“Can we at
least try to look like a united front?” I asked. “And where’s Jeff?”
Jeff was the
fourth member of our jolly little band of the damned. He was primarily our
archivist, although he was also responsible for things like helping Demi find
the sheet music that had allowed her to pipe the rats of the city up from the
sewers and into the streets. Sort of a jack-of-all-trades, master of none, and
happy about the fact. Like most of the rest of us, he had joined the Bureau
because he hadn’t had a choice. He was a fully activated five-oh-three, part of
a tale best encapsulated by the Shoemaker and the Elves. He did okay at
resisting his urge to clean the office when the rest of us weren’t looking, and
he definitely made the best shoes I’d ever had the luxury of wearing. It was
like walking on a cloud.
“He’s with the
new girl, getting her kitted out so that maybe she won’t die off quite as
fast.” Sloane didn’t look up from her computer. “We should start a betting
pool.”
“Betting pools
don’t count if you murder the person yourself,” I reminded her, earning myself
a look at her middle finger as she held it up for my inspection. “You know, I
am
technically your superior. You should really stop flipping me off.”
“Then you
should stop saying stupid shit that makes me want to,” said Sloane. She clicked
the “buy it now” button on a spiked leather collar. “Basically, you should shut
the fuck up forever. Just pretend you’re in a glass coffin and it’ll come
naturally.”
“Could you lay
off for five minutes?” I sat down at my own desk, causing one stack of
paperwork to cascade gently over into another, creating an undifferentiated
sweep of white across what was supposed to be my writing area. I fought back
the urge to put my head down and use it as a pillow. “We’re getting a new field
team member. She’s a Pied Piper. That has to be useful. Right now, Jeff’s the
only one of us who’s fully activated, and he doesn’t do much during
incursions.”
Sending
someone whose passions were cleaning and shoemaking into an active fairy tale
would very rarely make things better, and could frequently make things worse.
We had to keep him far away from the five-ten-A manifestations, or every
Cinderella who came along would wind up drafting him into the role normally
played by songbirds and talking mice. And he wouldn’t be able to fight them.
Being tied to a story gives a person certain strengths—see also my affinity for
woodland creatures and tendency to make wildflowers grow in the carpet. It also
makes you vulnerable. Jeff could no more refuse to clean up a mess than Sloane
could be trusted with apples and arsenic. We can fight our natures, but no one
has yet figured out how to change them.
We’d never
worked with an activated Piper before. Demi’s strengths we knew; if something
could be classed as vermin, she could control it. Given the most classic story
attributed to her tale type, that said something unpleasant about how children
were viewed in Europe during the Dark Ages. What we didn’t know was where her
weaknesses would be.
“Maybe she can
pipe my damn bluebirds away,” I added.
“I don’t think
anything can pipe your bluebirds away,” said Andy.
I raised my
head and looked at him flatly. “Really. That’s your useful contribution to this
discussion. That I am to be permanently plagued by happy songbirds.”
Andy shrugged.
“I never claimed to be useful.”
I balled up a
piece of paper and flung it at him. Andy laughed and batted it aside.
Unlike the
rest of us—Sloane with her averted story, Jeff with his active story, and me in
the middle—Andy was nowhere on the ATI spectrum. He was perfectly normal, with
no more connection to the memetic undercurrent of reality than any other man on
the street … except that once, before I graduated to full field agent, a
four-ten manifested in a small beachside community, and no one noticed. She put
the whole town to sleep, and this is the real world, which tends to be pretty
straightforward about things like “humans need to eat” and “if you sleep for
three weeks without any medical treatment of any kind, you will die.” Andy’s
twin brother, Eric, had been living in that little town. By the time the
four-ten herself died, breaking the spell cast by her presence, no one lived
there anymore.
Most people
would have written that off as a tragedy, the sort of thing that couldn’t be
explained. At the time, Andy had been going to college to study investigative
journalism. He started following reports of a mysterious government agency that
had been involved in the cleanup. He turned over rocks and knocked on doors
until he stumbled into the middle of the biggest cover-up in the world: fairy
tales were real, and Sleeping Beauty had been responsible for his brother’s
death.
Again, that’s
where most people would have walked away, or possibly run screaming. Andy asked
for a job. When I showed up for my first day as field team leader, he was
already there waiting for me to tell him what to do. I honestly couldn’t
imagine working a live field situation without him, even if we always had to
remember that he wasn’t on the spectrum, making him vulnerable to a lot of
dangers that the rest of us could ignore. On the flip side, he didn’t have to
worry about glass coffins or the temptation of poisoned apples, so things
balanced out, in their own way.
A throat was
cleared behind me. I twisted in my seat. Jeff was standing in the aisle leading
to our little slice of the bullpen. Demi Santos was behind him, still clutching
her flute the way a small child might clutch a teddy bear. She looked faintly
dazed and absolutely terrified, her dark eyes darting from side to side as she
tried to take in every possible detail.
“Special Agent
Marchen, Agent Winters, Agent Robinson, may I introduce Probationary Agent Demi
Santos?” Jeff turned, trying to urge Demi to step forward with a small wave of
his hand. She didn’t budge. He held his position for a few more seconds before
turning back to me, and saying, “Her personnel file is being prepared, and will
be on your desk inside of the hour.”
“Because more
paperwork is exactly what my desk needs right now,” I said, and stood. Demi
visibly cringed. Oh, yeah, this was going to be a
great
working
relationship. “Agent Santos, welcome to the field team. I assume Agent Davis
has explained what it is that we do here?”
“This is a
joke,” she replied. “This is a horrible joke, and you’re horrible people for
going along with it. Who put you up to this? Was it Andres? Because I’m going
to kick his ass when I get home. Do you hear me, Andres?” She raised her voice
at the end of the sentence, eyes darting wildly as she searched for a security
camera. “This is a shitty joke, and it’s not funny, and you need to call it off
right now
.”
“Agent Santos
was very clear about her unwillingness to sign any sort of release form that
might allow us to air this footage, as she’s more than reasonably convinced
that we’re currently appearing on a ‘prank’ reality show,” said Jeff. He
sounded tired. I peered at him. I’d never seen him look frazzled before, and I
wasn’t sure I liked it.
“Did she sign
everything else?” asked Andy, arrowing in on the potential liability issues
like the investigative journalist he never got the chance to be.
“After reading
everything six times and stating aloud that nothing on the paper cleared us to
use her image on film, yes.” Jeff shook his head. “So she’s a fully signed and
accredited government agent now. We just can’t take her picture.”
“Uh-huh.” I
stepped in front of Demi. She stopped scanning the room with a small squeak
before she took a big step backward. I smiled thinly. “You seem to be laboring
under a misapprehension about our agency. Since it’s your agency too now, I
think we should get that cleared up as quickly as possible. What part is
confusing you?”
“What
part—everything! You! Him! Her!” She stabbed a finger at Sloane, in case I
couldn’t figure out who “her” was supposed to refer to. “All of this! Fairy
tales are
not
real, I
can’t
control rats by playing the right
song on my flute, and you are
not
a real government agency! My father
would have been complaining for my entire life if there was a branch of
government dedicated to stopping things that don’t exist!”
“Oh, we’re not
a branch of the government, we’re just an agency, and there are at least three
agencies dedicated to dealing with things that most people don’t believe exist.
It’s a natural result of living in a world with aspirations of rationality.” I
continued to smile. It was better than screaming at her, but not by much. “How
much did Jeff tell you about what brought each of us to the agency?”
“He said most
of that was your business,” she said. “I figure it was a casting agency who
brought you.”
“You know, as
stupid-ass delusions go, this one is pretty good,” said Sloane. “It’s
consistent, it’s logical, and it’s fucking moronic. Gold star.”
“Don’t say
‘moronic,’” said Jeff. “It’s ableist language, and you know I won’t stand for
that.”
“Fuck you,”
replied Sloane genially.
“Much less
offensive,” said Jeff.
“Ignore her,”
I said to Demi, as I pointed at Sloane. “That’s what the rest of us do most of
the time, and as you can see, it’s worked out pretty well for us. Now give me a
second. If you’re assuming that we were hired by a casting agency, how are you
accounting for my coloring?” I narrowly escaped being cast to play Snow White
in the story of my own life. My story was still in waiting, lurking and looking
for a chance to pounce. Until it either swallowed me whole or was somehow
beaten back completely, I was blessed with suck in the form of the traditional
Snow White coloring: skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as
black as coal.
In the
cartoons and the storybooks, they make it look almost cute. Of course, when
artists and animators design a Snow White, they essentially give their
incarnation of my story a spray tan and some neutral lip liner. A true
seven-oh-nine was nowhere near as marketable as those animated darlings. We’re
too pale, and our lips are too red, and we look like something out of a horror
movie that didn’t have the decency to stay on the screen.
“Pancake
makeup and theatrical lipstick,” replied Demi, without missing a beat. “You’d
look more realistic if you’d bothered to blend the color at all, you know.”
“Oh, believe
me, I know.” My teen years had been an endless parade of foundation creams and
blending powders, all geared toward the simple goal of making me look less like
the vanguard of an impending alien invasion. Some of them had even worked for a
little while, as long as I remembered not to touch my face. I held out my hand.
“Andy, can you give me that box of tissues?”
Andy, bless
him, knew what I was about to do. “Here you go,” he said, pressing the box into
my hand.
“Thank you,
Andy.” I didn’t take my eyes off Demi as I pulled a tissue from the box and
held it up for her to examine. “Note that this is an ordinary tissue. Does it
look like an ordinary tissue to you?”
“I suppose,”
she said, somewhat grudgingly.
“Good.” I
wiped the tissue hard across my lips, and then held it up again. “No lipstick.
No nothing, because I’m not. Wearing. Any. Makeup.”
“Lip stain,”
she said, without missing a beat.
“Fine, then.
Lip stain is a thing; I’ll grant you that, but there’s no such thing as skin
stain, not unless you want to get into paint. Regardless, if you’ve got makeup
that thick on your face, nothing’s going to get through it, am I right?”
“Yes,” she
said. This time she sounded almost suspicious, like she was sure I had a trick
up my sleeve, but wasn’t sure what that trick could possibly be.
“Just so we’re
agreed.” I turned. “Sloane, I need you to slap me, if you would be so kind.”
“You know
what? I take it back.” Sloane bounced to her feet, moving with the speed that
she reserved for violence and free food as she closed in on me. “The new girl
rocks
.”
Then she pulled back and slapped me hard across the face. The sound was
incredibly loud. It was nothing compared to the pain that immediately followed.
Sloane might take a half-assed approach to a lot of things, but when it came to
hitting people, she was fully committed, no questions asked.
Gritting my
teeth to keep myself from swearing—or worse, whimpering—I turned to show my
rapidly reddening cheek to Demi, who was staring at the two of us like we had
just lost our minds. “If I was wearing pancake makeup, would there be a
handprint on my skin?”
“Look, Ma, no
special effects,” added Sloane, holding up her palm for inspection. I gave it a
sidelong glance. Her skin was a little reddened, but it was fading fast,
replaced by a normal Caucasian pink.
Demi’s only
answer was the sound of the back of her head rebounding off the floor with a
hollow
bonk
sound, like someone had dropped a coconut. She didn’t move
after that. The four of us stared at her for a moment.
“I just want
it noted for the record that I was not responsible for killing the new girl,”
said Sloane to break the silence. “Can someone please put that in writing right
now, before there’s some sort of inquest?”
“She’s not
dead,” I said, crouching down to check Demi’s pulse. It was strong and steady.
“She just fainted, which probably proves that she’s the smartest person here.”
“Isn’t it
customary to check someone’s pulse
before
you declare that they’re
alive?” asked Andy.
“I’m pretty
good at telling dead girls from sleeping ones, thanks.” I straightened. “Andy,
take her down to the break room and put up the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign. Maybe
when she wakes up she’ll feel more like facing reality.”