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  “We have to. If we don’t—”

  “There’s always another way.”

  “What do you want us to do? Should we kill Alicia? Because that’s one way to end the story—assuming we could get close enough to pull it off, that is, which I seriously doubt. Should we find a Prince? Waking one of them would do just as much damage as waking our Piper. Maybe more—if we have a Prince and a Beauty both, the odds are damn good that we’re going to get an Evil Sorceress. You’re the closest candidate. Do you want to risk that?”

  Sloane looked away. “No,” she mumbled.

  “You think I want to do this to her? Sloane, you know me. You know better.” The idea of someone deciding that my story needed to be completed, that my fairy tale needed to be awakened . . . it was enough to turn my stomach. And yet I knew full well that if someone ever managed to get a Magic Mirror to work, I was likely to find someone from the head office standing on my doorstep with an apple and an apologetic expression.

  “You sent me after her.”

  “Yeah, because what I want doesn’t always mesh with what I need in order to do my job. But I promise you: we’re not going to hurt this girl for nothing. This thing … it has the potential to infect the whole city, maybe the whole state. We’re saving a lot of lives.”

  Sloane was silent.

  I sighed. “Do you need a little bit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll be back at the van. Come join us when you’re ready.” With that said, I turned and walked away from her, giving her the space that she needed to come to terms with what she’d just done. Giving Demi to us was tantamount to betraying her, in Sloane’s mind: she had just condemned the girl to life on the ATI spectrum.

  Now we just had to make sure that it was worth it.

  #

  Andy was still trying to calm Demi down when I returned. She was holding an open can of Diet Pepsi, taking small sips and hiccupping occasionally as he reassured her over and over again that we weren’t going to let Sloane anywhere near her. I stayed well out of the way, waiting for her to stop crying and dry her tears. I am not one of nature’s more reassuring people, and even if this city contained another Pied Piper—which was statistically unlikely; the story is popular, but it’s not that popular, and there aren’t that many variations—we didn’t have time to send Sloane out to find them. The contagion was continuing to spread while we all stood around getting in touch with our feelings. If Demi wasn’t up for the job, the entire city was at risk of an extended, unplanned nap time.

  Andy straightened, waving to me. “Henry, I think you can come over now,” he called, giving Demi an encouraging smile. “We’re mostly calmed down.”

  “Thank you, Andy.” I walked over to them, offering Demi my hand. “I’m Special Agent Henrietta Marchen. I assume that my friend Andrew has given you a basic rundown of the situation?” She sniffled, nodding. She didn’t take my hand. After a second of awkward silence, I withdrew it. “Well, that’s good; it saves time. Has he told you what we need you to do?”

  “No, ma’am,” she said. Her voice was barely above a whisper. Honestly, I was just relieved to hear her speak. If she’d turned out to be a Little Mermaid, I think I would have screamed.

  “Okay, Demi, here’s the situation: we have a Sleeping Beauty in that building.” I pointed to the hospital. “Her particular story takes the form of an airborne infection. I need you to play your flute and lure in rats from as far away as you can manage. Once you have them here, I need you to send them into the hospital, pipe the sickness into them, and then pipe them into the sewers to drown. Think you can do that for us?”

  Demi stared at me. Finally, in the tone of someone who was just starting to catch up with the rest of the class, she said, “You people are insane.”

  “Probably,” I agreed, without malice. “We fight fairy tales for a living. We’re the definition of ‘people who go among mad people.’ But whether we’re insane or not, my proposal is a simple one. I think you’ll like it.”

  “What’s that?” asked Demi, with natural, understandable wariness.

  I smiled. I know how creepy I am when I smile. Whoever came up with “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood” and thought people would find it attractive really wasn’t thinking things through. “Pipe the rats into the hospital, and we’ll let you leave.”

  #

  “Agent Marchen!”

  The shout wasn’t a surprise. If anything, the surprise was that it had taken so long to come. I swallowed my irritation and pasted my best expression of bland obedience across my face as I turned to face the officious-looking little man who was storming in my direction, dark clouds and thunder virtually visible above his head. Deputy Director Brewer was thin as a whip, with dirty blond hair that had probably been thinning years before he pissed off the wrong person and got himself reassigned to the ATI Management Bureau. Probably. I mean, we were pretty aggravating before you got to know us—and more aggravating after you got to know us—but I didn’t think we had the power to make a man’s hair fall out.

  According to Sloane, the deputy director not only wasn’t on the ATI scale, he was so far from being a fairy tale that he practically came out the other side to become an anchor to the “real” world. I found that reassuring, somehow. It meant that he was one man who’d never stand up and announce that he’d discovered his inner Prince Charming. His inner bureaucrat, maybe, but in his case, “inner” was right up on the surface.

  And oh, did he look pissed.

  “Yes, Deputy Director?” I asked.

  “What’s this I’m hearing about a civilian?”

  I resisted the urge to glance back to the van where Demi was going over sheet music options with Jeff, who was absolutely delighted to have an excuse to download half the great composers of Europe on work’s time. They were focusing on pieces composed during the Black Death, since they were more likely to match up with the timeline on our Pied Piper variant. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific,” I said. “There are a lot of civilians involved in this action.”

  “Yes, but as most of them are currently unconscious, I think you know damn well which one I mean. Where’s the girl?”

  I raised both eyebrows, emphasizing the fact that the whites of my eyes were almost the same shade as the white of my skin. “Do you mean Demi Santos, by any chance?”

  My expression had the desired effect. The deputy director stopped in his tracks, actually rocking onto his heels for a moment before he recovered and pressed on, snapping, “Yes, I mean Demi Santos. I have several eyewitnesses who claim that a woman who sounds suspiciously like Agent Winters entered Miss Santos’s music class without invitation and physically removed her from the premises. The police were called.”

  “Uh-huh. Did you call them off? Because we really don’t have the time or manpower to deal with the police right now. I know this is piling shit on top of shit, but seriously, if you make me try to talk to some beat cop who doesn’t want to be here, I’m going to scream. And if I scream, the bluebirds will find me.”

  Deputy Director Brewer blinked at me as if he had no idea what I was talking about, and even less idea of how to handle it. Again, he recovered quickly, shaking his head as he said, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, Agent, but you can’t simply—”

  “Demi Santos is a half-awakened two-eighty, as you would know if you had stopped by the control van to read my mission log before coming out here to confront me,” I said calmly. “In case you can’t remember the ATI off the top of your head right now, that means she’s a Pied Piper. A Pied Piper at music school with no control and no handler is a threat to public safety. She was going to go live any day, and when that happened, a lot of people were going to get hurt.”

  He went even paler, if such a thing was possible. “Are you saying we have two concurrent memetic incursions?”

  The temptation to say yes and see him run was almost irresistible. I resisted. “No, I’m saying Demi Santos is on the ATI
spectrum, and is thus my responsibility, not yours. She’s aiding us with this investigation.”

  “Aiding you how?”

  “Jeff can explain better than I can, sir,” I said. “I assure you, it will all be laid out very clearly in his notes, as well as in my own. For the moment, may I please recommend that you leave the scene? You’ll be safer behind the cordon.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Safer how?”

  Deputy Director Brewer had risen to his current position by being a by-the-book kind of man. The trouble was, his book didn’t have any happy endings, and it certainly didn’t have evil witches, wicked stepsisters, and talking mice. Sometimes getting him to understand the reality of what fieldwork entailed was more trouble than I had the patience for. This was one of those times.

  “That hospital is ground zero for a sickness the likes of which we haven’t seen in centuries,” I snapped, jabbing a finger toward the looming shape of the Alta Vista Hospital. “There is a teenage girl asleep in there who’s going to kill us all if my team doesn’t prevent it—and when I say ‘all,’ I mean everyone in this city. That means coming up with an out-of-the-box solution. Enter Demi Santos. Now, I can’t say for sure what’s going to happen to you if you’re still standing here when she breaks out her flute, but I can say that you’re probably not going to like it. The rest of us have been touched by these stories. We have some resistance. You do not. Now, with all due respect, sir, I suggest that you get behind that cordon, before you get a hell of a lot closer to ever after than you ever wanted to be.”

  There was a moment of silence. It stretched out long enough that I started to worry I had gone too far. Then the deputy director nodded tightly, said, “I look forward to your report,” and turned to walk back toward the cordon.

  I stayed where I was, watching him go. When I was sure that he wasn’t going to turn and come charging back, I sighed and made my own turn, heading for the van. It was time to put my money where my mouth was and stop another story before it got big enough to eat us all.

  #

  Demi Santos—who was nineteen, only two years older than our Sleeping Beauty—lifted her flute to her lips, blowing an experimental note. According to the records Jeff had produced, she was a natural musician. She didn’t have her first lesson until she was sixteen. Six months later, she was already good enough to play with any symphony orchestra in the world, and was going to college mainly to get the paperwork to prove it. That kind of musical gift is one of the characteristic hallmarks of the Pied Pipers—no matter how poor their beginnings, they can always play their chosen instruments better than they have any right to.

  “I still think you people are out of your goddamn minds,” she muttered.

  “And you’re still not wrong,” said Andy amiably. He was wearing headphones as a precaution against her song. They were tuned to a white noise station that should keep the effects of her story to a minimum. We hoped. Like I said, fairy tales are not an exact science.

  Demi shook her head, closed her eyes, and began to play.

  It was a light, frothy classical piece—something that sounded like it should be accompanied by harps and followed by polite applause. Instead, it was accompanied by the manholes on the sides of the road beginning to rock in their sockets, and the sound of Sloane’s shrill, indignant scream.

  And the rats came.

  The manhole covers were shoved aside as a flood of gray and brown bodies boiled up from the sewers, surging seamlessly into the streams of rats pouring similarly out of the alleys on every side. Sloane’s scream was repeated, just before a pack of squirrels came stampeding from the direction of the park, joining their cousins in the assault on the hospital. Even a few of the local pigeons got into the act, making up the aerial branch of the vermin assault force. The blended mass of squirrels, rats, and pigeons slammed into the hospital’s automatic doors, overwhelming the sensors and stampeding, scampering, and soaring their way inside.

  Demi’s playing had stopped somewhere in the middle of the onslaught, her flute dangling forgotten in her hands as she stared at the hospital doors. It didn’t matter whether she played or not; at this point, she’d given the instructions to her army of vermin, and they were going to do what she told them to do.

  “I always knew pigeons were just rats with wings,” commented Andy. Sloane—stomping up with scratches on her cheeks and forehead, probably from standing in the path of the squirrels—just glared at him.

  “Did I do that?” asked Demi, sounding stunned.

  The van door slammed open and Jeff emerged, grinning so broadly that I could practically count his fillings. “You did it!” he said, jumping down to the street and running over to take her by the elbow. “Come on. I’ve figured out the best musical selection for you to use when you’re piping the virus into the rats, and from there, it’s a pretty standard descending trill to get them to commit mass suicide. You’re doing great so far. I’ll get you another soda, and we can go over the sheet music—” Still talking, he led the unresisting two-eighty away.

  I stayed where I was, watching the hospital doors. Rats and pigeons occasionally flashed by in the lobby, briefly visible through the glass. Andy touched my shoulder.

  “They’ll wake her up,” he said. “No Prince. No kiss. Just a disease scare and a major reduction in local pest control business for a while.”

  “I know.”

  “She’ll probably never even know what happened.”

  “I know.”

  Sloane interjected sourly, “But we’re going to have to figure out what the hell to do with a live Piper. She’s started her story now. Either we defuse her or we bury her in a shallow grave somewhere off the interstate.”

  “I know which one you’re voting for, and the answer is no,” I said, and turned away from the modern-day castle where a silly little girl who’d pricked her finger on something she shouldn’t have been touching was sleeping through the day that she’d been born for. “Besides, there’s a third option.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We hire her.” I smiled a little, without amusement. “Who doesn’t dream about fairy tales coming true?”

  Sloane eyed me with something close to respect. “Sometimes I think they got our Index numbers reversed,” she said.

  “Sometimes, so do I,” I replied, and turned to follow Jeff’s route to the control center, where our little two-eighty would be preparing for the performance of a lifetime. There’s one thing the Brothers Grimm got very, very wrong: There’s no such thing as “ever after.” That would require that the story ever end.

  Episode 2

  Musical Patchwork

  Memetic incursion in progress: tale type 280 (“Pied Piper”)

  Status: ACTIVE

  Demi Santos was becoming increasingly sure that she was being pranked. It was the only explanation for what was going on around her. First, that weird Goth girl had pulled her out of class, and then the skinny man with the glasses had pushed the flute and sheet music into her hand, and after that …

  Well, after that, things got a little blurry. She remembered playing her flute. She remembered the rats—it would have been impossible for her to forget the rats, fat and brown and everywhere, looking up at her with beady little eyes that were somehow worshipful, like they knew that she was meant to be venerated above all others. She remembered a woman with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as the feathers of a raven’s wing. She remembered being bundled into a black van, and a strange taste in her soda, almost buried under the more familiar chemicals. Everything had gone away after that, and now she was here, in a bare little room, with one hand handcuffed to the table. There was a mirror on the wall across from her. Years of watching crime dramas with her Gram-Gram told her that the mirror was probably one of those fancy ones that were clear on one side and reflective on the other. Someone was probably watching her.

  If I had my flute, I’d show them, she thought viciously, and froze, trying to figure out where the t
hought had come from. Show them what? How to play “Hot Cross Buns” one-handed? A flute wasn’t a good blunt instrument, and it was an even worse lock pick.

  But she didn’t have her flute, and she didn’t have any way to get herself out of the situation she had somehow gotten herself into. The feeling that this was all some huge, cruel practical joke wasn’t receding. If anything, it was getting worse the longer she sat alone, waiting to see what was going to happen next. Anyone would have been welcome by that point. Even the weird Goth girl.

  The door opened. Demi twisted in her seat, trying to see. A thin, balding man in a plain black suit was walking across the room toward her. He had a folder in his hands, and when he met her eyes, he smiled without any warmth.

  “Ah, Miss Santos,” he said. “Now what are we going to do with you?”

  #

  ATI Management Bureau Headquarters

  It’s customary for the field team to take a break after a confirmed memetic incursion into baseline reality—in layman’s terms, we’re supposed to get some time off after we stop a fairy tale from rewriting a major metropolitan area into an evil, R-rated version of Disney World. “New and improved! Now with extra incest and murder!” Normally, time off isn’t that hard to arrange. There are several field teams in every office, and we don’t tend to get more than one or two memetic incursions in a given week. We should have been packing our gear and heading home for naps, beers—whatever helped us to cope. It is not, however, customary for a field team to go after one fairy tale and stop to intentionally awaken another, no matter how good the reasons seemed to be.