Indexing (Kindle Serial) - By Seanan McGuire Page 0,4

and happen more frequently. Sadly for us, some of the more common stories are also some of the most dangerous.

Sloane’s expression darkened, eyes narrowing beneath the red and black fringe of her hair. “Well, maybe if you’d shown up when we were first scrambling this team, you’d have been able to have more input on what kind of story we’re after. You didn’t show up for the briefing, so the official designation is seven-oh-nine.”

I bit back a retort. Another promptly rose in my throat, and I bit that back as well. Sloane didn’t deserve any of the things I wanted to say to her, no matter how obnoxious she was being, because she was right; I should have been there when the team was coming together. I should have been a part of this conversation.

“Where’s Andy?” I asked.

“Behind you,” said a mild, amiable voice. It was the kind of voice that made me want to confess my sins and admit that everything in my life was my own fault. That’s the type of quality you want in a public relations point man.

I turned. “What’s our civilian situation?”

“I’ve cleared out as many as I could, but this isn’t an area that can be completely secured,” said Andy, as if this were a perfectly normal way for us to begin a conversation. Tall, thick-waisted, and solid, he looked like he could easily have bench-pressed me with one arm tied behind his back. It was all appearances: in reality, I could have taken him in either a fair or an unfair fight, and Sloane could mop the floor with us both. What Andy brought to the table was people skills. There were very few minds he couldn’t change, if necessary, and most of those belonged to people who were already caught in the gravitational pull of the oncoming story.

Put in a lineup, we certainly made an interesting picture. All three of us were dark-haired, although Andy and I were both natural, while Sloane’s intermittent brushes with black came out of a bottle. Andy had skin almost as dark as his hair. Sloane was pale but still clearly Caucasian. I had less melanin than your average sheet of paper, and could easily have been mistaken for albino if not for my blue eyes and too-red lips—although more than a few people probably assumed that my hair was as dyed as Sloane’s, and that my lip color came courtesy of CoverGirl. We definitely didn’t look like any form of law enforcement. That, too, was a sort of truth in advertising, because the law that we were enforcing wasn’t the law of men or countries. It was the law of the narrative, and it was our job to prevent the story from going the way it always had before—impossible as that could sometimes seem.

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We set the junior agents and the grunts to holding the perimeter while we walked two blocks deeper into our isolation zone, trying to get eyes on our target. We found her getting out of a cab that had somehow managed to get past the cordon—not as much of a surprise as I wanted it to be, sad to say. Most of the police didn’t have any narrative resistance to speak of, and our junior agents weren’t much better. If the story wanted her to make it this far, she’d make it. The obstacles we were throwing in her way just gave her tale one more thing to overcome.

There are times when I wonder if the entire ATI Management Bureau isn’t a form of narrative inertia, something gathered by a story so big that it has no number and doesn’t appear in the Index. We’d be a great challenge for some unknown cast of heroes and villains. And then I push that thought aside and try to keep going, because if I let myself start down that primrose path of doubts and disillusionment, I’m never coming back.

Our target paid her cabbie before turning to stagger unsteadily down the sidewalk. She was beautiful in the classical seven-oh-nine way, with sleek black hair and snowy skin that probably burned horribly in the summer. She looked dazed, like she was no longer quite aware of what she was doing. One of her feet was bare. She probably wasn’t aware of that, either.

Andy pulled out his phone, keying in a quick series of geographical tags that would hopefully enable us to predict her destination before she could actually get there. Finally, he said, “She’s heading for the