Feeder

by Patrick Weekes

  “I know. I’ll, um . . . I don’t know. This consult might run a couple of days. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay, Career Woman, but if I get you something, will you try it on?”

  Lori found herself smiling despite everything. “Sure.”

  “Oooh, this could work. I can pick out something so much hotter than anything I’d’ve been able to talk you into buying in person!”

  “Good-bye, Jenn,” Lori said, and hung up and went inside PortManta, smiling a little bit now.

  Part coffee shop, part juice bar, and part general hangout, PortManta was where Lori spent a lot of her summer afternoons when Handler didn’t have a job for her. The walls were painted in various eye-searing pastels, and the manta-ray logo smiled and waved in old photographs to which it had been digitally added. Sometimes she was there with Jenn, gossiping about classmates and checking out new bands on their phones over PortManta’s Wi-Fi. Other times she would hang out on her own and just enjoy the silence.

  Anna, a tiny little red-haired girl with a face full of freckles, smiled from behind the register as Lori came in. “Hey, Lori! Nice outfit. Work day, huh?”

  “Yep. Early one.”

  “Be glad you don’t work here,” Anna said, rolling her eyes. “Six a.m. opening. You want your usual?”

  “Please.” Lori used her phone to pay while Anna rang in the fruit smoothie order. “Hey, did a new group come in? One skinny black guy with locks, one short guy, pretty blond girl, and a green-haired girl in a wheelchair?”

  “Pretty blond girl?” Anna asked, and grinned at her.

  “Um . . .” Lori felt herself starting to blush, and Anna laughed out loud.

  “You probably could have led with the green-haired girl in a wheelchair,” Anna said, and pointed at the service elevator. “They’re on the roof. Or at least most of them are. The green-haired girl came back down and said she’d be right back.”

  “Thanks. Guess there aren’t too many wheelchair users here in Santa Dymphna.” Lori glanced outside. “The city’s still a few years away from having access ramps everywhere after the water rose.”

  “Guess it was just one of those things,” Anna said without missing a beat, and Lori winced. She hadn’t meant to trigger it that time. She hated doing it to people she liked. It made them seem like things, which was unfair to them. She was the weird one, after all.

  A moment later Lori’s juice came up. She grabbed it and shoved a straw in. “Have a good one,” she said to the now-silent Anna, and went up to the roof to get some answers.

  IARA

  Iara rolled into the electronics store and smiled at the balding shopkeeper who looked down at her with undisguised surprise.

  “Don’t get a lot of handicapped in Santa Dymphna,” he said thoughtfully.

  “The sidewalks are very well maintained,” Iara said, still smiling, because he was an old man, and she had been brought up to respect her elders.

  “Gotta be hard getting into the boats and all,” the shopkeeper added. “Can you swim?”

  “Yes,” Iara said, still keeping the smile. “I wished to buy a new phone.”

  “And you can use the phones all right?” the shopkeeper asked doubtfully.

  The shopkeeper was now beginning to vex her, but as he was one of the innocents that she would be protecting in her new role as Fighter of Eel Monsters, Iara simply gave a tiny sigh and said, “Unless you operate them with your feet.” As she said the words, she added a tiny little click from the back of her throat.

  The shopkeeper looked at her feet. “Your feet don’t look different,” he said, and his gaze trailed up her legs to the hem of the formfitting black skirt she wore.

  “I am pleased that you noticed,” Iara said, and wheeled herself a few meters forward and clicked again, looking back at the shopkeeper as she did.

  She shut her eyes and let out a long breath.

  “Are you all right?” the shopkeeper demanded, coming around the counter to her. “Listen, I can call a doctor if you need help.”

  “I need a phone,” she said, eyes still closed.

  She felt the words bounce off him, sensed the vibration and the echoes forming a pattern that her mind turned into the shape of the room. Past that—

  It was not sight, although that was how her mind processed this new sense. Instead, it was as though her sense of balance, the tiny little reactions to movement that let her body know when she was upside down or leaning to the left, had been made a thousand times more sensitive and then somehow tangled up with her sense of touch. She could feel the electric hum of the machines in the shop, the laptops and tablets and phones and fitness trackers, all of them buzzing against her skin. She could feel the wires running through the walls, power cables and Internet lines and security feeds.

  She could feel the electromagnetic field buzzing around the ignorant and prejudiced shopkeeper’s body, and with her two little triangulating clicks, she had a picture of his brain.

  “You have five new phones for me, already paid for,” she said, and hummed underneath the words, a subsonic vibration that took her words and carried them through the air and into the shopkeeper’s brain. The right frequency, keyed to the shopkeeper’s distance from her and his own natural electric field, kicked it into a different part of his brain.

  With that little hum, Iara turned it from a thing he was hearing into a thing he was remembering.

  Her words, no matter how beautifully phrased, could not create a memory from whole cloth, but she didn’t really have to. The human mind, Iara had learned, liked to correct errors. Given a false positive for a memory of her buying the phones, the shopkeeper’s mind was busily cobbling one together from the view he had of her now and a thousand past transactions.

  “Oh, right!” the shopkeeper said. “Just be a minute. Sorry, I should have boxed them up for you earlier.”

  It was not the power Iara would have asked for, but then, most of her heroes had been the same way. Peter Parker had wished for popularity, not spider powers, but fate had given him what he had needed, not what he had wanted, and she assumed that the same was true for her. She might have wished for Captain Marvel, but she got Professor X.

  Iara smiled as he scanned the phones, bagged them, and passed them down to her. “Thank you.”

  “You know how to use them?” he asked. Bless him, he sounded honestly concerned.

  She smiled and patted the bag. “Since I cannot walk, I have had much time to get very good with electronics.”

  She wheeled out of the shop and back to the juice bar with the manta ray logo.

  HAWK

  “So you can like Jedi mind meld people?” Hawk asked as he sipped his strawberry-acai-matcha smoothie with soy protein and watched his new phone sync up his apps. They’d all gotten each others’ contact information when Iara had passed out the phones, and all that was left now was to download old app info over PortManta’s Wi-Fi.

  “Mind trick,” Tapper muttered, more to himself than Hawk. Whatever he was drinking had many shots of espresso in it. The guy’s jeans and T-shirt had dried off really fast too, which Hawk thought might be because Tapper was always kind of vibrating.

  “Not quite,” Iara said, blushing prettily and running slender fingers through her wavy green hair. “I only plant memories. I cannot force them to do anything.”

  “Jedi mind trick, Vulcan mind meld, that’s basic information . . .” Tapper thumbed his phone, glaring intently at the glowing screen.

  “And you can swim,” Maya added. “You and Shawn were really good swimmers.”

  “Were,” Tapper muttered. “We even sure he’s dead? All we have is Lori’s word on that.”

  “And mine,” Iara said, and looked away and sipped the apple-berry smoothie she had said reminded her of some kind of soda they had back in Brazil. She had really pretty lips, and Hawk realized he was staring at them like a doofus and looked away instead.

  They were up on the roof, which had a little patio. Hawk had visited family on the
cluster of high-rise islands that was all that was left of Houston after the water rose, and they’d had the same kind of thing there. No room to grow out, so people grew up instead. PortManta had chairs and tables, all made from the same grayish-pink plastic that came from miracoral oil.

  Across the canal, Hawk saw little gardens, barbecues, and even tents made from plastic sheeting. In Santa Dymphna, the poor moved up, not down. A narrow woven-plastic footbridge connected PortManta’s rooftop to the building next door. The bridge swayed in the breeze. The Santa Dymphna locals walked across them without a second thought, but they creeped Hawk out. Partly the height, even though being indestructible now probably shouldn’t make that a thing, and partly the way the braided ropes of gray-pink plastic looked like a spider’s webbing.

  “What happened to him?” Hawk asked. “Iara, you saw it?”

  “I heard it,” Iara said, and put her drink down. “I do not know. I could not hear its shape, but it was very large.”

  “How very large?” Tapper asked.

  “Larger than the Hulk,” Iara said thoughtfully, “but smaller than Galactus.” She grimaced. “Shawn had no chance.”

  Tapper grunted. “Locked in a stupid crate with all of you, and now one of us is dead, and we still don’t know what’s going on.”

  “He helped save us,” Iara said, lowering her eyes. “He carried me.”

  “We’ll make it right,” Hawk said, and sipped his smoothie. “After we figure this out, we’ll make it right.”

  “Hawk?” Lori asked, and Hawk looked over at her. “It was your turn.” She was apparently only sixteen, like him? She’d looked older in her nice blouse and slacks. She was pacing around the edge of the table while the rest of them sat. Iara looked comfortable in her wheelchair, Maya was kind of splayed sideways across the chair like it was a very small resting couch, and Tapper was hunched over like he’d rather be anywhere else.

  “Turn?” he asked, and saw that Lori looked older when she glared. She could probably use a smoothie. Something chill, anyway.

  “We were sharing our stories of how we all ended up in the cargo container,” Maya said, “like how I got a scholarship from the Lake Foundation, and then when I came out here, I got drugged during my interview and then woke up in the cargo container.” She sipped her smoothie, which was only technically a smoothie instead of a chocolate shake because she’d let them throw in some whey protein. “That’s actually pretty much my whole story.”

  “Probably call it a Force nerve pinch . . .” Tapper glared at his phone. “Aw, that is some garbage.”

  “Well, I mean, I was giving the TL;DR version,” Maya said, “like, I mean, also they asked about doing wrestling and football and swim team and what I thought about rising sea levels and a time in my life where I had to overcome adversity, but I thought the part where my drink tasted funny and then I could taste my own happiness and then I lay down under the table to hug the floor was the part we cared about . . .”

  “Not that.” Tapper waved his phone. “TidePool suspended my posting privileges again. Said my account is locked.”

  Iara raised an eyebrow. “Do you believe it is tied to what happened to us?”

  “I don’t think so,” Maya said. “I just reposted a kitten video!”

  Hawk had just finished installing the TidePool app on his phone. “Mine’s okay too.” He reached over for Tapper’s phone, and the other guy jerked his hand back faster than Hawk could follow, then glared and flipped his screen around so that Hawk could see. “The following post was flagged as . . .” He squinted at the quoted post. “Oh, dude, you can’t write that! That’s somebody’s mom!”

  “Somebody’s mom should’ve raised a guy with smarter opinions about whether anime is better subbed or dubbed,” Tapper said grimly.

  “So they haven’t locked your social media accounts,” Lori said. She hadn’t looked at her own phone. “That’s something. So, Hawk?”

  Hawk grinned at her. “Yeah?”

  She did not grin back. “Your story. About ending up in the cargo container.”

  “Oh, right, yeah. So it’s basically same as Maya’s. I’ve lived in Austin for about eighteen months—after the water rose and Houston was underwater, the military moved their big base there, and my dad got transferred.”

  “Where are you from originally?” Iara asked, taking another sip of her drink.

  “Born on a base in the Philippines,” Hawk said, “but we moved around a lot, but because of the navy moving my dad around, I’ve lived in pretty much every US state that has a naval base.”

  “You can’t be Filipino,” Tapper cut in. “Filipino guys are big. Like the Rock.”

  “The Rock is Samoan,” Iara said. “He did a Samoan dance for his grandmother out of respect on her birthday.”

  “Oh yeah, I remember that!” Maya said, tapping on her phone. “I reposted the picture and everything, and I mean, I don’t do guys, but that grin plus him doing it for his nana, that was hot.”

  “Superhot,” Iara added. “Gostoso.”

  “Right? Anyway, Filipino guys are like tiny.” Maya looked over at Hawk. “Wait, sorry, no offense!”

  “My feelings are also mostly invulnerable,” Hawk said, grinning back at her, because at five foot three, he couldn’t exactly argue about it, and also she might not go for guys, but she was still a very cute blond girl.

  “And then?” Lori asked Hawk, and Hawk almost asked and then what? and then saw the look in Lori’s eyes and realized that she might actually kill him and remembered what they’d been talking about.

  “And then it was the same as Maya’s story, with a scholarship offer from the Lake Foundation. I flew out and did the questions and all. The poison didn’t work on me, so they used a net and then hit me with a stun gun or something.” Hawk shrugged. “That’s it.”

  Lori frowned. “Tapper?”

  “Hang on, I’m making a new account.” The guy’s thumbs were moving faster than Hawk had ever seen anyone’s thumbs move. He hadn’t even known the phone could keep up.

  “You know, you can unlock your account if you apologize and remove the offending post,” Maya said.

  “I will delete that post when a dubbed anime carries the same level of story and voice performance as a sub,” Tapper said, thumbs blurring, “which will be never.”

  “What about Avatar: The Last Airbender?” Maya asked. “That was pretty good.”

  “That wasn’t even—” Tapper stopped as his phone made a little click, and then he sat back slowly, leaving his phone on the table in front of him. The screen had a long crack running along the bottom right-hand corner. “I’m not talking to you. I do not acknowledge your opinions.” He looked up at Lori. “Same story, ’cept I’m from Vegas.” He gulped down his espresso-whatever-it-was.

  “Dude, do you really need more caffeine?” Hawk asked.

  “Bite me, Pint-Size.”

  “My story is also similar,” Iara said. “The Lake Foundation said the scholarship was for international students with disabilities.”

  “And they flew you all out here, to Santa Dymphna,” Lori said, tapping her phone on her leg as she thought. “And drugged you.” Her phone buzzed, and she glanced at it. “Hm. But they didn’t drug you right away. They interviewed you.” She looked at Hawk. “Did they do anything to you first? A medical procedure? Something that could’ve given you . . .” She paused, shook her head.

  “Our superpowers?” Iara asked.

  “They’re not superpowers,” Tapper snapped. “They’re mutations.”

  “The X-Men gain superpowers through mutation,” Iara pointed out, “unless you believe that our origin is tied to superscience, like the Flash or Spider-Man.” She smiled. “Or unless you believe we are all children of Krypton or Asgard.”

  “Or Tír na nÓg, or however you say it with the accents and stuff,” Maya said. “That’s where fae come from, and they sometimes swap babies with humans, so I think we’re maybe changelings.”

  “You als
o think Princess Mononoke was better with Claire Danes,” Tapper muttered. “You’ve forfeited the right to an opinion.”

  “I was kind of hoping we were angels,” Hawk said, and he said it quietly, just in case it sounded really dumb once it came out of his head, but Tapper was still ranting about anime, or possibly manga now, and nobody caught it.

  “Regardless of what they are,” Lori snapped, “none of you . . .” She paused. “None of us are normal. Did the people at the Lake Foundation do something to you all that made you like this?”

  “No. My powers came almost a year ago,” Iara said. “I do not know why. Nothing happened that would mark it. One day my senses were stronger, and while my legs were no different, my arms could pull me through the water faster than ever before.”

  “So they didn’t give you powers,” Lori said. “Or at least not then. Why not drug you as soon as you arrived, then? Why the interview?”

  “They had to be sure,” Iara said softly.

  “Like about a time when I faced adversity?” Maya asked.

  “It’s obvious.” Tapper finished his drink. “Their questions were to confirm that we had powers, that we were the right targets.”

  “Because I just made up a thing about stealing bread to save my starving family,” Maya added, “and then turning myself in to save an innocent man my parole officer mistook for me, and I’m not positive, but I think I got that from a movie.”

  “Could you . . .” Tapper placed his hands on the armrests of the chair. Hawk saw that the guy’s fingers were tapping a furious little rhythm on the plastic. “Could you please stop talking?”

  “Tapper, do not be rude,” Iara said, and then smiled at Hawk. “What questions did they ask you?”

  “Same as you guys, I guess.” Hawk sipped his smoothie and thought. It had been yesterday, but yesterday was a kidnapping and several weird monsters ago. “Influences, what I wanted to be when I grew up, what Maya said about adversity . . . ?”

  Maya’s hand shot up, and she fidgeted in her seat.

  Lori sighed. “Yes, Maya?”

  Maya looked over at Tapper, who rolled his eyes and waved at her to go. “Plus sea levels.”