Arachne Silkweaver crouched in the grass at the edge of a clearing and counted three days since anything had touched her silk. She was a large spider, and she had spun in many forests, many caves, and the quiet corners of more than one house. A web that got fought against was a web in the right place. This web had not been fought against. It had not even been brushed. She had chosen the spot for the smell of moss and the soft give of the soil. The grass around her anchor lines stood straight. No trail bent through it. No beetle had crushed a path to the water. The strands she had strung between two low branches caught the morning light and held only dew, a faint silver tangle glittering above untouched stems. Somewhere under the leaves above her, she had built a heavy bundle of pearl-pale silk wrapped around mossy twigs, ready to drop and bind whatever blundered in. Nothing had blundered in. Clipped to the underside of one leg, she carried a small keepsake. It was a scrap from an old kill: a torn cocoon threaded with moth scales, gnawed open at the center where the moth had fought and lost. She had carried it out of the rafters of a farmhouse where she had eaten for a whole summer. She kept it because it reminded her what a good web felt like before the strike. This new clearing did not feel like that. She climbed back up to the heavy bundle and pressed a leg against it. The silk was clean. No tug. No tremor. She understood, finally, what was wrong. She had spun where she could reach, not where prey already walked. She had no way to know, from one patch of forest to the next, which place held the blundering and which place held only grass. She had been guessing. The torn cocoon under her leg had come from a farmhouse beam that mice used every night. She had not chosen that beam. The mice had chosen it for her, and she had only noticed. Arachne cut the anchor lines one by one. The pale bundle dropped into the grass and rolled against a stem. She left it. From now on she would not spin first and wait. She would walk the ground first and read it: look for crushed stalks, for trails worn smooth, for droppings, for the small signs that something passed this way often. She tucked the torn cocoon tighter against her leg and started into the trees, watching the dirt.

Arachne walked the ground for two days before she found the alley. The bricks held old grease and the dirt between them showed the print of a shoe, then another, then the same shoe again a day later. She climbed the wall and read the marks above her head. A shoulder had brushed the mortar. A hand had grabbed the pipe. Someone came through here often, and came back. She thought of the mice on the farmhouse beam. This was a beam too, only taller and made of brick. She spun across the narrow gap between the two walls. She did not build one sheet. She built layers, a corridor of silk that ran from waist height to above the head, each strand anchored to a crack in the brick. She stretched pale lines across the lower opening so a foot would catch first. She strung heavier cord at chest height so an arm would tear through and tangle. She tucked herself into the seam where two bricks had fallen out and waited. The human she was hunting had walked past her smaller webs three times already without flinching. She had watched him brush her threads off his sleeve like rain. This time the threads would not brush off. He came at dusk. She heard the shoes first, the same shoes from the dirt. He stepped into the corridor and the low line caught his ankle. He pitched forward into the chest cord and his arm went through it and stuck. He twisted, and the twist wound a second strand around his shoulder. He pulled, hard, the way prey was supposed to pull. The anchors held. The brick held. He shouted once. Arachne dropped. She bit him at the back of the neck and the venom went in clean. His legs folded. She worked fast then, the way she had worked in the rafters, turning him slowly against the silk and laying band after band across his chest, his arms, his face. She left a small gap at the mouth out of habit, not mercy. When she finished, a pale shape hung in the corridor, wrapped from crown to foot, swaying a little against the anchor lines. Something on his wrist clicked against the silk as she turned him. She cut the strap and pulled it free. It was a small flat thing with a cracked face. Colored lines crossed under the broken glass, and a light still moved along one of them. She did not know what it was. She kept it. She carried the wrapped body back through the streets in the dark and up into the cave she had been using as a roost. She hung him from the ceiling beside her older bundles and clipped the cracked flat thing to a strand near her keepsake cocoon. The roost was not empty anymore. It had a fresh body in it, and the body had friends, because things with shoes always did, and the friends would come looking.