“All right, Ms. Patel, do you have a bus transfer?” muttered Sloane, as she resumed combing through the strange woman’s pockets.
Ms. Patel did not have a bus transfer. Since the local bus line used them as proof of payment, that meant she hadn’t come on the bus. And if she hadn’t come on the bus and she hadn’t walked, someone had to have brought her. Someone had to have guided her past security and into the building just in time for her to fall asleep.
“Shit,” said Sloane again, and transferred her focus to the woman’s hands. There was a needle mark on Priya’s right index finger. Wincing a little, Sloane squeezed the wound, trying to force out any splinters or shards that had been stuck inside. That wasn’t the most common variant anymore, but it would be the easiest to deal with.
Nothing emerged from Priya’s finger. “So much for that idea,” muttered Sloane. She started to push herself to her feet, and stopped as something pricked her ankle. Heart sinking, she twisted and looked behind herself.
There, growing from the carpet like it was the most natural thing in the world, was a thorny rose briar. It had twisted partially around Sloane’s calf, the trailing end of it hovering just above her leg. Any question about what sort of narrative incursion she was dealing with died when she saw that briar. Lots of princess archetypes could make your carpet sprout flowers. Only one of them would go for full-on roses, and only one would do it this fast.
“Technically this is assault and Henry would tell me to verbally request that you not file a sexual harassment claim against me,” she said, turning back to Priya. “Honestly, I don’t give a shit. I just want you to wake up. Although you know, you’re pretty hot and all.” This, too, was part of the story. Sleeping Beauties liked declarations of love, or attraction, or just “damn, girl, look at that body” before they were kissed awake. Something about their story made it work better that way.
Sloane bent forward and pressed her lips against Priya’s. The unconscious woman was wearing menthol-flavored lip gloss, and when Sloane pulled back, she didn’t open her eyes. Sloane swore and checked the other woman’s pulse. It was still slow and steady, showing no signs that her kiss had even registered.
“True love, lacking,” she muttered. “Fucking variations.” Not every Sleeping Beauty required true love, thank God, or the world would have been ass-deep in sleeping princesses. Unfortunately, it didn’t change the fact that Sloane was still ass-deep in sleeping princesses.
Moving carefully now, Sloane reached back to untwine the briar from her ankle before she stood and started back across the bullpen to her team. More rose briars had sprouted from the carpet between them, making her footing treacherous. None of them were blooming yet. She couldn’t remember whether that was a good sign or a bad one. This would have been so much easier if Jeff had been the one who’d stayed awake.
But Jeff definitely wasn’t awake. He had fallen on the floor between two of the desks, knocking his glasses askew and trapping an arm under his body at an angle that would probably cause him a lot of pain when he woke up if she didn’t do something about it. The skinny bastard was easy enough to hoist into a chair. Sloane only hesitated for a second before wheeling it over to park next to Henry, propping Jeff’s head on the pale woman’s shoulder. “There—you’re finally sleeping together,” she said, a gallows grin on her face.
Henry’s story hadn’t saved her from falling under the Sleeping Beauty’s spell either. That was an interesting narrative collision that would probably delight the geeks in the Archives, once they were all awake again. There had been potential Snow Whites caught in a Sleeping Beauty’s event horizon before, but never a fully active one.
Sloane looked at the pair for a few more seconds before she moved on to check on Andy, Demi, and Gerry. All three of them were sleeping peacefully, and since they had passed out while seated, she was saved from scooping anyone else off the floor. She paused to remove the gun from Andy’s belt, pulling back the slide to check that it was loaded. She wasn’t supposed to carry a weapon while at the Bureau—something about her semi-Wicked Stepsister status making her a safety hazard—but under the circumstances, she didn’t think she could be blamed. She started to turn away, hesitated, then put down the gun and bent to remove her shoes. Platform heels were great for cutting an imposing figure and stomping your way through life, but they weren’t exactly conducive to stealth, or to traversing an actively growing briar patch.
Gun clutched in her hand, Sloane padded on stocking-clad feet toward the hall.
#
The snow was falling more heavily than I’d ever seen, coating my face and body before I could push myself upright and wipe it out of my eyes. A frantic look around confirmed what the snowfall had already tried to tell me: I was in the whiteout wood, surrounded by the black skeleton trees. The other Snow Whites stood in the spaces between them, their hands folded and their expressions filled with a strange sorrow that I almost understood.
“What’s going on?” I demanded, spinning around. Tanya was behind me, that same sadness hanging heavy in her eyes. “Why am I here? I’m not sleeping!”
“Maybe not on purpose, but you’re asleep all right,” said the dairy princess, shaking her head. “Didn’t you feel the curse take you down?”
“Glass coffin time,” confirmed the Japanese girl. “You should have watched what you put in your mouth.”
“I didn’t eat anything,” I insisted. “I was at my desk, prepping for the day, when this woman walked in—” I stopped, eyes widening. “Oh, hell. We have a four-ten.”
The Snow Whites looked at me blankly. I resisted the urge to groan.
“A Sleeping Beauty came into my office and collapsed,” I explained. “That’s why I’m asleep. I didn’t eat any apples or use any poisoned combs. I’m not supposed to be here.”
“Then why are you here?” asked Tanya. “If you weren’t meant to be here, you wouldn’t be. That’s not how the forest works.”
The silent woman with the gray freckles on her nose looked suddenly alarmed, her hands flashing in a question I couldn’t understand. The Japanese girl frowned, a flicker of concern sliding across her own face as she turned to Tanya and said, “Adrianna.”
That one word—that one name—had a galvanizing effect on my guide. She swore in French as she lunged forward and grabbed me, yanking me out of my patch of snow and into hers. “Everyone, check the boundaries; make sure that nothing’s melting,” she snapped. “Close any lines you find.” The Snow Whites nodded and scattered, so many black and white birds flying into the whiteout wood like magpies in search of something to scavenge.
In a matter of seconds, only I, Tanya, the Japanese girl, and the silent woman remained.
“Uh, does someone want to tell me what’s going on here?” I asked, trying to pull my arm out of Tanya’s grip. It didn’t work. For a dead woman, she had incredibly strong hands. “What does Adrianna have to do with anything?”
“She’ll steal you if we don’t stop her,” said the Japanese girl. I looked at her blankly. She shot an accusing glance at Tanya. “I thought you were mentoring the new girl?”
“I am, but she doesn’t sleep much,” said Tanya wearily. “We’ve barely managed to get through the causes of coma.”
“Not helpful,” said the Japanese girl, while the silent woman’s hands flashed and dove in what I could only assume was an angry screed against Tanya’s priorities. Turning on me, the Japanese girl said, “Hi. My name was Ayane before it got changed to Snow White. My friend here,” she indicated the silent woman, “was Judi. She didn’t die when she fell into her coma, but she got trapped here because one of our restless sisters used the wood to take her body over.”
My eyes widened. “That can happen?”
“What, you think every Snow White wants to go back into her story? Some of us choose to stay here. Some of us don’t. Judi didn’t.” Ayane shrugged. “She’s still a little angry about that.”
Judi chose that moment to use an angry sign that I didn�
��t need to know any ASL to understand.
“Don’t frighten the girl,” said Tanya. “Henry, it’s going to be fine. Adrianna can’t take your body if she can’t get to you.”
“But she’s gotten to me a bunch of times,” I said. “She stabbed me in the chest the first time we met!”
“You weren’t in an enchanted sleep then,” said Ayane. “As long as you wake up before she finds you, you’ll be fine.”
“And what are the odds of that?” I demanded.
None of them would answer me.
I stood in the whiteout wood, snow falling around us like a curtain, and wondered whether I was ever going to make it home.
#
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 410 (“Sleeping Beauty”)
Status: ACTIVE
The hallway was choked with bodies. One of the other field teams had apparently been returning to the office when Priya collapsed; they were strewn about like broken toys. An open cat carrier was lying on the ground next to their driver. Sloane gave it a wide berth. The trouble with Cheshire Cats was the way they could lurk in shadows, and she wasn’t in the mood to be scratched with psychotropic claws just at the moment.
Dispatch was just as bad as the bullpen and the hall. Everyone was asleep, ignoring the strident beeping from their phones and computers. Sloane stalked silently through, grateful for the noise. Anything that could give her a little bit more cover was welcome, considering the circumstances.
She was reaching for the door that would lead her out of Dispatch to the lobby when she heard the voices. Immediately, she stiffened, backed up, and started looking for a place to hide. There wasn’t one. This was Dispatch, the cleanest, most open space in the building. She was trapped.
When the door swung open less than half a minute later, Sloane was facedown on the floor, her feet mostly concealed beneath the nearest desk. She wasn’t sure it looked like a natural fall, but it was the best she could do under the circumstances. Please don’t stop to check my pulse, she thought. Please just keep walking.
A familiar peal of laughter struck her like a dagger in her chest, followed by an even more familiar voice saying smugly, “That’s one down—mark it off. Now we just need to find the others, and we’ll be safely in business.”
Sloane remained where she was as she listened to the footsteps cross Dispatch and fade into silence. Even when they were gone she kept still, counting silently down from one hundred before she lifted her head and looked around the motionless room.
Birdie was back.
“Fuck this,” said Sloane, and bounced to her feet, stalking onward to the lobby.
#
Stillness had fallen across the whiteout wood once again as the four of us waited for Adrianna’s attack. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other before blurting, “What makes you so sure she’s going to come for me? Maybe she’ll leave me alone.”
“You’re in a coma, and that makes you a doorway,” said Tanya. “Doorways have gotten rarer as the story has adjusted to a world with less magic and more consequences; we have to seize them when we can. Dreamers aren’t doorways. Neither are the dead. She wants out of here. She doesn’t like the way we run things, and you’re the best chance she’s had at an escape in a very long time.”
“Besides, taking you over would make her an ATI agent,” said Ayane. “Do you have any idea how much damage she could do if she had one of those badges?”
Judi’s hands flashed and danced. No one translated for her. I had to wonder how frustrating that was, to be trapped forever in a forest full of people who should have been your sisters, but who didn’t make any effort to give you a voice.
“If I get out of here, I’m signing up for an after-work ASL class,” I muttered. Louder, I said, “I’m assuming a lot. She’d have access to our files, to our records … to everything.” And how long would it take for the others to realize that something was wrong? I’d always held myself mostly apart from everyone who wasn’t directly on my team. She probably wouldn’t be able to fool Jeff or Sloane for very long, but Andy? Demi? She could play them like fiddles, as long as she moved quickly and didn’t look behind herself.
“So we keep you safe,” said Tanya firmly. “Our story is not going to be the one that brings down the monomyth.”
“What?” I asked.
“Haven’t you heard the word before? The monomyth? Basic pattern at the heart of all the other stories? Some people say it’s the hero’s journey, but that’s too simplistic.”
“It’s too complicated, too,” interrupted Ayane. “The monomyth is the story that’s managed to win. The one that beat up all the other stories and sent them crying home to Mommy without their schoolbooks and lunch money.”
Unpleasant realization dawned. “You’re talking about reality.”
“Of course we are, dummy,” said Ayane, giving me a sidelong look. “What, you thought that one story was somehow more real than all the others, just because it’s the one that has the most people living in it? Shit, if it worked that way, all the narratives would focus on quantity over quality, and we’d be buried under something featuring rabbits. What we think of as reality is just the tale type that took over longest ago. The others keep fighting back.”
I stared at her as the snow fell all around us. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
#
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 410 (“Sleeping Beauty”)
Status: ACTIVE
A pathway had been hacked through the briars choking the lobby. Peering into the tangle of thorns and branches, Sloane could see the security guards who had been on duty when Priya was smuggled inside. They were sleeping soundly—or at least she hoped that they were sleeping. One of the guards had blood on his collar, and from what she could see, those thorns weren’t being too careful about where they grew. If his jugular had been pierced …
If the thorns had grown into a major artery, he was already a dead man, and there was nothing she could do for him. Sloane crept along the makeshift path until she could see out the door, wincing as wayward thorns dug into the soles of her feet. Birdie had left two men guarding the sidewalk, their sleekly tailored black suits making them look like they belonged at the Bureau. Sloane didn’t recognize either one of them though … and that was a good thing. She didn’t want to think about Birdie having too many people on the inside.
“What are you doing there?”
The voice from behind her wasn’t familiar, but it was male, and it was angry. Sloane stayed where she was, sinking a little deeper into her stance as she braced herself.
“Did you not hear me, or are you stupid?” A heavy hand landed on her shoulder.
Sloane moved.
Someone who had never seen her in the field couldn’t have been blamed for thinking that a woman of her height and generally curvaceous build would be slow, even ineffective in hand-to-hand combat. Anyone who thought Sloane couldn’t fight would have been quickly disillusioned by watching her in the lobby as she twisted, uncurled, and sprang.
Her fingers found her assailant’s wrist before she even started to turn, pulling him forward as she rolled her weight onto one hip and pivoted on her left foot, effectively flipping him over her shoulder into the thorns. As soon as he fell, she was driving the heel of her right foot down on his instep—not as effective a move as it would have been had she been wearing shoes, but the combination of her weight driving down onto his boot and her grip on his fingers left him briefly incapacitated from the pain. That was good enough.
Sloane pushed back one more time before she drove her elbow up into his jaw, snapping his head back into the thorns. This time he tried to scream, only to find her right hand smashing his mouth shut while her left hand gripped his nose and yanked his head hard to the side. There was a small, almost inconsequential snapping sound, and the man stopped fighting.
“Asshole,” Sloane muttered, straightening up. Birdie would realize that she was down a man soon; if they were patrolling th
e building looking for people who hadn’t been caught by their Sleeping Beauty, they’d probably be doing it in pairs. She needed to move.
He had a gun clipped to his waist. He’d been so sure that he couldn’t possibly be overwhelmed by a lone woman that he hadn’t even bothered to open his holster.
“Amateur asshole,” Sloane amended, and took the gun, retreating with it back into the building. She needed backup, and she needed it now.
#
“When’s the last time Adrianna got out of the wood?” I asked suddenly.
Tanya stiffened. Ayane frowned. And Judi burst into a gale of silent laughter, her hands moving in patterns I didn’t need interpreted for me. I crossed my arms.
“You weren’t planning to tell me that she’d managed to escape before, were you?” I demanded. “You were just going to let me think that this was business as usual when you had a potentially open doorway. What’s her deal?”
“Adrianna wants to replace the monomyth,” said Ayane finally, earning herself a bitter glare from Tanya. She shrugged. “What? New girl knows that something’s up, and it’s not like we can hide Princess Crazy-pants and her world revision brigade forever.”
I frowned. “Wait—brigade? That implies that she has help.”
Judi’s hands flashed as she directed a pointed look at Tanya. I turned. The other whiteout woman was red-cheeked and looked ashamed.
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