The darkness was going away. Ebbing back to where it came from and from where it would come again. Revealed in the new light was just one thing. A toy. From a distance it looked like a clown doll, but that wouldn’t have been quite accurate. It was a Krusty clown doll. They were rare. Would probably fetch a good price at the souk.

Callum decided that the risk was worth it and he slowly engaged his lower pistons. He stretched his mind into the cold parts where they had rested overnight and gradually, silently engaged the motors. His legs stood and his body came with them. He crouched and looked once more around, this time in every available spectrum. It was in ultraviolet that he finally noticed it – nothing more than a whisper of a thread. A nanofabric so beautifully concealed that it was only the last vestige of heat from whoever – or whatever – had laid the trap, the heat clinging to the noose that signalled its presence.

Callum set the motors to release his body back to the ground. He decided to wait and watch. He slept deeply, knowing that the motion sensor alarm he had set before drifting off would alert him the second it tracked any movement or heat signatures in the surrounding mile. The motion sensor brought him out of sleep mode and instantly he saw the furiously pumping legs, motors whirring against hope of the creature – part rabbit, part human; the arm of the upper portion ensnared in an unbreakable slither of fabric. In the other hand the Krusty doll and emerging slowly out of the ground the hair and giant machinery of an arachnid which retrieved the struggling rabbit android with barely a registration of its presence.

After a minute the ground lifted a foot, the doll was pushed out with surprising elegance given the massive bulk of the spider’s leg and Callum saw from the other side the movement of the nanofabric noose being hefted over a steel pipe up in the vaulted roof. The trap was set again. He wondered how many creatures had been caught in this way, pulled in by a relic of a faded civilisation. He wondered and he planned, later the spider would make another catch and Callum resolved it would be its last.