As they ate, the hanging light bulb at the ceiling brightened, flooding the basement. It was like sunshine in its purity and warmth. Sunny shaded her eyes.

“Udide has seen us!” she heard Ogwu shout. “Udide has seen us!!”

The spiders left the mess that was the djinn and went running to the wall, Ogwu leading the way. Up the wall they crept. Then they scrambled to the ceiling. Toward the hanging light. Ogwu stopped above it and pointed a leg at the light. “Go, my children, go! We’re free! I will show you the world!”

Group by group they lowered themselves on their webs into the light, which flashed blue whenever a spider entered it.

“Anyanwu,” Ogwu said. “Sunny Nwazue, good luck! We’ve saved you here, but all of our lives depend on what you and the others do. Stop Ekwensu.”

“How do you know it’s her?” Sunny asked. She hadn’t mentioned Ekwensu. “You’ve been down here all . . .”

“I’ve been down here, but you know my children and I are not just of this place. We dwell in the wilderness also. We know the news there.”

The basement flashed and flashed as if it contained its own lightning. Sunny looked back at the remains of the djinn. She was firmly in the physical world now and there was nothing but dust left of it. “Is it dead?” she asked Ogwu.

“It was never alive.”

“Will it rise again?”

“Not for a while. Eventually. But we will not be here when it does.”

Sunny smiled. She had one more night to spend here and she’d spend it alone. Thank goodness.

“Sunny Anyanwu, Anyanwu Sunny,” Ogwu said. Her children were all gone, and she was finally lowering herself toward the light. “Thank you for giving me this chance to finally act, to play a role. The Great Spider Udide blesses you. If you ever meet her, send her my greetings and love.” Then she was gone in a flash of blue light.

Silence. A good kind of silence. Sunny was safe. She held up her arm to look at where the djinn had bitten her and saw that her bicep was swollen and red. What did a bite from a djinn do? She had at least half a day left down here.

“The medical books!” she said, remembering. There were volumes of them in the case near the bronze toad. Her muscles felt sore and her head ached. But she felt good. She felt strong. The memory of Ogwu’s failure and curse was vivid in her head. As Anyanwu, she had been part of the group that sent Ogwu to stop the atomic bomb from dropping. She’d been a part of a group trying to prevent one of the worst human-caused disasters of all time, back in 1945. Wow.

It didn’t take Sunny long to find information in the medical books about the bite of a djinn. Apparently, they were common in the Sahara and all over the Middle East. They could kill you and take your soul if they held you in the wilderness long enough, which was probably what it had done to the man with the hard bones forty years ago and planned to do to Sunny. However, their bites only caused a low-grade fever and dryness in the mouth. Sunny would have to suffer until her final meal and release came.