“You can command me first,” said Piotr.
I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way. She’s been a part of the story longer than I have. She’s stronger than I am. If I take you to her, she will take you from me, and I have too much respect for your abilities to let you be used as a weapon.”
“I can go, sir,” said Agent Névé. “I would be happy to.”
“It’s a good team,” I said. “I have Demi and her flute; I have Andy and his relative resistance to the narrative. I’m not going to get your agent hurt, Piotr.”
“It’s not my agent I’m worried about,” said Piotr. “You need more manpower than you have.”
“We have no time, and we have three individuals with active narratives on our side,” I said. “Have a little faith, all right? We can do this. I’ve defeated Adrianna once before.”
“Judging by the face you’re wearing right now, she’s also defeated you,” he said. “That doesn’t sound like an easy win to me.”
“We’re tied right now, but she’s about to learn that you shouldn’t fuck with a fairy-tale princess who still has something left to lose.” I lifted my chin. “We’ll see you soon. Keep Ciara out of trouble. Agent Névé?”
He jumped before turning to face me. “Ma’am?”
“You see what’s real instead of seeing what’s not. Find me that beanstalk.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He pushed Elise toward Piotr, who took her unbroken wrist and pulled her away. Then he removed his sunglasses, blinking in the sunlight for a moment before he turned to scan the horizon.
Childe Prison stood in the middle of what looked like an impossibly vast forest—a fairy-tale forest, in other words, the sort of place where foxes spoke in riddles and the sun sometimes set early because it wanted to. No matter how many times the guards tried to map the woods, they always failed, because the woods didn’t want to be mapped. They wanted to be dark, and tangled, and twisted, and unknowable. They had a vested interest in their own impenetrability.
“There,” he said, pointing to a patch of wood that looked no different than any of the wood around it. The trees there grew thick and close together. If it was possible for foliage to seem unfriendly, this foliage did. It was almost enough to make me miss the hedge maze. “That’s where they planted the beanstalk.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“I’m sure,” he said. “I can see it.” The words sounded pained. He didn’t like admitting what he saw, that much was clear, and I couldn’t blame him. Seeing all the world’s secrets might sound like fun at first, but the excitement would wear off quickly, replaced by the crushing realization of just how much everyone, even the people we loved best in all the world, lied.
“Then let’s go,” I said, and started walking. I didn’t look back. Piotr would have more arguments; Ciara might try to convince me to take her with us; or worse, she might decide to take her blocking charm back. I needed my mind as clear as possible. I needed to be myself, Henrietta Marchen, and not whatever pale fairy-tale princess this place wanted me to be.
It was interesting, in a way. In the whiteout wood, the Snow White story was infinitely complex, a canvas defined only by a shared color and a sketchy common narrative. We would all eat the apple; we would all find ourselves in coffins made of glass. It was the space between those events that mattered, defining us in ways we couldn’t explain, but lived through every day. Here, in what should have been the real world, the story had been simplified and candy-coated until the presence of Childe’s wards reduced me to a simpering parody of a woman I’d never been. It was a kind of torture, and not a productive one. If I spent enough time in the presence of that field, with my soul rebelling against the story being forced on me, I would probably go either mad, bad, or both. It explained a lot about Adrianna and Elise. What it didn’t explain was how people like them weren’t more common.
We had hundreds of fairy-tale figures locked up, exposed to incredible pressure. It was only a matter of time before they started to shatter, and then we were going to have a lot more Elises on our hands. I made a quiet pledge to talk to the deputy director when this was over. If that didn’t change things, I would talk to his superiors, and to their superiors, until I’d gone all the way to the top of the food chain.
The image of the president of the United States signing a bill forbidding narrative conditioning of detained individuals suffering from memetic infection was almost funny enough to make me crack a smile. Only almost. I kept walking, and my team walked with me, and as we passed the first trees, I couldn’t help feeling like we were also passing out of safety and into story. The only question now was whether we would be able to find our way back again.
# # #
Agent Névé—Carlos, now that he was a member of my team, however temporary his assignment might be—led with calm confidence, walking straight toward something only he could see. The rest of us followed. Demi kept her flute raised, playing quick trills every time the underbrush grew too thick. It pulled back with surprising alacrity, leading me to glance at her and wonder if she even understood how strong she was becoming. We were in a story now. She could pipe the wings off a butterfly if she wanted to.
I hoped she wouldn’t decide she wanted to. I hoped this wasn’t going to be too much of a temptation. And I wondered, with sudden guilt, whether she could pipe the mirror out of Carlos’s eye. She could free him from his gift, relieve him of his curse, and let him go back to working a desk job for HR, if that was what he wanted. It would be a wonderful relief for him, and I couldn’t mention it until we’d done what we were here to do. I needed his sight.
It was suddenly, dismayingly easy to see how people like Birdie started down their own slippery slopes. Carlos had a gift that hurt him. I had a solution, but I needed his gift more than I needed his peace of mind. So I wasn’t saying anything.
“Demi might be able to pipe the mirror out of your eye,” I blurted. I wasn’t going to be like them, I wasn’t, and if that meant losing a weapon, so be it.
Carlos looked back over his shoulder, blinking at me in surprise. His gaze flicked to Demi. “Do you really think so?” he asked.
“It’s worth a shot.”
“Then we’ll try it. After this is done.” We had reached a clearing. Instead of walking forward, he reached out into the seemingly empty air.
It was like watching a chain reaction. His palm pressed flat against the beanstalk, and it appeared, stretching up and down for the better part of forever. It was infinite. It was Yggdrasil, the World Tree, and it had always existed, and it would exist when all of us were gone. Demi gasped. Andy whistled. I took a deep breath.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go catch ourselves a traitor.”
Carlos helped me get a good grip on the beanstalk. I reached down with one foot, and was somehow unsurprised when it passed through the seemingly-solid ground like it was a cloud. I nodded, once, and began to climb carefully downward. It was time for us to bring this story to a close, no matter how difficult that seemed.
The four of us made our descent through the world we’d known and into the world unknowable, and all I could do was hope we’d all be coming back.
NEVER AFTER
Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type unknown
Status: ACTIVE
Sloane’s eyelids fluttered, her mind resisting the siren-song of wakefulness. With waking would come awareness of her situation, and if there was one thing she didn’t need right now, it was to be reminded how bad things were. Alas, no one can sleep forever, no matter how much they want to. Her eyes opened. She focused on the ceiling, which was far closer than she’d expected, before sitting up in the bed and swinging her legs over the side.
The drop that followed was equally unexpected. She hit the straw-covered ground with a loud “thump,” and rolled onto her back to stare at the pile of mattresses—at least ten—where she’d been sleeping. “What the fucking fuck?” she demanded. The bed didn’t answer.
At least the s
traw covering the floor had broken her fall and kept her from breaking her tailbone, although the straw represented another kind of challenge. It slipped and slid under her hands when she tried to push herself to her feet, until she finally grabbed the mattresses and hauled herself upright. Her velvet gown swished around her legs as she stood. It was a dress fit for a princess, and she glared at it hatefully. This wasn’t her story. It never had been.
“Let’s see,” she said. “I’ve got the Princess and the Pea—nice one, make someone royal with no requirements other than insomnia and a skin condition—and there’s straw everywhere, so I’m assuming there’s a spinning wheel. Make someone royal for agreeing to sell their baby, which seems sort of crappy to me, but who am I to judge? I’m just the girl you have locked up against her will.” She turned to survey the rest of the room. There was a vase full of red roses; a mechanical nightingale in a cage, waiting to be wound; a pile of nettles and carding equipment, to render them into fiber. The expected spinning wheel was near the fireplace, which was empty of all but ashes. The sight of it made her wince.
There was a jar of lentils sitting nearby, waiting to be dropped. That made it worse.
The room had windows, too high to reach without building some sort of ladder, but no door. She finished her first survey and began a second, slower. This time, when she reached the fireplace, there was a rocking chair, and in the rocking chair was a woman with thick glasses and a cloud of curly blonde hair. She was wearing a shawl and a button cap, both of which would have been more suited to someone twice her age, and she had an outsized storybook propped open on her lap. She smiled when she saw Sloane looking at her.
“Hello, dear,” said Birdie Hubbard—Mother Goose. That was the role she’d chosen when she turned against the Bureau, a role she had only reinforced by breaking out of Childe Prison at her first opportunity. “I’ve been waiting for you to wake up. It’s time for us to have a talk about your story, don’t you think?”
Sloane didn’t say anything. Birdie’s smile widened, turning cruel.
The screaming started shortly after.
# # #
The beanstalk looked like it should have been slick, but looks, here as everywhere, were deceiving. It had the texture of thick rope, easy to dig our fingers into and grip as we descended through the layers of earth and cloud into the void below. I was grateful for the twist of fairy-tale logic that said beanstalks, like towers or braids, existed primarily for the sake of being climbed. Without it, we would have needed to go back for specialized equipment before we could attempt what we were doing now.
Of the four of us, my new body had the least upper body strength. Demi was climbing with her flute clenched in her teeth, to reduce the risk of dropping it, while Andy and Carlos took the descent like it was nothing. My shoulders were on fire, my arms trembling as I struggled to remain stable. Long comas don’t do much for muscle tone, as it turns out, and when I’d jumped into the nearest available Snow White, I hadn’t been able to select for physical condition.
My fingers slipped. It was a small thing, but enough to cause me to lose my grip and tumble backward, scrambling for purchase. Then I was dropping like a stone into the abyss, falling, falling—
—until Andy grabbed the collar of my shirt. It was such an abrupt stop that it knocked the wind out of me, and I hung in his grip, gasping for air. He looked at me sympathetically, waiting for me to start breathing again before he said, “Why don’t you ride down on my back? We need you in one piece if we want this to work. None of the rest of us can face this Adrianna chick on her own ground.”
“You need to focus on your own climb,” I said.
His expression sobered further. “Henry, if you think I can focus on myself when I’m watching you struggle, you’ve got some really strange, really wrong ideas about me. Now get on my back. I’ll get you down there safely.”
“Thanks, Andy,” I said, not bothering to conceal my relief. He nudged me closer to the beanstalk. I grabbed back on and, from there, climbed to hang, piggyback-style, from his shoulders. I was short enough that I couldn’t get my legs comfortably around his chest, and had to settle for digging my knees into his ribs. Andy snorted in evident amusement and resumed his descent, catching up with Demi and Carlos, who had continued to climb after they were sure I wasn’t going to fall to my death.
Riding rather than climbing gave me the opportunity to look around. We were passing through a void. It looked like clouds if I didn’t focus on it too hard, but looking directly into the blank whiteness of it all made it quickly clear that there were no clouds here: there was no sky to support them, and no water to form them. This was nothingness, and the only reason we could breathe was because the narrative had been largely formed before people understood what oxygen was. You could drown in a fairy tale, sure, but you could also ride a jumping cow all the way to the moon and never have a problem catching your breath. In another hundred years, journeys like this might require SCUBA gear and oxygen tanks. Or maybe not. It was always difficult to tell what the story would seize on, and suffocating all the heroes mid-journey might not be a useful tool.
“How far do we have to go?” I called, toward Carlos.
“Not far now!” he called back. “We’re almost there!”
“Thank Grimm,” muttered Andy.
I smiled a little. “Sorry to make this harder on you.”
“You weigh, like, nothing, Henry. Make me do this again when you have your real body back, and then we’ll talk about hazard pay.” Andy continued climbing.
The air shimmered around us, becoming thick with the distinct smell of impending snowfall. My head spun. Snow was my time, my place, and I wanted it more than anything. The whiteout wood was my destiny, and I could create it here, if I wanted to; I could pull it into the waking world and have it for my own. All I had to do was open my hands and my heart, and let the winter in. I shook my head fiercely, trying to push the impulse aside.
“We’re close,” I said, closing my eyes. I didn’t want to see that shimmer in the air. It looked too much like the aurora borealis, and it spoke to me in a language I’d always known but never learned to understand. If I listened too long, I would learn, and then the world would change again. Not in a good way.
“No, we’re not,” said Andy. His shoulders flexed beneath my arms as he let go of the beanstalk. My eyes snapped open, adrenaline lashing through me as I prepared to panic.
He was standing on a smooth expanse of green grass. Carlos and Demi were nearby. Rolling hills stretched off into the distance, dotted with pastel castles too perfect to be real. Birds sang in the distance. Everything still smelled of snow, but there were no signs of winter here; this was perfect, eternal springtime.
“We’re here,” said Andy.
Demi looked around critically before saying what we were all thinking: “This is so not what I was expecting. It’s so . . . cute. Are there unicorns frolicking nearby? Because there should be unicorns.”
Carlos turned and stared at her. “What are you talking about?”
“Hold on.” I put up a hand. “Carlos, why don’t you tell us what you see right now?”
“We’re standing in the middle of a field of dead grass and brambles,” he said. “There are trees on all sides, but they’re either dead or close to it. Their branches look like hands, reaching for us. The sky is the color of a fish’s belly, all gray and sickly. Can’t you feel the cold? You’re standing in snow up to your ankles. You should be able to feel the cold, even if you can’t see the snow.”
“Can you bend down and pick some of it up, please?”
Carlos stooped and filled his hands with something my eyes refused to focus on. I could tell that they weren’t empty: I couldn’t, for the life of me, tell what he was holding. I held my hands out.
“Please,” I said.
“This is strange, even for me,” said Carlos, and filled my hands with snow.
I saw it before I felt it, white and cold and undeniable. I turned to l
ook at Andy and Demi. Both of them were staring at the contents of my hands, eyes wide and bewildered. Good. That meant it was a fairly straightforward masking spell, and not something we were going to need to break for each of us individually.
“Adrianna’s getting scary strong if she can hide this whole place from us,” I said, focusing on the snow. “She’s still a Snow White, though.”
“Are you sure?” asked Demi. “If Birdie is changing the way peoples’ stories work, Adrianna could be anything by now.”
“I am, because Adrianna’s still in my body,” I said. “She was able to take it because we’re both Snow Whites. If she’d changed her story that much, she would have lost her hold over my body. Either I would’ve been pulled back into it, or it would have fallen into a coma, but either way, she wouldn’t be a problem anymore. She’s still a problem, so she’s still a Snow White.” And she wouldn’t give that up easily either, not even for more power; I knew that, as sure as I knew we still shared a story. Her sister had been a Rose Red. She was a Snow White. It was as simple as that, at least for her.
“So, what, do we follow Carlos through the place and hope he doesn’t walk us into any evil trees?” asked Andy.
I hesitated. I knew Adrianna was here: I could feel her in the icy air, and in the snow I held. It wasn’t melting. The odds were good she knew I was here too; there was no element of surprise between members of the same story. “I can try something, but if she doesn’t know we’re here yet, it will give us away.”
“Try,” said Andy. His tone was gentle, almost reflective. I shot him a surprised look, and he shrugged. “I don’t have a story to run toward, you know? Out of all of us, I’m the one who maybe didn’t have to be here. I mean, I don’t want to go job-hunting right now or anything, but if I went to the Bureau and said I wanted a desk job, no more frontline fairy tales, they’d give it to me. Because they know this isn’t my fight. And if I could, right now, I’d grab hold of my ever after and squeeze it until it bled. We’re talking about saving Sloane. She’s our friend. She’d never admit it, but she cares about us. If there’s something you can do, you need to do it.”
Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 31
