Indexing (Indexing, #1)

by Seanan McGuire

My mother was one of the most dangerous ATI types—a four-ten, Sleeping Beauty. She was in a deep coma when my twin brother and I were born, the misbegotten children of the doctor who was supposed to be treating her injuries and wound up taking advantage of her instead.

I know how creepy I am when I smile. Whoever came up with “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood” and thought people would find it attractive really wasn’t thinking things through.

my reward for saving her, for granting her a second chance at happy ever after? Paperwork. Oceans and seas and fjords of paperwork. Virtual kingdoms of paperwork, spread out across my desk like the vanguard of an invading army, all needing to be defeated if I wanted to avoid an internal review of my actions.

“The world’s not going to save itself from the collected works of the Brothers Grimm.”

“I’ll shoot you in your goddamn head if I really and truly feel that you’ve become a danger to yourself and others. And then I’ll take your body down to the folks in Agricultural and ask them to use you to fertilize an apple tree. And when you’ve grown to a lovely size and started bearing fruit, I will sit underneath you and not eat a single one of your inevitably poisoned apples.” Sloane glanced at me through her hair, and for a moment I actually saw a wisp of a smile on her face. “You’d do that for me?” she asked.

“She got a nosebleed,” said Sloane, reaching forward and taking my hand in hers. Her fingers left red stains on my skin. “Sure, I had to punch her four or five times to make that happen, but nosebleeds are a normal part of being a traitorous bitch who goes over to the dark side at the first sign of trouble.”

“I keep a change of clothes in my desk,” said Sloane. We all turned to blink at her. She shrugged. “What, you think I have all those packages shipped to the office for my health? It’s always ‘Sloane, go into the sewer after the gremlin,’ or ‘Sloane, wade into the abattoir to save the baby.’ I throw out six pairs of tights a month.”

Sloane slipped into the room the way a knife slips into a wound: silently, and with the potential to do a lot of damage to anything that happened to get in her way.