“Hunh.” Hawk nodded at the blond girl. “Yeah, they asked me that too.”
“Why they rose,” Tapper added. “Why all the coasts were underwater now.”
Lori was standing very still. “And what did all of you say?” she asked quietly.
“I said I thought it was global warming,” Hawk said.
“Ah yes, I suggested soil erosion.” Iara sipped her smoothie.
“That’s stupid.” Tapper shook his head. “Neither of those would account for the sea level rising this much in just a few years. I told them it had to be a chemical attack.”
“I said that I guessed it was just one of those things,” Maya said, “right? Because that’s what everyone says whenever I ask about it, so I thought that was what I was supposed to say, but then the interview lady got disappointed, so I added some stuff about how it could be the same crustal displacement that sank Atlantis, and she seemed happier.”
“Maya’s right,” Hawk said.
“What? No.” Tapper glared. “Crustal displacement is pseudoscience—”
“About that being what everyone says,” Lori said. She stepped toward them, and Hawk hadn’t realized until then how she’d put herself a little ways apart from the group. “Guess it was just one of those things. Those exact words, every time, no matter who it is.”
“Or how many times you ask,” Iara added.
“Their eyes always stop moving too,” Tapper said, fingers clicking a staccato rhythm on the plastic. “It’s like they go blank. Like they were programmed.” He pointed at Iara. “Like one of the Girl from Ipanema’s Jedi mind melds shoved the answer into their brain.”
“I thought it was a Jedi mind trick,” Maya said. Tapper glared at her.
“That’s what the feeders—the things I hunt—that’s what they do,” Lori said, frowning. “They change people’s minds, and people act like that when their mind hits something artificial that the feeder put in. But none of you acted like that. You showed them you weren’t . . .”
“Controlled?” Iara asked.
Lori nodded. “That’s when they decided to take you.”
Hawk’s phone chirped, and he looked down at it, then let out a big sigh, tension he hadn’t known he’d been carrying melting from his body. “It’s finally hooked up to the voice lines,” he said, and began dialing. “My parents can get us, and then we can go to the cops—”
“What?” Lori said, seeming more alarmed than pleased.
“Do you think the police will be able to deal with creatures like the eels?” Iara asked.
“Dunno,” Hawk said, “but my dad’s military. Maybe they’ve heard of these things.”
He heard the phone ring, and a moment later, his mother picked up. “Hello?”
“Mom,” Hawk said, and realized as he said it that she must have been wondering where he’d been for most of a day. He pictured her calling the Lake Foundation and the hotel frantically, worried out of her mind. “Mom, I’m sorry, it’s me, they got me, but I got free—”
“Oh, hello, dear,” his mother said. “I hope you’re having a good time at the Lake Foundation.”
“No, Mom, I’m not.” Hawk found himself fumbling for the words. “They’re, like, bad guys. They’re trying to do experiments or something on us . . .”
“I hope you’re having a good time at the Lake Foundation,” his mother said again.
Hawk’s mouth worked for a moment, but nothing came out. He looked over to see the others staring at him sadly. “M-mom?”
“I hope you’re having a good time at the Lake Foundation.”
“I’m . . . yeah.” Hawk shut his eyes. “I’ll see you soon.” He hung up the phone and looked at Lori.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and he blinked and shook his head.
“Can I get her back? Like . . .” He gripped the arm of his chair. “Like if something is messing with her head, and we kill it, she’s okay, right?”
“It’s impossible to . . .” Lori’s phone buzzed, and she glanced down at it. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, if it’s one of those eels, and we get it out of her soon, she should be fine.”
Hawk looked over as Tapper said, “Mom?” and realized he was calling his family as well. “Mom, it’s me. If you were worried about . . . No. No, yeah, I’m having a good time. I am. I’ll call you back.” He hung up, scowling at the ground, and shook his head.
“What are these things?” Hawk grimaced, and the chair squeaked. He looked down and saw that the plastic had curled in where he’d gripped it too hard. “The eels, the feeders, whatever you call them?” He looked at Lori, realized he was almost shouting but didn’t care. “Whatever killed Shawn? How do they do this to people’s minds?”
“I don’t . . .” Lori looked down at her phone like she was waiting for a text. “It’s hard to explain. But maybe I can show you.” She looked around at all of them. “If you want to know what they are, I know something that can sort of explain it.”
“Not like we have anywhere else to go,” Tapper muttered. “Blondie, Ipanema, you gonna call home?”
“I do not wish to hear that my family has been affected by these creatures,” Iara said grimly.
“My parents aren’t, uh . . .” Maya shook her head. “If they got yours, they probably got mine, right?”
“Right.” Hawk shoved himself to his feet. “If you’ve got something to show us, show us.”
IARA
Lori took them out of PortManta and along the sidewalk. It was busy at this time of day, and people bumped into Iara’s wheelchair as she rolled along with the group.
No one ever bumped into Professor X’s chair in the comic books. Sometimes he even had a chair that levitated. She would not have minded that.
She grimaced as a man jostled her, and then smiled as Hawk moved him out of the way with a little “Scuse me.”
“Oh, sorry,” the man who’d bumped into her chair muttered, and went back to looking at his phone.
“Is it always this bad?” Hawk asked her.
“It is an annoyance,” Iara said. “At least here in Santa Dymphna, they apologize.”
“Where are you from in Brazil?” Hawk asked. “Rio, São Paulo?”
“Rio,” Iara said, and smiled at him. “I do not know many Americans who could name more than one city in Brasil.”
“The navy sent my dad all over the world to help with relief efforts after the water rose,” Hawk said. “When we weren’t with him, I liked to read up on wherever he was.”
“So many areas flooded.” Iara loved to swim in the rivers, but some of her friends had swum in the lakes that had once been parts of the city. They liked the clear water and the glow of the miracoral, but to her, it had seemed like swimming over a graveyard, looking down at the drowned buildings below. “How could the world forget? Or not notice?”
“No idea,” Hawk said. “Guess Lori’s gonna show us.” He looked up ahead, and Iara saw that Lori and the others were heading up a ramp that led to an overpass made from the gray plastic of the miracoral. “Hey, you need a push?”
Iara could push herself, but Hawk had a nice smile, small and a little uncertain but honest, and Iara smiled back and shrugged her shoulders and said, “Well, if someone with superstrength wishes to volunteer . . .” and then sat back contentedly in her chair as the nice boy pushed her up the ramp.
They headed up and over the canal, and Iara pretended not to notice Hawk glancing down anxiously as they crossed the bridge, because he was being chivalrous. On the far side, Lori and the others headed down a ramp. Iara reached up gently behind her and said, “I have it from here.” Looking back over her shoulder and up at Hawk from under her lashes, she added, “But I am most grateful.” He flushed and stammered a bit, and Iara grinned as she wheeled down the ramp, letting herself whoosh past Lori and Maya and Tapper and catching a breathless laugh in her throat as her chair bounced at the bottom of the ramp. It likely looked uncontrolled to the others, but compared to the streets of Rio, this was nothing.
Lori had taken them to a large plaza. A sign guiding tourists read REEF SQUARE. One side of the square was a dock for ferries and personal boats that bobbed safely behind shiny white railings. The other three sides were high-end stores, glittering in the pale late-summer sun that was the best they were able to get this far north.
In the center of Reef Square, behind a little waist-high railing . . . Iara stared.
At first her eyes refused to make sense of it, and she shook her head to clear a sudden dizziness as she looked at the mass of metal. A pyramid of steel that shone with a different light, or no, a cone, no, a . . . In annoyance, she shut her eyes and clicked, and felt the echo, and when she opened them again, she could make sense of it.
It was a train car, or part of one. It had been whole once, a local line that carried people around this city. But something had caught it, and now half of it was not simply gone but going, stretched like taffy and pulled to a tapering point of infinite thinness, so that the overall shape was of a pyramid lying on its side.
“Will it ever disappear?” Iara asked.
“It’s been like this ever since the water rose,” Lori said. “Never changes.”
“What is . . . I can’t . . .” Hawk rubbed his eyes. “Why’s the corner all red and stuff?”
“It’s not,” Tapper snapped. “That end is being pulled somewhere else. The light waves bouncing off it are pulled too. They take longer to reach you, and the frequency—”
“Dude, I just got a solid A-minus in physics,” Hawk said. “I know what a Doppler shift is.”
“Is that the one where a trumpet player on a train sounds one way coming toward you and another way going away?” Maya asked.
“Yyyysorta,” Hawk said as Tapper snorted and shook his head. “I just didn’t expect to see it, you know, right here.”
“Walk around it,” Lori said quietly. “It looks that way from every side.”
“That can’t be right,” Hawk said, starting to walk. “If you go to the other side, it should be blue, because it’s coming toward . . . hunh.”
“It’s being pulled away from us from every angle,” Tapper said impatiently, “because it’s being pulled into another dimension.”
Iara cocked her head and wheeled forward, thinking about that.
“So, like, space?” Hawk asked.
“No,” said Tapper.
“Sort of,” Lori said. “That’s what the feeders are. They come from someplace we can’t understand, someplace outside of the universe as we know it.”
“Someplace wrong,” Tapper added.
“But how could this be in plain sight, and the world not alarmed?” Iara demanded. “This is proof of a world beyond our own, of dangers we must fight!”
Lori gestured, and Iara followed it. A mother wheeled her daughter past in a stroller. Behind them, two young men laughed at a joke together, holding hands and sharing a pair of earbuds. An older man in khakis and a button-up shirt talked in annoyance into a headset microphone, gesturing angrily with a croissant held in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.
None of them looked at the train being pulled into a place that could not be.
“Some of it might be on purpose,” Lori said, walking toward the train car. Iara wheeled along beside her. “Some feeders can affect people’s minds. But I think we . . .” She grimaced. “I think the feeders are just too different for this world, and so sometimes, when a big one changes things, the world just sort of flops into a new shape around whatever they do, and then the whole universe tries to pretend nothing happened.”
“People are good at seeing what they expect to see,” Maya said from beside them, and then added, “except who put up the railing?”
Iara looked over at the blond girl in surprise. “Excellent question, Maya.”
“There’s a plaque.” Hawk stepped to the little square of metal on the ground before the railing. “Invisible Changes: An art piece donated by the Lake Foundation.”
“Like they weren’t creepy enough before they drugged and kidnapped us,” Tapper said, glaring at the plaque.
“And put monsters inside our families.” Iara’s fingers ached, and she realized she was clenching the armrests of her wheelchair too hard.
“This is what feeders are,” Lori said. “This is what I hunt and kill, and this is what they do to the world, what they’ll do to people if we don’t stop them. They will destroy it and kill people, and no one will ever even realize what they’ve done.”
“Then we will stop them,” Iara declared. “Even if no one thanks us, even if no one but us can see what has gone wrong in this world, we will fight—”
“Hey,” Maya said suddenly, “those two people can see it.”
Everyone stopped and looked where Maya gestured. A little ways away, on the other side of the train car, an old man stood looking at the train car, with a younger man behind him, arms draped over the old man’s shoulders.
The old man’s lips were moving, and Iara focused and listened as only she could.
“What made the water rise?” the young man was saying.
“Guess it was just one of those things,” the old man murmured.
And again, “What made the water rise?”
“Guess it was just one of those things.”
And still again, “What made the water rise?”
“Guess it was just one of those things,” the old man repeated, and Iara realized that the arms draped over his shoulders ended in frilly little claws.
MAYA
“It’s a feeder,” Lori said sharply.
Maya wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but it wasn’t for Iara to suddenly wheel forward with a yell of, “For humanity!”
She was maybe halfway to the old man and the feeder when a whoosh of air zipped past her, and then Tapper was by the old man and the feeder, and the feeder was falling away from the old man, who looked . . . wet or something? His clothes were glistening, and there was something around him that she hadn’t seen before, a bubble that drew back toward the feeder as the man fell away from it.
Tapper’s arms were a blur, and the feeder sort of danced in place. Maya realized a moment later that Tapper was hitting it a whole bunch of times really quickly. “Where am I supposed to hit it?” he shouted.
“Head usually works!” Hawk yelled back. He and Iara were almost to the creature.
“It doesn’t have a head!” Tapper shouted, and Maya, who was still beside Lori, blinked and cocked her head, because, well, the feeder did seem to have a head.
“He can see it,” Lori murmured, and then it clicked for Maya, that if she could see the train car going down a black hole but normal people couldn’t, maybe Tapper could see something the rest of them couldn’t, and Maya squinted as she jogged forward, trying to let it come to her like one of those 3-D-staring things she had never been able to make work.
The feeder looked like a normal man, pale and with brown hair, wearing a white dress shirt and a brown suit that hung on him loosely, with baggy pant legs and flowing sleeves. And then Maya thought, It doesn’t have a head, because that was what Tapper had said, and let her eyes unfocus—
five brown limbs splayed out in all directions from a white maw in the center of the body, and on the underside of the limbs, little wriggling spines, and it curled forward even as Tapper kept punching, the spines grabbing hold
And Maya saw the normal-looking man fall onto Tapper, who shouted and yelled as the man hugged him with both arms and one leg, slowly but unstoppably.
At least, it seemed unstoppable until Hawk got there, grabbed ahold of the feeder, and then tore one of its arms off.
“Hey,” said the feeder, “what made the water rise?” The arm Hawk had torn off flopped on the ground.
“Shut up!” Tapper shouted.
“What made the water rise?” the feeder asked again. “Do you know? Think about it.”
“Get off of him!” Hawk added, and tore off another arm. It flopped on the ground ne
xt to the first one.
“This usually works,” said the feeder. “Look at the train car. Look at it and think about the water rising.”
“Ow!” Tapper yelled. “It’s got something on it, acid or something!” He was a blur of motion under the feeder, and that same bubble of wetness that Maya had seen before around the old man was forming around Tapper now.
Maya looked at the feeder. Iara had reached it now and was punching one of the arms on the ground, which kept moving and was trying to grab her wheelchair.
Lori was there as well. She looked like she was about to grab it, but then she stopped and flinched, looking anxious. “What do I do?” she yelled.
“Hey, guys!” Maya called. “I think it’s a starfish!”
In the sudden silence, the feeder added, “Okay, but have you thought about what made the water rise?”
“Like Starro?” Iara yelled.
Maya had no idea who Starro was. “I think more like the one on SpongeBob!” She ran forward. “Look, it doesn’t have a head, and its arms still work if they’re torn off, and when I went to the aquarium they talked about how starfish find stuff that can’t move, and then they grab it and, um, shoot out their stomachs and digest stuff and then suck it into them.”
“It’s digesting me?” Tapper yelled. “Get it off!” He blurred harder.
“Hang on!” Wincing, Lori worked her hands in toward the watery fluid that bubbled around Tapper. “I think I’ve got it. Hawk, pull!”
Lori pulled one way, hugging the water around her, and Hawk pulled another way, wrenching back on the main body of the creature, and Tapper whooshed out and was suddenly standing next to Maya, his clothes stained and in some places eaten through.
With a horrible splortch noise, the feeder came apart, the watery guts ripping away in one direction and the body going in another, and Lori and Tapper both flung away the parts they were holding.
“You tasted different,” said the body from the ground. “You’re from home. That’s why thinking about the water didn’t work. I forgot . . . how . . . delish . . .”
Then it melted away, hissing into a stain on the ground. All of it, all at once, seemed to just sort of give up on existing, and it flickered like it was falling away even though it was already on the ground, and then all the different pieces were gone.
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