Indexing (Kindle Serial) - By Seanan McGuire Page 0,2

is actually going to snap and start trying to kill her stepdaughter or stepsisters, although the urge will probably rear its ugly head a time or twenty. Like any rating system, the ATI has its flaws, but it mostly gets the job done, and it’s better than running around in the dark all the damn time.

Some folks say using the ATI dehumanizes our subjects, making it easier to treat them like fictional creatures to be dealt with and disposed of. Then again, most of them have never put in any real hours in the field. They’ve never seen what it takes to break girls like Agent Winters out of the stories they’ve gotten tangled up in before the narrative consumes them. Me, I got lucky; I got my sensitivity to stories by being adjunct to one, rather than being an active part. My mother was one of the most dangerous ATI types—a four-ten, Sleeping Beauty. She was in a deep coma when my twin brother and I were born, the misbegotten children of the doctor who was supposed to be treating her injuries and wound up taking advantage of her instead.

She slept through our birth, just like the stories said she should. We didn’t pull the poisoned needle from her finger when we tried to nurse; we pulled her life support cable. Mom died before the ATI cleanup crew could figure out where the narrative energy was coming from, leaving us orphans. Under normal circumstances, the narrative would have slammed us both straight into the nearest story that would fit. The cleanup crew didn’t let that happen though, despite the fact that I was already halfway into the Snow White mold, and my brother was just as close to becoming a Rose Red. In a very real sense, I owe them my life, or at least my lack of singing woodland creatures.

Most of the subjects we deal with are innocents: people who wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time and got warped to fit into the most convenient slots on the ATI. Others are born to live out their stories, no matter how much damage that does to the world around them. It’s not a choice for them. It’s a compulsion, something that drives them all the way to their graves.

That’s the second, and most important, thing you need to know about fairy tales: once a story starts, it won’t stop on its own. There’s too much narrative weight behind a moving story, and it wants to happen too badly. It won’t stop, unless somebody stops it.

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Whoever had initially scrambled the field team was following the proper protocol: I started driving blindly toward the address Piotr had sent to my phone, only to come up against a cordon nearly half a mile out from my destination. It was disguised as a standard police blockade, but the logos on the cars were wrong, and the uniforms were straight out of our departmental costume shop. Anyone who knew what the local police were supposed to look like would have caught the deception in an instant. Fortunately for us, it was early enough in the day that most people just wanted to find a clear route to Starbucks, and weren’t going to mess around trying to figure out why that officer’s badge had the wrong motto on it.

I pulled up to the cordon and rolled down my window, producing my badge from inside my jacket. A fresh-faced man in an ill-fitting policeman’s uniform moved toward the car, probably intending to ask me to move along. I thrust my badge at him.

“Special Agent Henrietta Marchen, ATI Management Bureau,” I said sharply. “Tell your people to get the hell out of my way. We’ve got a code seven-oh-nine, and that means I’ve got places to be.”

The young man blanched. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said. “We were told to stop all cars coming this way, and we thought all agents were already inside the impact zone.”

“Mmm-hmm. And while you’re apologizing, you’re not moving anything out of my way.” I put my badge back inside my jacket. “Apology accepted, sentiment appreciated, now move.”

He nearly tripped over his own feet getting away from my car and running to enlist several more of the “officers” in helping him move the barrier out of my way. I rolled my window back up to discourage further conversation, sitting and drumming my fingers against the steering wheel until my path was clear. I gunned the engine once, as a