“And Pint-Size is right too,” Tapper muttered, not looking at Hawk. “We got a win. We know more than we did.”
“Heck yeah, dude.” Hawk forced himself to grin over, since Tapper was trying, even if he didn’t speak universal dude language. “We kicked butt.”
“We did.” Iara flashed Hawk a smile after Tapper didn’t, and really, if only one of those two people was gonna smile at Hawk, he was okay with it being her. “We struck a blow against the monsters and escaped unharmed. We are one step closer to destroying them. Tonight, we celebrate that.”
“Wooo!” Maya waved her arms in what was possibly the white-girl-est attempt at . . . something . . . Hawk had ever seen. “Pizza and movies and kissing games!”
“You guys can celebrate,” Lori said, pushing herself to her feet. She had one arm wrapped around herself. “If we’re done, I think I should probably go home before the sitter starts sending ransom notes.” Her phone buzzed, and she glanced down at it.
“Is that her now?” Iara asked. “If you need to go, we can call you when we find something in the files.”
Lori looked at her phone for a long moment, and then jerked and looked up. It was weird, Hawk thought. Even though Iara had spoken, Lori looked at Maya for a second.
“Um, if you guys want, maybe you can come to our place,” Lori said, and then she wasn’t looking at any of them. “There’s more room for pizza and movies, and . . . just as long as you’re quiet when Ben goes to bed.”
“Party at Lori’s place,” Tapper said, and Hawk saw a tiny smile on the skinny guy’s face.
LAKE
Tia Lake stepped into the white room where her breeding host had been staying. Her black stiletto heels clicked on the tile of the floor, the echo the only noise in the room. The chair was empty, as Kirk had said it would be. The dead eels lay in a pool of slime on the floor, the only remaining sign of what had been there.
Tia Lake’s mouth was pressed into a thin line of red across her pale white face. She turned to the guard who had shuffled quietly into the room behind her. “And on the main floor.”
The guard’s eyes were glazed, but there was still something in his face. Not fear. He was too far gone for that. Sadness. “Three of them dead. The men tried to save them, but it was too late. They vanished.”
“I’m sure they did.” They would have died to save the eels, were it possible. That was how they worked.
She wanted to kill more guards now, but that wouldn’t help her plans. She had to focus on that, now more than ever.
“Ask Kirk to come to me,” she said, and the guard left at a jog.
Tia Lake knelt down beside the little dead eels, alone in the white room.
While the dead ones slid from the world naturally, these had never been born. They were less than living, not wholly part of her but not wholly distinct. They were still here, hours later.
Her fingernails carved little furrows into the white tile of the floor.
Small as the eels were, they were still enough of her that people would remember them, remember her. Still enough to trap her.
She scooped the dead little eels up in her hands and brought them to her mouth.
“You are nothing,” she said as she shoveled them in.
IARA
Iara looked over when Maya said, “Oooooooooooh, page twenty-three, page twenty-three! It says I’m an octopus, I think!”
Tapper, whose fingers blurred faster than Iara could follow, was there a moment later. “It does not!” he said with annoyance, and then read aloud. “ ‘Mutations of the Nix suggest that the miracoral recognized advantageous traits of aquatic species and adapted subjects accordingly. Subject Maya Finch displays greatly enhanced flexibility and camouflage, similar to that of several species of octopus.’”
“Right, like I said!”
Iara finally reached the page. “So our abilities are not random.” She kept reading. “It says that Shawn is . . .” She stopped herself, sighed. “. . . was similar to some type of stingray.”
Maya reached over and touched her arm. “I’m sorry.”
Iara smiled at her. “We cannot change what occurred, but we can seek justice for him.”
“ ‘Physical durability and resistance to toxin consistent with . . .’ Dude, I’m a turtle?” Hawk said, frowning. “I never got bitten by a radioactive turtle. I’d remember that.”
“I don’t think I’ve been bitten by an octopus. Do octopi even bite people?”
“They have beaks.” Tapper’s fingers blurred on his phone. “Also the plural is ‘octopuses,’ and also also, nobody got bitten by a radioactive anything. You’re thinking of Spider-Man.”
“Okay.” Maya frowned. “What if it’s because a turtle was the last thing you touched before the miracoral found us, and like, I don’t know, genetic stuff was—”
“Have you ever touched an octopus, Blondie?”
“I had fried calamari a few times,” Maya tried. “But I didn’t like it as much as onion rings.”
Tapper sighed. “So no, the Nix probably didn’t mess with us using Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles rules.”
Smiling, Iara read her own profile:
Subject Iara Costa’s physical ability in water and radically improved hearing and electroreception are consistent with several species of dolphin.
“I actually sometimes swim with the river dolphins,” Iara said happily, also noting that nothing in the notes said anything about her trick to change people’s memories. So they did not know everything.
“Okay.” Maya raised a finger. “So that’s a point in favor of the Ninja Turtles theory.”
“No, we are not doing this. I know I’ve never touched . . .” Tapper kept reading. “What is a peacock mantis shrimp?”
Hawk tapped on his phone, then began to laugh. “Oh, dude, I thought the turtle was dumb, but yours is so much worse,” he said, and held up his phone for them all to see.
Tapper glared at the brightly colored bug-looking thing on Hawk’s phone. “I am not a shrimp!”
“Wow, it’s known for being grumpy, punching things so fast that it breaks the sound barrier, and having extra stuff in its eyes that lets it see more colors than anyone else can.”
Tapper sighed grimly. “I’m a shrimp.”
“Sorry, man.” Hawk continued to laugh. “We can’t all be cool dolphin-mermaids like Iara.” He grinned at Iara, and she returned it. He was very cute when he smiled.
“No, Tapper, use it!” Maya said, leaning in and nodding encouragingly. “Now that you know, maybe you can figure out other stuff you can do?” She closed her eyes and screwed her face up in fierce concentration.
“Do not,” Tapper said, “squirt ink on the patio.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“There is one thing in these notes,” Iara said, looking out across the rooftop, “that confuses me.”
“I keep waiting for them to talk about what part of space the feeders are from,” Hawk said, shaking his head and using his finger to scroll down through the document on his phone.
“It’s not space,” Tapper said, as he had every time Hawk had said something to this effect. “It’s an alternate dimension we can’t perceive because it’s outside our frame of reference.”
“Right,” Hawk said. “Like space.”
“Still no.”
“They speak of all of us, plus Shawn”—Iara sighed, shared a little nod with Tapper, and kept going—“as well as a Sarah woman who died when they tried to make her into a puppet.”
“Wait, if they knew that we died if they put an eel in us, why’d they try to put one in Pint-Size?” Tapper asked. “You said it was on him like bad anime.”
Iara snorted, Maya blushed, and Hawk looked confused. “Yes,” Iara said finally. “But it could have just been trying to choke him. There were many.”
“Plus, eels are pretty stupid,” Hawk added, grinning.
“My point,” Iara said, since she kept getting interrupted, “is that there is nothing here a
bout Lori.”
With hearing as good as hers, it was easy to notice when the rooftop went quiet. She looked up. “What? We are certain she is not a Nix?”
“The miracoral is,” Maya said quietly.
Iara frowned. “Even so, I assumed that Lake would list concerns about someone who hunts monsters, like Lori does.”
“If that’s the truth,” Tapper said, grimacing.
“When she teleported us,” Maya said, wrapping her arms around herself as though suddenly cold, “we went into this place that even you would have found weird. Uh, no offense.”
Tapper waved it away. “What was it like?”
“It was wrong,” Maya said, “and it was cold, and big, and something there was looking at me.”
Tapper nodded. “She didn’t kill the other feeder, the way she said she did. Something else killed it. She grabbed it, and that let the big thing sense it, and then it came out of shut up not space,” he said rapidly, glaring at Hawk, who had his mouth open. “The point is, she has something bad tied to her. She’s not like us at all.”
Hawk shrugged. “So she’s got some kind of superweird guardian angel?”
Tapper rolled his eyes. “I like it better when you keep trying to make it about space.”
“So what does this mean?” Iara asked. “She helped us against Lake. She is continuing to help us. If you are saying she is an enemy—”
“No!” Maya said, and then looked over at Tapper, hurt. “You were supposed to say it with me.”
Tapper looked at her for a long moment. “She cares about her brother,” he said finally.
“And she cares about other people,” Maya added. “She cares about us.”
“Right,” Hawk said, “so we could twist ourselves up in knots worrying about it, or we could just go with it, and if it turns out she’s a monster—”
“She’s not!” Maya insisted.
“But she took you into a place that creeped you out,” Tapper said.
“Yeah, but—”
“And she’s got a monster looking over her shoulder, and she breathes water even though she isn’t like us,” Tapper went on. “So think about it.”
Maya glared. “She’s on our side!”
“Guys, chill,” Hawk said. “We’ve got enough real stuff to worry about, right? It’s like you’re looking for ways to feel sad about stuff instead of letting it go. Can’t we just have a pizza party and hang?”
“Yes,” Maya said firmly, and looked over at Iara. “Now, if you guys will excuse us, Iara is going to take me shopping . . . ?”
LORI
Lori got off the afternoon ferry and stalked down the sidewalk toward home before she could lose her nerve.
She could just tell them Ben needed routine, which was true, and she’d meet them tomorrow. It wouldn’t be unfriendly, just practical. None of them had someone they had to take care of. Maybe that was the smarter thing to do. Maybe—
Handler: Celebrating is a thing normal humans do, kid. FYI.
Handler: Ben will be fine.
Handler: Pizza and movies and kissing games.
Lori shoved her phone into her pocket. Those texts had arrived at PortManta, right as she’d been ready to leave again.
What did Handler even mean by that? Was that a reminder that she was supposed to impersonate a normal human? Was she supposed to lie to everyone and pretend the miracoral hadn’t turned an angry red and sent crayfish after her because it had recognized her as a nonhuman threat? Was she supposed to forget every thought that had raced through her head while Kirk had held her arm? Was she supposed to act like Maya had forgotten what it was like when Handler had taken her into the other place?
It didn’t matter. She dashed up the stairs and opened the apartment door. “Ben? Jenn? It’s me!”
“Hey, Lori!” Ben called from the living room. A moment later Jenn came out into the hallway, a curvy girl with a smile full of dimples and bangs dyed bright pink, tugging a sweater over her T-shirt.
She appeared alive and mostly conscious after a day with Ben, and she smiled a bit wearily at Lori. “He’s been great. He didn’t want to eat apple slices at lunch, so we did applesauce instead, which I hope was okay.”
Lori smiled. “It’s fruit of some sort. Thank you so much.”
“You can thank me by trying on what I got you,” Jenn said, flashing a grin that brought out the dimples in her cheeks, and held up a long-sleeved ruffled black top with a sassy red lightning-bolt pattern.
“Oh, that’s pretty,” Lori said happily, and then, as she figured out how it would look on her, added, “Like with an undershirt?”
“Ha-ha, nope!” Jenn tossed it to her. “Maybe a cute bra if you want to show off the straps, but otherwise, you wear this, like with courage.” As Lori stared helplessly at the top in her hands, Jenn’s voice softened. “Lori, come on, I’m not gonna make you look bad. It shows off your collarbones, which are really cute, and the crop top only does a little bit of midriff, so you tie a sweater around your waist or something if you don’t like it.”
“It’s . . .” At least it had a back. Jenn had a much stronger opinion of Lori’s body than Lori did.
“Look, trust me on this,” Jenn said. “It’s not a clubbing outfit. You wear it with jeans or those nice capris you got back in the spring, and as soon as you walk into the room, it’ll be like, bam, boobs, but like in a classy way!”
Lori laughed. “I will try it. I promise. Once I’m not exhausted from work.”
Jenn shook her head. “We’re gonna get you a man, Fisher. I swear it.” She gave Lori a hug, then called back into the living room, “See you later, Ben-to-box!”
“See you, Jenn-and-the-Ho’grams!” Ben called back happily, and as Jenn left, Lori shut the door behind her.
The kitchen had dirty plates on the counter and the twist tie from a rice-cake bag by the stove, ready to catch fire next time Lori tried to make dinner. She shoved the former into the dishwasher, shoved the latter into the utensil drawer, and called out, “Ben, would it be okay with you if I had friends come over?”
“Who are they?” Ben called back.
Lori headed into the living room, which had Legos all over the floor along with Pokémon cards and several sheets of paper with stick figures having brightly colored battles on them. “They’re from work. They wanted to come over. They’re going to bring pizza.”
Ben looked up from where he was building . . . something? Maybe a submarine. Maybe a Pokémon. Something, anyway, out of Legos. His big dark eyes were narrowed suspiciously. “Cheese pizza?”
“No, I thought we might try pizza with fish and asparagus and scrambled eggs on it,” Lori said thoughtfully, and as Ben burst into horrified giggles, she added, “Yes, cheese pizza. So is it okay?”
“Sure.” Ben went back to his Legos.
Lori considered making him clean up, and then remembered that it was his apartment too, and she’d just sprung the guests on him, and decided to let it be instead.
“Thanks, little guy. I appreciate you being good with the change in plans.”
“ ‘Our family might get there late . . .’ ” Ben called back from the living room.
“ ‘But we’ll get there together,’ ” Lori finished, glancing over at the dumb sign above the sink and shaking her head. She cleared several weeks of mail and notes from day care off the kitchen table, closed the door to the office, and got out glasses and plates. Iara had insisted that she would take care of everything else.
She took the crop top back into her room and looked at it skeptically.
Well, she had promised.
She put it on with the nice capris that Jenn had mentioned (and insisted Lori buy in the first place), fiddled with the neckline a bit, and checked herself in the mirror.
“Bam,” she whispered, and tried to settle the nervous giggle trying to escape. But like in a classy way.
And that was when the knock on the door came, of course. Lori headed back out into the kitchen, paused, dar
ted back into her room, pulled a long-sleeved flannel top around her waist, and called, “Okay, remember, Ben, guests mean what?”
“Close the door when I pee,” Ben called back without looking up.
“Thank you.” Boys, Lori thought, and opened the door.
The gang was there. Hawk was wearing a new Hawaiian shirt and had his hair slicked back. He was putting down Iara’s wheelchair—with Iara, now wearing a pale green sundress the same color as her hair, still in it—as the door opened. “Oh no. Stairs. I forgot about the stairs.”
“It is nothing,” Iara said, grinning and patting Hawk on the arm. “Hawk was happy to show off his muscles.” Hawk grinned and looked down, embarrassed. “You look lovely.”
“Got pizza,” said Tapper, coming forward with large steaming boxes in his arms as though prepared to run Lori over if she didn’t get out of the way. “Where do I put them?”
“Kitchen table’s great,” Lori said as she moved aside, and Tapper stalked past her and into the kitchen, which faced out over the living room, so of course the first one Ben had to meet was Tapper.
“Hi, what’s your name?” Ben said from the living room.
“Tapper. You’re Ben?”
“Yeah, hey, Tapper, what’s your favorite Pokémon?”
Tapper frowned. “It depends on the generation. By the numbers, Squirtle clearly has the best stats, but if you can evolve fast enough, Charmander eventually—”
“I like Dedenne,” Ben said brightly, “because he does electricity to communicate, and sometimes he makes a squeaky noise when Team Rocket shows up!”
“Wait,” Tapper said, “that totally disregards Dedenne’s stats, and Discharge isn’t even that good an ability . . .” He took a breath. “Okay, yeah, Dedenne’s cool.”
Lori breathed a silent thank-you to whoever made most boys fundamentally similar and headed back to the front door. Iara had just gotten her chair up over the little ledge and inside, and she wheeled past Lori, giving Lori a smile that Lori didn’t quite get. Hawk followed her, holding the door open for Maya.
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