Arachne was completely still as the teenagers ran just beneath her post. It was a small platform that her people rested on in between grappling. This particular post had an easy web and was one of her favorites - if she came to it at the right time she could watch the sunset.

She hadn't been near the teenagers since their initial impact that destroyed her nest. For the time being Arachne had decided to keep a bit of distance, but it seemed as though it wasn't meant to be.

Right now, she was much more concerned with the children that were fleeing the acid fog she could just barely make out in the distance. When Gladia had begun flying off Arachne had immediately known that the Mountain Men had released their poison. At the sound of the horn, Arachne had immediately pulled out her tarp, one of the few things her people always carried in their bags for cases just like these. Hers was one of the larger ones and could easily cover her entire body, but she had yet to cover her head, warily watching as the unprepared people of the sky sprinted without a definite location in mind. She could – damn it - she couldn't truly do anything for them, and if she tried to point them in the direction of the caves they'd likely be too distracted by her appearance to follow her directions.

Arachne nearly resigned herself to simply protecting her own body, when the boy tripped and fell. The dark haired teenager let out a shout that she guessed was the name of one of his fleeing people, but the others didn't stop.

She was going to regret this. But the fallen teenager was right below her. Arachne wasn't heartless, and if the boy did die it would be her duty to give him an outsider's blessing and construct his grave, something she quite frankly didn't want to spend time doing when she'd likely be seen by one of the Sky People.

With only a few seconds to spare, Arachne dropped down without grappling, landing wrong on her left ankle, almost certainly lightly spraining it – gods, that hurt – and threw the tarp over herself and the boy. Thankfully, he seemed to understand what to do and scrambled to pull it around himself, blocking out the air that had become fatal.

Arachne hissed as the fog touched her forearm while she held down her own half of the tarp and heard the boy let out a similar pained sound. However, seeing as they weren't dying, Arachne figured she was safe in her assumption that he had managed to tuck his own side of the tarp around them. It wasn't too cramped, thankfully. Arachne could comfortably sit up with her legs outstretched in front of her and still not touch the boy, who was also sitting. She'd have to find a position that didn't make her ankle throb.

When their scrambling had finally stopped, she turned toward the teenager.

Oh. He looked incredibly panicked. Arachne supposed that she should have expected such a reaction.

The silence lasted for nearly a full minute, and Arachne let the boy stare at her and look her over. The tarp didn't entirely block out light – though ironically it tinted the world within it yellow – so she allowed herself to assess him with equal focus.


Atom was, well, much less composed than he would have liked. But right now he couldn't even attempt bravado as he faced the grounder next to him. The skull mask was freaking him out, and the person seemed to realize that, letting out what sounded like an exasperated sigh before taking it off.

The woman, he now realized, ran her gloved hand roughly through her hair, pushing back the brown strands that had been sticking to her face as she muttered out an unrecognizable word. The tone of voice, however, made it pretty clear that she was probably swearing.

She looked –like an average person, a few years older than him and closer to Bellamy's age. Atom had sort of categorized the grounders in his mind as murderers after what had happened to Jasper, and it was weird to see that the person beside him was normal-looking. It was even more off-putting that she had saved him. There had to be some sort of ulterior motive going on – but Atom also knew that without her interference he'd either be really hurt or dead.

"Thank you."

The woman didn't answer, instead pulling the pack she'd been carrying on her back off and into her lap before opening it and rooting around for something.

"How long will this last?"

The suspicions that Atom had regarding the grounders' language were proven true when she looked up from her bag and raised her eyebrows, looking a little bit annoyed before she responded.

"Non scio all English verbae."

Atom stared at her. This would be more complicated than he'd thought. But seeing as he was in the position to speak to a grounder that evidently wasn't trying to kill him, he knew he should try to figure out as much as he could about her to report back to Bellamy.

"My name is Atom."

He supplemented his words by motioning to his chest, and the grounder clearly understood what he was saying when she froze, her eyes narrowing. After a few moments of evidently assessing him, she once more sighed before responding, "Meus name est Arachne."

"Arachne?"

The woman – Arachne – nodded, and looked down to pull a small jar out of her bag, holding it up to the light and seemingly trying to measure what was inside of it.

"Why did you help me?"

Arachne's face twisted, and she mouthed the word "help" under her breath before Atom realized he should try to phrase it a different way to see if she could understand.

"You saved me."

He tried to make his voice questioning, and the woman seemed to recognize the sentence when she responded, "Non want te sub terra."

And… okay. That wasn't exactly helpful. He knew his face had to be giving away his confusion, but Arachne evidently didn't care, instead opening the jar she'd found and pulling a glove off with her teeth to dip into the pot before slathering her burnt arm with the cream. She let out a sigh of relief before turning her head to look at him. After a second, she repeated the words, "Sub terra" and dug shallowly with her other hand before pointing to him and then the small hole she'd created in the dirt.

"Oh. Dead."

Arachne looked at him speculatively, so Atom drew a finger across his neck. His motion sparked a laugh out of the woman before she silenced herself, still looking amused. Nodding, she responded, "Ita. Dead."

Before Atom could respond, his stomach let out an embarrassingly loud growl. Without pause, Arachne reached again into her pack and pulled out a bag that she passed to him. Opening it up, he saw what looked like berries. Of course, he turned to stare at her with suspicion.

Snatching back the bag, she glared at him before exaggeratedly pouring a few into her palm and throwing them into her mouth, offering him back the bag with a scornful look. When he watched her closely for signs that something was wrong with the food, she snorted and said, "Es stultissimus."

Atom was pretty sure she was making fun of him. However, a minute later he figured that the food she'd offered wasn't poisonous, so he began eating the berries. Arachne had leaned back against the tree they were just next to and closed her eyes, seeing entirely at ease. It was a little insulting, actually, that she clearly didn't see him as any kind of a threat.

Without opening her eyes or looking at him, she muttered, "Here usque dawn. Circiter sedecim hours."

Atom nodded to show her that he understood that apparently he and the grounder would be in a tight space together until the morning. Something about her speech was vaguely familiar. Atom was pretty well versed in Spanish, and some of what she said was… almost similar.

However, before he could think further on the subject, Arachne opened her eyes and turned to look at him before wordlessly offering him the jar of burn cream. The burns on his arm and hand hurt pretty badly, so Atom didn't hesitate before using it himself.

An hour passed without either of them speaking, Arachne occasionally humming listlessly to herself. Atom had no idea what he could even say. Arachne was clearly not in the mood to talk, and half an hour before she'd kicked off one of her bulky combat boots and pulled a strip of cloth out of her bag, carefully wrapping and rewrapping her ankle that he had now realized was swollen and an angry-looking red.

When it started getting dark, Atom was pulled out of his thoughts when a large crack sounded out. Whipping his head to face her, he was shocked when he saw that Arachne had grabbed and was now using a glow-stick, one that was large enough to look military grade. He opened his mouth, finally feeling like he had something he could start a conversation about when suddenly Arachne threw something at him that bounced off his chest. Holding it up near the light he saw that it was –

"A Rubix cube? What – why – "

Arachne shrugged and said, "Game, Atom Caeli Genorum. This est longinquus."

Without saying anything else, she began reading from what looked like a small dictionary or some other textbook, trailing her fingers back and forth across the pages with a frustrated expression on her face as she mouthed a few words silently. Leaning over, he was able to make out what it was.

"That's English to Latin. You're speaking Latin?"

Arachne closed the book carefully, patting its cover absentmindedly before she held up both of her hands.

"Speaking Oldspeak."

Shaking one of her hands, she said, "English." Gesturing to the other hand, she said in the same flat tone, "Latina lingua." Smacking her palms together, she then said in an informative voice, as if speaking to a child, "Oldspeak. Meus lingua."

Incredibly annoyed at her patronizing tone, Atom decided that it wasn't worth talking to her. After a few infuriating hours of messing around with the Rubix cube, Atom drifted off to sleep.


Arachne was amused to see Atom jerk away violently from her when he awoke to her hands on his face. A burst of laughter left her unbidden as he scrambled away from her. Really? What did the boy think she was going to do? Keep him alive at her own expense for the entire night then kill him in the morning?

No matter. The ceremonial paint she'd applied to his face marked him as someone who had escaped death because of a member of the Skeletons, and he wouldn't be targeted by the Trikru for as long as he kept it on and didn't cause trouble.

Of course, with the outrageous protocol the People of the Sky seemed to follow, she was sure it would be gone as soon as he knew it was there. Figuring out the words to explain the significance of the marks would take too long, and pandering to the teenage boy's language was irritating to say the least. Why wasn't he learned her language?

Peering out from beneath the corner of her tarp, Arachne noted that the acidic cloud from the Mountain Men had finally dissipated. Quickly considering her options, Arachne realized that gathering up the tarp would likely take longer than she wanted. The shouting of the teenager's name in the distance solidified her decision to abandon the tarp, as much extra work as it would be to travel to one of her distant nests to grab one of her spares.

Arachne glanced down and saw that the nearly-solved Rubix cube remained in Atom's lap, but she saw no harm in letting the boy keep it. So without pause, Arachne winked at him before saying in a glib voice, "Farewell, Star Boy."

Running away as the voices came nearer, Arachne had just enough time to grapple up into a nearby web of cables and camouflage herself before Atom's people arrived.