Indexing (Kindle Serial) - By Seanan McGuire Page 0,3

warning, before hitting the gas and rocketing past the cordon like it had personally offended me—which, in a certain way, it had. I detest lateness. When you’re late in a fairy tale, people wind up dead. And not true-love’s-kiss, glass-coffin-nap-time dead. Really dead, the kind of dead you don’t recover from. I am notoriously unforgiving of lateness, and being late myself wasn’t improving my mood.

The control van was parked at the absolute edge of the probable impact zone. I pulled up next to it. The door banged open barely three seconds later, and five feet eleven inches of furious Goth girl threw herself out of the vehicle, already shouting at me. At least, her mouth was moving; thanks to the bulletproof, charm-proof, soundproof glass in my car windows, I couldn’t hear a damn thing. I smiled, spreading my hands and shaking my head. It was a shitty thing to do, but considering the morning I’d been having, winding Sloane up a little was perfectly understandable.

She stopped shouting and showed me the middle fingers of both her hands, an obscene gesture that was only enhanced by the poison-apple green nail polish that she was wearing. It clashed nicely with her hair, which was currently black, tipped with an unnaturally bright shade of red. Nothing about her could be called “subtle” by any conventional means, and that was how she liked it. The more visible she was, the less she felt at risk of sinking back into her own story.

“Getting a little saucy today, I see,” I said, finally taking pity on Sloane and opening my car door so that she could shout at me properly. “What’s the situation?”

“Andy’s working with the grunts to clear out as many of the local businesses as possible before shit gets ugly,” said Sloane. “And you’re late.”

“Yes, but if we’re still clearing coffee shops, I’m not late enough that you’ve been waiting for me at all.” I took another look around the area. In addition to our control van, I could see four more vehicles that were almost certainly ours, going by their paint jobs and lack of identifying features. “Who called it in?”

“Monitoring station,” said Sloane. She shoved her hands into her pockets, slouching backward until her shoulders were resting against the side of the van. The resulting backbend made my own spine ache in sympathy, but she continued as if she weren’t trying to emulate a contortionist, saying, “They started getting signs of a memetic incursion around two o’clock this morning, called it in, didn’t get the signal to wake us because there was nothing confirmed. The signs got stronger, the alerts kept coming; on alert ten they woke me, I came into the office and sifted the data, and we started mobilization about twenty minutes later.”

I nodded. “And you’re sure it’s a seven-oh-nine?”

“She has all the symptoms. Pale skin, dark hair, affinity for small animals—she works in a shelter that takes in exotics, and half the pictures we were able to pull off of her Facebook profile show her with birds, rats, or weird-ass lizards hanging out on her shoulders.”

The image of the bluebirds committing suicide via my windowpane flashed across my mind, there and gone in an instant. I managed not to shudder, turning the need for motion into a nod instead. “Have we identified her family members?”

“Yeah. No siblings, father remarried when she was nine years old, stepmother owns a beauty parlor and tanning salon. She’s pretty much perfect for the profile, which is why we’re here.”

“Mm-hmm.” I considered Sloane. She was our best AT-profiler; she could spot a story forming while the rest of us were still looking at it and wondering whether it was even in the main Index. But she was also, to put it bluntly, lazy. She liked knowing where the stories were going to be so that she could get the hell out of their way. She didn’t like knowing the details behind the narrative. Details made the victims too real, and reality wasn’t Sloane’s cup of tea. “And we’re positive about her tale type?”

Irritation flashed briefly in her eyes, there and gone in an instant. “Jeffrey confirmed my research, and he said we haven’t had a seven-oh-nine here in years. We’re due.”

“If that’s all we’re going by, we’re due for a lot of things.” Some stories are more common than others. Seven-oh-nines are thankfully rare, in part because they take a lot of support from the narrative. Dwarves aren’t cheap. Other stories require smaller casts