Lori: I hate you so much.
Handler: If it helps, we’re getting paid a LOT.
Lori: It does, actually.
The taxi pulled out of the canals of Santa Dee into open water. Looking out through the window, Lori saw the water go dark as it deepened beneath them. The taxi turned hard to starboard, and the driver opened up the throttle. Ahead, Lori saw the massive wharfs where shipping freighters brought Santa Dee everything it needed to survive.
They docked at a wharf that was empty but for them. Lori saw corrugated steel cargo containers stacked on huge pallets, but everything was still.
“Here we are, ma’am,” said the driver, and opened the cab. He started to get out, and Lori waved him back.
“I’m fine, thanks. You go ahead, and have a great day,” she said, and stepped out. She looked back. “Stay safe.”
The driver nodded and smiled, then closed the cab. A moment later, the taxi hummed to life and pulled away from the dock, leaving white water and the scent of vanilla behind it.
“All right, Miss Tucker,” Lori said, “let’s see what we’re dealing with.”
The dockyard was silent as she walked. She kept her steps light, the heels of her boots barely making a sound on the concrete. She slid her phone into her pocket. If Handler had anything else that needed saying, Lori would’ve heard it already.
“Do you see anything yet?” Tucker asked in Lori’s ear, which really helped Lori stay focused and stealthy.
“Not yet,” Lori said, still keeping her steps light. “You wouldn’t happen to have security cameras for the area, would you?”
“Oh, yes! Yes, I do. Here, I’ll call them up, and I’ll be able to watch everything.” Lori heard the sound of fingers clacking on a keyboard. “Here we go. There you are, clear as day. I can see you walking toward the cargo containers.”
“Great,” Lori said. “That’s great, you being able to see me and everything. That’s perfect.”
Her phone buzzed twice in her pants pocket, a special double buzz that Handler used for “No” when Lori was on a job and needed her hands free.
“Wait,” said Tucker. “Something happened to the cameras. How odd. They were working just fine until—”
“That happens a lot in cases like these,” Lori said. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Without warning, a voice came over the dockyard loudspeaker.
“Heyyyyyyyy,” said someone who sounded about Lori’s age. “Heyyy hi how’s it going?”
Well, it knew Lori was here.
“Hey so it is supergreat that you’re here,” said the voice, light and breezy and flirty and feminine. “Supergreat and not a problem at all for either of us, neither of us is in any danger right now, especially you.”
“Do you see anything?” Tucker asked over the earpiece.
“Give me just a sec, Miss Tucker,” Lori said brightly, and began to run.
“Hey so listen,” the voice came over the loudspeaker, “do you want to hang out, because I have some friends here who would love to hang out, all of us just hanging out and getting relaxed and not doing anything harmful to each other, and I don’t suggest this to like everyone, but you seem superchill, so if you want to hang out, just find some of my friends, and they’ll bring you to me and not hurt you at all.”
Lori came around a corner formed by a stack of cargo containers and found what was left of one of the security guards.
He’d been a tall, thin man before the feeder had killed him. He was a tall, puffy shell of a man now, his body expanded grossly under his uniform, green-tinged skin visible where his blue shirt strained against the buttons. His pants and shirtsleeves looked like they’d been filled with great thick pool noodles, perfect cylinders that bent like an old rubber doll. His face was a swollen parody of itself, leaking green gas from the mouth and nostrils.
“Hhhhhhey,” the shell said with more breath than he needed, coughing out with more of the green gas, and as he raised the gun in his hand, Lori moved.
She sidestepped the gun, checked his wrist to stop him from tracking the motion, and punched him in the face as he fired past her.
“Oh my god!” Tucker yelled in Lori’s earpiece.
The shell’s face sprayed green gas where Lori’s punch had connected, and she slammed a chop into his hand, sending the gun clanging to the concrete, and then kicked him in his puffy cylinder of a knee, twisting the arm to send him sprawling. She came down on him knee first, another impact that spat puffs of green gas out from between the buttons of his shirt, and then punched again and again.
“Was that a gun?” Tucker shouted.
Finally, something gave, and the body hissed, then sank and yielded underneath her as though it were an air mattress whose cap had come off. She rolled off as it deflated beneath her, trying not to breathe the gas, and the skin itself flaked and crumbled as green cloud ate through it, and then there was nothing but an empty security uniform lying on the ground with a dark little smudge where the head had been.
“Miss Angler, say something!” said Tucker, which was nowhere near as important as the “Hhhhhey” Lori heard from right behind her, along with the sound of another gun’s safety flipping off.
She felt Handler pull her, and for a moment, she was—
Pretend for a moment that you’re looking down at a microbe smeared on a microscope plate. The microbe has lived its entire life stuck between those two planes of glass. As far as it’s concerned, there’s no up or down. Everything in its world is forward, backward, left, or right. Pretend that you took away the top slide, got an eyedropper, and put a tiny liquid blob of something the microbe would find interesting right in front of it.
What would that be like to the microbe? It never thought to look up—it never thought of much at all, really, being a microbe. As far as it’s concerned, that little blob of something interesting just magically appeared in front of it out of nowhere. Maybe it moves forward to eat it, since “eat it” is the primary mode of interaction microbes have going for them. You don’t want that to happen, though, so you take the eyedropper, suck the little liquid blob up, and lift the eyedropper away. Then, just to mess with the microbe a little, you dab the eyedropper behind the microbe and squirt the little interesting thing back out onto the plate.
For you, this is trivially easy, albeit still more trouble than most people would go to in order to play a prank on something that lives on a microscope plate. But for the microbe, what has just happened is an impossibility. There’s no up in its world. There’s no frame of reference for what it just saw. To the best of its knowledge, the interesting thing just vanished, and then reappeared, impossibly, behind it.
Now let’s say you’re the microbe.
—somewhere else, and then she was back, herself again, behind the second shell as it fired at the spot where she had been. She kicked him in the back of the knee, grabbed his collar as he fell, and slammed the heel of her palm into the base of his skull once, twice. He tried to point the gun back behind him, and Lori got hold of his chin and jaw and twisted, and she heard the crunch of what used to be bone and then a whoosh as the neck snapped, and her hands stung as the gas slid through them.
She stepped back as the increasingly empty uniform crumpled to the ground. Her skin felt clammy, and everything was a little brighter than it should be. That happened when Handler pulled her to another place. It took her a bit to fit back in again.
“Miss Angler, are you there?”
“Yes,” Lori said. Her voice sounded wrong in her ears. “I’m here. The guards are dead.” The words were cold, but that was normal, too, when Handler pulled her.
“Miss Angler?”
The wisps of gas were trailing back around a corner, and Lori followed them. She no longer tried to be stealthy. It knew she was here.
“Heyyyyyyyyyy hi again hello,” came the girl’s voice over the loudspeaker, “I am superglad you weren’t killed by those guys who I don’t even know how they got in here, and it’s clear that you are more than
strong enough to deal with anything you run into, so there’s no reason for you not to come forward and see me and we can get to know each other, because you’re already so close, and you’re not dating anybody, I can tell that, it’s this funny thing I can do, like a party trick, and you and I can be the party, and I can be that thing you don’t have in your life, because I bet you’re pretty lonely, right, aren’t you, I mean if you didn’t want to be with me, why would you be here?”
Lori felt herself coming back. The heels of her boots clacked on the concrete with each bold stride as she came down the path between two rows of corrugated steel cargo containers.
“It’s a feeder,” she said to Tucker. “It lures them in, and then does something that hollows them out and leaves the shells to help it get more prey.”
“What are you talking about?” Tucker asked, her voice high-pitched and loud in Lori’s ear. “This is like a monster? You’re saying there’s some kind of, of, of monster in our shipping yard? There are no such things as monsters!”
“Then why did you hire me to come take care of it?” Lori snapped.
“I . . .” Tucker paused, the idea slipping through her brain. “I can’t actually remember. But why would a monster be in our shipping yard?”
Lori blinked. That was a good question, actually.
Then something rapped on the corrugated steel of the cargo container next to her, and she dove to the side, hands coming up ready.
There was nothing.
The bang came again.
It was coming from inside one of the containers.
“Is that you?” Lori asked.
“Noooooooo?” came the voice over the loudspeaker.
“Is what me?” Tucker asked.
Lori’s phone buzzed twice in her pocket.
“Tucker,” Lori said, “something is banging inside one of the containers. It’s . . .” She looked over at it, one of the few standing on its own. The others were all dark red or yellow, but the one that something was banging inside was black, with no logo and no numbers on the side. “It’s an unmarked black shipping container. The feeder says it isn’t her.”
“The feeder says . . . ?”
“Okay, but she’s—it’s been pretty honest so far, for one of them,” Lori said, which made feeders sound a whole lot nicer than they in fact were, “so do you know anything about this black shipping container?”
Keyboard keys clacked in Lori’s earpiece.
“I don’t . . . hmmm.” Tucker paused. “I’m going to contact Ms. Lake. She might know about it.”
Lori looked at the container, and then up at the loudspeaker.
“Soooooo you’re still coming, riiiiight?” the voice came over the loudspeaker. “I was getting all bored here by myself, and I know you’re lonely, and there’s a part of you that thinks you don’t deserve to be with somebody, that it’s better for you to be alone, but you know that’s not true, right, we all deserve someone, and you deserve me, and you can just come and find me and we will be together and it will be so beautiful and wonderful and not dangerous for you at all, I promise.”
It didn’t seem like the feeder was in the container. Something else was, and that was bad, but whatever the thing in the container was, it was probably better dealt with after Lori had taken care of the feeder.
Stepping quietly again, back to herself as the last echoes of Handler pulling her faded, she came around the corner, stalked down a lane of containers, and found the clearing.
And there it was.
The concrete had been corroded away, leaving a black-edged pit that opened to the dark water below. And hunched over the edge of the pit was a mass of slick glowing tentacles that—
a beautiful woman, her skin pale as moonlight, facing away from Lori with her dress sliding down so that the muscles and bones of her sexy back played under her skin, and her hair tumbled down in a cascade of shimmering black, and Lori could just see the bare edge of her face, and if Lori just came closer, she’d be able to see her perfectly, and it would be so worth it to see such
—almost looked like a human form when they coiled a certain way and blinked their strange lights.
Lori walked forward.
“Oh, hey, you can actually see me,” the feeder said. Its voice was still coming from the loudspeaker, which hardly seemed necessary anymore.
“And you can read minds,” Lori said, still walking forward. “Messing with the loudspeaker, so maybe you do things with electricity, and that includes reading how the neurons in my brain fire?”
“I can’t help people find true love unless I can read their desires,” the feeder said, “and as a magical creature who travels the world helping people find love, that’s totally something that it makes sense that I need to do, and wow you don’t even believe that a little bit, and most of you just thinks that’s a dumb idea because you know about feeders, but there’s a tiny part of you that just thinks no magical love-creature would ever come to you, because you don’t deserve anyone, and that is so tragic and sad that even though I was okay yes going to eat you before, feeling someone who is this down on herself makes me think that today, just this once, I should try to use my powers for good, and maybe in the process learn a valuable lesson—”
“Is there anything,” Lori cut in, “coming from my brain that makes you think I am in any way believing this?”
“No, but that’s all right,” said the feeder, “because even though you’re really actually pretty good at this whole not-believing-me thing, you are still coming closer, and that’s all that matters, because all of this, the talk and the pheromones I’m pumping into the air and the hallucinatory lights and the mild manipulation of your nervous system to adjust what you see—”
“It’s all a lure,” Lori said, taking the last few steps toward the feeder.
“Right, that is supergood thinking for a human, but see once you’re here, all I have to do is this—”
A tentacle snaked up and coiled around Lori’s arm.
Lori smiled through the sudden pain of whatever venomous ichor stung her wrist. “Okay, but did you ever wonder what the perfect lure for one of you things would look like?”
Pretend you took that microbe on the plate, dabbed something interesting in front of it, and then, as it oozed forward in its own primitive way, pretend you bit down into the plate. Feel the glass crunch and crackle beneath your jaws along with the wriggling whispers of the little microbe who only now realizes what is happening to it, caught by an enemy it never saw coming because it came from a dimension for which the little microbe has no frame of reference. Pretend you are that enemy, no, not an enemy, that hunter, and that you are grinding the glass away as the juices of your maw begin to digest the still-struggling microbe that thrashes, speared on your jaws. Pretend you drag the microbe down into depths it cannot even imagine because the direction has no meaning for it, and that it will vanish forever from that little plate.
Pretend that this is how you feed.
The fangs came out of nowhere as they always did, spearing through the feeder as they clamped down. The loudspeakers shrieked and the tentacles flailed, but the great fangs, sprouting from nothing in an oblong elongated fashion that made Lori’s eyes water to look at them, held firm, and after a few frantic wriggling moments, the tentacles went still.
“When you think about it,” Lori said, “the perfect lure for one of you would be something that looked human, wouldn’t it.”
The jaws receded without losing hold of their prey, pulling up or away or somewhere that made them look as though they were getting farther away without actually moving backward. The feeder, still pinned, went with them.
In a moment Lori was alone on the dockyard, still massaging her stinging wrist. It was red and puffy where the tentacles had touched her. If she’d been a real person, her internal organs would probably be liquefying already, but she healed quickly from just about any injury, and attacks from the feeders themselves could barely scratch her.
And
that was why, however nice Handler was in the little texts, Lori never made the mistake of thinking of it as a person.
“Hey, Tucker, good news,” Lori said, hoping that maybe Tucker hadn’t been listening to all of what Lori had been saying for the last little bit. “Your feeder is all taken care of.” With the feeder itself gone, the residual evidence would slide out of this world as well, and once Lori and Handler had gotten paid, even Tucker would probably forget any of this had happened. “You’ll want to have a team clean the area thoroughly in case there are traces of whatever toxins it was using, but most of the danger is over.”
“I’m so very glad to hear it,” said a low, smoky voice that was in no way Tucker’s. “Tia Lake. Thank you so much for all your help.”
“Oh,” Lori said, connecting Lake to Lake Foundation in her head. “It’s nice to meet you in person. Is Ms. Tucker—”
“This is hardly personal,” said Lake with a little laugh. “What do we call you again?”
“You can . . . Angler,” Lori said. “From Angler Consul—”
“But what is your first name?”
Lori’s phone buzzed twice.
No kidding, she thought, and then realized that she was already opening her mouth to answer, and she thought of ten different names, but her mouth couldn’t work the words.
Susan, Samantha, Sarah, Sally, Lee, Laura Laurie Lori Lori LoriLoriLori
Something in her twisted, and at last, pulling her phone from her pocket with her wrist still stinging, she said, “I’m not supposed to use my name,” and that at least she could get out. “There are privacy concerns.”
“Of course, dear, how very prudent,” Lake said reassuringly. “Now, speaking of privacy, you asked about that container, the black one. Have you opened it?”
“No,” Lori said, but now I have to, and her mouth opened like it wanted to say the words. She clapped her free hand over her lips and looked at her phone in desperation. Past all of the No texts that a double buzz from Handler signified, she saw a new note.
Handler: You can’t lie to her?
“That’s good, dear,” Lake said. “In that case, we have nothing to worry about. The taxi should be there for you shortly.”
Feeder Page 2
