Prologue

Sometimes the stars speak to me. And I listen.

I like to go outside, feel the cool grass squish under my paws and send shudders of excitement up my leg. I especially like to go outside in the dark and gaze up outside at the stars, bright, twinkling balls of light hanging in the sky. My mother has always told our group that the stars are there to light our way when the moon is gone, but I've always wondered if they have a deeper purpose in life, and if I will ever unravel that difference.

I don't think that I will. My mother has always told me that I am useless in life. I don't like her very much. She's mean to me. Every day she tells me how worthless I am. I always listen, and never put up a fight. Mother is the group leader. She must know these things.

Mother never tells my brother and sister that they're worthless. They can hunt, and fight, and are big and strong. They aren't afraid of anything, and laugh at me when I fall down. It makes a fire alight in my mind, and I want to yell at them, tell them I'm just as good. But something stops me.

I know what it is that does.

It is my fear.

No, I'm not scared of them. I'm not scared of Mother, either. I'm not scared of my father, who is big and tough and looks like he could survive just fine on his own. I'm not scared of any cat in my group, or any foxes or badgers.

I'm scared of the one creature that our group admires most, besides cats. Mother, being the ruler, decided one day that her favorite creature would be our emblem.

"It has grace, elegance, deadly beauty," she proclaimed to us one day, silhouette dark against the bright morning. "It creates a beautiful home for itself that is both intricate and gorgeous in its own way. It is none other than the spider, an arachnid so simple yet so complicated…"

I had zoned out at this part of the speech, and was going over my worries in my mind. Spiders had terrified me ever since I was a young kit, no bigger than a squirrel, and was eating my mouse when all of a sudden a large spider, the same size as my paw, crawled up over the mouse and hissed at me.

Of course I screamed and scrambled backward, and when my brother saw it, he laughed at me like he always does, picked up the spider with his paw, and brought it to Mother where she could admire it. She even had it live in her den so it could spin her a web. I've hated spiders ever since.

They are the emblem of my group, however. It's terrible, because I'm named after them. My name is Arachnid. Others call me Ara.

I am seen as an outcast, a freak, a leader's daughter gone wrong. The only ones who listen to me are the stars. I go outside in the squishy grass, feeling the shivers run up my leg, and I speak to them, and they listen to me.

Mother says that the stars aren't alive. They're simply balls of light that hang in the sky to light our way.

But…but if Mother is wrong? What if the stars really are cats, just like us? I already know that I am a freak, but what if freaks can hear the stars? Can freaks be discarded like they're trash, even if their parents are leaders of groups?

Can freaks, in a group that see spiders as equals, have arachnophobia?