Deputy Director Brewer only hesitated for a moment before finding a new approach. “If this is true, and you experienced the narrative spike, then where is Agent Davis?” he demanded.
“Right here,” said Jeff mildly. Deputy Director Brewer whirled in time to see Jeff stepping off the sidewalk next to our van. He must have gone out the van’s front door and then crept around the side, concealed by the bulk of the vehicle, while he listened to our argument. “I thought it best to stay out of the way until you had decided not to haul me back to headquarters for monitoring.”
“What makes you so sure I’ve decided that?” asked the deputy director.
“The fact that you’re a smart man,” said Jeff. He walked over to stand beside me. “If Agent Robinson is dealing with a potential narrative compromise, and Agents Marchen and Winters are already narratively compromised, there’s no reason to pull me out of the field. You said that all field teams had suffered an average twenty percent loss tonight. That means we’re strained, resource-wise. You need me here, with my people, more than you need me being handed off to Research for further examination.” He removed his glasses, polishing them against the tail of his shirt as he delivered the killing blow: “My story is nonviolent and not very useful. We have better things to focus on right now.”
“Like the missing Piper,” I said grimly. “Sir, if Demi has been taken by someone who intends to use her against us—and we have to assume that anyone connected to the narrative would have that as a goal—we may be in serious trouble. You need us at full operating strength.”
“You brought her into this agency, Marchen,” said the deputy director. His voice was suddenly low and menacing, and I realized that we had somehow strolled right into his trap. He’d threatened to take Jeff because it made enough sense to keep us talking—keep us defending our own long enough to incriminate ourselves. He took a step toward me, eyes burning. “You decided that she needed to become active, rather than leaving her alone. This is on your head, and if you fail to bring her back—alive or dead, it’s all the same to me—I will see to it that you spend the rest of your snowy-white life being poked and prodded by people who want to understand the cause of your fatal apple allergies. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
No,
I thought, almost dizzily.
This shouldn’t be happening on a street corner, in front of my team; this should be happening behind a closed door, in a space that we control.
But that wouldn’t have the right gravitas, would it? The narrative wouldn’t like that.
Someone was playing with us.
I schooled my face into as composed an expression as I could manage, nodding. “Yes, sir,” I said. “I understand completely.”
“Good,” he said. “Now bring her home.” He turned on his heel and stomped away before any of us could say anything further. He was getting the last word. We let him, standing in frozen silence until he climbed back into his unmarked van. Its engine rumbled to life, and it drove off quickly down the street.
“Well, we’re fucked,” said Sloane, and took a slurp of her drink.
Not one of us tried to argue.
The office was still essentially deserted when we made our way into the bullpen. Empty desks and screen savers spoke volumes about the night that the entire department was having. Normally, there would have been at least a skeleton crew of field and cleanup agents loitering around, ready to respond to an emergency call. If anyone had an emergency tonight, they were going to be waiting a long time for a response.
Jeff looked uneasily around at the empty desks. “Maybe we should tell Dispatch that we’re available to be sent back out if necessary—”
“No.” I said the word as calmly as I could, running him up against the wall of my refusal. “The main thrust has passed, and we have work to do here. We need to figure out who’s manipulating the narrative, and we need to find Demi before she’s irrevocably damaged.”
“It may already be too late,” said Sloane, pushing past me to her desk. She knelt, opening the bottom drawer as she continued, “Narrative’s got her now, and she’s an active. There’s no telling how far it can twist her if she says the magic words.”
“Demi’s smarter than that,” I said. My words were hollow even to my own ears.
Sloane raised her head and looked at me. “Really? Because from where I’m standing, she disappeared in the middle of an active narrative and she left her badge behind, which means she has
nothing
that was created by the Bureau. We can’t track her, we can’t follow her, and we can’t save her if she went willingly. That sure sounds dumb enough to say ‘once upon a’—”
“That’s enough,” said Jeff sharply. “We’re going to locate Agent Santos, and we’re going to bring her home intact and ready to explain what happened. Any other outcome is not to be considered. Do I make myself clear?”
“As glass,” I said, a bit taken aback by the vehemence from our normally quiet archivist. “What do you need us to do?”
Jeff smiled wearily. “Research.”
“My favorite waste of time.” Sloane pulled something out of her desk drawer, holding it up for the rest of us to see. It was a book, wrapped in brown paper, about as thick as a dictionary. “The 1936 ATI index,” she said. “I’ll start here.”
“The Aarne-Thompson Index index?” asked Andy blankly. “Isn’t that a little repetitive?”
“The Index is several volumes long, with a master index at the end,” explained Jeff. “What are you hoping to find?”
“Stories about stories,” said Sloane. She sat down, opening the book.
I looked to Andy and Jeff. “You both know what you’re doing?” They nodded. “Good. I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?” asked Jeff.
I flashed him a tight-lipped smile. “To see Dispatch.”
Dispatch was responsible for all field assignments: if there had been any Piper sightings, or any other sightings in the three-twenty-seven range, they would have them on file, and would be in the process of transcribing them for the permanent record. I made my way along the halls faster than was strictly safe, but I knew the office was virtually empty. More importantly, I could feel the weight of the potential narrative looming over me like an uninvited guest. The thought of Demi alone out there with the stories was enough to motivate me to go even faster, and I was opening the door to Dispatch in what felt like only seconds after leaving the bullpen.
The room was chaos personified. Every desk was filled, some with Dispatchers holding fountain pens and frantically scribbling out notes about the night’s narrative incursions, others typing frantically, their fingers flashing over their keyboards as they directed their teams around the city on cleanup and recovery assignments. Not one of them looked up at my entrance, not even when the door swung closed behind me with a sepulchral boom.
I started walking across the room, unable to shake a feeling of growing unease, and froze as I realized that my initial assessment had been incorrect on one point: not
every
desk was filled. Birdie’s chair was empty, and her computer monitor was dark. I stayed frozen for a few seconds, trying to make sense of what I was seeing, before I walked to the next dispatcher down the line. He kept typing, ignoring me. I cleared my throat. He still kept typing.
“Excuse me,” I said.
No reply.
“Where is Birdie Hubbard?”
No reply.
“I need to request some records.”
No reply.
I rapped my knuckles against the edge of his desk. “Excuse me? This is Agent Henrietta Marchen, ATI Management Bureau field agent, about to go Big Bad Wolf on your ass if you don’t start answering me.”
That got a response. His head slowly swiveled around to face me, revealing eyes as round and yellow as an owl’s. “That threat is unprofessional and should be reported to human resources,” he said. His voice had a fluting quality to it that matched his eyes, and I found myself wondering what his tale type was.
“You know what else is unprofessional?” I asked. “Ignoring a field agent who needs access to records. You don’t tell on me and I won’t tell on you.”
The dispatcher’s eyes narrowed for a moment as he considered my offer. Then he nodded, and said in that same fluting tone, “Agreed. What do you want? You’re not on any of my field teams.”
“No, my team is normally dispatched by Birdie Hubbard. Any idea where she is?”
He shook his head, a flicker of irritation crossing his face. “She called in sick. The rest of us have been picking up her slack, and we don’t have the resources to be down even one body. You people think you’ve got it hard out there tonight? We’re directing you to all those stories without time to put together full dossiers. It’s a miracle that there haven’t been
more
casualties.”
Hearing this owlish little man who had probably never seen the narrative in action since his own story activated dismissing the deaths of my friends and coworkers made me furious. I tamped down my rage, allowing my expression to harden. “There have been enough,” I said flatly. “One of my team members is missing. We think the narrative took her. We need your records on tonight’s dispatches.”
He blinked again. “You want records on all the dispatches your team was involved with?”
“No,” I said, and smiled coldly. “I want all the records from all the field teams that were scrambled tonight. I need to see the shape of this story.”
The owl-eyed dispatcher stared at me for a moment before swallowing heavily and pushing his chair back from his desk. “I’ll just get those for you,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “I’ll wait here.”
Not all the records were available yet: our scribes and non-field archivists were working their fingers bloody—in some cases literally—as they tried to transcribe everything that had happened since the sun went down and the narrative started working in earnest. The records I
could
get extended from six to eight in the evening. That would have to be enough for the moment. I hefted the stack of folders, gave the owl-eyed dispatcher one last stern reminder to have any additional records sent to my desk, and turned to leave Dispatch.
Birdie’s desk caught my eye on the way out. I paused, not quite sure what was bothering me, apart from her absence. My frustration was just that: frustration. I didn’t like the fact that someone I regarded as a satellite member of my team was unavailable when one of my actual agents was MIA. I shook my head and resumed walking.
This time I made it out of Dispatch and all the way down the hall to the bullpen, where uncharacteristic silence greeted my return. I frowned as I wove my way between the desks to my team’s quadrant. Sloane was sitting cross-legged atop her desk, hunched over a large clothbound book. Jeff was standing nearby, an equally large book propped open in his arms. Only Andy wasn’t reading; he was at his computer instead, skimming local news sites as he tried to assemble a timeline of the Bureau’s viciously unpleasant evening.
The slap of my file folders hitting my desk rang through the room like an alarm. Everyone looked up. Sloane scowled.
“What the fuck are you trying to do, scare me out of a year’s growth?” she demanded.
“No,” I said shortly. “What are you working on?”
“Storyteller archetypes,” she said.
“Looking up Piper variants,” Jeff said.
“Local damage reports,” Andy said.
I sighed. “All of which are good and vital things to be doing. Shit.” I sat down, reaching for the first folder. “If anyone needs me, I’ll be up to my ass in action reports.”
“We’ll pray for you,” said Jeff, his nose already firmly back in his own book.
The silence lasted for some time after that. Reading and research may not be the most interesting parts of our job—they’re definitely not the parts that are most interesting to
me
, which is why I chose fieldwork when I graduated from training, instead of something more staid and less likely to get me turned to stone or seduced by some wannabe Prince Charming—but they’re absolutely vital if we want to keep the world turning the way that centuries of rational thought have established. The narrative is an old, dark force that keeps trying to worm its way back out into the light, and sometimes the only thing that keeps it locked away is knowledge.
Our weapons are strange and some people don’t recognize them as weapons at all, but they’ve worked for us for a very long time. Don’t change what works.
Sloane made a small, irritated sound as she turned a page. “Why does everyone assume that all storytellers are magically good and wonderful and have your best interests at heart no matter what? Don’t they realize that someone had to tell these fucking stories in the first place?”
“Ah, but you see, the stories were told by storytellers,” said Jeff, looking up. “When a man tells a story of heroism and glory, he’s going to cast himself, or someone like himself, in the lead role. All men were storytellers before television supplanted the need to create entertainment in the home, and so a great many stories—”
“Lecture heard and received and oh sweet Grimm will you shut the fuck up if I get Henry to show you her tits?” Sloane turned another page. She didn’t raise her head, which meant she didn’t see the truly impressive blush that spread across Jeff’s nose and cheeks. “Everybody wants to be the hero, and so they make the people they don’t like—like their sisters—the villains. I get that. What I don’t get is why no one ever said ‘this narrative thing screws with us every chance it gets, and people who tell stories are sort of working for it, so maybe they suck too.’ It seems like a logical extension of the archetypes.”
“Sometimes I forget that you’re smarter than you act,” said Andy from his desk.
“Really? Because sometimes I forget that you’re not asking me to break your nose,” said Sloane.
“Hang on, everybody,” I said, raising my hand for silence. They all stopped and looked at me. Grimm bless my team: they might squabble like children when things got tense, but they always doubled down when I needed them. “Something’s bothering me. Sloane, what were you saying about storytellers?”
“That they’re all evil fuckers,” she said helpfully.