“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.”
“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.
BROTHERLY LOVE
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.”
Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 6