Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) (16 page)

“We were right,” I said. I projected irritation and outright anger at the cotton candy shackles, and they loosened enough to let me move. The madder I was, the more the narrative recognized me for what I was, and the less it would try to restrict me. It wasn’t fair. The Bureau only kept me fed and free because I was useful to them, and being useful meant embracing the parts of myself that played most into my story. I would lose myself someday, and all for the sake of serving them a little better in the time I was allotted.

I’d already had a fuck-lot more time than anybody else got. I snorted once, pawing at the ground with one foot as I shook off the last of the cotton candy. And then I ran.

I’ve always been good at running. Sometimes I wish the narrative could have found a story about a girl who ran around the world and shoved me into
that
, instead of into the role it chose for me. I could have run forever in the service of the story, and counted myself lucky when my heart burst in my chest and my body fell lifeless to lie on unhallowed ground. But that was not to be, and instead of becoming the Girl Who Runs, I became a girl who was always running, running from herself, running toward the story, running for the things that would destroy me. I just wished they’d hurry up and get on with it.

The door wasn’t locked. It slammed open when I hit it, swinging back until it struck the wall and rattled in its frame. I stumbled to a stop, gazing in horror at the lobby. My feet seemed to have been nailed to the floor. I looked down, and saw that I was standing in something black, viscous, and sticky. Pitch. There was pitch on the floor.

In some versions of Cinderella, her shoes fit fine, and the ball went on for three long, glorious nights. But the Prince got tired of his beautiful girl running away from him, and so on the third night he ordered pitch spread on the palace steps. She ran, because that was what Cinderellas were built to
do
, and she lost a shoe when her feet got stuck.

“You were taunting
me
all along, weren’t you?” I felt strangely serene all of a sudden. I didn’t have any knives on me, and the thing about good stompy boots was that they tended to come with sturdy laces. I was tied into my shoes from ankle to knee, and there was no way I was going to get out of them before the glass statues surrounding me started to explode.

Elise must have entered the lobby without anyone noticing that something was wrong. That was good information, in its way: she still looked more human than storybook, she could still move easily through crowds. Some of them had turned to look at her. I knew that, because they hadn’t moved since. There were only eight of them, two behind the front desk, the other six scattered throughout the room. Eight was more than sufficient. When they fractured, they would spray shards everywhere, and there would be nowhere for me to hide. Not with the pitch gluing my feet firmly to the floor.

“Agent Winters?” Ciara sounded more concerned than distressed. My body must have been blocking all direct view of the lobby. With the sunlight glinting off the glass, the statues inside would look like ordinary people. By the time anyone realized they weren’t moving, it would be too late.

“Don’t come in here!” I twisted as far as I could with my feet glued to the ground, putting out one hand in a warding gesture. Ciara stopped. Demi and Andrew stopped behind her. “It’s a trap. You can’t come any closer.”

“Why are you still standing there?” demanded Andrew.

“Because she spread pitch on the floor, you ass,” I snapped. “I’m stuck. Trapped. Finished. Fucked. Back off before she gets you too.” I was in the doorway. The door wouldn’t close enough to save me, and that meant I couldn’t keep the shards that would be flung when my body exploded from getting the rest of my team.

“I can fix this,” said Demi, raising her flute.

Suddenly it all came clear. The glass statues, standing frozen rather than exploding into contagious fragments, were a trap for more than just me. “If you play one note, I swear to Grimm I will find a way to return from the grave and rip your fucking arms off,” I snarled. Demi froze again, this time looking hurt. “You play, the statues go boom, we all die a horrible death, instead of just me dying a horrible death. Get out of here, all of you.”

“Why are you not trying to get loose?” asked Andrew.

“Too many shoelaces, not enough knives,” I said. “I’m not allowed to carry anything sharp. Something about the Bureau liking the rest of you without any holes.”

“How much can you lift, Agent Winters?” asked Ciara.

I blinked. “I don’t know. A hundred pounds?”

“Good. Catch.” With no more warning than that, she flung herself at me, traveling on an arc that would have carried her past my position and into the pitch if she wasn’t stopped. Instinct kicked in. I grabbed her around the waist, stopping her in midair.

Ciara turned her head so that she could grin at me. Then, in a surprisingly fluid gesture, she pulled a rapier from her side—which didn’t make any
sense
, I would have
seen
it if she’d been carrying it before—and sliced cleanly through my shoelaces.

“All better,” she said, which was when the statues began to vibrate.

“Fucking
run
!” I shouted, leaping out of my shoes with Ciara still tucked under one arm. I ignored the pain of the stones and thorns under my feet as I hauled ass toward the SUV. After a moment of stunned surprise, Demi and Andrew followed.

Ciara might be an excellent driver, but she wasn’t much for vehicle security, and she hadn’t locked the doors. I jerked the driver’s side door open, flung her through, and then jumped in on top of her, slamming the door as I did. There was a matching slam from the back as Andrew and Demi took cover.

The sound of the front of the Swan shattering was like the world’s biggest Christmas ornament being dropped. The glass shards hit the side of our vehicle a moment later, the shock wave setting the whole thing to rocking. Miraculously, the windows held.

Silence fell. Ciara pushed weakly at me; I shifted to let her crawl out from under me.

“They’re not playing fair,” said Demi.

“No shit.” I looked out at the shattered Swan. The trees and bushes in the formerly manicured yard were transforming into glass—more slowly than flesh would have changed, but just as irrevocably. There was no telling whether anyone in the hotel was still alive, not until the cleanup crew got here and we were able to start sifting through the shards.

“So here’s a question for you,” I said. “What are we going to do about it?”

No one said a word.

Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 709 (“Snow White”)

Status: ARCHIVED

Her name was Adrianna. It had been something else once, something longer, but that no longer mattered. Her family had forsaken her, and she was happy to forsake them in return. Here and now, within the walls of Childe Prison, her name was Adrianna. She had skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as coal. She was young and beautiful, tired of being a captive.

It had taken the better part of nine months to earn the trust of the Miller’s Daughter in the cell next to hers. She’d accomplished it, because she’d had no other choice. It grated on her nerves to play the victim, to put hurt and hopelessness in her voice, where only anger and resentment belonged. But that was done with: like her name, like her family, it was in the past. What mattered now was the thin golden rope she held in her hands. It was long enough to loop around her cell’s single light fixture. It was strong enough to hold.

Oh, yes. She was sure of that.

Adrianna had been locked up in 1972, after her rampage left more than a dozen people dead across the heartland of America. It wasn’t the Bureau that stopped her, amusingly enough: they’d still been chasing their tails around her hometown when she’d been picked up by the local police. One of the taillights in her stolen car had been out. Just her luck. They might still have let her go, if she hadn’t been covered in so
very
much blood.

She’d been carted off to a mundane prison, surrounded by mundane prisoners who had no idea what kind of monster had been dropped into their midst. She’d killed eight of them before the Bureau managed to tote her away to Childe Prison, where the whispers in the walls were crueler than the whispers on the wind in the whiteout wood.

Shame, shame,
whispered the forest.
You shame your story.

Bad little girl,
whispered the prison.
Learn your place and be grateful that you have it
.

Adrianna dragged her low wooden chair into position under the light fixture. They had been more than happy to lock her up, those mundane policemen with their eyes full of confused fear, those Bureau bastards who never thought to ask what had set her off and left her to be consumed by rage. They had never once asked how she had grown to adulthood without losing herself to either her temper or her story.

She could have told them, oh yes, she could have told them. She could have told them about redheaded sisters who decided they didn’t like their stories anymore, who dyed their hair and went looking for a different life. She could have told them about accidents, and comas, and princes who never came. It was surprisingly easy for a Rose Red to become a Sleeping Beauty, if the situation was orchestrated carefully enough and if that Rose Red’s Snow White wasn’t around. The narrative will have its due.

No matter how hard you fight, no matter how cunningly you rewrite the world around you, the narrative will have its due. Adrianna had learned that the hard way when it cut her sister down, and if she had reacted poorly, well. It was no more than could have been expected of her.

The wood might shame and disdain her for what she’d done, but it couldn’t keep her out. She was a Snow White, just like all the pretty porcelain princesses who’d chosen to live and die within the structure of their story, and the whiteout wood would always be open to her. She knew how much it hated her presence. It treated her like a disease, blackening the ground under her feet, sweeping the sky free of clouds and replacing them with plumes of smoke, like all the world was burning. Snow White could come in ash and ember as well as in ice and apples.

Let it do its worst. She was still its child; she belonged within its borders, and it couldn’t keep her from knowing when another sister in story was born. The latest was just a baby, barely a day in the world, unaware of what destiny awaited her. She’d have plenty of time to learn to hate the narrative before she was old enough and strong enough to serve Adrianna’s purposes.

Really, it wasn’t theft, no more than it was suicide. The girl would grow and learn what a terrible hand she’d been dealt. By the time Adrianna came along, she would be pathetically glad to get out of her life and into the whiteout wood, which would love and welcome her as one of its own.

“I’m coming for you, little doorway,” whispered Adrianna, slipping the golden noose around her neck. “Just be patient, and I’ll open you wide.”

The guards didn’t find her body until morning. While no one said it, they all secretly agreed that it was a good thing that they wouldn’t have to deal with her anymore. She upset the other prisoners.

In the whiteout wood, the clouds began to change.

# # #

Adrianna’s first blow had managed to catch me from behind, sending me sprawling and helpless into the snow. I’d even blacked out for a few seconds—which, ironically, was probably what saved me. She couldn’t use me as a door into the waking world if I wasn’t awake.

I awoke to find her shaking me viciously back and forth, slamming my head down so hard that I would probably have suffered a concussion if not for the snow that covered everything. “Wake
up
!” she snarled, princess-pretty features distorted with rage. “I did
not
bring you this far just to have you slip away from me now!”

I responded with a fist to her jaw, followed by a shove that sent her reeling backward, away from me. I scrambled to my feet. There was a black branch on the ground nearby, its thicker end red with blood. My blood. I grabbed the branch with one hand as I reached back to feel the base of my skull. My fingers came away sticky. I narrowed my eyes.

“You are a piece of work, you know that?” The branch was a good weight, almost like a baseball bat. It would serve me well. It had already served her.

Adrianna was standing slightly hunched over, her permanently bloody mouth twisted into a cruel line. She glared at me. I glared back.

“You have no idea what you’re doing when you fight me, little doorway,” she snapped.

“That’s not my name.”

“Neither is ‘Henrietta.’” She spat it out, letting the wind whip away the syllables that defined me. “Your mother would never have given you such an ugly name. You should have been a Nieve or a Bronwyn or something else elegant and lovely. But they named you ‘Henry,’ and you tried to grow into your name rather than making your name grow into you.”

Both the names she’d suggested meant “white.” I remembered when some of the girls I’d gone to school with had looked up the same names in the library, bringing them to me on a sheet of paper along with a dozen others, all sharing the same insipid, predictable meaning. We were eight at the time. They’d been making fun of my corpse-like complexion. “Did you never mature past second grade?” I asked. “Mocking my name doesn’t make me like you.”

“Reject me all you like: deep down, you know I’m right. They’ve been trying to limit you since you were
born
. You should have been more than what you are. They took that away from you.” Adrianna’s smile was sudden and feral. “All I want to take are the scraps they left behind.”

She had no weapons. She had no superior ground. Something about the look on her face told me it didn’t matter. Still clutching the branch she’d used to ambush me, I turned and fled deeper into the wood.

# # #

The whiteout wood had boundaries. It had to: without them, it could never have touched the other narrative preserves, the hazel wood of the Cinderellas or the rose briars of the Rose Reds. As I ran through the trees, skirts billowing behind me, hair snapping in the wind, it felt like those borders were the real fiction. Every other lie I’d ever been told had just been preparing me for the big lie, the lie that claimed the wood had limits. I would run forever, and I would never be free.

Worse, my dress—my warm, wine-red silk dress—stood out against the black trees and white snow like a flag, betraying my presence to anyone with eyes. I looked back. Adrianna was nowhere in sight. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. Unlike me, she was dressed in sensible black and white. I didn’t know what inspired the wood to dress us in specific colors, but in that moment, I hated it for not foreseeing that I might need to get away from a serial killer who looked just like me.

There was a thick copse of trees up ahead. I put on an extra burst of speed and threw myself into their shadow.

“She’s
your
problem, not mine,” I whispered. My voice sounded too loud to my own ears. “If you have any control over what’s happening here, you need to help me now. You
owe
me.”

The wind whistled around me, but if the wood gave any answer beyond that, I couldn’t hear it. I dropped my branch into the snow and hauled my dress off over my head, revealing a white silk slip that was distinct from my skin only in that it had a faint, translucent sheen to it that I lacked.

“Thank you,” I whispered, kicking off my red slippers. I wrapped my dress around the nearest tree, where it would hopefully snap and dance in the breeze and attract Adrianna’s attention. Then I grabbed my branch, turned, and ran in a new direction, seeking to lose myself in the wood. It was funny: my coloring had always marked me as a freak, something to be gaped at and avoided in public places, like a lack of melanin was catching. Here and now, that same lack of color might be the only thing that saved me.

Too bad I shared it with Adrianna. If my black and white nature concealed me from her eyes, her nature did the same from mine. She could have been anywhere, hiding between any two trees, and I wouldn’t have known. I might have run past her a dozen times in that initial headlong flight. I didn’t stop to find out.

I just kept running, barefoot and half naked, through the snow.

# # #

Time didn’t work the same way in the whiteout wood. Neither did bodies: most of the girls here were either dead or sleeping in the waking world, and they didn’t have the physical needs they once had. Even so, I was still among the living, and I was beginning to tire. I stopped in the middle of a clearing, panting as I bent to rest my hands on my knees. My feet were numb, and while I knew intellectually that I should have been dealing with severe frostbite by this point, even that small and creeping numbness was terrifying. If I didn’t keep running, she was going to catch me. If she caught me . . .

She’d called me “little doorway” since the moment we met. If she caught me, she was going to do whatever it took to open that door. I wasn’t certain what the consequences would be, but I could make an educated guess, and I didn’t like what I kept coming back to.

All Snow Whites were connected. The whiteout wood was proof of that. It was the physical manifestation of our monomyth, the place where blood on the snow meant something bigger and more important than death. We were the heralds of spring and this was our frozen fastness, where the sun never warmed but flesh never chilled all the way down to the bone. Every magic mirror was a Snow White who had “gone bad,” turning her back on the story that shaped her. The wood protected itself. Adrianna hadn’t become a mirror yet, but that time was coming. She had to see her future in every reflection, every skittering bolt of color cast through ice. She wanted a way out.

She wanted a doorway.

Some Snow Whites didn’t want their lives back after their inevitable stay in the glass coffin, whatever shape it took. When the story had been young and princesses had been expected to marry the princes who kissed them awake with no questions asked, it wouldn’t have mattered if the girls who fell asleep and the girls who woke up were the same person. There would have been no basis for comparison. Once your black and white girl was in your arms, smiling up at you with her bloody lips, what did it matter whose body she was wearing?

There were always girls who didn’t want to go back into the waking world, who didn’t want to wear the shape the story had created for them. And there were always girls whose bodies didn’t survive their personal versions of the apple—girls like Ayane, who died on an airplane, too far from land for any glass coffin to have saved her—who wanted nothing more than to be alive. To be a citizen of the whiteout wood was to be involved in a great square dance of bodies and birthrights.

I was here. My body was empty. Adrianna was here. She wanted to fill it. I didn’t know why, and frankly, I didn’t care. She wasn’t going to take me. She wasn’t going to steal my life. I was going home.

I put a hand over my mouth to block the red slash of my lips as I straightened and backed up, squeezing into a gap between two trees. Branches tangled in my hair, claiming it as their own. The wood was silent. The blizzard had died down while I was running, and I had to interpret that as the wood trying, in its curious, narrative way, to help me. The snow had allowed me to escape from Adrianna more easily, covering my footprints and obscuring her vision. Now that I needed to see her coming, it was tapering off.

My heart was a steady drumbeat against my ribs, beating almost hard enough to hurt. I forced myself to breathe slowly, watching the trees for any signs of movement. I was black and white and perfectly still against a landscape that mirrored me in all but form.

Adrianna stepped out from between two trees on the other side of the clearing. I hadn’t seen her approaching; I didn’t know if she had seen me move. She had another branch. This time she’d gone to the effort of sharpening it, creating a vicious-looking spear. I didn’t know whether Snow Whites could die in the whiteout wood, but I knew—from both past and recent experience—that we could be hurt. It seemed unfair, that we should have to hurt to bleed in a place that was all about emptying us out onto the white page of winter, but it was how the world was made, and I didn’t have the authority to revise it on my own.

“I know you’re nearby, because the wood keeps telling me you’re far away,” she said, her eyes scanning the clearing. For a moment, they paused on me, almost as if she’d picked my silk-clad form out of the landscape. I held my breath. Her gaze moved on. “It doesn’t have to be this hard, little doorway. Come to me. Let me stroke your hair and kiss your brow and slit your throat and steal your skin. It can be pleasant for both of us.” Her voice never changed, not even as she talked about effectively murdering me.