The Overlord scrambled to cover his eyes, but the damage was done. The psychic connection had snapped, and the feedback hit him like a physical blow. He staggered back, his silver-topped cane clattering against the stone floor.
"The silk!" the Overlord shrieked, his voice losing its cultured calm and breaking into a raspy, ancient thinness. "Tighten the silk!"
High above, the Spider-Morlocks responded to his distress. They dropped from the ceiling on glistening threads, their fly-eyes flashing with predatory hunger. Their multi-jointed limbs moved in a blur, reaching out to add more layers of webbing to Sarah’s cocoon.
But Sarah was no longer passive. The pain in her thumb—that sharp, stinging reality—was her north star.
She twisted her wrist inside the webbing. She didn't try to pull against the strength of the silk; she used the jagged, broken hinge of her metal locket like a serrated blade. She sawed at the fibers, the metal glowing faintly in the bioluminescent light of the cavern.
Snip. Snip. Snap.
The first layer gave way. Sarah surged forward, her shoulder tearing through the weakened threads. As the first Spider-Morlock landed on the pillar, she swung her bound fists like a hammer, catching the creature square in its massive, compound eye.
The fly-eye shattered with the sound of breaking lightbulbs. The creature let out a high-pitched, chattering scream and fell back into the shadows, clutching its face with four of its limbs.
"You're late for the beach, Sarah!" the Overlord hissed, his hands clawing at the air as he tried to find his glasses on the floor. Without them, he was half-blind in the dim light, his sensitive, hypnotic eyes weeping violet fluid.
Sarah ripped her legs free, the last of the silk trailing behind her like a tattered wedding veil. She didn't run for the exit. She ran deeper into the hive.
"The Machine," she whispered.
She could hear it now—not the rhythmic thrumming of the Morlock heartbeat, but the high-frequency whine of her quartz disc. It was being used. The Morlocks had wired her 2002 technology into their ancient, crumbling geothermal grid. They were using her life’s work to power the sirens and the hypnotic towers above.
She rounded a corner and skidded to a halt.
There it was. Her machine sat in the center of a massive, hollowed-out cavern. It was draped in thick webbing, and glowing cables made of translucent gut were pulse-welding into its cooling fans. The quartz disc was spinning at a dangerous, unstable speed, throwing off sparks of blue electricity that illuminated the thousands of Morlock eggs clinging to the walls.
And there, tied to a nearby pillar, was Weena.
The girl’s eyes were still rolled back, her body limp. She was being kept near the machine, her life force perhaps acting as a biological ground for the temporal energy.
"Weena!" Sarah lunged for the girl, but a shadow fell over her.
The Overlord had found his cane. He stood at the entrance of the machine chamber, his dark glasses back in place, though his chest heaved with exertion.
"You cannot take it, Sarah," he panted. "The machine is part of the hive now. To remove it is to collapse the ceiling. To take it is to kill us all."
"Good," Sarah said, her voice cold and steady. She reached into the open maintenance panel of the machine—a panel she had opened a thousand times in a garage in 2002. "I'm not taking it back to the past, anyway."
The Overlord froze. "What are you doing?"
Sarah’s fingers found the temporal governor—the piece of hardware that kept the machine from folding in on itself. She looked at the locket in her hand, then at the girl who looked so much like her daughter.
"I'm giving the future a chance to start over," Sarah said.
She gripped the governor and twisted it past the safety locks. The machine didn't just whine now; it began to roar. The air around the quartz disc began to warp, turning the cavern into a kaleidoscope of shifting time.
"Stop her!" the Overlord screamed to his swarm. "Kill her! Save the machine!"
Dozens of Spider-Morlocks leapt from the walls, a sea of chattering mandibles and grasping limbs, all diving toward the lone woman standing at
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