Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) (7 page)

“Do we need to cover our ears?” asked Sloane.

“Not this time,” said Jeff. “She’s not playing for the living; she’s playing for the inanimate. It’s a different tune.”

Demi, who still looked uncertain, pulled out her flute as she squinted at Jeff’s phone. Then she nodded once, sharply, and began to play.

The song was sweet, haunting, and somehow elusive: I enjoyed it as I heard it, but as each note followed the next, the earlier parts of the piece seemed to vanish from my mind, wiped away by the progression. Demi kept her eyes on the phone screen for maybe eight bars. Then she closed them, playing from somewhere deep inside herself. It was beautiful. It was heartbreaking.

It was working.

Slowly—so slowly that if I looked directly at them, they didn’t seem to be moving at all, even as I could see them shift and twist out of the corner of my eye—the glass vines began to turn back on themselves, retracting toward Elise’s cell. The glass fragments embedded in the walls turned into fluid, rolling drops, moving like water until they came into contact with a larger drop or with a vine. Then they would merge together, continuing their motion all the while.

Sloane also closed her eyes. But she didn’t look transported: she looked pained, like something about the song hurt her. She stayed where she was, not shifting positions at all as the glass flowed around her. The rest of us dodged the moving glass, avoiding any contact with our clothes or skin. Sloane just trusted that it wouldn’t touch her, and it didn’t. I wasn’t sure whether that showed serenity or madness. I wasn’t going to ask.

Demi played and the glass moved, and the world held its breath. Then, with one final descending trill, she stopped and lowered her flute, opening her eyes as she turned to look around the glass-free hall. Slowly, she blinked.

“It worked,” said Demi.

“You’re
terrifying
,” breathed one of the guards.

Sloane’s eyes snapped open. She turned on the speaker, a manic, almost feral smile on her face, and said, “We all are. Demi’s just the one you’ve figured out that you need to be afraid of.” Then she turned and stalked through the hole in the wall, following Elise’s now glassless passage to the outside. The rest of us followed her.

There were no bodies in the halls we passed. There was no way to know for sure whether that was because no one had been killed, or whether it was because all of Elise’s victims had been turned to glass. I glanced to one of the surviving guards. He shook his head.

“I can’t raise half my men on the radio,” he said. “Maybe they’re alive and hiding, or maybe they exploded like Carl. It’ll be hours before we know for sure.” He looked like he’d been beaten, and I knew what he was expecting to find.

The final hole opened onto the grounds. Sloane was already there, stooping to examine the ground, looking awkward and regal at the same time in her transformed, jewel-encrusted ball gown. She looked around at the sound of our footsteps.

“Carriage tracks,” she said. “Elise came through here. She found a coach waiting for her. It went that way.” She straightened and pointed at the stone wall on the other side of the prison grounds. There were no breaks in the wall, no visible holes or other ways a carriage could have disappeared. The story the tracks told and the story the wall told were incompatible. That didn’t mean either one of them wasn’t true.

Sloane straightened and took off running without waiting for any of us to comment on what she’d found. She followed the tracks right to the wall, and we followed her, trying to stay close enough to help if she needed us. When I say “we,” I mean my team: the guards who had accompanied us outside hung back, apparently feeling that whatever was going on was outside of their pay grade.

I felt bad for them, I really did. Most of their days were probably calm and predictable and didn’t include exploding into glass shards. At the same time, I couldn’t really feel
sorry
for them. They had chosen to take jobs at the only prison in North America built to contain living stories. What had they been expecting?

Sloane was beating her fists against the wall when we caught up with her. Andy looked at me. I nodded, and he stepped forward, closing his hands around hers when she pulled back to swing again. She looked at him, eyes wide and startled and surprisingly young in her pale, pale face.

“Let me go,” she said, voice full of unspoken threats.

“Will you keep hitting the wall if I let you go?” he asked. “Because we sort of need you to keep having hands. It’s important to the team that you not break them into little bits.”

“She came through here,” said Sloane—but she wasn’t trying to pull away. That was reassuring. “She got into her carriage, and she came through here. Can’t you smell the sap and pumpkin guts in the air? This is how she got away.”

“It’s a solid wall now, Sloane,” said Andy.

Unsurprisingly, it was Jeff who realized what Sloane was trying to say first. “Dear Grimm,” he breathed. “Doors, doors—who makes doors? Alice, of course, but that’s such a recent story, it shouldn’t have this sort of power yet. Or there’s the Twelve Dancing Princesses. If one of them had come here to meet her . . .”

“They could have opened her a door straight through to the other side,” I said. “Sloane. She’s gone. We’ve lost her.”

Sloane twisted to look at me, her hands still engulfed by Andy’s. She wasn’t struggling. That was something, anyway. “Don’t you understand what this means?”

“Try me,” I said.

“She changed her story. She went from one thing to another, and she did it so completely that her new story fought for her—you can let me go, Andy; I’m not going to run.” Sloane tugged gently on her hands. Andy released them, and she settled back onto the flats of her feet, looking heartbroken. “She
changed
her
story
.”

I finally caught her meaning. Sloane had been struggling with her narrative—sometimes violent, always angry—for longer than anyone knew. Elise had started out struggling, and then began to twist the people around her until they fit a world where she was Cinderella, not the wicked sister: where she was the princess. She had broken every rule, crossed every line . . . and her reward had been a new story, one where she had something Sloane would never have: the potential to live happily ever after.

Sloane looked at me, and I could tell from her expression that she knew I understood. I shook my head, not saying anything, and we stood together as a team, each one of us waiting for someone else to figure out what we were supposed to do next. We’d never lost a prisoner on my watch before: Heads were going to roll over this one. Maybe figuratively, maybe literally.

Either way, I just needed to make sure they weren’t ours.

Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type 327 (“Hansel and Gretel”)

Status: ACTIVE

Gerry March, high school English teacher and ordinary guy, was aware that he was lucky to have a job, given that he’d abandoned his classroom after seeing a bunch of oddly behaving deer on campus. He had always made it a policy to refuse gifts from the ATI Management Bureau since the organization was rooted firmly in the fairy tales it purported to prevent, and taking gifts from people in fairy tales was always a bad idea. After some soul searching and some contemplation of his bank account, he’d agreed to make an exception when his sister, Henrietta Marchen, had offered to call the school and claim their mother had died.

It wasn’t technically a lie: They
did
start their lives with a mother, and she
did
die. It was just that she’d done it shortly after they were born, and they’d never really mourned her.

Still. Gerry had been a responsible, reliable employee for years before “the incident,” and having his sobbing sister on the phone begging for him to be given a second chance had convinced the administration that nothing like this would ever happen again. It had been incredibly kind of her, and as he looked out his classroom window at the menacing forest inexplicably looming beyond the football field, he had to wonder if it had all been for nothing.

His sophomore Creative Writing class was as silent as a room full of teenagers could be, only whispering and shuffling a little as they tried to complete their papers. This wasn’t one of the “easy A” electives, and he usually got the kids who were serious about the idea of being better writers. Half of them just wanted to get better so they could improve their
Pacific Rim
hurt/comfort fanfic, but there was nothing wrong with that. Besides, one of them had let slip that a good portion of the class was posting on Archive of Our Own, and he’d spent a few nights with a beer in his hand, learning more about his students. He hadn’t read the NC-17 pieces—there were professional limits—and yet he felt he respected them more as writers because he’d seen what they were capable of when they weren’t being graded.

“Suzie, can you come over here please?” he asked.

One of his students—a gawky, bespectacled girl who was going to be gorgeous when she finished her awkward stage, and who wrote extremely involved coffee-shop AUs about everything she came into contact with—looked up from her paper. “Sure, Mr. March,” she said, and rose, walking over to join him at the window. A few of the other students looked up as well, curious about what was going on.

Gerry pushed the window a little further open. “What do you smell?” he asked.

Suzie gave him a sidelong look and leaned forward. Then she blinked. “Gingerbread.”

Gerry March, who had spent the better part of his life running away from fairy tales, and hence recognized them more readily than most, closed his eyes. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

“Mr. March?” asked Suzie. “Are you all right?”

“I’m great,” he said, opening his eyes and turning to give her what he hoped would seem like a reassuring smile. “I just remembered that I need to call my sister tonight. That’s all.”

Call his sister, and tell her to get her bleached butt over here before the witch in the woods devoured them all.

# # #

Things I enjoy: driving.

Things I do not enjoy: driving for long periods with my entire field team in the van, because taking two vehicles would be fiscally irresponsible in these days of short staffing and expensive gas. Jeff was in the passenger seat, having claimed it by sheer dint of will, and by agreeing to let Sloane control the radio. Which meant, naturally, that we’d been listening to a band called “Five Finger Death Punch” since leaving the office, and I was starting to consider the virtues of earplugs.

Demi had already given in to temptation. She was wearing noise-canceling headphones and had stretched out across the van’s rearmost seat, playing air flute as she listened to something light, classical, and less likely to make her eardrums bleed. Andy, caught in the middle as always, was sitting with his arms crossed, feigning sleep, while Sloane was methodically ripping the magazine she’d brought for the trip into confetti.

And we still had over an hour to go.

“You’re riding in the back on the way home,” I said, glancing to Jeff. “I can’t handle another three and a half hours of screaming men telling me about carnage.”

“I understand completely,” said Jeff. He looked back to the book he was balancing on his knees. “Since we’re almost there, are we ready to address the elephant in the room?”

“Which one? The one where this is the second narrative incursion my brother’s been involved with in the last six months, or the one where this is potentially the second three-two-seven
Demi’s
been involved with?” The first one had nearly led to us losing her for good. We still didn’t know whether that was solely due to Birdie’s influence, or because Pipers were uniquely vulnerable to the witches who built gingerbread houses.

There was only one way to find out for sure. The places where stories rubbed against each other were hard to document without actual exposure, and the records were woefully incomplete when it came to questions like “are Pied Pipers always vulnerable to temptation, no matter how self-destructive it would be to give in?” That was why Demi had been allowed—more like “required”—to come with us, even with both me and Jeff saying it would be better to leave her behind.

Deputy Director Brewer could require me to take her into the field, but he couldn’t force me to let Demi anywhere near the narrative taking root behind my brother’s school. Demi wasn’t going to meet another gingerbread witch if I had anything to say about it. I’d handcuff her to the van before I allowed that to happen . . . and judging by the way she’d gone pale and silent when she heard about this assignment, she’d let me. She had no more desire to be lost again than the rest of us had to lose her.

“That’s it,” I said, as the lead singer of Five Finger Death Punch went into a particularly loud tirade. I turned off the radio.

Jeff immediately relaxed, a look of blissful peace spreading across his face. Andy’s shoulders dropped down from where they’d been trying to touch his ears. Sloane looked up from her magazine and scowled.

“Hey,” she said. “I get to pick the music this trip. You promised, remember? I didn’t stab your boyfriend for taking my seat, and you let me pick the music.”

“I remember,” I said. “If I turn the radio back on, it will definitely resume playing your music. But for the moment, I need my head to stop pounding, and we need to talk about what we’re going to do when we get to the school. Can somebody get Demi’s attention?”

“On it,” said Andy, before Sloane could propose something unpleasant. He twisted in his seat, reaching back to set a hand gently on Demi’s upper arm. “Hey, time to come back to the land of the living. Boss lady’s going to start talking, and we’re expected to pretend to listen.”

Demi sat up, sliding her headphones down. The sound of something sweet and classical drifted through the van before she switched her MP3 player off. “Are we there already?” she asked, making no attempt to conceal her anxiety.

“About an hour out,” I said. “I just wanted us to take a minute to talk about how this is going to go. All right?”

“We get there, we find the story, we punch the story until it stops kicking, and then we leave it for the cleanup team,” said Sloane. “Case closed, let’s go out for ice cream sundaes.”

“Cute idea, but no,” I said. “For one thing, this is a school day, and we don’t have a good excuse to evacuate the campus.”

“Yet,” added Andy.

“Yet,” I agreed. If the narrative gathered enough strength, we’d have to close the school or risk losing any student who could be said to have a sweet tooth. And any diabetics. They were uniquely susceptible to three-two-sevens, even when they didn’t normally like candy. Something about the irony of using a gingerbread house to kill people who had issues with insulin seemed to appeal to the story. “Right now, however, there are kids there who don’t know that anything’s going on. For the sake of Gerry and his job, we’re going to keep it that way for as long as we can.”

“Does anyone there know what you look like?” asked Andy.

“No, thankfully,” I said. “They’ve only spoken to me over the phone, and since Gerry and I have different last names these days, they may find it to be an odd similarity, but they shouldn’t put anything together.”

“It’s not like you look alike,” said Sloane.

I glared at her in the rearview mirror. “Yes, I’m aware that I look nothing like my twin brother. Thanks for the reminder. Looking at my reflection every morning just wasn’t getting the point across.”

For once, Sloane actually looked apologetic. “Sorry,” she said. “I meant that we didn’t have to worry about any additional similarities.”

“Fair enough,” I said. Gerry and I had been tapped by the narrative at birth to play Snow White and Rose Red. I got the white skin, black hair, and inborn lipstick. Gerry got the red hair, freckles, and rosy cheeks. We had a similar bone structure, but given the differences of gender and coloration, no one would see that. He was the only family I had in the world, and I didn’t look a damn thing like him. That stung sometimes, when I was feeling particularly alone.

“Regardless, teenagers are more likely to have camera phones and to photograph their surroundings than any other demographic,” said Jeff, taking up the explanation and giving me the break I needed. “That means that if we can’t keep strange things from happening in their presence, those things are likely to wind up on the Internet. No one wants that.”

“Why not?” asked Demi. “Before I knew all this was real, I would’ve just assumed somebody was having me on.”

“Because it’s not safe,” said Sloane. She pushed her shredded magazine to the floor and began braiding her hair. “Fairy tales are attracted to fairy tales. That’s why the first thing we do when there’s an outbreak in a house with children is bag all their Disney videos. A teen walking around with a phone full of pictures of an active narrative is five times more likely to be targeted by an incursion than someone who owns a blue macaw.”

“Blue . . . what?”

“Bluebirds show up in a lot of stories, and birds in stories can almost always talk,” said Sloane, still braiding. “Blue macaws are like a big shiny ‘come fuck with my life’ flag.”

“Fairy tales are weird,” said Demi.

Andy chuckled. “Got that right, kid.”

“Anyway, as I was saying,” said Jeff. “We need to be as unobtrusive as possible, because we don’t want to sow the seeds of a hundred second narratives while we’re cleaning up this one.”

“The official story is that we’re from the EPA, and we’re investigating a strange smell originating from the woods,” I said, rejoining the conversation. “We aren’t wearing moon suits because there’s no current reason to believe the smell is related to any sort of toxic spill. If there
were
any reason to believe the smell was related to any sort of toxic spill, we would have alerted the authorities by now.”

“Ergo, no toxic spill, got it,” said Demi. “Aren’t they going to think we’re a little, um. Funny looking? To be federal agents?”

“I can do funny, but Henry’s the one with the clown makeup,” said Sloane. She tied off her braid and began winding it into a tight bun at the back of her neck. It was an impressive bit of stylistic chicanery: somehow the way she had it twisted managed to conceal the red and green streaks in her white-blonde locks, making her seem like a normal, if severe, federal agent.

Too bad I couldn’t disguise my natural coloration as easily. “I have a badge, the badge has my picture; if they want to comment on my complexion, they can enjoy being threatened with an ADA lawsuit,” I said. “Sloane already looks more respectable than she has for the last year.”

“I brought a button-down shirt, and I’ll change before I get out of the vehicle,” added Sloane, plucking at the front of her “Bad Kitty” T-shirt. “I understand the game, Agent Santos. I’ve been playing it since before any of you were alive.”

“That’s sort of the problem,” said Demi uncomfortably, and everything became clear.

“You’re worried they’re going to think you’re too young, and that it’s going to blow the whole thing,” I said. Demi nodded, worrying her lower lip between her teeth. I tilted my head and asked, “Are you sure that’s all you’re worried about? Because you’ve never been concerned about your age before.”

“We’ve never been going to a high school before,” said Demi. “I’m barely
out
of high school.”

“So we say you’re on an internship program if anybody asks,” said Sloane. “Shit, Demi, there was a time when you’d have been married with two kids and a household to run by now. Chill out and assert your womanhood. They’ll fall in line, because they won’t have any framework for
not
falling in line.”

“Much as I hate to agree with Sloane, ‘fake it until you make it’ may be the best approach here,” I said.

Demi sighed. “To dealing with the people maybe, but what do we do when the story decides that it wants to take me again?”

“We don’t let it,” I said firmly. “We’re never going to let that happen again.”

Demi met my eyes in the rearview mirror. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She knew that I was bluffing.

I drove on. We were almost there.

# # #

The school parking lot was surprisingly crowded when we pulled up at a quarter after four o’clock in the afternoon. Classes were done for the day, but it looked like every teacher who had been able to come up with an excuse had stuck around to see the federal agents. How did I know that they knew that we were coming?

Well, the news vans were a bit of a tip-off.

Andy sighed when he saw them, sitting up a little straighter and beginning to retie his tie. As our most charismatic member, he was always the one tapped when we needed to convince the bystanders and lookie-loos to move on. “What’s our cover story this time, boss?”