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  When we reached the third floor, I looked to Demi. “You’re on.”

  She nodded and raised her flute to her lips with trembling hands. Andy clapped his hands over his ears, and she began to play.

  It was a sweet, eloquent tune, but it lacked the compelling power I’d heard from her before. That was because this song wasn’t meant for me. It wasn’t meant for any of us, save for perhaps Andy, who wasn’t part of any standing story. One by one the doors in the hotel hallway opened, and the occupants of the rooms emerged, blinking and shuffling, into the open. Demi kept playing as she backed into the open elevator. The last I saw of her was the top of her head as she continued to play, luring all the normal people off this floor, away from what was to come.

  The other two elevators arrived and were filled, until the four of us were standing alone. Andy removed his hands from his ears. “Remind me not to piss that girl off,” he said.

  “I’m the one you need to worry about,” said Jeff. “I pick all her sheet music.”

  “Guys, focus. We need to—Sloane?” She was already starting down the hall, moving slowly at first, but gathering speed with every step. As I said her name, she broke into a run. I swore and ran after her, with Andy and Jeff running close behind me.

  Most of the doors were standing open or in the process of swinging closed. Sloane made her way straight to the closed door at the end of the hall. There was a piece of white plastic in her hand. I groped for my pocket as I ran, unsurprised to realize that she had stolen the key card to Elise’s room.

  “Sloane!” I shouted. “This isn’t the right way to fix things!”

  She didn’t stop running. When she reached Elise’s door, she swiped the key card, shoving the door open in practically the same motion. I caught a glimpse of a shocked face topped by a spray of carroty red hair. Then the door slammed, and Sloane, and our killer, were blocked from view.

  “Shit,” I hissed, skidding to a stop just before I would have hit the doorframe. “Sloane!” I pounded on the door. “Let us in! You don’t want to do this!”

  “What if she does?” asked Jeff. “What do we do then?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and kept pounding on the door, only to nearly fall forward as it was wrenched abruptly open. Sloane was standing just inside with one hand on the doorknob, and the other wrapped firmly around Elise’s throat. The gun was lying on the bed, too far away for either of them to have grabbed it. That was a mercy.

  “She’s not worth getting my hands bloody,” snarled Sloane, and half-shoved, half-threw Elise at Andy. He caught her easily. Elise huddled in his arms, sobbing. Sloane wasn’t done with her diatribe, and continued, eyes on Elise, “She turned herself into a Cinderella. You understand? She killed her own mother, turned herself into an orphan, and then went stalking the story. She hoped it would make her better. All it did was make her worthless.”

  “I don’t know what she’s talking about,” sobbed Elise. “Why does she keep calling me Cinderella? I didn’t do anything …”

  I looked at her, trying to feel something other than pity. “You did enough,” I said.

  “She’s lying,” said Sloane. “She knew exactly what she’d done, and what she was trying to become. She wanted to be a perfect little princess. All she did was turn herself into a flawed reflection of an ideal she could never achieve. You hear me? Never.”

  Elise straightened, her sobs fading as she twisted in Andy’s arms to glare at Sloane. She wasn’t trying to escape. Maybe she knew that it was pointless. “At least I’m better than you, sister,” she spat. “You think I don’t recognize you? At least I tried. I wormed my way into those families and made them my own. I tried to find another story, one where I didn’t have to be the bad guy. You just let our story take you.”

  Sloane stood frozen for a moment, looking at the girl she might have been. Then: “I’ll be in the car,” she said, and stalked away toward the elevators.

  Jeff watched her go before moving to stand beside me. “Is she okay?”

  “No,” I said, and we stood there waiting until the police descended.

  Episode 6

  Fox’s Tongue

  Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 105 (“The Fox and the Cat”)

  Status: SUSPENDED

  Dr. Reynard—not the name that he was born with, but then, how many people can be truly defined by their original names in both childhood and maturity? A truly sensible culture would grant a person a new name with every decade of their life, until age and perspective allowed them to choose the name that would grace their tombstone—closed his door. The office was cool and dark, filled with the soft, subtle scents of leather and fresh-turned earth. The former was natural; the latter came from a clever atmospheric spray he’d ordered from an online retailer. They made such amazing things these days.

  The room was as carefully designed as any home ever featured in a magazine spread. Every piece of paper and bit of memorabilia was positioned just so in front of the leather-bound books that lined the shelves, common enough to suggest eclectic interests, sparse enough not to seem like an unhealthy fixation. The shelves, in turn, lined the walls, creating an illusion of coziness in a space that was actually quite large. It was all very clever, and Dr. Reynard found that to be of the utmost comfort. Better still, the color scheme—all reds and browns and fertile yellows—echoed the soft simplicity of a British autumn. It was a burrow, plain and simple, designed for a thinking man of expensive tastes who also happened to be, through no fault of his own, a treacherous fox as likely to rob a fair maiden as to kiss her hand.

  “To thine own self be true” had been Polonius’s motto, and the good doctor found that it still served well in this troublesome modern world, where stories were considered to be fiction and those who were afflicted with a trifle too much narrative strength were viewed as outcasts, or worse, as monsters.

  One of those monsters was on her way to his office now. Dr. Reynard sat down at his desk, flipping languidly through the folders piled there until he found the one he wanted. “Sloane Winters,” he said aloud, feeling out the shape of her name with his mouth. It was a good name. She had almost certainly chosen that surname for herself, after her heart froze over, but the proper name had the flavor of one that had been worn for a lifetime. She had been a Wicked Stepsister-in-waiting from the moment of her first breath. Like so many who attracted the attention of the narrative, she had never been given a chance to be anything more than what she was: a tool, a fulcrum upon which the memetic incursions that sought to devour the world could turn themselves.

  “I think I will greatly enjoy getting to know you, Miss Winters,” he said, as he picked up a quill. After stealing a glance at the clock above the door—enough time, if only just—he smiled a small and private smile, and began to write.

  Truly, they would tell a glorious story together, the sister and the fox. All it needed now was a beginning.

  He was so engrossed in the plotting of their story that he didn’t hear the back door open, or the thin metallic sound of the knife being drawn from the butcher’s block in the kitchen. The carpet in the hallway was thick enough to swallow footsteps whole, gulping them down its padded gullet and replacing them with silence. Unaware of what was coming ever closer to his fine and private space, Dr. Reynard wrote on until, all too soon, his story ended.

  #

  Sloane sat in the passenger seat with her elbows on her knees and her shoulders hunched so that her spine formed one of those eye-bruising angles that always left me with a sympathetic backache. She had left her hair loose for a change, and it was hanging over her face, completely blocking her expression from view. She hadn’t bothered to re-dye her roots recently. They showed above the inky black and fire engine red streaks, dishwater blonde and somehow sad.

  “Dr. Reynard used to work for the Pacific Northwest branch of the ATI Management Bureau,” I said, feeling like one of us should be filling the silence in the car. The radio wasn’t an option: no matter what station w
e tuned into, it fluxed back and forth between thrash metal covers of nursery rhymes and syrupy sweet acoustic versions of murder ballads. I wasn’t sure which one of us was responsible for which parts of the unpleasant musical mash-up, and I didn’t want to worry about making her angry right now.

  The situation was weird enough as it was. We were both out of uniform—for Sloane, that meant slightly less aggressively overdone eye makeup; for me, it meant gray stonewashed jeans and a dark blue cotton shirt that had been white when I brought it home from the department store. I wasn’t entirely sure why the story I had spent my life avoiding felt the need to recolor my wardrobe. It was probably connected to the same memetic leak that occasionally caused wildflowers to sprout on my carpet.

  Deputy Director Brewer had been happy to grant my request for time off when I explained that it would be used getting Sloane to a therapist who was slightly more experienced with narrative recursion—a stable freeze starting to narratively thaw—than the stable of counselors, shrinks, and psychologists who were officially employed by the Bureau. Thanks to an outdated rule in our hiring practices, we were not allowed to recruit psychiatric support staff from people who had been directly impacted by a story. In theory, this meant that our psych staff would be able to approach all stories with equal compassion and neutrality. And most of the time, that was how it worked.

  But, unfortunately, we sometimes needed something more: people with a degree of empathy that required a more intimate understanding of what it meant to be on the ATI spectrum. The Bureau psychologists had been enough to keep Sloane functional until now. With her story starting to reassert itself, that was no longer the case.

  “We’re almost there,” I added, in case that would somehow prompt Sloane to respond to me. “Dr. Reynard has cleared his entire afternoon to get to know you, and I made sure that our insurance covers him as an out-of-house provider. You won’t be paying a penny for your care.”

  “I have plenty of pennies,” said Sloane, without lifting her head. “Almost as many as I have murderous impulses. I’d be happy to trade the one for the other.”

  “And that’s good, that shows you want to break out of your narrative track,” I said, turning down a small residential side street. “Luckily, you’re not going to have to trade anything. Dr. Reynard specializes in cases like yours. He’ll fix this.”

  Sloane finally sat up, unbending her spine one vertebra at a time, until she was upright and could look me in the face. Her eyes were surprisingly clear and tired, without their usual pigmented armor. “Henry. You’re a story, and I’m a story, and there’s nothing in the world that can ‘fix’ us. We’re going to be what we are until the day we die. All that matters is whether we can be kept in proper chains until then.”

  I pressed my lips into a thin line and said, “I don’t believe that, and neither should you.”

  “Do you have any idea how old I am? Of course you don’t. I’ve never let any of you people get close enough to figure that out. But believe me, Henry. You’re not the first Snow White I’ve seen, and you probably won’t be the last. You’ll do what you can with the resources you have, and you’ll serve your story by trying to save me.” Sloane dropped her head again. “I should be trying to save you. That would subvert the narrative. But instead here we are, you saving me, or dying in the process. Dying is a lot more likely.”

  “Only if you take things at face value,” I said. “I’m not going to eat anything you hand me, drink anything you’ve touched, borrow your comb, or put on any of your rings. You know what I will do?”

  “What?” asked Sloane, not sounding as if she believed that the answer could matter in the slightest.

  “I’ll shoot you in your goddamn head if I really and truly feel that you’ve become a danger to yourself and others. And then I’ll take your body down to the folks in Agricultural and ask them to use you to fertilize an apple tree. And when you’ve grown to a lovely size and started bearing fruit, I will sit underneath you and not eat a single one of your inevitably poisoned apples.”

  Sloane glanced at me through her hair, and for a moment I actually saw a wisp of a smile on her face. “You’d do that for me?” she asked.

  “Not sure whether you meant the shooting or the burying or the apples, but yes. I would do every bit of that for you.” And I meant it.

  I pulled up in front of a well-kept Victorian home, its decorative trim painted in shades of red and gold. What looked like a full murder of crows occupied the lawn and perched on the front porch railing. They ruffled their feathers and croaked when they saw us, seeming to object to our presence. I eyed the crows. The crows eyed me.

  “Well, you should feel right at home here,” I said. “Either this guy is evil, or he has a very unusual set of atmospherics.”

  Sloane leaned forward, peering past me to the black birds covering the grass. “What story did you say this guy escaped from?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. “I didn’t want to prejudice you.”

  The look she shot me was full of disgust. Given that most of her recent looks had been full of venom and self-loathing, disgust was a step up. “His lawn is covered in crows. Most memetic incursions using crows are negative. I really, really don’t think that taking me to a fairy tale villain is the way to neutralize my own negative impulses. Given how much I want to strangle you right now, I’d say that it does exactly the opposite.”

  “But you usually want to strangle me. I don’t see the difference,” I said. Sloane’s glare didn’t waver. I sighed. “He’s a one-oh-five, okay?”

  There was a pause as Sloane flipped through her mental copy of the Aarne-Thompson Index. For a moment, I wasn’t sure she’d be able to place the number.

  I shouldn’t have underestimated her.

  “He’s a clever fox?” she asked. “Or what, a patient hedgehog or whatever the hell it is that teaches the clever fox to be less clever. Because ‘don’t be smart, kids, that’s what gets you fucked over’ is a wonderful moral.”

  “He was a clever fox, yes, but that means he was never a villain, just an antihero,” I said, unbuckling my seat belt. “Now he’s a psychologist, and he’s the best in the business when it comes to your particular problem.”

  “Fox, huh? That’s why he calls himself ‘Reynard,’ isn’t it?” Sloane rolled her eyes as she retrieved her coffin-shaped purse from the floor. “Why is everyone so on-the-nose all the time?”

  “Asks the girl who chose ‘Winters’ as her surname.” I got out of the car. “Come on. Let’s go meet your new best friend.”

  Sloane glowered at me before stomping toward the front door, scattering crows before her like some ancient murder goddess whose story had been thankfully forgotten by the narrative that regularly tried to ruin our lives. I smiled to myself. It was such a Sloane thing to do that it actually gave me hope. As long as she was still herself, she’d tell the story that was trying to take her over to fuck off, just to be contrary.

  She stopped when she reached the porch, turning and shooting another glare in my direction. “Well?” she demanded. “Are you coming?”

  “I’m right behind you,” I said, and followed.

  #

  Both of us knew that something was very wrong as soon as we stepped into the front hall. The door being unlocked made sense—this was a place of business as well as a private home—but something about the atmosphere in the room put my back up. Sloane was clearly feeling something similar. She stiffened as the door swung shut behind us, lifting her head and sniffing the air in an almost canine manner.

  “Dr. Reynard?” I called. “It’s Henrietta Marchen? We spoke on the phone. I’m escorting Sloane Winters for her appointment …” I started to take a step forward.

  Sloane put out her arm, catching me across the chest. I stopped, frowning at her, until she said, “Something’s wrong. Can’t you smell it? That shouldn’t be here.”

  “Smell what?” I turned back to the hallway, trying to emulate her position. “All I smell is dust and o
ld books. It smells like library in here, but there’s nothing out of place.”

  “What did he have for lunch?”

  The question was rapid enough to seem casual, and I answered without hesitation: “Apple pie.” I froze. “Wait. What? There’s no way I could smell that from here.”

  “There’s no way you could smell that at all, because he didn’t have apple pie for lunch, and that’s not what you’re really smelling. That’s just how your story tells you to filter it.” Sloane lowered her arm. “You need to stay here, Henry.”

  “Sloane, I—”

  “Please.” There was an urgency in her tone that was entirely unlike her. I frowned at her again. She twisted to look at me, shaking her head. “I won’t leave your sight, I promise, but right now, you need to stay here, and you need to trust me. You’ve been using me as your fairy tale bloodhound since you joined the Bureau, and people were using me for the same thing while you were still learning your ABCs. Trust me now. Let me do my job. Let me be your hound.”

  Her eyes were wide and pleading. I bit my lip, trying to come to a decision when it felt like half the data I needed was outside my field of vision. In the end, it was her lack of insults that made me believe her. She hadn’t called me a snowy bitch or made any jokes about the smell of phantom apples. She was serious, even if I didn’t understand quite why … and it scared the hell out of me.

  “All right,” I said. “But if you need to leave this hall, you call me, and I come with you. Do we have a deal?”

  “I won’t need to leave the hall,” she said, practically jogging in place. She was starting to look pale and drawn, as if standing still took a greater physical toll than anything else I could have asked her to do. “The smell is too close for that. I won’t have to go far.”