Birdie looked instantly contrite. “Oh, the poor thing. I guess it’s too bad that her story couldn’t have been averted. She wouldn’t have to deal with us then.”
“No, but we’d be dealing with a four-ten in the middle of downtown, so I’m going to call this one a fair trade.”
“Isn’t it a little strange that we’ve had so many Sleeping Beauties in the last few decades?” Birdie’s hand twitched, like she was fighting the urge to reach for her mouse. “Demographically speaking, it’s not that popular of a story, and—” She gasped, hand twitching again before she used it to cover the perfect O shape of her mouth. “I’m so sorry, Henrietta! I forgot!”
“Yeah, well. I don’t like to make a big thing about it.” I smiled stiffly. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a recruit to see to.” I turned quickly and walked on before Birdie could start apologizing. If I let her reach the mindless platitudes stage, I’d be here all night long.
It’s funny, but most people forget that my mother was a Sleeping Beauty. They have better things to worry about, like whether Sloane has poisoned the coffee, or whether they’re going to find me sleeping in a big glass box one day. Working in a building where half the people are living fairy tales and the other half are memetically vulnerable makes for some interesting times, and I’m so clearly a Snow White that people don’t associate the Sleeping Beauty story with me in any way, unless they’ve read my file.
We all have our tragedies. That’s part of what brings us all to work for the ATI Management Bureau—and that brought me full circle back to Demi, whose story, like mine, had been kick-started by proximity to a four-ten. In my case, the Sleeping Beauty gave birth to me. In her case, the Sleeping Beauty forced us to activate her story in order to save lives. I guess in a way, a Sleeping Beauty gave birth to both of us. I just didn’t think the common ground would mean much to Demi at the moment.
I just hoped that once she came to better understand what we did here, she’d be able to forgive us.
#
The break room door was closed when I finally arrived. I paused outside, and decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Rapping my knuckles gently against the wood, I called, “Miss Santos, are you awake? It’s Agent Marchen.”
“That’s the word for ‘fairy tale’ in German, isn’t it?” asked a voice behind me. I whirled and found myself facing Demi Santos, who was standing in the hallway with a paper cup of bad government coffee in her hand. “I mean ‘marchen.’ Doesn’t that literally mean ‘fairy tale’? How do you people expect me to believe that this isn’t a big prank when you’re literally named ‘Agent Fairy Tale’?”
“My parents were drawn into a story like the one that we asked you to help us prevent today,” I said. Normally, I tried to avoid discussing my past with the new recruits. But this one was my fault. If she wanted to ask a few questions, I didn’t see any good way to refuse to answer them. “My mother turned out to be a four-ten—that’s what we call Sleeping Beauties. She was very much like the story we asked you to help us with, because she was the same story. She was unconscious the whole time she was pregnant with my brother and me. We accidentally pulled her life support cables out when we were born. She died before anyone could get to us.”
Demi gasped. “Oh my God.”
I shrugged a little. It was a painful story, but it was painful in part because of reactions like hers. I’d never known my mother. She wasn’t even a dim memory; she was just another tragedy in the long list of tragedies the fairy tales had left behind. “It was a long time ago. Anyway, as my brother and I were effectively orphans, we were taken in by the ATI Management Bureau. We were raised by one of the department heads, who was delighted to have children of his own, and we were given the last name ‘Marchen’ because we didn’t belong to any family but our own. So yes, my name is ‘Agent Fairy Tale,’ but I came by it honestly, and I assure you, this is not a prank.”
Demi sighed. “Yeah. I’m starting to get that impression.”
“I know this is a lot to take in.”
“You do, do you?” Her laugh was sudden, and distressingly brittle. “You just told me you were raised here. This has always been your world. There was never a point where you thought that stories were just stories. You always knew. Now you’re telling me that I’m a story, and you expect me to be okay with it, just like that. Like this doesn’t change everything. Like this doesn’t turn my life upside down.”
“Yes, exactly,” I said, choosing to ignore her sarcasm. Sometimes it was easier that way. “You were always a story. If we hadn’t triggered you when we did, people would have died, and one day you would have triggered on your own. Now you get to learn how to control the narrative, rather than letting the narrative control you.”
Demi’s face wrinkled in thought. After a moment, she asked, “What about my education? I have classes.”
“We’re a government agency. We may not be one of the big flashy ones, but we can get you a degree in anything you want, from any college in the country, without the mountain of student debt that would normally go along with it.”
“Can I go home?”
That was a trickier question. I hesitated. I must have hesitated a little too long because Demi’s expression darkened, and she took a step toward me.
“I have a family. They’re going to wonder where I am.”
Not if she stayed away from them for long enough, they wouldn’t. People who are outside the spectrum tend to forget about people who are inside if they don’t see them for a little while, no matter how beloved those people may have originally been. It’s just one more way that the narrative protects itself. “I am not personally opposed to you going home to your family,” I said, choosing my words with care, “but we need to check with Jeff first.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I’m a Snow White, and that meant my birth mother had to die,” I snapped.
Demi froze.
“Sloane? She was meant to be a Wicked Stepsister. Her story’s frozen right now—and you’ll learn about the stages a narrative goes through; you’re active, I’m in abeyance, Sloane’s frozen. Accept that for right now; the distinctions don’t matter. What matters is that Sloane was meant to be a Wicked Stepsister, and on the day she began showing signs of her story, her biological father was killed in a fire. Do you begin to understand? We need to check with Jeff so that he can make sure that you going home won’t cause the memetic incursion that you represent to start targeting your family.”
Demi’s eyes had gone wide and were glossy with unshed tears. Finally, in a small voice, she asked, “Can we do that now? Right now?”
“Yes, we can,” I said. “Come with me.”
#
The two-eighty narrative turned out to be completely devoid of family members in all of the iterations that we had on file. The Piper arrived in town as a stranger, did his or her business, and then left, usually taking something precious along in lieu of the original payment. After rattling off that special little fact, Jeff smiled broadly and said, “That’s why you’ll be the first one in the department to receive your check every pay period, Miss Santos. We don’t want your story to decide that we’re trying to short you something that’s rightfully yours!”
“Because having magic flute girl go all Scanners on us with an arpeggio would be a stupid-ass way to die,” contributed Sloane, without taking her eyes off her computer screen.
I wadded up a Post-it note and threw it at her. “How many pairs of shoes do you need? Turn around and pretend you care about good team relations.”
“Uh, point the first, I don’t care about good team relations,” said Sloane, spinning around in her chair so that I could see her face when she flipped me off. “Point the second, I stopped shopping for shoes an hour ago. I’m buying bulk lots of hair dye now.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” said Demi blankly.
“Don’t worry,” said Andy. “Neither does anyone else.”
Jeff cleared
his throat. “If the rest of you are done goofing around, I’d like to call your attention to some of the finer points of the Pied Piper clade of stories …” And then he was off and running again, listing a dozen possible variations on a theme that we were all about to become intimately familiar with. I watched Demi out of the corner of my eye while he talked. This was going to impact her most of all, after all.
I’ll never understand what it’s like to find out that you’re on the ATI spectrum. I was raised knowing what I could potentially become. So was my brother, Jerry. Neither of us had a single day where we thought of ourselves as “normal” or believed that fairy tales were anything other than a fate to be avoided. Demi was just finding out about that world now. It was becoming real for her, and there was nothing that I, or anyone else, could do.
I should have felt guiltier than I did. Her story might never have triggered. But in the end, all I felt was grateful that we’d been able to avert a Sleeping Beauty, and that no one had needed to die.
Jeff was still talking. I shook off the clinging shreds of my thoughts, and forced myself to listen. If Demi’s story ever took a turn for the dark, I might need to know what he had said in the beginning, when we still thought she had a chance.
#
Between the paperwork, dealing with Demi’s gear, and everything else, I didn’t make it back to my car until ten minutes to midnight. The time was enough to make me wince. Midnight is a bad hour for anyone on the ATI spectrum. We don’t like it. Too many stories set their watches by it, so to speak.
The wince got worse when I pulled out my keys and Sloane stepped out of the shadows of the carport. Her bangs were hanging over her eyes, and her lips were set firmly into a frown.
“Can I get a ride home?” she asked.
I didn’t ask how she’d been able to get to work in the first place. I didn’t suggest that she call for a taxi. I just nodded, and said, “Get in.”
She didn’t say anything for the first six blocks of our drive. Then she said, quietly, “The Pied Piper is a cipher. He’s not good. He’s not bad. He’s just a man who does a job and gets mad when people try to rook him.”
“I know.”
“Snow White’s good. The Wicked Stepsisters are bad. Pied Piper … that could go either way.”
“So we’ll watch her. We’ll make sure she picks the right path.” I shrugged. “This isn’t our first fairy tale, Sloane. It’ll be okay.”
“Maybe. But one day, it won’t be. What’s going to happen then?”
I didn’t have an answer for her. So I turned on the radio, and we rode in silence toward midnight, and the distant landmark the stories only ever know as “home.”
Episode 3
Honey Do
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 171 (“Goldilocks and the Three Bears”)
Status: UNRESOLVED/POSTPONED
Jennifer Lockwood didn’t so much “open the door” as “collapse against it while scrabbling vaguely at the doorknob” until gravity took pity on her and allowed her to stumble into the front hall of her small rental home. Working three shifts in a row at the diner was a good way to pay the bills, but a bad way to take care of her physical needs. Sleep, for example. Sleep had been discarded as a luxury at some point in the previous day and a half, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever be getting it back. She was equally unsure that she would be able to make it to the bed before passing out.
Her cat, a gray tabby with the uninspired name of “Puss,” came and twined around her ankles as she walked, making it even harder to traverse the hall into the darkened living room and onward to her bedroom. Jennifer struggled to keep her eyes open. If she let them close, she knew that she was going to wake up on the floor again, with a crick in her neck and the alarm in her bedroom ringing too loud to let her sleep and too late for her to get to work on time.
“Look out, Puss,” she mumbled, after the third time she kicked the cat. Puss purred and plastered against her leg again. Jennifer dropped her purse and kept on walking.
There was an art to removing clothing while remaining in motion. Teenagers mastered it effortlessly, creating endless trails of fabric leading to their lairs. Adults tended to lose the skill, but Jennifer had worked hard to retain it. Between her job at the diner and her classes at the university, she needed to cut corners wherever possible, and that included the three minutes it would have taken her to remove her clothing in the usual way. So her pants and underwear wound up on the living room floor, while her apron and shirt were discarded in the hall. The bra was the hardest part—undoing those little hooks without slowing down never got easier—but practice made perfect, and she dropped it just as she stepped into her bedroom.
The window shade was open again. “Stupid cat,” she mumbled, and half-walked, half-stumbled across the room to pull it down. The last thing she wanted was for the sun to rise and wake her up before she was ready.
Amazingly—considering her condition—she actually noticed something large and brown just outside the window, blocking her view of the backyard. Jennifer paused, squinting as she tried to figure out what it was. She was still squinting when the bear turned around, pressing its round black nose against the glass.
Jennifer had time for one good scream before she passed out, which was something like sleep, at least.
The bear stayed outside her window for a good long time before it rose and walked away, and when she woke up to the sound of two alarm clocks ringing stridently, it was easy to convince herself that the whole thing had been a dream. It was simpler that way.
At least until the next night, when the bear came back … and brought a friend.
#
ATI Management Bureau Headquarters
“Good morning,” I grumbled as I walked into the bullpen, a bag of donuts in one hand and a tray of coffee cups in the other. If I didn’t sound all that enthusiastic, well, maybe the breakfast offering would make up for things. “How is everyone today?”
“I dropped out of college,” said Demi glumly, not lifting her head out of her hands. She had her fingers laced so tightly through her bark-brown hair that I wasn’t sure she could lift her hands. Not without getting a pair of scissors. “The registrar’s office sent the confirmation that I am no longer enrolled in any classes. I am a failure.”
“Mike and I had a fight last night about how much of my job I’m not allowed to discuss with him,” said Andy, although he at least reached over and took one of the coffee cups. “He still wants to adopt, and he’s worried that writing ‘redacted’ on our papers will slow the process down.”
“Did you try pointing out that you work for a government agency, which will probably make it easier for you to adopt?”
Andy leveled a cool look on me. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, Henry—you know I love you and Jerry both—but if I let the folks who run this place help me find a baby, I’m going to get a kid who’s already halfway sucked into a story, and I can’t do that. Not after what happened to my brother.”
“No offense taken,” I said quietly.
Jeff, our official archivist, was nowhere to be seen. I put a coffee cup and a donut down on his desk, where he could find them later, assuming no one stole them in the meantime. Our office may be responsible for preventing fairy tale incursions on the so-called real world, but we’re still paid like government employees, and unguarded food has a tendency to go missing.
The last member of our little team didn’t even wait for me to get to her. She literally climbed over Andy’s desk, knocking over his pencil holder in the process, and grabbed for the bag. I jerked it back, out of her reach.
“Give them to me,” snapped Sloane, and grabbed again.
“No,” I replied. “You either wait for me to offer, or you ask.”
“I am asking,” she said, making a third grab. This one nearly knocked over the picture of Andy and his husband. He picked it up and hugged it to his chest, frowning at Sloane. Even Demi lifted her head, attention caught by the shena
nigans unfolding in front of her.
“Are you allergic to the word ‘please’?” I asked, finally allowing Sloane to snatch the bag of donuts from my hand.
She crab-walked triumphantly back into her seat, where she folded herself like a particularly content praying mantis and began rummaging through the bag. “Yes,” she said, not looking up. “It’s a legitimate health complication that comes with my position on the ATI spectrum, and I don’t feel very good about you rubbing it in my face like this. Maybe I should be reporting you to Human Resources for discrimination, huh?”
“Shut up and eat your donuts,” I said, and turned to Demi, who was looking at me with a blankly questioning expression. “Sloane is full of shit. She’s not allergic to the word ‘please,’ which is good for her, since if she were, we would all stand in a circle around her making polite requests until she went into anaphylactic shock. She just enjoys being horrible to the rest of us, and we let her, because we honestly can’t think of a way to make her stop.”
“I’ve thought of a few, but we never get them past the folks in HR,” added Andy in a low rumble.
“I’ve told you before, Andrew, dousing her with a bucket of water won’t make her dissolve, no matter how much she chooses to act like the Wicked Witch of the Worst.” Jeff appeared between two desks, smoothly winding his way around the obstacles in his path as he walked over to sit in his chair. He had a large book open in one arm, and never looked up from its pages, not even as he settled, picked up his coffee, and took a long drink. “Thank you, Henry. You always get the exact right amount of sugar.”
“I try,” I said, claiming my own coffee cup before someone could get ideas about swiping it. “Where were you?”
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