The queen's mandibles clicked again. Faster this time. A rhythm.

  Jess saw the shift—not in the queen's body, but in her eyes. Those massive compound orbs, faceted and dark, suddenly focused. The way a person's eyes focused when they recognized a face in a crowd.

  "You know who I am," Jess breathed.

  The queen's roar was different this time. Not a challenge. Not a warning. It was personal. The sound of something that had lost children and just found the one responsible.

  "Oh crap."

  The queen charged.

  Forty feet of armored hatred moved faster than anything that size had a right to. Her legs ate the distance in seconds, mandibles opening wide enough to bisect a truck.

  Jess dove left.

  The queen hit the wall where Jess had been standing. Rock shattered. The chamber shook. Cracks spiderwebbed across the stone, and a shower of debris rained from above—fragments of stalactites, dust, the bones of small creatures lodged in crevices for centuries.

  Jess scrambled up, already moving. "Okay. Okay. That's fine. I can work with that."

  She took stock of the chamber as she moved. It was huge—cathedral-huge—the ceiling lost in darkness. Glowing moss painted the walls in patches of sickly green, revealing striations of rock and the scars of ancient excavation. Stalactites hung like frozen spears, some as thick as her torso. A small rivulet of water trickled down one wall, carving a channel through the stone before disappearing into a crack in the floor. Clean water. Separate from the filth of the hive.

  And against the far wall, near where the stream vanished, a pile of bones.

  Not animal bones. Not all of them.

  Human ribs. A skull, cracked and yellowed. Another, smaller, half-buried under debris. Three of them, maybe four. Travelers. Explorers. People who'd found this place before her.

  Probably not from Reiro, she thought, dodging another charge. This is too far out. Too deep.

  Didn't matter. They were dead either way. She wouldn't join them.

  The queen turned. Slower than her charge—her bulk worked against her in tight turns. Jess filed that away.

  The mandibles came around in a scything arc. Jess ducked. Felt the wind of them passing inches above her head.

  She punched the queen's foreleg.

  [Bash activated]

  Her fist connected with the joint—the same soft membrane she'd exploited on a hundred smaller skitters. The impact was solid. Satisfying.

  The queen didn't react.

  Not a flinch. Not a stumble. Nothing.

  Jess stared at her hand, then at the queen's leg. A thin line of ichor welled from the strike—barely a scratch. The queen hadn't even noticed.

  "Oh," Jess said. "That's not good."

  The queen's abdomen swung around like a wrecking ball. Jess threw herself flat. The mass passed overhead, close enough to ruffle her hair.

  She rolled, came up, put distance between them. Her boot splashed through the rivulet—cold, clean, jarring.

  "Bash isn't working," she said. To herself. To Miri. To whoever was listening.

  "Observed," Miri confirmed. "Target's carapace density exceeds parameters for effective penetration."

  "No kidding."

  The queen charged again. This time Jess was ready—she waited until the last second, then sidestepped, letting the monster's momentum carry it past. The queen's head slammed into a pillar of natural stone. The pillar cracked. More debris fell. The queen shook it off.

  But she was slower to turn. Definitely slower.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Jess's mind raced. The armor's speed penalty should have been a death sentence in here. But the queen was also slow—slow to turn, slow to recover, slow to adjust. They were matched. Two tanks circling in the dark.

  "Positional advantage," she muttered. "Keep her turning. Keep her missing. Look for an opening."

  The queen came again. Jess danced.

  Left, right, duck, weave. Each time the mandibles swept past. Each time the queen's momentum carried her into a wall, a pillar, the ruins of her own egg sacs. The chamber shook with each impact. Stalactites fell and shattered. Moss was torn from the walls. The rivulet ran red with ichor.

  Jess found a rhythm. Wait. Sidestep. Punish the recovery with a strike to the same spot. Retreat. Repeat.

  She targeted the same joint every time—the one between the queen's head and thorax. The first three hits did nothing. The fourth left a dent. The fifth cracked the chitin.

  "Progress," she gasped, dodging another charge.

  The queen was getting frustrated. Her movements were wilder, less controlled. She'd stopped trying to bite and started just throwing herself at Jess, using her whole body as a weapon.

  Jess kept dancing. Her eyes found the eggs again. The sacs lining the walls, pulsing with internal light. Dozens of them. Hundreds.

  An idea sparked.

  If I can make her angry enough to be stupid...

  She dodged left, but this time she didn't retreat. She ran toward the nearest cluster of eggs.

  The queen saw. The queen understood.

  The roar that followed was different—higher, almost a scream. Maternal. Desperate.

  Jess reached the first sac and punched.

  It burst like a overripe fruit. Ichor and fluid and something moving inside—a half-formed skitter, pale and soft, thrashing once before going still.

  The queen's scream became something else. Something raw.

  Jess hit another. Another. Another.

  The queen charged—not at Jess, but toward her children, trying to shield them with her body. Too slow. Jess was already moving to the next cluster.

  "Come on," Jess snarled. "Get angry. Get stupid. Make a mistake."

  The queen obliged.

  She abandoned all pretense of tactics and simply lunged, mandibles wide, her whole body a weapon of pure maternal rage.

  Jess saw it coming. Calculated the angle. Knew she could dodge.

  Then the queen's abdomen pulsed. Once. Twice. The eggs inside began to glow.

  Oh no.

  The queen opened her mouth.

  She screamed.

  Not a roar. Something else—a focused blast of sonic force that hit Jess like a wall. Her passive cut it—had to—but the remaining force still lifted her off her feet and threw her against the far wall.

  She hit hard. The carapace held, but the impact drove the air from her lungs. She slid down, gasping, vision swimming.

  The queen was already moving. Not charging. Stalking. Her mandibles clicked with each step. Her eyes were fixed on Jess with an intensity that promised something worse than death.

  Jess tried to stand. Her legs wouldn't cooperate. Tried to roll. Her arms felt like rubber.

  That was stupid, she thought. That was really stupid. You made her angry and now—

  The queen loomed above her. Mandibles opened. The maw descended.

  And then there was only darkness.

  Jess came to in warmth.

  Wet warmth. Stifling warmth. The kind of warmth that meant she was inside something.

  She couldn't see. Couldn't move her arms—they were pressed against her sides by something soft and pulsing. Couldn't move her legs. Could barely breathe.

  The smell was indescribable. Organic. Rotting. Alive. The stench of a thousand meals half-digested.

  "Phantom." Miri's voice was a lifeline in the black. "You have been swallowed. Your current location is the queen's digestive tract."

  "No kidding."

  Jess tried to push against the walls around her. They gave slightly, then pushed back. Peristalsis. The queen's body was already working to move her deeper.

  The acid started.

  It wasn't sudden—more a slow burn, creeping across her skin where the armor didn't cover. Her face. Her hands. The gaps between plates. It stung. Then it burned. Then it seared.

  "Armor integrity," she gasped.

  "Compromised. Acid is penetrating the chitinous plates. Estimated time to failure: fourteen minutes."

  "Fourteen minutes until what?"

  "Until your body is exposed to full-strength digestive fluids."

  Jess thrashed. The walls squeezed tighter. She couldn't get leverage. Couldn't find a purchase. Couldn't do anything but burn and choke and try not to panic.

  Think, Jess. Use your head.

  The voice in her mind was her own. Calm. Professional. The part of her that had survived a hundred missions by keeping cool when everything went wrong.

  You're in a stomach. Stomachs have weaknesses.

  Acid. Obviously. But acid worked slowly. She had minutes, not seconds.

  Movement. The queen was still moving—stomping, pacing, probably destroying whatever was left of her egg chamber in grief-fueled rage. The walls shuddered with each step.

  She doesn't know I'm still alive. She thinks I'm just another meal.

  That was an advantage. Maybe.

  Jess forced her arms outward, against the squeezing walls. They gave a little. Not enough.

  She tried Bash. The skill activated—she felt the surge—but without room to swing, without a target, it did nothing. Just wasted energy.

  Bash is out. Armor is dying. Can't move. Can't fight.

  The acid was worse now. Her face felt raw. Her lips were cracking. She could taste copper and something else—something chemical and wrong.

  I don't want to become beetle poop.

  The thought was so absurd, so stupid, that she almost laughed. Almost. Laughing would hurt too much.

  Find a way out.

  There had to be one. There was always one. She'd survived orbital drops and corporate betrayals and a monkey that treated her like a chew toy. She wasn't going to die in a bug's stomach.

  Think.

  The walls pulsed. The acid burned. The darkness pressed in from all sides.

  Jess closed her eyes—not that it mattered—and tried to think of anything except the fact that she was being digested alive.

  She came up empty.

  "Phantom," Miri said. "Four minutes until armor failure."

  "I know."

  "Phantom. Three minutes."

  "I know."

  The darkness didn't answer.

  Jess hung there, burning, and tried to find a way out.

  She couldn't.