Indexing (29 page)

Glass coffins take many forms
, whispered a new voice, almost Snow, but not quite. Adrianna. I should have known that she’d be back to haunt me.

“I should,” said Deputy Director Brewer. “I refuse to believe that you truly had no other choice but to activate your story. Considering the training and experience represented by your team, you should have been able to find another way.”

He’d called them
my
team. “But?” I prompted.

“Birdie Hubbard is missing, as are many of the files she worked on,” he said. “The archivists are reviewing the last several years now. We have no real idea of the scope of the damage she’s done—or the damage she could still do, depending on what she’s managed to take with her. No one knows her better than your team … and your team is refusing to return to the field without you.”

Gratitude and satisfaction warred for dominance over my mood. In the end, they reached a peaceful compromise, and washed over me in equal measure as I fought the urge to smile. “I suppose that means your hands are tied. You need to return me to the field if you want Birdie apprehended.”

“Don’t think this is some sort of victory, Marchen,” he snapped. “You’re going to be watched more closely than you have ever been. The director has already requested regular updates on your activities, and that scrutiny is going to extend to the rest of your team. Do you understand? By agreeing to go back into the field and lead them, you are committing them to constant monitoring.” Deputy Director Brewer’s expression was oddly sympathetic. For the first time, I wondered if he might not be on our side after all.

That made me think of Jeff, and his brush with the narrative, and Sloane, who was just barely keeping herself from pouring bleach into everyone’s coffee. Casting an additional spotlight on them couldn’t do anything good.

Leaving them wouldn’t do anything good, either. “I understand the risks, Deputy Director, and I am willing to accept them. I believe my team shares my willingness. Anyone who doesn’t can request a transfer to another field team as soon as the issue with Birdie Hubbard has been resolved.”

Deputy Director Brewer nodded. “I thought that would be your answer. Agent Marchen, do you have a plan for what you’re going to do next?”

“I thought I’d start with asking you to take off these cuffs.” I raised my hands and offered him a thin smile. “Come on, Deputy Director. Let me go back to my team. Let me figure out how we’re going to stop her.”

“Don’t make me regret this,” he said, reaching into his pocket.

“Believe me, that’s
not
my plan,” I said. Then I shut my mouth, watching silently as he unlocked the handcuffs holding me to the table. There was nothing else I could safely say, and I didn’t want to risk changing his mind at this juncture. I had too much left to do.

It was time to get this story started.

Jeff, Andy, and Sloane were already in the bullpen by the time I finished taking a quick shower, rinsing my mouth with three different kinds of industrial-strength mouthwash, and changing into a clean uniform from the locker room. It was a purely psychological choice: I would feel better if I was appropriately attired for the situation ahead of us. It would also help my team if they saw me looking like myself. At least that was how I justified things, and after the night I’d had, I felt entitled to a little justification.

I paused in the doorway, watching the three of them cluster around Sloane’s computer, staring at something that I couldn’t see. They were all I had left of the strange little family I’d built within the ATI Management Bureau. Demi was compromised, and Birdie … Birdie was the enemy, and had apparently been the enemy for a long time. These people and my brother were all I had to defend, and I was going to get them to happily ever after if it killed me.

True to form, it was Sloane who sensed my presence first. She’d always been sensitive to the stories around her, one more gift she hadn’t requested from the narrative. As I watched, she stiffened, pushed her chair back, and swiveled to face me. Jeff and Andy turned a few seconds later. Andy looked wary; Jeff looked hopeful. Sloane looked like Sloane: suspicious, bored, and annoyed.

“So they decided to let you go?” she demanded, not rising.

“Looks that way,” I said, finally walking toward them. “Show a little respect. I’m your field team leader.”

“Really?” asked Andy, the wariness not fading. “They’re going to let you stay in charge?”

“For now, yes. Once the Birdie issue has been resolved, well. I guess we’ll see.” I looked from face to face, trying to distance myself from the scene enough to be objective. I couldn’t do it. “Having me in charge is going to mean extra scrutiny. If any of you wants out, Deputy Director Brewer has indicated that he would be willing to approve a transfer.”

“Fuck Deputy Director Brewer in the ear,” said Sloane. “You may be a Snow-bitch, but you’re
our
Snow-bitch.”

“We’re staying,” said Andy.

“
I’m
staying, and don’t think you can change my mind,” said Jeff.

I flashed him a quick smile. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Now: where’s Demi?”

I had been correct: Demi was being held in a small interrogation room very much like the one where I’d been kept, with one major difference: the walls were draped in sheets of sound-dampening foam, and her wrists and ankles were bound with plastic cord instead of the normal cuffs, with very little “play” left to enable her to keep her circulation going. Her health mattered less than the prevention of music. She wouldn’t be able to get a good percussive beat out of the things she had available to her.

I walked into the room, feeling the eyes of my team through the mirror to my back, and moved to take the seat across from Demi. The scene felt faintly unreal, like something out of a story, and I made a note to ask Jeff whether the narrative could be making use of modern television tropes as well as urban legends and the like. I didn’t particularly want to find myself in the kind of crime drama where someone always gets shot right before the commercial break.

“Hello, Demi,” I said. “I’m sorry about the restraints. You understand that they’re necessary, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said dully. Her head was hanging until her chin almost brushed against her chest. All the fight seemed to have gone out of her. I hoped that was a good thing. “You’re going to lock me up forever, aren’t you? I’m never going to see my family again.”

“That’s sort of up to you at this point,” I said. “We need to understand what happened tonight. We need to understand why you decided to start working with Birdie.”

“But I
didn’t
decide to start working with Birdie.” She raised her head, anger and bewilderment dancing in her eyes. “I was in the forest and then I was in a different forest, and I was so
angry
that when she said to start playing, I did. I don’t even know what I was mad about. I was just mad, and following orders seemed like the right thing to do. I didn’t even realize it was you until Sloane was punching me in the face …”

I frowned. If Demi had been controlled by the narrative, she had a reasonable chance of getting out of this cell without permanent damage. We just had to prove it. “Do you remember anything about what Birdie said to you?”

“Not much. It’s all sort of blurry, like I’m looking at it through glass.” Demi suddenly stiffened. “No, wait—there was one thing. She said that you might take me back. That I hadn’t been hers long enough. She wanted me to give you a message.”

“What message?” Demi could be lying, but I couldn’t stop myself from hoping she wasn’t. She was part of my team. I wanted her back.

Demi worried her lip between her teeth before she said, “Birdie wanted me to tell you to concede or die. And then she laughed and walked away and left me in the woods.” Tears were starting to pool in her eyes. “She
left
me.”

“I’m sorry.” I stood. “We’re going to get the Bureau’s best psychologists and archivists, and we’re going to figure out what she did to your story.”

“You mean you’re going to figure out whether you can trust me.”

“Yes,” I said. “I hope we can.”

“Yeah,” said Demi, letting her head drop forward again. “So do I.”

I stood there for a moment, looking at her. And then I turned and left the room. Demi might have more information for us; we’d get it out of her. But right now, there was something I needed to do.

Sleepy crows roosted in their patched-together nests in the aviary on the roof. Jeff stayed outside as I walked into the small structure, clucking and croaking with an ease that I wouldn’t have possessed just a few hours before. Finally, a large crow stood and stretched its wings before cawing a cursory greeting.

I held up the letter in my hand. “Take this to Mother Goose and I’ll feed your entire flock for a week.”

In a twinkling, the crow was in the air, snatching the letter as it flew past me. I followed it out of the aviary, watching as it soared away into the dawn. Jeff stepped up to stand beside me. His hand found mine, and I tangled my fingers through his, holding tight.

“Are you sure the crow will find her?”

“It would work if this were a fairy tale,” I said quietly.

“What does the letter say?”

The sunrise was pink and gold and red, and it didn’t look like apple skins at all. I smiled, stepping a little closer to Jeff, and answered, “That she’s going to lose.”

Not Sincere

Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 138.1 (“The Little Mermaid”)

Status: IN PROGRESS

Michael stood frozen in front of the mirror, one hand pressed to the hollow of his throat, like that would somehow magically give him back the voice he’d so casually allowed to be taken away. He wanted to scream. He wanted to throw back his head and howl to the skies until some fairy godmother from a kinder story turned and took notice of him, waving her magic wand and making it all better. Making wishes had gotten him into this situation, hadn’t it? Was it being so greedy to ask for just one more?

Nothing made sense anymore and nothing was ever going to make sense again.

When he’d decided on plastic surgery as the solution to his troubles, he hadn’t been expecting miracles—just an improvement, maybe, to the face that he’d been left with after the automobile accident that had killed his parents and left his little sister a wheelchair-bound mermaid of a girl. Emily would never walk again, and was free to move on her own only when she was in the swimming pool in their backyard. Michael still had his legs, but he’d wanted…God, he didn’t even know what he’d wanted. Normalcy, maybe. A face that didn’t make the boys down at the club turn away and gag when he worked up the courage to ask them to dance. Lips that someone might want to kiss someday, once they’d managed to get past those first few all-important steps, like saying hello and learning each other’s names.

He hadn’t been expecting miracles, but he’d received them all the same. The face the plastic surgeons crafted from the ruins of his own could have belonged to an angel. His eyes were large and liquid, his lips were soft and kissable, and everything about him was unscarred and symmetrical. He had never even dreamed he could see a face like that in his mirror.

But there had been complications: an infection in the tissue of his throat, growing with silent, malicious hunger until the day the bandages came off and one of the nurses noticed the swelling in his lymph nodes. They’d done everything they could to save his voice. It had been far too late. His vocal cords were utterly destroyed; he would never speak again, and would need to monitor his diet for the rest of his life, since his already-narrow esophagus wasn’t equipped to handle acid reflux or vomiting, let alone swallowing food that wasn’t mashed or chopped into tiny pieces.

Such a little thing. It had seemed like a reasonable price to pay when he was learning ASL and teaching it to his sister, who had laughed and laughed at the straightforward bluntness of his new language’s phrasing. It had seemed like something he could live with when he’d first gone to the club and met Kyle—beautiful, capricious Kyle—who was dance floor royalty if such a thing had ever existed. It had seemed like it was going to be okay.

And then Kyle had told him that he couldn’t be with someone who couldn’t speak. “If you can’t talk, how are we supposed to be a thing?” he’d asked, somehow making the question sound completely reasonable, even though it was the most unreasonable thing in the world. “You’re a cripple. Maybe that’s a shitty way to put it, I don’t know, but it’s not going to work. You understand.”

Michael understood. He understood that he’d given up everything about the man he’d been to become a man that someone like Kyle could love, and it hadn’t been enough. Nothing was ever going to be enough.

Emily had been keeping a knife under her pillow since the accident. “I have to be able to defend myself,” is what she’d always said. She hadn’t heard Michael creep into her room and take it. He was very good at being quiet.

Michael dropped his left hand from the hollow of his throat and raised his right hand, looking thoughtfully at his sister’s knife. He didn’t have to say anything.

The knife already knew.

Snow fell all around us in an icy curtain, guided by gentle winds to create a small island of perfect calm in the middle of the clearing. The woman from Nova Scotia—whose name was Tanya, when she wasn’t embracing her fairy tale fate—sat on a tree stump, looking at me gravely. I struggled not to squirm. The rock I was using as a chair was uncomfortable; my ass was freezing; and since I always landed in the whiteout wood in whatever I’d been wearing when I went to sleep, I was wearing nothing but socks and a flannel nightgown. Not the best winter gear the world has ever seen, but I couldn’t fall asleep if I went to bed in a thermal jacket and snow pants.

This had been happening every night for the two weeks since my story had fully activated. I was starting to get used to it, even if I missed being able to dream like a normal person.

“What are the means of putting us under?” Tanya asked, for the third time.

“Poisoned apple, poisoned comb, poisoned ring, too-tight girdle,” I said, with the prompt, irritated precision of an honor student forced into the remedial class. “The girdle has fallen out of favor in the past few decades, but had a resurgence in the goth community in the early nineties, and still shows up from time to time in certain fannish settings, like the steampunk community. Or fetish groups, of course.”

“What form does the comb take?” asked Tanya, her tone relaying no pleasure at my accurate answer.

I frowned. “It’s a comb. It’s the least common of the variants anymore. I don’t know—it could be a hairclip, I guess? Maybe bobby pins. That would make sense.” The poison on the comb was usually a variant of the type used on the apple. It was weaker nine times out of ten, since the Snow White needed to recover long enough to foolishly eat the forbidden fruit. Maybe that was why the combs got dropped from the narrative: people realized that they were being redundant, or maybe they collectively decided that their fairy tale icons shouldn’t be stupid enough to let themselves get poisoned twice.

Tanya frowned at me. “You’re not taking this seriously.”

“You’re appearing in my dreams to teach me how to be a better Snow White,” I pointed out. “I’m not sure how seriously I can take this without losing my grip on reality completely.”

“There are dangers in the world. Dangers that prey specifically on our kind.”

“I’ve been an ATI Management Bureau agent for my entire adult life,” I said. “I think I know about the dangers.”

“Henrietta…”

“Henry,” I corrected firmly. “My name is Henry.”

“Henry, then, if you insist. You’ve been fighting those dangers from the outside. You’re
inside
the story now. Some things can no longer touch you. Others…” Tanya shook her head, looking mournful. “Others will be a hundred times more dangerous.”

I saw my opening and I took it. “Is that what happened to you?” I asked, trying not to show my eagerness.

Everyone who existed in the whiteout wood was a Snow White. Most of them—like Tanya—were dead, their bodies having been lost forever in the waking world. Some were just sleeping, living out their comas on life support and in forgotten hospices all around the world. Most of the girls I’d been introduced to so far were among the dead. They dealt better with strangers, since they no longer hoped for rescue.

I’d been looking up the other Snows since my first trip to the wood, trying to ferret out the details of their lives and deaths based on the few facts that I’d been able to glean. What I was finding so far was deeply unnerving. At least two-thirds of the women in the wood didn’t seem to be in the records. Either Birdie’s meddling had gone deeper than any of us had guessed, or we’d been missing incursions for years, letting the narrative slip things under the radar. Of Tanya, whoever she’d been in life, I had thus far found no trace. That didn’t mean that I was going to stop looking.

Tanya sighed, and for a moment I thought she might actually answer me this time. The moment passed. “No,” she said finally. “I was done in by a piece of fruit, because I was a traditionalist. Can you please try to focus? We don’t have long.”

The snow was falling harder now, starting to actually drift into our little island of calm. I stiffened. “Why not? Is it Adrianna?”

“She doesn’t like us teaching you,” Tanya said. “She’ll stop us if she can. That’s why you have to focus.”

“Why? What’s the worst she could do?”

“
Focus
, Henry,” said Tanya, and the snow was coming down hard now, blocking out her coal black hair and blood red lips, until everything was white, and the snow was falling, and
I
was falling—

—and I opened my eyes on the pleasant dimness of my bedroom, and the distant, too-familiar sound of bluebirds beating themselves to death against my window. My phone was ringing. I sat up, reaching for the sound on autopilot. One: grab phone. Two: press button. Three: bring phone to ear. “Hello?”

“Henry, it’s Jeff.”

I blinked, looking around my room for some clue as to the time. With the blackout curtains drawn, it could have been any time between dawn and noon. “What’s going on? Did I sleep through a call?”

“No, no, you didn’t miss anything. It’s a little after five in the morning.”

That explained why I’d still been asleep: my alarm didn’t go off until six. I fell backward into the pillows, closing my eyes as I asked wearily, “Is there a
reason
you’re calling me this early? Better yet, is it a
good
reason?”

“We have a case.”

“That’s annoying and regrettable, and unless I hear it from Dispatch, I’m not seeing where this is our team’s problem. Did you sleep at the office again?”

Jeff sounded faintly defensive as he said, “I had things to do. You should be getting the call from Dispatch in about five minutes.”

“Why five minutes?”

“Piotr is calling Sloane first.”

That was enough to make me open my eyes again. Waking Sloane was something best done from a distance, and always done at your own risk. The rest of us tended to wake up grumpy. She had the potential to wake up homicidal. “So it’s ours?”

“It’s ours.”

“Got it. I’ll see you in the office.” I hung up and sat up again, pushing the covers back. This was the first call my team had received in the two weeks since my story had gone active. This was our chance to prove that we could still do our jobs, even though I was technically compromised. Which meant that above all, we couldn’t fuck this one up.

Swamp mallow had sprouted in the corners of my room, treating the carpet like a preternaturally good growth medium. I wrinkled my nose when I saw it. Then I picked up my phone, snapping a few quick pictures. Jeff would want to know what I’d found growing out of my floor
this
time. He could cross-reference it against whatever story we were about to get involved with, and that would give us one more way of predicting what was coming.

I don’t know what swamp mallows normally smell like, but these smelled like apples, making my mouth water and my stomach clench at the same time. I was starting to think that most Snow Whites were thin not because the narrative liked skinny girls, but because they couldn’t force themselves to eat once the smell of apples had started permeating everything.

I was standing in front of my closet, selecting the appropriate black suit to wear to work, when my phone rang. I clicked it on. “Henry,” I said, sounding considerably more awake than I had only ten minutes before.

“Agent Marchen, this is Agent Remus with Dispatch, we have reported incursion in your region, what’s your status?”

“Available, preparing for the field,” I said, grabbing a jacket from its hanger. “I just spoke with my Archivist, and he’s also preparing to be dispatched. Do we know what kind of incursion we’re dealing with here?”

“Confirmed one-three-eight dash-one.”

I made a disgusted sound. “A Little Mermaid.”

“Directions will be sent to your phone,” said Piotr. “You now know everything that we do. Try not to get yourself killed this time.”

“Don’t worry, Piotr,” I said, balancing the phone between my cheek and shoulder as I closed the closet with my free hand. “Once a month is my limit.”

Now it was his turn to make a disgusted sound before he hung up. I chuckled to myself, and then turned to the business of getting ready to go.

The address Piotr provided took me to one of the smaller suburbs that clustered around our fair city like shelf fungus ringing a tree stump. Our van was already parked in front of a low-slung colonial home when I pulled up. The front door was open, and Andy was standing on the lawn, consoling a yellow-haired girl in a manual wheelchair. I turned off the car and opened the door, sliding my keys into my pocket as I stood.

“You took your time getting here,” said Sloane’s voice from directly behind me.

I jumped, yelping in surprise as I whirled to face her.

She watched me struggle to catch my breath with apparent disinterest. Finally, when I was sure that I wasn’t about to have a heart attack, she said in a flat deadpan, “Boo.”

“I will report you to Human Resources so fast you’ll still be standing here when they show up with your formal reprimand,” I said. It was pure reflex, and we both knew it—she had startled me, and now I was threatening her. We’d been doing this dance for a long damn time. “What did you do to your hair?”

“Are you really going to stand outside an active incursion and grill me about my hair? I guess you really
are
a fairy tale princess now.” Sloane reached up to pat one of her bleach-white ponytails in an exaggerated preening gesture. Streaks of bloody red and poison apple green wormed through the bleached strands, somehow looking less like Christmas and more like a crisis getting ready to happen. “I figured it was time for a change. Between you and Demi, all the ‘black haired girl’ slots are taken.”

I arched an eyebrow. “So sorry.”

“You should be. My field team leader before you was a Snow Queen. She’s why I started dyeing my hair black in the first place. Blondes may have more fun, but I hate getting shown up by people whose hair is naturally blue.”

I lowered my eyebrow, my dubiousness fading into a frown. “Why are you stalling?”

Now it was Sloane’s turn to jump, a guilty look flashing across her face. “I’m not stalling.”