Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) Page 19

  I wondered, and not for the first time, how the narrative judged a love to be true, rather than any of the other things a love could be. I’d kissed my fair share of lips during my lifetime. Maybe more than my fair share, given how many years I’d spent among the living. But I couldn’t say that any of those kisses had been “true love’s kiss,” or anything close to it. They had been pleasant, and sometimes there had been love behind them. In any rational world, that would have been enough. True love, whatever quality it was, had always eluded me.

  If he hadn’t loved her . . . ah, if he hadn’t loved her, he might have been able to see what I saw. The stiff, uneasy way she held her shoulders; the faint leftward cant of her head, like she was listening to something the rest of us couldn’t hear. Henry was awake, yes, but she had woken up somehow subtly wrong. I couldn’t put words to what had changed. I knew only that she moved in frost and the scent of apples, and that none of the people I depended on to have my back seemed to sense the change.

  We were driving fast, heading down a series of back roads toward a destination that only Henry knew. One thing hadn’t changed: She still drove like she was afraid her license was about to be revoked, taking corners as if they had personally offended her. We were all so accustomed to it by this point that no one batted an eye.

  No one seemed to consider how far we’d driven from the hospital until Henry turned a corner and started driving down a narrow, winding road surrounded on all sides by trees. Demi shifted in her seat, hands tightening around her flute. Ciara cleared her throat.

  “Agent Marchen, what, precisely, is our destination?” she asked. “I need to notify our backup units before we arrive.”

  Bless you, I thought, and said nothing. Ciara was enough of a challenge to Henry’s authority. She didn’t need me wading in and making things worse.

  The idea was amusing. Why, Sloane Winters, are you finally learning restraint? I thought, and had to swallow my laughter. There was nothing restrained about me. There was just the natural predator’s urge to go still in the presence of danger, at least until that danger could be understood and—if necessary—devoured.

  “The old glassworks,” said Henry, her voice tight. “It doesn’t show up on any city maps. It was supposed to have been destroyed a decade ago. The contractors who took the money for the job knew no one was going to check their work for years—the site was too remote—so they just took off for the Bahamas with their pockets full and their consciences clear.”

  “Nothing in the records we saw mentioned anything about an old glassworks,” said Ciara suspiciously. “I would have expected that to be the first thing the Archives tagged, given Elise’s newfound predilections.”

  “Birdie had access to the Archives for years,” said Jeffrey. He sounded tired. “She could have pulled dozens of site flags without anyone realizing anything was going on. We don’t download the city records on a regular basis. If she deleted the plans, deleted anything that indicated it was an area of interest, and didn’t create such a large hole that someone would notice, it’s entirely possible she could have effectively hidden the place.”

  “But how did she know?” asked Andrew. “There’s no way she could have just waved her hand and said ‘hey, someday I’m gonna have a crazy bitch who controls glass on my side, better make sure I have the right supervillain hideout all ready to go.”

  “Why couldn’t she have?” I asked. His casual slurs irked me. I like profanity—it’s practically my mother tongue—but I try to use words that insult without demeaning, when I can. Anything else risks losing the point, and if I insult someone, I want them to understand that I mean every word. “Elise is not insane, no matter what you want to imply. She’s just a mean fucker, and we ran into her for the first time before we locked Birdie up. We know Birdie likes a long game. This could all be part of whatever scam she was running the first time.”

  “Who gets themselves locked in Childe on purpose?” asked Demi.

  “Someone who really, really wants access to a bunch of broken stories,” I said. “A bunch of stories we broke. The Bureau locked those people up together. Birdie—who sort of is a crazy bitch, because all Storytellers are—knew that they’d be mashed together like a big story-cake. All she’d have to do to build herself a new army would be to get thrown in there.”

  “She didn’t have an old army,” said Andrew darkly.

  “Yes, she did,” said Henry. I jumped in my seat, trying to cover the motion by crossing my arms. I wasn’t supposed to be afraid of my own team leader. That was the sort of fear that led to nothing good.

  I looked toward the front of the vehicle. Her eyes were locked on the rearview mirror, watching us. Watching me. My discomfort intensified.

  “We were her old army,” said Henry. “A Stepsister, a Snow White, a Piper, and a Shoemaker? She could have taken on virtually anything if she’d been able to get our stories to manifest the way she wanted them to. We didn’t follow the rules she’d put in place, and so she had to try something else. Sloane’s right. Childe Prison would have seemed like a giant grocery store full of options, and we’re the ones who made it possible for her to go shopping.”

  I frowned. Something about that metaphor didn’t feel right to me. But then again, nothing about this felt right. “So she never actually had an army. She just had the idea of one.”

  “For a Storyteller, that’s enough,” said Henry.

  That was where the conversation ended. We came around a bend in the road, and there it was: The old glassworks, rising out of the trees like a ruined monument. It was brick-faced and blind-eyed, dotted with the ghosts of broken windows. There wasn’t even any graffiti on the walls. That was how completely the place had been forgotten, after the people who were supposed to have destroyed it decided to walk away with the walls still standing.

  It was easy to see how they could have gotten away with it. There was no line of sight between here and any road, and I had to wonder, just a little, who would have built a major factory this far out in the middle of nowhere. Maybe that was part of what had caused the factory to fail in the first place.

  Or maybe someone had been rewriting the woods and roads around here, to better suit the idea of glassworks as ancient castle, to better prepare for their new role as fairy-tale antagonist.

  “I hate magic,” muttered Andrew, whose thoughts had apparently mirrored mine.

  “Don’t worry: magic hates you too,” said Ciara.

  I fixed her with a baleful stare. “That is, like, the opposite of encouraging,” I said.

  “It’s not my job to be encouraging,” she said.

  “It’s not your job to do anything relating to this team,” said Henry, steering the SUV to a stop in front of the building. “You’re here as an observer, nothing more.”

  “And nothing less,” said Ciara. Her eyes were narrowed, her face set in an expression I could only describe as predatory. She was a pirate’s wife with an untamed narrative behind her. I found myself wondering what sort of advantage that would be in the hours to come. “You still haven’t been medically cleared to return to duty, Agent Marchen. If I say you’re not stable, this team remains mine, and you get to have some time off. So I suggest you learn how to smile and pretend you really, really want me here, because the alternative is that one of us leaves—and right now, it wouldn’t be me.”

  “See, this is why I hate HR,” snarled Henry, and kicked open her door.

  It slammed behind her. For one glorious moment, we were alone.

  “Anybody else feel like she woke up scrambled?” I asked.

  Silence answered me.

  So we were going to do this the hard way. Fine. I’m Sloane Winters: I invented the hard way. “You want to ignore what’s right in front of your faces, that’s okay by me. I’ll just laugh even harder when it turns around and bites you. Assholes.”

  “Thanks for the motivational speech, Sloane,” said Andrew, wrinkling his nose. “Any time I start to feel like things are going well, a
ll I have to do is remember your contributions to this team.”

  “That’s my job,” I said. “Now open the goddamn door before Henry starts to suspect something’s going on in here.”

  He opened the door.

  When we were all out of the SUV and standing on the cracked remains of the old parking lot, Henry pointed toward the factory, and said, “This place used to supply most of the glass for the local area. If someone built a house or repaired a shop, they got their supplies here. There are probably still hundreds, if not thousands, of their windows scattered around the city.”

  “The glass Elise creates is all sympathetically connected,” said Demi. We turned to look at her. She reddened but continued: “When I pipe one piece, I can feel the rest trying to respond. All the pieces of glass that have been made here would be attuned to each other in the same way, all over the city.”

  The idea of someone seizing control of a bunch of glass as part of an evil plan should have seemed silly. Too bad we lived our lives according to fairy-tale logic. I opened my mouth to say something snide, and froze—which may have been a bad choice of words, given what had just occurred to me.

  “Fuck,” I breathed. “Fuck fuck fuck, they’re going to pull a Snow Queen.”

  Jeffrey might have been upset by his failure to rescue Henry on his own, but he was an Archivist: His training had been complicated and had taken years. He knew his fairy tales. Slowly, he turned to face me, mouth hanging slightly open.

  “Dear Grimm, I think you’re right,” he said.

  Henry looked annoyed, like our realizations about the dangers at hand were nothing more than an unwanted distraction. Andrew put up his hand.

  “Someone want to tell the rest of the class what that’s supposed to mean, before we go charging in there with our guns half-cocked? Because anything that makes the two of you look like you’re going to barf is something I think I’d like to know about now, not later.”

  “The Snow Queen narrative was codified by Hans Christian Andersen, as part of his work with an organization much like the Bureau,” said Jeffrey, reaching up to adjust his glasses. “At the time, the world’s scholars were working under the mistaken belief that knowing stories weakened them, since it tended to lower their flexibility. We didn’t have the data that would show the dangers of memetic repetition.”

  “What Poindexter here is trying to say is that before old Hans wrote down the whole ‘scary lady lives in the mountains and will freeze all your shit’ story, there were still women in the wind,” I said. “Snow Queens use magic mirrors to watch the world—sort of like Ladies of Shalott or Wicked Stepmothers. But unlike Ladies or Stepmothers, their mirrors are contagious. Who do we know who has control over infectious glass?”

  “If Elise could attune herself to the glass that was made here, she could seize control of all the windows it became, and blow them out,” said Ciara, with understanding and dawning horror. “She could kill hundreds of people.”

  “So it’s important we move fast, and we hit hard,” said Henry. She looked impatient. I couldn’t blame her for that. My feet itched; I wanted to move, to run, and to cut these bastards off at the knees for what they had already done to us, and for what they were potentially about to do. Henry might be cold and smell of apples, but she was behaving reasonably, for once. “Under the circumstances, I think it’s fair to say that if you have the shot, you should take it.”

  “Agent Marchen, are you sure—” began Ciara, only to cut herself off mid-sentence. “Never mind. These people have already caused civilian casualties. I apologize for questioning you.”

  “Apology accepted. Let’s move.” Henry stalked toward the factory. Andrew and Jeffrey were close behind her, and Demi hurried at their heels.

  Only Ciara lingered. “You’re right,” she said tightly, once she was sure she wouldn’t be overheard. “Something’s wrong with her. She makes my locked door fingers itch.”

  I didn’t know which fingers those were, and I didn’t care to ask. “So what are we going to do about it?”

  “Watch her. Try not to let her get herself killed. Try not to let her get anyone else killed.” Ciara shook her head. “I don’t have enough familiarity with Snow White stories. This may be normal.”

  “Or it may not,” I said, and started walking. Wrong or not, Henry was my team leader, and my friend. I didn’t have very many of those—I’d never been able to get the knack. If there was a way for me to protect her from herself, I was going to find it. No matter what that took.

  # # #

  The front door was padlocked shut, and an imposing sign warning of penalties for trespassers had been nailed to the wood above it, presumably to discourage non-existent vandals. Ciara looked at the lock for a moment, her fingers twitching and a small smile on her face.

  “I know this isn’t my team, Agent Marchen, but would you mind if I took this one?”

  Henry looked over her shoulder at Ciara. Then she smiled. “Be my guest,” she said, stepping to the side.

  Ciara didn’t so much walk to the door as float: her feet barely seemed to touch the ground. She leaned forward, putting herself on eye-level with the lock, and studied it until I began shifting my weight from foot to foot, eager to be moving. I didn’t like the idea of rushing into a death trap, but neither did I appreciate the notion of standing perfectly still in plain view of whomever might be watching from the inside.

  “You’re a handsome one, aren’t you?” she cooed. “So strong and sturdy. What a good hasp you must have; what a firm sense of your purpose. But you’ve been holding your place for so long. You can’t be expected to stay closed forever. Why, that simply isn’t fair! The people who put you here don’t appreciate you the way that I do. They don’t understand how difficult it is to be a lock, and to do the things you do. I would appreciate you always. I would never leave you alone in the rain to rust.”

  “Are we watching a woman try to seduce a lock?” asked Andrew. “I’m not objecting if we are—your kink is okay and all—but I just want to confirm that everyone else is seeing what I’m seeing, here.”

  The lock clicked as it released, popping open.

  “No, we’re watching a woman successfully seduce a lock,” said Jeffrey. “Fascinating.”

  “Her love life must involve a lot of handcuffs,” I said, earning myself a snort from Ciara as she reached out and removed the padlock from its place on the door.

  “Don’t ask about mine and I won’t ask about yours,” she said, making the lock disappear into her pocket. She straightened, tugging her jacket back into place. “We should be able to go right on in, and make no noise to warn them that we’re coming.”

  “Nice parlor trick,” said Henry, and began pulling the chains off the door. Andrew and Jeffrey hurried to help her. Demi stayed close. She was holding her flute now, fingers wrapped tight and ready to play.

  Ciara walked back to stand beside me, patting the pocket where she had placed the lock with one hand. She looked smug. “It’s not a parlor trick,” she said, voice low, like she was confessing something incredibly important. “It’s the world.”

  “Not going to argue,” I said. The door was open now, Andrew slinging the length of chain over his shoulder like he anticipated finding a use for it later. Maybe he did. The stuff was pure iron, and while fairy tales didn’t usually have any problem with iron, pure anything could have its uses.

  “Wise choice,” said Ciara, and followed the others into the dark, leaving me once more to bring up the rear.

  Henry was at the front of the group. That was normal—the woman never met a threat she wasn’t willing to face head-on, especially when she had the rest of us with her. It was like she felt like she couldn’t endanger us unless she was endangering herself as well, and if that was the case, who was I to judge? I, who had been throwing myself at the face of the world for centuries, and wondering always whether this would be the day when the world failed to blink, and I could return to the earth that had borne me?

&nbs
p; I was happy to judge Henry for the things that she did wrong. In this case, more than any other, she was simply demonstrating common sense. I couldn’t fault her for that. But I could follow her into the dark, and hope that whatever was wrong with her was not so wrong that it was going to get her—or the rest of us—killed.

  The glassworks had been abandoned for decades. The windows were dark with dust, and the smell of it hung in the air, thick enough to obscure the scent of apples. The chill rolling off of Henry was nothing compared to the cold of unused halls and empty rooms. We were walking into a tomb, or might as well have been, and the only question was whether it was going to be our burial mound.

  “Stay together,” said Henry, voice low. “We don’t know how many of them are in here.”

  “Oh, this just gets better and better,” muttered Andrew. He had drawn his service weapon at some point, and was holding it in both hands, aimed low, but ready to rise.

  Each of us was holding our weapon, such as they were. Jeffrey and Henry had their guns. Demi had her flute. Ciara had the key at her throat, which she touched almost continually as we walked, while her other hand rested on the pocket where she’d concealed the padlock. I had my fists and my anger. They wouldn’t do much against a hail of bullets, I supposed, but I’d had more than time enough to see that sometimes, hitting the enemy until they went away was an excellent approach.

  “Shh,” said Henry, and pushed onward, deeper into the glassworks.

  The rust in the air made it hard to focus on what the narrative was trying to tell me—or perhaps trying to avoid telling me if Birdie had somehow been able to reshape it in this limited area. She said she was a Storyteller. What did that mean? I had only met a few people who claimed that title, and they’d all been working for the Bureau, dedicated to the idea that the human race deserved to tell its own stories, craft its own future, not be shaped by echoes from a distant past that had never really been. They’d been odd people, one and all, but none of them had done what Birdie had done: none of them had awakened sleeping stories and aimed them like arrows at me or the people that I cared about.