Unheard, Lovecraft screeched.
#
ATI Management Bureau Headquarters
Most of the building that housed the ATI Management Bureau was old wood and older design, like a stage set transported from the 1970s—which was, not coincidentally, when the building had been originally constructed. The Dispatch Unit was a science fiction dream, all chrome, glass, and unnecessarily streamlined plastic fittings. I always felt like I was leaving a hard-boiled crime drama and stepping into something with starships and empires when I had to visit the dispatchers in their home territory. Still, “we may have misplaced our Wicked Stepsister, do you think you could give her a ring for us” wasn’t the sort of question I felt comfortable asking over the phone.
Three of the dispatch desks were occupied when I arrived. Two of the dispatchers were hard at work, coordinating their own field teams as they investigated possible incursions by the narrative responsible for fairy tales and folklore the world over. Human belief focused the narrative, and in our modern age of mass-produced DVDs and endless television reruns, incursions were becoming more and more common.
The third dispatcher, a small, round-faced woman with fluffy blonde hair and thick-lensed glasses, was leaning back in her chair and staring thoughtfully up at the exposed steel beams of the ceiling. I walked over to her desk, crossed my arms, and waited.
People wind up in Dispatch after they’ve been touched somehow by the Aarne-Thompson spectrum, but have failed to show the reflexes and capabilities for fieldwork. Most people expected Jeff to go into Dispatch, given both his nature and his narrative. He surprised them all when he wound up in the field. Birdie Hubbard, our primary dispatcher, surprised no one when she chose a nice, safe desk job.
After standing patiently and waiting to be noticed for more than a minute, I cleared my throat. Birdie jumped in her chair, knocking over a coffee cup full of pencils and nearly sending herself on a quick trip to the floor. I started to step forward to help her, and paused as she grabbed the edge of the desk.
“Not going to fall?” I asked carefully.
“A-Agent Marchen!” she said, half gasping for air. “You startled me!”
“I got that when you tried to teach yourself how to fly,” I said, taking a careful step back, into my original position. “Are you okay now?”
“I am, yes. How long have you been standing there?”
“Not long.” I shook my head. “Have you heard anything from Sloane this morning? She hasn’t checked in for work, and we’re concerned about her.”
Birdie blinked guileless blue eyes behind the magnifying lenses of her glasses, and asked, “Did you try calling her at home?”
“This is Sloane we’re talking about. We decided that Dispatch would be less likely to invoke her undying wrath.”
That earned me a chirpy giggle. “I guess that’s true,” Birdie admitted. “How is she doing with her story? I know she’s been in abeyance for a long, long time now.”
The fact was, none of us knew exactly when Sloane’s exposure to the narrative had occurred. She predated every other member of the team, and given the spectrum’s ability to influence people’s genetic makeup—witness my coloring—there was no reason not to believe that it could keep someone frozen at a particular age if it really wanted to. “She’s Sloane,” I said, with a shrug. “She does her Sloane things, and we try not to encourage her to kill us. She’s mostly stopped threatening to jam Demi’s flute down her throat, so I guess she’s been having a good couple of weeks. Can you call her house now?”
“Sure.” Birdie swung back toward her computer, only to pause, blinking. “But there’s no need, really.”
I frowned. “Why not?”
“Because she just used her badge at the front door. I—Agent Marchen?”
I didn’t stop to find out what else Birdie was going to say. I just kept walking toward the exit. When I was halfway there, I broke into a run. I didn’t know why, and I didn’t question it. I just knew that I needed to get to Sloane, fast.
#
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 315 (“The Treacherous Sister”)
Status: UNDETERMINED/UNDETERMINED
Settling Lovecraft in the aviary cage had been easy. He didn’t like getting off Sloane’s shoulder, but he was easily bribed with a thick slice of mango, which he accepted with all the gravity of a king being given his crown. Once he was safely locked inside the larger cage, Sloane stripped off her nightshirt, dropping it carelessly on the living room floor, and pulled the rest of her clothing roughly on, ignoring the wide picture window to her left. She was giving the backyard a show. Let anyone who might be standing out there look. She’d get them back for staring at her soon enough. She’d—
Sloane shook her head, almost hard enough to dislodge her earmuffs. “Don’t think that way,” she muttered, taking comfort mostly in the way her lips shaped the old, familiar words. It didn’t matter whether she could hear them or not. They were out there in the world, and that was what really mattered, at least according to the therapists employed by the ATI Management Bureau. They were quacks, every single one of them, but they’d prevented her from going on a murderous rampage thus far, and that made them quacks that she was willing to listen to.
For now.
Her coworkers would have been surprised by the size and airiness of her house. Henry had seen the gatehouse a few times, when Sloane didn’t feel like riding the bus home after work, but Henry had never been inside, and she’d certainly never realized that Sloane lived in the big house on the other side of the overgrown lawn. It was safer that way. Better to keep your cards hidden until it was time to put them on the table; better to know that your haven was actually a haven, and not just one more way station on the way to an inevitable fairy tale demise.
Sloane was aware that this was just one more example of “thinking like an antagonist,” something she had been regularly coached against by the Bureau quacks. In this one instance, she didn’t care. Princesses had towers, right? Keeping your sanctuary safe didn’t have to be a wicked thing to do. It could just be pragmatic.
“And if the good guys can’t be pragmatic, I wanna be there when they burn Henry at the stake,” she said, yanking her boots roughly on. Only silence greeted her. Slowly, cautiously, she reached up and tugged the earmuffs away from her ears. Maybe it—whatever it was—was finally over, and she could—
The sound was practically a physical assault this time, hitting so hard and so fast that it drove her to her knees. It seemed to bounce back and forth inside her skull, magnifying in that confined space until it was enough to make her stomach turn over. The earmuffs had fallen to the floor a few feet away. Sloane collapsed forward, stretching one shaking hand toward them.
She had almost caught hold of the band when the pain became too much, and she blacked out completely.
#
ATI Management Bureau Headquarters
I managed to catch up to Sloane in the main hallway, while she was still trying to get her key card back into the tiny, coffin-shaped box that she continued to pretend was a purse. One small mercy: her desire not to have any of us looking at her stuff meant the little coffin was a black one, rather than a clear one that she could taunt me with on a daily basis.
“Sloane! Wait up!”
She stopped walking, her chunky boots making a clomping sound on the cheap floorboards. “I’m not in the mood today, Henrietta,” she said.
There was something wrong with her voice. She had never been the most vivacious of people, but there was normally a sort of energy to her words, a thick chain of braided resentment and hope lurking just under the surface. Today, she sounded … flat, like all that energy had been yanked right out of her. “Agent Winters?” I said, cautiously.
“I told you, I’m not in the mood.” She turned to face me, scowling. “My fucking fire alarm broke this morning. It’s been blaring for the last hour. Does that count as me checking in with the boss, or do you need me to fill out some forms
in triplicate?”
“Oh, hell, Sloane, I’m sorry,” I said quickly, using the socially acceptable sympathy to cover my shock. Sloane—who was normally the most invested in her personal appearance, even if her particular fashion choices weren’t ones that I would have made—looked like hell. Her short plaid skirt was wrinkled, and there was a run in the knee of one black tight, showing the pale, sun-deprived skin underneath. She was wearing a rumpled red hoodie over a black T-shirt with a glittery apple appliqued on the front. It was tugged up at the hem, and she didn’t have the matching, glaringly offensive red apple jewelry that she always wore with that shirt.
Her hair was an uncombed snarl—and what’s worse, she didn’t have any makeup on. Her muddy hazel eyes were devoid of their customary rings of protective kohl and shadow, and her lips were only a few shades darker than the skin around them.
She followed my gaze, naked lip curving upward in a reassuringly familiar sneer. “I’m so sorry if I’m offending your sensibilities right now. Some of us didn’t get narratives that came complete with a permanent makeover, okay? I’ll put my face on when I get to my desk.”
“Get some coffee first,” I advised. Technically, she wasn’t supposed to spend work time doing things like fussing with her cosmetics. Under the circumstances, there was no way that I was going to report her. “You look like you could use it.”
There was an almost palpable beat and then, much to my surprise, Sloane’s mouth relaxed into something that could almost have been mistaken for the shadow of a smile. “I’ll do that,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” she echoed, and turned to continue on her way.
I remained where I was for a few more seconds, trying to process the situation, before turning on my heel and making a beeline back toward Dispatch.
The ATI Management Bureau is such a small government agency that we have virtually no budget for anything that doesn’t involve saving lives, which includes facilities. Instead of having a specially designed headquarters suited to our needs, we were crammed into a labyrinthine old medical building, which was frequently aggravating … until one of us needed a shortcut.
Sloane would go to the break room kitchen for coffee, because the break room kitchen always had better stuff than the individual kitchenettes scattered around the building. By cutting through Dispatch, I could beat her back to the bullpen and warn the others that she’d had a particularly hard morning. Sloane didn’t like it when we talked about her behind her back, but under the circumstances, I was willing to risk a little displeasure. Anything to keep her from biting Demi’s head off over nothing.
Birdie looked up as I came blowing past. “We’ve got a three-ten forming downtown,” she said. “I was just about to call it in to your team. Are you ready for fieldwork?”
A three-ten was a Rapunzel. I have no idea how they keep happening, given the incredible specificity of the narrative that they have to work with, but still, they crop up a lot more frequently than I like. I had to make the call.
“Call it in to Andy,” I said, only slowing down a little as I spoke to her. “He’ll start scrambling the supplies, and we’ll be ready to roll in ten.”
“Got it,” said Birdie, turning her attention back to her computer.
Sloane would understand. Maybe she’d even appreciate the chance to get straight to work. After all, idle hands are the devil’s playthings, and given the way she’d looked at me when she first turned around in the hall, Sloane needed something to keep her hands from going idle.
#
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 315 (“The Treacherous Sister”)
Status: UNDETERMINED
Everything was too loud and everything hurt. Again.
This time, when Sloane managed to peel her eyelids open, she was greeted with a distant thread of familiarity buried underneath the alarm bells that were ringing in her head: Lovecraft was screeching and rattling the bars of his cage, apparently in a panic.
“Stupid … bird …” she muttered, grabbing the earmuffs and shoving them down over her ears. All sound immediately stopped. She staggered to her feet, practically lurching across the room as she made her way back to the birdcage. “Hush, big guy. Hush.”
The black-winged parrot continued to flap and flail, beak opening again and again in protests that she couldn’t hear anymore. The sound had to be upsetting him as much as it was upsetting her, maybe more, even. He couldn’t shut it out the way she could. He was smart, for a bird, but even the smartest bird couldn’t understand something like this.
“Lovecraft, sweetie, hush,” she said, hoping that he could hear her under the din. He kept flapping. Sloane grimaced. If she wanted to calm him down, she needed to hear what kind of noises he was making. Unlike many parrots, Lovecraft had never bothered learning more than a few words, preferring to express himself through a variety of unholy screeches and ghostly whistles. Cautiously, she reached up and tugged one earmuff aside. The sound of a parrot in the middle of a full-blown fit promptly assaulted her already bruised eardrums. Lovecraft was unhappy, and he was going to make damn sure she knew it.
There was no unholy roar filling the room, no horrible noise without a source. The only horrible noise she could hear was coming from her parrot.
“Hey,” she snapped. “Be quiet.”
With one final indignant whistle, Lovecraft stopped. He turned his head to the side, looking at her with one eye, and raised his crest to half-mast in what she had learned to interpret as the equivalent of a teenager folding his arms and sulking. Except for a certain ruffled look around the edges, he seemed perfectly normal.
A horrible thought was starting to creep around the edges of her mind, slowed down by the headache but still finding its inexorable way toward the forefront of her thoughts. “You didn’t even hear the noise, did you, buddy?” she asked. “You were just upset because I fell down. I control the mango slices. I’m not supposed to fall down.”
Lovecraft whistled long and low. It was such a normal sound that it brought tears to her eyes. Of course he hadn’t heard anything strange. He was just a parrot, and she was …
She was …
Sloane barely remembered to grab her purse off the table next to the front door as she ran out of the house. She needed to get to the office. She needed to get away from Lovecraft, and from her things, and from her neighbors, who were perfectly nice people, even if she generally professed to hate their guts.
She needed to get away from all the things that she might hurt. She needed to be around people who would be able to stop her.
#
ATI Management Bureau Headquarters
The word from Dispatch beat me back to the bullpen; ah, the wonders of modern technology. Jeff and Andy were already packing the field kit for a three-ten when I came thumping down the stairs and announced, “Sloane’s in the building. She’s getting coffee now, and then I’m going to ask her if she wants to come with us.”
Jeff straightened, giving me a perplexed look. “What do you mean, ask her if she wants to come? She’s at work, this is a field excursion, she should be prepared to do her job. If she can’t do her job, she should have used a sick day.”
Sloane hadn’t used a sick day since I’d joined the Bureau, and I didn’t think she’d used them before I joined. I shook the comment off, saying, “She’s had a rough morning is all. We should probably take it easy on her.”
“How rough?” asked Jeff, as he slid a book into his bag. The laws of physics said that the book shouldn’t have been able to fit in there. It disappeared without so much as rippling the fabric.
“Rough enough that I’m telling you we need to go easy,” I said firmly. “Jeff, do you have sheet music for Demi, or are we going to wing this one?”
Demi looked alarmed by the thought of “winging it.” Luckily for her, Jeff nodded and said, “I’ve got something that should help us out.”
“Good.” I didn’t ask what kind of music you used on a girl wit
h hair extensions and mommy issues; he didn’t volunteer the information. Of such silences are good working relationships made.
There was a slam behind me. We all turned to see Sloane come stomping into the room with the largest coffee cup in our kitchen clutched firmly in her hands: a novelty mug someone had brought back from Disneyland with Grumpy—as in the dwarf—blazoned on the side. The scowl on her face dared us to so much as crack a smile. I bit the inside of my cheek to prevent myself from doing precisely that. Normally, nothing about dwarves will make me laugh. Seeing Sloane with that cup was enough to make me want to start.
“Why do we even have that cup?” asked Andy. “Isn’t it a little on the nose?”
“I will kill you all and feast upon your hearts,” snarled Sloane, and stomped past us to her desk. She paused halfway there, eyeing the field bags. “Are we going somewhere?”
“There’s a three-ten starting up; we’re going to stop it,” I said. “I was going to ask if you felt up to coming along.”
“It’s my damn job, isn’t it?” She gulped back half of her coffee in a single long gulp before slamming the mug down on her desk so hard that for a moment, I was afraid she’d broken it. Amazingly, the cup kept it together—which wasn’t something I was sure I could say about Sloane. She didn’t explode on us though, simply growling, “I can put my eyeliner on in the car. Let’s go fuck up a fairy tale.”
#
Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 315 (“The Treacherous Sister”)
Status: UNDETERMINED
The sound didn’t come back as Sloane was staggering down the pathway to the street, or if it did, her earmuffs blessedly prevented her from hearing it. She made her way past the gatehouse, and from there to the bus stop, where she slouched onto the bench, knees together, feet splayed, and bent forward until her forehead rested on the cottony material of her tights. She had no idea what was going on, but she hated it.