Indexing: Reflections (Kindle Serials) (Indexing Series Book 2) by Seanan McGuire Page B

or out of the other open cells. She was gathering them all together. That was good.
    A hand grabbed my arm. I looked back to see Jeff, who had uncovered one ear, holding me. I scowled at him. He let go.
    “Your jacket!” he shouted.
    I looked down.
    I always wear black and white suits. Not because I have a Men in Black obsession, although tapping into the modern narrative of the faceless, interchangeable government agents had come in handy more than once. I do it because as a storybook princess, if I give the narrative anything to seize on, color-wise, it can get me into trouble. There are lots of stories about girls in green, or pretty red gowns that catch fire when the light hits them just right. Black and white are only princess colors when they’re talking about skin and hair.
    Apparently, when the narrative gets rolling strongly enough, color ceases to matter. The buttons on my blazer had been replaced by diamonds, and silver brocade was starting to creep up from the bottom, giving me the distinct appearance of having been frosted.
    “Shit,” I swore, and didn’t take my hands off my ears.
    The mouse-men had stopped appearing from the rooms around us. Demi kept playing as she advanced on the open cell door. With a final loud trill she sent the mouse-men crashing to the rear of the cell, and slammed the door, locking them inside. One of the guards hurried to lock the door, and she stopped playing, lowering her flute.
    A fine sheen of sweat stood out on her forehead, and there was a light in her eyes that I didn’t see very often, bright and wild and slightly disconnected from everything around her. She looked like a marathon runner at the end of a race, half-drunk on adrenaline and not quite processing her surroundings yet. “Did I get them all?”
    “Yeah,” said Sloane. “Didn’t get the frog coachman, though. He hopped off that way.” She hooked a thumb down the hall. “Not sure I give a fuck, as long as he doesn’t come back with a bazooka or something.”
    “Nice dress,” said Andy.
    “Screw you,” said Sloane. “At least the story didn’t get my boots. These things are expensive.”
    Squinting at Sloane’s ball gown, I could see the outlines of her original clothes. It wasn’t a black dress, probably because the graphic on her T-shirt had included blue and purple, and had given the story something to work with. She looked like something out of a Broadway revival of Cinderella , all ruffles and lace and unlikely quantities of rhinestones—although given the strength of the narrative in question, they might just be diamonds. More than one fairy-tale princess had been able to fund her escape after she started spitting rubies or turning everything she touched into gold.
    “Ever seen a three-fifteen go infectious like this?” I demanded. The guards, who had followed Sloane into the prison before I was even out of the car, turned to look at me. I flashed my badge at them. “Agent Henrietta Marchen, ATI Management Bureau. I’m Agent Winters’s superior officer. Somebody want to answer my question?”
    “We had her filed as a three-fifteen—that’s why she was on the outside of the ring—but the narrative she’s manifesting is a five-ten-a,” said one of the guards. “That’s why we didn’t realize what was happening until someone saw a mouse run into her cell.”
    “Don’t you have someone monitoring the mice in here?” I asked. The question sounded as bad outside my head as it had sounded inside. There was still a reason for it. So many stories depend on the movement of rats, mice, and other vermin that it’s a miracle the ATI Management Bureau decided to become a government agency rather than an extermination firm. Kill all the rats and half a dozen stories will have to shift away, just because they won’t have anything to latch on to.
    “We had a resident five-four-five-b up until recently,” said one of the guards. “She’s been reassigned to a field team on the East Coast.