A wasp settled on the tunnel floor in front of her, watching her with his myriad eyes. A bolt of sunlight sparkled over his hairy abdomen. The buzzing stilled.

“A sweet surprise!” The wasp flicked forward and landed at Heather’s feet. He rose up on spindle legs to probe her face with his long, bristled mouth. “Yes, you taste just like her. Sweet as nectar. But you are too late. Your little pupa has grown wings and flown the hive. We finished her for you. Gave her wings, and poison.”

Heather swallowed the pounding of her heart that rose in a scream from her gut. “How late?”

The wasp rubbed two pronged feet together and slicked them over a protruding stinger that jabbed out from between its legs. “Nearly a day. She’ll have finished her ballad by now, I daresay, and then . . . ”

“Then?”

“Sweet as nectar, you are. You both are.” He slid the stinger down the side of her raw thigh.

Heather lowered her honeyed eyelids. She reached, lightning-quick, and grasped the stinger, wrenching it around so that the wasp writhed on its back. Acid peppered her face as she pulled.

His wings buzzed, scraping at the dirt of the tunnel floor.

Heather twisted. The swarm swept toward her in a hissing cloud.

Hairy chitin fractured, splintered the stinger from the twitching abdomen. She waved the stinger, sweeping it across the beams of light, and the swarm scattered. The wasp curled on the floor, rolling into a knot of legs. Heather wrapped her lips around the base of the stinger, sinking her thorn-teeth into it, sucking the sour acid from it like a straw. She hissed around the shaft. Poison glistened at its tip. She rushed and the wasps fell away, crawling into hollows whittled in the muddy walls.

Heather leapt from beam of light to darkness, leaving tattered wings in her wake, and ran through the tunnel.

Ahead, light shone—warm and golden like the flower honey, and she rushed into it, and into the ropey web stretched across its glow.

***

The web twisted with her, snapped and wrapped where she strained, then it trembled with her, as she lay back—exhausted. She felt the fibers stretched across her quiver, saw the low-slung bulb of the spider descend, the abdomen shining with a thousand sticky globes. Rough, scaled legs brushed over her. “You taste of insect and earth, of flower’s honey and of mother’s blood. What thing are you?”

Heather eyed the sticky globes, and saw soft stirring inside each. She flicked her tongue and pressed the stinger into one cheek.

“I am a mother,” she said.

The spider lowered, and grasped Heather’s face in her mandibles, sucked at her mouth.

“You are a child.”

“But a mother . . . ”

“In name only. You are a once-mother.”

Heather felt her throat constrict, and the tight web clenched to fill the slack against her heaving chest.

“How old is your web, widow?” Heather asked.