When imprisoned in a web, there is only one way out if one wants to keep their limbs and their light.

And even so, life is not guaranteed.

Luxa knows this. And everyone else knows this, too. Even the Overlander, though he does not seem to know what he knows.

"Someone must perform the Coiler," says Solovet. Her voice is hard, which is not an uncommon occurrence, yet there is another edge to it.

They are all looking at Luxa now.

At her youth and her agility, at her skill and her fragility.

All are wishing she need not do it; all know that she must do it.

Aurora touches her neck.

"We can do it," Luxa says. Her voice is soft where she would have preferred it to be hard and unwavering as rock.

Vikus tells her that they do not insist.

It is typical, for him to present her a choice where she has none.

Henry, at least, acknowledges the truth. He puts an arm around her and speaks of her strengths.

So she nods, mustering all her conviction. "We can do it. Let us not wait."

To wait may as well be to hesitate. And no matter what Henry may say, courage is never stable — the longer she waits, the more she worries.

Better steel herself now and get it over with.

She climbs on Aurora's back and waits. Aurora speaks to her, gently, words of how they have done this before and how they will do this again. And Luxa speaks the same words.

Except they haven't.

They have never been in a real web before.

But they must.

The Overlander upsets his sister and makes her screech.

Solovet is shouting, "Go you, Luxa!"

The spinners are cringing against the ear-grating noise.

And Luxa and Aurora are spinning through the air. She turns at a nauseating rate, her sword cutting straight through the web, except she is turning too fast to see, and thus must only hope that she is pulling this off.

She can do this. She must.

She has trained for this for years.

When she was small, she would watch the soldiers train in the Arena. Acrobatics seemed like magic to her — the twisting and the bending, how the world seemed to part for the people and not vice versa. And the Coiler had been one of the maneuvers truly surreal.

A web is no place for little girls, her father had said. Perhaps when you are older, you may try.

Yet she is a little girl in a web now.

And she will make sure everyone makes it out of here.