’t believe it.

  “Taking those kinds of notes. Drawing those kinds of conclusions. To what ends would you go through the trouble, if not to make their presence known?”