Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) (32 page)

“I thought she had some weird narrative connection to hidden doors, and could just wave her hand and have one open!” I said. “I’ve seen stranger things happen, especially since I fell into a magical, apple-induced coma and woke up a foot shorter and two cup sizes larger.”

“Three, I’d say, but I take your point,” said Piotr.

I folded my arms over my new breasts and glared at him before returning my attention to Ciara. She was still cooing sweet nothings at the hedge, which was enjoying the attention, if the rustling and slowly engulfing her hand was anything to go by. She smiled. The hedge pulled her a little closer—and then the hedge spread open like the mouth of some great beast, creating a tunnel where none had been before.

“I
knew
you could do it!” said Ciara, and kissed the foliage before stepping into the opening, gesturing for the rest of us to go with her.

“Your team is weirder than my team,” said Piotr.

“We consider it a badge of honor,” I said, and followed Ciara through the hedge. Andy and Demi were close behind, with Piotr and Agent Névé bringing up the rear. Jeff was safe with the EMTs, I was almost sure; Adrianna, wherever she was, wasn’t the sort to come back and kill the wounded. Especially not when she thought she’d taken them out the first time.

The door in the hedge closed behind us, weaving shut and leaving no sign it had ever been there before. That wasn’t the only change. The light seemed dimmer here, fragmented by unseen prisms, making the patterns of sun and shadow unpredictable. The walls were less well-trimmed, and twined and twisted around us in a mad array of looping branches and uncut thorns. Some of them were almost as long as my thumb, and looked wickedly sharp.

I stopped, motioning for the others to do the same. “Did we ever find Birdie and Elise?”

“No,” said Ciara. “We got the Rapunzel back. We still don’t know her name. But those two . . . we just don’t know.”

“Adrianna said she knew where they were, back when we thought she was you, and damn near got us all killed,” said Andy. “In hindsight, that should have been a clue something was wrong.”

“We’re
so
getting secret passwords,” I said, and pointed to the thorns. “Adrianna is a Snow White with access to both a Cinderella and a Storyteller archetype. Don’t touch the thorns. There’s no way of knowing whether she has access to a Sleeping Beauty, or worse, a Wicked Fairy, and I don’t have the time or the patience to wait for one of you to take a hundred year nap.”

“You have the best assignments, Marchen,” said Piotr. “Remind me never to accompany you on another.”

“I didn’t ask you to accompany me on this one,” I said, looking down the long green corridor of the maze. Moving as a group would mean we covered less ground. Splitting the party would make it easier for Adrianna and her allies to ambush us. Sloane was in danger, but we weren’t going to save her by acting like fools. “We stay together, we stay away from the walls, and if we see anything—
anything
—that doesn’t look like Sloane, we take it out. Understood?”

“Understood,” said Andy. The others nodded, nervous levity fading as we locked in on our new mission. We were in the maze. We were past the first hidden door. What came next was what mattered.

The smell of chlorophyll and wet grass accompanied us as we walked down the long corridor, watching for entries to the rest of the maze with every step we took. I was at the lead, my body tight and nervous as a cat about to bolt, my eyes scanning the shadows under the thorns for signs of ambush. Adrianna and I shared a story. If I could get close enough to her, I might be able to pick up on her presence before she had the chance to pick up on mine. After all, she didn’t know that I was coming.

We moved through the shadows like ghosts, silent save for the faint crunch of Piotr’s footsteps. I glanced down. The grass around his feet was covered with a thin layer of frost, and he was casting looks at Demi that were half longing and half terrified. She had a flute. She could call out his wolf if she wanted to. That fact that she’d never do it didn’t matter.

The corridor ended at a wall of solid green. We all stopped. It was Andy who spoke first, turning to Ciara as he asked, “So, uh, can you flirt with the hedge some more and get us through to the next pointless green hallway?”

“No,” she said. She looked perplexed. “The hedge let us in because this was where we needed to be. It was the
right
door. We should be where we need to be.”

“We are,” said Agent Névé, stepping forward. “Don’t you see it?”

“See what, Carlos?” asked Ciara.

He shook his head. “There’s a doorway right there. You can’t see it?”

“No, this one’s all you,” said Andy.

Agent Névé sighed. “I hate this fucking mirror,” he said, with surprising passion, before walking into the wall. Literally
into
the wall: as he stepped forward, he disappeared.

“Uh,” said Demi. “Has anybody else here seen
Labyrinth
?”

“Honey, if you’re telling me David Bowie is somewhere in this maze, I may forget that I’m a married man,” said Andy, and followed Carlos into the wall.

That was the cue for the rest of us to begin going through, one at a time, until only I was left in the green corridor of thorns. I looked over my shoulder. There was no one there.

Ciara stuck her head back through the green hedge wall. “You coming?” she asked.

“I’m coming,” I said, and followed her.

# # #

The maze seemed to go on forever—far longer than it should have, given the limited space behind the house where it grew. Even if Adrianna wasn’t here, the narrative had clearly been hard at work, distorting distance and twisting causality until it created a virtual labyrinth in what should have been a rich man’s idle diversion. Demi’s earlier question might have been asked in nervous jest, but it was impossible not to look at the unending walls around us and wonder if we really were on a path to the castle beyond the Goblin City. If so, I hoped that they would be friendly hosts, and wouldn’t mind the fact that we hadn’t brought them any babies.

Then we came around a corner in the maze, and suddenly we had much bigger things to worry about than David Bowie’s hypothetical trousers. Like the wall of thorns that had sprouted to block our path, ripping through grass and hedge wall alike. Even that wasn’t the biggest problem in front of us. No, that honor was reserved for Elise.

She was sitting on a pumpkin shell throne, held aloft by three loops of thorns, and she was smiling, her pretty pink lips curled upward in a perfect Cupid’s-bow smirk. Her dress managed to look elegant and tattered at the same time, like the greatest fashion houses in the world had come together to make “shredded chic” the next big thing. She was even wearing glass slippers, clear enough to show the dirt on her heels and insteps. It was beautiful. It was terrible.

“Hello, everyone,” she said, in a high, bright voice. “I was wondering when you’d come along.”

Demi’s hands clenched on her flute. “Where’s Sloane?” she demanded.

That was almost more of a surprise than Elise’s appearance. I wasn’t used to Demi showing that much spirit. I liked it. I didn’t say anything. If Adrianna didn’t know I was back, Elise might not know either. We could use that.

“Do you mean my stepsister?” asked Elise, and smiled like a broken mirror, all jagged edges and distorted glee. She had shattered her own story and stitched it into a shape she liked better, and nothing would ever make it whole again. I felt bad for her, even as I feared what someone who’d broken so many of their own chains might be willing to do. “She’s gone to have a chat with our dear Mother Goose, who can show her the error of her ways. She’s played the lapdog for you people long enough. It’s time for her to learn what an unshackled story can do.”

“Well, she’s telling the truth as she sees it,” said Agent Névé. He sounded slightly baffled. I suppose meeting someone else’s suite of enemies for the first time will do that. The Joker makes sense to Batman, but to anyone else, he’s just a shouting man whose coloration bears an unfortunate resemblance to my own. Elise made sense to us. To anyone else . . .

“That’s delightful,” said Piotr. He raised his voice, calling, “Miss, if you would please come down from your, ah, throne of thorns, I’d like to arrest you now.”

Elise blinked. “Excuse me?”

“The ATI Management Bureau gives me the authority to arrest anyone who knowingly and willfully uses narrative energy to distort reality,” said Piotr. “You’ve transformed a perfectly normal hedge maze into a terrifying tunnel of thorns and impossible doors. You’re thus clearly using narrative energy to distort reality, and are within my jurisdiction.”

Elise blinked again, more slowly. She wasn’t the only one. We all looked confused, to one degree or another. All except Piotr, who was watching her with perfect calm, waiting for her response.

“I’m not going to come down there and let you arrest me,” she said finally. “I knew that working for the government makes you arrogant, but I didn’t know it made you stupid.”

“It doesn’t,” said Piotr. “But it does make us very, very good at obfuscation.”

“Huh?” said Elise.

“He was distracting you,” said Andy, as Piotr broke into a run, heading straight for the thorns.

He was halfway there when his body turned inside-out, flesh becoming fur, hands becoming paws, until a great gray wolf was running in his stead. Demi raised her flute, starting to play the high, sweet solo from
Peter and the Wolf
. She’d been a music major before we activated her story and recruited her into the Bureau. She could probably have played that part in her sleep.

Elise shrieked, surprised by the sudden appearance of an apex predator, and waved one hand in a throwing gesture. Shards of colorless glass flew from her fingertips, arcing toward Piotr, who was mid-leap and couldn’t dodge them. Agent Névé whistled. The shards changed direction, flying toward him instead.

He grunted when they impacted with his chest. That was all: just grunted. I stared in horror as rivulets of glass began to spread out from the wound, turning glossy and bright. Elise was laughing in the background. Piotr was snarling, and Demi’s flute was playing louder and louder, chasing the narrative of the boy and his wolf ever closer to its conclusion.

The glass stopped spreading. Elise stopped laughing. The glass began to retreat, replaced by soft fabric and, presumably, living flesh. At the last, the glass emerged from his chest and fell to the ground, where it dissolved. I gaped.

Agent Névé shrugged, looking faintly abashed. “I already belong to somebody else,” he said. “I’m not afraid of glass anymore.”

Elise screamed. I turned to see Piotr, still in wolf-form, pinning her to her pumpkin throne. He had one massive paw on each of her arms, holding them down so she couldn’t fling any more glass at us, and he was snarling, his muzzle mere inches from her face.

For a moment, I thought about telling him to go ahead and eat her. It would make things so much easier on all of us if she was gone. Birdie could manipulate stories, but she’d never demonstrated the kind of direct physical power that we’d seen from Elise. Whether it was the breaking and re-forging that had made Elise as strong as she was, or just the fact that she was tapped into a huge, successful story didn’t really matter. We needed her out of the way, and she’d already shown that we had no prison capable of holding her.

No prison, except for maybe the one that was designed for fairy-tale princesses. “Piotr, don’t kill her,” I said.

The wolf swung his head around and glared at me. I sighed.

“I know, I know, she tried to kill Carlos, and that’s bad, but you don’t want to be picking bits of soured Cinderella out of your teeth for the next week. You know how human flesh upsets your digestion.” Piotr was good at controlling his wolf. He let it out to run on private estates, and he ate duck three times a week. But there had been incidents, always under circumstances where a police officer would have been able to plead “justified shooting.” It was just that Piotr’s justified shootings ended with his belly full of people who didn’t know when to surrender.

“See, first Ciara negotiates with a hedge, and then you negotiate with a wolf,” said Andy. He sounded almost philosophical. “I love this job.”

“Best one in the world,” said Ciara.

I walked toward the thorn wall, shrugging out of my jacket and wrapping it around my hand as I searched for a suitable thorn. Finally, I found what I wanted: a jagged spike easily a foot long, with a wickedly pointed tip. It took a little effort to break it free from the branch, but I persevered, wiggling it back and forth until it came loose in my hand. Then I turned and looked calmly at Elise.

Her eyes widened when she saw the thorn in my hand. “No!” she said, and began struggling against Piotr. His head snapped around, his nose almost brushing hers, and he snarled again. This time, it didn’t seem to have much of an effect. She kept struggling, fighting to break free of his bulk. “No, no, no, you can’t,” she said. “You
wouldn’t
. You’re the
good
guys.”

“People forget law enforcement is a narrative too,” I said. “Bring her down here, Piotr. You don’t need to be gentle about it.”

Piotr stepped off Elise. She had time to push herself onto her elbows, a look of elation spreading across her face, before the great wolf grabbed the back of her neck in his powerful jaws and leapt down to the ground. She howled like she was a wolf herself as they descended, and there was a horrible crunching sound when her right wrist struck the earth. Piotr let her go. She didn’t try to stand, just rolled onto her side and cradled her broken wrist against her chest.

“I think you can be a human again, Agent Remus,” I said. “She’s not going to run. She’s lost.”

“I won’t tell you
anything
,” gasped Elise, between wails.

“Why?” I asked. “Because you’re afraid of Adrianna?”

Elise froze, her eyes going wide in her pain-pale face.

“We know,” said Ciara, stepping up next to me. “We know everything.”