“None of this explains why we’re still keeping the Index,” said Andrew.
“Because we’d rather have a bunch of really nasty monsters that we know how to identify and fight than uncounted invisible monsters that can strike at any time,” I said wearily. “The mundane ATI covers Europe. Ours covers everything, because there was a period where only the European stories could be averted.” A Woman with Two Skins had stalked the streets of Boston once, when I was younger and less willing to ask for help; she had killed more than fifty people trying to enact her story, and would have killed more if one of the Archivists hadn’t convinced someone to tell him her story and let him write it down. The Index was our greatest weapon and our greatest burden, all at the same time.
“If Birdie gets the Index, she could rewrite any story to end in any manner she wanted,” said Ciara. “She could make it so that Snow Whites all died a true death upon eating the apple. She could make the Sleeping Beautys put entire continents to sleep. Her potential for mayhem would be unlimited.”
“It’s worse than you think,” said Jeffrey. He turned back to Henry as he spoke, like telling her would somehow hurt less than telling the rest of us. “She could write her own stories. The Index . . . it started off as a way for people to keep track of the narrative. We told each other about it. We taught each other to trust it. We gave it narrative weight, and there’s no way we can take that away again.”
There was a moment of stunned, horrified silence. Finally, Ciara asked, “Are you sure?”
“No.” Jeffrey looked up again. “I’m not sure of anything anymore. But am I right? I’m terribly afraid I am. If you want to save the story you call the world, you need to move, because you don’t have as much time as you need.”
We moved.
# # #
Birdie’s house had been roped off by the Bureau since the explosion that had taken out the living room, half the yard, and most of the back hallway. It helped that there weren’t any neighbors: she had been a loner, living on the edge of the forest in her own little fairy-tale cottage. That probably should have been a warning sign. It was definitely a sign that the Bureau had gotten too big to police itself safely. Back when I’d joined up—first as a prisoner, then as a curiosity, and later as an agent, when all the people who remembered my origins were safely in their graves—we’d been in one another’s business constantly. No one would have been able to hide a plan like hers.
“The modern world sucks sometimes,” I muttered, turning over a piece of charred drywall with the toe of my boot. That was one place where the modern world didn’t suck: The ready and affordable availability of sturdy footwear. I firmly believed that no one really understood the value of a good pair of boots anymore.
“What was that?” asked Andrew.
“Nothing,” I said. I kicked the piece of drywall across the room for emphasis. It hit the far wall with a thud; somewhere deeper in the house, Demi squeaked with surprise. “She’s not coming back here. There’s nothing in the Mother Goose framework that says she has to have a single nest, and this place is trashed. It’s not fit for human habitation.”
“So where’s she gonna go?” asked Andrew. “She has no job, no known associates, no credit cards. Her bank accounts were frozen after she was locked up in Childe. Face it, the lady’s out of options.”
“She has a Cinderella who can transform people into glass with a single shard, and a Rapunzel we still haven’t identified,” I said. “She doesn’t need anything else. Between the two of them, she can take over whatever she wants.”
“So where do you think she is?”
I paused, narrowing my eyes. “That’s not my job.”
“I know,” said Andrew. “You’re the lazy one. You go where you’re sent, and you do what you’re told. I’ve watched you for years, and I’ve never understood it. You don’t seem like the type who likes to follow orders.”
“I hate it.” I flipped another piece of drywall with my toe. “It makes me want to scream and slit throats. That’s why I do it. Sometimes you have to act against character if you want to have any freedom at all. Why are you talking to me, anyway? You don’t talk to me.”
“Henry talks to you.”
That was true. Henry talked to me, which was something hundreds of people had decided not to do since the day I became the Bureau’s problem. I would never have been as nice to her as I was if she hadn’t talked to me. I wouldn’t have been as mean to her either. She was a target because she’d made herself an ally, and if there was one thing I knew for sure, it was that I wasn’t allowed to have allies. The narrative wouldn’t stand for it.
“Henry doesn’t have the sense Grimm gave the seven dwarves,” I said. “Fuck off.”
“Nope.” Andrew crossed his arms. “Not going to do that, because we’re down two people for as long as Henry’s in the hospital, and I don’t know this Ciara lady well enough to trust her with my life. I’ve got a husband. I’m starting a family. Demi’s still just a kid. It’s time for you to step up, pull your head out of your ass, and do your damn job like the rest of us.”
I blinked at him slowly, trying to process his words. Finally, almost gently, I asked, “Do you know how long it’s been since somebody spoke to me like that?”
“Too damn long, apparently,” he said. “What do we do, Sloane? If Birdie isn’t coming here, where is she?”
I took a deep breath, forcing down the rage that struggled to rise up and overwhelm me. Anger was my constant companion, more faithful than my sister’s memory, more familiar than my mother’s faded voice. Finally, I said, “Rapunzels are only comfortable in towers. Cinderellas are drawn to glass. And Birdie’s going to want something that fits her whole ‘bird’ theme. Look for a skyscraper or hotel with an avian name.”
“Like the Swan?” Demi’s voice was hesitant. I turned. So did Andrew. She was standing in the hallway door, her flute clutched tightly in her hands. It occurred to me that she was holding it more and more these days. It was becoming her security blanket, and maybe that wasn’t such a good thing, considering what she was.
Then again, maybe we weren’t going to live long enough for her to turn on us. “Where’s the Swan?” I asked.
“It’s a tourist trap hotel outside of town, near the wineries,” said Demi. “My mom used to work there, before she quit to stay at home with me and the brats. It’s four stories tall, and the whole front of the building is glass, so the tourists can see the grapes growing while they’re sitting inside, drinking their wine. It’s really expensive.”
“Bird name, glass wall, near something that has vines?” I said. “That’s it. That’s where Birdie’s going to be hiding, at least for right now.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little on the nose?” asked Andrew.
I looked at him flatly. “Haven’t you learned anything from your time with the Bureau? The narrative is all about ‘on the nose.’ That’s what gives it the power it needs to do the things it does. The more ‘on the nose’ something is, the better position it’s in to serve the story. This place exists, so it’s where they’re going to be.”
“Then we need to be there too,” said Andrew. “Good work, Sloane.” He turned and walked away, presumably to find Ciara. I stared after him, unable to shake the feeling that he’d tricked me somehow, and that bad things were inevitably going to follow.
# # #
We pulled up in front of the Swan barely forty-five minutes later. Ciara wasn’t as aggressive a driver as Henry sometimes was, but let’s face it: neither was Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows. Henry never met a stop sign she didn’t feel needed to be run, or an unprotected left turn she didn’t want to take at top speed. Ciara obeyed traffic laws and brought the vehicle to a complete stop whenever necessary. It was just that somehow the car handled better for her, and the lights seemed to stay green just that fraction of a second longer than she needed to blow through every intersection that we came to.
She caught me looking at her speculatively as we pulled up in
front of the hotel. Her grin was a cutlass slash across her face. “The narrative doesn’t know what to do with me. I’m a Bluebeard’s Wife. My story ends in either decapitation or widowhood. So it’s trying to fit me into something else. I think it’s hybridizing me a bit with Sweet Polly Oliver and a little bit with Anne the Pirate Queen. Any ship I sail finds calm seas and safe harbor, and that includes the cars I drive.”
“You should join NASCAR,” said Andrew.
Ciara laughed. “Believe me, I’ve considered it.”
The hotel looked normal, save for one thing: It was perfectly still. Nothing moved. Sunlight glittered off the glass front of the building, and a bird chirped somewhere in the distance, but apart from that, everything was still. Ciara stopped laughing. Slowly, the four of us got out of the SUV. Demi was clutching her flute again. I didn’t say anything about it.
The Bureau has used me as a story detector for years. I’m wound tight in the narrative without quite belonging to it—quite—and so I can tell, sometimes, when things are about to start happening. As I closed the door behind me, the sticky-sweet feeling of being wrapped in a hundred yards of cotton candy began to muffle my limbs, trying to tangle them and hold them fast. There was a story unwinding here. I just didn’t know which one it was.
“We were right,” I said. I projected irritation and outright anger at the cotton candy shackles, and they loosened enough to let me move. The madder I was, the more the narrative recognized me for what I was, and the less it would try to restrict me. It wasn’t fair. The Bureau only kept me fed and free because I was useful to them, and being useful meant embracing the parts of myself that played most into my story. I would lose myself someday, and all for the sake of serving them a little better in the time I was allotted.
I’d already had a fuck-lot more time than anybody else got. I snorted once, pawing at the ground with one foot as I shook off the last of the cotton candy. And then I ran.
I’ve always been good at running. Sometimes I wish the narrative could have found a story about a girl who ran around the world and shoved me into that, instead of into the role it chose for me. I could have run forever in the service of the story, and counted myself lucky when my heart burst in my chest and my body fell lifeless to lie on unhallowed ground. But that was not to be, and instead of becoming the Girl Who Runs, I became a girl who was always running, running from herself, running toward the story, running for the things that would destroy me. I just wished they’d hurry up and get on with it.
The door wasn’t locked. It slammed open when I hit it, swinging back until it struck the wall and rattled in its frame. I stumbled to a stop, gazing in horror at the lobby. My feet seemed to have been nailed to the floor. I looked down, and saw that I was standing in something black, viscous, and sticky. Pitch. There was pitch on the floor.
In some versions of Cinderella, her shoes fit fine, and the ball went on for three long, glorious nights. But the Prince got tired of his beautiful girl running away from him, and so on the third night he ordered pitch spread on the palace steps. She ran, because that was what Cinderellas were built to do, and she lost a shoe when her feet got stuck.
“You were taunting me all along, weren’t you?” I felt strangely serene all of a sudden. I didn’t have any knives on me, and the thing about good stompy boots was that they tended to come with sturdy laces. I was tied into my shoes from ankle to knee, and there was no way I was going to get out of them before the glass statues surrounding me started to explode.
Elise must have entered the lobby without anyone noticing that something was wrong. That was good information, in its way: she still looked more human than storybook, she could still move easily through crowds. Some of them had turned to look at her. I knew that, because they hadn’t moved since. There were only eight of them, two behind the front desk, the other six scattered throughout the room. Eight was more than sufficient. When they fractured, they would spray shards everywhere, and there would be nowhere for me to hide. Not with the pitch gluing my feet firmly to the floor.
“Agent Winters?” Ciara sounded more concerned than distressed. My body must have been blocking all direct view of the lobby. With the sunlight glinting off the glass, the statues inside would look like ordinary people. By the time anyone realized they weren’t moving, it would be too late.
“Don’t come in here!” I twisted as far as I could with my feet glued to the ground, putting out one hand in a warding gesture. Ciara stopped. Demi and Andrew stopped behind her. “It’s a trap. You can’t come any closer.”
“Why are you still standing there?” demanded Andrew.
“Because she spread pitch on the floor, you ass,” I snapped. “I’m stuck. Trapped. Finished. Fucked. Back off before she gets you too.” I was in the doorway. The door wouldn’t close enough to save me, and that meant I couldn’t keep the shards that would be flung when my body exploded from getting the rest of my team.
“I can fix this,” said Demi, raising her flute.
Suddenly it all came clear. The glass statues, standing frozen rather than exploding into contagious fragments, were a trap for more than just me. “If you play one note, I swear to Grimm I will find a way to return from the grave and rip your fucking arms off,” I snarled. Demi froze again, this time looking hurt. “You play, the statues go boom, we all die a horrible death, instead of just me dying a horrible death. Get out of here, all of you.”
“Why are you not trying to get loose?” asked Andrew.
“Too many shoelaces, not enough knives,” I said. “I’m not allowed to carry anything sharp. Something about the Bureau liking the rest of you without any holes.”
“How much can you lift, Agent Winters?” asked Ciara.
I blinked. “I don’t know. A hundred pounds?”
“Good. Catch.” With no more warning than that, she flung herself at me, traveling on an arc that would have carried her past my position and into the pitch if she wasn’t stopped. Instinct kicked in. I grabbed her around the waist, stopping her in midair.
Ciara turned her head so that she could grin at me. Then, in a surprisingly fluid gesture, she pulled a rapier from her side—which didn’t make any sense, I would have seen it if she’d been carrying it before—and sliced cleanly through my shoelaces.
“All better,” she said, which was when the statues began to vibrate.
“Fucking run!” I shouted, leaping out of my shoes with Ciara still tucked under one arm. I ignored the pain of the stones and thorns under my feet as I hauled ass toward the SUV. After a moment of stunned surprise, Demi and Andrew followed.
Ciara might be an excellent driver, but she wasn’t much for vehicle security, and she hadn’t locked the doors. I jerked the driver’s side door open, flung her through, and then jumped in on top of her, slamming the door as I did. There was a matching slam from the back as Andrew and Demi took cover.
The sound of the front of the Swan shattering was like the world’s biggest Christmas ornament being dropped. The glass shards hit the side of our vehicle a moment later, the shock wave setting the whole thing to rocking. Miraculously, the windows held.
Silence fell. Ciara pushed weakly at me; I shifted to let her crawl out from under me.
“They’re not playing fair,” said Demi.
“No shit.” I looked out at the shattered Swan. The trees and bushes in the formerly manicured yard were transforming into glass—more slowly than flesh would have changed, but just as irrevocably. There was no telling whether anyone in the hotel was still alive, not until the cleanup crew got here and we were able to start sifting through the shards.
“So here’s a question for you,” I said. “What are we going to do about it?”
No one said a word.
FROSTBITE
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 709 (“Snow White”)
Status: ARCHIVED
Her name was Adrianna. It had been something else once, something longer, but that no longer mattered. Her family had forsaken her
, and she was happy to forsake them in return. Here and now, within the walls of Childe Prison, her name was Adrianna. She had skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as coal. She was young and beautiful, tired of being a captive.
It had taken the better part of nine months to earn the trust of the Miller’s Daughter in the cell next to hers. She’d accomplished it, because she’d had no other choice. It grated on her nerves to play the victim, to put hurt and hopelessness in her voice, where only anger and resentment belonged. But that was done with: like her name, like her family, it was in the past. What mattered now was the thin golden rope she held in her hands. It was long enough to loop around her cell’s single light fixture. It was strong enough to hold.
Oh, yes. She was sure of that.
Adrianna had been locked up in 1972, after her rampage left more than a dozen people dead across the heartland of America. It wasn’t the Bureau that stopped her, amusingly enough: they’d still been chasing their tails around her hometown when she’d been picked up by the local police. One of the taillights in her stolen car had been out. Just her luck. They might still have let her go, if she hadn’t been covered in so very much blood.
She’d been carted off to a mundane prison, surrounded by mundane prisoners who had no idea what kind of monster had been dropped into their midst. She’d killed eight of them before the Bureau managed to tote her away to Childe Prison, where the whispers in the walls were crueler than the whispers on the wind in the whiteout wood.
Shame, shame, whispered the forest. You shame your story.
Bad little girl, whispered the prison. Learn your place and be grateful that you have it.
Adrianna dragged her low wooden chair into position under the light fixture. They had been more than happy to lock her up, those mundane policemen with their eyes full of confused fear, those Bureau bastards who never thought to ask what had set her off and left her to be consumed by rage. They had never once asked how she had grown to adulthood without losing herself to either her temper or her story.
Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 14
