Feeder - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Patrick Weekes was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and attended Stanford University, where he received a BA and an MA in English literature. By day he works at BioWare, where he has worked on games in the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series. By night, he is the author of the Rogues of the Republic trilogy; Dragon Age: The Masked Empire, a novel set in the Dragon Age universe; and Feeder. Patrick lives in Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, with his wife Karin, his two Lego-and-video-game-obsessed sons, and far too many rescued animals. In his spare time, he takes on unrealistic Lego-building projects, practices Kenpo Karate, and embarrasses himself in video games. Follow him on Twitter at @PatrickWeekes.

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Feeder

01

LORI

The message about the new feeder came while Lori Fisher was trying to get her brother, Ben, to eat his breakfast.

“This is what you said you wanted,” Lori said, putting the toast down in front of him.

Ben, seven years old and blessed with a complexion that made him look perfectly tanned, while Lori herself just looked sallow, glared at Lori and let out a put-upon breath as he pushed the toast away. “I said toast. I didn’t say toast with butter!”

“Toast implies butter, though. Toast comes with butter,” Lori said, and then she looked down as her phone buzzed.

Handler: New feeder. Taxi will pick you up.

“I didn’t want the butter part!” Ben insisted, playing angrily with a Lego figure on their large and cluttered kitchen table as the toast sat uneaten in front of him. “I just wanted the toast part!”

“Okay, but the butter is on the toast already. I can’t take it off. Can you eat it just today for me?” Lori gave her brother a hopeful smile, then looked down at the phone again and tapped in a response.

Lori: I was going shopping with Jenn.

Handler: Sorry. And client wants to consult.

“No! I only want to eat what I said I wanted to eat, and that was toast, and not toast with butter!”

Lori looked at the clock on the microwave of their small kitchen. It read 7:17, which meant it was actually 8:21 because she had never reset it after the time change in the spring, and it had been four minutes slow before that. The ferry came by at eight thirty every weekday to take Ben to day care, and while the schedule wasn’t quite as strict during the summer as it was when she was trying to get Ben to school, Lori still got dirty looks from the day-care people if she brought him in late.

The plan had been shopping with a friend, partially school supplies for Ben and partially a new back-to-school outfit for her. Instead today would be spent dealing with feeders . . . assuming Ben ever left.

“Ben, we are almost out of time.”

His eyes brightened, and he pointed above Lori’s shoulder at the sign that hung over the sink. “ ‘Our family might get there late!’ ” he read.

“ ‘But we’ll get there together,’ ” Lori finished without looking back at the stupid sign, which had an overloaded car covered with luggage and a bike and a surfboard, “and that doesn’t mean we can miss the ferry!”

Ben was dressed and was even wearing an appropriate pair of shorts and T-shirt instead of the long-sleeved shirt and heavy sweatpants he’d put on the last time she let him dress himself. He still had to brush his teeth, though. The time it would take to make toast again and convince Ben that it was in fact new unbuttered toast was not time they could spare.

Ben saw her look at the clock, then saw her look at him, and changed his expression from angry to pleading. “I would eat a granola bar?”

Lori sighed. “Superfast?”

“Superfast,” Ben said immediately.

“And a banana,” she added as she reached up into the pantry over the fridge and grabbed a granola bar.

“I will eat a banana if you open it for me.”

Lori tossed him the granola bar, grabbed a banana from the bunch on the counter by the fridge, and peeled it for him. “Deal, little guy,” she said, and put it on the plate next to the awful, terrible buttered toast, which she grabbed for herself. “Superfast. I have to go to work, so I’m going to get dressed. Brush your teeth as soon as you’re done, all right?”

Ben was already chewing on the granola bar, and nodded as he read a page from a comic that had come free with one of his Lego sets and coincidentally included characters from a lot of other Lego sets available for purchase.

Lori’s bedroom was down the hall from her brother’s. She pulled off the long nightshirt she’d slept in and tapped another message at Handler while hunting for a clean bra.

Lori: Consult on-site or over phone?

Handler: Mainly phone, but on-site possible. Grown-up clothes, plz.

She scarfed the toast, pulled on dark gray slacks and boots she could move in, found a bra, and tugged it on. “You still eating?” she called back out into the kitchen.

“Almost done!”

“You promised me superfast,” she called with a note of warning in her voice, and pulled on a purple blouse that looked like it was silk but was in fact a high-quality stain-resistant polyester. The outfit made her look like she was in her early twenties instead of sixteen.

“The banana had a dark spot on it!” Ben called back from the kitchen.

Lori glanced at her phone: 8:25. “Okay, leave the rest of the banana and brush your teeth.”

She heard the sound of the electric toothbrush while she pulled her dark hair back into a ponytail and put on just enough makeup to look like an adult—a bit of eyeliner to accent the big dark eyes she shared with her brother, some blush on her cheeks, lip gloss that didn’t actively work against the purple blouse.

It was 8:27. “Shoes on,” she called, and grabbed her wallet and keys.

Ben came out of the hallway with a handful of Legos. “I just remembered, today we’re supposed to bring—”

“No time,” Lori said, cutting him off.

“But—”

“Shoes!”

Ben’s face screwed up into a knot of misery. “It’s not fair! You always want me to go fast, and I never go fast enough, and if I don’t bring it, I’ll be the only kid at day care who didn’t bring a Show and Share toy, and . . .”

Lori sighed again and looked at the microwave clock, which now read 7:24 and meant8:28. “Fast, please?”

Ben grabbed the rest of his Legos, shoved them into his backpack, and got his shoes on with remarkable speed. One minute later, she was hustling him out the apartment door, down the stairs, and out onto the sidewalk, where other children were already waiting. Most of them had long pants. A few had sweatshirts.

Lori looked at Ben in his T-shirt and shorts, and then at the overcast sky, and then at the ferry already puttering up the canal toward their stop. “Are you gonna be warm enough?”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay, but it’s a little cooler than I—”

“I’m fine,” Ben said again, as though Lori were the biggest idiot in the world, and Lori let it drop.

The ferry was a stubby boat with old rubber tires hanging from its sides and “Santa Dymphna Eastern” stenciled in above the waterline. Its horn blasted once as it navigated the tricky final turn—their street had been narrow before the rising water turned Santa Dymphna into a canal city—and pulled to a stop at the dock.

“Have a great day,” Lori said as they joined the line of people boarding. “Good listening and good attitude, right?”

“Right. Love you.” Ben hugged her. “Can you pick me up right after day care today?”

“I’ve got work, so go to day care, and we’ll see if I can get you early.”...