“Where is that spider?”

Goldie heard the voice from behind her, but with most of the wall in between her and the speaker, she could not tell whose voice it was, only that it was a woman speaking.

She desperately pressed herself more forcefully into the crevasse—and then heard a sound that made her whole body freeze up. The smallest cracking noise.

No, my eggs!

She had thought the thick and tough silk wrapped around them would protect against any environmental damage, but clearly it was not enough to keep the eggs completely secure.

Goldie heard the fall of the broom somewhere behind her.

“There she is!” said a voice.

She stretched her forelimbs forward to feel the gap in front of her, and to Goldie’s relief, it seemed like a wider space than that she was currently occupying. She pressed her body as flat against the ground as she could. Then she pushed forward, hoping and praying that she would not hear that sound again.

Her body seemed to advance agonizingly slowly, step by incremental step. But the voices of the maids grew more difficult to hear. And to her relief, there were no further sounds from the silken package on her back.

The gap that she traversed widened until she could no longer reach the top of the passage by feeling with her forelimbs, and before she could process what that meant, her head popped out—into what appeared to the spider to be a vast hidden room.

What is this place?

One thing she felt instantly certain of: the maids did not know this place. It was full of dust, small crawling insects, and spider webs.

Six of them, she counted in an instant. With who knows how many spiders living in them… Hopefully they do not make trouble.

Of course, if the other spiders did cause trouble, Goldie was confident she could deal with them more easily than the maids. She immediately knew she was probably going to stay in this place for some time, at least while she figured out her next moves.

After she had taken a moment to assess the situation, she moved on to the thing she was afraid of: inspecting her eggs.

She took them down from her back and immediately saw what had happened.

Over one of the eggs, the strong silk she had applied had been worn away from her repeated close scrapes with hard surfaces. That egg had a thin crack.

But Goldie felt relieved.

You will be all right, she sent to the egg telepathically. Mother is here.

She might have imagined it, but she thought she felt a faint sound back from within the egg. Something she picked up telepathically? Or was it only in her head?

Goldie waited for something more from the egg, but she did not hear anything else. She thought it must have been a product of her imagination.

She stroked the egg gently with the tip of a limb, then spun and applied a thin strand of sticky silk to mend the cracked place.

I think that egg will survive. Now to set up for my survival.

She peeled off the protective silk and checked the other eggs before resealing it.

And then Goldie started work on another web, this one much larger and more elaborate than the last. She had the feeling she would be here for a while, and even in the dimness, she wanted to make her surroundings as homey as possible. She went into a near autopilot mode, as she constructed a web that was almost a perfect replica of the web she had lived in when Adon first met her. The web where she had met Red.

When Goldie was done, she had to admire her handiwork.

This will be almost the same as the garden, she thought. I have already seen insects walking around. The surroundings are a bit less attractive right now, but I imagine this momentary discomfort will all be worth it in the end, when the Princess wakes, and we are recognized as honored guests.

For now, she withdrew to a hidden area at the top of her new web, where she had deliberately added a canopy of silk above the web, both to shield herself from view and to hide her eggs from any passing creature.

Hours passed, during which time little happened. This secret room behind the palace walls was a much less high traffic area than Goldie’s section of the garden. She could not help wondering if the location where the other spiders had built their webs, at a higher elevation, had better circulation of bugs.

She did not need to regularly eat, but when her hatchlings emerged from their eggs, they would certainly be hungry. She needed to gather provisions for them.

As Goldie was beginning to contemplate an expedition to check on the other spiders, however, she received her first tug. A simple, short pull on one of the threads she was monitoring pulled her sluggish, half-quiescent brain out of contemplation. Her attention was drawn to a small brown bug with yellow stripes and tiny protrusions sticking out like little hairs all over its body—not like Adon’s spines, but more similar to the little hairs Goldie had on parts of her legs.

Identify.

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Black Carpet Beetle Larva (Female)

Goldie did not recognize the species name, but it looked nice and juicy to her, and she found it a good sign that she had caught something on her very first day. She decided to taste the creature—just a small amount of its innards—to make certain that it was suitable for her offspring.

The spider strode confidently across her web, ignoring the larva’s increased flailing as she drew closer to it, and then she bent and injected it with a small, lethal dose of venom. She stepped back to watch how the larva reacted. The creature writhed and seemed to involuntarily contort its body, though its movements were restrained by the strong, sticky threads. Then it lay still.

Not immune to venom. That is good.

Goldie stopped to sink her fangs into the creature’s body once again. This time, she sucked in a little of its inner fluids, tasting it. She lacked the vocabulary to express the flavor, but it was similar to chestnuts.

Slightly bitter aftertaste, but I do not think it is poisonous.

She wrapped the larva in tightly wound silk, pulled it free from where it lay bound, and moved back up to the top of her web to wait again.

This process repeated itself a few times over the next several days.

At one point, she left her web, making sure to hide her eggs in a dense tangle of spider silk that she coated in venom. She walked up the wall, careful to avoid going anywhere near the spider webs that occupied much of the airspace of the secret room. She used her memory of how she had navigated the other rooms of the palace to figure out generally where Adon, the Princess, and the Queen were staying.

And she searched the wall along that room to find an opening by which she might visit Adon.

Ultimately, she found a way into the room through the ventilation system, which included small metal pipes that she discovered connected the second floor—and probably every floor, although she was primarily interested in the second floor, since that was where she wanted to be—to several exterior chimneys.

The pipes would have been far too small for any human to crawl around in, but for Goldie, the interconnected piping system was spacious and easy to move through. She had some difficulty when she finally managed to navigate to where she wanted to be, after several false starts.

She ended up at a slitted air vent, but there were no openings in it wide enough for such a large spider to pass through freely. Instead of trying to find some way to pass through, she accepted that it was impossible and simply looked out through the slits.

She heard the King talking to his sleeping daughter, and she saw the outline of Adon’s chrysalis in the distance.

After confirming that nothing substantial seemed to have changed, Goldie weighed the pros and cons of speaking up to the King now. But being chased so determinedly by the maids had shaken her sense of how the palace might value her. She felt no confidence that revealing her presence would lead to good results right now.

Better, she decided, to wait until Adon emerges from the chrysalis. He will know what to say, and he will make certain that the King and the Princess understand how important I am to him.

For the moment, she returned to her position in the secret room.

And aside from this brief adventure, Goldie’s life in the dark space passed peacefully.

The small area that Goldie now inhabited was quiet, and her time passed uneventfully. When she was not killing some insect that had stumbled into her web or repairing the damage that repeated arrivals to the web slowly and inevitably did, she was inactive, conserving Biomass. Keeping track of time, but otherwise not even thinking much.

She suspected that a caterpillar of a rare and powerful species would take some time to emerge from his chrysalis, so the major milestone she was waiting for right now was her eggs hatching, which she expected to happen first.

Although she was accumulating some reserves of food for her babies, the spider grew more and more nervous about whether it would be enough. If she did not have enough food, her children might starve—or even try to turn on their mother. She had seen it happen to other spiders, though not her specific kind. She had no illusions that her children would have any inborn loyalty to their mother. And if they tried to consume her, it would be her own fault for failing to feed them.

Goldie was eating very little herself—only nibbles here and there to be sure she was not leaving anything poisonous near her little ones.

Yet Goldie’s indoor web was simply accumulating far fewer insects than her garden web had. Perhaps it was due to the overzealous maids keeping the palace too clean and not attracting enough bugs.

Or maybe I simply do not control the best real estate in this space, she thought, looking coldly up at the other webs in the regions far above her head.

Even if she had known for certain that her web was in the ideal location, Goldie would probably have thought about invading the other spiders’ territory at some point anyway. After her Evolution, there was no reason for her to peacefully coexist with what she guessed were a weaker species of spiders. Where she had once been merely a peer to other arachnids in the garden, she assessed that she now likely stood at the top of the food chain, relative to both other garden creatures and those that lived inside the palace.

Rather than being a threat, those spiders in the webs above were probably mere walking Evolution Points.

Why should she occupy only one area of real estate, when she and her babies could control this entire chamber?

She could cover the walls and ceiling in her webbing if she did not have to avoid straying too near the webs of the other spiders.

There was a sense of urgency to her thinking now, because with each passing day, she could hear a little more activity from within her eggs. She knew it would not be long before they hatched.

So Goldie began planning an attack.

She broke her usual rule of inactivity more and more often, taking long, meandering walks around the secret room. If the other spiders were watching her and had enough intelligence to understand that she was a threat, they still might not recognize what she was doing: examining the setup of their webs, looking for lines of attack, and keeping her eyes peeled so that she could see what sorts of enemy species she was dealing with.

Gradually, she was able to see and Identify the creatures she was up against. To her relief, the spiders living here did not appear to be especially impressive.

Common House Spiders and Brown Recluse Spiders.

To her surprise, there were two different populations of spiders living in the six webs. There were two, clearly mated, Common House Spiders living in one web—she felt only a slight twinge of guilt at the prospect of destroying this happy couple—and there were two smaller Common House Spiders in two other webs that were not too far from the couple.

And each of the other three webs, scattered at a greater distance from each other and from the Common House Spiders, held a single Brown Recluse Spider.

Goldie felt a bit less guilty about going after the Common House Spiders once she saw the Brown Recluse Spiders. She had seen this species before, though not often, in the garden.

Apparently they had escaped the chaos of the garden and come here.

One of their behaviors that she remembered was that Brown Recluse Spiders were active hunters. And with the paucity of insects in this space, even if Goldie had never showed up, they would eventually have hunted their neighbors down.

So how should I do this? she thought. Do I pursue the hunters first, or the prey?