“Getting a little saucy today, I see,” I said, finally taking pity on
Sloane and opening my car door so that she could shout at me properly. “What’s
the situation?”
“Andy’s working with the grunts to clear out as many of the local
businesses as possible before shit gets ugly,” said Sloane. “And you’re late.”
“Yes, but if we’re still clearing coffee shops, I’m not late enough that
you’ve been waiting for me at all.” I took another look around the area. In
addition to our control van, I could see four more vehicles that were almost
certainly ours, going by their paint jobs and lack of identifying features.
“Who called it in?”
“Monitoring station,” said Sloane. She shoved her hands into her pockets,
slouching backward until her shoulders were resting against the side of the
van. The resulting backbend made my own spine ache in sympathy, but she
continued as if she weren’t trying to emulate a contortionist, saying, “They
started getting signs of a memetic incursion around
two o’clock this morning, called it in, didn’t get the signal to wake us
because there was nothing confirmed. The signs got stronger, the alerts kept
coming; on alert ten they woke me, I came into the office and sifted the data,
and we started mobilization about twenty minutes later.”
I nodded. “And you’re sure it’s a seven-oh-nine?”
“She has all the symptoms. Pale skin, dark hair, affinity for small
animals—she works in a shelter that takes in exotics, and half the pictures we
were able to pull off of her Facebook profile show her with birds, rats, or
weird-ass lizards hanging out on her shoulders.”
The image of the bluebirds committing suicide via my
windowpane flashed across my mind, there and gone in an instant. I
managed not to shudder, turning the need for motion into a nod instead. “Have
we identified her family members?”
“Yeah. No siblings, father remarried when she
was nine years old, stepmother owns a beauty parlor and tanning salon. She’s
pretty much perfect for the profile, which is why we’re here.”
“Mm-hmm.” I considered Sloane. She was our best
AT-profiler; she could spot a story forming while the rest of us were still
looking at it and wondering whether it was even in the main Index. But she was
also, to put it bluntly, lazy. She liked knowing where the stories were going
to be so that she could get the hell out of their way. She didn’t like knowing
the details behind the narrative. Details made the victims too real, and
reality wasn’t Sloane’s cup of tea. “And we’re
positive
about her tale type?”
Irritation flashed briefly in her eyes, there and gone
in an instant. “Jeffrey confirmed my research, and he said we haven’t
had a seven-oh-nine here in years. We’re due.”
“If that’s all we’re going by, we’re due for a lot of things.” Some
stories are more common than others. Seven-oh-nines are thankfully rare, in
part because they take a lot of support from the narrative. Dwarves aren’t
cheap. Other stories require smaller casts and happen more frequently. Sadly
for us, some of the more common stories are also some of the most dangerous.
Sloane’s expression darkened, eyes narrowing beneath the red and black
fringe of her hair. “Well, maybe if you’d shown up when we were first
scrambling this team, you’d have been able to have more input on what kind of
story we’re after. You didn’t show up for the briefing, so the official
designation is seven-oh-nine.”
I bit back a retort. Another promptly rose in my throat, and I bit that
back as well. Sloane didn’t deserve any of the things I wanted to say to her,
no matter how obnoxious she was being, because she was right; I should have
been there when the team was coming together. I should have been a part of this
conversation.
“Where’s Andy?” I asked.
“Behind you,” said a mild, amiable voice. It was the kind of voice that
made me want to confess my sins and admit that
everything in my life was my own fault. That’s the type of quality you want in
a public relations point man.
I turned. “What’s our civilian situation?”
“I’ve cleared out as many as I could, but this isn’t an area that can be
completely secured,” said Andy, as if this were a perfectly normal way for us
to begin a conversation. Tall, thick-waisted, and
solid, he looked like he could easily have bench-pressed me with one arm tied
behind his back. It was all appearances: in reality, I could have taken him in
either a fair or an unfair fight, and Sloane could mop the floor with us both.
What Andy brought to the table was people skills. There were very few minds he
couldn’t change, if necessary, and most of those belonged to people who were
already caught in the gravitational pull of the oncoming story.
Put in a lineup, we certainly made an interesting picture. All three of
us were dark-haired, although Andy and I were both natural,
while Sloane’s intermittent brushes with black came out of a bottle. Andy had
skin almost as dark as his hair. Sloane was pale but still clearly Caucasian. I
had less melanin than your average sheet of paper, and could easily have been
mistaken for albino if not for my blue eyes and too-red lips—although more than
a few people probably assumed that my hair was as dyed as Sloane’s, and that my
lip color came courtesy of CoverGirl. We definitely
didn’t look like any form of law enforcement. That, too, was a sort of truth in
advertising, because the law that we were enforcing wasn’t the law of men or
countries. It was the law of the narrative, and it was our job to prevent the
story from going the way it always had before—impossible as that could
sometimes seem.
We set the
junior agents and the grunts to holding the perimeter while we walked two
blocks deeper into our isolation zone, trying to get eyes on our target. We
found her getting out of a cab that had somehow managed to get past the
cordon—not as much of a surprise as I wanted it to be, sad to say. Most of the
police didn’t have any narrative resistance to speak of, and our junior agents
weren’t much better. If the story wanted her to make it this far, she’d make
it. The obstacles we were throwing in her way just gave her tale one more thing
to overcome.
There are times when I wonder if the entire ATI Management Bureau isn’t a
form of narrative inertia, something gathered by a story so big that it has no
number and doesn’t appear in the Index. We’d be a great challenge for some
unknown cast of heroes and villains. And then I push that thought aside and try
to keep going, because if I let myself start down that primrose path of doubts
and disillusionment, I’m never coming back.
Our target paid her cabbie before turning to stagger unsteadily down the
sidewalk. She was beautiful in the classical seven-oh-nine way, with sleek
black hair and snowy skin that probably burned horribly in the summer. She
looked dazed, like she was no longer quite aware of what she was doing. One of
her feet was bare. She probably wasn’t aware of that, either.
Andy pulled out his phone, keying in a quick series of geographical tags
that would hopefully enable us to predict her destination before she could
actually get there. Finally, he said, “She’s heading for the Alta Vista Medical
Center.”
I swore under my breath. “Of course she is. Where else would she be
going?” Alta Vista was the largest hospital in the city. Even if we’d been able
to close off eighty percent of the traffic coming into our probable impact
zone, we couldn’t close or evacuate the hospital. Not enough people believe in
fairy tales anymore.
“Shoot her,” said Sloane.
“We’re not shooting her,” said Andy.
Sloane shrugged. “Your funeral.”
“Let’s pretend to be professionals … and pick up the pace,” I
snapped. Sloane and Andy exchanged a glance, briefly united against a common
enemy—me. They knew that I wanted them to be mad at me rather than each other,
and they accepted it as the way the world was meant to be. Besides, we all knew
that our job would be easier this way.
We followed the target all the way down the road to Alta Vista, hanging
back almost half a block to keep her from noticing us. Our caution was born
more of habit than necessity; she was deep into her narrative haze, moving more
under the story’s volition than her own. We could have stripped down and danced
naked in front of her and she would just have kept on walking.
“If we’re not going to stop her from getting where she’s going, why are
we even bothering?” Sloane walked with her hands crammed as far into the
pockets of her denim jacket as they would go, her
shoulders in a permanent defensive hunch. “She’ll play out whether we’re here
or not. We could go out, get breakfast, and come back before the EMTs finish
hooking her to the life support.”
“Because it’s the polite thing to do,” said Andy. He was always a lot
more at ease with this part of the job than Sloane was, probably because the
only thing Andy ever escaped was a respectable profession that he could tell
his family about. Sloane missed being a Wicked Stepsister by inches, and she’s
always been uncomfortable around the ATI cases that tread near the edges of her
own story. I can’t blame her for that. I also can’t approve any of her requests
for transfer. Jeff’s fully actualized in his story, and I’m in a holding pattern,
but Sloane was actually averted. That gives her a
special sensitivity to the spectrum. She’s the only one who can spot the memetic incursions before they get fully under way.
“She’s a seven-oh-nine,” snarled Sloane, shooting a poisonous glare in Andy’s
direction. Metaphorically poisonous: she never matured to the
arsenic-and-apples stage of things. Thank God. Once a Wicked Stepsister goes
that far, there’s no bringing her back to reason. “You can’t do anything for
them, short of putting a bullet in their heads. Even then, the dumb bitches
will probably just get permanently brain-damaged on the way to happy ever
after.”
Andy raised an eyebrow. “Gosh, Sloane, tell us how you really feel.”
The target approached the doors of the Alta Vista Hospital. Even at our
half-block remove, we saw them slide open, allowing her to make her way inside.
If the story went the way the archivists predicted, her own Wicked Stepmother
would be waiting inside, ready to hand her a box of poisoned apple juice or a
plastic cup of tainted applesauce. That would let the story start in earnest.
That’s the way it goes for the seven-oh-nines. All the Snow Whites are
essentially the same, when you dig all the way down to the bottom of their
narratives.
Sloane shifted her weight anxiously from one foot to the other as we
waited, looking increasingly uncomfortable as the minutes trickled by and the
weight of the impending story grew heavier. Then she stiffened, her eyes widening
in their rings of sheltering kohl. “There isn’t a five-eleven
anywhere inside that hospital,” she said, and bolted for the doors.
Swearing, Andy and I followed her.
Sloane had been a marathon runner in high school, and she’d continued to
run since then, choosing it over more social forms of exercise. She was piling
on the speed now, running hell-bent toward the hospital doors with her head
slightly down, like she was going to ram her way straight through any
obstacles. Andy had settled into a holding pattern about eight feet behind her,
letting her be the one to trigger any traps that might be waiting. It wasn’t as
heartless as it seemed. As the one who had come the closest to being sucked
into a story of her own without going all the way, Sloane is not only the most
sensitive—she’s also the most resistant. She could survive where we couldn’t.
“Sloane!” I bellowed. “If it’s not a seven-oh-nine,
what is it?”
She didn’t have time to answer, but she didn’t need to. She came skidding
to a stop so abruptly that Andy almost slammed into her from behind, both of
them only inches from the sensor that would trigger the automatic door. Those
inches saved them. I could see the people in the lobby through the glass as
they started falling over gently in their tracks, all of them apparently
sinking into sleep at the same moment.
I let momentum carry me forward until I came to an easy stop next to
Sloane and Andy. “Great,” I sighed. “A four-ten.”
I hate Sleeping Beauties.
The cleanup
crew cordoned off the entire block surrounding the hospital, buying off the
inevitable media and local police with stories about a natural gas leak. “Radon
gas,” said Andy to a dewy-eyed reporter who looked like she had six brain cells
to knock together, all of them devoted to keeping her from falling off her
stiletto heels. She was nodding gravely in time with his words, making me
faintly seasick. Andy can be damn convincing when he wants to be. “It’s
invisible, it’s scentless, and …” he stepped forward, moving in for the
kill, “it’s deadly.”
The reporter took an unconscious step back, dewy eyes widening even
further. She looked like a startled deer. “Where did it come from?”
“Natural caverns, ma’am. The city’s riddled with them,” said Andy. I
groaned to myself, making a mental note to tell our media division to plant
some old city records about natural caverns. Undaunted, Andy continued, “Don’t
worry. As long as we can keep this area clear of civilians, we’ll have this all
cleaned up in a matter of hours.”
The reporter nodded, thrusting her microphone into his face as she
recovered her composure enough to start asking inane questions about the
supposed gas leak. I turned my attention from Andy to Jeff, head of the on-site
cleanup crew.
“It’s not
really
radon gas, is
it?” I asked. Stranger things have happened once a four-ten shows up on the
scene. As long as people fall down and don’t get up again, it falls within the
borders of the story. The narrative doesn’t care how little sense it makes.
“No,” said Jeff. I let my shoulders start relaxing. “It’s a new strain of
sleeping sickness that’s somehow managed to hybridize itself with the H1N1
flu.”