The Oldest Trick

The note taped to the terrarium said: Feed Tuesday. Do not touch. Aunt Priya wrote in capital letters when she meant it, and these were the biggest capitals Maya had ever seen.

The greenhouse smelled like wet bark and tomato leaves. Soren had brought the flashlight with the red filter, because Aunt Priya had told them white light bothered the animal. He held it low. The worm was the length of a finger, dark blue, soft-looking, with rows of stubby legs that ended in tiny claws. It moved like a drop of water deciding which way to roll.

"It doesn't look like a hunter," Soren said.

"It doesn't look like anything," Maya said. "That's the weird part."

In the corner of the terrarium, a cricket sat cleaning its antennae. It had no idea anyone was watching it. Maya thought it should have known. She always felt like she could tell when she was being watched, a prickle at the back of the neck. The cricket had nothing like that. It just sat.

The worm rolled toward it. Slowly. Then slower. Maya leaned in until her breath fogged the glass.

"How far away is it," Soren whispered.

"Three crickets. Maybe four."

"That's too far. It can't reach."

It happened so fast that afterward neither of them could agree on what they had seen. Two pale threads shot out from somewhere near the worm's mouth, crisscrossing in the air, weaving back and forth like someone shaking two ribbons. The threads landed on the cricket and around the cricket and across the floor of the terrarium. When they landed, they were already stiff.

The cricket lunged once. It was glued to the ground.

Soren had stopped breathing. The red light shook a little in his hand.

"It threw," Maya said. "It threw glue."

"From its head." Soren got the flashlight steady. "It threw glue from its head and it went hard in the air."

They watched the worm cross the distance, unhurried now, because there was no longer any hurry. The cricket strained against the white threads and could not move. The worm climbed onto it. And then it began to eat, and as it ate, it ate the glue too, pulling the stiffened threads back into itself along with the meal, leaving nothing behind.

For a while neither of them said a word. Outside, a sprinkler ticked across someone's lawn.

"It cleaned up," Soren said finally. "It ate the evidence."

"It ate the glue because the glue is expensive," Maya said. She was sure of this before she could say why. "Look how much it used. That's a lot of itself to throw away. It wouldn't waste it."

Soren reached into his jacket and took out his notebook. He drew the two crossing threads, the angle of them, the way they had widened into a net. Under the drawing his pencil wrote: solid before it lands.

"That's the thing I can't get," he said. "Glue stays wet so it can stick. If it hardens in the air it shouldn't stick to anything. But it stuck."

Maya pressed her finger against the glass over the empty corner where the threads had been. "It went out as liquid. It turned solid by the time it hit. Somewhere in the middle of the air, it changed."

"In a fraction of a second."

"In less than that." She watched the worm settle. "Aunt Priya's note. She didn't say don't touch because it bites. She said it because of this."

Soren flipped to the front of the notebook, where he had copied things from the book Aunt Priya left on the shelf. He ran the red light down the page until he found it.

"Onychophora," he read. "Velvet worms." He kept reading silently, his lips moving, and then he stopped and read the next part out loud, slowly, like he wanted to be sure of every word. "Fossils of velvet worms have been found that are five hundred million years old. And they look the same. Same legs. Same body. The book says the hunting method has not changed."

Maya turned from the glass. "Not changed how much?"

"Not changed at all. Five hundred million years of this exact thing. The threads. The crossing. The glue going hard."

The number was too big to hold, so Maya tried to break it into pieces she could carry. She thought about how the dinosaurs were gone, and how before the dinosaurs there were other animals, and how before those there were others, and how the velvet worm had been doing this, this precise trick, the throw and the net and the eating of its own glue, through every single one of them. Animals had grown bones and lost them. Grown wings. Crawled out of the ocean. Whole worlds of creatures had appeared and vanished and turned to stone. And the velvet worm had just kept throwing.

"It found the answer," she said. "A really long time ago. And it never needed a new one."

Soren stared at the worm. "Everything else kept changing. Everything. And this one figured out the right way to do it before there were trees." He set the notebook down on the potting bench. "Before there were trees, Maya."

The cricket was gone now. The corner of the terrarium was clean, no threads, no shell, nothing, as if the hunt had never happened. The worm rolled back toward its hiding place under the bark, soft and slow, a drop of water that had just done the oldest thing on the planet.

Maya looked at the prickle she always felt, the one at the back of her own neck, the sense of being watched. People had that. The cricket had not. Somewhere between the velvet worm's world and hers, animals had started to feel the eyes on them, and to fear them, and to run. And the velvet worm had watched all of it happen from behind the exact same glue.

"Aunt Priya thinks she's keeping it," Maya said.

"What do you mean."

"She wrote the note. She put it in the glass. She thinks she's the one in charge."

Soren looked at the bark, where two dark folds of the worm's head were just visible, and beneath them the small openings where the threads had come from, waiting, the way they had waited for five hundred million years.

The worm did not move. Under the bark, the glands sat full and ready, pointed out at the world.