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

by Seanan McGuire

  For the moment, however, we had other things to worry about.

  “Stay together; do not follow anything, no matter how tempting, unless it’s Sloane,” I said. “That goes for the guards too. Some of these stories may allow for shape-shifting, illusion-casting, or creating decoys. If you are unsure of what you are looking at, find a member of the team and ask them if they see the same thing. Any questions?”

  “Yeah,” said Andy. “Wasn’t this girl trying to manifest as a Cinderella when we locked her up in here? How the hell did she become this dangerous?”

  “Really, Andy?” I looked at him flatly. “If you think the princesses aren’t dangerous, you haven’t been paying attention. Now let’s move.”

  # # #

  Walking through the doors of Childe Prison was like forcing my way through a soap bubble that refused to pop. Instead, it clung and clutched until I had moved past its reach. Then it let me go, with a release that was almost as shocking as walking into it had been.

  “I hate this place,” I muttered.

  “We all do,” said Jeff. He probably meant for it to be reassuring. It just made me think of all the people we’d sent here over the years, the ones who were being kept inside these walls “for their own good,” while the maggots of the compulsion charm crawled across their brains and erased everything they had ever been. It was no wonder Elise had tried to escape. If anything, it was a miracle that she was the first.

  “Maybe we’re going about this all wrong.”

  Andy shot me a sidelong look. “What was that?”

  “Nothing.” Andy was a good guy, but he wouldn’t understand. I wasn’t sure I understood yet, to be honest. But maybe there was a middle ground between quashing every manifestation of the narrative before someone got hurt and torturing the people who’d been caught up in that manifestation. Maybe it was on us to find it. “Jeff, any idea what part of the prison Elise was being kept in?”

  “Third ring,” he said. “Past the quiet wards, and before the really bad levels.”

  “There’s worse than this?” asked Andy.

  “Yes,” said Demi. Her voice was scarcely louder than a whisper. “They said . . . they said a good Piper could make music from anything, so they put me on the fourth ring, with the villains who need constant supervision. They tied my hands and feet, and they shot me up with Novocain so I wouldn’t be able to whistle or sing. Somebody had to hand-feed me.”

  “You sounded normal when we called you,” I said, horrified.

  Demi’s smile was more like a grimace. “They have this stuff they can rub on your skin that wakes it up again. I don’t know what it is. No dentist I’ve ever gone to has used it, probably because it stings like nettles, but it cancels the Novocain right out. I talked to you because they took the numbness away, and I didn’t cry because I wanted you to think I was strong enough to be worth saving.”

  “Oh, Demi.” I’d never been a physically demonstrative person, and this wouldn’t have been the place anyway: not with cells to every side of us, each holding a prisoner just like Demi had been. I still wanted to hug her. “We would have saved you anyway. You’re always going to be strong enough for us.”

  “I hope that’s true,” she said—but this time her smile seemed a little more sincere, and that was good enough for me.

  “This way,” said Jeff. We followed him.

  The prison halls were wide and had originally been covered by white linoleum. They still were, toward the center and in front of some of the doors. But the presence of this much narrative energy couldn’t help but warp the world around it. Patches of linoleum had transformed into cobblestone, or hard-packed dirt, or brick. One cell had piles of straw in front of it, and shrill giggles drifted from inside. We gave it a wide berth. The door to another cell had twisted into something that would have looked more appropriate in the belly of a pirate ship, and the floor in front of it was damp wood that smelled strongly of brine. The door seemed to rock from side to side, like it was rolling on the waves, unless I looked at it directly.

  “I really don’t like it here,” said Andy, who looked faintly sickened by the piratical door.

  Those of us who were tied to the narrative were vulnerable to the compulsion charms and spells used to make the prison large enough and secure enough for our needs, but Andy, who had no natural or borrowed magic to protect him, had to feel like the entire world was shifting under his feet. It was rare in the modern era for the narrative to gather enough momentum to actually transform things. Here in Childe, where narratives were penned up and given no means of escape, it was happening constantly, and Andy’s modern mind had no real way of coping with it.

  We stepped around a corner and found ourselves facing a door made of straw. “I got this,” said Demi. She pulled out her flute and blew one long, resonant note. The door crumpled inward, revealing a stretch of identical hall. Demi lowered her flute and smiled. “I huffed and I puffed,” she said, sounding pleased with herself.

  “Good job,” I said. We walked on.

  The next door we encountered was made of sticks. “Mine,” said Jeff, who leaned forward and began pulling sticks out of the door, slowly at first, then with increasing speed, until his hands were a blur of motion. When he was done, the door was gone, and he had sorted all the sticks into tidy piles, divided by size.

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Sorting the materials for the shoes is a part of my job,” said Jeff. He shook his hands, looking unhappily at the grime blanketing his fingers. “You’d think they could wash the things before they used them as wards.”

  “Uh, forgive me for sounding like I don’t understand that our job is about impossible crap, but what good are doors that come apart when you poke them?” asked Andy, as we resumed walking. “Straw and sticks—that’s for pigs in nursery rhymes, not for building a prison that you actually want to hold prisoners.”

  “If we didn’t have the countercharms, the doors would represent a compulsion to obey the story,” said Jeff. “For someone like Demi, who has Big Bad Wolf tendencies but no natural ability to huff and puff and blow someone’s house down, she would stand there blowing on the door until she collapsed from lack of air. For someone like me, who has Little Pig tendencies, I would wind up braiding and weaving and improving the door to make it stand up better to attackers. It’s only the charms that allow us to cling to our actual narratives, instead of falling into a narrative that’s just close enough.”

  “Is everyone a wolf or a pig?” asked Andy.

  “Not everyone,” I said, as we turned another corner and found ourselves facing a door made of thorns. I sighed. “Okay, isn’t this supposed to be made of bricks? I was looking forward to getting my hands on a sledgehammer.”

  “Some pigs, some wolves, some princesses,” said Jeff, almost apologetically.

  “I don’t even want to know how Sloane got past all three, although one assumes the guards have keys.” I stepped forward and put my hands on my hips, giving the door of thorns a withering look—no pun intended. “Fuck off.”

  The door fucked off, the thorns unknotting and letting go of one another before they retracted into the walls, where they vanished without a trace. I looked back to my team. Andy and Jeff were staring at me. Demi was covering her mouth with one hand, but not quite managing to hide her smile.

  “Come on,” I said. “Sloane may have murdered a bunch of people by now, and I don’t want to deal with the paperwork.”

  The feeling of compulsive calm closed around us again as we walked, stronger than before. I slipped my hand into my pocket and clutched the crystal spire so hard I could feel it bite into my skin. That made the pressure a little easier to bear. At least there weren’t any maggots in my brain. Not yet, anyway. There was no telling what the prison was going to throw at us next.

  The sound of shouting drifted down the hall. One of the voices—the loudest, angriest voice—was Sloane’s. The others were unfamiliar, and I didn’t know if they were fighting with her, or
if she was the reason they were making so much noise.

  “Move,” I snapped, and broke into a run. My team ran with me.

  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.