Indexing
Indexing
Indexing
Seanan McGuire
The
characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to
real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not
intended by the author.
Text
copyright © 2013 Seanan McGuire
All rights
reserved.
No part of
this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North
P.O. Box
400818
Las Vegas, NV
89140
eISBN: 9781477859605
Table of Contents
Memetic
incursion in progress: estimated tale type
709 (“Snow White”)
Status: ACTIVE
Alicia
didn’t feel well.
If she was being honest, she hadn’t been feeling well for a while now.
The world was spinning, and everything seemed hazy and unreal, like she was
seeing it through the filter of a dream. Maybe she was. Dreaming, that is;
maybe she was dreaming, and when she woke up, everything would be normal again,
rather than wrapped in cotton and filled with strange signs and symbols that
she couldn’t quite understand. Maybe she was dreaming . . .
In a daze, she called a cab and left the house, the door standing open and
ignored behind her. The dog would get out. In that moment, she didn’t have the
capacity to care. Alicia didn’t feel well, and when you don’t feel well,
there’s only one place to go: the hospital.
Alicia was going to the hospital, and when she got there, they would
figure out what was wrong with her. They would figure out how to fix her, and
everything would be normal again. She just knew it.
My day
began with half a dozen bluebirds beating themselves to death against my
window, leaving little bloody commas on the glass to mark their passing. The
sound eventually woke me, although not before at least a dozen of them had
committed suicide trying to reach my bedside. I sat up with a gasp, clutching
the sheets against my chest as I glared at the window. The damn things had been
able to get past the bird-safety net
again
,
and I still couldn’t figure out how they were doing it.
A final bluebird hit the glass, making a squishy “thump” sound. Feathers
flew in all directions, and the tiny birdie body fell to join the others. I
glared at the bloody pane for a few more seconds before turning my glare on the
clock. It was 5:22 a.m.—more than half an hour before my alarm was set to go
off, which was entirely unreasonable of the universe.
“Once upon a fuck, you people,” I muttered, shoving the covers off me and
onto the floor. If I wasn’t going to get any more sleep, I was going to get
ready for work. At least in the office, there would be other people to receive
my hate.
Wildflowers had sprouted from the hallway carpet again, this time in a
clashing assortment of blues and oranges. I didn’t recognize any of the
varieties, and so I forced myself to step around them rather than stepping
on
them, the way that I wanted to.
Research and Development would be able to figure out what they were, where they
originated, and what tale-type variants they were likely to be connected to.
The wildflowers were usually random as far as we could tell, but they had
occasionally been enough to give us a lead. Rampion
flowers meant a three-ten was getting started somewhere, while the strange
blue-white blooms we had dubbed “dew flowers” meant that a three-oh-five was
under way. It wasn’t an exact science, but very little about what we did was
anything like exact.
Turning the water in my shower all the way to cold produced a freezing
spray that chased away the last unwelcome remnants of the previous night’s
dreams and left me shivering, but feeling like I might have a better day than
the one indicated by the heap of dead bluebirds outside my window. Really, if
all that went weird today was a few dead birds and some out-of-place flowers, I
was doing pretty well.
I work for the ATI Management Bureau. Our motto is “
in aeternum felicitas
vindactio
.” Translated roughly, that means
“defending happily ever after.” We’re not out to guarantee that all the good
little fairy tale boys and girls get to ride off in their pumpkin coaches and
on their silver steeds. They’ve been doing that just fine since the dawn of
mankind. They don’t need any help from a government-funded agency so obscure
that most people don’t even suspect that we exist. No, our job is harder than
that. Fairy tales want to have happy endings, and that’s fine—for fairy
tales—but they do a lot of damage to the people around them in the process, the
ones whose only crime was standing in the path of an onrushing story. We call
those “memetic incursions,” and it’s our job to stop
them before they can properly get started. When we fail . . .
When we fail, most people don’t hear about that, either. But they do hear
about the deaths.
There’s no dress code in my office, not even for the field teams, since
many of us have reasons to avoid the more common suits and ties. I still liked
to keep things formal. I pulled a plain black suit out of my closet, selecting
it from a rack that held ten more, all of them virtually identical. Pairing it
with a white button-down shirt and a black tie left me looking like an extra
from the set of
Men in Black
, but
that didn’t bother me much. Clichés are relatives of the fairy tale, and tropes
aren’t bad; they go with the territory.
My gun and badge were on the nightstand next to my SPF 200 sunscreen. I
scowled at the bottle. I hate the smell of the stuff—it smells like a shitty
childhood spent locked in the classroom during recess because the school
couldn’t take responsibility if I got burned, but also like trying to find the
right balance between flesh-toned foundation and sun protection. None of that
changed the fact that if I went out without lathering up, I was quickly going
to change my complexion from Snow White to Rose Red. “Lobster” is not a good
look for me.
My phone rang as I was finishing the application of sunscreen to the back
of my neck. I glanced at the display. Agent Winters.
“Answer,” I said curtly, continuing to rub sunscreen into my skin.
The phone beeped, and Sloane’s voice demanded, “Where are you?”
“In my bedroom,” I said, reaching for a tissue to wipe the last of the
clinging goo from my fingers. “I’m getting ready for work. Where are you?”
“Uh, what? Are you stupid, or just stupid? Or
maybe you’re stupid, I haven’t decided. Have you checked your texts this
morning?”
I paused guiltily. I hadn’t taken my phone into the bathroom while I
showered, and I could easily have missed the chime that signaled an incoming
text. “Let’s say I didn’t, to save time. What’s going on?”
“We have a possible seven-oh-nine kicking off downtown, and management
thought that
maybe
you’d be
interested in, I don’t know,
showing the
fuck up
.” Sloane’s voice dropped to a snarl on the last few words. “Piotr sent everyone the address ten minutes ago. Most of
the team is already en route.”
Full incursions are rare. We usually get one or two a month, at most.
Naturally, this one would kick off before I’d had breakfast. “I’ll be there in
five minutes,” I said.
“You don’t even know where—”
“Good-bye, Sloane.” I grabbed the phone and hit the button to hang up on
her with the same motion, pulling up my texts as I bolted for the door. Even
obscure branches of law enforcement can break the speed limit when there’s a
good reason, and a Snow White starting to manifest downtown? Yeah, I’d call
that a damn good reason.
There are a
few things you’ll need to know about fairy tales before we can get properly
started. Call it agent orientation or information overload, whatever makes you
feel more like you’ll be able to sleep tonight. It doesn’t really matter to me.
Here’s the first thing you need to know: all the fairy tales are true.
Oh, the specific events that the Brothers Grimm chronicled and Disney animated may only have happened once, in some kingdom so old that
we’ve forgotten whether it ever really existed, but the essential elements of
the stories are true, and those elements are what keep repeating over and over
again. We can’t stop them, and we can’t get rid of them. I’m sure they serve
some purpose—very little happens without a reason—but it’s hard to focus on
that when you’re facing a major beanstalk incident in Detroit, or a gingerbread
condo development in San Francisco. People mostly dismiss the manifestations,
writing them off as publicity stunts or crazy pranks. It’s better that way. Not
many people have the kind of ironclad sanity that can survive suddenly
discovering that if you’re born a seven-oh-nine, you’re inevitably going to
wind up poisoned and left for dead … or that rescue isn’t guaranteed, since
once you go inanimate, the story’s focus switches to the Prince. Poor sap.
We use the Aarne-Thompson Index to map the
manifestations as much as we can, cross-referencing fairy tales from all over
the world. Not every seven-oh-nine has skin as white as snow and a thing for
short men, even if Snow White is the best-known example of the breed. Not every
five-eleven is actually going to snap and start trying to kill her stepdaughter
or stepsisters, although the urge will probably rear its ugly head a time or
twenty. Like any rating system, the ATI has its flaws, but it mostly gets the
job done, and it’s better than running around in the dark all the damn time.
Some folks say using the ATI dehumanizes our subjects, making it easier
to treat them like fictional creatures to be dealt with and disposed of. Then
again, most of them have never put in any real hours in the field. They’ve
never seen what it takes to break girls like Agent Winters out of the stories
they’ve gotten tangled up in before the narrative consumes them. Me, I got
lucky; I got my sensitivity to stories by being adjunct to one, rather than
being an active part. My mother was one of the most dangerous ATI types—a four-ten,
Sleeping Beauty. She was in a deep coma when my twin brother and I were born,
the misbegotten children of the doctor who was supposed to be treating her
injuries and wound up taking advantage of her instead.
She slept through our birth, just like the stories said she should. We
didn’t pull the poisoned needle from her finger when we tried to nurse; we
pulled her life support cable. Mom died before the ATI cleanup crew could
figure out where the narrative energy was coming from, leaving us orphans.
Under normal circumstances, the narrative would have slammed us both straight
into the nearest story that would fit. The cleanup crew didn’t let that happen
though, despite the fact that I was already halfway into the Snow White mold,
and my brother was just as close to becoming a Rose Red. In a very real sense,
I owe them my life, or at least my lack of singing woodland creatures.
Most of the subjects we deal with are innocents: people who wound up in
the wrong place at the wrong time and got warped to fit into the most
convenient slots on the ATI. Others are born to live out their stories, no
matter how much damage that does to the world around them. It’s not a choice
for them. It’s a compulsion, something that drives them all the way to their
graves.
That’s the second, and most important, thing you need to know about fairy
tales: once a story starts, it won’t stop on its own. There’s too much
narrative weight behind a moving story, and it wants to happen too badly. It
won’t stop, unless somebody stops it.
Whoever had
initially scrambled the field team was following the proper protocol: I started
driving blindly toward the address Piotr had sent to
my phone, only to come up against a cordon nearly half a mile out from my
destination. It was disguised as a standard police blockade, but the logos on
the cars were wrong, and the uniforms were straight out of our departmental
costume shop. Anyone who knew what the local police were supposed to look like
would have caught the deception in an instant. Fortunately for us, it was early
enough in the day that most people just wanted to find a clear route to
Starbucks, and weren’t going to mess around trying to figure out why that
officer’s badge had the wrong motto on it.
I pulled up to the cordon and rolled down my window, producing my badge
from inside my jacket. A fresh-faced man in an ill-fitting policeman’s uniform
moved toward the car, probably intending to ask me to move along. I thrust my
badge at him.
“Special Agent Henrietta Marchen, ATI Management
Bureau,” I said sharply. “Tell your people to get the hell out of my way. We’ve
got a code seven-oh-nine, and that means I’ve got places to be.”
The young man blanched. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “We were told to
stop all cars coming this way, and we thought all agents were already inside
the impact zone.”
“Mmm-hmm. And while
you’re apologizing, you’re not moving anything out of my way.” I put my badge
back inside my jacket. “Apology accepted, sentiment appreciated, now
move
.”
He nearly tripped over his own feet getting away from my car and running
to enlist several more of the “officers” in helping him move the barrier out of
my way. I rolled my window back up to discourage further conversation, sitting
and drumming my fingers against the steering wheel until my path was clear. I
gunned the engine once, as a warning, before hitting the gas and rocketing past
the cordon like it had personally offended me—which, in a certain way, it had.
I detest lateness. When you’re late in a fairy tale, people wind up dead. And not true-love’s-kiss, glass-coffin-nap-time dead. Really
dead
, the kind of dead you don’t
recover from. I am notoriously unforgiving of lateness, and being late myself wasn’t improving my mood.
The control van was parked at the absolute edge of the probable impact
zone. I pulled up next to it. The door banged open barely three seconds later,
and five feet eleven inches of furious Goth girl threw herself out of the
vehicle, already shouting at me. At least, her mouth was moving; thanks to the
bulletproof, charm-proof, soundproof glass in my car windows, I couldn’t hear a
damn thing. I smiled, spreading my hands and shaking my head. It was a shitty
thing to do, but considering the morning I’d been having, winding Sloane up a
little was perfectly understandable.
She stopped shouting and showed me the middle fingers of both her hands,
an obscene gesture that was only enhanced by the poison-apple green nail polish
that she was wearing. It clashed nicely with her hair, which was currently black,
tipped with an unnaturally bright shade of red. Nothing about her could be
called “subtle” by any conventional means, and that was how she liked it. The
more visible she was, the less she felt at risk of sinking back into her own
story.