Around the foundation of the building she’d been deposited
in front of—the strange, unmarked building in the almost-deserted business
park—the thorny vines began to worm their way up out of the earth.
Everyone except for the woman with the red and green hair
slept, and really, what did one woman matter?
What did one woman matter at all?
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 410 (“Sleeping Beauty”)
Status: ACTIVE
“Oh, shit.”
It wasn’t the most intelligent thing that Sloane had ever
said, but considering the circumstances, she thought she was doing pretty well.
The pretty Indian woman in the lab coat who had collapsed into her arms didn’t
react to the profanity. Sloane gave her an experimental shake. She didn’t react
to that either, and so Sloane shook her harder, hoping that maybe
that
would do something. All it did was cause the strange woman’s arms and head to
flop around until Sloane started to worry about accidentally breaking her neck.
The paperwork for that would be, well, murder. Not to be crass or anything.
Lifting with her knees and not her back—since the last thing
she needed to do was incapacitate herself at this point—Sloane hoisted the
stranger up and moved her carefully to the nearest desk, sweeping its contents
to the floor with one elbow. When the space was clear she stretched the
stranger out, checking to be sure her limbs were straight and her breathing
wasn’t obstructed. Once this was done, Sloane began the much more important
process of patting the stranger down for ID. Luck was with her: the
stranger—who she should probably start thinking of as “the Sleeping Beauty,”
since that was
obviously
what was going on here—was carrying a plastic
badge connecting her to a biotech firm downtown. Which meant she couldn’t have
walked to the Bureau. Considering how quickly she’d passed out, she probably hadn’t
been in any condition to drive for several hours.
“All right, Ms. Patel, do you have a bus transfer?” muttered
Sloane, as she resumed combing through the strange woman’s pockets.
Ms. Patel did not have a bus transfer. Since the local bus
line used them as proof of payment, that meant she hadn’t come on the bus. And
if she hadn’t come on the bus and she hadn’t walked, someone had to have
brought her. Someone had to have guided her past security and into the building
just in time for her to fall asleep.
“Shit,” said Sloane again, and transferred her focus to the
woman’s hands. There was a needle mark on Priya’s right index finger. Wincing a
little, Sloane squeezed the wound, trying to force out any splinters or shards
that had been stuck inside. That wasn’t the most common variant anymore, but it
would be the easiest to deal with.
Nothing emerged from Priya’s finger. “So much for that
idea,” muttered Sloane. She started to push herself to her feet, and stopped as
something pricked her ankle. Heart sinking, she twisted and looked behind
herself.
There, growing from the carpet like it was the most natural
thing in the world, was a thorny rose briar. It had twisted partially around
Sloane’s calf, the trailing end of it hovering just above her leg. Any question
about what sort of narrative incursion she was dealing with died when she saw
that briar. Lots of princess archetypes could make your carpet sprout flowers. Only
one of them would go for full-on roses, and only one would do it this
fast
.
“Technically this is assault and Henry would tell me to
verbally request that you not file a sexual harassment claim against me,” she
said, turning back to Priya. “Honestly, I don’t give a shit. I just want you to
wake up. Although you know, you’re pretty hot and all.” This, too, was part of
the story. Sleeping Beauties liked declarations of love, or attraction, or just
“damn, girl, look at that body” before they were kissed awake. Something about
their story made it work better that way.
Sloane bent forward and pressed her lips against Priya’s. The
unconscious woman was wearing menthol-flavored lip gloss, and when Sloane
pulled back, she didn’t open her eyes. Sloane swore and checked the other
woman’s pulse. It was still slow and steady, showing no signs that her kiss had
even registered.
“True love, lacking,” she muttered. “Fucking variations.” Not
every Sleeping Beauty required true love, thank God, or the world would have
been ass-deep in sleeping princesses. Unfortunately, it didn’t change the fact
that
Sloane
was still ass-deep in sleeping princesses.
Moving carefully now, Sloane reached back to untwine the
briar from her ankle before she stood and started back across the bullpen to
her team. More rose briars had sprouted from the carpet between them, making
her footing treacherous. None of them were blooming yet. She couldn’t remember
whether that was a good sign or a bad one. This would have been so much easier
if Jeff had been the one who’d stayed awake.
But Jeff definitely wasn’t awake. He had fallen on the floor
between two of the desks, knocking his glasses askew and trapping an arm under
his body at an angle that would probably cause him a lot of pain when he woke
up if she didn’t do something about it. The skinny bastard was easy enough to
hoist into a chair. Sloane only hesitated for a second before wheeling it over
to park next to Henry, propping Jeff’s head on the pale woman’s shoulder. “There—you’re
finally sleeping together,” she said, a gallows grin on her face.
Henry’s story hadn’t saved her from falling under the
Sleeping Beauty’s spell either. That was an interesting narrative collision
that would probably delight the geeks in the Archives, once they were all awake
again. There had been potential Snow Whites caught in a Sleeping Beauty’s event
horizon before, but never a fully active one.
Sloane looked at the pair for a few more seconds before she
moved on to check on Andy, Demi, and Gerry. All three of them were sleeping
peacefully, and since they had passed out while seated, she was saved from
scooping anyone else off the floor. She paused to remove the gun from Andy’s
belt, pulling back the slide to check that it was loaded. She wasn’t supposed
to carry a weapon while at the Bureau—something about her semi-Wicked
Stepsister status making her a safety hazard—but under the circumstances, she
didn’t think she could be blamed. She started to turn away, hesitated, then put
down the gun and bent to remove her shoes. Platform heels were great for
cutting an imposing figure and stomping your way through life, but they weren’t
exactly conducive to stealth, or to traversing an actively growing briar patch.
Gun clutched in her hand, Sloane padded on stocking-clad
feet toward the hall.
The snow was falling more heavily than I’d ever seen,
coating my face and body before I could push myself upright and wipe it out of
my eyes. A frantic look around confirmed what the snowfall had already tried to
tell me: I was in the whiteout wood, surrounded by the black skeleton trees. The
other Snow Whites stood in the spaces between them, their hands folded and
their expressions filled with a strange sorrow that I almost understood.
“What’s going on?” I demanded, spinning around. Tanya was
behind me, that same sadness hanging heavy in her eyes. “Why am I here? I’m not
sleeping!”
“Maybe not on purpose, but you’re asleep all right,” said
the dairy princess, shaking her head. “Didn’t you feel the curse take you
down?”
“Glass coffin time,” confirmed the Japanese girl. “You
should have watched what you put in your mouth.”
“I didn’t eat anything,” I insisted. “I was at my desk,
prepping for the day, when this woman walked in—” I stopped, eyes widening. “Oh,
hell. We have a four-ten.”
The Snow Whites looked at me blankly. I resisted the urge to
groan.
“A Sleeping Beauty came into my office and collapsed,” I
explained. “That’s why I’m asleep. I didn’t eat any apples or use any poisoned
combs. I’m not supposed to be here.”
“Then why are you here?” asked Tanya. “If you weren’t meant
to be here, you wouldn’t be. That’s not how the forest works.”
The silent woman with the gray freckles on her nose looked
suddenly alarmed, her hands flashing in a question I couldn’t understand. The
Japanese girl frowned, a flicker of concern sliding across her own face as she
turned to Tanya and said, “Adrianna.”
That one word—that one name—had a galvanizing effect on my
guide. She swore in French as she lunged forward and grabbed me, yanking me out
of my patch of snow and into hers. “Everyone, check the boundaries; make sure
that nothing’s melting,” she snapped. “Close any lines you find.” The Snow
Whites nodded and scattered, so many black and white birds flying into the
whiteout wood like magpies in search of something to scavenge.
In a matter of seconds, only I, Tanya, the Japanese girl,
and the silent woman remained.
“Uh, does someone want to tell me what’s going on here?” I
asked, trying to pull my arm out of Tanya’s grip. It didn’t work. For a dead
woman, she had incredibly strong hands. “What does Adrianna have to do with
anything?”
“She’ll steal you if we don’t stop her,” said the Japanese
girl. I looked at her blankly. She shot an accusing glance at Tanya. “I thought
you were mentoring the new girl?”
“I am, but she doesn’t sleep much,” said Tanya wearily. “We’ve
barely managed to get through the causes of coma.”
“Not helpful,” said the Japanese girl, while the silent
woman’s hands flashed and dove in what I could only assume was an angry screed
against Tanya’s priorities. Turning on me, the Japanese girl said, “Hi. My name
was Ayane before it got changed to Snow White. My friend here,” she indicated
the silent woman, “was Judi. She didn’t die when she fell into her coma, but
she got trapped here because one of our restless sisters used the wood to take
her body over.”
My eyes widened. “That can happen?”
“What, you think every Snow White wants to go back into her
story? Some of us choose to stay here. Some of us don’t. Judi didn’t.” Ayane
shrugged. “She’s still a little angry about that.”
Judi chose that moment to use an angry sign that I didn’t
need to know any ASL to understand.
“Don’t frighten the girl,” said Tanya. “Henry, it’s going to
be fine. Adrianna can’t take your body if she can’t get to you.”
“But she’s gotten to me a bunch of times,” I said. “She
stabbed me in the chest the first time we met!”
“You weren’t in an enchanted sleep then,” said Ayane. “As
long as you wake up before she finds you, you’ll be fine.”
“And what are the odds of that?” I demanded.
None of them would answer me.
I stood in the whiteout wood, snow falling around us like a
curtain, and wondered whether I was ever going to make it home.
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 410 (“Sleeping
Beauty”)
Status: ACTIVE
The hallway was choked with bodies. One of the other field
teams had apparently been returning to the office when Priya collapsed; they
were strewn about like broken toys. An open cat carrier was lying on the ground
next to their driver. Sloane gave it a wide berth. The trouble with Cheshire
Cats was the way they could lurk in shadows, and she wasn’t in the mood to be
scratched with psychotropic claws just at the moment.
Dispatch was just as bad as the bullpen and the hall. Everyone
was asleep, ignoring the strident beeping from their phones and computers. Sloane
stalked silently through, grateful for the noise. Anything that could give her
a little bit more cover was welcome, considering the circumstances.
She was reaching for the door that would lead her out of
Dispatch to the lobby when she heard the voices. Immediately, she stiffened,
backed up, and started looking for a place to hide. There wasn’t one. This was
Dispatch, the cleanest, most open space in the building. She was trapped.
When the door swung open less than half a minute later,
Sloane was facedown on the floor, her feet mostly concealed beneath the nearest
desk. She wasn’t sure it looked like a natural fall, but it was the best she
could do under the circumstances.
Please don’t stop to check my pulse
,
she thought.
Please just keep walking.
A familiar peal of laughter struck her like a dagger in her
chest, followed by an even more familiar voice saying smugly, “That’s one
down—mark it off. Now we just need to find the others, and we’ll be safely in
business.”
Sloane remained where she was as she listened to the
footsteps cross Dispatch and fade into silence. Even when they were gone she
kept still, counting silently down from one hundred before she lifted her head
and looked around the motionless room.
Birdie was back.
“Fuck this,” said Sloane, and bounced to her feet, stalking
onward to the lobby.
Stillness had fallen across the whiteout wood once again as
the four of us waited for Adrianna’s attack. I shifted my weight from one foot
to the other before blurting, “What makes you so sure she’s going to come for
me? Maybe she’ll leave me alone.”
“You’re in a coma, and that makes you a doorway,” said
Tanya. “Doorways have gotten rarer as the story has adjusted to a world with
less magic and more consequences; we have to seize them when we can. Dreamers
aren’t doorways. Neither are the dead. She wants out of here. She doesn’t like
the way we run things, and you’re the best chance she’s had at an escape in a
very long time.”
“Besides, taking you over would make her an ATI agent,” said
Ayane. “Do you have any idea how much damage she could do if she had one of
those badges?”
Judi’s hands flashed and danced. No one translated for her. I
had to wonder how frustrating that was, to be trapped forever in a forest full
of people who should have been your sisters, but who didn’t make any effort to
give you a voice.
“If I get out of here, I’m signing up for an after-work ASL
class,” I muttered. Louder, I said, “I’m assuming a lot. She’d have access to
our files, to our records … to everything.” And how long would it take for
the others to realize that something was wrong? I’d always held myself mostly
apart from everyone who wasn’t directly on my team. She probably wouldn’t be
able to fool Jeff or Sloane for very long, but Andy? Demi? She could play them
like fiddles, as long as she moved quickly and didn’t look behind herself.