The double climbed .
It found the route the spiderlings had cut down the Hemoth Pine's bark and it took the route in reverse — the second self ascending the trunk surface toward the bursting red , the incense burning in one shadow hand , the canopy's near-black mass closing around it . Below it the forest floor . Above it the abdomen flaring and emptying and flaring again . Between them , thirty feet of bark and silk and the specific proximity that the High Cleric had said killed whatever entered it .
Rada held the tether from the tunnel's mouth .
She felt the clock in her body the way she had felt it for nineteen minutes — not yet the fatigue , the fatigue was the twentieth minute's tax and the twentieth minute had not arrived , but the pressure of the debt scheduled and the margin thinning . The double climbed and the margin thinned and the Red Widow produced its ordnance unaware that the thing climbing toward it was not a spiderling returning .
