“I’m sorry, did you mean to say ‘are you intending to rip Elise’s spine out through her mouth and show it to her before she chokes to death on her own blood’? Because that would be a much more reasonable question under the circumstances.” I narrowed my eyes. “No, I am not working with Elise. I have every intention of murdering Elise as soon as I get the opportunity. You know what murder is, don’t you? Do you need a demonstration?”
“She’s telling the truth,” said Tom. He sounded unsettled. I have that effect on people, especially ones who didn’t know what they were walking into.
I used to feel bad about that sort of thing, a long time ago, back when I believed that one day the world would realize its mistakes and start playing fair. I stopped waiting for that sort of cosmic correction a long time ago. These days, I just try to make sure the people I unsettle deserve it, at least a little.
I narrowed my eyes further. It was getting hard to see through my heavily mascaraed lashes, but what I could see told me the effort was worth it. Both Ciara and the deputy director were squirming, refusing to risk meeting my gaze. “You did this—you kept me away from my team—because you wanted to be sure I hadn’t switched teams. Really. After all this time, you still don’t trust me, Dan? I thought we understood each other better than this.”
“No one understands you, Sloane; you least of all,” said Deputy Director Brewer. Now he just sounded tired. “Birdie managed to subvert several other dispatchers and workers in the Archives before she was arrested. I had to be sure.”
His words were like an electric shock. I stood up a little straighter. “Are you serious?”
“I don’t tell your team everything that happens in this building; the word ‘field’ means you’re supposed to be handling external threats, while the word ‘director’ means I’m handling the internal ones,” he said. “I didn’t tell Henrietta. I knew it would only upset her, and wouldn’t change anything. Birdie was in prison. We didn’t anticipate her escape. That was an error on my part. It won’t happen again.”
“But you weren’t sure about me,” I said. “How could you leave me in position if you weren’t sure about me?”
Now the faintest hint of a smile touched his lips, and I saw my old teammate and rival in his face. Only for a moment, but still. That was long enough. “Because I knew that if you did anything, it would be huge and showy, and that if you were working for Birdie, leaving you in place might give us a bit of a heads-up when she was ready to move. Poisoning Henrietta would have qualified as huge and showy, but if you say you didn’t do it, and Tom says you’re telling the truth, then you’re telling the truth.”
“Why is it that I haven’t murdered you all yet?” I asked, dropping my arms. “You would make beautiful corpses, and you would be way less irritating. More smelly, but less annoying.”
“You’d miss us and you know it,” said the deputy director. “I need you to accept Ciara as your temporary team leader. More importantly, I need you to convince your teammates that she’s in charge. Henrietta is . . . we don’t know when she’s going to wake up. There are medical options. We’re going to explore them all.”
“And then you’re going to go looking for a prince,” I said grimly. “And what you wake up isn’t going to be Henry anymore. You’ve got that, right? When you kiss a snowflake out of a storm, what you get is the princess at the center of the story, not the shell she wore. I’ve seen it before. I’ll see it again.” I was seeing the start of it now. There was a reason I’d always held Henry at arm’s length, even when she was struggling to get closer to me: even when I wanted, more than anything, to be her friend. Because I’d always known that this would be the end.
Someone like me doesn’t get to be friends with the princesses. We always wind up getting left behind.
“We’ll be exploring all options,” said the deputy director. “In the meantime, as you have been informed, your vacation has been canceled. You will report to Agent Bloomfield. You will follow her directions as you would follow Agent Marchen’s.”
“So when they’re convenient and I don’t think they’re stupid, got it,” I said.
“Convince your team. Agent Bloomfield will take you to Agent Marchen now.” He turned and began walking away.
I should have stayed quiet. I knew it was the wiser course of action—but sometimes my better nature can’t win out over my demons. “You know this is your fault,” I said. “If you hadn’t made it clear to her that she needed to find a way without using Bureau resources, she might not have gone for the apple.”
He stopped, stiffening, but didn’t turn around. Finally, he said, “I think about these things every night,” and resumed walking.
# # #
Henry hadn’t been moved to the nearest Bureau-operated facility, since it specialized in transformations and physical changes, people who had become trees or giant cockroaches or started aging in reverse. She was still in her own body, still the black and white bitch she’d always been, and so the ambulance had taken her to the coma ward above the local hospital, where we kept the sleepers whose naps weren’t contagious. She was the only current patient, her hair making a splash of almost garish-seeming black against the white sheets of her bed.
Jeffrey was in the chair next to her, balancing a laptop on his knees, with half a dozen books resting on the edge of her mattress. In a pinch, he had been happy to turn his girlfriend into a desk. Considering the pair of them, that was almost romantic.
Andrew and Demi hovered around the edge of the scene, clearly unsure of what they should be doing. When they heard approaching footsteps they both turned, so unintentionally synchronized that I had to bite back a laugh. They wouldn’t have appreciated it, and I didn’t feel like picking a fight if I didn’t have to. I was sure I’d find a reason to have to soon enough. That’s the thing about being me: I can always find something to fight over. Call it my superpower.
“Sloane,” said Andrew. “We didn’t think you were coming.” There was a challenge lurking in his tone, and the black, bitter imp that dwelt in my soul yearned to rise up and answer it. He’d thought I didn’t care enough to come to Henry’s aid when she fell, that much was plain.
With many of the Snow Whites I’d known, he would have been right. It had always been an insipid little milksop of a story, birthing pallid princesses whose idea of rebellion was doing someone else’s laundry. Disney hadn’t helped when he chose her as his crown princess, his template for a new generation of little girls to dream of. All he’d done was spread what used to be a relatively obscure fairy tale back into the public consciousness, undoing centuries of hard work, waking the sleeping blizzard in children around the world. Snow White was meant to run and bleed, a frozen hart in the body of a girl. How I had hated her, every time I’d met her, decade upon decade, century upon century.
But Henry was different. When my own story had started to struggle for freedom, Henry had been there, ready to put a hand on my shoulder and anchor me in my own body. When Henry had gone into the whiteout wood, she had come back as an avenging goddess of the living winter, with brambles for hands and frostbite in her eyes. Henry was Henry, and of course I cared. I would never have risked myself by giving her the apple if I hadn’t.
Our relationship was complicated and painful and wonderful and one of the closest things I’d had to a true friendship since Mary. I wanted to tell Andrew that. I wanted to make him understand. I opened my mouth, and what came out was a genial, “Go fuck yourself with the nearest available vorpal blade. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and the snicker-snack will leave you gelded.”
“Can you not?” whispered Demi. “Just this once, can you not? Henry won’t wake up.”
“I know.” I managed, somehow, not to insult her or tell her to go jump off the nearest bridge. Maybe it was her eyes. She looked so miserable, like she was the one in the coma, and not Henry. “I gave her the apple.”
“And she thanked you for it, as do I,” said Jeffrey, finally looking up. “What took yo
u so long, Sloane? I know you wouldn’t have dawdled without a good reason.”
“Well, my vacation has been canceled, and as the senior member of this field team who isn’t in a coma, I needed to officially greet our new team leader,” I said. Ignoring the gasps from Andrew and Demi, I continued, “She’s filling out the last of the paperwork needed to transfer control of the team to her. Once that’s done, I figure she’ll be joining us. That, or she’ll realize this is a terrible fucking team and we’re going to get her killed, and she’ll be running for the hills.”
“They can’t give us to some stranger!” gasped Demi, sounding scandalized. For the moment, Henry’s enchanted sleep had been superseded as the most offensive thing in the room. It was always fascinating to see where people’s priorities lay. “We can’t . . . I mean, I won’t . . . I’m not going to take orders from somebody I don’t know!”
“Demi, you work for the government,” said Jeffrey, removing his glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose. He looked worn out, like Henry’s nap had been going on for years instead of hours. Illness, whether enchanted or natural, had a way of doing that to people. It used them up, like my father’s death had used my mother up, all those years and names and narratives ago. “You’re always going to be taking orders from people you don’t know. Even when you get them from someone familiar, they’re probably originating with someone you don’t know. Please don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
“But they can’t replace Henry! She’s our leader, not some stranger!” Demi’s fingers curled, like she was trying to summon her flute from its case through the sheer force of her indignance. “They can’t do this!”
“I know why you’re angry.” Jeffrey and Demi both turned toward me, her eyes widening, his mouth narrowing, like they’d forgotten who started the discussion. I shook my head. “Henry’s a fairy-tale princess in an enchanted coma, and now they’re bringing in a ringer. It pretty much says, ‘she’s never coming back’ to me. Even if she wakes up, she’s looking at a short ride to Childe and a long lockup in a room with no doors. But that’s not going to happen, because she’s our fairy-tale princess, and I’ll be fucked before I’ll let them have her. Our temporary leader isn’t a stranger either. It’s that Bluebeard-fetishist bitch from HR.”
“Ciara Bloomfield?” asked Jeffrey.
“That’s the one. She doesn’t want to stay here. I mean, sure, she works for the Bureau, but look at how she’s been controlling her own story. She married her villain and she’s staying with him because she wants to.” I’d never heard of a Bluebeard’s Wife who’d been so changed by her narrative before meeting Ciara. The blue hair, the pirate blouses . . . she was turning into something new, because she was wrestling her story to a standstill. “She’s going to keep us from getting killed while we figure out how to wake up the snowflake here, and then it’s going to be back to normal. You’ll see.”
They kept staring at me. Finally, Andrew spoke. “You’re not normally the encouraging one,” he said. “Are you sure she didn’t put some sort of a spell on you? An HR spell, that makes you play nicely with others for a change?”
“Believe me, if HR was developing that sort of spell, we would have used it on Agent Winters long ago,” said Ciara, stepping through the door and walking toward the five of us. She had taken the clips out of her hair, emphasizing the blue streaks. Either she was trying to look like part of the team, or she had been playing respectable for the deputy director. Time would tell which was true.
“I’d slit your throat before your pet witch could say more than a sentence and you know it,” I said.
“It’s good to see you too, Agent Winters,” said Ciara, with a hint of a smile. Then she turned to the others. “Greetings. While we’ve met before, it seems appropriate to introduce myself again at this juncture. I’m Ciara Bloomfield, and I’ll be your field team supervisor until Agent Marchen recovers from her current situation. Once she wakes up and is judged fit for duty, I will be glad to step aside. We want to preserve the continuity of your team, and HR understands that Agent Marchen’s leadership is a large part of that continuity.”
Demi’s fingers were still twitching, marching through unseen lines of notes as she played some destructive melody in her mind. Aloud, she asked, “Who gets to judge her fit for duty?”
“Among others, I do,” said Ciara. “I know we don’t know each other as people yet, and that you have no concrete reason to believe me, but please try to trust me when I say I don’t want this job. I wouldn’t even be taking it if we weren’t in a Bureau-wide state of emergency right now.”
“Birdie?” asked Jeffrey.
Ciara nodded. “All vacation has been canceled. All non-critical medical leave has been canceled. Agent Davis will be allowed to remain here to monitor Agent Marchen, in part because former Agent Hubbard has already targeted this team several times. Leaving one of its members unguarded and defenseless would be foolish.”
“So we’re leaving two of them unguarded and defenseless; much better,” I said. “How many hearts were you in the mood to scrape off the ceiling? Ballpark number, so I can start shopping for funeral gear.”
“There will be guards stationed at the door at all times, and Agent Davis will be expected to keep up his research duties while he remains here,” said Ciara, ignoring me like a pro. It occurred to me that she could have read all my files. She’d said she hadn’t, but if she was a liar, most of my tricks would be familiar to her. Damn. “We’ll be in constant radio contact, if nothing else. No hearts will be scraped off the ceiling on my watch if I have anything to say about it.”
“How bad are things out there?” asked Jeffrey.
For the first time, Ciara sobered. “Bad enough that I canceled a cruise with my husband to come here and take over this team. Bad enough that Childe is calling inactive guards back to duty. There have never been this many breakouts in a short period of time. They’re turning up the calming charms, and the inmates are still on the verge of riot. They can taste change on the air, and they want a part of it.”
“Do we have any idea what Birdie wants?” asked Andrew. “I know she was going for the Index before—at least that’s what Henry said; I was asleep at the time—but it’s just a book. It doesn’t control anything.”
Now it was my turn to stare at someone. All of us gaped at Andrew, even Demi, who had only been part of the Bureau for a short time. I had seen the organization born, and the urge to claw his eyes out for saying that was stronger than I cared to consider. I took a deep breath, trying to calm the murderous impulses that were suddenly thrumming in my veins.
Be better than this, you have to be better than this, I thought, scolding myself the way my mother had always scolded me, before the narrative started taking root in our innocent little family. You are a wicked, wicked child, and I will never ask you to be a good girl, but I will always ask you to be better.
It didn’t help as much as it used to, back when I could still remember what my mother’s voice had actually sounded like, instead of what I had turned it into, one century at a time. It helped enough that I could trust myself to speak without screaming. “The Index links every story in the world to their monomyth,” I said. “It says ‘Snow Whites have skin as white as snow, and hair as black as coal, and lips as red as blood,’ and it says ‘they will always eat the apple, except when the apple is a pomegranate, or a wine-red grape, or a slice of cake.’ It says ‘this is how they live, this is how they love, this is how they lose,’ and we protect it because when you change it, you change the stories it connects to.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Andrew.
“Snow Whites used to wear a poisoned girdle,” I said. “Disney left that out. It got less common, because people didn’t think about it. But the Index remembers, because the Index was written by people who wanted to know every angle, every aspect. They codified legends, and they turned them doubly dangerous.”
“The original, mundane ATI only covered Europea
n and some Middle Eastern stories,” said Jeffrey, sparing me the rest of the explanation. “We’ve expanded it since then, because we’ve had no choice. There are more stories in the world than just the ones that emerged from Germany or the British Isles.”
“You don’t say,” said Andy, tone turning sarcastic. “I still don’t understand how writing them down made them worse, or why we kept doing it if it was such a bad thing.”
“Writing them down made them easier to identify and prevent,” said Jeffrey. “When a baby is born with Henry’s skin tone, or with hair that grows unnaturally fast and strong, it’s easy to figure out what story the narrative is trying to shape them into. The trouble was, increased iconography came with increased awareness. The more we write the stories down, the more they anchor themselves in the public consciousness, and the less they change.”
“Stories are like the sea,” said Ciara, jumping in. “They naturally ebb and flow and change. They’re tidal things, mercurial and wild. We put them in cages when we started the Index, and they’re angry. They grow stronger the longer they stay caged, which makes them harder to contain. They also grow more rigid, less capable of adapting to new situations and circumstances.”
“So like when this little girl in my first grade class got angry because I was cast to be Cinderella in my school play?” asked Demi hesitantly. We all turned to look at her. She reddened and ducked her head, but kept talking. “She said you couldn’t have a Mexican Cinderella. Our teacher said anybody could be Cinderella, but this girl just kept shouting how that wasn’t the story.”
“First grade racists,” said Andrew. “I hope you knocked that kid down on the playground.”
“Somewhat like that, although the narrative is less strict about race and gender than some children can be,” said Ciara. “The stories don’t change as much, because they’ve been written down, and the versions people tell one another come from those transcriptions. But when they do change, they have teeth.”
Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 13
