Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) (6 page)

We came around the final corner to find Sloane, now wearing a crystal-beaded ball gown and elbow-length gloves, slamming the face of a man in full livery against the prison wall. He was struggling, trying to grab hold of her as she battered him. He was also not completely human: large mouse ears topped his head, and a pink tail hung from the seat of his pants. Three more of the mouse-men were down, one with a hole in the middle of his chest that could probably be ascribed to the guard who was backed against the opposing wall, eyes wide and service weapon trembling in his hands. Several of the cell doors were open, making it impossible to tell whether we were dealing with more than one escapee.

“Mouse footmen,” I said, voice somewhere between a whisper and a sigh. Cinderella’s story wasn’t mine, wasn’t even a close cousin, but I knew the trappings, and a corner of my treacherous princess heart yearned for them every night when I closed my eyes. “Fuck. Watch out for pumpkins.”

“What?” said Andy.

“Got it,” said Jeff.

“I don’t know what to do,” said Demi. She looked from the fight to me, eyes wide. “What do I do?”

For once, I had an easy answer. “The narrative has them, and it’s turning them into things it can use, but it didn’t count on you, did it?” I leaned closer, like that could keep the looming story from guessing what was about to happen, and whispered, “They’re still rodents.”

Demi lit up like happy ever after. “Cover your ears,” she said, and pulled out her flute.

“Sloane!” I shouted, clapping my hands over my ears as instructed. “Get some quiet!”

Sloane glanced my way, startled. Then she nodded and slammed her mouse-man against the wall harder than ever, so hard that he stopped fighting back and collapsed at her feet when she released his collar. She put the heels of her hands over her ears and took a step backward, skirts swishing.

It wasn’t just her, I realized. All three guards were now wearing fancier versions of their uniforms, with gold brocade around the shoulders and cuffs, and diamond buttons in place of their previous brass. Somehow, whatever route Elise had used to escape, she had left her stolen story behind—and it was on the attack.

And I’d walked straight into it. The realization was almost sickening. This was a princess story, and like it or not, I was a princess. If Demi couldn’t pipe it away, we might have a problem.

The first note of Demi’s rat-charming song trilled through the air, high and pure and only slightly muffled by my hands. That little bit of protection was enough: I didn’t feel any urge to start dancing. The mouse-men weren’t so lucky. All the ones who weren’t dead or unconscious started to waltz, first toward Demi, and then toward the door to an open cell. She took a step forward, upping the tempo, and their dance turned frantic, the mouse-men all but falling over one another in their hurry to get into the cell. More of them kept appearing, either from farther down the hall or out of the other open cells. She was gathering them all together. That was good.

A hand grabbed my arm. I looked back to see Jeff, who had uncovered one ear, holding me. I scowled at him. He let go.

“Your jacket!” he shouted.

I looked down.

I always wear black and white suits. Not because I have a
Men in Black
obsession, although tapping into the modern narrative of the faceless, interchangeable government agents had come in handy more than once. I do it because as a storybook princess, if I give the narrative anything to seize on, color-wise, it can get me into trouble. There are lots of stories about girls in green, or pretty red gowns that catch fire when the light hits them just right. Black and white are only princess colors when they’re talking about skin and hair.

Apparently, when the narrative gets rolling strongly enough, color ceases to matter. The buttons on my blazer had been replaced by diamonds, and silver brocade was starting to creep up from the bottom, giving me the distinct appearance of having been frosted.

“Shit,” I swore, and didn’t take my hands off my ears.

The mouse-men had stopped appearing from the rooms around us. Demi kept playing as she advanced on the open cell door. With a final loud trill she sent the mouse-men crashing to the rear of the cell, and slammed the door, locking them inside. One of the guards hurried to lock the door, and she stopped playing, lowering her flute.

A fine sheen of sweat stood out on her forehead, and there was a light in her eyes that I didn’t see very often, bright and wild and slightly disconnected from everything around her. She looked like a marathon runner at the end of a race, half-drunk on adrenaline and not quite processing her surroundings yet. “Did I get them all?”

“Yeah,” said Sloane. “Didn’t get the frog coachman, though. He hopped off that way.” She hooked a thumb down the hall. “Not sure I give a fuck, as long as he doesn’t come back with a bazooka or something.”

“Nice dress,” said Andy.

“Screw you,” said Sloane. “At least the story didn’t get my boots. These things are expensive.”

Squinting at Sloane’s ball gown, I could see the outlines of her original clothes. It wasn’t a black dress, probably because the graphic on her T-shirt had included blue and purple, and had given the story something to work with. She looked like something out of a Broadway revival of
Cinderella
, all ruffles and lace and unlikely quantities of rhinestones—although given the strength of the narrative in question, they might just be diamonds. More than one fairy-tale princess had been able to fund her escape after she started spitting rubies or turning everything she touched into gold.

“Ever seen a three-fifteen go infectious like this?” I demanded. The guards, who had followed Sloane into the prison before I was even out of the car, turned to look at me. I flashed my badge at them. “Agent Henrietta Marchen, ATI Management Bureau. I’m Agent Winters’s superior officer. Somebody want to answer my question?”

“We had her filed as a three-fifteen—that’s why she was on the outside of the ring—but the narrative she’s manifesting is a five-ten-a,” said one of the guards. “That’s why we didn’t realize what was happening until someone saw a mouse run into her cell.”

“Don’t you have someone monitoring the mice in here?” I asked. The question sounded as bad outside my head as it had sounded inside. There was still a reason for it. So many stories depend on the movement of rats, mice, and other vermin that it’s a miracle the ATI Management Bureau decided to become a government agency rather than an extermination firm. Kill all the rats and half a dozen stories will have to shift away, just because they won’t have anything to latch on to.

“We had a resident five-four-five-b up until recently,” said one of the guards. “She’s been reassigned to a field team on the East Coast. They lost their active in an ogre incident, and started pulling from the prison staff.”

“I see.” A five-four-five-b was a Puss in Boots: ideal for keeping track of the vermin inside of the prison. But field teams needed their actives as much as the prison did—maybe even more. Actives were better equipped to spot a story as it was getting started, and before it could do any serious damage. Most of the time, HR tried to limit field teams to one, maybe two actives, but all had at least one.

My team had four, or maybe three and a half, depending on how you wanted to look at Sloane. Suddenly, I found myself worrying about what was going to happen when someone in HR decided that we’d be more valuable to the Bureau if we were all assisting different teams.

That was a concern for another day. “Okay, we have ball gowns and formal jackets growing like kudzu, we have mouse-men and a frog person who we’re not worrying about right now; what else are we looking at?”

“Here,” said one of the guards, and beckoned for me to follow him over to an open cell door. I did, poking my head through to see what he was trying to show me. Then I grimaced.

“All right, that’s not good,” I said.

Elise’s cell—because only it could have been ground zero for this particular narrative outbreak; nothing else explained the density of changes inside—had been transformed into a virtual pumpkin patch. Vines snaked up the walls, clinging to the stone so tightly that they had started to break it down in places. Heavy orange, yellow, and necrotic-green gourds studded the floor, which had become heavy loam. One wall was missing, revealing a hole that ran through several rings of the prison to the distant outdoors.

In case that wasn’t decisive enough, there was a single glass slipper in the middle of the room. It wasn’t the classical “dancing shoe”: it was a plain slip-on, with lines and ripples that showed its origin as a standard-issue canvas sneaker. No laces, of course, those were considered a suicide risk. Just impossible glass.

“She must have left this on purpose,” said the guard, stepping into the room and reaching for the shoe. “Shoes like this don’t fall off your feet. They’re designed to be tight enough—”

The narrative tensed around me. I realized what was about to happen a split second too late. “Don’t touch that!” I shouted, lunging forward to grab his arm.

Sloane grabbed mine instead, pulling me up short a few inches shy of the guard, who had just touched the glass slipper. He started screaming instantly. He stopped almost as quickly, when the transformation that had started with his fingertips finished racing up his body, leaving a solid glass statue in its place.

“Get back, get back,
get back
!” she howled, dragging me out of the cell and slamming the door. The sound of the guard’s frozen body exploding echoed down the hall. I peeked cautiously up at the small viewport set in the cell door. Glass shards protruded from everything inside, and from the nearest walls of the hall on the other side of the hole.

“Nobody touches those,” snapped Sloane. “Cinderella’s mother was a cedar tree in a lot of variations, so cedar won’t turn to glass; get some cedar tongs from Munitions and use them to collect the shards. If you touch them, you’re fucked. So don’t touch them.”

The two surviving guards stared at her, clearly too shocked to fully understand what had just happened. The woman stepped forward and asked, “Is Carl . . . ?”

“He’s dead,” snapped Sloane. “Be glad. If he was still alive, he’d be a living mass of contagious glass shards, and that sort of thing never does anything good for anybody.”

“I have never heard of a Cinderella story doing this,” said Jeff.

Sloane looked at him tiredly. “That’s because the modern Archives are all about a world where she,” she pointed at me, “is the living embodiment of the most popular fairy tale in North America. Go back a century. Go back two. People used to be
way
more into Cinderella, because everybody wanted to believe that if they lived as the perfect Puritan princess, one day they’d get carried off to a castle. The Bureau was smaller then. More people lived in isolation, in little houses on the edge of the woods. Stories weaponized themselves a lot more frequently in those days, and five-ten-a was the most dangerous of a bad lot. Snow Whites will freeze your heart. Cinderellas will make sure you never make a mess again.”

“So how do we stop her?” asked Demi.

Sloane fixed her with a weary look. “We find her. We shoot her. We bury her on unhallowed ground, and we never speak her name again, ever, for as long as we live.”

The rest of us stared silently at Sloane, briefly unified in our shock. Sloane shook her head.

“Come on,” she said. “If there’s any chance she’s still in this prison, we need to find her.”

# # #

The prison’s ring system worked against us as we tried to backtrack along Elise’s path. We couldn’t go straight through her cell due to the glass shards everywhere, but getting to the other side necessitated going back through the doors of thorns and sticks, making a hard left, and going through a door of bones. The guards had keys that would dispel any of the doors with a touch—convenient. They still slowed us down. Sloane was swearing steadily by the time we got to the second ring.

Her swearing increased in volume, speed, and variety when she saw the glass vines that had grown across the hallway into the next cell, making the area effectively impassable. “Fuck my life,” she said, when the first flush of anger had passed. “They’re still growing.”

“How is that possible?” demanded a guard. “Carl exploded, and all he did was touch that damn shoe.”

“He wasn’t part of the story.” Sloane bent to study a vine, careful not to touch it. “Until we get this out of here, we’re not going to be able to follow her.”

“I have an idea,” said Jeff. We all turned to look at him. He had his phone out, and there was a piece of sheet music visible on the screen. “Demi, remember when we were looking at songs that could move liquid?”

“Yes,” she said, sounding like she didn’t much like where this was going. I couldn’t blame her.

“You were managing it by the time we had to stop to work on something else,” Jeff continued.

“I was managing to move a spill back into a glass of water,” said Demi. “That’s not earthshaking.”

“It’s better than we’ve got. Glass is an amorphous solid, not a liquid, but for a long, long time, people
thought
glass was a liquid. The narrative says glass is a liquid.” Jeff’s eyes sparkled. He was getting excited. “All you need to do is tell the glass that it’s a liquid, and pipe it all back into Elise’s cell.”

“I don’t think I can—”

“You can,” I said, cutting off Demi’s protests. “If Jeff says you can, and you have your flute, you can do it. Now come on. Clear this path before she gets away for good.” Although that had almost certainly already happened. We’d been called when they realized she was gone: between the clearance issues, the mouse-men, and the exploding glass, Elise was probably nothing but a memory by now. I knew that. I also knew that if we could clean up the cursed glass, we had to do it. Otherwise, the whole prison could be contaminated, and we could lose a lot more than just one twisted Cinderella.

“Glass is a slow liquid, if it’s a liquid at all,” said Jeff, positioning his phone in front of Demi. “Play at half tempo, and you should be able to find a connection.”