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.
To be continued in the next episode. Your book will be automatically updated with Episode 2 and you can continue reading from this page.
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