I bit my lower lip for a moment, pondering, before I touched
her shoulder and asked, “Are you afraid you’re going to manifest, Sloane? Is
that what this is all about? Because we can step up your counseling, we can see
about adjusting your medications—”
“I’m not afraid that I’m
going
to manifest, Henry.”
She ducked her head, hiding behind the dyed black curtain of her bangs. It
struck me, and not for the first time, just how similar we looked. Her coloring
was all pancake makeup and Midnight Whisper #9 applied at the salon, but we
still came out looking like sisters, or close enough as to make no difference.
Looking like stepsisters.
I froze, my hand still resting on Sloane’s shoulder. I
wanted to pull away. I somehow knew that doing so would be a huge mistake, and
so I stayed where I was and asked, in a voice that had no force behind it,
“Then what are you afraid of?”
“I’m afraid I’ve already manifested,” she said. Sloane
raised her head. To my great dismay, I realized that she was crying. Her mascara
ran down her cheeks, leaving tarry streaks behind. “Remember the three-ten we
had last week? The one I yelled at until it went away?”
I nodded mutely.
“I shouldn’t have had that kind of power over the narrative.
No one who isn’t part of the narrative gets to have that kind of power.” Sloane
started crying harder. “Can’t you see? It didn’t want a Rapunzel. That’s why it
let her go so easily. It never wanted
her
. It wanted
me
all
along—and I let it in.”
“You haven’t. You wouldn’t.” I squeezed her shoulder. “You
haven’t done anything—”
“Your coffee yesterday.” She looked away, focusing on the
wall, presenting me with her profile. “I didn’t knock it off the desk because I
was clumsy, or because I was being a bitch. I knocked it off the desk because I
managed to get myself back under control before you drank the poison I’d
slipped into your cup.”
My blood turned to ice in my veins. And Sloane kept talking.
“The stapler that disappeared. The donuts I threw away and
dumped pencil shavings on top of. I’ve nearly killed you eight times in the
last week. I was planning to put a poisoned spindle in your desk when the call
came in asking me to join you at the scene. I can’t help myself, Henry.” She
finally turned back to face me. “It’s like I’m not even there when it’s
happening, I’m just watching from a distance, like … like …”
“Like you’re watching a story?” I asked. She nodded mutely.
I sighed, and did something I had never believed that I would have a reason to
do: I pulled her away from the wall and gathered her into a hug.
Sloane didn’t resist me pulling her toward me, but she
didn’t relax at first either. She endured my embrace like it was part of her
punishment, the first step in repaying her crimes. Then, bit by bit she
softened, until she was limp in my arms, her face pressed into my shoulder,
sobbing. I stroked her back with one hand.
“I won’t say it’s okay, Sloane. It’s not okay. But I will
say that you’re among …” Calling us her friends seemed to be overstating
things a bit. “You’re among teammates, and we don’t give up on our own. We’ll
find a way to fix this. I promise.”
My phone chirped. I dug it out of my pocket one-handed and
raised it to my ear, not saying anything. A few seconds later, I nodded,
lowered the phone, and patted Sloane awkwardly on the shoulder as I tried to
extricate myself from her arms. It was surprisingly difficult.
“Come on,” I said. “Andy found proof that Elise Walton
bought a gun at a pawnshop downtown last month, and Jeff … well, Jeff
thinks he’s found Elise Walton. We need to roll.”
According to Andy’s research, a woman named “Christina
Marlowe” had checked into a cheap downtown motel two days previous, and hadn’t
checked out yet. It made sense. Elise would need time between killings, time to
recover and decide where she was headed next. Maybe in the beginning she’d been
better about getting out of town fast, but after killing multiple families
without a whisper from law enforcement, she’d started to get cocky.
The Bureau had been protecting her all along, even if we
didn’t know it. That made me angry—and worse, it scared me. How many killers
like Elise were out there, protected by the shadows that they cast and by our
mandate to preserve the world’s ignorance of the narrative that moved beneath
reality’s skin? How many people had died because we were so good at covering up
the tracks that the fairy tales left behind? And was there any possible way for
us to change the way that we worked? The ATI Management Bureau is the way it is
today because it’s had centuries to grow and evolve, going from a loose
alliance of storytellers and archivists to a governmentally funded agency with
ties to law enforcement and media censorship agencies. We don’t change quickly.
We’ve never needed to.
Sloane took Andy’s usual place in the front passenger seat
for the drive to Elise’s hotel. She buckled her seat belt but only grudgingly,
and sat as far forward as it would allow, her fingers tapping against her
knees. She looked like a child on Christmas morning. I cast her several uneasy
glances before asking, “Are you sure you’re up for this?”
“Don’t treat me with kid gloves, Henry,” she snarled. That
was reassuring. If she was snarling at me, she wasn’t trying to poison me.
“This is exactly the sort of thing I need.”
“Yes, violence,” muttered Jeff, making no effort to keep
himself from being overheard. “That’s the best medicine for what ails anyone.”
“Sarcasm doesn’t help,” I said. “We’re here.”
Elise’s hotel was as rundown and nondescript as its website
implied: the perfect place for a fugitive Wicked Stepsister to go to ground for
a few days while she regrouped and prepared herself for her next attack. A sign
out front advertised free Wi-Fi. That would help her figure out where she was
heading. Families that fit her extremely specific profile couldn’t be all that
common.
Of course the narrative would be helping her, in its own
implacable way. Failed memetic incursions represented a loss of strength, of
self—of substance, in a way that our researchers had never quite been able to
pin down or define. By sending Elise around the continent mopping up failed
Cinderella stories, the narrative could sow chaos and regain strength in the
same gesture. I didn’t know how it was directing her movements. I’d never heard
of the narrative getting personally involved like that. But that didn’t mean it
couldn’t happen.
We pulled up to the curb in front of the hotel. The local
police had beaten us there. They were using unmarked cars to avoid spooking our
suspect, but Officer Troy wasn’t the kind of man who could just disappear into
a crowd, even when he was lurking around in front of a nondescript black
Lincoln Town Car. That wasn’t going to be a problem; my team was many things,
most of them good. We weren’t subtle, though. All five of us got out, gathering
together on the sidewalk like a flock of black and white birds. Only Sloane’s
non-uniform attire and my too-red lips broke our color scheme.
“Officer,” I said genially, as Troy approached. “I take it
dispatch was able to get through to you?”
“What’s this I hear about you preparing to make an arrest?”
He didn’t bother with even the pretense of pleasantries, going straight for the
implication that we were somehow trespassing on his jurisdiction.
I looked at him coolly. “I wouldn’t call it an arrest, since
she’s part of the narrative now. It’s more of an apprehension. But yes, that’s
why we’re here.”
“If this is about your ‘narrative,’” I could virtually hear
the air quotes around the word, which really wasn’t fair, since he had seen its
effects up close and personal more than once, “why are we here at all?”
“Because the bitch probably had a gun when she took out the
Marlowes, and there’s no telling what she’ll do when she sees us standing in
the hall,” said Sloane. She rocked up onto her toes, and then down again to the
flats of her feet. “What are we waiting for, the SWAT team? Let’s get in there
and finish this story.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” said Demi.
“I don’t think anybody has a better one,” said Andy.
“And at this point, I don’t think it matters,” I said.
“We’re here. If she’s somehow getting cues from the narrative, it’s going to
tell her to move soon. She’ll just get a feeling, and then off she’ll go, and
we won’t find her again until she slips up in another city with a field team.
Do you really want to be the ones who let her get away?”
“No,” said Andy.
“No,” admitted Demi.
Jeff and Sloane didn’t say anything. They just looked at me,
the one resigned and the other eager, still radiating that kid on Christmas
excitement. I turned back to Officer Troy.
“My team takes the lead, and you don’t interfere unless
you’re asked,” I said. “If there’s an arrest, it’s yours.”
He frowned. “What do you mean, ‘if’ there’s an arrest? She
killed people. Either you’re taking her in or I am. There’s no way she’s
walking free.”
I didn’t say anything. I just looked at him silently until
eventually—inevitably—he looked away.
It was time to go in.
Officer Troy’s badge got us past the front desk; my badge
got us a key to Elise’s room and a promise that no one would be calling up to
warn her about our impending arrival. My team and I took the elevator up to the
third floor, while Officer Troy and his men took the stairs. It would give us a
few minutes where we wouldn’t need to worry about anybody deciding to play cowboy,
and between us, we had all the exits covered. She wasn’t getting away.
When we reached the third floor, I looked to Demi. “You’re
on.”
She nodded and raised her flute to her lips with trembling
hands. Andy clapped his hands over his ears, and she began to play.
It was a sweet, eloquent tune, but it lacked the compelling
power I’d heard from her before. That was because this song wasn’t meant for
me. It wasn’t meant for any of us, save for perhaps Andy, who wasn’t part of
any standing story. One by one the doors in the hotel hallway opened, and the
occupants of the rooms emerged, blinking and shuffling, into the open. Demi
kept playing as she backed into the open elevator. The last I saw of her was
the top of her head as she continued to play, luring all the normal people off
this floor, away from what was to come.
The other two elevators arrived and were filled, until the
four of us were standing alone. Andy removed his hands from his ears. “Remind
me not to piss that girl off,” he said.
“I’m the one you need to worry about,” said Jeff. “I pick
all her sheet music.”
“Guys, focus. We need to—Sloane?” She was already starting
down the hall, moving slowly at first, but gathering speed with every step. As
I said her name, she broke into a run. I swore and ran after her, with Andy and
Jeff running close behind me.
Most of the doors were standing open or in the process of
swinging closed. Sloane made her way straight to the closed door at the end of
the hall. There was a piece of white plastic in her hand. I groped for my
pocket as I ran, unsurprised to realize that she had stolen the key card to
Elise’s room.
“Sloane!” I shouted. “This isn’t the right way to fix
things!”
She didn’t stop running. When she reached Elise’s door, she
swiped the key card, shoving the door open in practically the same motion. I
caught a glimpse of a shocked face topped by a spray of carroty red hair. Then
the door slammed, and Sloane, and our killer, were blocked from view.
“Shit,” I hissed, skidding to a stop just before I would have
hit the doorframe. “Sloane!” I pounded on the door. “Let us in! You don’t want
to do this!”
“What if she does?” asked Jeff. “What do we do then?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and kept pounding on the door, only
to nearly fall forward as it was wrenched abruptly open. Sloane was standing
just inside with one hand on the doorknob, and the other wrapped firmly around
Elise’s throat. The gun was lying on the bed, too far away for either of them
to have grabbed it. That was a mercy.
“She’s not worth getting my hands bloody,” snarled Sloane,
and half-shoved, half-threw Elise at Andy. He caught her easily. Elise huddled
in his arms, sobbing. Sloane wasn’t done with her diatribe, and continued, eyes
on Elise, “She turned herself into a Cinderella. You understand? She killed her
own mother, turned herself into an orphan, and then went stalking the story.
She hoped it would make her better. All it did was make her worthless.”
“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” sobbed Elise. “Why
does she keep calling me Cinderella? I didn’t do anything …”
I looked at her, trying to feel something other than pity.
“You did enough,” I said.
“She’s lying,” said Sloane. “She knew exactly what she’d
done, and what she was trying to become. She wanted to be a perfect little
princess. All she did was turn herself into a flawed reflection of an ideal she
could never achieve. You hear me?
Never
.”
Elise straightened, her sobs fading as she twisted in Andy’s
arms to glare at Sloane. She wasn’t trying to escape. Maybe she knew that it
was pointless. “At least I’m better than you,
sister
,” she spat. “You
think I don’t recognize you? At least I tried. I wormed my way into those
families and made them my own. I tried to find another story, one where I
didn’t have to be the bad guy. You just let our story take you.”
Sloane stood frozen for a moment, looking at the girl she
might have been. Then: “I’ll be in the car,” she said, and stalked away toward
the elevators.
Jeff watched her go before moving to stand beside me. “Is
she okay?”
“No,” I said, and we stood there waiting until the police
descended.