Indexing (39 page)

I didn’t answer her. I just ran.

I was so focused on running that I stopped paying attention
to what was in front of me, so it was a shock when Adrianna’s arm caught me
across the throat, knocking me off my feet and onto my ass. The snow promptly
soaked through my pants. I made a choking sound, reaching up to hold my bruised
throat.

Adrianna stepped forward, looking imperiously down at me. “You
were smart enough to run, huh, new girl? Well, I suppose that makes sense. They
must have given you
some
training to go with that badge you’re wearing. But
there’s no training in the world that could get you ready for me.” She lunged
before I could react, filling her fingers with my hair and yanking me back to
my feet. “Any last words, little doorway?”

I coughed and tried to speak. My words came out as a broken
rasp.

“Aw, did you lose your voice? That’s a different story, you
know.” Adrianna leaned closer, a smile twisting her features into something
terrible. “I’m going to wear your skin like a coat, and I’m going to break
every heart you’ve ever given a damn about, and who knows? Maybe when they’re
all cursing your name, I’ll come back through the door and let you go home.”

I rasped again, finally managing to find my voice enough to
whisper, “… wrong about … my training.”

“What’s that?”

I struggled to look pathetic, gesturing for Adrianna to lean
even closer as I whispered, “I said … wrong about … my training.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I have no idea what you’re trying to
say.”

Her fingers were still knotted in my hair. She seemed to
think that was enough to immobilize me. I straightened abruptly, removing all
the slack from her grip as I slammed my forehead into hers. There was an
audible crack, and bright stars of pain burst into existence inside my skull,
going supernova before fading away. Adrianna howled as she dropped my hair and
staggered backward, one hand flying to her injured head.

The trouble with forehead smashes is that they hurt you as
much as they hurt the other person. Unlike Adrianna, though, I’d been braced
for the pain. While she was still reeling, I closed in and punched her twice,
once in the stomach, once in the left breast. She howled again. I kicked her in
the knee, and she fell, a red and black splotch against the white, white snow.

“I said, you’re wrong about my training,” I snarled, aiming
a kick at her head. “I was trained to survive sharing an office with
Sloane
.
You’re just a Snow White reject who couldn’t hold on to her own goddamn body,
and I am not afraid of you.” I followed the kick with two more. “Do you hear
me? I. Am not. Afraid. Of you.”

Adrianna wasn’t howling anymore. I kicked her a few more
times anyway.

Just to be sure.

Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 410 (“Sleeping
Beauty”)

Status: ACTIVE

Henry’s belt had come off easily, and removing it didn’t
make any difference in her condition. She wasn’t wearing a girdle. Sloane
hesitated for only a moment before unhooking the other woman’s bra. That didn’t
do anything either.

“Worth a shot,” she muttered, and pulled the elastic out of
Henry’s hair. That didn’t do anything either. Sloane leaned back and frowned,
studying her field team leader.

Snow Whites went into comas when they ate poisoned apples,
put on cursed girdles, did up their hair with cursed combs, or …

“Poisoned rings.” Sloane grabbed Henry’s hands, looking for
anything that could be charitably called a ring. Her fingers were bare, and so
were her wrists. “Dammit, Henry, don’t you wear
any
jewelry?” Unpierced
ears. No necklaces. The only thing that could even remotely be considered
decorative was her badge.

Sloane didn’t stop to think. She just grabbed the badge and
flung it as hard as she could across the office, not bothering to watch as it
vanished into the briars. Henry stayed limp and unmoving, sunk as deep into her
enchanted slumber as the rest. Sloane grabbed her by the shoulders and shook
her fiercely back and forth, saying, “Come on, wake up, I can’t do this by
myself, all I’m good for is killing them, I can’t
stop
them, so wake up,
Henry, wake up, please,” as loudly as she dared. “
Please
.

“Just wake up already.”

Adrianna grabbed my foot as I was pulling it back for one
more kick to the side of her head. I probably deserved that for kicking her
while she was down, but I still fell back onto my ass, sending snow flying
everywhere. She let go of my foot with a snarl, grabbing me around the waist
and clawing her way back toward my face. I managed to get a knee up and into
her stomach. She gasped as the air was knocked out of her, and still she kept
on coming.

“You need to calm the fuck down,” I snarled, grabbing a
fistful of her hair and yanking hard. “This is not how a princess behaves!”

That was the wrong thing to say. Adrianna found her second
wind and shoved herself the rest of the way into position, grabbing me by the
shoulders and beginning to shake me like a rag doll. The snow fell all around
us, blurring and distorting the landscape. Her fingers dug into my arms,
painful and anchoring.

“Let me go,” I snarled.

“You’re no better than me,” she responded. “If anything,
you’re worse. You’re—” Her words blurred and became inaudible, drowned out by a
screech like a radio being tuned.

There were words in the noise. Just for an instant, but that
instant was long enough: “—up, I can’t do this by myself—”

Then Adrianna was back, shouting, “—weak! Do you hear me? You’re
weak
!” She shook me again, harder. The snow was almost blocking out her
face.

Every time I left the wood, the snow was falling, and my
eyes were closed. As I watched the snow obscuring Adrianna, I realized what I
had to do. It was dangerous, but I couldn’t think of any other way. I closed my
eyes, going limp while she shook me harder and harder, and the radio static was
back, wiping out the sound of her voice, wiping out the feeling of snow on my
face, until it was just Sloane’s voice, alone in the world, saying the words I
needed to hear more than anything else: “Just wake up already.”

And I opened my eyes.

The figure above me was blurry, like a woman carved out of
living shadow, with stripes of darker gray moving across her skin in a way that
made my eyeballs itch. I didn’t think: I just reacted, punching upward as fast
and as hard as I could. She hadn’t been expecting that. She yelped, lurching
back, and I recognized Sloane’s voice even as the impact registered with my
suddenly aching knuckles.

“God
dammit
, Henry, you can’t just go around punching
people!” The figure clapped a hand over its face, continuing to use Sloane’s
voice as it muttered, “I think my nose is bleeding. You have a mean right hook,
snow-bitch.”

“Sloane?” I straightened in my chair before struggling to my
feet. Taking my eyes off Sloane’s disorientingly blurry form, I looked around
the bullpen, which was choked with rapidly growing rose briars springing from
the walls and floor. That meant—right. I frowned as I spotted the stranger
lying motionless at the heart of the overgrowth. “Sleeping Beauty?”

“Got it in one,” said Sloane. “She staggered in here and
passed out. No bus transfer, too far gone to have driven herself. Birdie
imported her to fuck with us.”

“So how are you awake? And why can’t I see you?”

“Neat trick, huh? I sweet-talked the Cheshire Cat that was
brought in just before shit got ugly, and he loaned me his stripes. They should
fade before too much longer, so it would be good if we got moving.” I heard
Sloane shift her weight behind me. “As for why I didn’t fall asleep, I think I
got the villain loophole. The evil fairy never passes out when Sleeping Beauty
goes down for the count, and that’s the only role I fit in this story. We
should be safe as long as we don’t wander into a christening or anything
idiotic like that.”

“Wasn’t on my list.” I tried to check my belt, only to
discover that it was missing, and my gun along with it. Weirder still, my bra
was unhooked. “What the—Sloane? Did you try the girdle approach?”

“Yeah,” said Sloane’s voice. “It didn’t work.”

“Right.” I scanned the floor, finding my belt a few feet
away with my gun still clipped securely into place. I picked it up and put it
back on, feeling some of the tension leave my shoulders. “Well, if that didn’t
work, why am I awake?”

“True love’s kiss, of course,” purred Sloane from behind me.

I jumped.

Her laughter had a distinctly feline twang to it. She’d
clearly borrowed more than just a set of stripes from the Cheshire Cat. “Relax,
Princess, I didn’t do anything we’ll have to report to HR. I took your badge
off.”

“What?” I reached around behind myself to re-hook my bra.

“We both know that I’m not your true love, which means
kissing you wouldn’t have done a damn thing. But a Snow White who’s fallen into
an enchanted sleep is just waiting for someone to find a way to wake her up. The
girdle approach didn’t work, and you aren’t wearing a hair comb or a ring. Sometimes
the poison is in a brooch. So I went for the closest thing you had.”

“That is ingenious, and you have to tell Jeff about it when
he wakes up. He’ll probably give you a medal. Just don’t mention messing with
my bra.” Speaking of Jeff, someone—presumably Sloane, as the only person who’d
been actually
awake
—had moved his chair so that it was sitting right
next to mine. He was facedown on the desk, and looked like he was sleeping
peacefully. I hoped that that was true. “You said Birdie was in the building?”

“Yeah.” Sloane’s tone turned grim, borrowed levity leeching
away. “She’s heading for Deputy Director Brewer’s office.”

“Okay.” I unsnapped my holster, drawing my gun. “Let’s go
stop whatever it is she’s hoping to accomplish.”

Sloane’s smile suddenly appeared in the air in front of me,
all the more disturbing because it didn’t have the rest of Sloane visibly
attached. “Oh, Snowy. I thought you’d never ask.”

Sloane had clearly been hard at work while I was sleeping: there
was a dead man in the hall, his body already halfway overgrown with briars. There
was no sign of the Cheshire Cat. Even without its stripes, the creature was
designed to hide. It just wouldn’t be able to teleport away until it got them
back.

“I told you they went the other way,” grumbled Sloane.

“That’s why we’re going this way,” I said. “Birdie isn’t
expecting anyone to still be moving around the building, but she’s more likely
to watch the door she came through. Humans are funny that way.”

“If you say so.”

Passage was slower than it should have been, thanks to all
the thorns. They’d left wide-open trails in some places, narrowing the hall to
nothing but a sliver in others. I gritted my teeth and kicked them aside,
snagging my trousers and trying not to cut my skin too much. Sloane made a
soft, pained sound behind me. I glanced back, seeing the expected nothing.

“Sloane? Are you all right?”

“It’s nothing. I just had to take my shoes off for stealth,
and my feet are getting a little sore.” There were small red drops on the
floor, marking out our passage like signposts.

I stiffened, torn between yelling at her for leaving bloody
bread crumbs behind us and yelling at her for hurting herself. Yelling at all
was a terrible idea. I swallowed the bulk of my anger before asking, “Can you
keep going?”

“Oh, yeah. I can keep going. She came into our home. She
hurt us
in our home
. I could walk on burning coals right now.”

“Let’s hope you won’t have to.” I started moving again—but I
took more care to shove the briars aside now, trading a little bit of speed for
a clearer trail. If Sloane couldn’t stand by the time we caught up with Birdie,
I would be facing the first fully active Mother Goose on record by myself. We
didn’t know what she was capable of, except that it included manipulating the
narrative and somehow staying awake despite the Sleeping Beauty in the other
room. I didn’t want to learn what else she could do. Not without backup.

I was moving as quietly as I could. Sloane might as well not
have been there at all. Birdie and her men were being nowhere near as careful. I
could hear their voices when we were still several offices down from Deputy
Director Brewer’s open door.

“—a book? We did all this for a book?”

“Not just any book, Samson.
The
book. The book that
will make all our troubles go away forever.” Birdie’s voice was reverent. “They
should have given this to me years ago. I could have made everything so much
easier for them, if they’d just learned to let me work.”

There was only one book she could be talking about. I
signaled for Sloane to follow as I broke into a run.

Birdie had the Index.

Every field team had a copy of the Aarne-Thompson Index,
entrusted to their archivist and used to track and identify narrative incursions
within their sector. They were mass-market printings, culled from the print run
supplied to schools and libraries around the world. They weren’t safe by any
means, but they were essentially magically inert.

And then there was the true Index. The first copy of any
revision, containing all the carefully written adjustments and notes that would
go into the
next
revision, shaping our understanding of the narrative’s
powers—and thanks to the force of the human subconscious, shaping the narrative
for the next twenty years. The rest of us were virtually forbidden to write
anything down too close to the record books. Whoever held the Index was
required
.

Had Deputy Director Brewer been holding the master Index
this whole time? That would explain why Birdie had come out of our field
office, and not one that was more central, like New York or Huntsville. We were
targeted because we had something worth stealing.