Page 95 of Steel Heart Iron Claws

“Tck-sssSSS-Tck,” I sing softly aloud, cooing to the mother Barkcreeper spider who nests here with her downy egg sack.

Soon, a button-sized gray spider emerges from the shadows, wiggling her front two legs in greeting. I lower my hand for her to crawl onto my palm, then carefully descend the stool.

As a rule, spiders are hard to communicate with, but not impossible. You just have to understand how they sing. Spider songs communicate by pitch and modulation: For example, low and rounded notes mean “sleep,” staccato ones mean “help,” and a piercing warble means “danger.”

I carry her to the door, where I lay on my belly in front of the narrow gap. I softly sing a staccato trill, and she bouncesup and down to say she understands while trilling back my melody.

Then, I hold up two fingers to mean the closest guards, then two more fingers with my other hand to indicate the ones down the hall. I don’t know the exact pitch to convey “venom,” but I do know the note for “bite.”

I quietly sing a shrill aria that repeats three times.

She bounces up and down faster, her front two legs waving excitedly in the air.

“Go, then, little friend,” I whisper as I lower my hand for her to crawl under the door.

For the next few minutes, my nerves rattle. I gnaw on my thumbnail, waiting.

The desk clock keeps ticking, ticking, ticking.

Is something wrong?

Nearly ten minutes pass before the spider returns, resolutely making a bee-line onto my hand.

“SSSsss-tck-tck-SSSsss,” she sings with such urgency that her melody stumbles over itself. “Tck-tck-tck!”

“I don’t know what you mean. Slow down.sssSSS sssSSS.”

She continues to wave her front legs and sing emphatically, and I shake my head in frustration.

All I can think to do is give a high warble to clarify:Danger?

She immediately stills, then carefully repeats my warble backward. “SSSsss SSSsss.”In the language of spider songs, a backward melody means the negative of whatever the previous speaker said.

So, she means:No danger.

It eases my anxiety, but now my curiosity is hooked. I lift the spider back to her egg sack on top of the armoire, thentiptoe to the door and press my ear against it. Silence meets me from the other side. Not so much as a guard’s sigh.

Well, spiders have never failed me before…

I crack open the door, ready to plead ignorance to the guards about how the lock possibly opened. My heart hammers hard enough to crack a rib. The first thing I see is a guard slumped against the wall, his head slack, drool sliding out of his mouth.

My hand tightens on the doorknob.

That isn’t the reaction from a Barkcreeper spider bite, which leaves a victim’s face bright red.

If it wasn’t the spider, how did?—

Movement from the other side of the hall sends my heart shooting into my throat—as I look up to find Basten.

He presses a rag reeking of chloroform to the struggling second guard’s mouth and nose. Locking eyes with me, he continues to silently wrestle the second guard until that one also slumps to the floor.

The two at the end of the hall? Already knocked out.

The second guard’s unconscious body sits like a boulder between Basten and me as we stare at one another, a million and one questions perched like daggers over our heads.

“I—was going to do that,” I blurt out.

Without missing a beat, he deadpans, “You were going to drug a pair of two-hundred-fifty-pound guards?”

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