“Yes, but as most of them are currently unconscious, I think you know
damn well which one I mean. Where’s the girl?”
I raised both eyebrows, emphasizing the fact that the whites of my eyes
were almost the same shade as the white of my skin. “Do you mean Demi Santos,
by any chance?”
My expression had the desired effect. The deputy director stopped in his
tracks, actually rocking onto his heels for a moment before he recovered and
pressed on, snapping, “Yes, I mean Demi Santos. I have several eyewitnesses who
claim that a woman who sounds suspiciously like Agent Winters entered Miss
Santos’s music class without invitation and physically removed her from the
premises. The police were called.”
“Uh-huh. Did you call them off? Because we really don’t
have the time or manpower to deal with the police right now. I know this
is piling shit on top of shit, but seriously, if you make me try to talk to
some beat cop who doesn’t want to be here, I’m going to scream. And if I
scream, the bluebirds will find me.”
Deputy Director Brewer blinked at me as if he had no idea what I was
talking about, and even less idea of how to handle it. Again, he recovered
quickly, shaking his head as he said, “I don’t know what you think you’re
doing, Agent, but you can’t simply—”
“Demi Santos is a half-awakened two-eighty, as you would know if you had
stopped by the control van to read my mission log before coming out here to
confront me,” I said calmly. “In case you can’t remember the ATI off the top of
your head right now, that means she’s a Pied Piper. A Pied Piper at music
school with no control and no handler is a threat to public safety. She was
going to go live any day, and when that happened, a lot of people were going to
get hurt.”
He went even paler, if such a thing was possible. “Are you saying we have
two concurrent memetic incursions?”
The temptation to say yes and see him run was almost irresistible. I
resisted. “No, I’m saying Demi Santos is on the ATI spectrum, and is thus my responsibility,
not yours. She’s aiding us with this investigation.”
“Aiding you
how
?”
“Jeff can explain better than I can, sir,” I said. “I assure you, it will
all be laid out very clearly in his notes, as well as in my own. For the
moment, may I please recommend that you leave the scene? You’ll be safer behind
the cordon.”
His eyes narrowed. “Safer how?”
Deputy Director Brewer had risen to his current position by being a
by-the-book kind of man. The trouble was, his book didn’t have any happy
endings, and it certainly didn’t have evil witches, wicked stepsisters, and
talking mice. Sometimes getting him to understand the reality of what fieldwork
entailed was more trouble than I had the patience for. This was one of those
times.
“That hospital is ground zero for a sickness the likes of which we
haven’t seen in centuries,” I snapped, jabbing a finger toward the looming
shape of the Alta Vista Hospital. “There is a teenage girl asleep in there who’s going to kill us all if my team doesn’t prevent it—and
when I say ‘all,’ I mean
everyone in this
city
. That means coming up with an out-of-the-box solution. Enter Demi
Santos. Now, I can’t say for sure what’s going to happen to you if you’re still
standing here when she breaks out her flute, but I can say that you’re probably
not going to like it. The rest of us have been touched by these stories. We
have some resistance.
You do not
.
Now, with all due respect,
sir
, I
suggest that you get behind that cordon, before you get a hell of a lot closer
to ever after than you ever wanted to be.”
There was a moment of silence. It stretched out long enough that I
started to worry I had gone too far. Then the deputy director nodded tightly,
said, “I look forward to your report,” and turned to walk back toward the
cordon.
I stayed where I was, watching him go. When I was sure that he wasn’t
going to turn and come charging back, I sighed and made my own turn, heading
for the van. It was time to put my money where my mouth was and stop another
story before it got big enough to eat us all.
Demi
Santos—who was nineteen, only two years older than our Sleeping Beauty—lifted
her flute to her lips, blowing an experimental note. According to the records
Jeff had produced, she was a natural musician. She didn’t have her first lesson
until she was sixteen. Six months later, she was already good enough to play
with any symphony orchestra in the world, and was going to college mainly to
get the paperwork to prove it. That kind of musical gift is one of the
characteristic hallmarks of the Pied Pipers—no matter how poor their
beginnings, they can always play their chosen instruments better than they have
any right to.
“I still think you people are out of your goddamn minds,” she muttered.
“And you’re still not wrong,” said Andy amiably. He was wearing
headphones as a precaution against her song. They were tuned to a white noise
station that should keep the effects of her story to a minimum. We hoped. Like
I said, fairy tales are not an exact science.
Demi shook her head, closed her eyes, and began to play.
It was a light, frothy classical piece—something that sounded like it
should be accompanied by harps and followed by polite applause. Instead, it was
accompanied by the manholes on the sides of the road beginning to rock in their
sockets, and the sound of Sloane’s shrill, indignant scream.
And the rats came.
The manhole covers were shoved aside as a flood of gray and brown bodies
boiled up from the sewers, surging seamlessly into the streams of rats pouring
similarly out of the alleys on every side. Sloane’s scream was repeated, just
before a pack of squirrels came stampeding from the direction of the park,
joining their cousins in the assault on the hospital. Even a few of the local
pigeons got into the act, making up the aerial branch of the vermin assault
force. The blended mass of squirrels, rats, and pigeons slammed into the
hospital’s automatic doors, overwhelming the sensors and stampeding,
scampering, and soaring their way inside.
Demi’s playing had stopped somewhere in the middle of the onslaught, her
flute dangling forgotten in her hands as she stared at the hospital doors. It
didn’t matter whether she played or not; at this point, she’d given the
instructions to her army of vermin, and they were going to do what she told
them to do.
“I always knew pigeons were just rats with wings,” commented Andy.
Sloane—stomping up with scratches on her cheeks and forehead, probably from
standing in the path of the squirrels—just glared at him.
“Did I do that?” asked Demi, sounding stunned.
The van door slammed open and Jeff emerged, grinning so broadly that I
could practically count his fillings. “You did it!” he said, jumping down to
the street and running over to take her by the elbow. “Come on. I’ve figured
out the best musical selection for you to use when you’re piping the virus into
the rats, and from there, it’s a pretty standard descending trill to get them
to commit mass suicide. You’re doing great so far. I’ll get you another soda,
and we can go over the sheet music—” Still talking, he led the unresisting
two-eighty away.
I stayed where I was, watching the hospital doors. Rats and pigeons
occasionally flashed by in the lobby, briefly visible through the glass. Andy
touched my shoulder.
“They’ll wake her up,” he said. “No Prince. No kiss. Just a disease scare
and a major reduction in local pest control business for a while.”
“I know.”
“She’ll probably never even know what happened.”
“I know.”
Sloane interjected sourly, “But we’re going to have to figure out what
the hell to do with a live Piper. She’s started her story now. Either we defuse
her or we bury her in a shallow grave somewhere off the interstate.”
“I know which one you’re voting for, and the answer is no,” I said, and
turned away from the modern-day castle where a silly little girl who’d pricked
her finger on something she shouldn’t have been touching was sleeping through
the day that she’d been born for. “Besides, there’s a third option.”
“What’s that?”
“We hire her.” I smiled a little, without amusement. “Who doesn’t dream
about fairy tales coming true?”
Sloane eyed me with something close to respect. “Sometimes I think they
got our Index numbers reversed,” she said.
“Sometimes, so do I,” I replied, and turned to follow Jeff’s route to the
control center, where our little two-eighty would be preparing for the
performance of a lifetime. There’s one thing the Brothers Grimm got very, very
wrong: There’s no such thing as “ever after.” That would require that the story
ever end.
Memetic incursion in
progress: tale type 280 (“Pied Piper”)
Status: ACTIVE
Demi Santos was becoming
increasingly sure that she was being pranked. It was the only explanation for
what was going on around her. First, that weird Goth girl had pulled her out of
class, and then the skinny man with the glasses had pushed the flute and sheet
music into her hand, and after that …
Well, after
that, things got a little blurry. She remembered playing her flute. She
remembered the rats—it would have been impossible for her to forget the rats,
fat and brown and
everywhere
, looking up at her with beady little eyes
that were somehow worshipful, like they knew that she was meant to be venerated
above all others. She remembered a woman with skin as white as snow, lips as
red as blood, and hair as black as the feathers of a raven’s wing. She
remembered being bundled into a black van, and a strange taste in her soda,
almost buried under the more familiar chemicals. Everything had gone away after
that, and now she was here, in a bare little room, with one hand handcuffed to
the table. There was a mirror on the wall across from her. Years of watching
crime dramas with her Gram-Gram told her that the mirror was probably one of
those fancy ones that were clear on one side and reflective on the other.
Someone was probably watching her.
If I had my
flute, I’d show them,
she thought viciously, and froze, trying to figure
out where the thought had come from. Show them what? How to play “Hot Cross
Buns” one-handed? A flute wasn’t a good blunt instrument, and it was an even
worse lock pick.
But she didn’t
have her flute, and she didn’t have any way to get herself out of the situation
she had somehow gotten herself into. The feeling that this was all some huge,
cruel practical joke wasn’t receding. If anything, it was getting worse the
longer she sat alone, waiting to see what was going to happen next. Anyone
would have been welcome by that point. Even the weird Goth girl.
The door
opened. Demi twisted in her seat, trying to see. A thin, balding man in a plain
black suit was walking across the room toward her. He had a folder in his
hands, and when he met her eyes, he smiled without any warmth.
“Ah, Miss
Santos,” he said. “Now what are we going to do with you?”
ATI Management Bureau
Headquarters
It’s customary for the field
team to take a break after a confirmed memetic incursion into baseline
reality—in layman’s terms, we’re supposed to get some time off after we stop a
fairy tale from rewriting a major metropolitan area into an evil, R-rated
version of Disney World.
“New and improved! Now with extra incest and
murder!”
Normally, time off isn’t that hard to arrange. There are several
field teams in every office, and we don’t tend to get more than one or two
memetic incursions in a given week. We should have been packing our gear and
heading home for naps, beers—whatever helped us to cope. It is not, however,
customary for a field team to go after one fairy tale and stop to intentionally
awaken another, no matter how good the reasons seemed to be.
Reports from
the hospital said that Alicia Connors, our erstwhile Sleeping Beauty, was
already awake, unaware of the bullet she’d just dodged. She wouldn’t need a
Prince to save her. She wouldn’t sleep through her own rape and pregnancy, or
any of the other horrible fates that await the four-tens. She would be referred
to in our files only as “ATI subject 308 (confirmed 410),” and she would be
able to put her story behind her with no effort at all, because it hadn’t been
given the time to become truly hers. And my reward for saving her, for granting
her a second chance at happy ever after?
Paperwork.
Oceans and seas and fjords of paperwork. Virtual kingdoms of paperwork, spread
out across my desk like the vanguard of an invading army, all needing to be
defeated if I wanted to avoid an internal review of my actions. I scowled at
the sheaves, which did nothing to fill out or file any of the waiting forms.
Most agencies the size of the ATI Management Bureau have gone paperless by now,
as much out of mercy as out of any desire to protect the environment. That
wasn’t an option for us, no matter how much we might want it to be. There are a
lot of things in the Index that can only be documented the old-fashioned way,
with paper and specially prepared typewriter ribbons. Even those don’t work as
well as doing it by hand; there’s a whole team of admins whose only job is ink
and quills, every day, until retirement comes to save them.
Sometimes I
have nightmares about being reassigned to the steno pool. The very fact that we
have
a steno pool should say something about how outdated and archaic
life in our office really is. But it has to be done. Enter a report into a
computer, where no eyes can see where it goes, and sometimes it will change.
Those changes are never good, especially not if someone reads that modified
story and takes it for the original. That’s how variants are born. The first
time a seven-oh-nine got done in by a poisoned ring instead of a poisoned
apple, it was because the story had been allowed to deviate.
I put my head
down in my hands, massaging my temples with the tips of my fingers and
desperately wishing for some sort of semi-horrible disaster to strike the
office. Nothing major. Just something to destroy the paperwork before it
actually devoured my soul.
“
Henry!
”
The shout was
shrill and angry, and cut through the ambient noise of the office like a buzz
saw through an enchanted hedge. I winced and kept massaging my temples with my
fingertips. When I’d wished for a mildly catastrophic event, I’d been thinking
something a little less terrifying than—
“Henrietta
Marchen, what the
fuck
is going on?”
That was the
kind of targeted demand that meant I needed to pay attention or pay the consequences.
I raised my head to watch Sloane Winters—ATI Management Bureau Agent, failed
Wicked Stepsister, and never-ending pain in my ass—come storming down the
narrow aisle between desks, nearly knocking over several precarious towers of
paperwork in the process. She was wearing a
Devil’s Carnival
T-shirt and
ripped jeans, and her red-tipped black hair was tied into stubby ponytails. She
would have looked like any other generic Hot Topic Goth Girl if not for the
sheer murderous rage in her eyes.
“I don’t know,
Sloane,” I said. “It’s a pretty big world. There are potentially a lot of
things going on right now. Do you want to narrow down the field a little bit,
or should I start making wild guesses and see how long it takes for you to get
pissed off and just tell me?”
Sloane’s eyes
narrowed, her rage pulling back until it was merely a looming threat, rather
than an immediate danger. “Have you read the after-action report on our four-ten
yet?”
“No, Sloane, I
haven’t, because I was busy doing site cleanup at the hospital, and helping
Andy deal with the witnesses, and debriefing the doctors, and taking
statements, and oh, about a dozen other things you don’t have to deal with.” We
no longer allowed Sloane to interface with the public, and hadn’t since an
on-air interview when she tried to get a little too candid about a beanstalk
incident. We’d been able to downplay her apparently deranged ravings as the
result of a little too much coffee, but that plus her temper meant that she was
not considered a public face of the agency.
“So you didn’t
see the staffing updates.”
I resisted the
urge to fling a stack of paperwork at her head. “No, I didn’t, since in order
to see the staffing update, I would have needed to read the after-action
report. As I did not read the after-action report, you can safely assume that I
haven’t seen anything that it contained.”
Sloane’s lips
drew back in what would have been a smile coming from anyone else. From her, it
was more like a dominance display. “They took your suggestion. They’re hiring
that Pied Piper that I found for you.”
“Good. Demi
Santos has a lot of potential.” Potential to do good, working with us;
potential to do a whole lot of damage, left to her own devices. As a fully
activated individual on the ATI spectrum, she was limited only by the shape of
her story. The poor girl.
“They’re
assigning her to our team.”
My mouth
dropped slightly open as I stared at Sloane, who smirked. With an effort that
felt entirely out of proportion to the size of the movement, I forced my mouth
closed and swallowed before I said, “You can’t be serious.”
“Would I joke
about something this annoying?”
“We’re a field
team. We’re
the
field team. They can’t give us a rookie who hasn’t even
known about the Index for twenty-four hours.”
“And yet they
are.” Sloane folded her arms. “So come on, irritating boss lady. What are you
going to do about it?”
Deputy Director Brewer’s office
door was closed, and his blinds were drawn, a sure sign that our fearless
leader wanted to be left alone. Too bad for him that I’ve never really given a
crap what anyone in management wanted. I hammered against the doorframe, and
when that didn’t get an immediate response, I hammered against it a second
time, even harder. The skin of my fist turned red from the pressure. I ignored
it, pulling back my hand to try again.
The door swung
open to reveal Deputy Director Nathanial Brewer in all his frowning, rat-faced
glory. He was the sort of man who could make even a bespoke suit seem poorly
made just by putting it on, with dirty blond hair that seemed to fall out
faster than any hair replacement treatment on the market could grow it back.
His frown deepened when he realized who had been banging on his door.
“Special Agent
Marchen,” he said. “With the racket you were making out there, I assumed that
you had to be Agent Winters. Can I help you with something?”
“You can tell
me why you’re assigning a rookie to the field team without putting her through
the normal training program,” I said, barely remembering to add a grudging
“sir” at the end of my statement.
His eyebrows
rose in feigned surprise. “Really, Agent? Aren’t you the one who recommended
that we hire Demi Santos?”
“Yes, I am,
but—”
“And aren’t
you the one who authorized the activation of her memetic alignment during a
field operation, potentially endangering dozens, if not hundreds, of civilian
lives? I just want to be sure that we’re both approaching this problem from the
same starting point.”
I stood up a
little straighter, raising my chin as I replied, “I did those things,
sir
,
but they were necessary at the time. They do not justify placing an untrained
teenager on a field team. She will be in danger. She will endanger those around
her.”
“She’s not an
untrained teenager anymore, Agent Marchen,” said Deputy Director Brewer. He didn’t
visibly change positions, but something in his posture shifted, becoming cold
and hard. He looked at me with hooded eyes, and I was suddenly reminded of
something that it was all too easy to forget in our day-to-day work: Brewer
didn’t get his job by calling in political favors or striving for the level of
his own incompetence. He earned it the hard way, with dedication and with
talent … until he pissed off the wrong person and wound up getting shuttled
to the basement with the freaks who kept fairy tales from eating the rational
world.
It was the
sort of thing that could make anyone lose their temper. Hell, I
am
one
of the freaks—have been since I was born—and sometimes it was enough to make
me
lose my temper. I couldn’t imagine what it was doing to a career civil servant
like Nathanial Brewer.
“She’s
nineteen,” I said, trying to rally.
Deputy
Director Brewer just kept looking at me. “She’s a story. She’s nineteen, and
she’s a story. She was an untrained teenager, and then you sent your little
associate to drag her out of the music room and into the role she’d somehow
been avoiding for her entire life. What is she now? She’s a threat to the very
fabric of reality. She’s a danger to everyone around her, including herself and
her family and any friends who she may have had before you decided it was okay
to turn her life upside down. But most of all, Agent Marchen—most of all—she’s
your problem now. Please try to keep her alive long enough to justify the
paperwork.” With that, he stepped back into his office and closed the door in
my face.
I stayed
frozen where I was for several seconds, staring at his nameplate and waiting
for him to come back out and tell me that he was kidding. It didn’t happen.
Finally, I turned around and started walking slowly back toward the stairs that
would lead me down to the bullpen.
It was time to
explain to my team that we were getting a new member. Whether we were happy
about it or not.
“You shouldn’t have embarrassed
him when he came to ask about Demi in the first place,” said Andy, shaking his
head. He was leaning against the edge of his desk, arms crossed, trying to look
like he wasn’t upset about the situation. He was doing a pretty decent job of
it; if I hadn’t known him as well as I did, I might have even believed the lie.
Unfortunately for his attempt at rendering himself unreadable, he couldn’t
control the small muscle in his cheek that jumped whenever he was stressed. And
oh, he was stressed.
“I’m sorry,” I
said. “I did what needed to be done in the moment. I’m not so good about
considering the long-term consequences sometimes.”
“That’s what
leads your type to eat the poisoned apples, isn’t it?” sneered Sloane. She kept
her eyes glued on her own computer screen, where she was surfing eBay on
company time. “A lack of understanding that what you do today has an impact on
what you’re going to be able to do tomorrow.”