It was early July 2026 when a small group of emissaries sent by Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez set out once again for Amazonas State. This was not the first time people connected to the Rodríguez siblings had made that journey, nor was it the sort of visit likely to appear later on any official government schedule. Its purpose belonged to that peculiar realm where, in Venezuela, the superstitions of those in power become entangled with political decisions no one is willing to acknowledge publicly. They were returning to the Yanomami shaman whose revelations had become part of what was later known as the Oracle of the Great Mamerto—a prophecy that had decreed Nicolás Maduro’s inexorable fall through betrayal.

The first consultation directly involving Delcy Rodríguez had taken place in March 2022. Three emissaries sent by the then vice president traveled to the shaman’s community after learning that, months earlier, during a ceremony witnessed by a justice of Venezuela’s Supreme Court, he had received a disturbing revelation about Maduro’s future.

Delcy’s emissaries, however, had not gone there to ask about Maduro. Their question concerned her own political ambitions, and the xapiripë offered no favorable answer. Through his interpreter, the shaman announced that the woman who was the subject of the consultation would not see her ambition fulfilled and left them with a particularly disturbing warning: “The mark of destiny indicates that only exile will prevent a fatal outcome.” He then delivered a second message whose meaning no one fully understood at the time: “This home of life and harmony has received unforgivable wounds and, in the suffering that has been inflicted on it, the screams of pain have opened like jaws the cracks that will devour the architects of this sacrilege.”

For four years, those words hung over the Rodríguez siblings in the way certain superstitions tend to hover around power. No one openly admitted to taking them seriously, but neither was anyone willing to forget them. In the Miraflores Palace, people had learned that some prophecies possess the uncomfortable ability to outlive those who ridicule them.

On June 24, 2026, Venezuela was shaken by powerful earthquakes. Images of damaged structures and fractures in the ground immediately reminded those familiar with the old consultation of the shaman’s reference to cracks opening like jaws.

Of course, any rational explanation began and ended with geology. Earthquakes require no intervention from the xapiripë, Ananké, or any other supernatural force. Magical realism, however, has never required the supernatural to replace reality; it merely needs to stand beside it until the two begin to resemble one another.

Jorge Rodríguez was among the first to make the connection. According to the account that later circulated among those familiar with those days, Delcy did not ask whether the Yanomami shaman was still alive; she asked whether he was still receiving visitors.

That night, as they reviewed photographs of the damage, Delcy stopped at an image showing a long fracture across a paved road.

“Those are the cracks,” she said.

Jorge continued looking at the screen. “They’re earthquakes, Delcy.”

“They were just three old women weaving, too, until Maduro ended up outside the country.”

Jorge looked at her with irritation. “Don’t start with that.”

“I didn’t start anything. They said it in 2022.”

He remained silent. The words of the xapiripë had been buried in their memories for too long, and now the earth itself seemed to be reminding them.

“Find the shaman,” Jorge finally said.

Delcy looked away from the photograph. “I already did.”

Part I: The return to the oracle

A few days later, a new expedition to Amazonas State was quietly organized. One of the men sent from Caracas had taken part in the 2022 journey and remembered the sensation of entering the jungle. It was not fear of animals or the objective danger of unfamiliar territory; it was the impression that distance and time followed different rules there. In a city, roads exist to take people somewhere; in that part of the Amazon, rivers and trails seemed almost to decide whether passage would be allowed.

When they reached the community, they recognized the interpreter and were soon taken before the shaman. The man had aged, but he listened with the same serenity as the visitors explained that circumstances had changed completely. Nicolás Maduro was no longer in power, Delcy Rodríguez now occupied a position that had seemed almost unimaginable in 2022, and the words pronounced by the xapiripë were beginning to acquire a meaning none of them had understood then.

One of the emissaries, impatient with the old man’s silence, insisted that they were now facing an entirely different reality: “None of this had happened in 2022.”

The interpreter conveyed the observation. The shaman smiled faintly. “It had not happened for you.”

The response caused unease. The men had arrived convinced that changed circumstances should make it possible to reconsider the prophecy. The shaman seemed to begin from the opposite premise: events did not alter what the xapiripë had shown; they merely allowed human beings to understand it gradually.

That night, the shaman inhaled yakoana while the embers cast a dim light over those present and the sounds of the jungle overtook their conversations. The emissaries finally asked whether what had been revealed about Delcy Rodríguez in 2022 could now be changed.

The answer was no.

One visitor insisted that human circumstances could always be altered. The shaman acknowledged, through the interpreter, that circumstances changed, but he drew a distinction: one thing was to alter the way a person passed through what had been allotted to them; another was to pretend that what had already been shown could cease to exist.

“You think destiny is a door,” the interpreter explained. “You believe that if you find another key, you can open a different one.”

“What did the xapiripë show, then?” the emissary asked.

“A path.”

The men explained that the woman about whom they had asked four years earlier now held power and intended to keep it. If the prophecy could not be erased, they at least wanted to know how she could avoid the fatal outcome announced in 2022.

The shaman replied that he would not bargain with what had already been shown.

One of the men, irritated, asked why they had returned if nothing could be changed. The old man then spoke at length with the interpreter and explained that perhaps their mistake was not the question itself, but their insistence on asking it within the same spiritual path.

“Is there another shaman who can help us?”

The old man shook his head. He did not speak of a more powerful shaman, but of another people.

He mentioned the Hüottüja, whose communities are spread throughout areas of the Orinoco basin. Their songs, their knowledge, and the realities with which they interacted were not the same as those of the Yanomami tradition. It made no sense to ask which path was stronger.

He told them to seek a meñëruá.

The emissaries had never heard the word. The interpreter explained that it could be translated approximately as “master of song,” although the phrase did not fully describe the role. He also mentioned Ñuá, used by certain specialists in a visionary discipline different from the Yanomami shaman’s use of yakoana and his xapiripë.

“Can the meñëruá change the prophecy?”

Again, the answer was no. But the Hüottüja specialist might be able to show them how what had already been ordained would come to pass.

At dawn, before leaving, one of the men made one final attempt to understand.

“Then why are we going?”

The shaman looked toward the jungle. “Because you still believe you are traveling to change what is coming.”

“Isn’t that what we are doing?”

The old man smiled. “That is what you believe.”

Two days later, a boat was traveling toward the Orinoco. The emissaries carried with them two unfamiliar words, meñëruá and Ñuá, and the illusion that somewhere ahead there might still be room for negotiation. They did not yet understand that they were not traveling to change the old prophecy, but to discover its mechanism.

Part II: The monk’s prophecy

The events that sent the Rodríguez siblings back to the Amazon had actually begun months earlier, in October 2025, when another old prophecy suddenly acquired a disturbing political meaning.

At the end of 2021, after learning of the Yanomami shaman’s first revelation about the end of his rule, Maduro had ordered that a Hindu monk associated with Sathya Sai Baba be brought to Venezuela. Maduro and Cilia Flores had admired the spiritual leader for years, and Maduro hoped that a different tradition might offer him a more favorable interpretation.

The monk meditated for hours and finally answered that what destiny had revealed was inexorable. Maduro retained only one choice: he could leave power voluntarily and thereby determine the manner in which his rule would end. If he resisted, he would be overthrown through betrayal.

That word became an obsession. For years, Maduro searched for betrayal among generals, ministers, businessmen, former allies, and foreign governments. Tareck El Aissami’s fall even seemed for a time to offer a possible fulfillment of the warning. Yet Maduro never imagined that four years later Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez would be discussing how the system could survive without him.

In October 2025, a delicate meeting took place with representatives of the Cuban government. The arrival of a new administration in the United States, combined with Cuba’s deepening economic and energy crisis, had turned the preservation of the Cuban-Venezuelan alliance into a matter of strategic survival. The argument presented to the Rodríguez siblings was simple: the alliance could survive an immediate defeat if its essential structures remained intact and enough time could be gained to rebuild economic capacity.

“We have to enter a mode of resistance. That is the key to asymmetric warfare,” the Cuban vice president explained. “We must project an image of defeat and endure critical conditions, because what matters is buying time while Venezuela’s oil industry is rebuilt.”

Jorge asked what he meant by projecting an image of defeat.

The Cuban official replied that the objective was not to avoid every defeat, but to prevent any single defeat from becoming definitive. If the political structure survived and Venezuela recovered its oil production, the Cuban-Venezuelan alliance could eventually regain both resources and initiative.

Delcy quickly understood that the discussion was no longer about saving Nicolás Maduro. It was about preserving the structure even if Maduro himself had to be sacrificed.

To the Rodríguez siblings, the proposal resembled the process that had once brought Maduro himself to power. During Hugo Chávez’s government, Maduro had occupied positions from which he managed relationships essential to Chavismo. He spent years as foreign minister, later became vice president, and when Chávez disappeared from the political scene, he became his successor.

Delcy’s career had followed a comparable sequence. She too had served as foreign minister and then vice president, gradually accumulating knowledge of political, economic, and diplomatic networks vital to the regime’s international survival.

Within the clandestine mythology surrounding those networks, there was even an operation some officials called the Sword of Bolívar. According to accounts circulating among intelligence specialists, the system kept records of favors, financial transfers, intermediaries, political support, and compromised relationships. Its power lay not merely in remembering what had happened, but in preserving enough information to remind participants what they had received, what they knew, and what might later be expected from them.

The October meeting ended with a preliminary understanding that did not need to be put in writing. Maduro could become expendable if his continued presence threatened the survival of the larger structure.

When the Rodríguez siblings left the meeting, Jorge remained silent until they were inside the vehicle.

“They’re doing exactly the same thing they did with Chávez.”

Delcy shook her head. “Yes. And just as they found Chávez a successor, they are not going to give Maduro a way out.”

“And they’ve been preparing you to take his place. Now they’re letting you know that the moment is getting closer.”

Delcy looked out the window.

“Did you think about the monk?” Jorge asked.

This time she turned toward him. “From the moment that man started talking about resistance.”

Both had remembered the same sentence. If Maduro clung to power, the monk had said, betrayal would remove him.

“The worst part,” Jorge said, “is that Maduro has spent four years looking for the traitor.”

“And he had him sitting right beside him,” Delcy replied.

Jorge smiled uneasily. “Several of them.”

For the first time, the betrayal Maduro had spent years searching for among his enemies seemed to be taking shape within his own circle.

Part III: The araña mona

Two months later, in December 2025, the Rodríguez siblings made an unusual request during another meeting with Cuban representatives. They wanted Cuban security agencies to review documents, transcripts, and internal references and eliminate any trace of a nickname that had been used for years to refer to Delcy Rodríguez.

After the story of the Great Mamerto, the siblings had developed an understandable aversion to nicknames.

“What is the name?” one Cuban official asked.

Delcy answered without enthusiasm. “The Araña Mona.”

According to the story circulating among certain officials, the nickname had originally been used by Guillermo García Frías, one of the historic commanders of the Cuban Revolution, who for decades had led Cuba’s Flora y Fauna enterprise—the state organization responsible for the protection, management, and conservation of much of the country’s wildlife and natural resources. His long association with the organization had made the natural world an unusually familiar source of references and comparisons for the old guerrilla commander. It was from that world, according to the story, that he had supposedly drawn the image he used to describe Delcy Rodríguez.

The Venezuelan jungle is home to enormous spiders of the genus Theraphosa, popularly known in several regions as arañas monas. They include some of the largest spiders on the planet, but according to the anecdote attributed to García Frías, the nickname had nothing to do with Delcy’s physical appearance. It referred to the animal’s method of hunting.

The araña mona does not rely on a large aerial web to capture prey. It generally remains associated with a burrow and depends heavily on ground vibrations and subtle disturbances in the air. A small animal may move near the refuge without ever seeing the spider, yet every movement supplies information. Silk arranged near the burrow helps transmit those disturbances toward the place where the predator remains protected.

According to the Cuban anecdote, someone once asked García Frías why he used that nickname for Delcy.

“Because she doesn’t need to chase anyone,” the old commander reportedly replied.

“What does she do?”

“She waits for them to move. When they move, they tell her where they are.”

That, supposedly, was how La Araña Mona was born.

For years, Delcy treated the nickname as Cuban irreverence. The Great Mamerto changed that. Nicolás Maduro had watched an old insult attributed to Ramiro Valdés become entangled with prophecies, ceremonies, and political events until it acquired a meaning no one had foreseen.

Hours after the December meeting, once the siblings were alone, Jorge returned to the subject.

“I don’t understand why it bothers you so much.”

“Because Ramiro Valdés called Maduro ‘Gran Mamerto’ for years, and then we ended up with a shaman, a mountain, an oracle, and half the country waiting to see how the Great Mamerto would end.”

“Guillermo García isn’t a shaman.”

Delcy stared at him. “Neither is Ramiro.”

Jorge laughed briefly, then realized she was serious.

“It’s just a nickname.”

“So was the Great Mamerto.”

“You can’t order Cuba to erase a word because you think it brings bad luck.”

“I’m not erasing it because of bad luck. I’m trying to prevent someone from eventually finding a meaning for it.”

The discussion ended there.

On January 3, 2026, the monk’s prophecy finally found its interpretation. Nicolás Maduro was extracted from Venezuela in a U.S. operation and taken out of the country alongside Cilia Flores. The clashes left Venezuelan casualties but, above all, Cuban military and security personnel dead—a cost high enough to make any public accusation that Havana had deliberately participated in Maduro’s fall difficult to sustain.

For those familiar with the October conversations, however, the matter looked different. The prophecy had never said who would execute Maduro’s fall; it had only announced that if he refused to leave voluntarily, betrayal would remove him. Soon after his extraction, the government reorganized and Delcy Rodríguez formally assumed the position Maduro had occupied.

The old sequence had repeated itself: Foreign Ministry, Vice Presidency, Presidency.

Instead of reassuring the Rodríguez siblings, this deepened their concern. If the monk’s warning had materialized after four years, the old xapiripë prophecy concerning Delcy could no longer be treated as an Amazonian curiosity.

Then, on June 21, 2026, Ramiro Valdés died—the historic Cuban commander said to have called Maduro the Great Mamerto. Three days later, Venezuela shook. The Great Mamerto was gone, the man who had supposedly named him had died, and Delcy occupied the Miraflores Palace.

There was another coincidence. The epicenter of the first earthquake lay in Yaracuy State, where the Mountain of Sorte is located, pulling María Lionza once again into the same strange chain of associations.

Delcy remembered the nickname she had tried to erase six months earlier. It was still only a nickname, but the Great Mamerto had once been only a nickname too.

Within Venezuelan magical realism, the difference between mockery and an oracle may simply be a matter of waiting for the right event.

Part IV: The masters of knowledge

Following the Yanomami shaman’s instructions, the emissaries continued until they reached a Hüottüja community. The final stretch was traveled by river, through a territory that seemed organized according to rules the men from Caracas did not understand.

The man they had come to find did not resemble the dramatic image some of them associated with the word shaman. He was a thin old man with calm movements, occupied with ordinary tasks when they were brought before him. The interpreter explained that he was a meñëruá, approximately a “master of song,” although the translation did little justice to a role connected with knowledge, ritual protection, and the capacity to reach through song realities others could not perceive.

The emissaries explained the Yanomami prophecy, the warning that only exile would prevent a fatal outcome for Delcy, and the shaman’s refusal to alter what had been seen.

“Can he change what the xapiripë have already said?” one of them asked.

The old man shook his head.

“Then why are we here?”

The answer took a moment. “To learn what you still do not understand.”

Preparations began before nightfall. There were no altars, statues, or ceremonial objects resembling practices the visitors associated with María Lionza. This belonged to another cultural universe.

Among the materials being prepared was Ñuá, the Hüottüja name for yopo, a powder used within a visionary discipline whose purpose cannot be reduced to the mere production of hallucinations. Its principal ingredient comes from seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina, a tree widely distributed throughout the Orinoco basin. The seeds contain several alkaloids, including bufotenine. Traditionally, they are ground, combined with alkaline plant ash, carefully dried, and reduced to a fine powder.

The interpreter explained that Ñuá was placed on a small tray and inhaled through a slender bifurcated tube, usually shaped like a Y, allowing the powder to be drawn into the nostrils.

For the meñëruá, however, Ñuá was not an instrument for imagining things that did not exist, but a path toward knowledge. The emissaries then learned that the old man was also a ñœwœrua, a specialist in Ñuá with an advanced visionary capacity. He therefore mastered both the songs and the medicine through which those songs could lead him toward what others could not see.

One emissary asked what could be dangerous about knowledge.

“That is precisely what you are going to hear tonight,” the interpreter replied.

When darkness fell, the meñëruá inhaled the Ñuá and began to sing. Gradually, two names appeared repeatedly in the chants: Wahari and Kuemoi.

The interpreter explained that they belonged to the time of the creators, when the world had not yet acquired the order later known to human beings. In that primordial universe, knowledge could create, but it could also become dangerous when power exceeded the ability of its holder to govern it.

Kuemoi possessed extraordinary knowledge of plants, poisons, hunting, food, and many of the techniques through which the forest could be used. Yet as his knowledge increased, so did his arrogance, distrust, paranoia, and violence. The knowledge that had allowed him to act upon the world eventually began acting upon him.

Wahari initially appeared different. He attempted to appropriate and govern some of Kuemoi’s dangerous knowledge, but he too eventually fell into excess, confusing knowledge with unlimited power.

For that reason, the interpreter explained, it was a mistake to divide the two into a simple opposition between good and evil. Both could create, deceive, learn, and cause harm. Both demonstrated the same danger: power can become poison when the person who wields it loses the ability to impose limits.

One visitor asked whether the Hüottüja deities were therefore malicious.

“He says you always need to know who is good and who is evil,” the interpreter explained.

“Doesn’t that matter?”

The old man resumed his song before replying. “What matters more is knowing who can govern what he carries within himself.”

The moral point did not arise from ignorance of violence or ambition, but from knowing their consequences too well. Wahari and Kuemoi had made, in different ways, the same mistake: they believed possessing a force meant mastering it.

“And who truly masters a force?” one emissary asked.

The interpreter listened. “The one who knows when to stop using it.”

Part V: The vision of the äukä

From that moment, the song changed. The meñëruá’s voice grew more intense, his body began to sway, and the interpreter started describing images emerging within the vision.

In one of them appeared an enormous äukä, the Hüottüja name for the giant tarantula known in several regions of Venezuela as the araña mona.

The creature remained near the entrance to a burrow, protected by darkness. Within the vision, it possessed an almost supernatural ability to perceive everything around it. Yet the image reflected a real characteristic of large Theraphosa spiders, which rely heavily on ground vibrations and minute disturbances in the air to detect nearby movement.

In the vision, that capacity had become almost absolute power. Every insect crossing the leaves and every small animal moving among the roots revealed itself through vibration. The spider did not need to pursue constantly; it could wait in safety until others told it where they were.

Then another figure appeared.

A Hüottüja boy of about five years old, small and barefoot, approached the burrow. He carried neither bow nor spear. He picked up a thin stem and moved slowly toward the entrance.

“Isn’t he afraid?” one visitor asked.

The interpreter listened to the song. “No. He says the child knows something the spider does not.”

The boy began moving the stem near the mouth of the burrow, producing a vibration similar to that of prey moving across the ground. The spider remained still at first. The boy repeated the motion, never touching it and never trying to force it outside.

He simply sent into the burrow the kind of information the animal was prepared to trust.

Everything that made the spider an effective hunter was now working against it. Its senses detected a familiar vibration. The distance seemed favorable. Nothing suggested danger.

It did not interpret the signal as a threat; it interpreted it as an opportunity.

Finally, the spider left the burrow.

It emerged with the same speed it had used to capture countless prey and, by doing so, surrendered the protection that had made it difficult to defeat. The boy blocked its return while others appeared to help him. Once outside, the creature was exposed.

The meñëruá was not singing about a powerful being defeated by something stronger; the opposite had occurred. A child had captured the spider because he understood the mechanism that produced its strength. He had not destroyed its ability to detect vibration; he had used that ability to make it voluntarily abandon its refuge.

Then came the fire.

In the vision, the urticating hairs were burned away, the spider was prepared and roasted, and the community gathered around the meal. Children ran nearby while adults shared cassava bread and the meat of the animal that moments earlier had appeared formidable.

There was no hatred in the scene. The people were not celebrating suffering; they were celebrating the disappearance of a danger.

The interpreter heard one word repeated throughout the chants and searched for its closest equivalent. “Liberation,” he finally said.

One emissary asked what they were being liberated from.

The interpreter shook his head. “He has not explained that yet.”

The ceremony ended shortly before dawn. Exhausted after hours of songs and visions, the meñëruá refused to offer an immediate interpretation.

What had been seen, the interpreter explained, first had to be understood.

Part VI: The inexorable trap

By midmorning, the old man returned. His first clarification was that the emissaries would make a mistake if they tried to interpret the vision as a drawing in which each figure corresponded directly to a person. Wahari was not a ruler, Kuemoi did not represent Cuba, and the spider was not simply a physical representation of Delcy Rodríguez. Visions showed relationships among forces, behaviors, and consequences.

“Then the spider wasn’t her?” one of the men asked.

The old man listened to the translation. “You still think a vision is a drawing.”

The spider, the interpreter explained, had survived because it could read the movements around it before its prey understood its own. From the protection of the burrow, it waited, gathered information, and exposed itself only when the signals outside announced an opportunity.

The child did not destroy that ability; he merely gave the spider the information it wanted to receive.

“That is why it came out,” the interpreter explained. “Not because it was afraid, but because it was certain that it was hunting.”

Then, for the first time, the meñëruá spoke the name Delcy Rodríguez.

Her time in power, he explained, had already been marked. What had been seen was not a warning about something that might happen and not one possibility among several. It showed what had already been ordained.

One emissary asked whether that meant Delcy would lose power.

The interpreter listened. “That has already been written.”

The men remained silent. The phrase carried the same inexorable quality as the Yanomami prophecy and the Hindu monk’s warning.

The meñëruá explained that Delcy retained only one choice: she could leave power voluntarily and accept that her time had ended. If she did so, she would preserve her life outside the position she had occupied. If she remained, the vision would unfold exactly as shown.

One visitor immediately remembered Maduro. “Will it also be betrayal?”

The old man shook his head. Maduro had received his own sentence: if he refused to leave voluntarily, betrayal would bring him down. Delcy’s mechanism was different: she would be led toward her end by the very methods she had used to exercise power.

For years, she had built power by knowing the movements of those around her, accumulating information, identifying weaknesses, waiting for the right moment, and acting when what she knew gave her an advantage. Those mechanisms would not fail. Precisely because they would continue working, they would lead her into the trap.

A signal would come, but it would not look like a threat; it would look like an opportunity.

Delcy would believe she had discovered a weakness to exploit, an adversary to eliminate, a chance to expand her authority, or a situation finally within her control. Everything that had helped her survive politically would tell her the same thing: she had to act.

No one would need to force her from the refuge. She would leave the position protecting her because she would be convinced prey was waiting outside.

“And what will happen when she realizes she was deceived?” one emissary asked.

The meñëruá replied after hearing the translation: “By the time she understands, she will already be outside.”

The interpreter explained that by then the trap would have closed and the outcome would be violent. The fire, the children, the shared food, and the celebration showed what the disappearance of that form of power would mean to those who had lived beneath it.

It would be a liberation.

One emissary asked whether there was still any way to prevent it.

The meñëruá corrected the question. This was not about preventing what had already been established. Delcy retained only the choice of how to leave power: voluntarily, before the signal arrived, or by remaining until the vibration drew her out of the refuge.

“Will she know when that signal arrives?”

The old man shook his head. “No.”

The signal that would destroy her, the meñëruá explained, would be indistinguishable from all those that had allowed her to succeed. It would not resemble danger; it would have the appearance of success.

The very quality that had made Delcy Rodríguez an effective political operator would prevent her from recognizing that the opportunity before her was not prey.

It was the trap.

The emissaries left the community several hours later. They had arrived seeking a bargain with invisible forces and were returning without formulas for changing destiny. The Yanomami shaman had been right: they had not found another door, only a clearer explanation of the path.

Maduro had spent years fearing betrayal. He searched for it among soldiers, ministers, allies, and foreign governments. Delcy faced something more difficult to recognize because what was destined to destroy her would not arrive disguised as an enemy.

It would arrive as an opportunity.

The spider in the vision had not been defeated because its senses failed. They had worked exactly as they were meant to work. It detected the vibration, inferred the presence of prey, and voluntarily left its refuge.

The child did not neutralize its power; he understood it.

Wahari and Kuemoi had shown that acquiring knowledge does not necessarily mean mastering the forces that knowledge unlocks. The äukä revealed the same principle from another direction: an extraordinary ability can become a weakness if someone creates the exact stimulus that ability is prepared to interpret as favorable.

The prophecy left no room for the hope the emissaries had gone there seeking. Delcy’s time in power had already been written. Only one decision still belonged to her: accept that it had ended and leave voluntarily, or remain until the opportunity destined to draw her from safety appeared. Unlike the Cuban soldiers who had apparently been unable to prevent Maduro from being extracted alive, no such outcome awaited Delcy once the trap was set in motion. For her, being lured beyond the boundaries of her hunting ground would not simply mean losing power.

It would be fatal.

The real problem was that she would never know which opportunity it was.

She could scrutinize every negotiation, watch every collaborator, search for betrayal, and study every visible threat. None of that would identify the signal because the signal would not resemble a threat. It would look like useful information, an exposed enemy, a favorable negotiation, someone else’s weakness, or an opportunity to expand control.

When it appeared, every political instinct she possessed would tell her to act.

And she would.

The Araña Mona would not learn in time the lesson that Wahari and Kuemoi had learned too late: true mastery of power requires knowing not only how to use it, but when not to use it.

When she hears the vibration destined for her, she will believe that she is going out to hunt once again.

By then, the trap will already be waiting. And what follows will occur with no mercy.