Indexing by Seanan McGuire Page A

Andy.
    “I’m pretty
good at telling dead girls from sleeping ones, thanks.” I straightened. “Andy,
take her down to the break room and put up the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign. Maybe
when she wakes up she’ll feel more like facing reality.”
    Andy snorted
as he bent to scoop Demi’s motionless form off the office floor. “I don’t know
what you’ve been smoking, Henry, but there’s no reality in this building for
her to face. She’s barely even started down the rabbit hole.”
    “Then the
faster she wakes up, the sooner she can start coping. Go. And when you get
back, get started on your paperwork.” I dropped back into my chair. “The
world’s not going to save itself from the collected works of the Brothers
Grimm.”
#
    Having Jeff back at his desk
was a definite relief: he could generally be trusted to do his own paperwork in
record time, and then get bored and start helping everyone else with their
share. Most forms didn’t care who filled them out, as long as it was done
correctly, and I shortly found myself in the enviable position of playing
rubber stamp while Jeff shoved page after page in front of me to be signed.
Sloane ignored us both, choosing to return to eBay’s modern-day Goblin Market in
search of treasures.
    Andy stalked
back up the aisle and glared when he saw my empty desk. He didn’t need to see
the look on Jeff’s face to know what had happened. “Dammit, Henry, again ?”
he asked.
    I smiled at
him broadly as I shrugged. “It’s a symbiotic relationship. Jeff enjoys doing
paperwork; I enjoy not doing paperwork. Everybody wins.”
    “Everybody but
me,” grumbled Andy, and dropped down into his seat. “Why do I have to do my own
stupid reports?”
    “Because I’m
the boss and you’re not,” I said, scrawling my signature on the last report.
“Sloane, is there anything coming up on the radar?”
    “Nope,” she
said, not taking her eyes off the screen. “Clean as a whistle.”
    “Uh-huh.” I
turned to my own computer and called up the monitoring program, even though I
knew that it would confirm Sloane’s statement. She was uncanny when it came to
predicting oncoming intrusions. It had something to do with her having been
averted. Jeff was fully manifested, and now subconsciously accepted fairy tales
as a normal part of the background radiation of life. Normal people were blind
to them. His eyes were open too wide. And as long as I was holding my story in
abeyance, I couldn’t be open enough to feel another story coming. Sloane was
unique.
    Our four-ten
was listed under the “recent” column on the ATI incursion tracker, as was
Demi’s own two-eighty. The four-ten was labeled “neutralized.” Demi was labeled
“fully active.” I felt a little twinge of guilt at that. She’d been living a
normal life until we came along, and no matter where her life went from here,
normal was never going to be put back on the table.
    Of course, she
was living a normal life in the middle of a minefield, one where any careless
word or casual encounter had the potential to trigger her story into sudden
motion. At least this way, she’d been activated under controlled conditions,
giving her the potential to find a way that she could live with it. Jeff had
already managed to find that balance. It was possible. And I was a total
hypocrite, because I was sitting at my desk, safe in my own frozen narrative,
and thinking about how waking up to learn that you were secretly a fairy tale
wasn’t actually that bad.
    “She’s going
to need weapons training,” said Andy. “She probably has no clue how to handle a
firearm.”
    “About that,”
said Jeff. “I think it would be a good idea if she didn’t carry a
firearm. She can get by just fine with her flute, and between that and maybe a
harmonica or some other form of small backup instrument, I think she’ll be able
to deal with any situation she’s likely to encounter.”
    Sloane
snorted. “Sure. If she gets mugged, she can just flute