“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?”
“What part—everything! You! Him! Her!” She stabbed a finger at Sloane, in case I couldn’t figure out who “her” was supposed to refer to. “All of this! Fairy tales are not real, I can’t control rats by playing the right song on my flute, and you are not a real government agency! My father would have been complaining for my entire life if there was a branch of government dedicated to stopping things that don’t exist!”
“Oh, we’re not a branch of the government, we’re just an agency, and there are at least three agencies dedicated to dealing with things that most people don’t believe exist. It’s a natural result of living in a world with aspirations of rationality.” I continued to smile. It was better than screaming at her, but not by much. “How much did Jeff tell you about what brought each of us to the agency?”
“He said most of that was your business,” she said. “I figure it was a casting agency who brought you.”
“You know, as stupid-ass delusions go, this one is pretty good,” said Sloane. “It’s consistent, it’s logical, and it’s fucking moronic. Gold star.”
“Don’t say ‘moronic,’” said Jeff. “It’s ableist language, and you know I won’t stand for that.”
“Fuck you,” replied Sloane genially.
“Much less offensive,” said Jeff.
“Ignore her,” I said to Demi, as I pointed at Sloane. “That’s what the rest of us do most of the time, and as you can see, it’s worked out pretty well for us. Now give me a second. If you’re assuming that we were hired by a casting agency, how are you accounting for my coloring?” I narrowly escaped being cast to play Snow White in the story of my own life. My story was still in waiting, lurking and looking for a chance to pounce. Until it either swallowed me whole or was somehow beaten back completely, I was blessed with suck in the form of the traditional Snow White coloring: skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as coal.
In the cartoons and the storybooks, they make it look almost cute. Of course, when artists and animators design a Snow White, they essentially give their incarnation of my story a spray tan and some neutral lip liner. A true seven-oh-nine was nowhere near as marketable as those animated darlings. We’re too pale, and our lips are too red, and we look like something out of a horror movie that didn’t have the decency to stay on the screen.
“Pancake makeup and theatrical lipstick,” replied Demi, without missing a beat. “You’d look more realistic if you’d bothered to blend the color at all, you know.”
“Oh, believe me, I know.” My teen years had been an endless parade of foundation creams and blending powders, all geared toward the simple goal of making me look less like the vanguard of an impending alien invasion. Some of them had even worked for a little while, as long as I remembered not to touch my face. I held out my hand. “Andy, can you give me that box of tissues?”
Andy, bless him, knew what I was about to do. “Here you go,” he said, pressing the box into my hand.
“Thank you, Andy.” I didn’t take my eyes off Demi as I pulled a tissue from the box and held it up for her to examine. “Note that this is an ordinary tissue. Does it look like an ordinary tissue to you?”
“I suppose,” she said, somewhat grudgingly.
“Good.” I wiped the tissue hard across my lips, and then held it up again. “No lipstick. No nothing, because I’m not. Wearing. Any. Makeup.”
“Lip stain,” she said, without missing a beat.
“Fine, then. Lip stain is a thing; I’ll grant you that, but there’s no such thing as skin stain, not unless you want to get into paint. Regardless, if you’ve got makeup that thick on your face, nothing’s going to get through it, am I right?”
“Yes,” she said. This time she sounded almost suspicious, like she was sure I had a trick up my sleeve, but wasn’t sure what that trick could possibly be.
“Just so we’re agreed.” I turned. “Sloane, I need you to slap me, if you would be so kind.”
“You know what? I take it back.” Sloane bounced to her feet, moving with the speed that she reserved for violence and free food as she closed in on me. “The new girl rocks.” Then she pulled back and slapped me hard across the face. The sound was incredibly loud. It was nothing compared to the pain that immediately followed. Sloane might take a half-assed approach to a lot of things, but when it came to hitting people, she was fully committed, no questions asked.
Gritting my teeth to keep myself from swearing—or worse, whimpering—I turned to show my rapidly reddening cheek to Demi, who was staring at the two of us like we had just lost our minds. “If I was wearing pancake makeup, would there be a handprint on my skin?”
“Look, Ma, no special effects,” added Sloane, holding up her palm for inspection. I gave it a sidelong glance. Her skin was a little reddened, but it was fading fast, replaced by a normal Caucasian pink.
Demi’s only answer was the sound of the back of her head rebounding off the floor with a hollow bonk sound, like someone had dropped a coconut. She didn’t move after that. The four of us stared at her for a moment.
“I just want it noted for the record that I was not responsible for killing the new girl,” said Sloane to break the silence. “Can someone please put that in writing right now, before there’s some sort of inquest?”
“She’s not dead,” I said, crouching down to check Demi’s pulse. It was strong and steady. “She just fainted, which probably proves that she’s the smartest person here.”
“Isn’t it customary to check someone’s pulse before you declare that they’re alive?” asked Andy.
“I’m pretty good at telling dead girls from sleeping ones, thanks.” I straightened. “Andy, take her down to the break room and put up the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign. Maybe when she wakes up she’ll feel more like facing reality.”
Andy snorted as he bent to scoop Demi’s motionless form off the office floor. “I don’t know what you’ve been smoking, Henry, but there’s no reality in this building for her to face. She’s barely even started down the rabbit hole.”
“Then the faster she wakes up, the sooner she can start coping. Go. And when you get back, get started on your paperwork.” I dropped back into my chair. “The world’s not going to save itself from the collected works of the Brothers Grimm.”
#
Having Jeff back at his desk was a definite relief: he could generally be trusted to do his own paperwork in record time, and then get bored and start helping everyone else with their share. Most forms didn’t care who filled them out, as long as it was done correctly, and I shortly found myself in the enviable position of playing rubber stamp while Jeff shoved page after page in front of me to be signed. Sloane ignored us both, choosing to return to eBay’s modern-day Goblin Market in search of treasures.
Andy stalked back up the aisle and glared when he saw my empty desk. He didn’t need to see the look on Jeff’s face to know what had happened. “Dammit, Henry, again?” he asked.
I smiled at him broadly as I shrugged. “It’s a symbiotic relationship. Jeff enjoys doing paperwork; I enjoy not doing paperwork. Everybody wins.”
“Everybody but me,” grumbled Andy, and dropped down into his seat. “Why do I have to do my own stupid reports?”
“Because I’m the boss and you’re not,” I said, scrawling my signature on the last report. “Sloane, is there anything coming up on the radar?”
“Nope,” she said, not taking her eyes off the scr
een. “Clean as a whistle.”
“Uh-huh.” I turned to my own computer and called up the monitoring program, even though I knew that it would confirm Sloane’s statement. She was uncanny when it came to predicting oncoming intrusions. It had something to do with her having been averted. Jeff was fully manifested, and now subconsciously accepted fairy tales as a normal part of the background radiation of life. Normal people were blind to them. His eyes were open too wide. And as long as I was holding my story in abeyance, I couldn’t be open enough to feel another story coming. Sloane was unique.
Our four-ten was listed under the “recent” column on the ATI incursion tracker, as was Demi’s own two-eighty. The four-ten was labeled “neutralized.” Demi was labeled “fully active.” I felt a little twinge of guilt at that. She’d been living a normal life until we came along, and no matter where her life went from here, normal was never going to be put back on the table.
Of course, she was living a normal life in the middle of a minefield, one where any careless word or casual encounter had the potential to trigger her story into sudden motion. At least this way, she’d been activated under controlled conditions, giving her the potential to find a way that she could live with it. Jeff had already managed to find that balance. It was possible. And I was a total hypocrite, because I was sitting at my desk, safe in my own frozen narrative, and thinking about how waking up to learn that you were secretly a fairy tale wasn’t actually that bad.
“She’s going to need weapons training,” said Andy. “She probably has no clue how to handle a firearm.”
“About that,” said Jeff. “I think it would be a good idea if she didn’t carry a firearm. She can get by just fine with her flute, and between that and maybe a harmonica or some other form of small backup instrument, I think she’ll be able to deal with any situation she’s likely to encounter.”
Sloane snorted. “Sure. If she gets mugged, she can just flute them to death.”
“Once she’s a little more confident in her powers, yes, she probably can,” said Jeff.
We were all quiet for a moment, contemplating that. There had been no active two-eighties in the service prior to Demi. We didn’t really know how she would play out—so to speak—not in any practical sense.
“She’s going to be that powerful?” asked Andy finally.
“She’s going to be that versatile,” said Jeff. “In a situation like this, flexibility is more important than raw strength.”
“Oh, this just keeps getting better,” muttered Sloane. “What’s the good news?”
“If we take away her instruments, she’ll be essentially powerless—”
“That’s good,” agreed Sloane.
“—until she finds something else that she can use to make music—and as a Piper, she can make music from virtually anything,” Jeff finished. “Whether or not we’re happy about having her assigned to our field team, she needs to stay within the agency. She’s too dangerous to be left unsupervised.”
“Then why did you let Henry suggest activating her?” demanded Andy. He actually sounded agitated for the first time. I guess being reminded that fairy tales can be dangerous was freaking him out.
“Because it was this or let a Sleeping Beauty impact half the city,” said Jeff. “That, and I honestly figured the stress of piping the fever into the rats would kill her, and we wouldn’t have to deal with this part of things. I guess she’s stronger than I expected.”
There was a momentary silence while we all stared at Jeff. Finally, Sloane said, “Dude, that’s cold. I was almost a Wicked Stepsister, and I’m still impressed by how cold that is. Are you sure you’re not from my tale type?”
Jeff sniffed, looking defensive as he said, “It was the practical solution, and it was tidy. I like things that are tidy.”
“And that, right there, is why not everyone who works here can be on the spectrum.” I sighed as I pushed my chair away from my desk. “I’m going to go check on our sleeping newbie. Hopefully she’s having really pleasant dreams, and won’t start whistling in her sleep.”
“I don’t think she could whistle us to death,” said Jeff.
“Well at least that’s something,” I said flatly, and walked away.
#
Being a government agency, however secret and unusually staffed, means we’ve been supplied with a decent base of operations by good old Uncle Sam. Being an agency that no one wants to claim either ownership of or responsibility for means that our “decent base” started life as a research lab dedicated to biological warfare … before a big-ass city decided to expand its borders to include the lab’s location. Not wanting to turn into the Umbrella Corporation from the Resident Evil movies, the US government promptly decommissioned the lab, bombed the whole thing with enough bleach to kill any creepy crawlies that might be lurking there, and moved the ATI Management Bureau in. Because fairy tales are apparently better for property values than aerosolized Ebola.
To get from our part of the bullpen to the break room where Demi was sleeping, I had to go up a flight of stairs, walk through something that used to be an air lock, and enter the space-age glass and chrome domain of the Dispatch Unit. Four dispatchers were currently at their desks, headsets in place and eyes glued to their screens. I tried to look unobtrusive as I followed the path through the center of the room. Dispatch is a hard, unforgiving job that doesn’t come with the supposed “glamour” of fieldwork. Just hour upon hour staring at a screen, waiting for something to pop, and knowing all the while that if you miss anything, people are going to die.
I was almost to the door when a voice behind me said, “Henry? If you’ve got a second?”
“Sure thing,” I said, keeping the urge to roll my eyes at bay as I turned around. Experience has taught me that you should never refuse a reasonable request from a dispatcher. Not unless you want to spend the next six months chasing phantoms and “likely incursions” rather than actual incidents.
Birdie Hubbard, who was generally responsible for my team’s assignments, was standing up at her desk and leaning over her computer, blinking at me owlishly through her thick-lensed glasses. “We were wrong?” Her voice was plaintive, almost wounded—the tone of a child asking whether or not Santa Claus was real.
“You were right about the incursion,” I said, walking back toward her. The other three dispatchers were listening. They were trying to pretend that they weren’t, but human nature wins out over almost everything else in this world. “There was definitely a story trying to break through, and if you hadn’t sent us, it would have succeeded.”
“But it wasn’t a seven-oh-nine.” Birdie looked utterly ashamed of herself. “I’m so sorry. We didn’t prepare you properly.”
“Hey. Sloane confirmed your ID when she got to the scene. She said the girl was a seven-oh-nine, and we followed the protocol accordingly. I saw our subject with my own eyes, and she had all the hallmarks. We could have been cousins.” Not sisters, not quite; you don’t get coloring as extreme as mine unless one or both parents were also fairy tale–afflicted. Our latest Sleeping Beauty had been spared that particular indignity.
Rather than looking reassured by what I was saying, Birdie’s look of shame and confusion deepened. “So you also thought that she was a seven-oh-nine?”
“Up until people started passing out in the hospital lobby, yes, I did.” I frowned. “Birdie? What’s wrong? This was a hard call, and you had to pick a type to activate the system. The one you picked wasn’t quite right, but it was damn close.”
“You don’t understand.” She looked to the other dispatchers. “We need to tell her.”
“We’re not ready,” said another dispatcher, a slim Asian man whose name I didn’t know. “We need more data.”
“We have four incursions,” countered Birdie. “How much data do you think we need?”
“I’m standing right here, and I can hear every word you’re saying,” I said. “How likely do you think it is that I’m going to walk away without one
of you explaining what the hell it is that you’re talking about?”
Birdie turned back to me. “We’ve had four incursions recently that presented as one tale type and turned out to belong to another part of the Index. In every case, the original type was less dangerous than the actual type.”
I paused. If it had been possible for me to go pale, I think that I would have. “You’re saying that the stories are intentionally camouflaging themselves?”
Birdie nodded. “We think so.”
“Do you have any evidence to support this?” Evidence would be good. Evidence could be refuted.
A lack of evidence would be even better.
“There’s not much, but we’re monitoring every incursion, and what we’re finding isn’t encouraging,” said Birdie. “It’s getting to where we can’t reliably guess what you might find out there, much less tell you what you will.”
“Okay, so this is all terrifying,” I said, clapping my hands together. “Birdie, I want all your findings on my desk at your earliest convenience. Jeff and I can go over them together and see if there’s anything that we can confirm from a field perspective that you haven’t already documented. Maybe we’re lucky, and this will just turn out to be a period of memetic instability or something.”
“Do those exist?” asked the other dispatcher dubiously.
I shot him a quick glare. “Think about where you work before you ask me whether something is real. If it means the Index hasn’t somehow started hiding itself from us, then yes, we’re going to hope that memetic instability exists.”
“I’ll have it all on your desk inside the hour,” Birdie assured me.
“Thank you.” I sighed. “Now if you don’t mind, I need to go check on our newest recruit.”
“You mean the Pied Piper? Is she really going to come and work here?” Birdie perked up, her earlier distress forgotten in the face of something interesting that she could focus on. “I’ve never met an actual Piper before. What’s she like?”
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