Arach by C.M. Simpson (books to read for 12 year olds TXT) 📕

The arach swung towards me, again, its forelegs lashing out in another grab.

Fine! I was going to treat it like a really grabby ball-on-a-string… just as soon as I found a stick.

I hit the grass on my stomach, trying to dodge it as it swung back. I wasn’t quite fast enough, and I felt its talons rake down my back. This time, I was lucky, and it didn’t find a grip on my clothing. Those cuts were going to hurt like hell. They would have to hurt later, though, because, right now, I didn’t have time for hurt.

I rolled, getting out of its return path, and seeking the shelter of a clump of bushes clustered around the foot of a tree. I realized, just a fraction too late, that they had thorns, slamming into them, as the arach spun by me, again. It had learned from its previous near-miss, and, this time, its claws raked the ground, where I’d lain. When it saw where I had rolled to, it dropped all the way to the ground, and lumbered towards me. I tried to wriggle free of my thorny haven, and yelped.

The arach laughed.

“Ravreshret,” it said, reaching cautiously under the bush to wrap its clawed feet over my back, between thorn branches. “This is going to hurt you a lot more than it will ever hurt me.”

I just bet it was. There was nothing like impaling yourself on some serious thorns, unless it was being torn off them, again, by a creature who thought your screams of pain were funny. I gritted my teeth, tensing in the arach’s grasp, as I waited for it to start pulling.

That pressure didn’t come. Instead, a loud buzzing filled the air, sort of like the sound of a wasp trapped against the glass, only a million times louder. The feminine voice that followed was both unexpected as it was unfamiliar.

“Let it go, and I might let you live.”

It? I was an it? I seemed to remember someone else referring to me that way before… We hadn’t gotten along. Right now, though? Right now, I had other things to worry about.

The arach’s grip tightened, and it gave a little tug. The thorns tore at the skin of my back, my scalp, and my legs, and I screamed in spite of myself. The owner of the feminine voice was unperturbed.

“Death it is, then,” she said, and I steeled myself for the pain to come.

Except that it didn’t. The arach let me go, even though it raked its claws viciously across my back as it did so.

“Bastard,” I said, and tried, very carefully, to get out from under the bushes.

I choked back another cry of pain, and resigned myself to being stuck in the rava, ravra, the whatever-the-fuck-they-were bushes, until someone pulled me out. All I could hope was that they pulled me out gently, because I wanted some skin left when they were done. In the meantime, I might as well watch the show.

Because there was going to be a show, right?

Oh, hell yes, there was.

The sound of a million wings could only have come from the four, large, wasp-like creatures hovering around the edge of the clearing, and—now that I was looking up—the arach could only have come from the shuttle that had suddenly put on power, and flown across the top of the wall and out of sight. One of the wasps turned its head to watch it go.

“Your web-mates have deserted you.”

“They know you will not harm me.”

That sounded like bravado to me.

The wasp whirred its wings, and lifted higher into the air.

“They don’t know us very well, do they?” and even I knew it wasn’t looking for an answer.

The arach rattled out a curse, and charged towards the wasp closest the trees. That wasp, too, lifted up, but only to move out of its reach.

“I am not your opponent,” it said. “That is the queen’s privilege.”

Queen? Fuck me. I’d had enough of near-royalty dealing with Skymander. I had no desire to deal with more.

“Near royalty amongst humans is not royalty,” and this time I realized that the voice in my head was not matched to the sound in my ears, that I could only understand the sound in my ears because there was a voice in my head. This also meant I had company inside my own skull.

It struck me that this was actually going to be worse than having Mack and Tens privy to my implant. I groaned, and would have tilted my head back to close my eyes, except that my head was well-and-truly trapped in the ravra bush. Fuckit. Fuckitfuckitfuckit.

“Our hospitality does not include participation in acts of procreation,” the wasp informed me, and I had to laugh.

It was a short-lived laugh, full of pain and irony, and a sadness that Mack hadn’t returned for me.

Fuck it all.

“Ah, cursing. Not an expression of the desire to procreate. Our mistake.”

I had never heard insects laugh, before, and it was an experience I could have done without. The arach, also, was not in the mood for laughter. It charged after one wasp, and then another, ignoring the queen, who hovered above it, watching its antics.

Finally, the spider backed itself into a corner, where it was sheltered by the trees, and, only then, did the queen descend.

“Which form?” she asked, touching lightly to the ground, and I guessed the speech in my mind to be a courtesy.

The spider rattled its fangs at her, and hissed.

“That is your choice, but you are trespassing, and I am the final judge.”

Well, that was interesting.

Again, the spider spoke, and this time, the queen’s insect-like form faded away, and a tall, woman stood, where there had been a giant wasp. She was armed with a Blazer 54, two Jhinevra pistols, matching foot-long blades sheathed on each hip, and a longer blade sheathed in a scabbard hanging down her back.

I noticed the wasps on either side of her lift uneasily