Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) (5 page)

Speaking of my field team . . . “Did Sloane run straight inside?” I asked. “We need to catch up with her before she does something we’re all going to regret.”

“Sloane has her ‘free-story’ charm,” said Jeff. “We need to get you yours.”

“You have one already?”

Jeff nodded and pulled his key ring out of his pocket. One of the charms dangling from the overloaded steel hoop—an oversized crystal spike that I had always assumed was plastic—was glowing with a serene blue light. “They gave it to me years ago, when they approved my access to the Archive. They use the same charm sets in the two locations.”

It would’ve been nice if someone had mentioned any of this to me: if there had been an orientation packet of some sort, handed out when my story consumed the last chances I’d been holding for a normal life. But there was no point in getting upset about it now. Not when we had a job to do. “What about Demi?”

“I have to get a visitor’s pass,” said Demi. “I don’t think I’m eligible for a permanent charm.”

“This place is creepy as all fuck: I’m not contesting that,” said Andy. “I don’t see what’s so upsetting about it. What’s it doing to you that I can’t feel?”

“It wants us to be calm and docile and obedient and not riot,” I said. “It’s like having a bunch of
really happy
maggots shoved into my brain, and it makes me want to burn the whole thing to the fucking ground.”

Andy frowned. “That’s probably not the result they were looking for.”

“You think?” I started storming toward the prison doors. The happy maggots writhed and bit inside my brain. I did my best to ignore them. Let them bite and squirm. I knew who I was, and no charm or personality manipulation spell was going to change that.

I was fucking pissed, that was who I was.

A guard in the standard slate-gray uniform of Childe Prison was standing outside the doors when we arrived. He was alone. That wasn’t normal: they usually insisted their guards travel in groups of at least two. Then I saw how he was fidgeting, and realized there was a reason for his solo status.

“Your friend is already inside,” he said, as soon as we were close enough to speak without shouting. “She was quite insistent.”

“How many guards did you send with her?”

“Three.”

“That’s not enough.” Thirty might not have been enough. “I’m Agent Henrietta Marchen. This is my field team. I’m also an active seven-oh-nine, and your prison is trying to make my brains dribble out my skull. My agent, Demi Santos, is an active two-eighty. We need whatever protections you have to offer against your compulsion charms.”

“I was told you’d be accompanying Agent Winters,” said the guard, casting an uneasy glance at Demi, who was still holding her flute like a lifeline. “I’ve been cleared to provide you with a countercharm, but Agent Santos is on the watch list. I can’t let her have one.”

“Yes, you can,” I said. “If you want us to go in there and fish Sloane out before she starts putting people through walls, you’ll give Demi her own charm. If you don’t think that’s an important use of our time, we’ll go wait in the van. I’m sure Agent Winters can do plenty of damage without our help.”

The guard stared at me. “You wouldn’t dare.”

I looked calmly back. “We were summoned to Childe. We came to Childe. As the leader of this field team, it’s up to me to decide how my people can be of the best use. If I say we’re most useful sitting in the van and listening to the radio, then that’s what’s going to happen. Good luck getting Sloane back under control. She doesn’t listen to most people.”

The guard paled. “Please wait here. I’ll be right back with two countercharms.”

“Thanks,” I said, and smiled so he could see all of my teeth. My naturally red lips did an excellent job of making them seem very white, and very sharp.

The guard turned and fled.

“You’re feeling assertive today,” said Andy, giving the prison walls another unhappy look. He couldn’t feel the compulsions they radiated, but he didn’t have to feel them to dislike the place. All he had to do was look at it. “This because you figure it’ll take HR six months to put together another review?”

“It’s because I refuse to let a member of my team be treated like a second-class citizen when we’re the ones who failed to protect her,” I said. My voice was tight with anger. “Birdie got to Demi because we didn’t think to check the downsides of the Piper story. That was
our
fault. She doesn’t get punished for it forever.”

“Or I do, but I have people like you to keep it from sucking as much as it could,” said Demi. I looked at her. She smiled a little. “I know I’m never going to be a deputy director or anything fancy like that. Even if I’d been the first Pied Piper with an impeccable record, that would always have been one step too far. But I like my team, and I trust you to take care of me. Because you do. You always have. Even when I couldn’t see it.”

“Demi—”

“Here.” The guard came trotting back through the prison doors, moving so fast that the only thing between him and the word “run” was the stiff way he was holding his arms, like he was afraid they’d drop off if he let them bounce too much. He had a crystal spike in each hand. The crystals were glowing. Our charms.

He stopped in front of me. “Here,” he said again, and thrust the crystals toward me.

I raised an eyebrow as I plucked the crystals from his hands. “Thanks.” The effect was instantaneous. The pressure that had been rolling off the prison since we arrived faded like it had never been there in the first place. The maggots stopped chewing at my brain, and suddenly I could breathe again.

Wordless, I turned and offered one of the crystals to Demi. She took it, and an expression of profound, heartbreaking relief washed across her face. We shared a look. This was what the Bureau was doing to all the stories they had in custody. Innocent people whose only crime was being afflicted with an incurable narrative were being kept under the same spells that were used to control and contain real villains. It wasn’t right. It needed to change.

For the moment, however, we had other things to worry about.

“Stay together; do not follow anything, no matter how tempting, unless it’s Sloane,” I said. “That goes for the guards too. Some of these stories may allow for shape-shifting, illusion-casting, or creating decoys. If you are unsure of what you are looking at, find a member of the team and ask them if they see the same thing. Any questions?”

“Yeah,” said Andy. “Wasn’t this girl trying to manifest as a Cinderella when we locked her up in here? How the hell did she become this dangerous?”

“Really, Andy?” I looked at him flatly. “If you think the princesses aren’t dangerous, you haven’t been paying attention. Now let’s move.”

# # #

Walking through the doors of Childe Prison was like forcing my way through a soap bubble that refused to pop. Instead, it clung and clutched until I had moved past its reach. Then it let me go, with a release that was almost as shocking as walking into it had been.

“I hate this place,” I muttered.

“We all do,” said Jeff. He probably meant for it to be reassuring. It just made me think of all the people we’d sent here over the years, the ones who were being kept inside these walls “for their own good,” while the maggots of the compulsion charm crawled across their brains and erased everything they had ever been. It was no wonder Elise had tried to escape. If anything, it was a miracle that she was the first.

“Maybe we’re going about this all wrong.”

Andy shot me a sidelong look. “What was that?”

“Nothing.” Andy was a good guy, but he wouldn’t understand. I wasn’t sure I understood yet, to be honest. But maybe there was a middle ground between quashing every manifestation of the narrative before someone got hurt and torturing the people who’d been caught up in that manifestation. Maybe it was on us to find it. “Jeff, any idea what part of the prison Elise was being kept in?”

“Third ring,” he said. “Past the quiet wards, and before the really
bad
levels.”

“There’s worse than this?” asked Andy.

“Yes,” said Demi. Her voice was scarcely louder than a whisper. “They said . . . they said a good Piper could make music from anything, so they put me on the fourth ring, with the villains who need constant supervision. They tied my hands and feet, and they shot me up with Novocain so I wouldn’t be able to whistle or sing. Somebody had to hand-feed me.”

“You sounded normal when we called you,” I said, horrified.

Demi’s smile was more like a grimace. “They have this stuff they can rub on your skin that wakes it up again. I don’t know what it is. No dentist I’ve ever gone to has used it, probably because it stings like nettles, but it cancels the Novocain right out. I talked to you because they took the numbness away, and I didn’t cry because I wanted you to think I was strong enough to be worth saving.”

“Oh, Demi.” I’d never been a physically demonstrative person, and this wouldn’t have been the place anyway: not with cells to every side of us, each holding a prisoner just like Demi had been. I still wanted to hug her. “We would have saved you anyway. You’re always going to be strong enough for us.”

“I hope that’s true,” she said—but this time her smile seemed a little more sincere, and that was good enough for me.

“This way,” said Jeff. We followed him.

The prison halls were wide and had originally been covered by white linoleum. They still were, toward the center and in front of some of the doors. But the presence of this much narrative energy couldn’t help but warp the world around it. Patches of linoleum had transformed into cobblestone, or hard-packed dirt, or brick. One cell had piles of straw in front of it, and shrill giggles drifted from inside. We gave it a wide berth. The door to another cell had twisted into something that would have looked more appropriate in the belly of a pirate ship, and the floor in front of it was damp wood that smelled strongly of brine. The door seemed to rock from side to side, like it was rolling on the waves, unless I looked at it directly.

“I
really
don’t like it here,” said Andy, who looked faintly sickened by the piratical door.

Those of us who were tied to the narrative were vulnerable to the compulsion charms and spells used to make the prison large enough and secure enough for our needs, but Andy, who had no natural or borrowed magic to protect him, had to feel like the entire world was shifting under his feet. It was rare in the modern era for the narrative to gather enough momentum to actually transform things. Here in Childe, where narratives were penned up and given no means of escape, it was happening constantly, and Andy’s modern mind had no real way of coping with it.

We stepped around a corner and found ourselves facing a door made of straw. “I got this,” said Demi. She pulled out her flute and blew one long, resonant note. The door crumpled inward, revealing a stretch of identical hall. Demi lowered her flute and smiled. “I huffed and I puffed,” she said, sounding pleased with herself.

“Good job,” I said. We walked on.

The next door we encountered was made of sticks. “Mine,” said Jeff, who leaned forward and began pulling sticks out of the door, slowly at first, then with increasing speed, until his hands were a blur of motion. When he was done, the door was gone, and he had sorted all the sticks into tidy piles, divided by size.

I blinked. “What?”

“Sorting the materials for the shoes is a part of my job,” said Jeff. He shook his hands, looking unhappily at the grime blanketing his fingers. “You’d think they could wash the things before they used them as wards.”

“Uh, forgive me for sounding like I don’t understand that our job is about impossible crap, but what good are doors that come apart when you poke them?” asked Andy, as we resumed walking. “Straw and sticks—that’s for pigs in nursery rhymes, not for building a prison that you actually want to hold prisoners.”

“If we didn’t have the countercharms, the doors would represent a compulsion to obey the story,” said Jeff. “For someone like Demi, who has Big Bad Wolf tendencies but no natural ability to huff and puff and blow someone’s house down, she would stand there blowing on the door until she collapsed from lack of air. For someone like me, who has Little Pig tendencies, I would wind up braiding and weaving and improving the door to make it stand up better to attackers. It’s only the charms that allow us to cling to our actual narratives, instead of falling into a narrative that’s just close enough.”

“Is everyone a wolf or a pig?” asked Andy.

“Not everyone,” I said, as we turned another corner and found ourselves facing a door made of thorns. I sighed. “Okay, isn’t this supposed to be made of bricks? I was looking forward to getting my hands on a sledgehammer.”

“Some pigs, some wolves, some princesses,” said Jeff, almost apologetically.

“I don’t even want to know how Sloane got past all three, although one assumes the guards have keys.” I stepped forward and put my hands on my hips, giving the door of thorns a withering look—no pun intended. “Fuck off.”

The door fucked off, the thorns unknotting and letting go of one another before they retracted into the walls, where they vanished without a trace. I looked back to my team. Andy and Jeff were staring at me. Demi was covering her mouth with one hand, but not quite managing to hide her smile.

“Come on,” I said. “Sloane may have murdered a bunch of people by now, and I don’t want to deal with the paperwork.”

The feeling of compulsive calm closed around us again as we walked, stronger than before. I slipped my hand into my pocket and clutched the crystal spire so hard I could feel it bite into my skin. That made the pressure a little easier to bear. At least there weren’t any maggots in my brain. Not yet, anyway. There was no telling what the prison was going to throw at us next.

The sound of shouting drifted down the hall. One of the voices—the loudest, angriest voice—was Sloane’s. The others were unfamiliar, and I didn’t know if they were fighting with her, or if she was the reason they were making so much noise.

“Move,” I snapped, and broke into a run. My team ran with me.