“Oh, what kind of question is that?” Kirk asked, rolling his eyes. “Are you human? After what’s happened, your body constantly on the edge of exploding into motion and your eyes taking in far too much information, are you human anymore? But then, you weren’t even sure before, were you?” Kirk’s voice was soft, pattering along without worry as he smiled at Tapper. “And after all, the first thing you thought when you got our little information packet was that this had to be a mistake, because you weren’t good enough, weren’t smart enough, that you were just a disappointment to your mother . . . and your second was wondering if maybe, just maybe, we could fix you.”
There was a whoosh beside Lori, and then Tapper was in front of Kirk, and Kirk’s head rocked back where Tapper’s fist had landed, and then Tapper was blurring into another punch, and another.
And Kirk still wasn’t falling.
Suddenly Kirk’s hand was on Tapper’s shoulder, and Tapper was on his knees.
“A little overwhelming, isn’t it, Mister Taylor?” Kirk asked. “Don’t worry. I don’t think I can fix you, but I can make sure you don’t hurt your mother or disappoint your teacher or have any of the kids at school look at you from the corner of their eyes ever again, and isn’t that what you really want?” Tapper’s head was bowed. He had one arm still up, but Kirk was holding it. “Maybe you’ll be on the table, or maybe you’ll be in a tank, but you won’t be hurting anyone with what you are anymore.”
“He’ll pass.” Lori lunged in, knocked Tapper from Kirk’s grip, and grabbed Kirk’s wrist. “Let’s see what you taste like.”
She waited for the fangs to come out of nowhere and spear through whatever Kirk was.
Kirk smiled at her. “Oh, honey.” And then he twisted his arm so that he was grabbing her wrist instead—
the phone was going to ring again, and Mister Barkin was going to tell her that they were taking her brother away because Lori couldn’t take care of him, she was a terrible guardian, and her brother deserved better, deserved someone smarter and more organized, and the worst part wasn’t that Mister Barkin was going to say it, the worst part was that when it happened, Lori would be relieved, because at least finally now it was done, and there was no more wondering and no more worrying and no more trying and failing and pretending she loved anyone, because how could she, she wasn’t even human
—and Lori realized that her phone was buzzing frantically in her pants pocket.
She was on the ground. When had she fallen to the ground?
She scrambled back, yanking her arm out of his grasp. The tiles on the white floor were cold beneath the palms of her hands as she crab walked away.
“Don’t get up,” Kirk said, his voice still casual. “In fact, get used to this room, because Ms. Lake really wants to meet you, and I’ve got a feeling you’ll be spending a lot of time here.” He came forward, unhurried and smiling. “And when it’s over, the world will have one less monster in it. Isn’t that what you really want?”
Lori was still scrambling away from him. Her hands slipped on something wet on the floor, and she sprawled out on her back. Kirk didn’t change his pace. “What are you?”
“I don’t have giant fangs or crushing superstrength or a kung fu grip,” Kirk said. He reached down, and Lori kicked at his hand, knocking it away, and then scrambled back out of reach until her head cracked against the wall. “But we all have to eat, don’t we? So when I get ahold of something I want, I tell it the truth.” He smiled again. “That’s all I do.”
Lori pushed herself back to her feet. Kirk was still coming. “What about Lake? Feeders don’t work for each other. You compete for food—killing people.”
“Feeders?” Kirk actually did stop now, chuckling. “Isn’t that a little prosaic? Why not call us ‘breathers’ or ‘reproducers’? Everything feeds, Miss Angler Consulting. You just disapprove of my dietary choices.” He raised an eyebrow. “But if you’re going to use a metaphor, then use it. You think Ms. Lake is just another feeder, like that thing you killed out on the docks or the one you just killed in here?” His eyes narrowed, making his smile turn suddenly nasty. “She’s big, Miss Angler Consulting. She likes to have someone to clean the bits of her that she can’t reach, clear away the extra scraps she doesn’t want to hunt down herself.”
“You’re like one of those birds that cleans the crocodile’s mouth,” Tapper said. He was back by the other corner, and his voice was a little unsteady, but he was on his feet and glaring.
Kirk rolled his eyes. “The word is ‘ symbiosis,’ Mister Taylor. I’m sure even the public education system probably mentioned it once or twice.”
“The word is ‘parasite,’ ” Tapper shot back. “You cling to her flank and eat her leftovers and hope she never notices you.”
“Oh, look at you, trying to offend me.” Kirk turned to Tapper. “Do you think that little distraction is going to save Miss Angler Consulting? Do you think it’s going to make her not think of you as that creepy jerk anymore? It must be hard, knowing everyone thinks of you as so rude, so angry, when all the time you’re hiding, because if they saw what was underneath, it would be even worse.”
“You . . .” Tapper paused. Then he reached into his pocket. “Hang on, got a call.”
“Children today,” Kirk exclaimed, and looked over at Lori. “You can’t even have a decent conversation anymore, with everyone looking at their phones.”
“Yeah, we’ve got trouble,” Tapper said into the phone. “They’re on us. Yeah.”
“Well, then,” Kirk said, turning back to Lori, “I guess you get to go first.” He stepped forward again.
“No, it’s too far,” Tapper said. “Can you get the lights?”
Kirk reached out, and Lori ducked under his grab, hammered him in the ribs, grabbed his arm, and punched him in the jaw. It was like punching rubber—it didn’t hurt, but it didn’t seem to do much either. Kirk spun toward her, and she blocked the sweep of his arm, kicked him in the knee, and yanked on his arm as she kicked his ankle. He was heavier than he looked, though, and his other hand clapped down on her waist—
she couldn’t do it, couldn’t take care of him on her own, how could she ever think it was possible, she was nothing, just a sad, weak thing pretending to be a real little girl, she didn’t even care about him, not really, he’d be better off with someone who really loved him
—and Tapper slammed into her, pulling her free, and she blinked in the sudden darkness and realized that the lights were out.
“Hang on,” Tapper muttered, and Lori started to ask why or to what, and then they blurred, and it was a crushing rush of force all through her body, Tapper’s grip like iron as he held her, and the breath blew out of her lungs as something shattered, and as cold air whipped around her, Lori realized that what had shattered had been the windowed wall looking out over the miracoral pool.
Tapper let go. “Best I could do,” he called over as their arc turned into a fall.
Lori had time to get her breath back before they hit the water.
The cold was as much of a shock as the impact itself, and she flailed, inhaling water and then realizing that she was actually inhaling water and kicking blindly, frantically, wondering how far under she was, how close to the miracoral that had attacked the last time she’d gotten close to it. The water was grabbing at her clothes, pulling her down, and—
A hand closed around her and pulled her up, and a moment later she broke the surface, still coughing.
“You’re really bad at breathing water,” Tapper said beside her.
Lori spat out the last of the water, then looked around. They were in the middle of the pool. “I thought there were motion sensors.”
Tapper looked back at the Lake Foundation building, which had a broken window up on the top floor. A moment later, Hawk kicked open the door they’d used to get inside, Iara in his arms and Maya close behind them.
“I think we’re done with stealth mode,” Tapper said. “Come on. Let’s swim.”
“Hey.” Lori started swimming after him. He turned back, treading water at a speed that made it foam around him. “Thanks for the save.”
Tapper looked away. “Thanks for not teleporting out and leaving me on my own back there.”
“Yeah.” Yeah, it’s not really under my control, and now that you say that, I’m not sure why Handler didn’t do that, she didn’t add. “Let’s just hope the others found more than we did.”
HAWK
A few hours later they were back on the rooftop at PortManta, all of them dry and not just Tapper, who apparently used his superspeed to vibrate all the water off him, and man, that sounded kind of dirty. Iara was back in her chair, wearing her leather jacket over a creamy white sundress that made the warm red tones in her skin stand out. She munched on a breakfast burrito and shot him a grin when she caught him looking.
“So we’re something called Nix,” Hawk said, looking at the late-morning skyline and hoping he wasn’t blushing as much as he felt like he was. “What’s that, anyway?”
“It’s not angels,” Tapper shot back. Hawk winced. Apparently Tapper had heard him yesterday. “Maya, send us the file.” He popped a hard candy into his mouth and crunched it loudly.
“Okay, hang on.” Maya had a smoothie and was fiddling with her phone. “I transferred it over from the USB drive with the cord that came with it—”
“After I showed you how,” Tapper added.
“—and I’m just getting it formatted right so it’s easy for us all to read on our phones, and also I was really hoping to see something about the fae or—”
“Please, alemã,” Iara said, smiling, “so we can all read.”
“Right! Sorry! Okay, here you go.” She pressed a button on her phone. “Check your mail.”
“Would’ve been faster to set up a cloud,” Tapper muttered, glaring at his phone, Maya, or the world in general. Then he started scrolling, his fingers moving faster on the screen than Hawk could follow.
“It seems . . .” Iara had her lips pursed, looking at her phone. “It seems Tapper was correct.”
“Duh, Ipanema.”
Iara sighed. “The document suggests we—all Nix—are mutations. If I understand correctly, they believe we are linked somehow to the miracoral.”
“The Lake Foundation is the big corporation responsible for the miracoral,” Lori said, frowning at her own phone. She’d grabbed new clothes as well—jeans and a dark blue blouse that was light for the cloudy day—but she didn’t seem to mind the cold. Summers in the Pacific Northwest must run cooler than summers in Austin, Hawk decided. “At least, that’s the public story. Lake was just saying in the interview that they engineered it to help create renewable energy and replace oil-based plastics.”
“They’re lying.” Tapper didn’t look up from his own screen. “They want something from the miracoral. They’re studying it—that’s how they figured out how to use it for power—but they didn’t create it. Looks like it showed up about two years ago—”
“Isn’t that around the time the water rose?” Maya asked, and then frowned. “I mean, I think? It’s kind of hard to remember when it’s not written down anywhere and nobody else will talk with you about it.”
“That’s right.” Lori nodded, smiling over at her. “Or at least, I remember it that way too. The water rose, and then . . .” Her face clouded over, and she blinked away an unhappy thought. “Then the miracoral came, and the Lake Foundation started using it for electricity and making things out of the gray plastic.”
“That’s all extra,” Tapper said, scrolling down fast enough that his fingers blurred. “Stuff they found out while trying to learn its weakness.”
“When did you all get your abilities?” Lori asked.
“A year ago,” Maya said. “I remember, it was after I switched to swim team, and people were being jerks, and then all of a sudden I could, you know, do weird stuff.”
“Same here,” Tapper said. “They think the miracoral did something to us. They think we might be the weakness they’re looking for.”
“Their mistake,” Hawk said, grinning. “Those eels in the computer room found out the hard way not to mess with us.”
Iara didn’t grin back. Maya flinched a little. Girls, Hawk thought, and rolled his eyes.
“So, uh,” Maya said, looking away, “if we’re linked to the miracoral, does that make us mermaids?”
“No. Gah. Stop.” Tapper glared over. “And they’re crayfish. Or crawdads, if you’re a Southern hick instead of a Midwestern ditz.”
“You could be a merman?” Maya offered. Tapper kept glaring.
“Regardless of who is a mermaid,” Iara said, smiling at both of them, “their studies on the miracoral are inconclusive. When they study the coral, it seems completely normal. It has none of the properties that make it useful.”
“It’s a feeder, then,” Lori said in a low voice.
“Like the thing in the white room?” Tapper asked. “Or Kirk, or the eels, or SpongeBob?”
“Like all of it.” Lori sounded angry; Hawk saw that the hand not holding the phone was balled into a fist. “Feeders don’t show up on camera most of the time. If you ran a test, the instruments would show that nothing was there, or something normal. That’s how they work. And Lake had one chained up by her office.”
“She was using it,” Tapper cut in, voice rough as though daring her to argue. “Like those wasps that lay eggs in the spider, and then the eggs hatch and the larvae eat their way out. Only she was breeding more of those eels.”
“Well, that’s another thing we did today, then.” Hawk grinned over at him. “No more eel makers, right?” He thought for a moment about those things crawling on him, curling around and trying to force their way into his mouth, and then put the thought out of his mind.
“Yes.” Lori nodded. “And she had another one working for her. Kirk. My—” She broke off for a second as her phone buzzed, then started again. “My power didn’t work on it. It was like . . . I need a place to latch on, to attack. Usually when I touch them, that’s all I need, but whatever Kirk is, it couldn’t see him. So whoever Lake is, she’s big enough that she uses other feeders to breed her pets or do her dirty work.” She shook her head. It almost looked like she was going to cry. “We’re no further than when we began.”
Hawk stood, and in a moment, he was beside her. “Hey.”
She glared up at him. “Look, we’ve got two more days, and then she finds me and comes after my brother, and that cannot happen. I will not let it happen.”
She was scared, Hawk realized. Using sad and angry to cover it.
“You don’t do a lot of team sports at school, do you?” Hawk asked.
“Like you do, Pint-Size?” Tapper shot back.
“I did football.” Hawk grinned. “Being small makes me harder to tackle. And also, it’s good for teaching strategy.” He dropped to one knee beside Lori. “Look, you start at your own twenty, you run for four yards and get tackled, it’s easy to look at that and see how little you gained. But you’ve also set up a second-and-six, which means you can pass or run. You’ve put your team closer to a first down, one step closer to the other end zone.”
“Ah,” Iara said with a little sniff, “American football.”
“Provided you can convert on third-and-short,” Maya added, and then, when everyone looked at her, “Sorry!”
“How do you know so much about football?” Hawk asked with a laugh.
“You don’t think they have women’s teams at some schools?” Tapper snapped. “Or coed?”
“Whoa, dude, chill.” Hawk raised his hands in mock surrender. “I’m just glad to have someone else here who gets it. Anyway, point is, you guys are smart. Keep reading. If they studied the miracoral and wanted to study us, they had to have other stuff about the miracoral and what it does, right? We pulled all their data. Maybe we can find out why we turned into Nix. You figure that out, we’re solid.”
“It’s not just mutation,” Tapper sai
d. “It chose us.”
“Like changelings?” Maya asked.
“Not like—arrgh!” Tapper glared over at her. “No! Something made us into Nix on purpose!”
“Why?” Lori asked.
“Because it was screwing with us.” Tapper put his phone down. “Because it hates us.”
Iara gave him a soft smile, hands folded in her lap. “I know it seems hard, the things we must face now, but if we are brave—”
“Because we were all broken,” Tapper snapped, cutting her off, “so it thinks we’re useless, fair game, the weak kid the bully picks on because nobody else will care.”
“Are you like that?” Maya said quietly.
“Shut up!” Tapper blurred to his feet and stalked across the rooftop, his fingers twitching. “Just shut up. I was . . . You think I don’t know?” He wasn’t looking at them. He was blurring in place. “You think I don’t know how I sound all the time? I had pills. They were expensive, and my mom’s insurance only covered like half of it, but they worked. Stuff didn’t come at me all at once anymore. I could see one thing instead of seeing everything. I could, I could walk in a crowd and not feel like all the talking was gonna make me crawl out of my skin. And then this comes, and all of a sudden, it’s all there again, and I can’t, I can’t, the pills don’t work anymore, and every time I let everything speed up, it’s like it’s all there going through me. It’s screwing with me, just like it gave Ipanema mermaid powers because she’s stuck in the chair, or . . .” He looked back at them, and his mouth worked for a moment like words were fighting to come out. “Or whatever. It did this to all of us.” He looked over at Iara. “Sorry.”
“Partial paraplegia.” Iara sat up straight. “It was a car accident. I had spent years convincing the boys that a pretty girl could like Superman and the Avengers just as they did, that I was not a ‘fake geek girl.’ ”
“Oh, that’s a thing in Brazil, too?” Hawk asked.
Iara nodded. “But after the accident, when I am out of the hospital, when I am back with my friends? The store where we would buy our comics is at the top of many stairs.” She shook her head. “If anyone thinks my disability makes me weak, that is their mistake. But you are right, Tapper. I was angry. I did not fit.”
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