The toes of my boots hung over a precipice dropping into silky blackness. The tunnel continued on the other side, lit by tiny glow orbs, but the crevice was too wide to jump. Metal strands shot down from the ceiling like ropes. Plunging into the darkness, the strands looked slick as ice.
A sickening vertigo made my head spin. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Sirius’ locator beeped from behind me. “We’ve got company.”
Not now. I didn’t want to die like this, contemplating which end was worse: jumping to my doom or being dragged away by giant bugs.
Sirius’ voice cut through my panic attack. “There’s got to be another way.”
I dropped to my knees and shined my locator into the depths. The metal strands seemed to stretch forever. How big was this ship?
Sirius bounced on his feet and checked over his shoulder. “Incoming.”
Metal webs clung to the other side of the crevice. I hung my head over the rim. Weave-work covered our side, too. I tugged on Sirius’ pants. “We’re going down.”
He glanced at his locator, watching the green dots approach. “How? Last I checked neither of us could fly.”
“Look.” I aimed the light from my locator on the webbing. “We’ll climb.”
Sirius’ eyes widened. “Holy mother-of-the-universe.”
“You’re not afraid of heights, are you?”
He gave me a defensive look. “No. I just don’t see many handholds.”
“Me neither.”
The same sickly sweet aroma I’d smelled in the cavern permeated the air. Sirius stuck his nose up. “Pheromones. It has to be.”
I didn’t care what it was. We didn’t have time for scientific analysis. Forget the objectives of Team Prime Contact.
I dangled my legs over the rim of the abyss and probed the metal web with my right boot until I found a foothold. Too much of my boot hung over thin air for me to feel anywhere near safe. I can’t believe I’m doing this. My fingers slickened with sweat. Sirius held my left arm while I reached down and threaded my fingers through the crisscrossing metal. I hoped the strands would hold my weight.
I found another hole large enough for my left foot. The opening was at an angle, so I had to bend my knee as I lowered my whole body down. Once I cemented my position, I helped Sirius climb down beside me. Moving one foot at a time, we scaled the wall, descending farther into darkness.
A shadow grew above us, and we froze, clinging to the side of the precipice. Hanging on with one hand, I turned the screen of my locator off. Sirius did the same.
With a liquidy sound, the creature shot a web of tendrils from the back of its torso. The web cemented to the ceiling, and the giant arachnid swung over our heads. I pressed my face into the web, trying to blend with the shadows. Legs twitched as the creature lowered itself to the level of my head. I couldn’t help but stare into its eyes. A cold, calculating intelligence glistened in the dim light, and I cringed, hoping it hadn’t noticed us against the side.
The creature sputtered a few clicking sounds then disappeared into the blackness beneath us.
Sirius released his breath like he’d been holding it the whole time. “Hopefully he’s not going where we’re going.”
I glanced down, relaxing my muscles enough to move again. “If he is, we have lasers for that.”
I tried not to glance into the abyss as we descended. I couldn’t decipher any patterns in the web, and I struggled to find openings big enough for my toes to poke through. I panicked several times, thinking our luck would run out and the webbing would narrow and become too thin to support our weight or be too close together to thread our fingers through. We’d gone so far, I couldn’t imagine climbing back up.
I checked my locator. “We’re almost level with our team.”
“Good.” Sirius had taken the lead, finding the best path down. He was the navigator, after all.
The wall curved inward, and I had to secure each foot against the webbing to keep from falling. The strands grew narrower, and my heart climbed into my throat. My life dangled from brittle strands of malleable metal.
Crack.
I froze, my heart thumping wildly. Any second I expected to fall to my death.
Crack.
My hold was still stable. I glanced at Sirius, who’d already crossed most of the inward curve.
His eyes widened. “It’s me.”
“Hold on, I’m coming.”
“Don’t move. You’ll only make it worse.”
Crack.
His hand fell, then both his feet. Pieces of the web disappeared beneath us. Sirius dangled one-handed from a slim strand that couldn’t be any thicker than my middle finger.
“Sirius!”
His eyes shone with resignation, and my chest tensed so tightly I couldn’t breathe. It was the same look Gavin had before the arachnids took him away.
“Get the others.”
“No. You wait right there. I’m coming after you.”
“Don’t.” His fingers slipped a centimeter until his pinky no longer reached. “I chose the wrong way. Go around this part. Save the others. I know you can do it.”
“No.” I whimpered, a numbing shock racing through me. “You have to hold on.”
His arm shook with the weight of his entire body. Another crack shattered my soul. His face grew scarily placid. “If I could do it all over again, I would have picked you.”
The strand broke, and he plummeted into the darkness.
I screamed, not even hearing my voice until the ugly echoes came back at me.
Frantic, I scanned the shadows in denial.
Maybe he’d latched onto the wall in free fall? Maybe there was a horizontal web? Anything to avoid the obvious.
Absolute blackness mocked my hopes. I was alone in almost complete darkness, dangling from the ceiling off a giant precipice in a hostile alien ship. I squeezed my eyes shut and sobbed.
Get a grip. You’re still the team expedition leader.
I wanted to take my position and shove it up Crophaven’s butt. None of it mattered now. I’d finally won Sirius’ respect, and maybe more. Now he was gone.
Or was he?
I remembered my locator. Gripping the web with one hand, I used the other to switch from my team’s coordinates to Sirius’.
His green dot blinked, and I almost died from joy. He was still alive.
“Sirius!” I yelled down into the shadows, not caring if the arachnids heard me. “Are you okay?”
My voice echoed down the shaft and petered into silence. Either he was too far away to hear me, or the fall had knocked him unconscious. I forced myself to focus. Keep going. Find another path.
There was no way I was going leave him like he suggested. He might be hurt and in pain. Get to Sirius first, then get the others.
I chanted my own commands as I forced myself to descend another step, then another. The strands thinned across the entire wall, and I tested each handhold before redistributing my full weight. I was smaller than Sirius, less heavy. I could do this.
Sirius’ words came back to me: I would have picked you. What did he mean by that? He would have picked me over Andromeda? He would have loved me instead? As I climbed, I came up with a thousand different interpretations, each one more appealing than the last.
One thought outshined the rest, becoming my mantra: if I could get us out of this, we’d be together. We’d be happy. We’d have a chance at love.
I kept scrambling down into the abyss. It could have been hours, days. The darkness was a vacuum around me, sucking every second and spitting it back out so I had to relive my nightmare again and again. My mind kept repeating Sirius’ fall, and I checked my locator every few seconds to make sure he survived.
After telling myself not to look down, and looking down anyway, the dim, white glow of my locator reflected in a silvery sheen of the cavern floor. My heart sped. I was almost there.
A pool of water covered the bottom, which I hoped had braced Sirius’ fall. The water tapered to a tunnel at the far side. Puddles led from the pool into the darkness.
I checked my locator. Sirius’ green dot was farther inside.
Preparing for a frigid splash, I jumped. The water slammed against me, and I flailed as I sank toward the dark depths. My toes touched the bottom, and I bent my legs and pushed myself toward the surface. I breached the air and took in a gasping breath. Images of hairy legs grabbing me and pulling me back under made me swim rapidly toward the tunnel. I climbed out and lay hugging myself and panting in the fetal position on the tunnel’s floor.
Violet light, much like the sky on Paradise 21, glowed farther down.
“Sirius?” I whispered, more careful now I’d regained an ounce of my sanity. “Are you there?”
No answer. Squeezing out my hair, I followed the light.
My locator beeped with a strange, whiny sound. The screen flickered, showing random information like my own bodily signs, topography charts of the region and even old texts before it flashed off.
I should have known. The crystals affected our equipment. They were the reason we couldn’t call for help when we crashed in the pod field. I’d have to find Sirius without my locator.
I emerged in a low-ceilinged room that stretched into dark shadows in all directions. The vastness of the ship threatened to overwhelm me. Chunks of crystal, twice my height and wider than a Landrover, sat in rows above raised bumps in the floor. I’d never seen so many in such high concentration. Something about the connection to the floor illuminated them, and they danced with light as if the ship had turned them on. A distant, vibrating hum stirred my gut. Somehow I’d always known the resonance was there, but the pedestals tuning the crystals allowed me to hear the sound clearly for the first time.
A scuffling sound to my right drew my attention. My hopes shot up. “Sirius?”
I circled a chunk of crystal just in time to see a set of long, hairy legs extend as the hunch-backed sack of squiggly brains pulsed with life.