She ticked across the steel deck on eight javelin-pointed feet and forty-eight undulating knees. She was a chimera. Below the waist, she was a mechanical spider; above it, she was a woman wrapped from forehead to hip in strips of tea-colored cloth. Thin, blue-black hair hung about her face like a veil. Her arms and fingers moved slowly, dreamily, like a cobweb in a draft. She seemed a body preserved for burial. The impression that she belonged in a mausoleum was only compounded by the fact that the entirety of her upper body was held inside a crystal bell jar.
