Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) (30 page)

“Sir?” I said.

“Her name is Mary. She used to be an agent in this same Bureau. She was the one who brought me here, thirty years ago.” The deputy director sat up straight, looking at me. “She was a new tale type, they said. Something to research and learn how to use. And then one day the mirror swallowed her whole, and I haven’t seen her since.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, sir,” I said.

“If you passed through a mirror to get here, as you keep insisting, it makes sense that you would have seen Mary.” He looked at me assessingly. “You have my attention.”

“I don’t want your attention. I want your authorization to go back into the field and save my people from a mass-murderess who stole my body.” I scowled. “All this ‘prove yourself’ bullshit is getting old,
sir
. I can tell you anything you want to know about my past, which should prove I’m myself. I can go out on the back lawn and trade secrets with the squirrels, which should prove I’m a Snow White. But if you don’t want to believe me, you’re not going to. I don’t see where there’s anything I can do about that.”

“So what are you going to do?” asked Deputy Director Brewer.

I pushed my chair back and stood. “If you’re not going to help me, I’m going to help myself. Thanks for the shoes. They’ll make marching into hell a lot easier.” I turned and started for the door.

The deputy director was silent as I crossed the room. When I reached for the doorknob, he said, “Agent Marchen, do you think you can drive in your current condition?”

It took me an instant to realize that by my “current condition,” he meant the fact that I was dealing with the cognitive dissonance of being in a body that wasn’t my own. “I’m not sure,” I said, turning back to him. “I was going to give it a try.”

“I’d rather you not get yourself killed when we don’t even know the name of that body you’re in,” he said. “I’m sending Agents Remus and Névé with you to your team’s last known location. They left this morning to respond to a five-four-five-B, and they haven’t checked in recently.”

I wanted to yell at him for wasting my time when my team was radio silent with a murderess in their midst. All I did was nod tightly and say, “Yes, sir. Thank you. My badge and gun . . . ?”

“Your badge is with your body; I don’t have it to give,” he said. “I’ll issue you a provisional shield for now. As for your gun, I feel like the same difficulties you would have with driving will apply to marksmanship. I’ll give you a Taser. You can still incapacitate your body if you catch up to it, but you’re less likely to kill someone by mistake.”

Meaning I was less likely to kill myself and strand my consciousness in another Snow White’s skin. “Fine,” I said. “Anything that gets me back into the field.”

“Understood. And Agent Marchen?”

Here came the catch. There was always a catch. “Yes, sir?”

“I’m going to want to talk to you about Mary when this is all over.”

Naturally. “Yes, sir,” I said, and opened the door. I had my identity, if not my body, back. Now it was time to get down to business.

# # #

Piotr drove, leaving Agent Névé to pack himself into the back seat and look nervously at anything but the rearview mirror. Interesting. I had no such limitations. I watched him for a few blocks before I said, “So what’s your story?”

He jumped, eyes darting instinctively toward the mirror before he flinched away and went back to looking out the window. “Ma’am?”

“HR usually keeps their people, since training you is a nightmare. What made them release you to the field?”

“My story was useful for personnel evaluations, but when Agent Bloomfield was put on assignment to the field office, she asked if I could come with her for logistical support,” he said. “There was no room on her team. I got assigned to Agent Remus.”

“And Agent Remus is smart enough to recognize someone whose story has been pushed to the point of breaking,” said Piotr. “They were using mirrors to have Carlos evaluate their people without making direct eye contact. That’s not healthy for him. When I threatened to call HR
on
HR, they said I could keep him for as long as he was needed.”

Unhealthy mirrors . . . “Are you from a Snow Queen scenario?” I asked.

Agent Névé’s big head nodded. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I can tell truth from lies when I hear them spoken, but if you give me a mirror, I can see all your worst secrets in your reflection. It hurts. I don’t like it.”

“If he does it long enough, he stops seeing anything
but
your worst secrets,” said Piotr grimly. He sounded personally offended, as if the things that had been done to Carlos before he was a part of Piotr’s team had been an affront to Piotr himself. That sort of loyalty wasn’t uncommon within the Bureau. It was still refreshing after what I’d been through. “He lived in a world peopled with rotting corpses pretending to be his friends, and then they had the gall to pretend not to know why he was unhappy.”

“It wasn’t that bad, Piotr,” protested Agent Névé.

“If I could tell truth from lies, would I believe you?” asked Piotr. “They have other human lie-detectors. They were
torturing
you.”

Agent Névé was silent.

I settled deeper in my seat. Snow Queens were nasty, destructive things, and they left long-term effects that most people didn’t really think about. The Kay in the story—the child the Snow Queen inexplicably abducted, driven by the narrative even if she’d never wanted to have children—would be saved from the fragment of mirror caught in his eye. That was the role of the Gerda in the story, the little girl who got the chance to play heroine and go up against a villain who was more natural disaster than actual antagonist. But all the other children who had fragments of the Snow Queen’s mirror in their eyes, they just had to live with it. No one ever came to save them; they were outside the scope of the central narrative.

Sometimes the mirror was an experimental drug, or a foster parent who enjoyed practicing a twisted form of home lobotomy. But none of those children ever got to put the past behind them.

We rode in silence for a while before Piotr asked, “So Henry, what’s the plan here? Are you just going to charge in and hope they believe you when you start telling them you’re the real deal?”

“You’re pretty well accepted as unimpeachably honest, and you’re backing me,” I said. “Agent Névé is from HR, which means Ciara will know he’s trustworthy. That should give me enough of a platform to start casting doubt on Adrianna’s story. I don’t care how long she’s been watching me. They have to know that
something’s
wrong.”

Didn’t they? There was no possible way she could be a better version of me than I was. I was the real thing, and she was just a ghost who refused to stay dead. Andy and Sloane would believe me.
Jeff
would believe me.

He had to.

“What if they don’t want to listen to you?” asked Piotr. “I’ve seen this woman in the office since ‘you’ woke up, and she’s believable. I didn’t realize anything was different about her.”

“Nothing, really?” I gave him a sidelong look. “Nothing at all?”

He paused before admitting, in a slightly embarrassed tone, “She seemed a little more relaxed than I remembered you being, like she’d finally pulled the stick out of her ass. I thought maybe being in a coma and being woken up by true love’s kiss had left you in a better position to deal with your own shit.”

“But she wasn’t woken up by true love’s kiss,” said Agent Névé, before I could squawk. “I was talking to Ciara about it. Agent Marchen’s boyfriend kissed her, and she didn’t wake up. Not for quite some time. A lot of people have been waiting for the breakup, honestly.”

“That’s stupid,” I said. “I don’t know whether what Jeff and I have is true love, and I don’t care. I like him. He likes me. He makes me feel safe. Why should I require ‘true love’ on top of all that?”

“We live in a fairy-tale world, Marchen. If we’re going to suffer the downsides, we might as well hold out for the good parts.” Piotr turned down a broad, tree lined street. It was the sort of idyllic-looking place where nothing ever seemed to go wrong, until it went wrong to a catastrophic degree.

That hint of catastrophe was borne out by the police cars parked on the street in front of a large, white-fronted McMansion. My team’s SUV was in the driveway, nestled in next to an ambulance—and two of the people I was looking for. Andy and Demi were standing a few feet from the SUV, their heads close together in the way of people who didn’t want to be overheard.

“This was a Puss in Boots scenario, correct?”

Piotr pulled to a stop, blocking the driveway and—not accidentally—cutting off all exits for my team. Even if they thought I was a liar or under an evil spell, they wouldn’t be able to leave. He killed the engine. “Correct. A young woman who’d been held for several days by a home invader managed to break loose, and a team—your team—was dispatched to investigate. The young man, who we believe to be a Marquis de Carabas at this point, fled into the hedge maze behind the house.”

I stared at him as I undid my belt. “There’s a
hedge maze
behind the house?”

“Yes.”

“Who the fuck has a
hedge maze
in a residential neighborhood?”

“This woman’s parents,” said Piotr. “Aside from that . . . serial killers, presumably. People who enjoy Stephen King novels a bit too much. And people who are hoping that one night, they’ll wake up to find David Bowie standing at their window.”

“Right,” I said, and opened the door, sliding out of the car. I didn’t wait to see whether Piotr or Carlos were following me, because waiting hadn’t ever been something I did. I walked straight into danger, no matter how likely it was to get me killed. Loitering around and waiting for backup now would just make me seem weak, and more, it would make me seem like someone
else
, someone I had never been before.

The part of me that was tethered most strongly to the Snow White story had always been there, lurking at the back of every decision I made, trying to pull me into passivity. I could feel it now, as much a part of this body as it was a part of my own. I shoved it aside, marching straight up to the little conversational huddle that Demi and Andy had created. They were positioned to discourage strangers from trying to interrupt. That was fine. I wasn’t a stranger.

“So we have a problem,” I said, skipping the preamble in favor of getting straight to the part I knew they weren’t going to like. They turned to look at me. Andy seemed amused; Demi looked disbelieving, like she couldn’t understand how I’d found the nerve to interrupt them.

“Really?” asked Andy. His eyes skimmed across me, taking note of my coloration and the cut of my suit and filing me—correctly, if incompletely—as a Snow White employed by the Bureau. “Is your team here to take custody of the scene? Who are you working for?”

“My team already has custody of the scene, and I answer directly to Deputy Director Brewer,” I said. I lowered my hands, letting him see that they were empty. “Andy, it’s me. Henry. We have a problem.”

Andy blinked. Demi looked confused. Then, to my surprise and annoyance, Andy broke out laughing.

“Oh, man, what field office did they dig you out of?” he asked. “I know we don’t have any other seven-oh-nines working in this time zone. Henry would have introduced us by now.”

“Your name is Andrew Robinson, you got married to Mike Dawson four years ago. I thought having your wedding at an amusement park was a little weird, but since it meant I got to give my best man speech while I was on an inverted roller coaster, I was cool with it in the end. Jeff threw up twice. Sloane laughed at him twice. The wedding cake was supposed to be the color of cotton candy, but it turns out that cotton candy doesn’t translate into frosting, so it was the color of Pepto Bismol instead. Am I getting through to you yet? Do I need to get embarrassing? Because I am too short and my tits are too big and I
will
get personal.”

Andy stared at me. Then his expression turned grim, and he took a step forward. It was all I could do not to take a step back. Was it just that I was smaller than I remembered being, or had he always been so damned
big
?

“I don’t know what you’re playing at, lady, but this isn’t funny. Henry was hurt recently. Hurt bad. Showing up here pretending—”

“I wasn’t
hurt
, I ate an apple, and I should have known better, but I was cutting corners because I was
afraid
, and I thought Jeff could wake me up. Only he couldn’t, because Adrianna was already in the way.” I glared at Andy, daring him to accept the truth in my words, to see the undeniable reality of my situation. Whether I was getting through, I didn’t know.

But I was getting through to Demi. She shifted positions, ever so slightly, before putting a hand on Andy’s arm. “When I was with Birdie, she talked about Adrianna,” she said, voice barely above a murmur. “She said Adrianna was her get out of jail free card. Maybe . . . ?”

“Lady, I don’t know what your problem is, but this isn’t funny,” said Andy.

“Henry’s been weird since she woke up. Sloane feels it most. That doesn’t mean I don’t feel it too,” said Demi. She turned to look at me. “Say something only Henry would know.”

I smiled a little. “You still watch Saturday morning cartoons. You got so mad when they stopped being on broadcast television that you asked me whether the Bureau had any pull with the FCC. I’m still sort of sorry that we don’t.”

“Anyone who has access to your Facebook would know you were angry about the cartoons,” said Andy.

“But would they know that she wanted me to call the FBI and claim that free cartoons for children of low-income households were a matter of national security?” I asked. Then I stopped, tensing. Someone was emerging from the maze. If it was Adrianna . . .

The figure was lithe, shorter than my body, with brown hair streaked in seemingly natural blue. Ciara Bloomfield. I relaxed a little; not completely. According to Deputy Director Brewer, Ciara had been assigned to my team as a temporary field leader while I was in my coma, and had remained as an observer after “I” woke up. She might believe me. She might put the nails into my coffin. There was no way for me to know, not here, not until she reached us.