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

her. Andy looked at me. I nodded, and he stepped forward, closing his hands around hers when she pulled back to swing again. She looked at him, eyes wide and startled and surprisingly young in her pale, pale face.
    “Let me go,” she said, voice full of unspoken threats.
    “Will you keep hitting the wall if I let you go?” he asked. “Because we sort of need you to keep having hands. It’s important to the team that you not break them into little bits.”
    “She came through here,” said Sloane—but she wasn’t trying to pull away. That was reassuring. “She got into her carriage, and she came through here. Can’t you smell the sap and pumpkin guts in the air? This is how she got away.”
    “It’s a solid wall now, Sloane,” said Andy.
    Unsurprisingly, it was Jeff who realized what Sloane was trying to say first. “Dear Grimm,” he breathed. “Doors, doors—who makes doors? Alice, of course, but that’s such a recent story, it shouldn’t have this sort of power yet. Or there’s the Twelve Dancing Princesses. If one of them had come here to meet her . . .”
    “They could have opened her a door straight through to the other side,” I said. “Sloane. She’s gone. We’ve lost her.”
    Sloane twisted to look at me, her hands still engulfed by Andy’s. She wasn’t struggling. That was something, anyway. “Don’t you understand what this means?”
    “Try me,” I said.
    “She changed her story. She went from one thing to another, and she did it so completely that her new story fought for her—you can let me go, Andy; I’m not going to run.” Sloane tugged gently on her hands. Andy released them, and she settled back onto the flats of her feet, looking heartbroken. “She changed her story .”
    I finally caught her meaning. Sloane had been struggling with her narrative—sometimes violent, always angry—for longer than anyone knew. Elise had started out struggling, and then began to twist the people around her until they fit a world where she was Cinderella, not the wicked sister: where she was the princess. She had broken every rule, crossed every line . . . and her reward had been a new story, one where she had something Sloane would never have: the potential to live happily ever after.
    Sloane looked at me, and I could tell from her expression that she knew I understood. I shook my head, not saying anything, and we stood together as a team, each one of us waiting for someone else to figure out what we were supposed to do next. We’d never lost a prisoner on my watch before: Heads were going to roll over this one. Maybe figuratively, maybe literally.
    Either way, I just needed to make sure they weren’t ours.

BROTHERLY LOVE
    Memetic incursion in progress: estimated tale type 327 (“Hansel and Gretel”)
    Status: ACTIVE
    Gerry March, high school English teacher and ordinary guy, was aware that he was lucky to have a job, given that he’d abandoned his classroom after seeing a bunch of oddly behaving deer on campus. He had always made it a policy to refuse gifts from the ATI Management Bureau since the organization was rooted firmly in the fairy tales it purported to prevent, and taking gifts from people in fairy tales was always a bad idea. After some soul searching and some contemplation of his bank account, he’d agreed to make an exception when his sister, Henrietta Marchen, had offered to call the school and claim their mother had died.
    It wasn’t technically a lie: They did start their lives with a mother, and she did die. It was just that she’d done it shortly after they were born, and they’d never really mourned her.
    Still. Gerry had been a responsible, reliable employee for years before “the incident,” and having his sobbing sister on the phone begging for him to be given a second chance had convinced the administration that nothing like this would ever happen again. It had been incredibly kind of her, and as he looked out his classroom window at the menacing forest