She hated everything.
The thought was like an eel moving through the silt that clouded her mind, flashing by so fast that it barely registered. But it left clouds of angry, puzzled loathing in its wake, churning up resentments so old that she’d believed them safely dead and buried. How dare the universe do something like this to her, when it had already done so many other horrible things? The people she worked with thought she was a bitch—they had no idea. They had no idea how hard it was to be her, caught in the claws of a story that told her to be wicked, that told her to be cruel. She tried to turn those impulses into affectations, choosing rudeness over actual evil, but it was hard, it was so hard, and they never gave her an inch of credit.
Well, why should they? Their stories were all sunny ones, full of saviors and sorcery. Not like hers, which was blood and betrayal, all the way down to its bones. They still believed in happy endings. None of them knew how hard she struggled every day not to slit their throats.
Sloane was so deep in her own misery that she barely heard the hydraulic growl of the bus pulling up to the curb in front of her. A few seconds later, a hand touched her shoulder. “Miss Winters? Are you all right?”
Kill him kill him for touching you how dare he how dare he, doesn’t he know who you are?
But he did know who she was—he’d called her by name. Sloane forced her head up and met the eyes of the bus driver who’d been picking her up at least three times a week for the last eight years. He never commented on how she seemed to stay frozen in the same protracted adolescence; she never yelled at him or threatened to call his superiors and have him fired over some imaginary infraction. She didn’t know his first name, but she supposed that he was a friend, inasmuch as she could have friends.
Swallowing the rage that threatened to overwhelm her, Sloane lifted her head and offered him a wan smile. “I ate something I shouldn’t have last night, and got food poisoning for my sins,” she said. “I’m fine. Thanks for stopping for me.”
The bus driver’s eyes flicked to her ears. Sloane raised one hand to touch the earmuffs, which were sitting slightly askew. She must have knocked them out of place when she put her head down, and that was how she’d been able to hear the bus arriving and the driver saying her name.
“I was cold,” she said, a brief flare of anger only half-buried under the words. How dare he question her? The fact that he hadn’t said a thing didn’t seem to make a difference.
Whatever he saw in her eyes, he didn’t care for it much. Looking nervous now, the driver took a step backward before he asked, “Are you going to ride with us today, Miss Winters? I need to get back to my route.”
It was harder this time to swallow her anger; it took an effort that was almost physical. Finally though, she managed to push it all the way down and forced herself to nod. “I am,” she said. “Thank you.” She didn’t say anything else as she followed him to the bus. She didn’t trust the words that might come out of her mouth. Instead, she slunk to her seat and tried to pretend that the other passengers weren’t looking at her the way that mice look at a snake that has suddenly slithered into their den.
She would get to the office, where her colleagues were, and her headache would go away, and everything would be fine. Everything had to be fine.
She still reached up and moved her earmuffs back into place. Just in case.
#
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 310 (“Rapunzel”)
Status: IN PROGRESS
The latest Rapunzel to haunt our fair city was the adopted daughter of the woman who owned the local organic grocery. If we really dug into her past, we’d probably discover that her birth parents had lived nearby when she was born, and that they’d either owed money to the woman who adopted her, or had been somehow guilty of shoplifting. That was how it worked with the Rapunzels, little girls becoming the payment for a few stolen heads of lettuce. It was a ludicrous way of measuring value. The narrative didn’t care.
This girl was named Holly. She had a medical condition that kept her from leaving her room very often, and had decided when she was eleven that she would grow her hair out until she won the world record. The neighbors had been calling her “Rapunzel” for years, turning it into some sort of local joke.
“Why don’t we hear about these ‘local jokes’ before somebody’s about to get hurt?” I demanded, casting a glare at Jeff. He put his hands up.
“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger,” he said. “I’m just the guy who went and talked to people when you said we needed to know what was going on.”
“What is going on?” asked Demi. “We’re just standing out here staring at this poor girl’s window. Shouldn’t we be talking to her, or … something? I don’t understand what good we think we’re going to do out here.”
“The easiest way to avert a Rapunzel is to cut her hair off, but that leaves you open to be recast as the wicked witch if the narrative can get a good grip on you,” said Andy. “That’s why we don’t just hand Sloane a pair of scissors when something like this comes up.”
“There are a lot of issues with the three-tens,” I said. “First off, a lot of the time, the poor kids who wind up cast as ‘princes’ get thrown out of second-story windows and permanently maimed. There have been reports of Rapunzels who sunk so deep into their stories that they actually could cure blindness with their tears, but we haven’t had one of those in years, and it’s not company policy to let unmonitored memetic incursions progress to that level.”
“What Henry means is that we can’t leave this poor girl trapped in the story even if something does happen to her boyfriend,” said Andy. “She’d have to be homeless for at least a year, and give birth while she was out on the street. Even if we thought that was a humane way to treat a sheltered teenager, she wouldn’t survive it. She has kidney trouble. That’s why her mother has kept her isolated like this—she needs regular dialysis just to stay alive.”
“Why the hell did the narrative target her, then?” I put my hands on my hips, glaring up at her window. “She should have been too fragile to make a good victim.”
“Oh, right, because the narrative cares so damn much about all the lives it ruins,” snarled Sloane. She was looking more like herself now that she had her face on, but there was still a waxy undercast to her skin, making her look sick and drawn. “Did it give a fuck when it turned you into the lost Queen of the Emo Kids? Because it sure didn’t give a fuck when it decided to hammer into me.”
“Much as I hate to admit it, Sloane has a point,” said Andy. “The narrative may just have seen her as a weak spot. It doesn’t have to finish every story it starts. It just needs to find a way to widen the cracks in the world.”
“That’s what we’re here to prevent,” I said, trying to pull the discussion back on course. “Does anybody have a suggestion?”
“Yeah,” said Sloane. “Me.” Before I could stop her, she shoved her way between Demi and Jeff and went storming toward the closed, locked door of the grocery. The rest of us stood frozen for a moment—long enough for Sloane to begin hammering her fist against the door.
“What the hell is she doing?” I ran after her.
Not fast enough. The door opened, revealing Holly’s mother. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman who had obviously been crying. “We’re closed,” she said.
“Your daughter needs you to be a rational damn human being,” replied Sloane. “Pull your head out of your ass and stop making empty threats. So she’s pregnant. So what? Sick people have babies all the damn time. Steel Magnolias stopped being relevant years ago. You sit down and you talk to her about what she wants to do, and then you talk to the boyfriend, and you find a way to get all three of you through this.”
“I—what?” Holly’s mother stared at Sloane. I did much the same. I couldn’t even find the words to ask her what she was trying to pull.
Sloane continued to glare. “If you don’t make this right, then you’re going to lose her forever. Do you get that
, or do I need to draw a diagram to hammer it through your thick-ass skull? You’ll become the wicked witch in her private fairy tale, and even if she lives, she’ll never love you again. You’re so close right now. You’re so close that I can smell it. Is that what you want?”
Holly’s mother was silent.
Sloane took a step forward, eyes blazing. “Is it?” she screamed.
“No!” Holly’s mother put up her hands as if to ward Sloane off, shaking her head at the same time. “No, of course not! She’s my daughter and I love her, no matter what!”
“Good. Then you go and tell her that, and tell her you’re thrilled as shit by the chance to be a grandmother, even if you wish she’d made things clear a little sooner.” Sloane took a step back. “And for God’s sake, don’t cut her hair yourself. Let her keep it long if that’s what she wants, or take her to a goddamn Super Cuts and get it whacked off by a professional. That’s the least that she deserves. Got it?”
Holly’s mother nodded mutely.
“Good. Now close the damn door and go talk to your daughter.”
There was a pause. Holly’s mother glanced in my direction, possibly seeking some sort of sanity check for the scene that was unspooling in front of her. She must not have found any sanity in my puzzled face, because she shut the door. The sound of a dead bolt clicking home punctuated the whole thing.
Sloane stayed where she was for several seconds before turning to face me and saying, with no satisfaction whatsoever, “Averted. The story just snapped around us. Our little Rapunzel isn’t going to get a happy ever fuck you after all. Now can we go back to the office? I’ve got a headache.” With that, she stormed past me again, her hands balled into fists at her sides.
I turned to watch her go, wide-eyed and bewildered. I was still standing there when Jeff and Andy walked over to join me, Demi trailing along behind them like a confused puppy.
“What just happened?” asked Jeff.
“Sloane just yelled at the story until it went away,” I said blankly.
“Is that possible?” asked Andy.
“I didn’t think it was, but Sloane says the narrative has been disrupted, and she’s never been wrong before.” I glanced past the rest of my team to the car, where Sloane was climbing into the backseat. “I’m worried about her.”
“I am, too,” said Jeff. “She doesn’t normally interact directly with the narrative if she can help it. Interacting directly with the narrative is what caused me to go fully active.”
I turned and stared at him, a chill racing across my skin. “Are you saying this could force Sloane into an active state?”
“I don’t … I don’t think so?” He shook his head. He looked as perplexed as I felt. “She was averted before I joined the Bureau. If a bad day was enough to bring her story back to life, she’d have switched sides years ago.”
No matter how ill-tempered and unpleasant Sloane got, she was stable. If she wasn’t stable, she wouldn’t have been allowed to do fieldwork, since a villainous narrative coming suddenly to life while we were dealing with another story would have been bad for everyone in its path. I gathered this certainty close, stood a little straighter, and nodded.
“So we’re done here; the Rapunzel has been averted, and we don’t need to worry about a sudden desert springing up outside the city. Sloane’s methods may have been unusual, but we’ve used unusual methods before.” I glanced at Demi, who represented the most unusual method possible. “Let’s get back to the office and file our reports.”
“What report?” asked Andy, sounding frustrated. “We didn’t do anything.”
“We watched Sloane do something. In this particular instance, that’s going to have to be good enough.” There was a bang as Sloane slammed the car door. When I turned, I could see her in the backseat of the car, head bowed, hair hanging so that it concealed her face. That chill ran across my skin again.
Something was very wrong, and I had no idea what it was … and that meant there was no way that I could fix it. All I could do was stand by and wait for everything to explode.
#
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 315 (“The Treacherous Sister”)
Status: UNDETERMINED
Sloane got to the office, and everything was not fine.
The bus dropped her at the end of the block, just like it always did, and the jolt from the heavy vehicle rolling to a stop threatened to slide her butt out of the easy-clean plastic seat, just like it always did. This time, for whatever reason, it felt like a personal affront. Sloane lunged from her seat, a curse forming on her lips, and pulled back when she saw the startled faces of the passengers around her.
“No,” she said. Her voice came out louder than she’d intended; the earmuffs prevented her from gauging her volume. The faces around her grew more startled. “No, this isn’t right.”
The driver turned, his mouth moving in a question that she couldn’t hear.
The urge to slit his throat was overwhelming. Sloane grabbed her purse, stammering, “This is my stop thank you good-bye,” and ran for the door, almost slamming her shoulder against it as it slid open. Then she was outside, she was blessedly outside and away from anyone she could hurt by mistake. She dropped to her knees on the sidewalk, tearing her stockings, and twisted around to watch the bus pull away from the curb and drive off.
“This isn’t right,” she whispered.
The earmuffs had been knocked askew again when she hit the sidewalk. She reached up to feel them, and then, when the sound from earlier did not return, she slid them off and stuffed them roughly into the pocket of her hoodie. They formed a visible bulge, but she was confident that no one would ask. Most of the people she dealt with on a daily basis simply didn’t want to know.
Her headache made walking the half-block to the office more difficult than she could have dreamed. She staggered along the sidewalk like a drunk, putting out her hands to catch herself whenever the pain became too much to deal with. And bit by bit, she was getting a handle on it. The pain was no less severe, but it was becoming almost normal, one more part of the world that deserved to be a target for her hatred and scorn. The more she hurt, the more she hated, and the more she hated, the less it seemed to matter that she hurt.
By the time she reached the door, her headache barely registered with her conscious mind. She pulled her ID card out of her bag and swiped it against the scanner, snarling at the little light until it beeped and turned from red to green, unlocking the office door. She yanked it open, harder than she needed to, and stepped inside.
What’s happening to me? The thought was small and almost inaudible over the roar of blood in her ears. Why is this happening?
She was still fumbling with her key, trying to get it back into her purse, when a voice behind her shouted, “Sloane! Wait up!” Henry. Just the sound of that frigid Snow White knockoff’s syrupy soprano was enough to set Sloane’s teeth on edge.
“I’m not in the mood today, Henrietta,” she said as she stopped walking, hoping that the other woman would hear the warning in her voice. She wasn’t sure how long she’d be able to keep her temper.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d keep wanting to.
“Agent Winters?”
The bitch sounded nervous. Good. “I told you, I’m not in the mood.” Sloane turned, scowling. “My fucking fire alarm broke this morning. It’s been blaring for the last hour. Does that count as me checking in with the boss, or do you need me to fill out some forms in triplicate?” It was a good lie. It would do.
Sympathy suffused the bitch’s red-on-white features, making her look even more like a caricature than she normally did. “Oh, hell, Sloane, I’m sorry,” she said. Her eyes raked across Sloane’s body, weighing, measuring, judging.
How dare she judge me? This time, the thought was very loud. “I’m so sorry if I’m offending your sensibilities right now. Some of us didn’t get narratives that came complete with a permanent makeover, okay? I’ll put my face on when I get to my d
esk.”
“Get some coffee first,” said the bitch. “You look like you could use it.”
And just like that, Sloane’s headache burst, and everything became finally clear. “I’ll do that,” she said.
“Okay,” said Agent Marchen.
“Okay,” Sloane echoed, and turned away. It was all so clear now.
All she had to do was kill the bitch, and all her troubles would end forever.
#
ATI Management Bureau Headquarters
It didn’t take long to write up our reports, since they mostly consisted of variations on “Rapunzel confirmed downtown, field team dispatched to resolve the incursion; incursion resolved when Agent Winters shouted at it until it agreed to go away. Resolution mechanism not recommended for future incursions.” Demi’s was even shorter: “Barely made it out of the car.”
Sloane herself vanished into the kitchen for about twenty minutes, returning with a bottle of painkillers from the first-aid kit, a sour expression, and a fresh mug of coffee. She sat down at her desk, and for a brief moment, I was afraid that she was going to get to work on her own after-action report. Sloane never did her paperwork without being reminded over the course of at least three days. If she started documenting our day without prompting, it would be time to call one of the departmental therapists for an emergency appointment.
To my sublime relief, Sloane just opened a web browser, went to eBay, and started browsing listings for stompy boots. Just another normal day at the office.
“Are you going to do your after-action report?” I asked, just to be sure.
Sloane responded by raising her left hand and flipping me off, without turning away from her computer.
“Just checking.” I picked up my own empty coffee mug. “Jeff, you want to come with me to scavenge for donuts in the kitchen? I didn’t get breakfast before we got dispatched.”
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