“This,” she said, “was never what I wanted.”

“Maybe not, but it’s what you’re getting,” I said. My voice was cold. The last of my mercy had leaked out onto the concrete along with Mandy’s blood. Mandy … I turned.

First had her neatly cocooned, completely obscured by veils of green silk. The vast spider lifted her head, and I knew she was looking at me, focusing on me with the full power of her many multifaceted eyes.

// she is not dead // she said. // she will not die until the cocoon is cut. you will have to choose for her, then, because she will not be able to choose for herself. //

“What’s she saying?” demanded Graham.

“Mandy’s alive.” I turned back to the vice-president. “Congratulations. If there was any prayer for humanity, it just got answered. Because I promise you, if she dies, I will tell my mother to burn everything mankind has ever made to the ground and salt the ashes to be sure that nothing ever grows there again. Do you understand me?”

The skin under Vice-President Rogers’s eye twitched. “Your … mother?”

“You’d probably think of her as ‘the spider.’ Her name is First, and she’s the diplomatic team. Good job trying to shoot her.” I glared at the guards, not making any effort to figure out which one had actually fired the gun. Let them all share the blame, unless they were willing to give up one of their own in the hopes of earning back a sliver of our favor.

This was human nature. This was understandable, even excusable, when viewed from a great-enough distance. We had scared them. We had forced them into a situation where they felt like they had to take a stand or lose everything. And none of that mattered, because the distance wasn’t there. Before we had done anything intentional, anything beyond existing, they had been prepared to kill us all.

Agent Brown had been right about one thing, even if she had been so perfectly, patently wrong about everything else: I wasn’t a citizen of the United States of America anymore. I wasn’t even a citizen of Earth. They’d been in such a hurry to throw me away that they had left me with nowhere to turn beyond the people of my origins, and now I was free to be what they had decided I was. I was free to be a monster.

First walked toward us, body low and knees high as she balanced her swollen abdomen against the cruel gravity of Earth. A hand touched my shoulder. I didn’t need to look to know that it was Graham. If one of the guards had even dared touch me, Hunter would have left his meal and slaughtered them for their audacity. I could hear him chirping and creeling as he gulped down limbs and viscera, healing the damage their bullets had done one mouthful at a time.