Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) (4 page)

Demi was frowning. “I thought Bluebeard always murdered his wife.”

“Yes, but there can be a long window between activation and spousal homicide,” I said. “Dr. Bloomfield understands the risks, and she seems to have found a good balance. I’m not going to criticize her life choices.”

“Not until after she’s out of our hair, anyway,” added Sloane.

We arrayed ourselves around the glass and waited. Seconds ticked by; Ciara rearranged her notes. The door to the interview room opened, and Jeff stepped inside, adjusting his glasses with one hand, the way he always did when he was nervous. It seemed suddenly difficult to breathe.

The main thrust of this review might have been determining whether I was still competent to stand as leader of a field team, but I wasn’t the only one in danger. Sloane and Jeff risked rehab for their recent narrative flares. Demi risked rehab, and worse, imprisonment: she
had
gone over to the dark side of the story, after all, even if we’d been able to lure her back. There were so many possible bad endings to this tale, and it was all riding on Jeff, who looked nervous enough to throw up on the table as he sat.

Andy leaned over without prompting and pressed the button to let us hear what was going on in the other room. I didn’t know whether to thank him or curse his name.

“—Bloomfield,” Ciara was saying, introducing herself one last time. “I’m going to be conducting your review today. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I know your narrative can manifest as a sort of nervous disorder, so I just wanted to reassure you that you are not in any trouble at all: this is a fact-finding visit.”

“Jeffrey Davis,” said Jeff, offering his hand across the table. “And bullshit, ma’am, if you don’t mind my being so forward.”

Ciara blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“This isn’t a fact-finding visit. The fact-finding visit happened weeks ago. It happened in the Archives, rather than in the bullpen, so I suppose I can understand why you think the field teams wouldn’t have noticed, but you’ve accessed all our records.” Jeff sounded perfectly calm, even a little bored, like he was reading from a book of essay questions. “You know when I went active, and when Sloane asked for help. You know when and why and how Henry manifested her narrative. You have the facts. You’re here to get context on them, and to make yourself feel better about whatever it is that you’ve already pretty much decided.”

“I see.” Ciara made a note. “It’s interesting that you’d mention the Archives. I’ve heard a great deal about your accomplishments there. Is there a particular reason you haven’t accepted a position there? I know the archivists would be thrilled to have you with them full-time, rather than sharing you with a field team.”

“I enjoy working with the field team,” said Jeff. “It’s an interesting challenge. It keeps me from getting bored. I don’t know if you have to deal with boredom in Human Resources, but there’s only so much filing I can do before I start feeling the urge to do something else with my hands.”

“Is that an oblique reference to making shoes?”

Jeff shook his head. “No. There’s nothing oblique about it. Being on the field team offers me constant challenges. It keeps me from sinking into my own head. I’m aware of the danger that my story represents. Since I’d rather not let it win, I manage myself through the best means I have available to me. That includes field work.”

“Does your relationship with Agent Marchen influence your desire to stay in the field?”

“My relationship with Agent Henrietta Marchen is the only reason I would consider leaving the field.” Jeff looked at her coolly. “If you say to me, right here, right now, that we can’t both be out there, I will cede my position to her. She’s more important to this work than I am.”

“Because she’s a princess?” asked Ciara, leaning forward, like a hawk getting ready to swoop in for the kill.

Jeff’s expression turned disgusted. “Because she’s a damn fine field agent,” he said. “What else is required?”

# # #

Jeff appeared in the doorway of the observation room and blinked, taking in the edifying sight of the rest of us waiting for him. Sloane slid off the counter where she’d been sitting, and carried him a mug of tea without saying a word. Jeff blinked again, looking from her to the liquid, before he appeared to decide that the threat of poisoning was less important than his need for tea. He took a long drink.

“Well?” asked Demi.

“Well, what?” He lowered the mug. “I’m assuming you sat in here through my interview?” We all nodded. “Then you know as much as I do. She took notes. She asked questions. She didn’t quite imply that I am completely ruled by my genitals, but she certainly edged around the subject.”

“If I’d known Henry was such a great lay, I would’ve seduced her years ago,” said Sloane.

“Hey!” I yelped. She smirked, and showed me her middle finger.

“You really do function well as a team.” We turned to the doorway, where Ciara was standing, her notepad held against her chest. She smiled as we stared at her. “It seems like you shouldn’t. Four disparate narratives and one man who’s never been touched by the narrative at all? You should be at best a mess, and at worst completely dysfunctional. But you work. Why is that, do you think?”

“The whole ‘ragtag bunch of misfits’ trope came out of fairy tales a long time before it came out of movies,” said Sloane. “Maybe we’re something older and stronger than you know.”

“Maybe so,” said Ciara. She looked to each of us in turn. “If any of you want out, if any of you want a transfer, tell me right now. No one will think you’re being disloyal. No black marks will go into your file. But if this team is not what you want, you need to say so.”

None of us said anything.

“Very well. It was . . . pleasant, meeting all of you. You’ve managed to build something surprisingly coherent out of a bunch of pieces that shouldn’t fit together, and I respect that. My recommendation will take everything you’ve told me today into account.”

“Wait.” I stepped forward. “Am I suspended?”

“Suspended? Why, Agent Marchen.” She smiled. “You have work to do. I don’t open doors that are better left closed. That sort of thing gets a girl in trouble. Good luck out there.”

She turned, and walked away, leaving my team—shaken but intact—staring after her.

“Well, boss?” said Andy, once Ciara was out of sight. “Now what?”

“Now?” I turned and smiled at him. At all of them. “Now we get back to work.”

Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 315 (“The Treacherous Sister”)

Status: ACTIVE

It was never quiet in Childe Prison.

Night and day, screams and laughter echoed from the walls. The more dangerous prisoners were kept sedated as much as possible, but they were surprisingly resilient and had a way of shaking off their restraints as soon as the guards weren’t looking. The prison, built in an old sanitarium originally intended to house victims of tuberculosis, followed a ring system. The deeper you went, the farther you were from the sun, and the more dangerous the stories around you became.

There were Sleeping Beauties on an inner ring, going slowly out of their minds from the drugs that kept them from sleeping. There were men and women who had eaten of the flesh of the White Snake, clawing at their ears as the rats in the walls told them terrible lies. There were Pied Pipers and Rumplestiltskins and Thumbelinas and Clever Jacks, all of them weeping in their boxes. But they were not the innermost ring: no. They were the heroes and heroines of the stories that had shaped them, and while they might have been dangerous enough to warrant locking away in this terrible place, they were nowhere so terrible as their villains.

Evil Queens. Wicked Kings. Robber Bridegrooms and False Princes and Sea Witches and Untrue Loves. All the darkest faces of the fairy tales were there, locked away where no one could reach them, sealed behind iron bars and strong stone walls. The guards were on the spectrum but fully averted, narratively dead. Anything else was too much of a risk.

On the edge of the inner circle, in a cell without windows, a pale-skinned girl with a mass of frizzy, coppery hair lay on the floor, her cheek pressed to the stone. She was whispering, a low, constant stream of nonsense syllables that had attracted some attention from the guards during her first days in the prison. They had checked the behavior against her tale type—315, The Treacherous Sister—and against her records, which said that she’d been apprehended while trying to manifest a Cinderella scenario.

“She’s out of her mind, but she’s not doing anything wrong,” had been the verdict of the warden, a big, burly man who had almost been cast as the leading role in a manifestation of Pinocchio when he was a boy. Blame Disney for that one: the story was a recent invention, as narratives went, but it was close enough to parts of the ATI that the narrative had been able to latch on to it and start turning flesh to wood. He still walked with a limp. “Leave her alone as long as she’s not hurting anyone.”

Elise had been muttering since then, muttering for months, reminding the walls what her story was supposed to be. Still, her eyes widened in surprise when the mouse skittered out of its hole, a brass key clutched in its jaws. She held out her hand. The mouse dropped the key into her palm before sitting back on its haunches and beginning to groom its whiskers.

Elise sat up. Elise looked at the key.

Slowly, Elise smiled.

# # #

We’d been on cleanup duty for most of the morning, picking up the pieces of a fairy-tale pyramid scheme, better known as a twenty-thirty-five—a House That Jack Built. Each element had chained onto the last until it formed an inevitable tower of ridiculous coincidences and unsustainable expense. Then it had started to crumble and had caught the attention of dispatch. Since my team was currently low man on the totem pole, on account of having barely survived our HR review, we were the ones called to corral the cow with the crooked horn, catch the horse and the hound, and recover the hammer our eponymous Jack had used to build his house in the first place. Once we had them all locked safely away, we’d be able to take care of any remaining narrative disturbance.

Sloane had managed to locate the cat that chased the rat, and was sitting on the back bumper of our van, petting the feline and making little cooing noises. It was weird as hell, and I was considering going over to ask her what she thought she was doing when Jeff walked up with a mopey-looking teenage girl.

“This is Agent Marchen,” he said. “Tell her what you told me.”

“Um,” she said. “Jack? Like, the guy who built us this clubhouse? He went to my high school up until last year. He’s pretty cool. He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“He didn’t file proper building permits with the city,” I said, giving Jeff a sidelong look.

‘Wait for it,’ mouthed Jeff.

“But he did,” said the girl. My attention snapped back to her. “This lady, she showed up with a toolbox and a bunch of papers. She said her husband had filed everything before he died, and she just wanted to see his final project completed. Jack didn’t do anything wrong. He had all the papers, everything. If you look in what used to be the living room, you’ll find them.”

“Did this woman have a name?” I asked.

The girl shook her head. “No. She was short though, if that helps. Way in need of a better hairdresser. She looked like she had a perm that melted.”

“What color?”

“What? Uh, white lady. I think that’s sort of, you know, racist? As a question?”

I forced a smile. The girl took a half step backward. Lips as red as blood and skin as white as snow do not make a friendly combination when viewed in the real world. “No, I didn’t mean ‘what color was her skin,’ I meant ‘what color was her hair?’ That melted perm you were talking about, what did it look like?”

“Oh! Uh, it was blonde. She was blonde. I don’t know what her eyes looked like, she was wearing really thick glasses.”

There was only one person I knew who fit that description, and she was supposed to be locked up in Childe for the rest of her life. Trying not to sound as disturbed as I felt, I asked, “How long ago was this?”

“Like six months,” said the girl.

“Excellent. Thank you for your help.” So Birdie Hubbard had given this Jack his hammer and his building plans before she’d challenged the entire Bureau. The House must have been part of her attempt to overwhelm us with more stories than we could handle—a plan that had nearly worked and had left plenty of time bombs scattered around the city, waiting for the right set of circumstances to set them off.

“Goddammit, Birdie,” I muttered, pinching the bridge of my nose. “If you weren’t already in prison, I’d wring your neck and put you there myself.”

“Henry?”

The voice was male, deep, and worried. I lowered my hand and turned. Andy was looming over me.

“What is it?” I asked. Out of my entire team, Andy was the only one not on the ATI spectrum. That meant he was less sensitive to the ripples and eddies in a site like this one. That was good. He might be slower to recognize certain dangers than the rest of us, but he was also immune to the little narrative needles that made us twitch out of our skins. If Andy looked this upset, something was genuinely wrong.

“Dispatch just called,” he said. “They’re sending Piotr and his team to this site to finish cleanup. We have a new assignment.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

Andy’s anxious look didn’t change. “There’s been a breakout at Childe. Six prisoners are missing, including Elise Walton. Our self-made Cinderella.”

“Oh, fuck,” I breathed. Then I whirled, shouting as I marched toward the van, “Pull back, we’re leaving!”

Sloane raised her head and blinked as the cat leapt out of her lap and dashed off to find a new rat. Demi and Jeff looked up from their own tasks. I kept walking. They’d move when they realized I was serious, or I’d leave them here. I didn’t see any other choice.

“The fuck?” demanded Sloane, when I was close enough.

“Elise got out.” It wasn’t the gentlest way to tell her. There wasn’t any way to tell her that would actually be
kind
. Elise and Sloane shared a story. No amount of trying to be kind was going to change that, and so there was no point.

Sloane jerked to her feet, cupped her hands around her mouth, and shouted, “We’re leaving! Get in the fucking van or get out of the fucking way!” Dropping her hands, she stomped for the passenger-side door. I ran after her. If I didn’t move fast enough, she’d hot-wire the van and leave without me. I couldn’t blame her. I would have done the same if it had been someone who shared my story.

I started the engine as the side door slammed open and the rest of my team tumbled inside. “Andy, fill them in,” I said, turning the flashers on. We weren’t police in the traditional sense, but we were close enough to get away with breaking a few traffic laws when we had to.

I was planning to break them all.

“Hold tight,” I said, and slammed my foot down on the gas.

Our van had been outfitted by the finest mechanics the ATI Management Bureau had to offer, and since some of them could bend metal with their bare hands, that
meant
something. If it hadn’t been for the sirens giving people time to move out of our way, we would have been in multiple crashes before we reached the turnoff for the prison.

There’s only one prison in North America rated for containing fairy tales. Maybe that sounds silly, but the wards alone took up half the attention of the Archives, and opening another would have required us to pull staff from elsewhere in the world. Having one prison for a continent was problematic enough before you started trying to transport prisoners. Sleeping Beauties couldn’t be safely loaded onto airplanes; if the pilot passed out at the controls, a lot of innocent people would die. Bluebeards had a tendency to manifest on ships and trains, and we’d once had a full-on Big Candy Mountain incursion when trying to transport a Robber Bridegroom. The only answer was to set up a transit network that skipped over those risks.

When I said I was planning to break
all
the laws that governed motorized vehicles, I meant it. That included the laws of physics.

We came tearing around a bend in the road, at a spot the locals had helpfully started calling “Dead Man’s Curve” some twenty years before. The needle was hovering at ninety-five, which was as fast as we could go without risking me losing control. The guardrail loomed up ahead of us, so close that I almost hauled on the wheel and followed the road. But that would have missed the point of this little exercise, wouldn’t it? I slammed my foot down instead, and we broke through the rail and sailed off into the abyss, already falling.

# # #

Trips to Childe always did a number on our shocks. The van hit the prison parking lot like a load of bricks, all excess speed swallowed as payment for the transport. I jerked against my seatbelt. Demi swore. Sloane didn’t say anything. She just kicked her door open and ran, heading for the prison. I unbuckled my belt and checked that my badge was clipped in place before I opened my own door and slid out—

—and staggered, almost falling over as a wave of peace, contentment, and absolute calm tried to hammer its way into my forebrain. My badge blocked some of the impact, but the rest was bad enough to make me want to vomit. I caught myself against the side of the van instead. My story, which had been relatively quiescent recently, reared at the back of my mind, stretching tendrils out like it was going to manifest in self-defense.

“Henry?” It was Jeff’s voice. I realized I could feel his hands supporting me. That was when I realized something more alarming: I couldn’t see.

He must have realized I was in distress, because he lowered his voice as he leaned in, and said, “It’s all right. You closed your eyes. I forgot that you hadn’t been here since you fully activated. Take a deep breath. Remember who you are.”

I’m Snow White.
The words popped into my mind, so compelling that I started to open my mouth and say them aloud. I snapped it shut again, alarmed. “I’m Henrietta Marchen,” I said. There was no strength in my voice. I might as well have been whispering.

“Your full name.”

“I am . . . I am Agent Henrietta Marchen, ATI Management Bureau.” This time, I spoke loudly enough to be heard. I stood a little straighter. “I am Agent Henrietta Marchen, ATI Management Bureau.” The story stirring inside my skull backed off and backed down, curling back into the place where it slept. The pressure radiating off the prison didn’t go away, exactly, but it died down to manageable levels. I opened my eyes.

“I am Agent Henrietta Marchen, ATI Management Bureau,” I said, for a third time. Three was always a good number to go for in fairy tales. Then I turned to look at my team.

Jeff was holding my free arm, keeping me from collapsing. He let go when I started to move, although the look of worry on his face didn’t die. Demi and Andy were behind me. Demi was pale, and she was holding her flute, fingers clenched so tight that her knuckles were white.

“Sucks, don’t it?” she asked, forcing herself to smile. It looked more like the grimace of a grinning skull. “It’s supposed to keep us from freaking out and killing each other when we’re all locked up together like a big box of stories. All it ever did for me was scramble my brains into pudding.”

“You were
here
?” I stared at her. I knew Demi had been taken into custody after Birdie Hubbard subverted her—my team had made the arrest. But I’d seen her in the interrogation room, and she’d always been available when I called with questions. I suppose I’d believed, on some vague, hopeful level, that she’d been kept somewhere in our offices until she was cleared to return to field duty. Not Childe.

Never that.

Demi nodded fractionally, her hands never leaving her flute. “Yeah,” she said, lowering her voice to something that was barely above a whisper.

“I didn’t know,” I said. I looked over my shoulder to the prison, which loomed, cold and foreboding, like something out of a Gothic romance.
Old sanitariums have their own story,
I thought.
Maybe they chose the wrong place to build.
“I didn’t know you were here, and I didn’t know it was like
this
once your story was active. Sweet Grimm, I’m so sorry.”

“You’re one of us now,” said Jeff. I looked back in time to see him pushing his glasses up, a wry smile on his face. “Maybe management will listen when you say that this is inhumane. They’re letting you lead a field team, after all.”