Alight (The Generations Trilogy #2)(19)

Far down the street, I see it coming. My skin shivers and prickles. Dark yellow, with thin strips of green and brown. Three-jointed legs moving so fast they are blurs, little flecks of torn vine tossed high in their wake. The hungry whine echoes through the streets, bounces off the ziggurat walls. The spider runs with a wobble, a halting hitch—one of the legs is lame, maybe.

If it reaches us, it will tear us to shreds.

I grab Spingate, shove her through the slowly closing door, then squeeze through the narrowing gap myself. On the other side, I stand next to Coyotl, hurl all my strength at the door. Spingate does the same.

The massive hinges screech and howl, seem to fight our desperate effort, but my toes find purchase in the plant-juice-slick stones and I feel the slab of metal moving. The door’s grinding grows louder, but so does the spider’s whine.



Bishop’s extended arms tremble with effort. Sweat pours off his skin. His voice is a roar of command.

“Everything you’ve got! Godsdammit, push!”

Coyotl and Farrar groan with effort. Spingate screams, a combination of fear and frustration and rage.

The door picks up speed.

I hear the spider’s hard feet clicking against the stone street lying beneath the vines, a harsh, rapid drumbeat of oncoming death.

The hinges give a final, tortured shriek—the door clangs shut with a reverberating gong that hangs in the air.

Everyone sags, even Bishop. If the spider can get through these doors, we don’t have the strength to run, let alone fight.

The whining sound stops.

I keep my hands pressed against the door. I hear and feel a scraping coming from the other side, hard-shelled legs scratching at thick metal, searching for a way through, a way to get at us.

The scraping stops.

That whine again. Faint…then fading…

Then nothing.

Is the spider gone? Or is it standing there, motionless, waiting for us?

“We’ll rest here for a minute,” I say, as if we could do anything else.

Farrar falls to the ground. Coyotl slumps to his butt, his back against the door. Bishop’s hands are on his knees, his stomach heaving in and out as he tries to get his breathing under control. Spingate seems the least winded; her hands are on her hips, her lips are pursed.



“Spin, what happened back there?”

She laces her fingers over her head.

“At the top…jungle on either side of the river,” she says, forcing words through deep breaths. “Trees…real trees, not the vines. Coyotl went in…for a closer look. I was testing the water. He came sprinting out…shouting at us to jump. I saw what was behind him…it almost got us. But…it wasn’t a spider.”

“What are you talking about? We all saw it.”

She closes her eyes, shudders.

“Five legs…not eight.”

Her correction angers me. Like the number of legs matters?

Bishop stands straight. He gleams with sweat. “So it attacked?”

Coyotl sees that Bishop is standing, struggles to his feet. “It came after us. Maybe I should have fought it…I wasn’t afraid, but there was Spingate, and…well, I wasn’t afraid.”

Still lying on his back, Farrar raises a hand. “I was. Glad we jumped into the pool, because when I saw that thing I think I peed in my pants a little.”

Coyotl glares at him.

Bishop nods. “It scared me, too.”

His admission of fear seems to relax Coyotl. If even Bishop is afraid, then running away from the spider couldn’t be such a bad thing.

I put my shoulder to the door again, give it a little push to make sure it’s really closed. It is. At my feet, I see mashed vines, blue-smeared curving lines on the stone where the door scraped against it.



No way I can relax, not even a bit, but with the door shut I have a moment to think.

I turn and rest my back against the door. In front of me, trees, more than I could ever count.

Before us lies a dense jungle, growing up and through and around blackened, burned, crumbling, vine-choked six-sided buildings. Trees also grow out of giant, plant-covered holes in the ground. There are long, open spaces that were maybe once roads, but it’s hard to tell with all the holes and trees and the endless yellow vines that cover everything.

When we first landed, I thought the sprawling city was a ruin, taken by the hands of time. What I see now shows me I was wrong. The city we landed in isn’t ruined, it is merely abandoned and overgrown: most of those four-sided buildings are still standing.

What I look at now is something else altogether.

These six-sided buildings weren’t abandoned.

They were destroyed.





We walk through the jungle.

The curving wall is on our right, tall and constant, covered with layers of thick vines. Following it takes us mostly south and a little east. We hope to run across another gate soon, but we have no way of knowing if we will, or if it will be open. I’m very worried—we’ve eaten what little food we brought with us, and we’re already out of water.

Keeping the wall on our right means the thick jungle is on our left. Tall trees with dark-yellow leaves, green or brown trunks. Plenty of vines there, too, dangling from branches and covering the collapsed buildings. Blurds—some as big as I am—dart in and out of the trees, or fly full speed into the deep canopy where they vanish from sight.