Indexing

by Seanan McGuire

  “Like the missing Piper,” I said grimly. “Sir, if Demi has been taken by someone who intends to use her against us—and we have to assume that anyone connected to the narrative would have that as a goal—we may be in serious trouble. You need us at full operating strength.”

  “You brought her into this agency, Marchen,” said the deputy director. His voice was suddenly low and menacing, and I realized that we had somehow strolled right into his trap. He’d threatened to take Jeff because it made enough sense to keep us talking—keep us defending our own long enough to incriminate ourselves. He took a step toward me, eyes burning. “You decided that she needed to become active, rather than leaving her alone. This is on your head, and if you fail to bring her back—alive or dead, it’s all the same to me—I will see to it that you spend the rest of your snowy-white life being poked and prodded by people who want to understand the cause of your fatal apple allergies. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

  No, I thought, almost dizzily. This shouldn’t be happening on a street corner, in front of my team; this should be happening behind a closed door, in a space that we control. But that wouldn’t have the right gravitas, would it? The narrative wouldn’t like that.

  Someone was playing with us.

  I schooled my face into as composed an expression as I could manage, nodding. “Yes, sir,” I said. “I understand completely.”

  “Good,” he said. “Now bring her home.” He turned on his heel and stomped away before any of us could say anything further. He was getting the last word. We let him, standing in frozen silence until he climbed back into his unmarked van. Its engine rumbled to life, and it drove off quickly down the street.

  “Well, we’re fucked,” said Sloane, and took a slurp of her drink.

  Not one of us tried to argue.

  #

  The office was still essentially deserted when we made our way into the bullpen. Empty desks and screen savers spoke volumes about the night that the entire department was having. Normally, there would have been at least a skeleton crew of field and cleanup agents loitering around, ready to respond to an emergency call. If anyone had an emergency tonight, they were going to be waiting a long time for a response.

  Jeff looked uneasily around at the empty desks. “Maybe we should tell Dispatch that we’re available to be sent back out if necessary—”

  “No.” I said the word as calmly as I could, running him up against the wall of my refusal. “The main thrust has passed, and we have work to do here. We need to figure out who’s manipulating the narrative, and we need to find Demi before she’s irrevocably damaged.”

  “It may already be too late,” said Sloane, pushing past me to her desk. She knelt, opening the bottom drawer as she continued, “Narrative’s got her now, and she’s an active. There’s no telling how far it can twist her if she says the magic words.”

  “Demi’s smarter than that,” I said. My words were hollow even to my own ears.

  Sloane raised her head and looked at me. “Really? Because from where I’m standing, she disappeared in the middle of an active narrative and she left her badge behind, which means she has nothing that was created by the Bureau. We can’t track her, we can’t follow her, and we can’t save her if she went willingly. That sure sounds dumb enough to say ‘once upon a’—”

  “That’s enough,” said Jeff sharply. “We’re going to locate Agent Santos, and we’re going to bring her home intact and ready to explain what happened. Any other outcome is not to be considered. Do I make myself clear?”

  “As glass,” I said, a bit taken aback by the vehemence from our normally quiet archivist. “What do you need us to do?”

  Jeff smiled wearily. “Research.”

  “My favorite waste of time.” Sloane pulled something out of her desk drawer, holding it up for the rest of us to see. It was a book, wrapped in brown paper, about as thick as a dictionary. “The 1936 ATI index,” she said. “I’ll start here.”

  “The Aarne-Thompson Index index?” asked Andy blankly. “Isn’t that a little repetitive?”

  “The Index is several volumes long, with a master index at the end,” explained Jeff. “What are you hoping to find?”

  “Stories about stories,” said Sloane. She sat down, opening the book.

  I looked to Andy and Jeff. “You both know what you’re doing?” They nodded. “Good. I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Jeff.

  I flashed him a tight-lipped smile. “To see Dispatch.”

  #

  Dispatch was responsible for all field assignments: if there had been any Piper sightings, or any other sightings in the three-twenty-seven range, they would have them on file, and would be in the process of transcribing them for the permanent record. I made my way along the halls faster than was strictly safe, but I knew the office was virtually empty. More importantly, I could feel the weight of the potential narrative looming over me like an uninvited guest. The thought of Demi alone out there with the stories was enough to motivate me to go even faster, and I was opening the door to Dispatch in what felt like only seconds after leaving the bullpen.

  The room was chaos personified. Every desk was filled, some with Dispatchers holding fountain pens and frantically scribbling out notes about the night’s narrative incursions, others typing frantically, their fingers flashing over their keyboards as they directed their teams around the city on cleanup and recovery assignments. Not one of them looked up at my entrance, not even when the door swung closed behind me with a sepulchral boom.

  I started walking across the room, unable to shake a feeling of growing unease, and froze as I realized that my initial assessment had been incorrect on one point: not every desk was filled. Birdie’s chair was empty, and her computer monitor was dark. I stayed frozen for a few seconds, trying to make sense of what I was seeing, before I walked to the next dispatcher down the line. He kept typing, ignoring me. I cleared my throat. He still kept typing.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  No reply.

  “Where is Birdie Hubbard?”

  No reply.

  “I need to request some records.”

  No reply.

  I rapped my knuckles against the edge of his desk. “Excuse me? This is Agent Henrietta Marchen, ATI Management Bureau field agent, about to go Big Bad Wolf on your ass if you don’t start answering me.”

  That got a response. His head slowly swiveled around to face me, revealing eyes as round and yellow as an owl’s. “That threat is unprofessional and should be reported to human resources,” he said. His voice had a fluting quality to it that matched his eyes, and I found myself wondering what his tale type was.

  “You know what else is unprofessional?” I asked. “Ignoring a field agent who needs access to records. You don’t tell on me and I won’t tell on you.”

  The dispatcher’s eyes narrowed for a moment as he considered my offer. Then he nodded, and said in that same fluting tone, “Agreed. What do you want? You’re not on any of my field teams.”

  “No, my team is normally dispatched by Birdie Hubbard. Any idea where she is?”

  He shook his head, a flicker of irritation crossing his face. “She called in sick. The rest of us have been picking up her slack, and we don’t have the resources to be down even one body. You people think you’ve got it hard out there tonight? We’re directing you to all those stories without time to put together full dossiers. It’s a miracle that there haven’t been more casualties.”

  Hearing this owlish little man who had probably never seen the narrative in action since his own story activated dismissing the deaths of my friends and coworkers made me furious. I tamped down my rage, allowing my expression to harden. “There have been enough,” I said flatly. “One of my team members is missing. We think the narrative took her. We need your records on tonight’s dispatches.”

  He blinked again. “You want records on all the dispatches your team was involved with?”

  “No,”
I said, and smiled coldly. “I want all the records from all the field teams that were scrambled tonight. I need to see the shape of this story.”

  The owl-eyed dispatcher stared at me for a moment before swallowing heavily and pushing his chair back from his desk. “I’ll just get those for you,” he said.

  “Good,” I said. “I’ll wait here.”

  #

  Not all the records were available yet: our scribes and non-field archivists were working their fingers bloody—in some cases literally—as they tried to transcribe everything that had happened since the sun went down and the narrative started working in earnest. The records I could get extended from six to eight in the evening. That would have to be enough for the moment. I hefted the stack of folders, gave the owl-eyed dispatcher one last stern reminder to have any additional records sent to my desk, and turned to leave Dispatch.

  Birdie’s desk caught my eye on the way out. I paused, not quite sure what was bothering me, apart from her absence. My frustration was just that: frustration. I didn’t like the fact that someone I regarded as a satellite member of my team was unavailable when one of my actual agents was MIA. I shook my head and resumed walking.

  This time I made it out of Dispatch and all the way down the hall to the bullpen, where uncharacteristic silence greeted my return. I frowned as I wove my way between the desks to my team’s quadrant. Sloane was sitting cross-legged atop her desk, hunched over a large clothbound book. Jeff was standing nearby, an equally large book propped open in his arms. Only Andy wasn’t reading; he was at his computer instead, skimming local news sites as he tried to assemble a timeline of the Bureau’s viciously unpleasant evening.

  The slap of my file folders hitting my desk rang through the room like an alarm. Everyone looked up. Sloane scowled.

  “What the fuck are you trying to do, scare me out of a year’s growth?” she demanded.

  “No,” I said shortly. “What are you working on?”

  “Storyteller archetypes,” she said.

  “Looking up Piper variants,” Jeff said.

  “Local damage reports,” Andy said.

  I sighed. “All of which are good and vital things to be doing. Shit.” I sat down, reaching for the first folder. “If anyone needs me, I’ll be up to my ass in action reports.”

  “We’ll pray for you,” said Jeff, his nose already firmly back in his own book.

  The silence lasted for some time after that. Reading and research may not be the most interesting parts of our job—they’re definitely not the parts that are most interesting to me, which is why I chose fieldwork when I graduated from training, instead of something more staid and less likely to get me turned to stone or seduced by some wannabe Prince Charming—but they’re absolutely vital if we want to keep the world turning the way that centuries of rational thought have established. The narrative is an old, dark force that keeps trying to worm its way back out into the light, and sometimes the only thing that keeps it locked away is knowledge.

  Our weapons are strange and some people don’t recognize them as weapons at all, but they’ve worked for us for a very long time. Don’t change what works.

  Sloane made a small, irritated sound as she turned a page. “Why does everyone assume that all storytellers are magically good and wonderful and have your best interests at heart no matter what? Don’t they realize that someone had to tell these fucking stories in the first place?”

  “Ah, but you see, the stories were told by storytellers,” said Jeff, looking up. “When a man tells a story of heroism and glory, he’s going to cast himself, or someone like himself, in the lead role. All men were storytellers before television supplanted the need to create entertainment in the home, and so a great many stories—”

  “Lecture heard and received and oh sweet Grimm will you shut the fuck up if I get Henry to show you her tits?” Sloane turned another page. She didn’t raise her head, which meant she didn’t see the truly impressive blush that spread across Jeff’s nose and cheeks. “Everybody wants to be the hero, and so they make the people they don’t like—like their sisters—the villains. I get that. What I don’t get is why no one ever said ‘this narrative thing screws with us every chance it gets, and people who tell stories are sort of working for it, so maybe they suck too.’ It seems like a logical extension of the archetypes.”

  “Sometimes I forget that you’re smarter than you act,” said Andy from his desk.

  “Really? Because sometimes I forget that you’re not asking me to break your nose,” said Sloane.

  “Hang on, everybody,” I said, raising my hand for silence. They all stopped and looked at me. Grimm bless my team: they might squabble like children when things got tense, but they always doubled down when I needed them. “Something’s bothering me. Sloane, what were you saying about storytellers?”

  “That they’re all evil fuckers,” she said helpfully.

  “Okay. Jeff? What have you found about Pipers?”

  He shook his head, lips pressed into a thin line. “There’s a lot of unity in the narrative since it’s a relatively recent story, as such things go. The Piper comes to town, is hired to pipe away the local vermin, is cheated by his employers—”

  “That. Right there.” I stabbed a finger at Jeff for punctuation. “The Piper turns on the town when someone convinces him that he’s been cheated out of what was rightfully his. So what happens if someone convinces Demi that she’s been played by the Bureau? That we’ve somehow cheated her out of something that she was supposed to receive?”

  “Like what?” asked Andy. “Vacation benefits? Fat lot of good those’ll do her. She’ll never get the chance to use them.”

  I frowned. “What are you talking about? Sloane uses vacation days all the time.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve been with the Bureau for more than fifty years,” Sloane said. “I have like, infinity vacation time banked up. They only let me take any of it because the shrinks say it’s good for my mental health and probably keeps me from stabbing people, and even then I have to cancel half my vacation days because we come up in the rotation.”

  A chill washed over me, like snow falling in a forest I’d never seen, but that knew my story intimately. “What do you mean?”

  “Shit, you’ve never taken vacation, have you?” Sloane wrinkled her nose. “Days off can be canceled for any reason, at any time, and we have enough vans and magic carpets and flying horses and crap like that that if you’re wanted back at the office, you’ll be back at the office. No slacking allowed. How did you never pick up on this?”

  “All I’ve ever wanted was to do my job and do it well,” I said. “As long as I can do that, what would I need vacation time for?”

  Andy looked at me gravely. “Henry, that is about the damn saddest thing I have ever heard in my life. You need a vacation.”

  “How about we worry about me having a social life after we get Demi back and avert whatever the hell is going on in this city, huh?” I glared at Andy for a moment before turning back to Sloane and saying, “I need you to really consider your answer. If you had taken a vacation day or called in sick today, tonight, would you be here now?”

  “What, tonight?” Sloane snorted. “I would have been dragged kicking and screaming out of the pleasure domes of Xanadu. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation, and you know it. Why?”

  I stood, dropping the folder that I’d been reading from and yanking open my desk drawer in almost the same motion. I pulled out a fresh clip of ammunition, sliding it into my pocket. “Because our dispatcher didn’t show up for work today. Demi may not be the only member of our team in trouble.”

  “Birdie?” asked Jeff.

  “Yeah,” I said tightly. “Now let’s roll.”

  #

  There were a few other field teams outside in the parking lot, clustering around their vehicles like trauma victims—which they technically were—as they eyed the building. Once they went inside, they would need to start their paperwork. I knew from experience jus
t how exhausting that could be. I avoided eye contact as I hurried toward our van, the rest of my team trailing along behind me. It said something about how anxious we all were to find out if Birdie was safe that Sloane didn’t say anything nasty to any of the people we passed.

  To my surprise, Jeff crammed himself into the front passenger seat. I gave him a startled look. He held up one of the file folders from my desk. I hadn’t even seen him pick them up. “I’m going to see if I can find anything in here that suggests a pattern,” he said. “Not to demean your research skills—”

  “But they’re not as good as yours,” I said. “I know that. Everybody buckle up, we’re going to break a few speed laws.”

  I hit the gas.

  Birdie’s home address was programmed into the van’s GPS, along with everyone else on the team. It made the vehicle a liability if it was ever stolen, but the risk was counterbalanced by situations like this one, where trying to contact Personnel to find out where someone lived could mean the difference between a timely rescue and a corpse. I pulled up her name even as we roared out of the parking lot, following the route appearing on the tiny display screen.

  “Thirty minutes out, people,” I said.

  “Where the fuck does she live, Jupiter?” asked Sloane.

  “Close,” I said. “She’s in a housing development out near the edge of the wildlife preserve. I guess she likes being close to nature.”

  “Or she’s cuckoo-bats,” said Sloane. “That’s a horrible commute. I’d be road-raging weekly.”

  “That’s why we don’t let you drive,” said Andy. “Henry, you going to light it up?”