Darith slept, even the whites of his eyes eaten by black. Across the void in his mind, Silvia stretched. Solid and aware of his surroundings, Darith looked back at her, his as black as her own. The surrounding web thrummed with his power. Deep inside, lodged in his spine was the darkness Halis planted and at the base of his neck, the ichor of her own mark. He twisted these using them, drawing them out of him to surround himself.

"They found you. I can help," Silvia said. The nothingness around her roiled like storm clouds ready to crack with thunder.

"I don't need your assistance."

"But you do. They've come for you, and without us you can't fight them."

"I'm going to cure myself of you."

Silvia laughed and the silver of her mirth shot like lightening from the clouds rolling around her. "And then cure Marim? Only, they have her. Do you think you understand?"

"Enough. I will kill you and your wretch of a brother. I'll save Marim, and I don't need anything from you."

"You have my pride, Boy. Once, I deemed myself a match for them. That's pride, nothing else and it'll see not just you but your Marim destroyed." Silvia reached out and touched him, as she did the storm encased him too, locking out the emptiness. "You're family now. Though you have yet to accept it, you are part of Halis and me. So is Annabelle. I have information you need."

"I was clear on my need of you," Darith said. What could she tell him that the voice of the web could not? What could she possibly know that it did not.

"Darith," she said. "They're evil and you don't have time. You must get her out. Look."

With the word, he plunged into a thick convoluted tangle of emotion, light and sound. Then, he looked out from her eyes. Her heart raced. Her palms were sweaty and as her panic welled up, it nearly overtook him. She flinched back from a line of men strapped into chairs. Their wrists and heads were secured, and greedy eyes stared at her naked body as she tried to cover herself with nothing but her hands and her hair.

'I was thirteen,' Silvia's voice informed him. 'Eight days earlier, I witnessed Halis turn into a spider for the first time. And then, I was brought to this room, shoved inside. I always knew I was intended to be one of the Brothel girls. What other fate awaits a woman raised in those walls? But I was thirteen. I had my first woman's cycle only four months prior.'

Silvia stumbled and Darith, stuck inside her mind, stumbled with her. The click of a door opening alerted her to a new presence, and she pivoted. A robust man wearing a leer and nothing else entered. At over six feet tall and sturdy muscle hidden under his girth, Silvia endured a wave of panic as it occurred to her that she was powerless.

Silvia backed away. "Please, don't..."

The man approached. Silvia froze in the center of the room. His fingers latched around her arm, and a sharp pain shot up her, mingling with an unnamed painful clutching in her gut.

"Let me go!"

He laughed, and driven on instinct, Silvia darted forward and bit his arm. Her teeth sank in until the metallic tang of blood filled her mouth.

A hand slammed into her face, spinning her to the side. Her eyes fastened on Halis' form behind the open door. Three men held the spider back; it strained forward. The hand caught her jaw again, twisting her head the other way, to the wall of men. Men who paid to be there. Paid to see this.

She slammed into the ground. Blood trickled from her mouth- hers and his mingled. This time when she looked up into the eyes of her tormentor, she did not speak. There was no point in begging. No one would help her. Only...

'Halis, I'm scared,' she said.

'I'll fucking gut him,' Halis replied.

A great weight pressed down on her. Silvia closed her eyes, but she could still feel the crushing weight of the man's body on top of her. Raised in a brothel, she comprehended what was happening in a distant way. Unprepared for the forced experience, the fight drained from her limbs. To be held immobile, all choice ripped from her, elicited an illogical reaction—Silvia screamed.

"Stop!" Darith cried, but he remained pinned with Silvia. He smelled stale booze and sweat, tasted blood, and her panic threatened to sweep him away.

Then, the man was ripped off of them. Blood spraying from his mouth. And Darith, carried on Silvia's emotions, felt a surge of love and triumph as the spider drained the man.

"By all that is good in the universe, why would you share that?" Darith yelled. He yanked free of her. The clouds surrounding them swept away at his outburst, leaving them in a vacuum of emptiness.

"Those are the people that have your Marim," Silvia said.

Elegant and distant as always, Silvia appeared unaffected by the memory. She glanced down at the nails on the hand that had held him, inspecting each finger as if for damage to a nail. Darith trembled, ashamed to show weakness in front of her but unable shake off the weight of that man laying on top of her, on top of him.

"You don't have time for your pride," Silvia said. "You don't have time to struggle through these discoveries on your own. Darith, you need me. Like it or not, we're your family. Halis and I. Come to me, Darith."

'Come to us,' the dark voice echoed.

Darith disengaged, pulling away from the web and falling back into the sunlit world around him. The mess in his room seemed less random. The brothel. It wasn't just Silvia and Halis the brothel wanted. They want us too because we carry the contamination.

They kidnapped Marim.

Holding tightly to the arms of his chair, he dragged himself up into the seat. Only once his daughter rested in his lap did he leave the blood splattered room and head down the hall. He took the time to ponder whether he should bother checking on his parents.

They were dead. If he hadn't known it before, sharing in Silvia's memory left no doubt. Those people weren't likely to care about who they killed as long as they accomplished their goal. But he owed his parents something for raising him, so he wheeled himself back to his father's study.

The room was in disarray, papers and books scattered everywhere. The butler, or he assumed the corpse belonged to the butler, lay on top of the desk, his face a pulp. Like a scarlet fruit half-eaten by a wild beast. Could a gunshot do that? Or was this something different?

Wheeling carefully through the wreckage, Darith came around the back of the desk.

"Hi, Father." The back of his eyes burned. Annabelle began to cry, the sharp tuneless cry of a human infant. One of them weeping over the old man was enough. "I'll clean you up. You wouldn't want to be found like this."

In the mess of the count's torn clothing, a scar stood out on his shoulder, a small discolored circle. Staring at his father's stripped corpse, a knot of fear in his gut unwound.

He can't hurt me. Tears slipped from Darith's eyes unheeded, the scar demanded his attention and drained from killing the agents and witnessing Silvia's pain, Darith couldn't fight the images. Distanced from it by ten years Darith heard the crack of the gun. Saw blood spurt from the wound as the bullet embedded itself in the wall by his bed. His father's drunken eyes cleared and his hand fell from his belt buckle.

"Next time, I won't miss. I'll live with all manner of indignities but you won't touch my son. Darith is the only good thing you ever did, and I'll see us both burn before you ruin him." His mother's voice had been flat, emotionless. But the pistol in her hands shook and tears streamed from her eyes coating her cheeks in mascara.

Darith turned angrily from his father. He thought of Timmy in town, for the first time since the accident he truly thought about it. Remembered the person he wanted to be, the person his mother thought he was.

As he finished cleaning his father to be found, Darith pondered how he could honor that part of his life. He couldn't' be that boy anymore. He smiled as he thought of Gretta. The girl who'd promised to help him, the one he'd parted ways with to avoid entanglement. A large settlement with instructions to her to provide for Timmy would do a fine job of finishing up his life here.

He only hoped it didn't put her in danger.

***

Not possible. Berrick stared at the file as if by doing so the words would begin to make sense. Everything besides the punctuation was blacked-out. Every damn thing. What could be that classified? And why was Silvia interested in an event that the government had tried to scratch out of existence?

For days, he'd poured over videos of Silvia at the library. Every appearance coincided with violent attacks. The same crimes that had led Berrick to believe they stopped here in the first place. At first, that troubled him. Silvia delved into her research only when Halis went on a killing binge. In the end, any discord between them could only serve to benefit him. He'd set his mind to finding what Silvia was doing that she didn't want Halis to know about.

Figuring out her goal proved to be no challenge. He tracked her research. He had to give her credit, she managed to hack into files no civilian should have been able to access. But if she'd had his rotten luck with finding answers, that explained why on her last visit she had broken some poor saps arm. And proceeded to kick him repeatedly in the head and casually walk out.

So far what had he learned? A planet had existed. The government destroyed the planet twenty-five years ago. Everything else was classified. The basic fact probably would have been classified too if there hadn't been a burnt out hull of a planet visible to all passers-by.

Berrick stood up, giving one last disgusted look at the black-lined document. There was one more place to look. A place Silvia never would have thought of. The physical files. If this colony was like most of these tech colonies, physical files stopped being kept about twenty years prior. Most of the old files were supposed to be uploaded. But, that was a lot of manual entry, and no one prioritized the project.

Back in his office building on Yahal, they had a basement filled with files just like these. Occasionally, they punished a new officer who stepped over a line by making them input a box.

If this particular incident was uploaded, that would be the end of the line. The physical forms would be destroyed. But they wouldn't be uploaded. Good old beaurocracy and its overwhelming ineffectiveness. The files would be sitting there, forgotten.

On his walk through the town, unrest filled Berrick. I should have drowned that damn baby. Should be with Marim. Instead, I'm out here tracking ghosts. When things are classified there is a reason.

He'd checked, a level six clearance would be needed to see the unedited documents. Even on Yahal, he only had a level five. Six. Only members of the high council had a level six clearance. Whatever those black-lines held was deep and nasty.

This whole time, he'd been so convinced they were all playing Silvia's game. But they weren't. She might be the queen on the chessboard, but she wasn't the player. So who was? If this wasn't the spider's game, then whose?

He let himself into the building. Like every other building it was spotless, cleaned by machines until it stank and looked like the inside of a factory. He went directly to the door at the back. The descent murky with dim lights that flickered on at his movement. Like plunging down into the underworld.

At the foot of the stairs, a robot jerked to life. "What can I help you find?"

"Files from twenty-five years ago."

With a whir and a few blinking lights, the metal box equipped with a smaller second box with a speaker and a camera moved out of a puff of dust. The robot led him past rows and rows of boxes. It stopped at one and a little puff of dust particles lifted from it, flitting in the light. "Any particular interest, Sir?"

Berrick stayed silent a moment. Telling it the truth might mean being denied the files. But lying put him at risk of treason and might mean a fruitless search.

"Intergalactic issues with focus on the cold months."

"Third row down, Sir. Blue coded boxes."

Berrick walked the echoing isle in-between the rows, grateful that the robot didn't trail him. He pulled out the first box and leafed through. The papers were old and yellowed, a few with water spots. It took him thirty seconds to find something. The box fell to the floor as he gripped the neat sheet of paper. The page gleamed white as if the contents of the sheet had burned away all signs of age.

"Gods forgive us...Gods forgive me."

* If you like the story, please go ahead and hit the fancy little star and let the world and me know you appreciate it :) Thank you all for reading. I'm getting a better response than I hoped! Constructive comments are always welcome or almost any other type of comment you wish to make. Your responses always make my day!