Indexing (6 page)

Andy snorted
as he bent to scoop Demi’s motionless form off the office floor. “I don’t know
what you’ve been smoking, Henry, but there’s no reality in this building for
her to face. She’s barely even started down the rabbit hole.”

“Then the
faster she wakes up, the sooner she can start coping. Go. And when you get
back, get started on your paperwork.” I dropped back into my chair. “The
world’s not going to save itself from the collected works of the Brothers
Grimm.”

Having Jeff back at his desk
was a definite relief: he could generally be trusted to do his own paperwork in
record time, and then get bored and start helping everyone else with their
share. Most forms didn’t care who filled them out, as long as it was done
correctly, and I shortly found myself in the enviable position of playing
rubber stamp while Jeff shoved page after page in front of me to be signed.
Sloane ignored us both, choosing to return to eBay’s modern-day Goblin Market in
search of treasures.

Andy stalked
back up the aisle and glared when he saw my empty desk. He didn’t need to see
the look on Jeff’s face to know what had happened. “Dammit, Henry,
again
?”
he asked.

I smiled at
him broadly as I shrugged. “It’s a symbiotic relationship. Jeff enjoys doing
paperwork; I enjoy not doing paperwork. Everybody wins.”

“Everybody but
me,” grumbled Andy, and dropped down into his seat. “Why do I have to do my own
stupid reports?”

“Because I’m
the boss and you’re not,” I said, scrawling my signature on the last report.
“Sloane, is there anything coming up on the radar?”

“Nope,” she
said, not taking her eyes off the screen. “Clean as a whistle.”

“Uh-huh.” I
turned to my own computer and called up the monitoring program, even though I
knew that it would confirm Sloane’s statement. She was uncanny when it came to
predicting oncoming intrusions. It had something to do with her having been
averted. Jeff was fully manifested, and now subconsciously accepted fairy tales
as a normal part of the background radiation of life. Normal people were blind
to them. His eyes were open too wide. And as long as I was holding my story in
abeyance, I couldn’t be open enough to feel another story coming. Sloane was
unique.

Our four-ten
was listed under the “recent” column on the ATI incursion tracker, as was
Demi’s own two-eighty. The four-ten was labeled “neutralized.” Demi was labeled
“fully active.” I felt a little twinge of guilt at that. She’d been living a
normal life until we came along, and no matter where her life went from here,
normal was never going to be put back on the table.

Of course, she
was living a normal life in the middle of a minefield, one where any careless
word or casual encounter had the potential to trigger her story into sudden
motion. At least this way, she’d been activated under controlled conditions,
giving her the potential to find a way that she could live with it. Jeff had
already managed to find that balance. It was possible. And I was a total
hypocrite, because I was sitting at my desk, safe in my own frozen narrative,
and thinking about how waking up to learn that you were secretly a fairy tale
wasn’t actually that bad.

“She’s going
to need weapons training,” said Andy. “She probably has no clue how to handle a
firearm.”

“About that,”
said Jeff. “I think it would be a good idea if she
didn’t
carry a
firearm. She can get by just fine with her flute, and between that and maybe a
harmonica or some other form of small backup instrument, I think she’ll be able
to deal with any situation she’s likely to encounter.”

Sloane
snorted. “Sure. If she gets mugged, she can just flute them to death.”

“Once she’s a
little more confident in her powers, yes, she probably can,” said Jeff.

We were all
quiet for a moment, contemplating that. There had been no active two-eighties
in the service prior to Demi. We didn’t really know how she would play out—so
to speak—not in any practical sense.

“She’s going
to be that powerful?” asked Andy finally.

“She’s going
to be that
versatile
,” said Jeff. “In a situation like this, flexibility
is more important than raw strength.”

“Oh, this just
keeps getting better,” muttered Sloane. “What’s the good news?”

“If we take
away her instruments, she’ll be essentially powerless—”

“That’s good,”
agreed Sloane.

“—until she
finds something else that she can use to make music—and as a Piper, she can
make music from virtually anything,” Jeff finished. “Whether or not we’re happy
about having her assigned to our field team, she needs to stay within the
agency. She’s too dangerous to be left unsupervised.”

“Then why did
you let Henry suggest activating her?” demanded Andy. He actually sounded
agitated for the first time. I guess being reminded that fairy tales can be
dangerous was freaking him out.

“Because it
was this or let a Sleeping Beauty impact half the city,” said Jeff. “That, and
I honestly figured the stress of piping the fever into the rats would kill her,
and we wouldn’t have to deal with this part of things. I guess she’s stronger
than I expected.”

There was a
momentary silence while we all stared at Jeff. Finally, Sloane said, “Dude,
that’s cold. I was almost a Wicked Stepsister, and I’m
still
impressed
by how cold that is. Are you sure you’re not from my tale type?”

Jeff sniffed,
looking defensive as he said, “It was the practical solution, and it was tidy.
I like things that are tidy.”

“And that,
right there, is why not everyone who works here can be on the spectrum.” I
sighed as I pushed my chair away from my desk. “I’m going to go check on our
sleeping newbie. Hopefully she’s having really pleasant dreams, and won’t start
whistling in her sleep.”

“I don’t think
she could whistle us to death,” said Jeff.

“Well at least
that’s something,” I said flatly, and walked away.

Being a government agency,
however secret and unusually staffed, means we’ve been supplied with a decent
base of operations by good old Uncle Sam. Being an agency that no one wants to
claim either ownership of or responsibility for means that our “decent base”
started life as a research lab dedicated to biological warfare … before a
big-ass city decided to expand its borders to include the lab’s location. Not
wanting to turn into the Umbrella Corporation from the
Resident Evil
movies, the US government promptly decommissioned the lab, bombed the whole
thing with enough bleach to kill any creepy crawlies that might be lurking
there, and moved the ATI Management Bureau in. Because fairy tales are
apparently better for property values than aerosolized Ebola.

To get from
our part of the bullpen to the break room where Demi was sleeping, I had to go
up a flight of stairs, walk through something that used to be an air lock, and
enter the space-age glass and chrome domain of the Dispatch Unit. Four
dispatchers were currently at their desks, headsets in place and eyes glued to
their screens. I tried to look unobtrusive as I followed the path through the
center of the room. Dispatch is a hard, unforgiving job that doesn’t come with
the supposed “glamour” of fieldwork. Just hour upon hour staring at a screen,
waiting for something to pop, and knowing all the while that if you miss
anything, people are going to die.

I was almost
to the door when a voice behind me said, “Henry? If you’ve got a second?”

“Sure thing,”
I said, keeping the urge to roll my eyes at bay as I turned around. Experience
has taught me that you should never refuse a reasonable request from a
dispatcher. Not unless you want to spend the next six months chasing phantoms
and “likely incursions” rather than actual incidents.

Birdie
Hubbard, who was generally responsible for my team’s assignments, was standing
up at her desk and leaning over her computer, blinking at me owlishly through
her thick-lensed glasses. “We were wrong?” Her voice was plaintive, almost
wounded—the tone of a child asking whether or not Santa Claus was real.

“You were
right about the incursion,” I said, walking back toward her. The other three
dispatchers were listening. They were trying to pretend that they weren’t, but
human nature wins out over almost everything else in this world. “There was
definitely a story trying to break through, and if you hadn’t sent us, it would
have succeeded.”

“But it wasn’t
a seven-oh-nine.” Birdie looked utterly ashamed of herself. “I’m so sorry. We didn’t
prepare you properly.”

“Hey. Sloane
confirmed your ID when she got to the scene. She said the girl was a seven-oh-nine,
and we followed the protocol accordingly. I saw our subject with my own eyes,
and she had all the hallmarks. We could have been cousins.” Not sisters, not
quite; you don’t get coloring as extreme as mine unless one or both parents
were also fairy tale–afflicted. Our latest Sleeping Beauty had been spared that
particular indignity.

Rather than
looking reassured by what I was saying, Birdie’s look of shame and confusion
deepened. “So you also thought that she was a seven-oh-nine?”

“Up until
people started passing out in the hospital lobby, yes, I did.” I frowned.
“Birdie? What’s wrong? This was a hard call, and you had to pick a type to
activate the system. The one you picked wasn’t quite right, but it was damn
close.”

“You don’t
understand.” She looked to the other dispatchers. “We need to tell her.”

“We’re not
ready,” said another dispatcher, a slim Asian man whose name I didn’t know. “We
need more data.”

“We have four
incursions,” countered Birdie. “How much data do you think we need?”

“I’m standing
right here, and I can hear every word you’re saying,” I said. “How likely do
you think it is that I’m going to walk away without one of you explaining what
the hell it is that you’re talking about?”

Birdie turned
back to me. “We’ve had four incursions recently that presented as one tale type
and turned out to belong to another part of the Index. In every case, the
original type was less dangerous than the actual type.”

I paused. If
it had been possible for me to go pale, I think that I would have. “You’re
saying that the stories are intentionally camouflaging themselves?”

Birdie nodded.
“We think so.”

“Do you have
any evidence to support this?” Evidence would be good. Evidence could be
refuted.

A lack of
evidence would be even better.

“There’s not
much, but we’re monitoring every incursion, and what we’re finding isn’t
encouraging,” said Birdie. “It’s getting to where we can’t reliably guess what
you
might
find out there, much less tell you what you
will
.”

“Okay, so this
is all terrifying,” I said, clapping my hands together. “Birdie, I want all
your findings on my desk at your earliest convenience. Jeff and I can go over
them together and see if there’s anything that we can confirm from a field
perspective that you haven’t already documented. Maybe we’re lucky, and this
will just turn out to be a period of memetic instability or something.”

“Do those
exist?” asked the other dispatcher dubiously.

I shot him a
quick glare. “Think about where you work before you ask me whether something is
real. If it means the Index hasn’t somehow started hiding itself from us, then
yes, we’re going to hope that memetic instability exists.”

“I’ll have it
all on your desk inside the hour,” Birdie assured me.

“Thank you.” I
sighed. “Now if you don’t mind, I need to go check on our newest recruit.”

“You mean the
Pied Piper? Is she really going to come and work here?” Birdie perked up, her
earlier distress forgotten in the face of something interesting that she could
focus on. “I’ve never met an actual Piper before. What’s she like?”

“She’s
confused as all hell,” I said, unable to keep the disapproval from my tone. No
one who isn’t on the ATI spectrum can really understand what it’s like to live
your life knowing that you’re halfway between unique individual and structured
story. Half of who we are was decided years before we were even born, shaped by
the narratives that we were intended to embody. Hell, I’m living proof of that:
both of my parents were brown-eyed brunettes. So how did they have a blue-eyed,
black-haired baby girl? Easy: the story made them do it. “She’s only been a
two-eighty for a few hours, and she has no idea what’s going on.”

Birdie looked
instantly contrite. “Oh, the poor thing. I guess it’s too bad that her story
couldn’t have been averted. She wouldn’t have to deal with us then.”

“No, but we’d
be dealing with a four-ten in the middle of downtown, so I’m going to call this
one a fair trade.”

“Isn’t it a
little strange that we’ve had so many Sleeping Beauties in the last few
decades?” Birdie’s hand twitched, like she was fighting the urge to reach for
her mouse. “Demographically speaking, it’s not that popular of a story, and—”
She gasped, hand twitching again before she used it to cover the perfect O
shape of her mouth. “I’m so sorry, Henrietta! I forgot!”

“Yeah, well. I
don’t like to make a big thing about it.” I smiled stiffly. “Now if you’ll
excuse me, I have a recruit to see to.” I turned quickly and walked on before
Birdie could start apologizing. If I let her reach the mindless platitudes
stage, I’d be here all night long.

It’s funny,
but most people forget that my mother was a Sleeping Beauty. They have better
things to worry about, like whether Sloane has poisoned the coffee, or whether
they’re going to find me sleeping in a big glass box one day. Working in a
building where half the people are living fairy tales and the other half are
memetically vulnerable makes for some interesting times, and I’m so clearly a
Snow White that people don’t associate the Sleeping Beauty story with me in any
way, unless they’ve read my file.