Indexing (Kindle Serial) - By Seanan McGuire Page 0,5
Alta Vista Medical Center.”
I swore under my breath. “Of course she is. Where else would she be going?” Alta Vista was the largest hospital in the city. Even if we’d been able to close off eighty percent of the traffic coming into our probable impact zone, we couldn’t close or evacuate the hospital. Not enough people believe in fairy tales anymore.
“Shoot her,” said Sloane.
“We’re not shooting her,” said Andy.
Sloane shrugged. “Your funeral.”
“Let’s pretend to be professionals . . . and pick up the pace,” I snapped. Sloane and Andy exchanged a glance, briefly united against a common enemy—me. They knew that I wanted them to be mad at me rather than each other, and they accepted it as the way the world was meant to be. Besides, we all knew that our job would be easier this way.
We followed the target all the way down the road to Alta Vista, hanging back almost half a block to keep her from noticing us. Our caution was born more of habit than necessity; she was deep into her narrative haze, moving more under the story’s volition than her own. We could have stripped down and danced naked in front of her and she would just have kept on walking.
“If we’re not going to stop her from getting where she’s going, why are we even bothering?” Sloane walked with her hands crammed as far into the pockets of her denim jacket as they would go, her shoulders in a permanent defensive hunch. “She’ll play out whether we’re here or not. We could go out, get breakfast, and come back before the EMTs finish hooking her to the life support.”
“Because it’s the polite thing to do,” said Andy. He was always a lot more at ease with this part of the job than Sloane was, probably because the only thing Andy ever escaped was a respectable profession that he could tell his family about. Sloane missed being a Wicked Stepsister by inches, and she’s always been uncomfortable around the ATI cases that tread near the edges of her own story. I can’t blame her for that. I also can’t approve any of her requests for transfer. Jeff’s fully actualized in his story, and I’m in a holding pattern, but Sloane was actually averted. That gives her a special sensitivity to the spectrum. She’s the only one who can spot the memetic incursions before they get fully under way.
“She’s a seven-oh-nine,” snarled Sloane, shooting a poisonous glare in Andy’s direction. Metaphorically poisonous: she never matured to the arsenic-and-apples stage of things. Thank God. Once a Wicked Stepsister goes that far, there’s no bringing her back to reason. “You can’t do anything for them, short of putting a bullet in their heads. Even then, the dumb bitches will probably just get permanently brain-damaged on the way to happy ever after.”
Andy raised an eyebrow. “Gosh, Sloane, tell us how you really feel.”
The target approached the doors of the Alta Vista Hospital. Even at our half-block remove, we saw them slide open, allowing her to make her way inside. If the story went the way the archivists predicted, her own Wicked Stepmother would be waiting inside, ready to hand her a box of poisoned apple juice or a plastic cup of tainted applesauce. That would let the story start in earnest. That’s the way it goes for the seven-oh-nines. All the Snow Whites are essentially the same, when you dig all the way down to the bottom of their narratives.
Sloane shifted her weight anxiously from one foot to the other as we waited, looking increasingly uncomfortable as the minutes trickled by and the weight of the impending story grew heavier. Then she stiffened, her eyes widening in their rings of sheltering kohl. “There isn’t a five-eleven anywhere inside that hospital,” she said, and bolted for the doors.
Swearing, Andy and I followed her.
Sloane had been a marathon runner in high school, and she’d continued to run since then, choosing it over more social forms of exercise. She was piling on the speed now, running hell-bent toward the hospital doors with her head slightly down, like she was going to ram her way straight through any obstacles. Andy had settled into a holding pattern about eight feet behind her, letting her be the one to trigger any traps that might be waiting. It wasn’t as heartless as it seemed. As the one who had come the closest to being sucked into a story of her own without going all the