“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked softly, and my words fell between us like snowflakes, one more layer of accusation and betrayal lain at the foot of this damned, impossible forest. I couldn’t stay here much longer. I wasn’t safe. I never had been.
“Most of the ones who go bad are sealed away for our own protection,” said Tanya, choosing her words with care. “We lock them in the mirrors. Sometimes they figure out a way to communicate despite their situations, and they whisper in the ears of anyone who will listen. They reach out. They … influence.”
I blinked at her, a piece of the endless puzzle of my existence snapping into sudden clarity. “That’s where the magic mirror entered the story, isn’t it? It was all simple poisons and jealousy once, until suddenly there was real magic, and everything changed.”
“We didn’t mean to shift the narrative,” said Tanya.
“We never do,” I replied. “So every magic mirror is a Snow White gone wrong. All of them, all the way back to the beginning?”
Tanya didn’t answer me, but Judi nodded, tugging Ayane’s sleeve before her hands flashed and flew like milk-white birds. Ayane signed something back, a frown on her face. Judi nodded. Ayane turned to me.
“Some of the mirrors are other stories, but most are ours,” she said. “That was part of the codification process for our narrative.”
“And the Bureau doesn’t know.” I glanced desperately around. The snow was still falling heavily, and between that and the black trunks of the trees surrounding us, there was no way I’d be able to pick Adrianna out of the wood. If she was coming, she was coming. “There’s something this major about one of the most common narratives, and the Bureau doesn’t know.”
“There’s something major about every narrative that the Bureau doesn’t know,” said Ayane. “That’s the nature of stories. No one ever gets to know the entire thing. We just get to know the parts we have to deal with right here, right now. Before they rip our throats out.”
The snow was falling even harder. I was starting to be afraid—really afraid—that I was going to die here. I was starting to be even more afraid that I wasn’t going to die at all.
#
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 410 (“Sleeping Beauty”)
Status: ACTIVE
Sloane left bloody footprints through Dispatch, a clear sign to Birdie and her minions that someone in the building was up and about. It couldn’t be helped. She’d make too much noise if she put her boots back on, and the first aid kit in the break room wasn’t extensive enough to stop the bleeding. She kept her head down and moved quickly, her stolen gun held out in front of her the way she’d seen a hundred action heroes hold their weapons. That wasn’t her narrative. It was still pretty damn powerful in this modern world, and maybe that would work for her. Maybe some kid was already dreaming up a Cinderella remix with guerilla fighters in place of stepsisters, and she could tap into that sweet vein of potential story.
It was funny, in a twisted sort of way. Sloane Winters—not her original name, not by a long shot—had been with the Bureau longer than anyone really knew, held in a permanent teenage dream by the story that didn’t want to let her go. As long as she didn’t pour the poisoned cup for anyone, time couldn’t touch her. That meant she’d had longer to practice her arts than anyone ever wanted to give her credit for, and longer to learn how to feel the edges of the narrative, what it was doing, what it was growing into. The war fantasies of her childhood had matured into the spy dreams of her second adolescence, and now the male power games of the modern day. They were all part of the narrative, if she dug down deep enough, and if she was willing to let them finally have her.
Sloane liked being her own woman. She liked being alive even more. So she crept through the building and thought of ninjas, of barbarians, of anything that might give her just that little extra added edge.
One of Birdie’s men was in the hall between Dispatch and the bullpen. Sloane didn’t hesitate before whipping her stolen gun hard against the side of his head and then, when he crumpled into an insensate heap, pulling the knife from inside one of her striped stockings and opening his throat in a gleaming ear-to-ear smile.
Something giggled behind her. She turned to see the tabby-striped cat slink out of the shadows, tail held down low and an all-too-human grin distorting otherwise perfectly animal features. The cat—or Cat, as was more appropriate—couldn’t take its eyes off Sloane’s latest kill.
“Hello, kitty,” she said softly, crouching down. “I was hoping I’d run into you. Do you want to make a deal with me?”
The Cat giggled again, slinking closer still.
Sloane struck like a snake, her hand grasping the back of the Cat’s neck and pulling it close to her before it could respond. She held it in front of her face, forcing it to look at her, and said, “I’ll kill them for you, if you’ll loan me your stripes for just a little while. Think about it. These men are just like the ones who brought you here. They don’t care about the tea parties or the topiary. They don’t care about Alice. Poor little Alice, all alone with no one to take care of her. You don’t want that, do you?”
The Cheshire Cat blinked, smile fading as the thought percolated through its simple feline mind. If it was here, and Alice was not here, then Alice was unprotected. An unprotected Alice was an Alice in danger, because Alices were foolish things that never knew how fragile they really were. An unprotected Alice might get hurt. The Cat’s ears flattened against its skull, and it made a small, querulous sound.
“Give me your stripes, and we can save her,” said Sloane. “All you need to do is trust me.”
The Cat meowed. Sloane sighed, looking put-upon.
“Yes, I swear by the red and the white that I’ll give them back to you. I don’t need to be a Cheshire Wicked Stepsister, I just need to be a Cheshire girl who isn’t dead.” She tucked her gun into her waistband and lifted the hand that wasn’t holding the Cat, turning her palm outward. “You can trust me, or you can leave Alice to the jabberwocks and borogroves. It’s up to you.”
The Cat lashed its tail. The Cat growled, deep and low and dangerous in its throat. And the Cat slashed its claws across Sloane’s palm, cutting deep into the flesh. She hissed and dropped the Cat, falling from her crouch onto her ass. She hissed again when her butt hit the floor, somehow managing to swallow the urge to yell. Blood welled up in the scratches the Cat had left across her palm—and then shadow-gray stripes began to slither up her arm like snakes, spreading until they covered her entire body.
Sloane watched the march of stripes with wide, solemn eyes, looking momentarily like an Alice herself: younger than she should have been, older than any child should ever need to be. Then she shook off her surprise and bowed her head to the Cat, which was grinning again as it licked her blood from its claws.
“Thank you,” she said. “Now hide yourself. These aren’t people that you want to have interfering with you.”
The Cat yawned, displaying a full array of razor-sharp teeth. Then it vanished, leaving nothing behind it but the smile.
“I’ll probably regret losing sight of you later, you little creep,” murmured Sloane. She stood, watching her own shadow-striped arm as it began to blur into the background.
Once she was on her feet she froze, holding perfectly still while the Cat’s borrowed camouflage worked its magic. Less than a minute later she turned, and a Sloane-shaped shadow slunk toward the bullpen, leaving only the dead man on the floor to mark her passing.
#
Someone tugged on my arm. I turned to find Judi standing too close for comfort, a pleading expression in her overly blue eyes. She moved her hands in a quick, almost perfunctory motion. I shook my head.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t speak ASL.”
Judi frowned and moved her hands again.
“Neither did most of the girls when they first came here,” said Ayane. “I was a translator—amusement parks, concerts. Judi beat me to the wood by almost twent
y years, and before I arrived, she was lucky if anyone realized she was talking.”
Judi flipped her off. I laughed.
“Okay, that sign I know,” I said.
“It’s pretty universal,” Ayane agreed. She signed something back to Judi, who nodded. Ayane frowned. This time, it took longer for her to sign her message—whatever that message was. “I’m sort of stuck here. As a translator, it was my job to relay what my clients were saying, regardless of how I felt about it. As a Snow White, I’m supposed to listen to the wood before I listen to the other girls.”
I froze. “What?”
Judi signed something frantically. Ayane sighed.
“The wood talks. Haven’t you heard it whispering? It tells you to let the Snow White side of yourself get stronger, because she’s older and wiser than you are, she’s been here before, she’ll keep you from making mistakes that you’ll regret later.” Ayane shook her head. “Judi can’t hear it. It’s not … smart the way a person is smart, you know?”
“Be quiet,” hissed Tanya.
Ayane ignored her. “It doesn’t adjust the way it approaches people just because its usual tactics don’t work on them. So it whispers to Judi constantly, and she can’t hear it, and she spends a lot of time frustrated with the rest of us over the things that we can’t say.”
“Oh,” I said, slow realization dawning. “And there are things that you can’t say, is that it?”
Ayane nodded silently.
“Well, it seems to me that if you’re translating for Judi, you’re not saying them. You’re just doing your job as a translator—and your duty as a part of the same story. We’re here because we’re supposed to learn from each other, right? Well, what does it say about us as a narrative if we shut Judi out just because she can’t hear us? That’s not fair. We have to let all our Snow White sisters participate.” I felt like a snake oil salesman, peddling a bill of goods that wasn’t actually good for anyone.
It seemed to work, at least. Ayane smiled, a relieved expression peeking through her frown as she turned back to Judi and signed something, hands flying too fast for me to follow. Judi signed back, and for a moment the world narrowed down to the two of them: Judi explaining what she wanted Ayane to say; Ayane making sure she understood.
A hand caught my arm. This time when I turned, it was Tanya who was looking at me with concern. Snowflakes were caught in her bangs, unmelting. Had we really all become so cold? “She’s not going to say anything you should want to hear,” said Tanya earnestly. “All she’s going to do is make it harder for you to accept what you are, and to accept that you belong here.”
“I thought you were supposed to be teaching me,” I said, pulling my arm out of her grasp. “Wasn’t that what you promised me that you were going to do?”
“I have been teaching you,” she protested. “I haven’t told you any lies, and I haven’t withheld any information that you genuinely needed to have.”
“You didn’t tell me the forest talked to us!”
“I thought you knew,” she said, with a shrug. “All the rest of us figured it out eventually, although some of us had to do it more on our own than others. The oldest Snows don’t come out of their clearings anymore. They stand and talk to the forest, and the forest talks back to them, and that’s all they really need out of the world. I think—no, I know—that there were white-skinned, black-haired girls before those Snow Whites came to the wood, and that they are the wood now, and someday we’ll all be the wood, and we’ll talk to the girls who come here after us. We’ll tell them not to be afraid.”
I stared at her. “But you told me to break the narrative. To end the story.”
“Yes, and we meant it. We’re tired of being a parasite on the monomyth. But there will always be girls who find their way here, even if they don’t know the name ‘Snow White.’ Places like this don’t die. They just get repurposed to serve a different storyteller.”
“Henry?” Ayane sounded more hesitant than she ever had before. I turned toward her. Judi was standing with one hand on the shorter woman’s shoulder, like she was afraid that if she let go, Ayane would turn and run into the trees, rather than delivering her message. “Judi has something she wants to tell you.”
“I’d really love to hear what Judi has to say,” I said.
Ayane took a deep breath and said, “‘The forest speaks to the girls who find their way here. It tells them not to be afraid, because this is the place that comes after fear, and that’s good; some of us were afraid for far too long in our lives before. But it also tells them to be good and to be patient and to wait for their Prince to come. It makes them weak if they listen for too long. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you? It’s talking to you now.’”
“How?” I asked, directing my word to Judi. Ayane echoed it with a gesture.
Judi nodded and signed back, saying something that must have been fairly complicated, since it involved both arms and most of her upper body. It was beautiful, like watching someone dance their way through a paragraph.
“‘It talks through the snow,’” said Ayane. “‘The snowflakes are words, the blizzard is its voice. You can hear it if you listen closely, but you shouldn’t listen, and you shouldn’t stand still when the snow is falling, or it will tell you things you shouldn’t hear. It makes you soft. It makes you scared. Why are you still standing here? You aren’t the kind of woman who stands and waits to be protected, but that’s what you’re doing, because the forest wants you to do it. It wants Adrianna to take you. It doesn’t like having her here—she’s a disruption, she makes things dark and frightening, and so it wants her to go away, even if it has to sacrifice you to accomplish that.’”
I stared at her for a moment before I turned back to Judi and asked, “What should I do?”
She made a small, declarative gesture with her hands. I barely needed Ayane’s translation: “‘Run.’”
#
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 410 (“Sleeping Beauty”)
Status: ACTIVE
Sloane slipped into the room the way a knife slips into a wound: silently, and with the potential to do a lot of damage to anything that happened to get in her way. Birdie and her people were standing next to Henry’s desk, digging through an open file drawer and piling its contents carelessly atop the nearest desk. Sloane gritted her teeth and forced herself to hold her ground.
Birdie was down to two men inside, both of them larger and stronger-looking than Sloane herself. That was fine: that just meant they’d put up a decent fight before she put them down. Most of her attention was reserved for Birdie herself. The ex-dispatcher was still short, plump, and crowned with a corona of fluffy blonde hair, but there was an air of menace about her that Sloane had never noticed before. Birdie was playing the villain, finally, and she was loving every second of it.
Sloane hadn’t been sure up until that moment that she would be able to kill someone who she used to work with. Looking at Birdie gloating over Henry’s motionless body, she stopped worrying about whether she’d be able to get the job done.
Killing her would be easy.
“How long is this spell supposed to last?” asked one of the men, looking anxiously toward the briar-wrapped body of Priya Patel.
“A better question would be ‘how long is our protection from the spell supposed to last,’” said Birdie. “Now that she’s out, our Sleeping Beauty will slumber for a hundred years, or until she’s awakened by true love’s kiss. She’s actually manifesting brambles. That’s not common anymore; I blame the narrative concentration in this building, since it warps the laws of reality in some very exciting ways. Anyway, no one expects a thorn hedge to have a chewy princess center anymore. I doubt anyone’s going to fight their way to her rescue. She’ll sleep the full century, and die of old age five minutes after she finally wakes up.”
The man frowned at Birdie. “You mean you’re not kidding about this fairy tale mumbo jumbo?”
“You’re asking me that
now, after everything that we had to go through to reach this point? Oh, my dear hired goon.” Birdie actually reached up and patted the much taller man on the cheek, murmuring, “The ability that humans have to block out what’s actually happening around them will never fail to astonish me,” in a tone that implied she was speaking to no one in particular. Then she sharpened, and continued, “Yes, dearie, all that ‘fairy tale mumbo jumbo’ is real, and we’re going to help it become even more real, because once the rules of the world are rewritten into something more … pliant … people like me and our benefactor will be as gods.”
“What about us?” asked the other man.
Birdie looked at him coolly. “As long as you continue following orders, you’ll be the ones that the gods look upon with favor. Now pick up those files. Some of what we came here to get is missing. We need to check the deputy director’s office.”
“So what about them?” asked the first man, indicating Henry and the others with the back of his hand.
Sloane tensed. She didn’t want to blow her camouflage yet, but if she had to, then she had to. She was capable of a lot of things. Under the right circumstances, she was even capable of murder. What she wasn’t capable of was standing idly by while a demented Mother Goose archetype told her hired goons to wipe out the only family that Sloane had left. If anyone was going to kill Sloane’s team, it was going to be Sloane.
Birdie sniffed dismissively. “It smells like apples in here, didn’t you notice?” she said. “The little tart decided to go full-on fairy tale in order to fight me, and she failed. I know where she is now. Killing her would be a mercy, and I’m not feeling very merciful.”
“So we leave them?” asked the man.
“We leave them,” Birdie confirmed. “Come on.”
Sloane tensed again as the trio turned to go. If they took the hall that connected to Dispatch, they’d see her handiwork soon enough; not even a Cheshire Cat could hide that much evidence that someone was awake and fighting back. Luckily, Birdie started instead for the door at the back of the bullpen that would lead her to Deputy Director Brewer’s office. Sloane didn’t know what he would have there that was so important, and she didn’t care. She just cared about getting back to her people and waking them the fuck up before she ran out of tricks.
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