“Next time, ask first,” she said, shaking her head. “Ears still ringing. Get me to the water.”
He started running. He couldn’t move at a blur like Tapper—or whatever it was the girl who’d rescued them did, if she was moving at all or teleporting or something—but he’d been strong even before the change, and now he could carry Wheelchair-Girl-no-wait-Iara like she was nothing. “You can swim?” he said between breaths.
“Watch and see.” She shook the last of the dizziness away and gave him a wicked smile.
He was totally gonna get past the wheelchair thing.
Men were pulling themselves up onto the docks from the water, water dripping from their wetsuits. The net was moving around, with the people caught in it struggling, and then one of the men in the wetsuits pressed a button on his wristband, and the net crackled and sparked.
Shawn kept running. The guys in the wetsuits didn’t have guns. Another boat was coming toward the dock, and the guys in the boat did have guns, and Shawn had figured out some cool tricks since the change, but he was pretty sure he didn’t have anything that stopped bullets.
The guys in the wetsuits saw him as he came out onto the main dock. They had face masks and scuba gear that made it hard to see their expressions, but they were pointing his way.
“Throw me!” Iara shouted, and as Shawn adjusted her from carrying position to something like a shot-put position midstride, she unhooked her arms, and then Shawn launched her with all of his strength just as she pushed off him, and he had a moment to think that wow, she had a fantastic butt.
Then she torpedoed into one of the wetsuit guys, and both of them went into the water.
Shawn spun to the second wetsuit guy, who did in fact have a gun, some kind of weird, clunky toy-pistol-looking thing made from black plastic, and Shawn wasn’t sure if it was a speargun or what, but he knew he didn’t want it pointing at him, so as the wetsuit guy brought it up, Shawn lunged in, fingers tightened to a spear point.
His hand punched clean through wetsuit guy’s chest and out the other side. He saw the man’s eyes go blank behind his mask, and as Shawn yanked his arm back out, the man’s mask ripped off, and some kind of horrible snake-worm slithered out and slid into the water.
Which was good, Shawn decided. It was definitely good. He slid the blood off his hand—not that there was much; whatever he did to make himself sharp made the blood sheet right off him. If wetsuit guy had a snake-worm inside him, he wasn’t really a person, so Shawn wasn’t a murderer, and that was good.
He heard the crack of gunfire and saw that the boat was drawing closer. After a second of staring like an idiot, he realized they were firing at him, and he dove to the ground beside the giant pile of netting.
“No, no, no.” He needed to get into the water. A bullet spat off the concrete beside him, and he rolled away, behind the netting now.
The netting.
“Hang on!” Shawn shouted. “Get down!” He thought, scissors, scissors, scissors, as hard as he could, and then held his hands out like a karate expert doing a chop and sliced into the netting.
His hands sheared through the heavy rope like it was overcooked pasta, and he slashed it free, then hauled it apart with all of his strength.
Under the giant net, Tapper and Hawk crouched. Tapper was twitching. Hawk was blinking a bunch.
“I g-got el-l-lectrocuted ag-g-gain,” Hawk said.
“Where’s the girl?” Shawn asked. “The one who got us out?”
“She got out,” came a voice from behind him, and Shawn turned to see her crouched by one of the containers. She didn’t look good—she was pale, and her blouse and pants were wrinkled, but the weird part was her face. Normal girls freaked out when their nice clothes got messy, or they were too angry to worry about it, sometimes, but she was just . . . blank.
Then gunfire cracked again, and he forgot about Creepy Blank Lady and dove to the concrete. He peeked around the pile of netting to see if the guys in the boat were shooting at him.
They weren’t. Their guns were pointed down into the water on one side.
A moment later Iara leaped from the water on the other side, punched one of the gunmen at the top of her arc, and dove cleanly back into the water like a kung-fu mermaid.
Shawn grinned. “Get them out!” he called back to Creepy Blank Lady. “I’m going in!”
He heard the cry behind him as he scrambled forward, but then he was in the water.
His element.
He sucked in a lungful of cool water. The shock of it always hit him like a jolt of adrenaline, the heavy coldness as he went from air to water, the taste of sea salt in the back of his throat. He thrust his arms out to either side and thought wings and pushed and surged through the water faster than any Olympic medalist.
There were more wetsuit guys under the water, holding on to a big machine with a propeller and a bunch of handholds and the tube where they’d shot the netting out. The water here was a dark blue, the wetsuit guys just shadows themselves, and they hadn’t seen him yet.
He glided forward with another flap of his arms, then thought spear point and stabbed at the nearest man. His fingers punched through the guy’s chest, and he flailed as blood clouded the water. Shawn tasted it and freaked out for a moment, kicking away as the man thrashed.
The second wetsuit guy turned and raised one of the toy guns, and there was a bubbling pop as something like a needle or a nail hissed past Shawn’s shoulder with a little buzz of pain. Shawn shouted in surprise, surged forward, and stabbed the man through the chest.
This time he kicked off and out of the blood cloud before he tasted it.
He saw when the snake-worm ripped out of the dead guy. It moved fast in the water, as fast as Shawn, and Shawn stabbed at it on instinct, but the snake-worm curled around the thrust, and Shawn felt its slimy skin around his wrist as it slipped away and wriggled down into the darkness below.
The heck with that. It was time for some answers.
Shawn made his arms into wings again and surged down after the thing that had used the wetsuit guy like a puppet. He stroked down, pulling himself into the dark water. It was deeper than it ought to have been this close to shore. That must be where the snake-worms lived, down in the dark water.
Up above, he saw splashing and the gray-blue silhouette of water rippling on the surface, and then he heard, “Wait!”
It was Iara, her voice cutting through the water with the perfect clarity of a bell. Shawn looked up and saw her shape in the splashing. She glided through the water even faster than he could, her muscular arms pulling her forward with each stroke.
“You take the ones on the surface!” Shawn called up. Unlike her perfect clarity, his voice burbled in the water like a normal person’s, and he wasn’t sure if she could understand him. Still, she was smart. She could figure it out. “I’m going after them!”
He flapped down into the darkness again, ignoring her cry. He’d lost the snake-worm he’d been trailing, but he could still sense the little bubbles of its wake, disturbances in the water that would probably have been invisible to him before but were now as clear as footprints. There were other bubbles too, big green ones floating up from the dark water below. Shawn wasn’t sure where they were coming from.
The snake-worm’s trail led down into the deep, though; maybe there were more of them down there.
He swam down, eyes straining. The blue-gray faded to washed-out black below, and he felt the water grow hot around him.
Then it moved, and green bubbles surged up all around him.
He thrust out blindly through the sudden heat and felt his hand hit something, and then something hit him.
He thought spear point and then wings and then help help help no no help.
As he tasted his own blood in the water, his scream came out as bubbles.
LORI
Lori’s phone was buzzing almost constantly now. Lori hadn’t looked at it.
Hawk and Tapper, the two boys on the ground in t
he pile of netting, still weren’t moving. Shawn had dived into the water.
Lori had yelled at him to stop. He hadn’t.
She wasn’t sure why she had yelled.
Everything was cold and clammy. Nothing directly threatened Lori right now. She had seen something in the water. No. She had felt it, or Handler had felt it and Lori had felt it because of what Handler had felt, like your fingers imagining the heat of a hot stove because your eyes had seen that it was turned on. She had yelled for the boy not to go in. He had gone in anyway.
Buzz, buzz, buzz, went her phone.
Too many jumps in too short a time. The girl who couldn’t take care of herself had let the monster save her and, as punishment, was now having to remember that she wasn’t really a girl. She was part of the monster, and it was having trouble making her act real.
A bullet panged off a cargo container beside Lori. She looked at the boat with the two gunmen in it, but they were still shooting at the water where Iara, the girl with the green hair, was hiding.
She looked around.
Three gunmen in wetsuits had come around the corner.
Lori remembered the hole the feeder had made in the concrete, opening it up to the water below.
She was moving on instinct, sidestepping the gunman at the front and checking his gun with one hand even as her other fist jabbed into his throat. He stumbled, and she saw another gunman aiming at her and ducked down under the first gunman’s gun to put his body between her and the others, then punched him in the crotch.
His head and chest spat blood as bullets ripped through him, clanging off the cargo containers over Lori’s head, and Lori shoved the dead man into the other two.
She didn’t need to fight. Handler would pull her again if she was in danger. She’d lose more of herself, and that would have bothered her before, but Lori didn’t see why it mattered right now.
Still, it was what she did.
But there were still two of them, and they shoved the man they’d just shot to death aside and aimed at her with their pistols.
Then a section of the cargo container beside them came to life and wrapped itself around one of the men like a giant snake. The corrugated red steel—no, an arm, Lori realized, stretched out longer than any arm and twisted like a bendy action figure and somehow colored to match the pattern of the shipping container, but still with fingers at the end—choked the man and twisted his arm away from Lori. His gun went off pointing at the other man, who went down with his chest bloody, and then the man turned his gun back toward himself, shooting behind him. Lori heard screaming, and part of the shipping container fell off, and then Lori realized it was Maya, the corrugated pattern rippling back into the normal shape of the willowy blond girl holding the man in a chokehold.
He was trying to fire behind himself at her, and Lori stepped in, grabbed the gun hand, and punched him in the throat until he collapsed.
“Oh gosh oh gosh oh gosh, I wasn’t trying to kill that first guy,” Maya said. “I just saw them pointing at you and I wanted to help. I did a season of wrestling. You punched him in the throat. He’s not human either, is he? I mean, not that we’re not human.” Maya smiled hopefully at Lori. “Mostly human? Ish?”
Lori’s phone buzzed again. She took it out and looked at it.
Handler: RUN
Handler: NOW
Handler: They are trying to herd you toward the water.
Handler: It’s in there and we are not ready to fight it yet.
“So should we help Iara and Shawn?” Maya asked. “Or . . . I brought her wheelchair, which, I don’t know, it seemed like she wouldn’t want to leave that behind.”
Handler: Shawn is dead.
“What?” Maya said, and Lori realized that she’d said it aloud. “Did he like text you to tell you that? Should we share numbers?”
Handler: Lori. Lori, focus.
Handler: If it gets us, it will still finish tracking accounts.
Handler: IT WILL GO AFTER BEN.
It was like pins and needles as Lori came back to herself, and it hurt, like biting a sore on the inside of your cheek, all the anger and fear and frustration that make people people rushing back in at once.
Lori felt hands on her shoulders and realized she had stumbled. Maya was steadying her. “Are you okay? You got weird. Did I trigger you? Was it phone numbers, because I don’t know why it’d be phone numbers and not like being shot at or whatever those snake-worm things are that just crawled out of those guys’ heads, but I am totally not judging your trigger—”
“I’m Lori.” Lori stood up straight and squeezed Maya’s hands before pulling them away from her shoulders. “We need to run now, or we’re all dead. Grab the wheelchair.”
“On it!” Maya nodded brightly and looked down at the things slithering back toward the docks. “Oh yeah, you meant literally on both now and run.”
Lori dashed back to the edge of the dock, where Hawk and Tapper were slowly getting back to their feet. “We’re leaving,” she said. “Can either of you drive a boat?”
“I can,” came a voice from nearby, and Lori looked up to see Iara driving a now-empty boat. Her eyes were large, and her legs splayed out awkwardly in the chair, but her hands were steady on the wheel. “There’s something in the water.”
“Yes, there is,” Lori said.
“It killed Shawn,” Iara said. “I don’t . . . I don’t know what it is.”
“I don’t know what any of us are,” Lori said. “Would you like to find out?”
“I have your chair,” Maya added softly.
“Thank you.” Iara swallowed as the boat bumped gently against the dock. “Let us get out of here, then. I wish to call my parents and go home.”
03
LORI
Lori was mostly back to herself by the time they reached the downtown docks and abandoned their stolen boat. She looked at her phone to check the time. It was only a little past noon.
“Give me a minute,” she said to the others, and pointed across the canal to a large water-level shop whose logo was a big friendly manta ray. “I’ll meet you guys in there.”
Without waiting for a reply, she stalked off, then dialed Ben’s day care.
“Sandee Day Care, this is Maura,” came the voice of an older lady. Maura was a genial woman who didn’t give Lori grief when she had to bring Ben late after he missed the ferry.
“Hi, Maura, this is Lori, Ben’s sister. I got a missed call?”
“Oh, hello, Lori. Let me give you to Mister Barkin,” Maura said.
Argh, Lori thought. “Thanks,” Lori said.
“Hello, Miss Fisher.” Mister Barkin was a big man who, as far as Lori could tell, was pretty sure everyone was raising children wrong. “We’ve had some trouble with Ben today.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Lori kept her teeth ungritted. She was pretty sure Barkin could hear when she grit them. “What’s wrong?”
“He’s been very disruptive and has had a hard time following directions.”
“Okay, so he’s seven,” Lori said, and immediately knew it was the wrong thing to say.
“When we invited Ben to share with us why he was so upset, he said that you had yelled at him this morning.”
I am going to kill that little jerk, Lori thought. “Ben sometimes has trouble getting ready on time in the mornings,” she said instead. “It’s honestly a challenge for both of us, and I’m sure Ben read my . . .” Her phone buzzed, and she pulled it away to look.
Handler: . . . attempt to set a consistent schedule to help him develop a routine . . .
“. . . attempt to set a schedule to develop a routine,” Lori finished, “as being grumpy with him.”
“Ben also said that you didn’t give him his ADHD pill this morning,” Barkin went on, and Lori winced and swore silently at the phone. “An important part of children’s development is establishing a routine, including regular and appropriate medication.”
“No, of course.” Lori didn’t care if
he could hear the gritted teeth this time. “I completely understand. I was trying to get Ben out the door, and it completely slipped my mind. Since it’s summer, we haven’t been worrying about his medicine unless he’s going on a field trip.” This was true-ish.
“We at Sandee Day Care can’t give any medication ourselves without authorization, and if you don’t think that you can commit to giving Ben his medication when he needs it—”
“If he’s becoming disruptive without it, then of course, I’d be happy to see that he has it every morning,” Lori added. “Ben’s doctor wanted us to avoid overmedicating him, you understand.” Because she’d had a lousy morning, she added, “Especially during the summer, the doctor really assumed he’d be getting enough exercise at day care that he wouldn’t need medication. Does Sandee still have outdoor playtime? Because I’ve heard horror stories about those day cares that just put the kids in front of the TV all day.”
After a thoughtful pause, during which Lori remembered why Mister Barkin made her nervous, he said, “We’ll keep an eye on him this afternoon. Based on his behavior—”
“I’ll be by in a little while to pick him up, anyway,” Lori added. “My work has finished up early for the day. Thanks so much for calling. I really appreciate you keeping me up to date on how Ben is doing.”
“We’ll see you soon, Miss Fisher,” Barkin said, and hung up on her.
Lori sighed, took a breath, and then dialed again. A moment later Jenn picked up. “Lemme guess.”
“I’m sorry,” Lori said. “Go without me.”
“We were supposed to figure out a plan for which guy you were gonna get this year!”
Lori sighed and gently head-butted her phone. “I can’t even manage a trip to the mall, Jenn. I think dating is going to be a stretch.”
Her phone buzzed, and she glanced at it.
Handler: Or you could tell your friend the truth.
Handler: About your noninterest in guys, I mean. Not about us.
It wanted her to be honest. That was rich.
Lori glared, even as Jenn said, “Come on, Fisher. That stuff might fly freshman and sophomore year, but it’s time to make a play.”
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