Irritation flashed briefly in her eyes, there and gone in an instant. “Jeffrey confirmed my research, and he said we haven’t had a seven-oh-nine here in years. We’re due.”
“If that’s all we’re going by, we’re due for a lot of things.” Some stories are more common than others. Seven-oh-nines are thankfully rare, in part because they take a lot of support from the narrative. Dwarves aren’t cheap. Other stories require smaller casts and happen more frequently. Sadly for us, some of the more common stories are also some of the most dangerous.
Sloane’s expression darkened, eyes narrowing beneath the red and black fringe of her hair. “Well, maybe if you’d shown up when we were first scrambling this team, you’d have been able to have more input on what kind of story we’re after. You didn’t show up for the briefing, so the official designation is seven-oh-nine.”
I bit back a retort. Another promptly rose in my throat, and I bit that back as well. Sloane didn’t deserve any of the things I wanted to say to her, no matter how obnoxious she was being, because she was right; I should have been there when the team was coming together. I should have been a part of this conversation.
“Where’s Andy?” I asked.
“Behind you,” said a mild, amiable voice. It was the kind of voice that made me want to confess my sins and admit that everything in my life was my own fault. That’s the type of quality you want in a public relations point man.
I turned. “What’s our civilian situation?”
“I’ve cleared out as many as I could, but this isn’t an area that can be completely secured,” said Andy, as if this were a perfectly normal way for us to begin a conversation. Tall, thick-waisted, and solid, he looked like he could easily have bench-pressed me with one arm tied behind his back. It was all appearances: in reality, I could have taken him in either a fair or an unfair fight, and Sloane could mop the floor with us both. What Andy brought to the table was people skills. There were very few minds he couldn’t change, if necessary, and most of those belonged to people who were already caught in the gravitational pull of the oncoming story.
Put in a lineup, we certainly made an interesting picture. All three of us were dark-haired, although Andy and I were both natural, while Sloane’s intermittent brushes with black came out of a bottle. Andy had skin almost as dark as his hair. Sloane was pale but still clearly Caucasian. I had less melanin than your average sheet of paper, and could easily have been mistaken for albino if not for my blue eyes and too-red lips—although more than a few people probably assumed that my hair was as dyed as Sloane’s, and that my lip color came courtesy of CoverGirl. We definitely didn’t look like any form of law enforcement. That, too, was a sort of truth in advertising, because the law that we were enforcing wasn’t the law of men or countries. It was the law of the narrative, and it was our job to prevent the story from going the way it always had before—impossible as that could sometimes seem.
#
We set the junior agents and the grunts to holding the perimeter while we walked two blocks deeper into our isolation zone, trying to get eyes on our target. We found her getting out of a cab that had somehow managed to get past the cordon—not as much of a surprise as I wanted it to be, sad to say. Most of the police didn’t have any narrative resistance to speak of, and our junior agents weren’t much better. If the story wanted her to make it this far, she’d make it. The obstacles we were throwing in her way just gave her tale one more thing to overcome.
There are times when I wonder if the entire ATI Management Bureau isn’t a form of narrative inertia, something gathered by a story so big that it has no number and doesn’t appear in the Index. We’d be a great challenge for some unknown cast of heroes and villains. And then I push that thought aside and try to keep going, because if I let myself start down that primrose path of doubts and disillusionment, I’m never coming back.
Our target paid her cabbie before turning to stagger unsteadily down the sidewalk. She was beautiful in the classical seven-oh-nine way, with sleek black hair and snowy skin that probably burned horribly in the summer. She looked dazed, like she was no longer quite aware of what she was doing. One of her feet was bare. She probably wasn’t aware of that, either.
Andy pulled out his phone, keying in a quick series of geographical tags that would hopefully enable us to predict her destination before she could actually get there. Finally, he said, “She’s heading for the Alta Vista Medical Center.”
I swore under my breath. “Of course she is. Where else would she be going?” Alta Vista was the largest hospital in the city. Even if we’d been able to close off eighty percent of the traffic coming into our probable impact zone, we couldn’t close or evacuate the hospital. Not enough people believe in fairy tales anymore.
“Shoot her,” said Sloane.
“We’re not shooting her,” said Andy.
Sloane shrugged. “Your funeral.”
“Let’s pretend to be professionals … and pick up the pace,” I snapped. Sloane and Andy exchanged a glance, briefly united against a common enemy—me. They knew that I wanted them to be mad at me rather than each other, and they accepted it as the way the world was meant to be. Besides, we all knew that our job would be easier this way.
We followed the target all the way down the road to Alta Vista, hanging back almost half a block to keep her from noticing us. Our caution was born more of habit than necessity; she was deep into her narrative haze, moving more under the story’s volition than her own. We could have stripped down and danced naked in front of her and she would just have kept on walking.
“If we’re not going to stop her from getting where she’s going, why are we even bothering?” Sloane walked with her hands crammed as far into the pockets of her denim jacket as they would go, her shoulders in a permanent defensive hunch. “She’ll play out whether we’re here or not. We could go out, get breakfast, and come back before the EMTs finish hooking her to the life support.”
“Because it’s the polite thing to do,” said Andy. He was always a lot more at ease with this part of the job than Sloane was, probably because the only thing Andy ever escaped was a respectable profession that he could tell his family about. Sloane missed being a Wicked Stepsister by inches, and she’s always been uncomfortable around the ATI cases that tread near the edges of her own story. I can’t blame her for that. I also can’t approve any of her requests for transfer. Jeff’s fully actualized in his story, and I’m in a holding pattern, but Sloane was actually averted. That gives her a special sensitivity to the spectrum. She’s the only one who can spot the memetic incursions before they get fully under way.
“She’s a seven-oh-nine,” snarled Sloane, shooting a poisonous glare in Andy’s direction. Metaphorically poisonous: she never matured to the arsenic-and-apples stage of things. Thank God. Once a Wicked Stepsister goes that far, there’s no bringing her back to reason. “You can’t do anything for them, short of putting a bullet in their heads. Even then, the dumb bitches will probably just get permanently brain-damaged on the way to happy ever after.”
Andy raised an eyebrow. “Gosh, Sloane, tell us how you really feel.”
The target approached the doors of the Alta Vista Hospital. Even at our half-block remove, we saw them slide open, allowing her to make her way inside. If the story went the way the archivists predicted, her own Wicked Stepmother would be waiting inside, ready to hand her a box of poisoned apple juice or a plastic cup of tainted applesauce. That would let the story start in earnest. That’s the way it goes for the seven-oh-nines. All the Snow Whites are essentially the same, when you dig all the way down to the bottom of their narratives.
Sloane shifted her weight anxiously from one foot to the other as we waited, looking increasingly uncomfortable as the minutes trickled by and the weight of the impending story grew heavier. Then she stiffened, her eyes widening in their rings of sheltering kohl. “There isn’t a five-eleven anywhere inside that hospital,” she said, and bolted for the doors.
; Swearing, Andy and I followed her.
Sloane had been a marathon runner in high school, and she’d continued to run since then, choosing it over more social forms of exercise. She was piling on the speed now, running hell-bent toward the hospital doors with her head slightly down, like she was going to ram her way straight through any obstacles. Andy had settled into a holding pattern about eight feet behind her, letting her be the one to trigger any traps that might be waiting. It wasn’t as heartless as it seemed. As the one who had come the closest to being sucked into a story of her own without going all the way, Sloane is not only the most sensitive—she’s also the most resistant. She could survive where we couldn’t.
“Sloane!” I bellowed. “If it’s not a seven-oh-nine, what is it?”
She didn’t have time to answer, but she didn’t need to. She came skidding to a stop so abruptly that Andy almost slammed into her from behind, both of them only inches from the sensor that would trigger the automatic door. Those inches saved them. I could see the people in the lobby through the glass as they started falling over gently in their tracks, all of them apparently sinking into sleep at the same moment.
I let momentum carry me forward until I came to an easy stop next to Sloane and Andy. “Great,” I sighed. “A four-ten.”
I hate Sleeping Beauties.
#
The cleanup crew cordoned off the entire block surrounding the hospital, buying off the inevitable media and local police with stories about a natural gas leak. “Radon gas,” said Andy to a dewy-eyed reporter who looked like she had six brain cells to knock together, all of them devoted to keeping her from falling off her stiletto heels. She was nodding gravely in time with his words, making me faintly seasick. Andy can be damn convincing when he wants to be. “It’s invisible, it’s scentless, and …” he stepped forward, moving in for the kill, “it’s deadly.”
The reporter took an unconscious step back, dewy eyes widening even further. She looked like a startled deer. “Where did it come from?”
“Natural caverns, ma’am. The city’s riddled with them,” said Andy. I groaned to myself, making a mental note to tell our media division to plant some old city records about natural caverns. Undaunted, Andy continued, “Don’t worry. As long as we can keep this area clear of civilians, we’ll have this all cleaned up in a matter of hours.”
The reporter nodded, thrusting her microphone into his face as she recovered her composure enough to start asking inane questions about the supposed gas leak. I turned my attention from Andy to Jeff, head of the on-site cleanup crew.
“It’s not really radon gas, is it?” I asked. Stranger things have happened once a four-ten shows up on the scene. As long as people fall down and don’t get up again, it falls within the borders of the story. The narrative doesn’t care how little sense it makes.
“No,” said Jeff. I let my shoulders start relaxing. “It’s a new strain of sleeping sickness that’s somehow managed to hybridize itself with the H1N1 flu.”
I stopped relaxing. “You’re saying we have an airborne Sleeping Beauty?”
Jeff nodded. “Her influence is confined to the hospital right now, probably because the vents were closed when she went fully infectious, but eventually it’s going to start spreading.”
“How bad could this get?”
“Bad enough.” His expression was grim. “There’s no vaccine, since it’s a new disease. Antibiotics won’t work on a virus. It seems to spread through the air. One little crack and we could have a citywide outbreak. City turns to state, and hell, we could lose the whole seaboard. This thing wants to spread, Henry. It wants to get bad enough—”
“—to attract a Prince,” I finished grimly. “Some opportunistic son of a bitch out to nail a Princess for the sake of a payoff. I hate Princes. The goddamn things are worse than rats.” I froze, considering the implications of that statement.
“I don’t like them much either, Henry, but I don’t see how else we’re going to stop this story before a lot of people get hurt.” Jeff gave me a sidelong look. “I don’t like that look on your face. What are you thinking?”
“Get me Sloane,” I said, my own gaze swinging toward the hospital. “I have a job for her.”
#
“You’re insane,” announced Sloane, folding her arms across her chest and distorting her skull-and-crossbones T-shirt graphic into something that was less pirate and more Picasso. “I’ve always known that you were going to go over the edge one day, but this is worse than I thought it was going to be. I just figured you’d start talking to bunnies and singing into wishing wells.”
“Be as nasty as you want, Sloane; that won’t change what I’m asking you to do.” I met her eyes as calmly as I could, trying to ignore her digs at my borderline seven-oh-nine status. I had all the hallmarks—a dead mother, a redheaded twin, and a deadbeat father who tried to claim custody over the protests of his flaxen-fair trophy wife—but I dodged that bullet years ago, and I’ve been dodging it ever since, bluebirds and unwanted wildflowers aside. Sloane knows that, just like she knows that I’ll never respond in kind. It wouldn’t be fair.
“What makes you think this is even going to work?”
“It’s going to work because we’re dealing with a pathogenic Sleeping Beauty this time. The story’s trying to buck us off its trail and keep us from disrupting the narrative. That’s fine, because if it’s a disease, it falls under the AT Index for ‘vermin,’ and if the problem is vermin, we can resolve the story with another story.”
“So you want Sloane to find you a two-eighty?” Andy shook his head. “I know you don’t like the four-tens, but don’t you think this is reaching a little?”
“It’s reaching, sure, but Henrietta’s got the right idea,” said Jeff abruptly. We all turned to look at him. Our resident archivist had his copy of the Index open, propped on one arm, his finger anchored midway down the two-eighty column. He always had a paper Index in the van: the story could change computer readouts if it got enough momentum, but there’s nothing that changes a printed copy of the Aarne-Thompson Index. “There’s a reported variation here where the two-eighty killed the village that refused to pay him by piping the Black Death into their houses while they slept. Pipers can control disease. The narrative supports it.”
“Then it’s settled,” I said, firmly. “We’re going to give it a try. Sloane, you’re our fairy tale detector. Go do your job. Find me a Pied Piper.”
“I fucking hate you sometimes,” she snarled, and turned to stalk away.
Andy waited until she was out of earshot before he asked, “Do you honestly think this is going to work?”
“I have no fucking clue,” I replied. “But that’s not the important question here, is it?”
“What is?” he asked, eyeing me suspiciously.
“Can you think of anything better?”
Andy was silent.
I nodded. “I thought not,” I said. “Come on. Let’s get back to the van. The coffee should be ready by now.”
#
The containment team estimated that the hospital would be able to hold our Sleeping Beauty—identified by the research crew back at headquarters as Alicia Connors, age seventeen, daughter of a fairly prominent local family that had also been reported as inexplicably asleep—for approximately six hours before the contagion started to spread. They were close. The people nearest the hospital began slumping gently over approximately five-and-a-half hours after our four-ten went inside, marking the first cases outside the hospital walls.
“If Sloane’s not back soon, we’re going to need to look at pulling our men back,” said Jeff, watching as Andy continued his attempts at crowd control. “We can’t afford to have an entire team fall asleep for a hundred years. The strain on personnel would be unbelievable.”
“She’ll be here,” I said. “God, I hate Sleeping Beauties.” Why that story, out of all the possible stories, should have the sort of staying power it does is beyond me. Centuries of helpless girls, half
of them rotting away years before their Prince could come. It makes me sick.
“I know,” said Jeff. “Look, Henry—”
Whatever platitude he’d been preparing about hating the story, not the subject, was cut off as Sloane came storming back up the street, managing to stomp at a pace most people can’t manage when running. She was hauling a frail-looking slip of a teenage girl along by one arm. The girl was clutching a concert flute in one hand, and she looked distinctly alarmed. I couldn’t blame her. Sloane is distinctly alarming.
“Here,” announced Sloane, shoving the girl in our direction. “Demi Santos. She’s a music major at the community college. I followed the pigeons. You explain what’s happening to her. I’m going to go twist the heads off some kittens.” She spun on her heel and went stalking off again.
The brusquely identified Ms. Santos shot us an alarmed look. Jeff, trying to be helpful, said encouragingly, “Don’t worry. Sloane very rarely twists the head off anything.”
Demi Santos, now officially convinced that she’d been abducted by crazy people, burst into tears.
“Jeff, handle her,” I snapped. “Sloane!” I stalked after my runaway team member, who didn’t stop, slow down, or turn to look at me. “Sloane!”
“Fuck you, princess,” she said, holding up a hand and once again showing me her middle finger. “I did what you asked. Now go save the day like a good little hero while I slink off like a good little villain.” Her last word dripped with venom. I found myself wanting to retreat as my inner Snow White stirred, alarmed by the presence of danger.
Forget that. “You want me to write you up?” I demanded.
She stopped walking. I didn’t.
“I could do that, you know,” I said, pulling up even with her. “All I have to do is send in one little report that says you’re not as redeemed as we all want to believe you are, and you’re going back to rehab for another six months. I don’t want to file that report. Do you want to make me?”