FB | Ch. 13 - Informant

Carlos and I discussed a few meters away from Rajni whether to accept her offer. Scratch that. Not meters. Centimeters. It’s easy to forget how small we are now.

“It’ll help us survive,” Carlos said.

“Right,” I said. “At the expense of everyone else’s survival.”

Carlos exhaled and leaned closer, voice low. “She’ll learn it eventually. And if she eliminates them, that’s less competition for us.”

“Ouch. That’s cold,” I said, though I had to admit—he had a point. She’d figure it out eventually—one ambush at a time. But us? We had to make it long enough to keep figuring anything out at all.

I nodded.

Carlos spoke for both of us. “We accept your agreement.”

“Cool,” Rajni said, sitting cross-legged with practiced ease, like this was a picnic, not a post-attempted-murder debriefing. She gestured to the ground before her, and we sat—apprehensively.

“Let me introduce myself, then. My name is Rajni.”

We gave her our names.

“I’ll start. You asked me what species I chose earlier. I’m a spider. And you?”

“Roach,” Carlos replied.

She turned to me, expectantly.

I smiled. “Sorry. One-for-one. Our turn to ask a question.”

She laughed, a musical sound that made me briefly forget she nearly turned me into pulp five minutes ago. “Go on.”

“How does your conscience work?” I asked.

Now, before you accuse me of trying to be clever with a single question—yeah, I was. But hear me out.

I’d seen a human who picked a carnivorous species before. They had that look—famished, hollow-eyed, like their humanity had been eaten from the inside out. More beast than person. And now here I was, chit-chatting with a beautiful spider-girl who claimed she refused to kill fellow humans on principle.

So naturally, I wondered: why her? Why could she keep her cool while that guy was ready to chew drywall? How much of her was still human? How much was spider? Could carnivores be reasoned with? Negotiated with? Or was Rajni just a very charming exception—and everyone else would treat me like a walking protein bar?

Yeah, it was a lot to pack into one question. Especially when I knew the next one was coming: what species did I pick? My answer would be a single word. “Beetle.” Not exactly dramatic.

But Rajni was smart. Not spider-smart. Just... smart-smart. She saw right through me. A playful smile tugged at her lips.

She humored me.

“At first,” she said, “all I felt was hunger. Overpowering. Relentless. If you’d shown me a mirror, I’d have eaten my own reflection.”

Her voice softened. “But after a few... meals, I can control it. Somewhat.”

She glanced at us. “You’ve probably felt it too. The kind of hunger that makes you eat things you’d never admit to.”

We nodded. Been there. Still there.

“So, I hunt. I kill. But I’m not a cannibal,” she said. “I only eat non-human insects.”

If I’d been matched with a carnivorous species, I’d probably have done the same. Eventually. After seeing enough alien species, you start making mental menus. It gets easy to rationalize it. They're just animals, right? Like beef. Or pork. Or dolphins. Dogs. The occasional smart parrot. As long as they don’t talk back or wear pants, it’s fair game.

She’d drawn a line. One I could respect. At the time.

I nodded.

“Was that a satisfactory answer?” she asked.

I opened my mouth, caught myself. “Wait—don’t answer. You’ll charge me for that question too, won’t you?”

She grinned, gold and toothy. “Haha. You’re so clever.”

I laughed. Late. Nervous.

“Your species?” she asked me.

“Beetle.”

“Your turn again.”

“Tell us one skill you have,” Carlos said.

Good man, I thought. If he’d asked her to list all her skills, she would’ve bounced the same request back at us. But asking for just one meant she’d be locked into the same exchange rate. By the end, we’d know everything she could do, and she’d only know half of what we could.

Rajni caught on immediately. “You guys are so clever,” she said, smirking. “Alright. One of my skills is…”

She vanished.

Not literally. But close enough. Her skin and clothes shimmered, matching the surroundings like she was part of the scenery. It wasn’t just insect camouflage—it was Hollywood-invisibility-cloak stuff.

“Ta-ta! Camouflage.”

Carlos and I exchanged a glance. That’s how we’d missed her earlier. I had camouflage too, and even with just one point, I could tell she had at least three invested. Maybe more.

“You?” she asked.

I jumped in before Carlos could answer. “Camouflage,” I said. A skill she already knew I had. Least valuable intel possible. “Your turn. Another skill.”

She held up a hand. A faint shimmer ran along her fingertips. A soft click echoed in the quiet.

“Claw hands. Makes my hands sharp.”

To demonstrate, she dragged a finger through a blade of grass. It fell apart like paper.

Carlos followed up. “I can clone myself,” he said, as another him stepped into view, then melted back into the perimeter like nothing had happened.

Rajni raised a brow. “If I’d known that, I might’ve eaten you anyway.”

A pause.

“Kidding. Probably.”

I tried to relax. Failed.

It became a barter system. One answer at a time. Always her terms. Between Carlos and me, we offered up eight abilities—four each. She, on the other hand, gave us the full spider starter pack.

But it was the way she asked that unsettled me.

“Tell me another predator-avoidance mechanism,” she’d say.

Same phrasing. Same tone. Like she was reciting from a script hardwired into her brain. Each time she asked, it landed like a switch being flipped—cold, clipped, surgical.

It made me wonder if she was a sociopath.

Not originally, maybe. Most predators don’t start that way. But enough bloodshed rewires things. Rearranges priorities.

I wasn’t sure what she was becoming.

Then she asked the final question.

“Are you orphans?”

Carlos and I blinked. “Yes,” we said in unison.

“Why do you ask?”

“I am too. Single?”

I blinked again. Was she—? “N-no!” I stammered.

“No friends?”

We hesitated, then nodded.

“As I thought.”

“What? Don’t leave us hanging,” I said.

She smiled. “It’ll cost you one more skill each.”

Ugh. Fine. We gave her another.

Then she dropped it.

“Didn’t you find it odd,” she said slowly, “that after you arrived here, you never once thought about your family? Where they were? Your friends?”

I froze. She was right. I hadn’t wondered. Not once. I’d taken this whole abduction like a field trip.

“Now that you mention it...” I said.

“You’re the third and fourth humans I’ve met,” she continued. “All of us orphans. That’s no coincidence.”

The implications hit hard. She was suggesting the Giants had wiped our minds—scrubbed them clean of anything they deemed unnecessary. Love. Family. Connection. Maybe they thought it would slow us down. Or maybe they thought it was too human.

I gulped.

It made you wonder: what else had they erased?

How much of what I believed... was even real?

Ch. 11 - Instar

INDEX