Udide worked fast, wrapping more webbing around the suspended strand. It took the shape of a white sticky-looking sphere about the size of a tennis ball. Then Udide raised a leg and started spinning. It whirled, slowly at first and then quickly. Then the great spider really began to work. She attached and wove and shaped so quickly now that Sunny’s eye couldn’t follow it. And as Udide worked, Sunny saw some of the spirits around her stop to watch. One looked like the shape of a man, only he was nothing but oily blue light. He stood beside Udide, a hand on a hip. Then he raised his other hand, brought it to his chin, and seemed to blow. His breath was blue, and it wafted right into the thing Udide was weaving.

Another wilderness creature came and did the same thing. And as they each added these ethereal ingredients, Udide’s creature began to shift and take on different colors. It went from being spherical to a blob with many appendages on the sides, top, and bottom. It also began to grow. From tennis-ball sized to the size of a horse and then to the size of a van.

Sunny had since moved back to join her friends, who were all gawking.

One of what Sunny had begun to call colored-spirit people came and blew at the large still-growing mass Udide was weaving, and Udide seemed to get annoyed and shoved it away. For some reason, this made Sunny’s belly cramp with hysterics.

“What is wrong with you?” Chichi whispered, frowning at her. “Are you all right?”

Sunny only shook her head. “Maybe the leftover spider poison is making me giddy, I don’t know.” Her body certainly still ached. But this didn’t stop the laughs that kept bubbling up from within her. When she looked up, she saw Anyanwu’s dimly luminescent form perched upside down on the cave’s ceiling, surrounded by spiders as she watched Udide weave.

“What is so funny?” Sasha asked. When she looked at him, he was smirking.

“This . . . everything,” she whispered.

And that got Sasha snickering, too. Orlu tried his best, but he, too, was clearly tired and overwhelmed and terrified. Soon, his eyes were watering from trying not to laugh. Only Chichi sulked, her arms across her chest.

Sunny was laughing so hard that when the large hovering mass that Udide was weaving plopped to the floor, she wasn’t afraid. She took a deep breath and tried not to think about the fact that she was deep in a cave beneath the city of Lagos with a spider the size of a house who was weaving some mass of webbing that was starting to wriggle.

She turned away from everything and looked down the dark cave. That helped quell her giggles. The marbles she’d dropped lit the cavernous cave well enough, but their light didn’t reach down the tunnel for even a few yards. It was as if the light bent toward Udide. Sunny inhaled and then exhaled and inhaled again. She could feel each place where the spiders had bitten her to inject venom and then the antidote. Those spots felt itchy and were probably red and swollen. But she was otherwise okay.