Reports from the hospital said that Alicia Connors, our erstwhile Sleeping Beauty, was already awake, unaware of the bullet she’d just dodged. She wouldn’t need a Prince to save her. She wouldn’t sleep through her own rape and pregnancy, or any of the other horrible fates that await the four-tens. She would be referred to in our files only as “ATI subject 308 (confirmed 410),” and she would be able to put her story behind her with no effort at all, because it hadn’t been given the time to become truly hers. And my reward for saving her, for granting her a second chance at happy ever after?
Paperwork. Oceans and seas and fjords of paperwork. Virtual kingdoms of paperwork, spread out across my desk like the vanguard of an invading army, all needing to be defeated if I wanted to avoid an internal review of my actions. I scowled at the sheaves, which did nothing to fill out or file any of the waiting forms. Most agencies the size of the ATI Management Bureau have gone paperless by now, as much out of mercy as out of any desire to protect the environment. That wasn’t an option for us, no matter how much we might want it to be. There are a lot of things in the Index that can only be documented the old-fashioned way, with paper and specially prepared typewriter ribbons. Even those don’t work as well as doing it by hand; there’s a whole team of admins whose only job is ink and quills, every day, until retirement comes to save them.
Sometimes I have nightmares about being reassigned to the steno pool. The very fact that we have a steno pool should say something about how outdated and archaic life in our office really is. But it has to be done. Enter a report into a computer, where no eyes can see where it goes, and sometimes it will change. Those changes are never good, especially not if someone reads that modified story and takes it for the original. That’s how variants are born. The first time a seven-oh-nine got done in by a poisoned ring instead of a poisoned apple, it was because the story had been allowed to deviate.
I put my head down in my hands, massaging my temples with the tips of my fingers and desperately wishing for some sort of semi-horrible disaster to strike the office. Nothing major. Just something to destroy the paperwork before it actually devoured my soul.
“Henry!”
The shout was shrill and angry, and cut through the ambient noise of the office like a buzz saw through an enchanted hedge. I winced and kept massaging my temples with my fingertips. When I’d wished for a mildly catastrophic event, I’d been thinking something a little less terrifying than—
“Henrietta Marchen, what the fuck is going on?”
That was the kind of targeted demand that meant I needed to pay attention or pay the consequences. I raised my head to watch Sloane Winters—ATI Management Bureau Agent, failed Wicked Stepsister, and never-ending pain in my ass—come storming down the narrow aisle between desks, nearly knocking over several precarious towers of paperwork in the process. She was wearing a Devil’s Carnival T-shirt and ripped jeans, and her red-tipped black hair was tied into stubby ponytails. She would have looked like any other generic Hot Topic Goth Girl if not for the sheer murderous rage in her eyes.
“I don’t know, Sloane,” I said. “It’s a pretty big world. There are potentially a lot of things going on right now. Do you want to narrow down the field a little bit, or should I start making wild guesses and see how long it takes for you to get pissed off and just tell me?”
Sloane’s eyes narrowed, her rage pulling back until it was merely a looming threat, rather than an immediate danger. “Have you read the after-action report on our four-ten yet?”
“No, Sloane, I haven’t, because I was busy doing site cleanup at the hospital, and helping Andy deal with the witnesses, and debriefing the doctors, and taking statements, and oh, about a dozen other things you don’t have to deal with.” We no longer allowed Sloane to interface with the public, and hadn’t since an on-air interview when she tried to get a little too candid about a beanstalk incident. We’d been able to downplay her apparently deranged ravings as the result of a little too much coffee, but that plus her temper meant that she was not considered a public face of the agency.
“So you didn’t see the staffing updates.”
I resisted the urge to fling a stack of paperwork at her head. “No, I didn’t, since in order to see the staffing update, I would have needed to read the after-action report. As I did not read the after-action report, you can safely assume that I haven’t seen anything that it contained.”
Sloane’s lips drew back in what would have been a smile coming from anyone else. From her, it was more like a dominance display. “They took your suggestion. They’re hiring that Pied Piper that I found for you.”
“Good. Demi Santos has a lot of potential.” Potential to do good, working with us; potential to do a whole lot of damage, left to her own devices. As a fully activated individual on the ATI spectrum, she was limited only by the shape of her story. The poor girl.
“They’re assigning her to our team.”
My mouth dropped slightly open as I stared at Sloane, who smirked. With an effort that felt entirely out of proportion to the size of the movement, I forced my mouth closed and swallowed before I said, “You can’t be serious.”
“Would I joke about something this annoying?”
“We’re a field team. We’re the field team. They can’t give us a rookie who hasn’t even known about the Index for twenty-four hours.”
“And yet they are.” Sloane folded her arms. “So come on, irritating boss lady. What are you going to do about it?”
#
Deputy Director Brewer’s office door was closed, and his blinds were drawn, a sure sign that our fearless leader wanted to be left alone. Too bad for him that I’ve never really given a crap what anyone in management wanted. I hammered against the doorframe, and when that didn’t get an immediate response, I hammered against it a second time, even harder. The skin of my fist turned red from the pressure. I ignored it, pulling back my hand to try again.
The door swung open to reveal Deputy Director Nathanial Brewer in all his frowning, rat-faced glory. He was the sort of man who could make even a bespoke suit seem poorly made just by putting it on, with dirty blond hair that seemed to fall out faster than any hair replacement treatment on the market could grow it back. His frown deepened when he realized who had been banging on his door.
“Special Agent Marchen,” he said. “With the racket you were making out there, I assumed that you had to be Agent Winters. Can I help you with something?”
“You can tell me why you’re assigning a rookie to the field team without putting her through the normal training program,” I said, barely remembering to add a grudging “sir” at the end of my statement.
His eyebrows rose in feigned surprise. “Really, Agent? Aren’t you the one who recommended that we hire Demi Santos?”
“Yes, I am, but—”
“And aren’t you the one who authorized the activation of her memetic alignment during a field operation, potentially endangering dozens, if not hundreds, of civilian lives? I just want to be sure that we’re both approaching this problem from the same starting point.”
I stood up a little straighter, raising my chin as I replied, “I did those things, sir, but they were necessary at the time. They do not justify placing an untrained teenager on a field team. She will be in danger. She will endanger those around her.”
“She’s not an untrained teenager anymore, Agent Marchen,” said Deputy Director Brewer. He didn’t visibly change positions, but something in his posture shifted, becoming cold and hard. He looked at me with hooded eyes, and I was suddenly reminded of something that it was all too easy to forget in our day-to-day work: Brewer didn’t get his job by calling in political favors or striving for the level of his own incompetence. He earned it the hard way, with dedication and with talent … until he pissed off the wrong person and wound up getting shuttled to the basement with the freaks who kept fairy tales from eating the rational world.
It was the sort of thing that could make anyone lose their temp
er. Hell, I am one of the freaks—have been since I was born—and sometimes it was enough to make me lose my temper. I couldn’t imagine what it was doing to a career civil servant like Nathanial Brewer.
“She’s nineteen,” I said, trying to rally.
Deputy Director Brewer just kept looking at me. “She’s a story. She’s nineteen, and she’s a story. She was an untrained teenager, and then you sent your little associate to drag her out of the music room and into the role she’d somehow been avoiding for her entire life. What is she now? She’s a threat to the very fabric of reality. She’s a danger to everyone around her, including herself and her family and any friends who she may have had before you decided it was okay to turn her life upside down. But most of all, Agent Marchen—most of all—she’s your problem now. Please try to keep her alive long enough to justify the paperwork.” With that, he stepped back into his office and closed the door in my face.
I stayed frozen where I was for several seconds, staring at his nameplate and waiting for him to come back out and tell me that he was kidding. It didn’t happen. Finally, I turned around and started walking slowly back toward the stairs that would lead me down to the bullpen.
It was time to explain to my team that we were getting a new member. Whether we were happy about it or not.
#
“You shouldn’t have embarrassed him when he came to ask about Demi in the first place,” said Andy, shaking his head. He was leaning against the edge of his desk, arms crossed, trying to look like he wasn’t upset about the situation. He was doing a pretty decent job of it; if I hadn’t known him as well as I did, I might have even believed the lie. Unfortunately for his attempt at rendering himself unreadable, he couldn’t control the small muscle in his cheek that jumped whenever he was stressed. And oh, he was stressed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I did what needed to be done in the moment. I’m not so good about considering the long-term consequences sometimes.”
“That’s what leads your type to eat the poisoned apples, isn’t it?” sneered Sloane. She kept her eyes glued on her own computer screen, where she was surfing eBay on company time. “A lack of understanding that what you do today has an impact on what you’re going to be able to do tomorrow.”
“Can we at least try to look like a united front?” I asked. “And where’s Jeff?”
Jeff was the fourth member of our jolly little band of the damned. He was primarily our archivist, although he was also responsible for things like helping Demi find the sheet music that had allowed her to pipe the rats of the city up from the sewers and into the streets. Sort of a jack-of-all-trades, master of none, and happy about the fact. Like most of the rest of us, he had joined the Bureau because he hadn’t had a choice. He was a fully activated five-oh-three, part of a tale best encapsulated by the Shoemaker and the Elves. He did okay at resisting his urge to clean the office when the rest of us weren’t looking, and he definitely made the best shoes I’d ever had the luxury of wearing. It was like walking on a cloud.
“He’s with the new girl, getting her kitted out so that maybe she won’t die off quite as fast.” Sloane didn’t look up from her computer. “We should start a betting pool.”
“Betting pools don’t count if you murder the person yourself,” I reminded her, earning myself a look at her middle finger as she held it up for my inspection. “You know, I am technically your superior. You should really stop flipping me off.”
“Then you should stop saying stupid shit that makes me want to,” said Sloane. She clicked the “buy it now” button on a spiked leather collar. “Basically, you should shut the fuck up forever. Just pretend you’re in a glass coffin and it’ll come naturally.”
“Could you lay off for five minutes?” I sat down at my own desk, causing one stack of paperwork to cascade gently over into another, creating an undifferentiated sweep of white across what was supposed to be my writing area. I fought back the urge to put my head down and use it as a pillow. “We’re getting a new field team member. She’s a Pied Piper. That has to be useful. Right now, Jeff’s the only one of us who’s fully activated, and he doesn’t do much during incursions.”
Sending someone whose passions were cleaning and shoemaking into an active fairy tale would very rarely make things better, and could frequently make things worse. We had to keep him far away from the five-ten-A manifestations, or every Cinderella who came along would wind up drafting him into the role normally played by songbirds and talking mice. And he wouldn’t be able to fight them. Being tied to a story gives a person certain strengths—see also my affinity for woodland creatures and tendency to make wildflowers grow in the carpet. It also makes you vulnerable. Jeff could no more refuse to clean up a mess than Sloane could be trusted with apples and arsenic. We can fight our natures, but no one has yet figured out how to change them.
We’d never worked with an activated Piper before. Demi’s strengths we knew; if something could be classed as vermin, she could control it. Given the most classic story attributed to her tale type, that said something unpleasant about how children were viewed in Europe during the Dark Ages. What we didn’t know was where her weaknesses would be.
“Maybe she can pipe my damn bluebirds away,” I added.
“I don’t think anything can pipe your bluebirds away,” said Andy.
I raised my head and looked at him flatly. “Really. That’s your useful contribution to this discussion. That I am to be permanently plagued by happy songbirds.”
Andy shrugged. “I never claimed to be useful.”
I balled up a piece of paper and flung it at him. Andy laughed and batted it aside.
Unlike the rest of us—Sloane with her averted story, Jeff with his active story, and me in the middle—Andy was nowhere on the ATI spectrum. He was perfectly normal, with no more connection to the memetic undercurrent of reality than any other man on the street … except that once, before I graduated to full field agent, a four-ten manifested in a small beachside community, and no one noticed. She put the whole town to sleep, and this is the real world, which tends to be pretty straightforward about things like “humans need to eat” and “if you sleep for three weeks without any medical treatment of any kind, you will die.” Andy’s twin brother, Eric, had been living in that little town. By the time the four-ten herself died, breaking the spell cast by her presence, no one lived there anymore.
Most people would have written that off as a tragedy, the sort of thing that couldn’t be explained. At the time, Andy had been going to college to study investigative journalism. He started following reports of a mysterious government agency that had been involved in the cleanup. He turned over rocks and knocked on doors until he stumbled into the middle of the biggest cover-up in the world: fairy tales were real, and Sleeping Beauty had been responsible for his brother’s death.
Again, that’s where most people would have walked away, or possibly run screaming. Andy asked for a job. When I showed up for my first day as field team leader, he was already there waiting for me to tell him what to do. I honestly couldn’t imagine working a live field situation without him, even if we always had to remember that he wasn’t on the spectrum, making him vulnerable to a lot of dangers that the rest of us could ignore. On the flip side, he didn’t have to worry about glass coffins or the temptation of poisoned apples, so things balanced out, in their own way.
A throat was cleared behind me. I twisted in my seat. Jeff was standing in the aisle leading to our little slice of the bullpen. Demi Santos was behind him, still clutching her flute the way a small child might clutch a teddy bear. She looked faintly dazed and absolutely terrified, her dark eyes darting from side to side as she tried to take in every possible detail.
“Special Agent Marchen, Agent Winters, Agent Robinson, may I introduce Probationary Agent Demi Santos?” Jeff turned, trying to urge Demi to step forward with a small wave of his hand. She didn’t budge. He held his position for a few more seconds before turning back to me, and saying, “Her pers
onnel file is being prepared, and will be on your desk inside of the hour.”
“Because more paperwork is exactly what my desk needs right now,” I said, and stood. Demi visibly cringed. Oh, yeah, this was going to be a great working relationship. “Agent Santos, welcome to the field team. I assume Agent Davis has explained what it is that we do here?”
“This is a joke,” she replied. “This is a horrible joke, and you’re horrible people for going along with it. Who put you up to this? Was it Andres? Because I’m going to kick his ass when I get home. Do you hear me, Andres?” She raised her voice at the end of the sentence, eyes darting wildly as she searched for a security camera. “This is a shitty joke, and it’s not funny, and you need to call it off right now.”
“Agent Santos was very clear about her unwillingness to sign any sort of release form that might allow us to air this footage, as she’s more than reasonably convinced that we’re currently appearing on a ‘prank’ reality show,” said Jeff. He sounded tired. I peered at him. I’d never seen him look frazzled before, and I wasn’t sure I liked it.
“Did she sign everything else?” asked Andy, arrowing in on the potential liability issues like the investigative journalist he never got the chance to be.
“After reading everything six times and stating aloud that nothing on the paper cleared us to use her image on film, yes.” Jeff shook his head. “So she’s a fully signed and accredited government agent now. We just can’t take her picture.”
“Uh-huh.” I stepped in front of Demi. She stopped scanning the room with a small squeak before she took a big step backward. I smiled thinly. “You seem to be laboring under a misapprehension about our agency. Since it’s your agency too now, I think we should get that cleared up as quickly as possible. What part is confusing you?”
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