And for a moment Spinneretta just stood there, watching. Each breath she took fueled the lust for carnage. The impure, tainted blood that hung in the air was just a taste, a prelude, an overture. Her fingers shook with anticipation. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Her tongue tingled with the metallic aroma. Behind the shattered tank, the yellow robe—now a patchwork of bloodstains—was hunched over, hissing and moaning. Tremors assailed his frame, and Spinneretta could taste every impulse buried in his muscles.
Face twisted into a tortured grimace, Kaj raised an unsteady finger in her direction. “D-demon!” he said. Though the wounds in his arms and head had healed over with chitin blisters, blood still ran from hidden cuts all over his body.
The shadows of the lab came alive, boiling and slithering along the walls and floor toward Kaj. Spinneretta snapped to attention at once, and again she willed the air around her to grow denser, heavier.
“Cursed child of the King,” he said, his form beginning to darken. “You win this round. But I promise you, I shall not forget what transpired here!” Tendrils of shadow wrapped about his body, deepening into an inky black. “Next time we meet, I will make you pay for this. This is not over.”
The air congealed into the psychic fog, and Spinneretta fanned her spider legs across her body, releasing the coiled energy field in a wave. There was another electric crackle—stronger this time—like a rubber band snapping and inverting. In a flash, the shadows surrounding the Vant’therax vanished, dispersing again to the ambient dark. But still Kaj sat there, a look of confusion and horror glued to his face.
Spinneretta moved. She flowed around the shattered glass pillar and into Kaj’s hunched form. Her anterior legs unfurled and seized him about his neck, wrenching him up from his hunch. “I decide when it’s over,” she said. His wide eyes considered her with pure terror, and his ruined arms pried at her legs in a futile effort to free himself.
She tightened her grip upon his throat, and a choked gasp answered her. Scarcely able to control her own muscles, she brought her lips just beside Kaj’s ear. “Monster. Abomination. I could snap your neck right now. Crush your brain stem. But no. I want to enjoy this. I want you to experience all the pain your magic has shielded you from. A whole lifetime of fear and suffering unfolding in your final moments. I want to hear you scream your throat raw. I want to bathe in your agony, to drink deep your sorrow.” She shifted the legs wrapped about Kaj’s throat, bringing their tips sliding across his skin. “Now, beast. Let the festival begin.”
In a violent motion, she split his throat open. A deathly scream boomed from his maw. Blood gushed from opened arteries. It rained and splattered upon her. It was filthy, tainted, unnatural. And that made it all the more intoxicating. Her spider legs undulated to some unheard rhythm, barbaric and dark. As Kaj collapsed onto the ground she fell upon him. She tore his yellow robe open and found an uneven wall of chitin armor protecting his vitals. Consumed by the sweet rapture of blood, Spinneretta let her legs go wild. Her appendages rained upon his chest in heavy blows. The tactile release of the cracking chitin made her shiver, and Kaj’s desperate voice became an angelic song to her ears. And after only a few moments, the protective shell cracked.
Laughing, driven wild by the inhuman monster’s suffering, Spinneretta let her legs smash into its chest armor again and again until the plating began to fragment and break inward. After collapsing a large portion of the protective husk, she started prying chunks of the armor loose and casting them aside. The satisfying crack of the monstrous plates was seductive. After tearing free a half-dozen chunks of the chitin armor, Spinneretta thrust four of her legs into the mangled center of the creature. She then ripped them out through the thing’s sides in a single cruel motion, throwing blood and fragments of broken chitin across the floor in all directions. The Vant’therax seized up, his screams reduced to mere gurgling, and fell limp after a series of helpless thrashes.
Spinneretta rose to her feet slowly, panting and soaking her legs in the blood-filled air. The adrenal thrill that flowed through her, however, was accompanied by a nauseous, crawling feeling that coated her stomach and threatened to turn it inward. She stumbled back a step from the disemboweled Kaj. Just as suddenly as it had come upon her, the bloodlust—and the Instinct—was gone.
Her eyes went wide as she stared at the corpse below her and the expanding ocean of blood. Her stomach rolled harder than it ever had before. She doubled over, dry heaving. “What the fuck,” she choked out, barely able to vocalize the sounds. What was that? What have I done?
“S-Spins?”
At the sound of Kara’s voice, Spinneretta snapped her gaze toward her. There her sister sat, hunched over on the floor. Her eyes were wide, her complexion pale. Spinneretta looked down at her blood-soaked hands, and then back up at her sister. “Kara . . . I’m sorry you had to see that. I don’t know what came . . . ”
The girl didn’t say anything. She just kept regarding her with that same shocked expression.
Her stomach rolled again as the smell began to permeate her lungs and spiracles. Holy fuck, she thought. Recounting the events leading up to this moment made her dizzy. She doubled over again, and her hands landed in the slick pool, filled with ribbons of black bile and flakes of chitin. “K-Kara, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” In that moment, when the blood on her hands and the blood on the floor mixed together, she was unable to decide which disgusted her more: that she had willfully taken the innocent life of the creature called Isabella, or the wanton, excessive brutality she had just committed. She tried not to breathe the tainted air, but suppressing her urge to breathe just made the stench of the thing’s corrupted blood stronger in her spiracles.
“Are . . . are you okay now?” Kara asked.
Spinneretta shook her head, her eyes again burning. Her viscera felt as though they were going to crawl out her mouth. “I’m . . . ” A monster, her stomach wanted to say. An atrocity, her mind wanted to say. Invincible, the voice of the other self wanted to say. That voice. Had it just been a figment of her delirium? A subconscious manifestation? Her shaking grew more severe. From the shadows of her peripheral vision, laughing ghosts painted themselves across the walls.
“What the fuck am I?” she choked out.
“Spins?”
She sat there for a long moment, shaking, trying to convince herself that this was all a nightmare. You’re afraid of your true strength, her other voice had said. If this is what my true strength looks like, she thought at the mental phantom, then you’re damned right I’m scared of it.
There then came a moment of grim lucidity. This was no time for melting into a puddle. The answers she was looking for were here, waiting for her. Still shaking, her spider legs pushed her up until her knees were able to carry her the rest of the way to her feet. She looked at Kara again. Neither of them spoke. Spinneretta grimaced and turned away, beginning to walk toward the door.
“Where are you going?” Kara asked.
Spinneretta stopped, searching for the words. When she couldn’t bring herself to face Kara again, she just slipped through the doorway and out into the connecting chamber. The dark control center opened before her through the other door. As she drifted toward it, something clawed at her ankle. She looked down to find Cinnamon lurking just behind the threshold. She gave a hollow smile at the kitten-thing. “Hid here? Smart.” The air tasted different in this room. It tasted somehow worse. “Go on inside, Cinnamon. I think Kara needs you.”
Inside the computer room, Spinneretta reactivated the monitors. Still short of breath, she let her eyes float between the images of the first Vant’therax frozen on the screens. Subject 0-198, the text read. She swallowed hard, looking away from the flickering images. She turned her attention instead to the computer terminal that occupied the largest section of the control panel. After wiping her bloody hands on her soaking jeans, she placed her fingers on the old keyboard.
As soon as she tapped one of the keys, the smallest screen hummed back
to life and deposited her on a familiar command prompt. Though the screen was faded, the lines of text that carved their way across the black background were unmistakable. It was a UNIX terminal. Happy coincidence, she thought to herself, only to be reprimanded by a sharp cackling coming from some internal voice. Alhazred’s razor, her other voice seemed to say, attribute not to chance that which can be stirred by the Primal Ones. With a shiver, she began to type.
Clumsily, she managed to back out of the directory containing the logs and information on Subject 0-198. Scanning the rows of disassociated data, she remembered what Harold had told her about the creature in the tube. He had referred to the work here as being part of the Eleventh Project, a fact she was reminded of when her eyes found the directory simply marked 11. She changed directory into the folder and found more scattered and enigmatic files with indecipherable names. After hopping about between numbered subdirectories for a few unfruitful moments, she stumbled upon a directory containing twelve data files. She squinted at the names listed on the faded monitor.
Beatrice
Cordelia
Emilia
Hermione
Isabella
Juliet
Katherina
Miranda
Ophelia
Paulina
Rosalind
Viola
She took a breath to steady herself before prompting the Beatrice file open on the screen. Rows of text and measurements took over the monitor, and she at once went to scanning the lines for something to answer her gnawing questions. The wall of data in itself was sickening, but there was one part of it that gave her significant pause. She was certain her eyes were deceiving her, for it could only have been meant ironically. At the very top, beneath where the creature’s name was written, was a string written in pale orange:
REPRODUCTIVELY VIABLE
She shook her head, opting not to think too hard about it, and instead scrolled down until the text turned into some manner of activity log. Periodic measurements, dietary changes, growth . . . The log ended abruptly at a date two months prior. Beside the date was written a single line:
SUBJECT BEATRICE ESCAPED CONTAINMENT DURING ROUTINE INSPECTION; FOOTAGE INDICATES SUBJECT THREW SELF INTO PIT BENEATH SECTOR 3.
Reading those words, her mind flashed back to when she and Mark had fled through the tunnels beneath San Solano. She had halted, drawn magnetically to the gaping mouth that led to that enigmatic underworld cavern. She remembered the awful suggestiveness of that cavern, opening into untold depths below. So, too, had she marveled at the mystery of what had been littered across the floor at the time. Now, the trail of dried blood and ichor-drenched shards of glass took on a far more terrible meaning—a far more human meaning. Whether those relics were indeed the last will and testament of the creature known as Beatrice she could never know, but the possibility disturbed her nonetheless.
She backed out of the file, and for a moment she hesitated. The name Isabella was once again blinking at her on the command line. Her eyes began to burn again. She swallowed a hot breath and opened the file. As she thought, the measurements and data that crawled across the screen were indistinguishable from the previous. Only the name and date of birth seemed to have changed. Even the ominous orange line at the top of the file remained. This time she found its wording somehow more difficult to ignore:
REPRODUCTIVELY VIABLE
And here her mind hit an impasse. That creature, so deformed as it was, could not possibly have been reproductively viable. And even if it was, why would that matter? Why should such a fact be recorded here at the very top of the file in a bright color, as though it were the most important piece of information to be gleaned from its records? Reproductively viable. With what, exactly? Then, she realized something else. She backed out of the file and glanced once more at the names in the directory. Twelve names, every one of them female. Was it just a coincidence? Was the Eleventh Project truly made up of only female specimens? If that was indeed the case, then what could they possibly be reproducing with to justify the reproductively viable tag?
With a gasp, Spinneretta froze. Words from long ago floated through the empty recesses of her mind.
Allegedly, the cult of the Yellow King aimed to create a perfect hybrid race between man and spider, Mark’s words echoed. A terrible certainty speared its way through her gut as other words followed them.
It was written that they somehow birthed a human-spider hybrid. That creature became the high priest of the followers of Raxxinoth. He became known as the Yellow King.
The Coronation of the unborn prince. You know, don’t you?
Her skin crawled. Her stomach swam with tentacled horrors older than the stars. She’d even asked Mark directly, and he’d refused to answer her. Even after he’d admitted knowing the answer, he’d refused to tell her why NIDUS was so obsessed with the creation of those hybrids. Short of breath, she found herself beginning to shake.
From the open door, Kara’s gentle voice flowed. “Spins, what’s wrong?”
She ignored the girl. Arms beset by tremors, breath growing labored, she again put her hands on the keyboard of the terminal and began to type. Please, God, no, she thought. She couldn’t let the chance to know the truth escape this time. And yet now that she was on the very cusp of understanding, she wanted only to run as far from that knowledge as she could, to bury her head in the sand of blissful ignorance. But her hands went to work, typing a search command for the name Arachne. The processor chugged for a few precious moments. The data file she hoped would not exist appeared on the screen. Fingers almost refusing to obey her command, teeth clattering with dawning apprehension, she summoned the information contained within to the monitors.
The file loaded on the screen. Contained within, there would surely have been innumerable secrets pertaining to the Corporation’s role in her birth—as well as the births of her siblings. It would have to contain facts and data about herself that even she did not know. It would likewise surely reveal what NIDUS knew about the loathsome Instinct. But none of those things now mattered, save the sole question that obsessed her mind. When the lines of data painted their way across the screen, she found the answer. And she wished above all else she’d never dared to ask. There, at the top of that document, glared an orange string of text:
REPRODUCTIVELY VIABLE
Chapter 43
Defiers of Fate
Nemo found himself within an unending black sea, the likes of which no man can escape. He felt himself falling inward, toward the core of that ocean, the point where he would be released from his ill-begotten fate. His scorched eyes were still alive with the burn from those damned green flames. The sight stolen by that witchcraft was fading further, and he knew he was at his end. And as his mind drifted toward nothingness, the only thing he felt was a pervasive chill that sank into his mental form. That, and a boundless hatred.
He remembered a time not so distant when he’d lived in peace within the ruins of the old kingdom. Ur’thenoth was all he had ever known. While the elders spoke of the times past and of the treachery of Griffith, Dwyre, and the Vant’therax, he had not truly understood what had been taken from the Websworn until he was forced to become a Helixweaver. Now, in death, he knew the sins of Repton’s disciples ran far deeper than the stories hinted.
The Vant’therax had taken everything from him. They took away his identity, his past, his mind, his freedom, his beliefs. And now, they had taken his life away from him just as well. Until a few weeks ago, he had been a Websworn. He had been born into the cult of Raxxinoth, but now died a heretic. He had worshiped the Overspider for his entire mortal existence, but had been ended by the black ambition that tore their order asunder beneath Repton. Had he any muscles to move his tongue, he’d have cursed that name with his dying breath.
But as he felt himself drawing near the border that would release him to his end, a voice surrounded him, ripping his mind back from the edge. The sound was a grating, guttural disharmony,
like a thousand tuning forks scraping away at steel and stone. It rattled his brain and brought him to the very verge of awakening. The black sea rolled and then parted. He felt his phantom muscles clenching and burning, and his false eyes trying to turn inside out. His imagined teeth clamped and cracked and ground themselves to dust before unclenching and doing it all again.
His mind was seized by tremors that racked him with alien thoughts. Memories and unmemories merged together, piercing his mind and filling it with a thousand holes and gaps. In a vision he saw Griffith, who brought back the hand of the King. He saw the spider-hounds that followed him back through that portal. He saw the ones who went before, the Websworn, and saw firsthand their exile beneath the earth. He saw an image of a flowing, tattered yellow robe sitting upon the throne in Tha’ai-ma in Zigmhen. He saw the face of Urn-ma Nayor. The beast’s bright blue eyes belied his utter lack of humanity. Urn-ma Nayor was indifferent to Nemo’s torture at the hands of the Vant’therax—the false Vant’therax, those who took that name in a pretentious mockery of its original meaning. He heard the voice of the Yellow King—another cacophonous tuning-fork ballad—and he began to scream as the vision melted away and the death-dream was stripped bare.
He then beheld a great seal, within which a pernicious form stretched out in all directions. It was a slithering black mass of impossible proportions, covered in plated, two-pronged legs that groped about, opening wounds in its own body from which gaseous, black blood flowed. From those clouds of smoke-like ichor, tentacles covered in razor-sharp barbs grew in tangled masses. And at the furthest extreme of that immense form, a single massive eye stared out from beneath a masked crown of slithering and snapping appendages. As soon as Nemo looked into that glowing eye, his thoughts were washed away by a shroud of smoke-noise that poisoned his brain and filled it with mad visions and commandments.
Helixweaver (The Warren Brood Book 2) Page 52