Andy stepped into view, a basket slung over one arm. An actual, honest-to-God wicker basket, complete with the soft white cloth lining and looped handle. It was full of red apples. They were too far away for me to smell them from where I was, but my mouth began to water all the same. I wanted those apples.
I was going to have them. “Over here,” I called, waving. Andy turned, orienting himself on my voice, and trotted over. “Have any trouble getting away from the reporters?”
“Nah,” he said. “I explained how the chemicals we were checking for were nontoxic but could cause massive acne outbreaks in adults, and they all split for safer ground. We’ll probably have complaints about pimples from the locals for a little while, but that’s not so bad, considering what we could’ve been dealing with.”
“You are a genius of public relations,” I agreed, and reached for the basket.
Andy pulled it back, out of my reach. “Nuh-uh. I brought them because Jeff asked me to, and I generally trust him not to let you hurt yourself—much—but I’m not giving them to you until you tell me what you want them for. Where’s Sloane? And your brother?”
“That’s what I want them for,” I said. “We found signs that Elise had been here. Maybe she still is. She managed to twist her own story into something that was more useful to her: well, Gerry and I are twins, and orphans, and we just walked together into a dark wood where a gingerbread witch is supposed to be lurking. I’m pretty sure she’s trying to use Gerry’s undefined narrative to warp him into a Hansel, which would allow the story to turn me into a Gretel.”
“Dangerous if you’re a witch, but nowhere near as dangerous for anyone else, when compared to the potential damage that an active Snow White can do,” said Jeff, before Andy could ask why that was a bad thing. Andy nodded, accepting Jeff’s explanation without question. Jeff was our expert, after all. “The apples will keep Henry grounded in her story. Gretel is hungry—that’s what makes the gingerbread house so tempting—and Snow White always knows where the nearest apple tree is located.”
“Before you say anything, none of us like this either,” I added. “Now give me the basket before Sloane bakes my brother.”
Andy gave me the basket. I smiled.
“Thank you,” I said, and turned on my heel, and began stalking forward, following the trail of little white stones into the deep dark wood. The rest of my team walked behind me, not saying anything. The time for conversation was over. The time for action was upon us. As long as the action didn’t get us all killed, that was for the better. We needed this to be done.
The smell of gingerbread got stronger with every step. My stomach rumbled. I lifted the basket and inhaled, letting the smell of apples wash away everything else. My stomach rumbled again, louder this time, demanding I give it the one fruit that could ever truly fulfill me. I kept walking. The time for eating apples would arrive eventually, but it wasn’t here yet, and I wasn’t going to push it.
Then we stepped out of the trees and into a clearing, and I forgot about the tempting smell of apples in favor of gaping at the towering, Addams-esque gingerbread house that was occupying the entire skyline. The giggling continued, seemingly without a source. That was a good thing: that meant the narrative probably hadn’t snared any actual children.
Sloane was standing on the porch, blank faced and motionless, one hand resting on the twisted peppermint banister. Gerry was nowhere to be seen. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t even begin to see that as a good thing.
“Hi, Sloane,” I called, stopping about ten feet from the house and gesturing for the others to do the same. “What are you doing up there?”
“You should come inside,” she said. “It’s a nice house. I couldn’t find the witch, but you should see the place. I didn’t know you could do so much with fondant.” Her voice sounded oddly distant, like she was disconnected from what she was saying.
“I think I may know why you couldn’t find the witch,” I said, as gently as possible. “Where’s Gerry, Sloane?”
“He’s in the kitchen.” Her tone didn’t change. It still sent shivers down my spine.
“You know he’s not your Hansel, right, Sloane?” It felt strange to use her name so much, but it was necessary: I needed to ground her back in the story she had been born to live through. “He’s my brother. He used to be my Rose Red, and now he’s feeling his way through things, but this isn’t his narrative. No matter how hard it’s pressuring you to treat it like it is, it’s not. It’s not your narrative either.”
“The line between witch in the woods and wicked stepsister is thin and academic,” said Sloane. Her voice was sounding emptier with every word she spoke, like she was breathing out her own story and breathing a new one in. It was terrifying to watch. “This story has a shape and a structure, and it loves me. My story never loved me.”
“Yeah, but Sloane, feeding kids? Fattening them up on delicious candy? That’s not your gig.” I reached into the basket with my free hand, choosing the largest, reddest apple I could find, and took a step forward. “Look at this apple.”
Sloane looked at the apple. Her eyes lit up a little. I chose to see that as a good sign.
“Doesn’t the apple look delicious?” I raised it to my nose and sniffed exaggeratedly. “Smells good too. I bet I could eat it without suffering any negative consequences. Too bad there’s nobody around to poison it.”
Sloane’s right eye was starting to twitch.
I took that as my opening. “Catch,” I said, and lobbed the apple at her.
Sloane snatched it out of the air with both hands, clutching it and staring down at its reflective red surface. Then, without saying anything, she spun around and hurled the apple through the candy-glass window of the house. Shards went flying everywhere. I ducked to avoid being hit. Demi wasn’t fast enough; she yelped. I didn’t turn to see if she was okay, because I had other things to worry about—namely Sloane, who ran through the open door without saying a word.
“Move,” I snapped.
We moved.
The house was already beginning to break down as we stormed up the porch and into the gingerbread living room. Sloane hadn’t been careful, and had kicked several holes in the floor. Maybe that was a new way of leaving us a trail. We followed the holes to the kitchen, where she was untying a stunned-looking Gerry.
She looked up, eyes widening. “Get out! All of you, get out! The house isn’t—”
The house collapsed on our heads.
# # #
Gingerbread is a poor building material, in part because it’s so light. We finished digging ourselves out and looked around the thinly wooded stretch of land behind the school, which resembled a deep dark wood only inasmuch as a toy poodle resembles a wolf.
“I think we broke the story,” I commented.
“I hate you,” said Sloane, and threw an apple at my head.
“Is someone going to tell me what just happened?” asked Gerry.
He looked utterly lost. Poor guy. He might have gotten away from the day-to-day adventures with the narrative, but he would always be on the ATI spectrum. All he’d done by breaking free was make sure he would never be quite prepared for what was coming. I couldn’t blame him for running. I couldn’t hate him because I’d stayed. But I could take pity on him, and I could love him.
“Let’s go tell the school there’s no chemical spill, and then grab dinner,” I said. “It’s a long story.”
Demi snorted, looking amused. She wasn’t clutching her flute as hard anymore. That was a good thing.
Together, the six of us brushed off the crumbs and turned to walk, side by side, back to the office.
SPLIT ENDS
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 310 (“Rapunzel”)
Status: IN PROGRESS
She didn’t know her name. She hadn’t known her name for a long time: not since the car crash that took her lover’s eyes as they fled from her abusive mother, not since that same mother cast her out to wander the stree
ts of the city, alone, starving, and pregnant. She didn’t know how long ago that had been—past and present seemed to blend together these days, until sometimes she almost felt like none of it had happened at all, like her sweet boy might open the door to her windowless cell and sweep her away again, the way he had before.
It couldn’t have been too long ago, could it? It couldn’t have been, because her belly was flat, tight as a drumhead, and not swelling with new life. She knew she was pregnant, just as surely as she knew that her name was . . . her name was . . .
She didn’t know her name. Somehow, she always circled back to that.
The nameless girl paced in her cell, and the long golden trail of her hair followed her, disregarded and virtually unseen as she chased her ghosts down the long and haunted hallways of her mind. She had been chasing them for a long time.
Maybe someday she would catch them, and they would show her the way home.
# # #
“I hate paperwork,” announced Andy, looking up from his desk. “How is it that we have a form for ‘you got a gingerbread house dropped on your head’? How do we have a job where that’s something you’d need a form for?”
“There’s a recession going on,” said Demi, not looking up from her own report. “My abuela says we’re lucky to have jobs at all, and we shouldn’t be too upset when they ask us to do reasonable things.”
“Paperwork is not a reasonable thing,” said Andy.
I understood how he felt. As leader of the field team that had walked into a manifesting three-two-seven, I got extra paperwork, including a full report on all interactions with the staff of the high school where my brother worked. I also had to proofread and approve my brother’s statement, which mostly consisted of “I smelled gingerbread, so I called my sister.” If there was one thing we shared, thanks to our upbringing in an ATI-aware household, it was the knowledge that the sudden smell of mysterious baked goods never meant anything good for anybody.
Jeff snorted once and kept reading. He had already finished his paperwork and was working his way through an alternate translation of Grimm’s collected fairy tales for reasons he hadn’t bothered to share with any of us, but which probably had something to do with his unending need to know absolutely everything about the narrative. It didn’t matter that stories had more “weight” when people thought about them regularly, which meant the more obscure stories almost never manifested in the physical world. Thank Grimm for that. Much as I hated the assortment of Little Mermaids, Donkeyskins, and Pusses in Boots that we dealt with on a regular basis, there were worse things lurking in the corners of the fairy-tale world. Much worse, and much harder to explain away as gas leaks, people in masks, or teenage pranks.
“Do what I do,” suggested Sloane, trotting to the printer. She had been printing recipes for apple pie all morning. None of us were saying anything about it. She was still shaken from the gingerbread incident, and if collecting a large stack of what were, for her, potential murder weapons could help, then we were going to let her go ahead. We just weren’t going to eat anything she baked.
“What’s that?” asked Andy.
“Burn all your paperwork and pretend you have no idea what people are talking about if anyone asks you for it,” she said, picking up her printout and walking more decorously back to her desk.
“No one is burning their paperwork today,” I said. “We’re all going to do our jobs, and no one is poisoning anyone else, and no one is setting anyone else on fire. Am I clear?”
“As ice,” said Sloane, rolling her eyes.
“Agent Marchen?” The voice belonged to my boss, Deputy Director Brewer. I turned, and there he was at the mouth of the bullpen, a balding, uncomfortable looking man in a three-piece suit. There was an unusual tightness around his eyes.
“Sir?” I stood. Behind me, my team went quiet. They knew how odd it was for the deputy director to come to us: usually, he sent someone to fetch me when he wanted to talk, rather than roaming around the building without a handler. He wasn’t on the ATI spectrum. He was a career agency man who had made a wrong turn somewhere, and wound up in storybook land instead of managing a bigger, better, less secret government office.
“I need to speak to you,” he said. “Will you please come with me?”
My mind was already racing, reviewing everything I could have done wrong over the course of the past few weeks. It was a good-sized list, given our visit to Childe Prison and the whole thing with the gingerbread house. I stood. “Should I bring my team with me?”
“Not at this time, Agent Marchen,” he said. “You’ll be back with them soon enough.” He turned and walked away, quickly, like he was afraid life in the bullpen was contagious and would infect him if he stayed near it for too long.
I looked back to my people. “You heard the man. I’ll be back soon enough. How about you surprise me and have all your paperwork done by the time I get back here?”
“We’ll try,” said Demi.
Jeff looked disturbed. “Henry . . .”
“I know,” I said, and followed our deputy director down the hall. It was time to find out what we’d done—and whether it was too late for it to be fixed.
# # #
Deputy Director Brewer didn’t say anything until we were in his office with the door closed. He gestured for me to take a seat. I didn’t want to, but I sat anyway. He was my superior officer. Listening to him was the best way to survive what might be turning into a bad situation.
“Agent Marchen, before I begin, I have to ask: has your team experienced anything unusual lately?”
I frowned. “Sir, forgive me if this sounds flippant, but unusual is what we do for a living. You’ll have to be more specific.”
“I reviewed your account of what happened at Childe. I also read your recommendation that all agents on the spectrum, whether active or not, be provided with access crystals to prevent the prison’s protections from interfering with the performance of their duties. I assure you that I’m taking your request seriously and will be discussing it with prison management.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk. “Your report said the story had become ‘infectious.’ What did you mean by this?”
“If you read my report, you’re already aware of what I meant,” I said. “Somehow, the glass generated when Elise changed her story was capable of transforming other living things into glass, which then exploded. It was very messy and could potentially have wiped out the population of the prison, had a large enough chain-reaction been allowed to form.”
“And you say Agent Santos was able to extract all of this, ah, ‘infectious glass’ from the walls by playing the right song on her flute?”
“Agent Santos is a Pied Piper, sir. We’re still not sure what the limits of her powers are, providing she has the correct sheet music. Yes, she was able to pipe all the dangerous glass into a single location, where it was left for the cleanup team.” A sudden thought struck me, trailing dread in its wake. “Did the cleanup team not find the glass?”
“Oh, they found it, Agent Marchen, and they were able to test its properties in a narratively-sealed room. Even clumped together as you left it, it continues to transmute living flesh.”
I stared at him, appalled. “Please tell me you didn’t explode an agent to find out whether we were telling the truth about that stuff being dangerous.”
“No. One of our agents who speaks in toads, snakes, and lizards agreed to read a prepared statement in the presence of the remaining glass. She’s in counseling now, and is expected to make a full recovery.”
I had met the agent in question. She was a good sort, spoke almost entirely in ASL, and would never have agreed to let one of her cold-blooded friends be sacrificed in that manner if she had been told what the Bureau intended ahead of time. I shook my head and didn’t say anything. Deputy Director Brewer grimaced, taking the meaning from my silence.
“We had to be sure.”
“You could have lobbed a watermelon at it,” I sai
d. “There were petrified vines on location. We knew the glass could affect plant matter.” But it hadn’t transformed the grass when we’d seen it again outside the gingerbread house. Maybe the rules weren’t as static as we wanted them to be.
They never were.
Deputy Director Brewer shook his head, expression soothing back out to its normal grave neutrality. “Agent Marchen, have any of the members of your field team been behaving in an unusual manner recently?”
“You mean more unusual than normal?” I asked. “No. Demi’s stressed about her place in the organization, Andy’s in the middle of trying to get approved for adopting a kid, and Sloane keeps threatening to poison us all. The only one who’s not being weird is Jeff, and that’s because he’s so busy reading and filling out all his paperwork that he doesn’t have time to be weird. I’m sure he’ll start once he’s all caught up on things. Why do you ask?”
“You didn’t mention yourself,” he said.
“I think I’m the least qualified person to comment on whether or not I’ve been behaving oddly,” I said. “I passed my HR review and my psych exam, and it no longer snows in my bedroom when I have a bad dream, so I’d like to think I’m doing pretty well. Why don’t you tell me if I’ve been behaving oddly?”
“There’s no need to get defensive, Agent Marchen.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but you’ve dragged me away from my team and started asking invasive questions that you don’t want to explain. This is the perfect time for me to get defensive.”
“There’s been another incident at Childe Prison,” said Deputy Director Brewer.
I went very still.
“I asked whether any members of your team had been behaving oddly because there’s going to be an investigation. As we both know, coincidences are rare in this line of work.” He looked at me gravely, and for the first time, I saw the sorrow, and the concern, behind his eyes. “We need to know for sure that no one here has been subverted.”
Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 9
