Goldie fed morsel after morsel of food into the black hole that was Adon’s mouth.

There were moments when she wanted to laugh. Her little friend had such a voracious appetite. Typical caterpillar!

And there were moments of terror, when she understood that the food she was giving Adon might be the difference between life and death. She wasn’t just thinking to herself when she commented on Adon’s appetite. She was trying to think loudly so that he might hear it and respond. But it was no use. He was lost to her for now at least. Either too weak to use Telepathy or too scatterbrained at the moment to focus on responding.

Goldie had suffered a bite of her own to her leg, and when she felt the sensation of the venom beginning to move up through the leg, she simply tore the limb off. Unlike Adon, she grew new legs whenever she shed her skin.

Though she hadn’t done that yet, because she was too busy nursing her friend. Adon had suffered much more serious bites, affecting areas she could not simply tear off of his body. Because he volunteered to fight from front, while I struck from behind…

Goldie wanted to cry. This was all her fault. She had made so many mistakes. She let her friend take the lead, even though she was bigger. He was so much less fearful than her. She had taken that to mean that he could handle the spiders almost alone. Or maybe she had simply wanted it to mean that. She had been worried about the thief spiders for so long.

I could have done so much more in fight… but I was afraid to step off of web. It had been Adon’s plan to have her stay on the web for the duration, but that should have gone by the wayside once she saw that he was in trouble—as it eventually had, when that last spider was trying to kill him.

She had underestimated the thief spiders too. She could tell the venom must have been more powerful than she had realized. Probably stronger than hers after all. The wounds were not blackened, which meant that the venom was probably neurotoxic rather than necrotic. So the venom was attacking Adon’s brain and nervous system right now. Doing that, it was effective enough to push him into a coma.

Even so, his resistances seemed to be fighting through. He wasn’t in the midst of convulsions, as he had been for a few minutes after his collapse. And he wasn’t dead. Hopefully that meant he was on the mend and just needed more Biomass to fuel his recovery.

It was like he was sleeping, though of course insects did not truly sleep. Not when they were healthy, at least…

All Goldie could do to support Adon in this fight was feed the caterpillar. She began by giving him every one of the thief spider’s corpses to eat. She also found that one of them had laid an egg sac in the corner of her web, and with only a twinge of guilt, she fed the other spider’s eggs into Adon’s mouth as well.

The guilt was because she felt that Adon was a gentle soul, and she was not certain how he would feel about eating a spider’s eggs when his friend was a spider about to lay her own eggs.

The mouth, fortunately, seemed to work independently of the caterpillar’s suffering brain. It took nourishment regardless of the ethical implications.

No matter how much she fed into it, the gaping maw seemed ever ready to consume more fuel. She threw in her own torn off leg without much hesitation, then went to dig through her reserves of food, once all the spider flesh was gone.

This was her fault. Even if she ended up with nothing, Goldie would make this right.

Goldie’s mate—who she had recently taken to calling “Red” in her own mind, following Adon’s apparent naming conventions—stood on the top part of her back, where her neck would be if she was a mammal, for most of this. He made little tapping and scratching movements on the back of her head with the tips of his legs, which she found soothing. Similar to another sensation that she couldn’t quite remember. Something from another life, she knew. Another world.

She didn’t like to think about how much she had lost when she reincarnated—memories of family, friends, her own name! Perhaps more. She could have been a male in her last life, and she would have no way of knowing now. Maybe one day she would try to prise open that door.

Right now, she preferred to just enjoy the sensation of the rhythmic motions to her exoskeleton. They were a balm on her painful feelings of responsibility and helplessness.

When her stocks of food were almost empty, though, even that soothing sensation stopped. Goldie’s mate started making tiny hissing noises. Not hostility, she knew. There were no enemies nearby. He was just alarmed that she was continuing to empty out their food stocks, even as they scraped bottom.

The two of them had never communicated verbally, but she thought she understood Red’s values well enough by now. They weren’t complicated, nor did they need to be.

His top priority was to ensure that she and their eggs survived. Next in line, he wanted to make certain that their offspring were well provided for. Red hadn’t taken to Adon at first, she could tell from his body language. Now he seemed to like the caterpillar well enough—the small matter of killing off the Kleptomaniac Dewdrop Spiders had helped with that. He hadn’t objected to her nursing Adon back to health and feeding him a lot of their stored food until this moment. But clearly, there were limits to Red’s newfound appreciation for the insect.

Now Red was trying to say, in his way, This is going too far. You will lay eggs soon. Keep this up, and you will not have anything left for yourself and the hatchlings!

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I know, she wanted to tell him. Would tell him, if only she had invested in Telepathy. I know we are taking a risk. I will replenish reserves. Have faith in me. Web collects fifty flies on good days! It would be even more effective if she had not chosen a fairly low traffic area to build her web, primarily for safety.

Perhaps it was for the best that Goldie and Red could not talk to each other, though. What might have become an ugly argument quietly dissipated instead. Red gave up and sat still on her back, maintaining a sullen silence, while she fed the last of their reserves of food into Adon’s mouth. The caterpillar mechanically devoured everything but gave no other signs of life. He lay still.

Then there was nothing to do for a little while but wait. Night fell, Goldie and her mate rested, and Adon remained inert, like a statue of a caterpillar.

The next morning, Goldie knew she had to do something more for her friend. She thought he might be recovering. His body didn’t look like it had completely burnt up the food she’d given him—there was a hollow appearance to an arthropod when it was low enough on Biomass—but he wasn’t waking up either. He needed more food to recover properly.

A fly every twenty minutes or so was enough to sustain Goldie and Red, but not anyone else. Certainly not a life form with a bottomless appetite who was also recovering from neurotoxic venom.

So Goldie and her mate had their morning meal, and she communicated to him with her best attempts at simple sign language that she was going out into the garden. Going hunting. She tapped her abdomen, pointed at Adon, gestured at the garden, gestured at her mouth. She had to repeat and revise her pattern of communication several times before her mate got the meaning. They had only rarely tried to understand each other so overtly.

At first, Red tried to demand that she stay. Feed Adon with whatever surplus came into the web, while the two of them subsisted on their bare minimum amount of food. He even offered to take less food himself if it would help her friend. At least, all of the above was how Goldie interpreted Red’s strange spider dance moves and gestures.

When Goldie rejected his suggestions and reiterated her intention to go out there, her mate simply demanded—or offered—to go with her. And she eagerly accepted that.

The ground was scary enough to think about traversing with company. There could be danger lurking behind every leaf. She didn’t know how she would have survived alone.

Somehow, though, Adon did it every day. If the plucky caterpillar could do that, so could she.

Goldie bent to make it easier for Red to clamber onto her back. She went up to Adon and strung up slender threads all around him so that any creature that tried to approach him for an attack would get caught in this new webbing. Then she walked her and her mate over to the edge of the web and hopped down.

She was immediately anxious and wished she could go back to the safety of her web. Her legs felt unsteady and clumsy on the ground, instead of dexterous as they were in her web.

She marched out from the shadows she’d built her home in and into the light of day.

I can do this, she told herself. I have my silk, venom—plenty of weapons. As much as Adon.

Recalling a tactic Adon had mentioned using, Goldie paused and quickly crafted a silk net that she could hold in her front limbs while she walked. She would have no time to do so in a fight. And her silk should be even more potent as a weapon than Adon’s, she told herself. She had spent all these years perfecting it and investing in it.

After that minor project, and a little more effort reassuring herself, Goldie moved a bit further from her home.

She tried to walk on the edge of the garden path, aware that the deadliest threat, above and beyond hostile insects and birds, was humanity. Any one of those giants might step on her without even noticing. And sometimes the humans who maintained the garden killed unwanted insects on purpose.

How long has it been since I left web? she found herself wondering. The plant life had always been intimidating to her, hiding as it did so many vicious predators. But she had hoped everything would seem smaller, since the last time she wandered the garden had been when she was a juvenile.

No such luck.

Goldie jumped as a big green lizard poked its head out from behind a leaf.

That head was large enough to swallow her whole, she realized. Then a long, pink tongue snaked out and shot straight for her!

No! She dodged to the side and tried to run away, but she saw the tongue flying her way out of her peripheral vision once again. She had to jump toward the open path to get away from it. The other direction would have taken her closer to the lizard.

Why are you coming after me?!

The lizard started running toward her now, and she stepped further onto the dangerous open terrain of the garden path, trying to outpace him. It was no good. He was faster. She began trying to decide how she could survive this encounter. Not getting sucked into his mouth would be a good start. Maybe she needed to dodge the next attack and then try to get in close. Give him an injection of venom. Or she could try and inject his tongue? No, then she would probably still get pulled into those jaws.

As she thought about the best way to defend herself, Goldie continued frantically running away and steadily losing ground. She zigzagged where needed to dodge the tongue.

This was an unwinnable situation, she slowly realized. Her venom was potent enough for bugs, but this lizard was more than twice her size. She wouldn’t kill this thing that way.

Maybe I can run up plant. Can it climb as fast as it runs?

As she had this idea, the tongue darted out. She tried to dodge once more, but she was just too slow. The pink appendage struck her in the back and stuck fast.

And then Goldie felt herself flying through the air. Her brief spider life flashed before her eyes.

No! I wanted to know so much more… do more!

The greatest regret in her mind was that she had never had the chance to see her eggs hatch and become little spiders. The second greatest regret was that she was taking Adon and Red down with her. The little caterpillar would probably die without someone to feed him substantial food and fuel his recovery. And Red was still on her back. Along for the ride to the very end.

Then she felt a sharp yank upward. The direction of her movement changed. Goldie was still flying through the air, but now, rather than being pulled backward into a gaping mouth, she saw the ground receding further and further away.

The spider managed to twist her body to look upward, and she saw a sparrow clutching the lizard in its mouth. That was the source of this new momentum.