Birdie and her two goons vanished through the door. Sloane held her position, counting slowly backward from thirty before she dared to move. Safety was better than sorrow, or so the saying went.
Her feet left little red marks on the floor, bloodstains that looked more like paw prints than footprints. She stopped when she reached Henry, leaning in close and inhaling. She could smell apples when she got in close enough.
“Wait a second …” Sloane straightened, eyes going wide.
There were only two confirmed ways of waking a Sleeping Beauty—true love’s kiss or childbirth, neither of which was on the table, since Priya was a stranger and not visibly pregnant. Sloane would have needed a turkey baster and nine months to put childbirth on the table, and while the situation was dire, it wasn’t quite that bad—not yet, anyway. She couldn’t speak for how she’d feel if the Bureau was still wrapped in an enchanted sleep at the end of the week.
There were other offices, of course, other field teams and directors who could be counted on to make logical decisions about illogical situations, but none of them were her team. None of them understood her, or gave one good goddamn about what happened to a would-be Wicked Stepsister whose story had somehow managed to shoehorn her into the villain’s role such that the Beauty’s spell had missed her. And that, possibly, was the solution.
“I’m not your true love and I’m not going to kiss you,” said Sloane, delivering a kick to Henry’s ankle. “I want you to remember this if you wake up and think I have hands in bad places.” Then she knelt, and began undoing Henry’s belt.
#
Tanya shouted something behind me, her voice washed out and muffled by the snow. Now that I was aware that it was speaking, the whiteout wood seemed to have lost all desire to keep quiet: I could hear the voices whispering with every flake that fell, telling me to be good, to be meek, to be merciful and dutiful and all the other qualities that the kings of frozen kingdoms must work to imbue in their princesses. I wanted to listen, deep down, in the place where I was more fiction than flesh. And still I ran.
Where did it begin? If Snow White was just the latest face of this eternal winter, what was my story before the modern narrative got to work on it? I was direly afraid that I knew, and that I even understood why the latter-day whiteout women would be content with what they had. There are names, after all, for stories that involve running into the wood with a huntsman chasing after you, his knife naked to the wind. There are stories about the meaning of blood on the snow. The snow whispered for me to be still, and the wood whispered for me to be calm, and I thought of temporary kings and divine figures killed to bring the springtime back around again.
The snow fell so fast behind me that it filled my footprints, covering them up in the veil of endless winter. That would make me harder to track. That was a good thing; I just hoped that it would be good enough.
My socks were soaking through with snowmelt, and my shoes offered little protection against the cold. I normally didn’t feel it that much—but I normally stayed safe with Tanya and the others, didn’t I? I did what the wood wanted.
For the first time, I started to think that maybe that so-noble command to break the narrative, end the story, was something other than altruistic. None of the harvest tales started out as parasites. They were the most powerful pieces of the narrative, once upon a time. We fought back, turned them tame, gave them names and labels that pinned them like butterflies in the textbooks of religious studies professors and folklore teachers all around the world.
It didn’t have to be like that, murmured a voice in my head, and I couldn’t tell whether it was the wood speaking or my own inner Snow White. It doesn’t have to be like that.
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 th
e 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.
“Goddammit, 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.
I drew my gun as I swung myself into the door frame, shouting, “Freeze!”