Page 53 of The Inheritance
I slipped on the narrow waist connecting the abdomen and thorax, caught myself, leaped onto the thorax, and scrambled onto her neck.
The wings hummed and blurred like the blades of a helicopter. A gust of wind buffeted me.
I drove my sword into the queen’s neck. It sank through, and I ripped it to the side, carving through the exoskeleton. The queen’s head drooped, and I chopped at the thin filament connecting it to the body.
The head crashed down.
The wings kept going. The headless body rose in the air, carrying me with it. I clung to it. The wasp corpse climbed twenty feet up...
The wings slowed.
The body fell slowly, careened, and landed in a heap. I jumped, rolled to break my fall, and came up in a crouch.
The queen was dead.
Elias put away his phone.
“Nice.” Leo grinned.
“They wanted a fight. We gave them a fight.”
All they had to do now was wait.
8
“What the hell was that?”
Bear panted at me.
“I said stay. I know you know what stay means. I didn’t say run into the fight and bite the giant wasp.”
Bear looked completely unrepentant.
“You’re a butthole. That’s your name from now on. Bear Butthole Moore.”
Butthole padded over to me and sat with a big canine grin on her face.
“What are you so happy about? I’m mad at you. At least have the decency to look embarrassed.”
Bear twitched her ears. Bear and decency clearly had nothing to do with each other.
I looked up. And forgot to breathe. Above me, the chamber climbed to a height of a hundred and fifty feet, expanding into a wider space. Long spiral ledges of something that looked like paper wrapped around the perimeter of the cavern, and between them huge luminous crystals glowed with pale yellow light. Far above, at the very top, a cluster of paper tubes hung together, some sealed with pale paper caps, others empty, their edges ragged. It was like standing inside a gargantuan conch shell, and it felt otherworldly, like a cathedral.
Regret pinched me. I destroyed this.
Yes, it was beautiful, but the spider herders deserved to harvest their eggs in peace, and I needed to get home. I had to get the coral egg and get out.
“Come on, Butthole. Let’s find what we are looking for.”
The ledges were paper, but they were the sturdiest paper I had ever seen. It had no problem supporting my weight. First, I walked up the ledges to the top, severed the cluster of pupae and let it fall to the ground. I didn’t need any more worker wasps hatching while I rummaged around their house. Then I searched the nest top to bottom.
I found the stolen spider eggs glued to the walls still in their web cocoons. Each egg had a bunch of blue coconut-sized spheres by it - the wasp egg sacs containing larvae. In some places, the sacks had hatched into fat three-foot-long grubs resembling maggots and were feeding on the spider eggs.
The lifecycle was clear. The wasps stole the spider eggs and left them for their young. Once the wasp larvae hatched, they would eat the spider eggs and grow until they formed a pupa and finally matured into adults. The spiders weren’t the nest’s only prey. I found three stalker corpses and the bodies of four goat-like animals the size of a small deer, all glued with that same rough paper near the egg sacs.
Most of the spider eggs were empty or dark. I destroyed any wasp sacks or larvae I came across.
The coral egg had been hidden away near the top of the nest, in a curve of the chamber, with a single egg sack attached to the wall next to it. Perhaps food for the new queen. I killed the wasp egg and gently removed the spider egg from the wall. It was smaller than the others, more like a soccer ball than a beach ball, and it felt warm and surprisingly light. I focused on it, activating my talent. A tiny life slept within, safe in a shell of nurturing liquid.
