We all have
our tragedies. That’s part of what brings us all to work for the ATI Management
Bureau—and that brought me full circle back to Demi, whose story, like mine,
had been kick-started by proximity to a four-ten. In my case, the Sleeping
Beauty gave birth to me. In her case, the Sleeping Beauty forced us to activate
her story in order to save lives. I guess in a way, a Sleeping Beauty gave
birth to both of us. I just didn’t think the common ground would mean much to
Demi at the moment.
I just hoped
that once she came to better understand what we did here, she’d be able to
forgive us.
The break room door was closed
when I finally arrived. I paused outside, and decided that discretion was the
better part of valor. Rapping my knuckles gently against the wood, I called,
“Miss Santos, are you awake? It’s Agent Marchen.”
“That’s the
word for ‘fairy tale’ in German, isn’t it?” asked a voice behind me. I whirled
and found myself facing Demi Santos, who was standing in the hallway with a
paper cup of bad government coffee in her hand. “I mean ‘marchen.’ Doesn’t that
literally mean ‘fairy tale’? How do you people expect me to believe that this
isn’t a big prank when you’re literally
named
‘Agent Fairy Tale’?”
“My parents
were drawn into a story like the one that we asked you to help us prevent
today,” I said. Normally, I tried to avoid discussing my past with the new
recruits. But this one was my fault. If she wanted to ask a few questions, I
didn’t see any good way to refuse to answer them. “My mother turned out to be a
four-ten—that’s what we call Sleeping Beauties. She was very much like the
story we asked you to help us with, because she was the
same
story. She
was unconscious the whole time she was pregnant with my brother and me. We
accidentally pulled her life support cables out when we were born. She died
before anyone could get to us.”
Demi gasped.
“Oh my God.”
I shrugged a
little. It was a painful story, but it was painful in part because of reactions
like hers. I’d never known my mother. She wasn’t even a dim memory; she was
just another tragedy in the long list of tragedies the fairy tales had left
behind. “It was a long time ago. Anyway, as my brother and I were effectively
orphans, we were taken in by the ATI Management Bureau. We were raised by one
of the department heads, who was delighted to have children of his own, and we
were given the last name ‘Marchen’ because we didn’t belong to any family but
our own. So yes, my name is ‘Agent Fairy Tale,’ but I came by it honestly, and
I assure you, this is not a prank.”
Demi sighed.
“Yeah. I’m starting to get that impression.”
“I know this
is a lot to take in.”
“You do, do you?”
Her laugh was sudden, and distressingly brittle. “You just told me you were
raised
here. This has
always
been your world. There was never a point where you
thought that stories were just stories. You always knew. Now you’re telling me
that
I’m
a story, and you expect me to be okay with it, just like that.
Like this doesn’t change everything. Like this doesn’t turn my life upside
down.”
“Yes,
exactly,” I said, choosing to ignore her sarcasm. Sometimes it was easier that
way. “You were always a story. If we hadn’t triggered you when we did, people
would have died, and one day you would have triggered on your own. Now you get
to learn how to control the narrative, rather than letting the narrative
control you.”
Demi’s face
wrinkled in thought. After a moment, she asked, “What about my education? I
have classes.”
“We’re a
government agency. We may not be one of the big flashy ones, but we can get you
a degree in anything you want, from any college in the country, without the
mountain of student debt that would normally go along with it.”
“Can I go
home?”
That was a
trickier question. I hesitated. I must have hesitated a little too long because
Demi’s expression darkened, and she took a step toward me.
“I have a
family. They’re going to wonder where I am.”
Not if she
stayed away from them for long enough, they wouldn’t. People who are
outside
the spectrum tend to forget about people who are
inside
if they don’t
see them for a little while, no matter how beloved those people may have
originally been. It’s just one more way that the narrative protects itself. “I
am not personally opposed to you going home to your family,” I said, choosing
my words with care, “but we need to check with Jeff first.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I’m a
Snow White, and that meant my birth mother had to die,” I snapped.
Demi froze.
“Sloane? She
was meant to be a Wicked Stepsister. Her story’s frozen right now—and you’ll
learn about the stages a narrative goes through; you’re active, I’m in
abeyance, Sloane’s frozen. Accept that for right now; the distinctions don’t
matter. What matters is that Sloane was meant to be a Wicked Stepsister, and on
the day she began showing signs of her story, her biological father was killed
in a fire. Do you begin to understand? We need to check with Jeff so that he
can make sure that you going home won’t cause the memetic incursion that you
represent to start targeting your family.”
Demi’s eyes
had gone wide and were glossy with unshed tears. Finally, in a small voice, she
asked, “Can we do that now? Right now?”
“Yes, we can,”
I said. “Come with me.”
The two-eighty narrative turned
out to be completely devoid of family members in all of the iterations that we
had on file. The Piper arrived in town as a stranger, did his or her business,
and then left, usually taking something precious along in lieu of the original
payment. After rattling off that special little fact, Jeff smiled broadly and
said, “That’s why you’ll be the first one in the department to receive your
check every pay period, Miss Santos. We don’t want your story to decide that
we’re trying to short you something that’s rightfully yours!”
“Because
having magic flute girl go all
Scanners
on us with an arpeggio would be
a stupid-ass way to die,” contributed Sloane, without taking her eyes off her
computer screen.
I wadded up a
Post-it note and threw it at her. “How many pairs of shoes do you need? Turn
around and pretend you care about good team relations.”
“Uh, point the
first, I
don’t
care about good team relations,” said Sloane, spinning
around in her chair so that I could see her face when she flipped me off.
“Point the second, I stopped shopping for shoes an hour ago. I’m buying bulk
lots of hair dye now.”
“I don’t
understand any of this,” said Demi blankly.
“Don’t worry,”
said Andy. “Neither does anyone else.”
Jeff cleared
his throat. “If the rest of you are done goofing around, I’d like to call your
attention to some of the finer points of the Pied Piper clade of stories …”
And then he was off and running again, listing a dozen possible variations on a
theme that we were all about to become intimately familiar with. I watched Demi
out of the corner of my eye while he talked. This was going to impact her most
of all, after all.
I’ll never
understand what it’s like to find out that you’re on the ATI spectrum. I was
raised knowing what I could potentially become. So was my brother, Jerry.
Neither of us had a single day where we thought of ourselves as “normal” or
believed that fairy tales were anything other than a fate to be avoided. Demi
was just finding out about that world now. It was becoming real for her, and
there was nothing that I, or anyone else, could do.
I should have
felt guiltier than I did. Her story might never have triggered. But in the end,
all I felt was grateful that we’d been able to avert a Sleeping Beauty, and
that no one had needed to die.
Jeff was still
talking. I shook off the clinging shreds of my thoughts, and forced myself to
listen. If Demi’s story ever took a turn for the dark, I might need to know
what he had said in the beginning, when we still thought she had a chance.
Between the paperwork, dealing
with Demi’s gear, and everything else, I didn’t make it back to my car until
ten minutes to midnight. The time was enough to make me wince. Midnight is a
bad hour for anyone on the ATI spectrum. We don’t like it. Too many stories set
their watches by it, so to speak.
The wince got
worse when I pulled out my keys and Sloane stepped out of the shadows of the
carport. Her bangs were hanging over her eyes, and her lips were set firmly
into a frown.
“Can I get a
ride home?” she asked.
I didn’t ask
how she’d been able to get to work in the first place. I didn’t suggest that
she call for a taxi. I just nodded, and said, “Get in.”
She didn’t say
anything for the first six blocks of our drive. Then she said, quietly, “The
Pied Piper is a cipher. He’s not good. He’s not bad. He’s just a man who does a
job and gets mad when people try to rook him.”
“I know.”
“Snow White’s
good. The Wicked Stepsisters are bad. Pied Piper … that could go either
way.”
“So we’ll
watch her. We’ll make sure she picks the right path.” I shrugged. “This isn’t
our first fairy tale, Sloane. It’ll be okay.”
“Maybe. But
one day, it won’t be. What’s going to happen then?”
I didn’t have
an answer for her. So I turned on the radio, and we rode in silence toward
midnight, and the distant landmark the stories only ever know as “home.”
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type
171 (“Goldilocks and the Three Bears”)
Status: UNRESOLVED/POSTPONED
Jennifer
Lockwood didn’t so much “open the door” as “collapse against it while
scrabbling vaguely at the doorknob” until gravity took pity on her and allowed
her to stumble into the front hall of her small rental home. Working three
shifts in a row at the diner was a good way to pay the bills, but a bad way to
take care of her physical needs. Sleep, for example. Sleep had been discarded
as a luxury at some point in the previous day and a half, and she wasn’t sure
she’d ever be getting it back. She was equally unsure that she would be able to
make it to the bed before passing out.
Her
cat, a gray tabby with the uninspired name of “Puss,” came and twined around
her ankles as she walked, making it even harder to traverse the hall into the
darkened living room and onward to her bedroom. Jennifer struggled to keep her
eyes open. If she let them close, she knew that she was going to wake up on the
floor again, with a crick in her neck and the alarm in her bedroom ringing too
loud to let her sleep and too late for her to get to work on time.
“Look
out, Puss,” she mumbled, after the third time she kicked the cat. Puss purred
and plastered against her leg again. Jennifer dropped her purse and kept on
walking.
There
was an art to removing clothing while remaining in motion. Teenagers mastered
it effortlessly, creating endless trails of fabric leading to their lairs.
Adults tended to lose the skill, but Jennifer had worked hard to retain it.
Between her job at the diner and her classes at the university, she needed to
cut corners wherever possible, and that included the three minutes it would
have taken her to remove her clothing in the usual way. So her pants and
underwear wound up on the living room floor, while her apron and shirt were
discarded in the hall. The bra was the hardest part—undoing those little hooks
without slowing down never got easier—but practice made perfect, and she dropped
it just as she stepped into her bedroom.
The
window shade was open again. “Stupid cat,” she mumbled, and half-walked,
half-stumbled across the room to pull it down. The last thing she wanted was
for the sun to rise and wake her up before she was ready.
Amazingly—considering
her condition—she actually noticed something large and brown just outside the
window, blocking her view of the backyard. Jennifer paused, squinting as she
tried to figure out what it was. She was still squinting when the bear turned
around, pressing its round black nose against the glass.
Jennifer
had time for one good scream before she passed out, which was something like
sleep, at least.
The
bear stayed outside her window for a good long time before it rose and walked
away, and when she woke up to the sound of two alarm clocks ringing stridently,
it was easy to convince herself that the whole thing had been a dream. It was
simpler that way.
At least until the next night, when the
bear came back … and brought a friend.
ATI Management Bureau Headquarters
“Good
morning,” I grumbled as I walked into the bullpen, a bag of donuts in one hand
and a tray of coffee cups in the other. If I didn’t sound all that
enthusiastic, well, maybe the breakfast offering would make up for things. “How
is everyone today?”
“I
dropped out of college,” said Demi glumly, not lifting her head out of her
hands. She had her fingers laced so tightly through her bark-brown hair that I
wasn’t sure she
could
lift her hands.
Not without getting a pair of scissors. “The registrar’s office sent the
confirmation that I am no longer enrolled in any classes. I am a failure.”
“Mike
and I had a fight last night about how much of my job I’m not allowed to discuss with him,” said Andy, although he at least
reached over and took one of the coffee cups. “He still wants to adopt, and
he’s worried that writing ‘redacted’ on our papers will slow the process down.”
“Did
you try pointing out that you work for a government agency, which will probably
make it
easier
for you to adopt?”
Andy
leveled a cool look on me. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, Henry—you
know I love you and Jerry both—but if I let the folks who run this place help
me find a baby, I’m going to get a kid who’s already halfway sucked into a
story, and I can’t do that. Not after what happened to my brother.”
“No
offense taken,” I said quietly.
Jeff,
our official archivist, was nowhere to be seen. I put a coffee cup and a donut
down on his desk, where he could find them later, assuming no one stole them in
the meantime. Our office may be responsible for preventing fairy tale
incursions on the so-called real world, but we’re still paid like government
employees, and unguarded food has a tendency to go missing.
The
last member of our little team didn’t even wait for me to get to her. She
literally climbed over Andy’s desk, knocking over his pencil holder in the
process, and grabbed for the bag. I jerked it back, out of her reach.
“Give
them to me,” snapped Sloane, and grabbed again.
“No,”
I replied. “You either wait for me to offer, or you ask.”
“I
am
asking,” she said, making a third
grab. This one nearly knocked over the picture of Andy and his husband. He
picked it up and hugged it to his chest, frowning at Sloane. Even Demi lifted
her head, attention caught by the shenanigans unfolding in front of her.
“Are
you allergic to the word ‘please’?” I asked, finally allowing Sloane to snatch
the bag of donuts from my hand.
She
crab-walked triumphantly back into her seat, where she folded herself like a
particularly content praying mantis and began rummaging through the bag. “Yes,”
she said, not looking up. “It’s a legitimate health complication that comes
with my position on the ATI spectrum, and I don’t feel very good about you
rubbing it in my face like this. Maybe I should be reporting you to Human
Resources for discrimination, huh?”
“Shut
up and eat your donuts,” I said, and turned to Demi, who was looking at me with
a blankly questioning expression. “Sloane is full of shit. She’s not allergic
to the word ‘please,’ which is good for her, since if she were, we would all
stand in a circle around her making polite requests until she went into
anaphylactic shock. She just enjoys being horrible to the rest of us, and we
let her, because we honestly can’t think of a way to make her stop.”
“I’ve
thought of a few, but we never get them past the folks in HR,” added Andy in a
low rumble.
“I’ve
told you before, Andrew, dousing her with a bucket of water won’t make her
dissolve, no matter how much she chooses to act like
the Wicked Witch of the Worst.” Jeff appeared between two desks, smoothly
winding his way around the obstacles in his path as he walked over to sit in
his chair. He had a large book open in one arm, and never looked up from its
pages, not even as he settled, picked up his coffee, and took a long drink.
“Thank you, Henry. You always get the exact right amount of sugar.”
“I
try,” I said, claiming my own coffee cup before someone could get ideas about
swiping it. “Where were you?”
“Dispatch.” He finally
looked up from the book, gray eyes concerned behind the wire frames of his
glasses. “Birdie left a note on my desk asking me to come and see her as soon
as I came in. Since I was running early—”
“When
are you
not
running early?” muttered
Sloane. “Kiss-ass.”
Jeff
ignored her as he cleared his throat and tried again: “Since I was running
early, I thought I would go down and find out if she had any pressing news
before the rest of you got here. That way, we could hit the ground running, if
necessary.”
I
nodded. “Good thinking.” As our primary dispatcher, I didn’t know what hours
Birdie Hubbard actually kept, since it seemed like she was in the office any
time that we needed her to be; for all that I knew,
she slept on a cot somewhere in the Dispatch Unit. She took her job very
seriously. All the dispatchers did, and that was a damn good thing, because at
the end of the day, they were the first line of defense between the everyday
world and the looming memetic incursions of the Aarne-Thompson Index spectrum. My team and I? We were the last line of defense, no matter
how unprepared we might sometimes seem. As the world had not yet been sucked
into an unending once upon a time, I figured we were doing pretty well.
“Do
you remember Jennifer Lockwood?” Jeff asked.
I
hesitated, trying to recall exactly why I knew that name. Andy did the same. Demi, who had been with us for less than a week, just looked blank.
It was becoming her default expression.
Sloane
didn’t share our mutual confusion. “Tall, skinny, blonde hair—out of a bottle,
but it was natural when she was a kid, so she still fits the primary narrative
cues—and she’s an averted Goldilocks,” she said, rattling off the information
like it was written on a piece of paper in front of her. “She’s a weird one,
isn’t she?”
Jeff
nodded. “She’s been averted three times. Once at age six, again at age twelve,
and a third time at age fifteen. She’s twenty-seven now, working two jobs as
she tries to put herself through college.”
A
light went off in my head. “That’s why I recognize her name,” I said. “She’s
one of the case studies I had to review when I took over the field team. Our lords and ladies in waiting.”
“What?”
asked Demi.
“That’s
what we call the ones who were almost stories, and somehow managed to pull back
at the last minute, either because we intervened or because they changed their
personal narratives enough to keep from going over the edge,” said Andy.
“Henry’s a lady in waiting.”
“Yes,
thank you for the reminder,” I said sourly. “Okay, so we all know who Jennifer
Lockwood is. Why is this relevant?”
“Because
Dispatch intercepted a call she made this morning, shortly after four o’clock,
in which she said, quote, ‘it was a bear, it was right outside my window, it
was a real bear.’ She assured Birdie—whom she thought worked for the
police—that she wasn’t crazy. I have the transcript: she repeated that part
eight times. ‘I’m not crazy, it was a bear, I’m not
crazy.’ Birdie promised her that she’d send some officers out to look for signs
of the bear.”
“Officers
meaning us, right?” asked Demi.
Sloane
rolled her eyes. “And this is the prodigy that the field team couldn’t live
without. Wow. The world is super safe now.”
“Sloane,
be quiet,” I snapped. “Everyone else, grab your gear. We have a bear to find.”
Jennifer
Lockwood lived in a run-down neighborhood that looked like it had been
teetering on the edge of “slum” for years, only to be kept from toppling over
by the combined efforts of the residents, none of whom were willing to let it
fall. Younger children played in the narrow strips of weed-choked grass that
served as front lawns, while the older children had set up a game of soccer in
the middle of the street. “Car!” shouted the lookout as we came around the
corner, and all the players pulled back to the sidewalk, watching solemnly as
we drove past.
“Nice
place,” said Sloane, with her customary sneer.
Demi,
who was riding in the backseat, raised her head so that the reflection of her
large brown eyes was staring directly at us in the rearview mirror. “Yes, it
is,” she said. “I wish I’d grown up somewhere this nice.”
For
once, Sloane didn’t have a smart comeback. I pulled over and parked in front of
Jennifer Lockwood’s house, leaving room for Jeff to fit the van in behind me.
He and Andy would stay in the vehicle, out of sight, unless something came up
that required either an archivist or public relations. Considering that I was
about to walk up to an averted Goldilocks’s door with a trainee and Sloane—who
was practically an invasion of privacy on two legs—I was pretty sure we were going
to need Andy.
“Now,
Demi, remember: your job is to stand quietly and observe,” I said, as we closed
our car doors. “I’m going to do all the talking, and Sloane is going to do all
the Sloane-ing, while you learn how to do this without me.”
“Remember,
kids, you’re only one poisoned apple away from advancement in your chosen
career,” said Sloane. There was something automatic about the barb, like she
was saying it because she knew that it was expected of her. She seemed
distracted, her eyes darting from side to side in small, erratic bursts. I
stopped, putting my arm out so that it blocked her passage. Sloane hates to be
touched. She stopped immediately.
“What
are you getting?” I asked. “Are we walking into something that’s going to get
us all killed?”
“Yes,”
said Sloane. “No. I don’t know.” She shook her head, the distracted expression
spreading until she looked utterly baffled. “There’s a one-seven-one nearby.
And there’s … there’s also
not
a one-seven-one
nearby. I don’t know what the f—”
She
was cut off by the front door swinging open and Jennifer Lockwood appearing in
the doorway. “Are you from the police, or are you here to offer me a copy of
the
Watchtower
?” she asked. “Because
I’m either going to need to see some badges or I’m going to have to ask you to
leave.”
“We’re
from the Bureau of Urban Wildlife, ma’am,” I said, dropping my arm and dipping
my hand into my jacket, where I withdrew the badge that Jeff had prepared for
me. Fake departments and bureaus were one of his simple joys in life. It was
better than having him spend all his time making shoes that no one wanted to
wear. “The police don’t have jurisdiction over bears, I’m afraid.”
“And
you do?” asked Jennifer. She took my badge, studying it carefully as she tried
to reassure herself that it was real. It wasn’t, of course, but she’d never be
able to figure that out on her own.