As if those were the magic words, the egg sac seemed to explode. Later, with the video slowed down, Melanie saw the way in which the spiders broke the sac open at its weak points, using the open seams for leverage, but in the moment, an explosion was the only word to describe their birth. One moment the egg sac was mostly intact, quiet and still in front of her, and the next moment spiders banged against the glass walls of the insectarium, scuttled across its floor and the underside of the lid, legs tapping against the glass and plastic, the sound like grains of rice spilling on the floor.
Patrick shrieked, high-pitched, like a child. Julie scrambled backward. Even Bark jumped.
But Melanie found herself drawn forward. She didn’t know how many of them there were, but they were frantic. Dozens of them at least. They’d been packed in the egg sac, and they came out in a swarm, their bodies unfolding, alien and beautiful. Big and fast, black apricots thundering against the glass. Skittering. She put her palm against the glass of the insectarium, and the spiders flew to it. It was like the plasma ball she’d had as a kid, one of those globes with an electrical charge in the middle. She remembered the way she’d put her hand on the glass and the filaments of plasma would be drawn to her flesh. She could never feel the current, but she knew it was there. In the same way, the spiders flocked to where her hand pressed against the insectarium. Even though she couldn’t possibly be feeling them through the glass, the vibrations went through her flesh anyway.
She pulled her hand back.
“Holy shit.” Bark leaned forward and pointed to the corner. “They’re eating that one.”
Julie trained the lens toward the small group of spiders—three or four, though it was hard to tell given the way they crawled over one another—that were tearing into one of their brethren.
“Whoa! Do you see this?” Patrick pointed to the other side of the insectarium. A large group of the spiders—maybe half the number in the container—had gone to the other side. Some of them just seemed to be pushing against the glass, but several were actively throwing their exoskeletons against the glass. They wanted out.
“What the fuck?” Melanie stood straight up. “Are they trying . . . ?”
All four of them looked at the cage on that side of the insectarium. Inside, Humpy, Patrick’s favorite lab rat, was oblivious to the arachnid swarm banging against the glass of the insectarium, desperately trying to get at his small body.
Metro Bhawan, Delhi, India
Dr. Basu was not pleased. She did not like Delhi. And Faiz was exhausting her. Normally she found him mostly amusing, but he’d spent the entire drive from Kanpur to Delhi—which should have taken six hours, but instead had taken thirteen—in a state of despair. She’d already been dreading the drive with him because she knew he would be texting or e-mailing Ines constantly, and when he wasn’t talking to Ines, Dr. Basu assumed he’d be talking about Ines. But literally five minutes into the trip, his Italian girlfriend had texted and informed him that she was now his Italian ex-girlfriend. Their relationship had moved too quickly, Ines wrote, and she was calling things off. Dr. Basu had a fleeting moment of relief—which made her feel immensely guilty—at the idea that she and Faiz could now talk about seismology instead of Ines, but of course, Faiz was distraught. Which was the lesser of those two evils, she thought, having to endure Faiz’s misery or his ecstasy? The longer the drive took, however, the angrier she became at Ines. She hadn’t even met this woman, but there was a part of her that wanted to fly to Italy just to give Ines a piece of her mind. How dare she break up with him by text? And worse, after an hour or so of Ines and Faiz texting back and forth, Ines dropped the bombshell: the real reason for the breakup was that she’d finally had a chance to read some of his work and she couldn’t be with a man if she didn’t “respect” his research. Saying she didn’t respect Faiz’s research was as good as saying she didn’t respect Dr. Basu’s research either.
Thirteen hours in that car, and most of that time spent reassuring Faiz that he was smart, which was true, and an excellent worker, which was mostly true, even if he occasionally—okay, often, well, always—made inappropriate comments, and that he deserved to be treated better. By the time they arrived, she had a throbbing headache. No surprise, then, that she was beyond annoyed that she could still not figure out what the hell was causing the odd seismic readings.
Faiz waved her over to where he was. He still looked miserable, but he was doing his best, holding his tablet and phone and talking with a man wearing a suit and tie. When she got closer, she saw that the man had a Delhi Metro Rail Corporation ID badge clipped to his jacket. He held up one hand.
“I’m sorry, but I’m not authorized to let you go any farther.”
Dr. Basu pointed to the man’s ID badge. “Are you not the supervisor?”
“I am, but—”
“There are no ‘buts’ to this. One of our sensors is below. We need to see it.”