“Do you want a donut, Andy?” I asked, setting the box down on my desk. “Where’s Demi?”
“Henry!” He lit up as he turned to face me and my burden of sugary goodness. “Please tell me you got me a maple bar. I would kill for a maple bar right now.”
“I got you a maple bar,” I confirmed. “Where’s Demi, she asked again, with slightly less patience?”
“Not here yet,” said Andy. “She was taking the bus this morning, since her car’s still in the shop. She’s got at least five minutes before we all wind up fired for failure to report.” He stood and walked over to my desk, where he began investigating the contents of the donut box.
“See? I’m not going to be responsible for things going horribly wrong. It’s going to be a group effort.” I picked out a plain cake donut and dropped into my desk chair. “You should all have more faith in me.”
“We do, or we would have requested reassignment weeks ago,” said Andy. His voice was unexpectedly grave. I looked up, startled. He shrugged. “Me and Mike, we’re looking into adopting a kid. You know how expensive that is? How above reproach you gotta be before they’ll even consider your application? And that’s assuming you’re a straight couple. Black man married to a white man . . . the deck’s already stacked against us. I need to be the guy with the good, stable government job. Makes it more likely that the agency reviewing our application will go ‘whoa, better not discriminate against this one, we’ll get our asses sued.’”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think about that.”
“It’s cool,” said Andy. “Just don’t think for a second that Jeff’s the only one who has your back. He may be the one who goes home with you, but during the workday, we’re all here for you as much as he is.”
“That means a lot. Thank you.” I took a bite of my donut to keep from needing to say anything else. I was swallowing when there was a commotion from the mouth of the bullpen. I smiled without turning. “Demi’s here.”
“I’m here!” called Demi, half a beat later. A skinny Latina rushed past me, dumping her things on her desk. A flute case protruded from the edge of her duffel bag. “Am I late? I’m not late. I have,” she checked her watch, “fifteen whole seconds!”
“You do,” I agreed. “Have a donut.”
“Oo, donuts,” said Demi. She moved to root through the box. I sat back in my chair, feeling a little better about our chances. The gang was all here. If we stuck together, we could survive anything.
Demi Santos was our newest, youngest member. Like me, and Jeff, she was ATI active: she was a Pied Piper, and could accomplish almost anything with the right sheet music. She was also the strongest argument for taking the team away from me. Birdie Hubbard, our old dispatcher and unexpected enemy, had been able to use Demi’s story to turn her against us. Having a Pied Piper gunning for you wasn’t a fun experience. I don’t recommend it. Demi herself was a generous, thoughtful, compassionate girl, but once her narrative got involved, all bets were off.
Snow White wasn’t such a sweet, delicate story either, once you started digging into the monomyth. It began with bluebirds and true love, but it ended in sacrifice and blood on the snow. I could do a lot of damage if I ever let my narrative take over. The Bureau would be within its rights to minimize that damage by pulling me away from the front lines. It was up to us to convince them that leaving me where I was would be a better idea.
“Excuse me?” The voice was pleasant, female, and unfamiliar. I turned, already starting to rise. There was only one person I didn’t know who could reasonably be expected to be approaching my team today. Everyone else in the building was avoiding us like we’d contracted a bad case of the plague.
The woman at the mouth of the bullpen was short, curvy, and dressed like the accountant of a pirate-themed restaurant. I’d never seen anyone combine a ruffled blouse with a pencil skirt and striped tights before. It worked surprisingly well, maybe because the woman looked so comfortable. Her only jewelry was an antique-looking brass key, worn on a black velvet choker. She had ash blonde, salon-perfect hair, but there was something wrong with it, something about the roots.
Deputy Director Brewer was a foot or so behind her and to the left. He didn’t look pleased. That was nothing new. The deputy director never looked pleased if he had any possible way to avoid it.
“Hello,” said the woman. She was smiling. That made me nervous. “I’m Dr. Ciara Bloomfield, from Human Resources. I’m here to perform a full evaluation on your team and determine whether there’s anything the ATI Management Bureau can do to help you keep functioning at your best. Is Henrietta Marchen here?”
She knew I was a seven-oh-nine; it was written all over my files, going back to my birth. It was still nice of her to pretend she couldn’t tell on sight. “I’m Henrietta Marchen,” I said, dropping my half-eaten donut back into the box. “Pleasure.”
“The pleasure’s all mine,” she said. “Would you like to come with me?”
No. “Sure,” I said. I cast a reassuring look back at my team, who didn’t look reassured at all, before I followed Ciara out of the bullpen.
# # #
We wound up in one of the interrogation rooms. I wondered whether Ciara realized the mirror behind her was a two-way, designed to allow for observation. I decided she had to know. If she was high up enough in Human Resources to be doing employee reviews, she would have encountered this sort of setup before.
She waited until I was seated before producing a file and setting it on the table between us. “I want you to feel safe in this room. Whatever you say is entirely between us here.”
Between us, and whoever was on the other side of the glass. I leaned back in my seat and just looked at her. I was aware of how disturbing my appearance could be to people who weren’t used to dealing with me: There’s a reason almost all representations of Snow White add a little color to her skin. “Dead white” is not a shade humans are supposed to come in.
“Now, Henrietta, according to your file, you prefer to be called ‘Henry.’ Is that correct?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Is there a particular reason?”
I forced myself not to sigh. “I’ve manifested the coloration associated with my narrative since birth. I’ve never been capable of going outside without sunglasses and high-proof sunscreen. Most of my medical issues in grade school stemmed from my ‘forgetting’ to reapply before recess, because I was trying to be like all the other kids.” The rest of my medical issues in grade school had arisen from the other kids. They had a finely tuned sense of what was right and what was wrong, and when I’d failed to be the Snow White they thought they were entitled to—when I was brash and bossy, instead of meek, sweet, and inclined to bake cookies for everyone in my class—they’d been more than happy to show me the error of my ways. Because nothing says, “gosh, I wish you were nicer” like kicking your classmates in the teeth.
“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” said Ciara.
“I didn’t want to have an old-fashioned name to go with being considered ‘funny looking.’”
“This didn’t have anything to do with your brother?” Ciara looked at me earnestly. “According to his file, Gerald Marchen started insisting on male pronouns at the age of eight, and was living full time as a male by the age of fourteen. Did you choose a male name for yourself out of solidarity?”
“Yes,” I said. I didn’t hesitate. I was sure there was something in my file that confirmed exactly that, possibly clipped to a note from my adoptive father, Andrew Briggs, one that went into detail about how I’d perverted and twisted my sister into becoming my brother in my attempt to escape from my story. Mr. Briggs had never been able to cope with the fact that Gerry had always been male: that it was his body, not his brain, which was in error. “Gerry was experiencing severe emotional distress in both our home and school lives. At home, he had to wear dresses and play with dolls, even when he was begging to be allowed to wear jeans and climb trees. At school, he was being
called by a female name constantly, by both teachers and students. When we both adopted a male nickname, people just thought the Briggs twins were being weird again. They tolerated our weirdness better when we did it in unison.”
“You didn’t experience emotional distress over being called by a boy’s name?”
“No. Why would I? I was born female, I grew up female, everything around me was constantly approving of and reaffirming my gender, even if it was in tiny ways. I got to use the right bathrooms. I got to line up with other girls. On our birthday, I got dolls and teddy bears and toys that said ‘you are a girl.’ Even if I didn’t want them, they affirmed my gender identity. A name couldn’t take that away from me. Gerry didn’t get any of those things. He got the whole world telling him, every day, that his idea of who he was wasn’t right. I got the opposite of emotional distress. I got to know that me having a boy’s name meant my brother didn’t have a girl’s name. He got one thing, and I helped to make that possible.”
“I see.” Ciara made a note. “Did you feel betrayed when he escaped your story? When the narrative started seeing him as male, and turned all its attention on you?”
“No,” I said.
Ciara tilted her head, seemingly waiting for me to continue. When I didn’t say anything, she made a note on her pad and said, “There are people in Human Resources who are concerned that your recent activation will lead you to sympathize with other actives over those who have been averted or do not appear on the spectrum, even as you showed more sympathy for your brother than for the other students in your class who may have been made uncomfortable by having a little girl insist she was actually a little boy. How do you respond? Can you be sure you won’t favor your own kind over the nonactivated?”
I stared at her. Literally stared, my mouth hanging slightly open as I tried to process what she’d just said. I took a breath to respond, and stopped. There was nothing I could say that wouldn’t get me into trouble. Better for me to keep my mouth shut.
There was something about this Ciara woman that put my teeth on edge. It wasn’t the questions she was asking, oddly—I was willing to bet those had come from somewhere up the chain of command, and she was at least trying to ask them with empathy and compassion. They were horrible questions. They made me want to punch whoever’d written them. This woman didn’t write them: she was just doing her job. No, it was something about her hair, something I should be seeing, but wasn’t.
Then she tilted her head, and I finally saw.
“Blue roots,” I said. “Are you a one-three-eight dash-one, or a three-twelve?”
And Ciara smiled. “What do you think?”
“You can walk, you can talk, and you’re wearing a shirt you stole from Captain Hook. I’m betting three-twelve. Averted or abeyance?”
“Abeyance,” Ciara said. “I’m happily married to my Bluebeard. He said ‘don’t go in that room and I’ll give you whatever you want,’ and I took him up on it. He loves me.”
“He’s a murderer.” I didn’t know why I felt compelled to point that out: I just did, like there was a chance that she wouldn’t know.
“I’m his first wife,” she said. “I may have triggered his story when I agreed to marry him. As long as I never use this,” she fingered the key around her neck, “he never starts killing. Can we really punish people for what they might do?”
I looked at her, and slowly, I smiled.
# # #
“Here.” Andy pushed the coffee into my hand as I joined him in the viewing area. I shot him a sidelong look. He shrugged. “You looked like you needed it. She pretty much chewed you up and spat you out. All those questions about Gerry? I expected you to start swinging.”
“She’s just doing her job,” I said. “I don’t think she wrote those questions.” I glanced at the mirror, which was a window from this side. Ciara was greeting Sloane, who looked about as happy to be there as I’d been. “Odds that Sloane punches her in the mouth if she gets invasive?”
“I don’t think so.” Andy’s expression leveled out, becoming almost neutral. “I did some digging when I heard we were going to get reviewed. I didn’t want to be caught flat-footed, you know?”
Sloane was taking her seat. Ciara, looking much more nervous than she had when it was her and me, sat down across from her.
“Makes sense,” I said.
“Remember how Sloane said something about being a track runner once, and we all assumed she’d been on the track team in high school? I got to wondering about that, so I had the folks down in records pull everything I was cleared to see. One of them was a report from 1908, right after this area got its first office. It mentions ‘the unpleasant Miss Winters and her ongoing crusade against respectability and good behavior.’ I checked the roster. There’s never been another Miss Winters, and women weren’t allowed to compete in track and field until 1928. Whatever Sloane meant, it wasn’t a high school track team.” Andy looked back to the window. “Sloane’s older than we ever thought she was. She hasn’t been canned or shipped off to live with the other fairy-tale villains. That means she must be better at dealing with things like this than we want to give her credit for.”
“. . . right,” I said, after a long pause. I’d suspected Sloane was older than she looked for a long time. There were things she’d said, ways she had reacted, that tended to imply a long, long life, all of it spent fighting against the story that wanted to define her.
It must have been very difficult, being Sloane.
Andy pressed the button that would broadcast the conversation going on in the other room. Ciara was talking. “—opinion, do you feel Miss Marchen is overly inclined to put the needs of individuals on the ATI spectrum above the needs of individuals who are not on the spectrum?”
“In my opinion, the snow bitch has always been too soft on the stories,” said Sloane. I tensed. She continued: “If it was up to me, we’d kill them all. Princes, princesses, goosegirls, it doesn’t matter. Slit their throats and let Grimm sort them out.”
“So Miss Marchen shows mercy when it isn’t warranted?”
“No,” said Sloane. She leaned forward, putting her elbows on the table, and nodded toward Ciara’s files. “You have a write-up on me in there?”
“You know I do,” said Ciara.
“It probably says something like ‘Sloane Winters is impulsive, temperamental, and poses a possible danger to herself and others. While she is a highly effective field agent, the need to team her with individuals who will balance her moods cannot be overstated. Her aggression is often focused toward individuals who suffer from placement on the ATI spectrum. Recommend she be working with or under one or more individuals who show increased empathy to people in that situation.’” Sloane’s smile was sudden, and seemed to contain too many teeth. “There’s probably a lot of correction fluid on the second to last sentence. ‘ATI spectrum’ is pretty new language. Not what we used to call people like you and me.”
“What was that?” asked Ciara, sounding horrified and fascinated in equal measure.
“Cursed. They called us cursed, or story touched, or both, and they said I always had to be paired with a princess or a second son, because otherwise, I’d burn down the world.” Sloane kept smiling. “I think Henry’s too soft because I think you’re all too soft. Let me slit a few throats and see how the fairy tales back off this region. If you’re not willing to do that, Henry’s what I need to keep me under control.”
“Damn,” breathed Andy. “Girl’s a menace.”
“She knows what she is, and she makes sure she doesn’t take it out on us,” I said. “That’s the definition of a hero in my book.”
On the other side of the glass, Sloane was still smiling. “They’ve taken my muzzles away before,” she said. “That should be in your files too. Take a look at how that always ends, and get back to me, huh?”
# # #
Sloane sauntered into the observation room like she didn’t have a care in the world, and scowled when she saw the co
ffee cup in my hand. “I came for coffee,” she said. “If you have consumed all the coffee, I am going to straight-up fucking murder you, and drink a latte out of your skull.”
“You forgot to mention poison,” I said, taking a sip from my cup and making an exaggerated “mmm” face before turning my attention back to the window. Demi was stepping into the room. Out of everyone on my team, I was most worried about her. Not because she was going to slip and say something she shouldn’t: because she had been as victimized by Birdie Hubbard as I was, if not more, and we were still figuring out where her fault lines were.
I had known I was on the ATI spectrum from the time I was born. Skin as white as snow was a pretty big indicator. But Demi . . . her world had been perfectly normal, up until the day Sloane had crashed into her music theory class and dragged her out by the arm. She’d been given no warning of what the world wanted her to become: she hadn’t even known the Bureau existed until we’d dropped her off the deep end and told her to get to work. We hadn’t been fair to Demi in a lot of ways. We’d done what we had to do in order to save the world. Sometimes I wasn’t sure she could forgive us for that. After all, her world had essentially ended the second she saw Sloane’s smiling face.
“I’m trying not to poison people this week,” said Sloane. “I figure it’ll make it more surprising when I spike your food with ground glass.” She sashayed more than stomped to the coffee machine and snagged a cup. “So what, are we having a party in here? Andy, what are you doing? You haven’t had your review yet.”
“Yeah, I have,” said Andy. We both turned to stare at him. He shrugged. “I’m not on the spectrum, remember? HR sent a normal auditor yesterday afternoon to ask me a bunch of questions. Which were nowhere near as invasive as the ones you people seem to be getting. I mostly got ‘do you worry about being killed by your coworkers,’ and ‘are you interested in moving up within the Bureau.’ That sort of crap.”
Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 2
