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“No,” I said. “What’s this all about?”

“Before my current issues with the narrative started, I heard this noise for hours. It was just this huge blaring siren that wouldn’t slack off and wouldn’t stop ringing in my ears. It was enough to make me want to rip the throat out of the world in order to make it stop.” Sloane looked grim. “I don’t think my parrot could hear it. I don’t think
anyone
could hear it, except for me. The narrative started this shit by going after me.”

“Why didn’t you—” said Jeff.

“You never said—” I said, at the same time.

“Because I didn’t want you people to think I was losing my fucking mind, okay?” Sloane snapped. “I start dreaming about poison apples and you start calling for the therapists and reaching for the restraints. I tell you it started with me hearing an alarm that nobody else could hear, and you start looking into rubber rooms. Thanks, but no thanks. As long as I can keep myself from poisoning Blanche over there,” she gestured violently toward me, “I can do a lot more to figure out what’s going on from out here than I ever could in an Agency institution.”

“I wouldn’t have let them do that to you,” I said.

“You wouldn’t have had a choice,” Sloane said, shrugging off my loyalty like it was nothing. She focused back on Jeff. “Okay. We have about thirty seconds before Henry does the math and realizes we’re down two people, who are probably about to be eaten alive by predatory fairy tales. So tell me before she freaks: what can we do? How can we stop this, how did we start this?”

“I …” Jeff stopped for a moment, paling until his skin tone was close to mine. “Oh, God. You and I were both attacked by our stories. Henry’s been talking to birds. The narratives are leaking. There’s only one thing that could do this.” He put his Gatorade aside, sliding quickly to his feet. “We have to find the others.”

“You’re not the one I expected to go all big damn hero on me,” said Sloane, grabbing his arm. “We’re not going anywhere until you tell me what your ‘one thing’ is.”

I wanted to intervene, to tell her to let go of him before somebody got hurt. Instead, I stood frozen, thinking about what they were both saying, and thinking about the crow in Dr. Reynard’s kitchen. Talking to it had seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

Maybe Deputy Director Brewer was right. Maybe I was being compromised.

“There are tale types that include storytellers,” said Jeff. “The whole Scheherazade class of narratives depend on someone who can tell them—and that’s just one grouping. We could be dealing with someone, a person, who can control the narrative. And if that’s true …”

“If that’s true, then we’re all screwed,” I said. “More screwed, I mean. Okay. Let’s go.”

Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type 440 (“The Frog Prince”)

Status: ACTIVE

The frog stayed in the water for at least five minutes. Even a talking amphibian couldn’t stop the current from doing its work, and Andy’s wallet hadn’t been that heavy; it must have traveled some distance down the creek bed before the frog went back in to look for it.

When the frog finally came back out of the water, the wallet clutched smugly in its jaws, Andy was ready for it. He might not have been able to make his legs work, but he was fully capable of moving his arms, and the high weeds around the creek had proved to contain a great many treasures. There were tools there—even makeshift weapons, for a man who knew how to use them.

The frog probably didn’t even see the rusty old crowbar coming before Andy smashed it down on the fragile plane of the amphibian’s skull. The frog was driven down into the mud, its entire head taking on a distinctly flattened aspect. The wallet shot out of its mouth, coming to rest nearly a foot away.

“This isn’t … over … you fool …” wheezed the frog. Its legs started to spasm. “You’ll pay. You’ll …” The spasms stopped.

Andy gave the frog’s body an experimental prod with the end of his crowbar. “You dead, or I need to hit you again? You know what, fuck it. I’m just going to hit you again.”

He actually hit the frog’s body three more times, until it started to feel less like vengeance and more like sadism. Then he climbed to his feet, his legs suddenly working once more, picked up his wallet, and started looking for a way back up to solid ground.

He barely even noticed that he was still holding the crowbar.

Andy had been assigned to follow a bunch of semi-spectral goats over a creek until he either managed to dispel them or found the troll that was inevitably going to show up and start trying to eat them. The idea was to prevent a troll bridge narrative from establishing itself in the area. There were kids around here.

Jeff, Sloane, and I approached the bridge cautiously. Jeff and I both had our service weapons drawn. Sloane was empty-handed, which made her the most dangerous of us all.

Something was rustling in the scrub grass that grew around the creek. I stopped, motioning for the others to do the same. “Who’s that trip-trap-tripping over my bridge?” I called.

“Fuck you,” Andy’s voice replied. One large brown hand appeared through the grass, followed a moment later by his head and shoulders as he pulled himself up to our level. “Where the fuck have you people been all night? I’ve been dying out here.”

“Nice crowbar,” said Sloane.

Andy shot the rusty crowbar in his hand a look, like he’d never seen it before. Then he flung it away into the weeds and climbed to his feet. “You didn’t give me all the intel, Henry. I’m pissed.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. He was wet and muddy, and there was what looked like blood on the cuff of one sleeve. “Are you all right?”

“I took out the troll, no problem,” he said. “But the frog …” A bleak look crossed his face. “I think the frog nearly had me.”

“You fell into a Frog Prince?” asked Jeff, sounding horrified. “I didn’t think you qualified for a four-forty scenario. You’re not a prince. I mean, you’ve never shown any princely tendencies …”

“Whoever’s driving this thing is trying to take us out,” I said. “If they’re twisting the narrative to force it to do what they want, it doesn’t
matter
if Andy would normally qualify for a four-forty.” I turned to the muddy agent. “You okay, Andy?”

“I’m fine,” he snarled. “I beat the goddamn thing to death and left it by the water. You think that’s far enough from happy ever after to save my ass?”

“I say again,
nice
crowbar,” said Sloane approvingly.

“I think you’re good, but don’t really have time to worry about that right now. There’s something more pressing going on, so if you’re capable of moving, we need to move,” I said.

Andy’s eyes skirted over the three of us, drawing an immediate and unwanted conclusion. “Demi?” he asked.

“She dropped off the walkie-talkie the same time you did, and we haven’t been able to rouse her,” I said.

“Then what the fuck are we standing around here for?” he said. “Let’s move.”

We moved.

Demi’s assignment had taken her into the little square of woodland still standing at the heart of the newest neighborhood in the area. It was too small to get lost in, yet somehow two of the local children had managed to do exactly that: Gregory and Hannah, twins, age eight. They were ripe for a three-twenty-seven-A, and when the story came calling, they went after it. Demi should have had no trouble pulling the wayward kids out of the woods and returning them to their homes.

So why the hell wasn’t she answering her walkie-talkie?

Sloane was the first one into the trees, with Andy’s muddy, rusty crowbar clutched in one hand like a sword. She’d somehow managed to find the thing in the grass, and had refused to leave it behind—probably because she was charmed by the idea of beating someone to death Tarantino-style. As long as she was taking point, I wasn’t going to argue with her about it.

Jeff and I moved at the center of the group, while Andy, who wasn’t moving as quickly as he normally did, brought up the rear. I kept glancing back to make sure that he was okay, and that another story hadn’t swooped out of nowhere to claim him as its own. That wasn’t an ordinary fear for me. This wasn’t an ordinary night.

It only got worse when Sloane appeared from the trees up ahead of us. “You guys need to see this,” she said, sounding subdued. The crowbar was dangling limply in her hand, no longer held like a weapon; she was clinging to it more the way a little girl would hold a teddy bear.

I stopped. “How bad is it?” I asked.

“Bad,” she said. “Come on.”

This time, when she vanished into the trees, the three of us were right behind her. She only had to lead us a little way, to a small clearing that had probably seen a hundred games of hide-and-seek and tag since the housing development was put in place. Two small bodies were curled at the center of the clearing, their clothes and skin blackened by the fire that had killed them. I had no doubt that when they were examined by someone with the proper tools, they would be identified as Hannah and Gregory. Everything smelled like burnt meat … and like sweet vanilla frosting, the kind that children might imagine using as the spackle in a life-size candy cottage.

Jeff moved to circle the bodies, studying them with a practiced archivist’s eye. Finally, he knelt and pulled something from the edge of the ashes, holding it up for the rest of us to see. Even in the dim light that filtered through the trees from the street, Demi’s badge managed to gleam.

“Is she dead?” asked Andy.

“No,” said Jeff. “There are only two bodies here. This is a message.”

“We’ve lost her.” My voice sounded hollow. “She failed, and the narrative took her.” And I didn’t have any idea how we were going to get her back, or if getting her back was even possible. Demi was gone, the narrative was being controlled by a person or persons unknown, and we were screwed.

“The mole,” said Sloane.

I nodded. “It’s the only explanation.”

“We need to go,” said Jeff. He walked back to the rest of us, offering me Demi’s badge. I took it without thinking. “The narrative may have settled for the night, but we need to get back to headquarters. We need to tell them what’s happening.”

“Things are about to get ugly,” said Andy.

I looked back to the two dead children—the kids Demi was supposed to have saved. “Things already are,” I said quietly, and no one had an answer to that. No one said anything at all.

Empty Nest

Memetic incursion in progress: no memetic incursions currently in progress

Status: NO ONGOING THREAT

The four of us made our way back to the van without saying anything. There were things we needed to say—too many things, when you got right down to it—but our voices seemed to have collectively failed us, leaving us as mute as a Little Mermaid who has not yet made contact with her Prince.

The streets outside the little stretch of forest were dark and quiet, giving no indication of the chaos that had been unfolding so nearby only a short time before. The smell of smoke and burnt sugar tainted the air, making it difficult for me to breathe in through my nose. Jeff was still unsteady on his feet; I looped an arm around his waist, keeping him stable as we walked up the grassy knoll at the edge of the park. Our van was waiting for us there, representing the closest thing to safety we were going to find.

Andy stopped a few feet from the van and pulled out his phone. I looked at him, raising an eyebrow in silent question. He nodded: yes, he was calling for cleanup, and yes, he trusted me to keep Jeff and Sloane safe until he was finished. I echoed his nod, and guided Jeff the rest of the way to the vehicle.

“Sloane, get the door,” I said. My voice seemed too small for what we had just seen, lacking the strength it needed to make any impact on the scene.

For once in her life, Sloane didn’t argue. She just opened the already unlocked rear doors, disappearing into the depths of the van. I stopped, pulling Jeff to a halt along with me. He blinked.

“We don’t know if it’s safe,” I said, trying to project a level of calm I wasn’t actually feeling. I might never be that calm again. I shook my head to clear the thought away and said, “The narrative has just stopped trying to kill us. There’s a chance it left us a little surprise in the van.”

Jeff frowned, glaring at the open van door even as he leaned against my shoulder, trying to keep himself upright. “Sometimes I truly hate fairy tales, Henry,” he said.

“Yeah.” I sighed. “Me too.”

“Here’s something else to hate,” said Andy, moving up on my other side. “The cleanup crews are all stretched as thin as the field teams, thanks to the number of incursions we’ve had to deal with tonight. It’ll be about an hour before anyone can get here.”

I stared at him. “An
hour
? Did you tell Dispatch that we have civilian casualties? And that Demi’s gone missing?”

“Yes. That’s why the cleanup crews are getting here as fast as they are.” Andy looked grim. “We’re to remain where we are until we can formally hand off the scene. We have not been instructed to maintain a perimeter, but we are to intervene if we see anyone trying to enter the woods.”

Sloane’s head popped out of the van door. “Are they high, or just stupid?”

“Maybe both,” I said. “How’s the van?”

“Clear. Nothing here that isn’t ours.”

“Good. Move.” Miracles happen, because Sloane didn’t argue this time, either: she just hopped out of the van, allowing me to help Jeff over to the rear bumper, where he sat down heavily. If she went along with my orders one more time, the Vatican might have to seriously consider her for sainthood. “Is there a convenience store or something near here?”

“There’s a 7-Eleven a few blocks over, at the edge of the commercial district,” said Andy. “Why?”

“Because Jeff looks like he’s been run over by a bus, and you don’t look much better. Sloane, stay here and keep an eye on them.”

Sloane frowned at me. “What, you’re making a munchie run?”

I shrugged. “Yes.”

“Cool. I want some of those little ice cream bites and a Slurpee. And I won’t let anybody hurt the boys, since they’re too wussy to defend themselves.” Sloane produced a file from inside her shirt, and began addressing her nails. She didn’t offer to give me any money.

I hadn’t expected that she would. “Call me if you need anything,” I said. “Andy, which way was the 7-Eleven?”

He pointed wordlessly. I turned, and started walking.

The 7-Eleven was virtually deserted: just me, the night clerk, and a homeless man who blanched when he saw me. From the way he was twitching, he was probably high enough that my dead-white complexion made me look like the Angel of Death, coming to punish him for his past transgressions. Thankfully, punishing people isn’t usually a part of my job description. I stood aside and let him rush out of the store, leaving me with open aisles and the freedom to browse at my leisure.

The clerk barely even glanced in my direction. Her attention was fixed on the TV mounted above the register. She had twisted her torso at an angle that even Sloane would have been impressed by, and she stayed that way the whole time I was shopping, not even untwisting when I approached the counter with my armload of drinks and salty snacks.

“Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” she asked.

That was the first sign she’d given of knowing that I was in the store. I nodded, putting my things down on a stretch of counter where she hopefully wouldn’t knock them over as soon as she moved. “Not sure what you mean in specific, but I find that ‘hell of a thing’ is usually a good description of the world.”

“This night.” She finally unwound herself, sliding easy as you please onto her stool before beginning to ring up my purchases. “It’s all over the news. Five fires, three murders, some missing kids …”

Three murders was better than I’d been expecting, given the number of incursions the Bureau had been trying to handle. “You’re right,” I said. “That’s definitely a hell of a thing. Does anyone have any idea why all this is happening?”

“Something in the air, I guess,” she said. “It’s probably not terrorists.”

“I guess that’s a good thing.” I swiped my credit card before she could give me the total. “The last thing this city needs is a terrorist attack right now.” It was interesting that the clerk would use that word, since terrorism was one of the few things we’d never used to cover up an incursion. The scars that sort of lie would leave on the city would be impossible to heal.

“Amen,” said the clerk. She bagged my purchases—all but Sloane’s Slurpee, which she simply passed back to me—with a quick efficiency that didn’t seem possible, given how laconic she’d been otherwise. Thrusting the bag in my direction, she flashed me a smile. “Have a nice night. Try to stay safe out there.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said.

Exiting the store with Sloane’s Slurpee in one hand and the bag in the other, I was struck by just how quiet the city had become. Most of my night had been spent racing from one emergency to another. Suddenly, with the stories no longer trying to force their way back into the human world, it was like everything could rest. Moments like this were part of why we kept on fighting. Sure, we all had our own reasons to hate the narrative, but that didn’t necessarily mean we had an overwhelming love for humanity. So we loved the quiet instead. The spaces where there were no stories, where anything could happen.

The walk back to the van was quick and peaceful: something else I needed, and wasn’t going to get much more of, if the shouting I heard when I came around the corner was any indication. I broke into a jog, careful not to spill Sloane’s Slurpee. If I was running into danger, I didn’t need to get it from two directions at the same time.

The van came into sight. Andy was standing near the bumper, one hand clenched in a fist at his side, the other shaking a finger in the face of a familiar figure in a slim-fitting charcoal suit. Sloane was crouching behind him in the open van door. Jeff was nowhere to be seen.

Deputy Director Brewer was focused on Andy, who was the most immediate potential threat in the area. I slowed when I was about ten feet away, taking a quick glance around the area as I looked for the rest of the deputy director’s team. There: a plain white van parked illegally near the corner, with a man in mirror shades in the driver’s seat. It was a surveillance vehicle. That was probably all that we’d had remaining in the pool, with all the field and cleanup teams scrambled and out trying to stop stories from destroying us all.

“—and I’m telling you that you’re not going to remove
any
of us,” said Andy, shaking his fist again.

“Something the matter here, gentlemen?” I strolled up as casually as I could, holding Sloane’s Slurpee out for her to snatch from my hand as I focused my attention on the deputy director. “Deputy Director Brewer. I didn’t expect to see you out tonight. Don’t things need supervision back at headquarters?”

“Headquarters is a ghost town. Dispatch is relaying anything that comes in directly to me.” He tapped the Bluetooth headset clamped onto his left ear. “Right now, we have a window. Maybe it’s a short one; maybe it’s a sign that this was the last burst of the storm, but it’s a window.”

“That’s great,” I said. “That takes us back to my first question: is something the matter here, gentlemen? We’re not in the best of shape right now, but I can’t imagine that the rest of the field teams are doing any better.”

“No, you’re right on the money: twenty percent casualties seem to be the order of the night.” His voice was Arctic cold, with no room for movement. I felt myself starting to freeze under his regard. He continued, “Now if you’d just release Agent Davis to me, I’ll be able to let you continue whatever monitoring work you’ve been doing here.”

I blinked at him. Moving slowly and deliberately, I set my bag of snacks down on the van’s rear bumper before turning back and asking, “Agent Davis? And why would I be releasing Agent Davis to you?”

“He’s somehow under the impression that Jeff’s gone rogue,” said Andy, shooting a poisonous glare at Deputy Director Brewer. “He wants him for ‘observation.’”

“Radio signals were intercepted, and Dispatch reported a spike in narrative activity from this location,” said the deputy director. “Agent Davis is not in any trouble, but we do need to observe him for the next few days.”

“With all due respect, sir,” I said, despite feeling zero respect for the bureaucrat now standing in front of me, “no. Agent Davis is not experiencing a spike. We’ve all been through a lot tonight, and some of those stories are more than capable of creating a smoke screen when they feel like they’re about to be detected. Whatever Dispatch intercepted wasn’t real.”

“Well, then, it’s time that he was reassigned,” said Deputy Director Brewer. “This isn’t the normal way of doing this, but field teams are maintained at four for a reason. You can’t—”

“There are only four of us left.”

Sloane sounded utterly calm when she said that. The rest of us turned to face her. She was sitting in the van’s open rear doorway, her Slurpee in one hand and an open bag of chips in the other. Looking unconcerned, she took a long sip of frozen sugar water before she said, “Demi’s gone. Went into the woods chasing a three-twenty-seven-A, and when we arrived to extract her, she wasn’t there anymore. I don’t know how you don’t know this already, but you can check the logs. We called Dispatch to report her disappearance and request cleanup for the civilian casualties a good twenty minutes ago. So if you pull Jeff off our team, you’re not rebalancing us, you’re crippling us—and you’re breaking up one of the most effective field units you have. I don’t know the whole picture, but I don’t think you can afford that right now.”

“Gone?” Deputy Director Brewer rounded on me. “What does she mean, Agent Santos is gone? Where did she go? Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I don’t know, sir. Agent Winters described the scene accurately: we got to the woods, and Agent Santos was not there. Her badge was, however, which leads me to believe she was either abducted or went willingly, but was not killed. There were no signs of a struggle. As for why we didn’t tell you …” I shrugged. “Maybe we got a little defensive when you started talking about running off with our archivist. Sloane hits things, Andy does public relations, and I keep them from killing each other. Without Jeff, we’d never know where we were supposed to be standing. So we don’t like having people threaten to take him away from us.”

“We had reports of a narrative spike from your team’s location.”

The change in tactics threw me for a second. I opened my mouth, preparing to lie, but stopped as Andy stepped forward and rumbled, “That was me, sir.”

Deputy Director Brewer stared at him. I did much the same. “Excuse me?” said the deputy director.

“The spike was me, sir. Your readings probably indicated that it was a solo team member who was potentially compromised, which explains why you thought it might be Agent Davis. It was an easy mistake.” Andy shook his head. He was still imposing, even in his muddy, water-damaged clothes. “I would have thought the same in your place. Honestly, I wish it had been him. I never wanted to encounter the narrative face-to-face, as it were.”

Deputy Director Brewer’s eyebrows were climbing so high that it seemed like they were going to meet his hairline. “
You
, Agent Robinson? But you’re not connected to any ongoing story.”

“I think that’s why the narrative came after me, sir. I’m a blank page; you could write anything on me, if you tried hard enough.” Andy somehow managed not to look disturbed by the words that were coming out of his mouth. That was all right; I was looking disturbed for him. “I separated from the rest of the team in order to pursue a Billy Goats Gruff scenario that was playing out near the local creek. It terminated easily, and was immediately replaced by a Frog Prince. It took up a temptation approach, trying to convince me to agree to let the narrative perform a service for me.”

“A service?” said Deputy Director Brewer. He sounded appropriately horrified.

“Yes, sir. I had dropped my wallet when I fell into the creek. The, ah, talking frog offered to retrieve it for me, in exchange for a favor to be named later.” Andy shook his head. “I did my best not to listen, but I’ll be honest with you, sir—that little fucker was smooth as hell. I knew that going along with him was the worst thing I could possibly do. I wanted to do it anyway.”

“And did you?” asked the deputy director.

“No, sir. I beat it to death with a crowbar instead.” Andy’s mouth twitched upward in a smile. “Violence may not be the healthiest response, but it seems to work for Agent Winters.”