“What—” Iara started, and Lori clapped a hand over Iara’s mouth, shaking her head frantically. Could Iara even see her in the darkness? Should she say something? Would that be as bad as Iara’s click? Would whatever it was hear them? Would it see them?
Then Tapper was there, patting Iara’s arm and then pointing down. He spread his hands apart, miming something large, and then he put the palms together, like he was praying . . . then tucked his head to the side and put his praying hands under it, resting his head on them like a pillow. Not praying, sleeping.
Something large down there, sleeping.
Iara swallowed and nodded slowly, eyes wide.
She pointed at Tapper, then, and Tapper blinked, then nodded and took the lead.
His eyes shone like tiny little rainbows in the darkness.
They all followed behind Tapper as he went down, down into the darkness. Lori felt something slip into her hand and glanced over to see Maya looking at her, forcing a worried smile. Lori didn’t know if Maya was worried about losing track of Lori, the only one who didn’t have the little miracoral glow, in the darkness, or if Maya was just worried, period.
Either way, Lori didn’t pull her hand from Maya’s grasp. It made swimming a little harder, but no one was trying to go fast anymore.
Up ahead Tapper slowed, and the darkness slid slowly back to gray. Lori realized she was looking at a wall. Some of it was old metal, overgrown with seaweed. Other parts might have been glass once. They’d been replaced with the pink-gray plastic that came from the miracoral.
Below the building, where there should have been sidewalk, there was nothing. Not concrete, not the ocean floor, not ground and old sewer pipes or anything that should have been here. Lori tried to look closer, but her eyes slid off the darkness, like she was trying to grab hold of half a bar of wet soap.
There was a door, reinforced with the plastic but still functional. Tapper pulled on it, then grunted a little and pulled harder, but it didn’t budge.
It clanked, though.
Below them, more movement, and this time everyone heard it, felt it, the sudden dread of the small rodent who freezes at the scent of the wolf.
Maya pulled her hand from Lori’s grasp and went to the door. She traced the doorframe with her fingers, looking for catches or hinges or something, Lori thought. Lori kept treading water and trying not to think about what was down there below them, as though thinking about it might draw its attention to her. Nothing to see here, just a tiny fish not worth anyone’s time.
Maya found something beside the door and worked at it, a small lever. Hawk drifted over and helped, and a moment later the door opened ever so slightly, a crack no wider than Lori’s palm.
Maya went to the door and pushed against it. She wriggled, like she was trying to squeeze into tight pants, and then she went still and very slowly slid one hand through the crack. Then went her arm, up to the elbow, then up to the shoulder, and Maya leaned forward and grimaced, like she was listening for something, and slowly, carefully, slid her head through the tiny opening.
Below them came a sudden rush of bubbles, and the bubbles glowed with their own green light, and the water around them was hot as it rushed up past them, and tasted like blood.
Maya had both arms in now and was stretching slowly as she pulled herself through.
Lori pressed against the wall of the building as the others did the same. The bubbles foamed up in greater numbers, and below them, something moved, something enormous, waking up, breath hot with hunger. The others were still glowing, and Lori had the sudden wild thought that it would see them, that she had to get away from their damning light into the safety of the darkness, where she could disappear.
Had she been able to move, she might have done it, but even as the thought came to her, something roared up, and Lori’s muscles locked her in place, frozen with instinctive terror.
The shape was impossible to get fully, but it was long and so huge that it covered her field of vision. It was not so much lighter than the darkness as dismissive of it. In the light cast by the green glowing bubbles, its hide was slick and shiny and the same sickly shade as the eels.
It roared past them, so huge that hot water tore at them with its passage, and then it was gone, and Lori was spinning, tumbling helplessly as the great thing’s wake tore her free from where she had been pressed against the wall, and she choked and flailed as green bubbles swirled around her, thinking only, I can’t make noise, I can’t, it will come back.
A hand grabbed hers.
Lori focused on the glowing golden form of Tapper, who hauled her back to the building. She was upside down, and she kicked herself back around. Maya was gone—or no, not gone, Lori realized, as the door opened a moment later, all the way this time, and Maya leaned out and waved, and they all rushed in, floundering and jostling.
The door slammed shut behind them a moment later, and a moment after that there was a whirring, clunking mechanical noise, and blinking in the darkness, Lori felt the water swirl and swish around them . . . and then her head broke the surface, and she coughed out the little bit of water that was still in her lungs and blinked at the dim but normal lights in the ceiling.
It was an air lock, she realized, looking around the small, featureless gray room. The water was rushing out through grates in the floor, leaving them safe and breathing air again.
“Hey, are you okay?” Maya asked, and Lori looked up at her, and only then realized that she was looking up at her because she was on the ground, somewhere between crawling and curled up into a ball, shaking.
“S-super.” It came out with a little stammer. Her teeth were chattering. “J-just really looking forward to swimming out past whatever that was.”
“It was like those eel things,” Tapper said, “only bigger.” He was already dry, his hair sprouting everywhere.
“Kind of a lot bigger,” Maya added. She was back to looking like she was in a pretty pink T-shirt and jeans.
“That’s what killed Shawn, I think,” Lori said, and her phone gave one long buzz for “yes.” “You said Lake was trying to attract something called Leviathan?”
“That thing is big enough to be Leviathan,” Hawk said, rubbing his arms.
“No, it’s the same as the eels,” Tapper said impatiently, “and they work for her. If that was Leviathan, she’d’ve found it by now, no problem. I think that’s what Lake works for, or uses, or . . . something.”
“Whatever it is, I apologize for waking it,” Iara said. She’d slicked her hair back behind her ears and had pushed herself to her feet, crutches cuffed over each wrist. Her red-brown skin glistened in the pale fluorescent lights, and she had goose bumps. “I did not know.”
Lori wanted to remain curled up like that. If she just lay there, she wouldn’t have to learn more about what that enormous thing was and what it meant and how she was much more like it than she was like Maya and Iara and the boys. She could have stayed there on the floor forever.
But she didn’t have forever. She had until tomorrow. After that Tia Lake found Ben.
If she were a real person, like she was pretending to be, she wouldn’t let that happen.
“What matters is that we made it.” Lori pushed herself to her knees, then took the hand Maya offered and pulled herself to her feet. “Come on. Let’s see what was worth coming down here for.”
IARA
Hawk wouldn’t stop looking at her as she made her way down the hallway attached to the air lock. It made her want to beat him to death with the crutches.
She knew that walking with the crutches was slower, and she knew it did not look dignified to someone who had no idea how long she had spent in therapy learning the step-to gait, how much strength and coordination it took, or how much her back would ache for the rest of the day as a result.
She also knew that she would not be letting Hawk carry her around like a baby anymore if there were any way to avoid it, and a little backache was a small price to pay.
&nbs
p; “Hey,” Hawk said as she swung her legs forward, “if you want—”
“I want for you to stop staring,” she snapped, and Hawk flushed and looked away.
Plant crutches, swing legs, plant crutches, swing legs. Iara sighed and looked at the others.
Lori was still pale and shaken, and she walked with her hands curled into fists, her weight light on her feet, as though she were ready for an attack from any quarter. Maya, who really ought to have gotten a real swimsuit, was walking close beside Lori, and good for the two of them. Tapper was in the lead, blurring ahead down the hall and then pausing to look around and wait for the others to catch up. It struck Iara as a little annoying until she realized that it was just what she had been doing back in the water, when she was the fast one.
The hallway had been sculpted from the gray miracoral plastic and was lit by white ceiling panels that flickered and buzzed annoyingly. They passed a changing room that contained only old towels and forgotten diving equipment, as well as a closet with cleaning supplies.
At the end of the hallway, a large double door awaited them. It had once had a window in the top, but the window had been covered with plastic, giving Iara no clue what was on the other side. There were little holes in the floor before it, where something had once been bolted to the ground. Iara looked at the little holes as they approached, and then at the slick tiles on the floor, with part of a little swooping pattern with a grain like sandpaper that caught roughly on her feet. The gray miracoral plastic was new, but the rest of it . . .
“I believe this was an exercise facility before the water rose,” she said. “There would have been . . . I do not know the word in English. When you enter with a ticket, and you push the bar, and it allows you to go forward but not back?”
“A turnstile,” Maya said. “Lots of gyms have those by the front desk. I guess if it got turned into a lab, the juice bar and the little table with all the free towels are probably gone too.”
“The towels aren’t free,” Tapper muttered, glaring at all of them. “You pay for them as part of membership.”
“I don’t know,” said Maya, “they always got angry when I took the towels home—”
“Stop.” Lori looked at all of them. “I’m scared too, but we need to keep moving.”
Everyone looked guiltily away.
“I wasn’t saying anything,” Hawk said, sounding amused.
Lori pushed the door open, and Iara followed her through.
She had been expecting computers or laboratory equipment, lots of tiny offices. Instead there was a vast dark chamber on the other side of the door, and it took Iara’s eyes a moment to adjust. It was more like a cave than a laboratory, she thought. A lair.
There was electronic equipment, but it was plugged into the floor or stacked haphazardly on flimsy card tables, leaving little LED lights to blink here and there as the main source of light. Rather than walls, the impression she got was of sloping curves. Support pillars around the massive room were dim silhouettes in the faint light. They seemed to curve and branch out near the walls and ceiling, but it was an illusion caused by the vines that twined around them, sickly yellow and . . .
Not vines, Iara realized. Eels. The walls, the support pillars, all of the room was covered with the creatures. While the eels that worked people like puppets were less than a meter long, some of the ones here were enormous, fat and glossy and longer than she could track, as she tried to determine where one ended and another began.
“This is her lair,” she whispered.
“Okay, so I am superinvested in figuring out who Tia Lake is and everything,” Maya said, looking into the room, “but I am also kind of not going into that room full of things that crawl down your throat and enslave you.”
“They’re asleep, Blondie,” Tapper said quietly. “We don’t make noise, they’ll stay that way.”
“Do you promise that if they wake up, you will superspeed me out of there before they get me?” Maya asked, shifting her weight anxiously from one foot to the other.
“That depends.” Tapper gave her a sour smile. “I only rescue people who can correctly answer what the best Studio Ghibli movie is.”
Maya considered. “How to Train Your Dragon?”
“I swear, you do it on purpose.”
“Come on.” Lori walked in, steps light and quiet. The others followed, and for a moment, Iara was there in the doorway alone.
Then Hawk looked back, and before he could ask, Iara glared and shuffled forward. The hard rubber tips of the crutches scuffed the ground, but no more than a heavy footstep, as she made her way into the lair.
The darkness was deliberate, she realized as she left the safe fluorescent light of the hallway. The overhead lights had been removed, and there were floor lamps scattered here and there, usually near the electronic equipment. The buzzing noise must have bothered Tia Lake, Iara thought.
There were eels on the floor here and there, twining around each other like braided ropes to connect the different groups around the pillars. Iara could hear them breathing, or whatever it was they did instead of breathing—a slow raspy rustle that made it sound like the whole room was whispering. She wondered if everyone could hear it or if it was audible only to her.
The others stepped over the eels carefully. Iara tried to go around, until she saw that there was nowhere to go. Then she took a slow breath, let it out, steadied her crutches, and carefully hopped over them.
One crutch slid on the slick tile, and she landed with a little thump, just saving herself from a fall with a grunt as the other crutch jolted its way up her arm with the effort of taking her weight.
The eels stirred, a few centimeters from her feet, and the raspy whisper paused for a moment. Iara froze, swaying. She wanted to take a step to balance herself, but knew that if she did, it would be an ugly, ungainly step that made more noise. She balanced, suddenly sweating in the cold stale air, holding the crutch that had slipped off the ground so that it could make no more noise.
After a long and breathless moment, the slick, ropy mass of the eels seemed to settle, and the raspy whisper began again. Iara let out a breath and looked up at the others.
Maya and Tapper were both looking back at her. Maya shot her a thumbs-up, while Tapper had his arms half-out, ready to leap forward if she fell.
She returned the thumbs-up and nodded her thanks. “I am fine,” she mouthed, and Tapper gave her a quick nod and moved ahead.
She started moving again, looking around at what else was on the floor, now that her eyes had adjusted to the dim light. Electronics of all sorts—computers, of course, but also speakers, as well as large power tools that she thought would be more at home in an auto shop. Off by itself, a large doughnut-shaped device stood upright, with a low table on wheels ready to roll the patient into the tube. Iara had undergone many spinal scans in the MRI machine after the accident, and she looked away from it with a grimace.
Other things were not electronic. A great stone slab etched with forms that might have been Egyptian—or Incan, for that matter. Piles of books scattered on the floor, some left open, others with pages torn free. A great curved sword, its hilt beaten gold and shaped like coiling snakes. An old stone statue of a woman with snakes wrapped around her arms and legs. And bloodstains, so many bloodstains.
Iara saw that the others had stopped up ahead, and she hurried to catch up, thankful that she had no more lines of the eel creatures to hop over. On the floor rested an aquarium as long as Iara was tall, and half as wide. Sitting in the water, glowing a warm and inviting gold, was a cluster of the miracoral.
The floor around the aquarium was etched with writing. It was in dozens, maybe hundreds of languages, some using the Latin alphabet, others using Cyrillic letters, or Greek, or Hebrew, or something that might have been Arabic. There were pictograms as well, carved into the tile with painstaking precision, a little cloud of words all around the miracoral.
Iara found it in Portuguese first. Venha aqui e comer. She kept
searching, and a moment later saw what looked like old Tupinamba. She knew only a few words and the bedtime song her mother always sang, but it looked like the same message, even if she wasn’t sure the grammar was right: Ur iké u. Then again in English: Come here and eat.
“It’s the same in both English and Tagalog,” Hawk whispered. “Halika’t kumain. Like a really formal invitation.”
“And Mandarin Chinese,” Lori added quietly. “Lái zhèlĭ chī.” Everyone looked at her in surprise. “I did an immersion school as a kid.”
“I just thought you were kinda tan,” Hawk said.
“What about you, Tapper?” Maya asked. “Do they have it in, um . . . ?”
“Ebonics? No. I only speak English,” Tapper said. “What about you?”
“Maybe they have it in lolcat?”
While they went on, Iara looked at a computer printout of an old stone tablet. This one had a woman on it, lying on her back, and her dress turned into the waves of the ocean. Monsters crawled out of the ocean, things that looked like snakes or lizards or men with scorpion bodies . . .
“The Lake Foundation,” Iara whispered, and turned to the others. “In English, what does ‘foundation’ mean?”
“It’s like a company,” Maya said, “only sometimes it does nonprofit work, and on some shows, it’s the people who give the good guys secret robot cars.”
“Yes,” Iara said, “but it can also mean the, the . . .” She waved a hand in irritation. “The base, the bottom, yes?”
Tapper nodded. “The part everything else sits on.”
“Lake is not just a name, I think,” Iara said, and pointed at the woman. “I think she is the Lake Foundation. She is the source of it, where it all comes from.”
“So the statues and stuff all around here . . .” Maya gestured. “That’s her? I thought it was Medusa. Or a medusa, since in some shows it’s a type of monster instead of a person.”
“Could we not base plans on how to beat the evil monster lady on TV lore, Blondie?” Tapper made a quiet but very emphatic noise. “And if you’re thinking Greek, think of Echidna. Mother of monsters, including the hydra.” He gestured at the eels hanging from the support pillars around them. “Lots of snaky heads, cut off one and another appears. Sound familiar?”
Feeder Page 17