Feeder

by Patrick Weekes

  “Thanks for having us over, Lori!” Maya said as she came in, the last one inside. She wore a bright pink blouse open over a lacy satin undershirt. A short pleated black skirt danced around her waist, showing off long legs that ended with strappy black sandals.

  “I, um,” said Lori, and realized she was still looking at Maya’s legs, forced herself not to look at Maya’s legs, and looked up instead to see that Maya had done something with her hair so that instead of the simple pixie cut it had been before, it bounced out in excited little waves like it was saying hi to Lori. Maya smiled. Lori’s face was hot, and she was pretty sure she was blushing. “You’re welcome,” she finally blurted.

  She was saved mercifully by hearing Ben asking Iara if she was Professor X.

  “Oh no, I have to make sure he doesn’t say anything,” Lori said, and hurried back to the kitchen in time to hear Iara laugh and Hawk say something about her being She-Hulk instead, because of her hair.

  Lori’s phone buzzed, and she yanked it from her pocket.

  Handler: Lori. Chill.

  Lori: What is this? What is going on?

  Handler: You’re celebrating.

  Handler: Like a person.

  Lori: Why is Maya wearing all that?

  Handler: She’s probably not wearing anything.

  Handler: You know, shape-shifter.

  Handler: So if it helps, just think about her being naked.

  Lori shoved the phone back into her pocket, smiled at Hawk and Iara, watched Tapper hunt through the Lego pieces, and decided to grab a piece of pizza.

  Her heart was hammering and she was still pretty sure something was going to go terribly wrong at any second, but tonight, the monster was telling her not to worry. It wanted her to celebrate.

  Like a person.

  TAPPER

  The floor had rough ragged carpet that stretched and scratched and snagged his forearms when he moved. The Legos were scattered across it. They should have been on something flat. They would have been right angles then. Instead they were bright and shiny in all the colors and glittered everywhere at him. Red and green and blue and yellow and other red and too many to track. Some of the reds were supposed to be the same color but weren’t. Different batches maybe. Different chemical mixtures. The mix of chemicals put too much blue into one of them so that it was a tiny bit darker.

  “Ash’s Pikachu is so cute.” That was Ben. Ben was Lori’s brother. He talked a lot. It had been confusing at first. Now it didn’t bother Tapper. Sound didn’t get to be too much for him the way that colors and light did. He just had to say something when Ben was done. “She’s the most famous Pokémon.”

  Ben was building a dragon robot. He didn’t care about the colors being wrong. Even the ones that were very different. One wing was blue and another was green. One of the dragon’s legs was a half-made leg from another Lego set. All the pieces were perfect and crisp. The rest of the dragon robot was all thrown together from pieces that had been in Ben’s box.

  He was done talking.

  “Pikachu is male.”

  Was that mean? Would that hurt Ben’s feelings? Looking would tell Tapper. It would also mean looking at Ben and seeing all the muscles in his face move when he talked. Flesh tone changing in the cheeks and even under the hair from blood flow. The little old coffee table had fake wood paneling with one corner chipped off in the shape of a triangle to show plywood underneath. He had to say something else.

  “He’s an it in the games.” That was better. Ben liked Pokémon. He wasn’t scared when Tapper knew things. That had been too harsh. He still needed more. “Though.” He put it on the end. People did that to show they were done talking. It connected the words. “Though” and “through” and “rough.” They looked like they should sound the same. Ugh ugh ugh.

  Tapper moved the more-red-blue pieces into a pile. They fit together nicely when he organized them. The red-red pieces went into another pile. The glitter from the different angles made it still look like different colors. But he knew they were the same. They were just in different places.

  “Oh.” Ben paused. “Cool.”

  “You appear to be enjoying yourself.” That was Iara. Tapper looked up. She wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to Hawk. Hawk’s head and shoulders and knees were all pointed toward her. He was smiling. It looked natural. Tapper wondered how he did it.

  The light from the kitchen was bright and glittery. The glass bowl around the lamp hadn’t been cleaned in a long time. It was frosted but uneven. There were eight dead flies stuck inside. Seven were upside down. One was on its side. Lori had a dish in her hand. It didn’t match the other dishes. The pattern on the inside of the dish was a spiral instead of a plain white with blue edges. The dish was old. It had tiny little scrapes from forks and knives and little discolorations from cracks deep inside that weren’t on the surface yet.

  “I’m taking the win.” That was Hawk. He was talking to Iara. Tapper knew because that was where Hawk was looking. “There’s always room for pain.” His smile was bright white against his dark skin. “And that’ll kill you if you let it.” One of his teeth was more yellow than the others. It might be a cavity. The smile still made Hawk look handsome. “So you’ve gotta relax and be happy.” He said “gotta” and not “got to.” There was no space between the words.

  Lori put the plate away. Tapper wondered if he should tell her that it was going to break someday. Maybe not. All plates did that. The cupboard door had one new hinge and one old hinge. The new hinge was shinier and caught the light as she opened the door. Above the sink next to the cupboard was a sign:

  OUR FAMILY MIGHT GET THERE LATE

  Then a picture of a car with too many things.

  BUT WE’LL GET THERE TOGETHER

  Tapper’s mom would like that sign. Even though whoever loaded the car was stupid for putting so much stuff into it.

  Even his eyes could barely see the thing behind Lori. It was always behind her. It was big. Too big to see. And Tapper saw everything. But it wasn’t all here. A cord of colors that were too shiny to be real normal colors in this world came from Lori’s back and went someplace else. The refraction was thicker than water. All Tapper could see was the size and the cord.

  “Do you think Lori needs help?” That was Maya. Maya was on the other couch by herself.

  What Maya was asking wasn’t the real question. It was hard. Tapper didn’t always know what the real question was. Sometimes he thought he did. Sometimes he said the answer to the real question and made people angry. Weird boy creep god why does he even talk to us I bet he smells.

  Lori didn’t need help. It was her house. She knew where everything went. Her heart rate was lower than normal. Her skin was flushed because of it. She bounced a little when she took steps. Her glossy dark hair bounced with the steps.

  A light came from the thing in the other place. It came down the cord too fast for anyone but Tapper to see. At the end of the cord it reached Lori. Lori stopped and looked down at her phone.

  “You didn’t dress up like that to sit on the couch.” Tapper tried to say it in a way that made it okay for Maya. It needed more. It needed what a normal person would say. “And she can’t complete simple sentences whenever she looks at you.” That was better. Maya would know that it was good to go. Maybe. No. Maybe not. Maya’s hair was three yellows darker than wheat. It had been only two yellows darker before. Maya’s clothes were darker too. They were closer to the color of the couch now. “So go get her.” Better. That made sense. But it didn’t sound nice. “Blondie.”

  Maya smiled at Tapper and then looked down. Maya’s skin went darker. But it was a blush and not because Tapper had made Maya sad. Maya’s clothes slid brighter too. The saturation turned up.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Tapper turned back to Ben and the Legos.

  Being a person was hard.

  LAKE

  “Heck of a mess,” Tia Lake’s aide, a round and unassuming man with a constant little
smile, said cheerfully as he walked into the white room. “The people who do the windows say the version the rest of the building has was technically discontinued, and they can get us a replacement from a similar line, but there’s a chance that the light will hit it slightly differently, and in the late afternoon, you’ll be able to—”

  “Stop. Karkinos.” Tia Lake turned to him. She used his older name, his first name, when they were alone. He had gone silent but still stared at her with an agreeable unworried smile. “My best incubator is dead, and the Nix escaped. Tell me why I do not use you as the new host.”

  “You could.” Karkinos shrugged, his jowls twisting with his smile. “It’s been a good run, Mistress, but if you think I can help you more by popping out little eel babies than I can finding the Nix and Miss Angler Consulting, it’s not like I could stop you. I have always been yours to kill at your whim. And also, it’s been Kirk for the last few centuries.”

  Tia looked at him more closely. Something bothered her. “You speak the truth. You are not afraid of me.”

  “I know what I am, Mistress.” Karkinos’s voice was even. “I am useful, and I am hard to kill, and I eat better following in your wake. When you are gone, I will either mourn you or”—his eyes wrinkled with his smile this time—“I will never remember you at all. And if you kill me, it’ll have been after a long stretch of good eating.”

  It had been so long. She was so close. She wanted to rend and tear and finish everything.

  But if she destroyed her servant, she would lose what help she had. She needed the Nix. The Nix were the key to unlocking the miracoral, and the miracoral was the key to bringing the Leviathan.

  And the Leviathan was the key to oblivion, and without oblivion, she could never be forgotten.

  Tia Lake let out a long breath and adjusted her black blouse. “Tell me how close we are to getting the financial data on Angler Consulting.”

  “Two or three days at most,” Karkinos said, and raised a finger. “But. Would you care for another lead?” He held up his personal tablet, which had an image on it.

  It was grainy and blurry. “Our cameras are better than that,” Lake said.

  “Unless another feeder tries to jam them,” Karkinos agreed. “Most of it was garbage, but once you pushed back against it, a few frames came through with enough data for me to clean up into still images. This one in particular is useful.”

  The image was from Tia Lake’s office. Her security camera, she thought.

  A woman—no, a girl, with long dark hair and lightly sun-kissed skin—was standing in her office. In one hand she held her phone.

  Karkinos used his finger and thumb to zoom in on the girl’s phone. Tia Lake could clearly read, “J Vickers Cell.”

  She gave Karkinos the faintest fraction of a smile. “You are tracking it?”

  “As we speak,” he said, tugging on his suit with a proud little sniff. “And when I encountered our little interlopers, I did get ahold of one other little thing . . .”

  LORI

  Ben had gone to bed a little after nine, after hugging everyone, promising to show Tapper the rest of his Pokémon cards tomorrow, and getting thoroughly distracted on every step of the brushing-teeth-and-using-mouthwash-and-taking-melatonin-and-multivitamins process.

  It was now ten thirty. In the living room, a dumb action movie was playing. Iara had moved onto the couch and was sitting next to Hawk.

  “Hey, is the bathroom the second on the right, or the third?” Tapper asked, heading down the hall.

  “It’s the second,” Lori said, and shot Tapper a confused look. “There is no third door on the right.”

  Tapper shrugged. “Got it.” He headed in quietly, so as not to wake up Ben, whose bedroom was right across the hall.

  Lori had dealt with dishes and was now sitting in a kitchen chair at the edge of the living room. She kept thinking there was something else she was supposed to do. Drinks? Iara had brought soda—Ben had gotten one glass, enough for him to bounce around for an hour but not enough for him to be up all night—and everyone was topped off. Dessert? She’d grabbed a box of cookies from the pantry and put them on a plate, which was kind of a waste of a good plate but was what polite people did instead of just dropping the box on the table and calling it close enough.

  Normally when she thought about things like this, she got a buzz from her pocket and looked to see what Handler wanted her to do, even if that was just “Chill.” Her phone was suspiciously silent, however.

  Maybe she should run the dishwasher, she thought, and was about to get up when Maya slipped onto Lori’s lap and put one arm on Lori’s shoulder to steady herself.

  “Hey!” she said, smiling superclose while right there in Lori’s lap, not very heavy since she was slender but also very warm and wearing some kind of light perfume. “You doing okay? You’ve been kind of running around working all night, and it is superlame of us to make you do all the work just because it’s your place.” She looked at Lori in concern, biting on her lower lip.

  “Um, I, no, it’s okay,” Lori stammered. “I just—”

  “Oh no, I said superlame.” Maya put a hand on her mouth. “I used to say that all the time, but now I’m friends with Iara, and it’s like a thing, and I need to stop saying it, right? I don’t think Iara cares, mostly because I asked her and she said no, but still, I do need to stop saying it. Right. Okay. That was it. Last time using ‘lame.’ ”

  “I hadn’t really thought about it,” Lori said, and didn’t add, because I was remembering what Handler said about what you were wearing, and now I’m terrified to move my legs.

  “I think Hawk is worried,” Maya said softly, looking out at the living room and the dumb action movie and Hawk and Iara on the couch. Lori saw the green-haired girl’s hand curl around Hawk’s, and Hawk jumped a little, and then his fingers twined together with hers.

  “He looks okay to me,” Lori said, and Maya turned back, and her face was closer now than it had been before, and her eyes were a really light blue, the only color in her pale face besides the pink of her lips. “He, um, I think—”

  “He likes her,” Maya said, her voice even softer, and she leaned in even closer to make sure Lori heard the words, “but he’s, like, afraid, probably because of the wheelchair, right? He’s probably never done anything with a girl in a wheelchair, and he doesn’t want to mess it up, but he’s nervous and ashamed because he’s not sure he deserves to be happy, and it’s making him wonder whether he shouldn’t do anything.” She smiled a crooked little smile. “I hope he works up the nerve to do something. Life is too short to be ashamed of who you are. They are both supercute and would be supercute together, and he shouldn’t be afraid of doing something because of stuff that nobody really cares about.” The hand that was hanging over Lori’s shoulder was tracing a little circle on Lori’s upper back. “Right?”

  This is it, Lori thought. Handler, if you’re going to tell me this is a bad idea, this is when you do it. Maybe I’m a person and maybe I’m not, but if I were, this would be when I did something, and if you don’t stop me, it’s going to be your fault . . .

  Her phone didn’t buzz.

  “Right,” Lori said, and leaned in and kissed her.

  BARKIN

  Jonathan Barkin glared at his front door as the bell rang. After a day of screaming children, he needed his quiet.

  He put down his book and his fork, shoved his dinner away from his place as he stood up from the table, and stomped over. If this were another door-to-door kid gathering money for school, he was going to tear them a new one. The public school system might be going down the drain, but “No Solicitors” was a phrase everyone needed to learn.

  He opened the door. “Yes?”

  “Mister Barkin?” asked a short, fat man in a gray suit. “Mister Jonathan Barkin from”—he looked down at a tablet in his hands—“Sandee Day Care?”

  “Did you see the sign?” Barkin asked with some annoyance, gesturing at the NO SOLICITORS sign over
his mailbox.

  “I did, I absolutely did, and I am absolutely devastatedly sorry about having to disturb you,” said the man, “but I had a few questions I needed to ask you.”

  He clapped Barkin on the shoulder—

  she was gone, she was gone, she had left him and it didn’t matter what she said, it was about him, she said he had changed, and she was right, and the job took everything he had and there was nothing left when he came home, they were sucking the life out of him, and now he’d lost her and the truth was he didn’t even care about it, because he was better off alone

  —and Barkin was on his knees, and the fat man was pulling something from a jar he’d had in his pocket. A slick yellow snake that twisted in the fat man’s hands.

  “Starting with,” said the man as he brought the snake toward Barkin’s face, “who have you been calling lately about their little brother?”

  WEDNESDAY

  07

  LORI

  “Are you okay?” Lori’s brother, Ben, asked the next morning in between spoonfuls of yogurt.

  “Yep!” Lori rinsed off the plate from his toast (properly, without butter, this time) and did a little spin to the dishwasher to load the plate. “Why?”

  “You’re very bouncy today,” Ben said. “Is it just that you’re happy because your friends came over last night?”

  “Mm-hmm,” Lori called back, flipping the dishwasher door up with one foot and snapping the light switch with the dish towel. “It was nice having them over, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. I like Tapper.” Ben thought for a moment and then added, “He knows a lot about Pokémon. Am I done with my yogurt?”

  “If you want to be!” Lori danced to the happy little song playing in her mind and took a probiotic pill that Handler had told her contained good gut flora or something.

  “You didn’t even look,” Ben called over from the table.

  Lori deliberately turned and looked at her little brother, who held the yogurt cup out for inspection. It was perhaps half-full.

  “Close enough for today, little guy,” Lori said, and grinned at him. “Now, do you want to go get Legos for day care today?” She was going to have to come up with a cover story for day care, since she’d kept Ben at home yesterday. She hadn’t thought of one yet and was having trouble caring.