Indexing (Indexing, #1)

by Seanan McGuire

I mean, we were pretty aggravating before you got to know us—and more aggravating after you got to know us—

I was struck by just how quiet the city had become. Most of my night had been spent racing from one emergency to another. Suddenly, with the stories no longer trying to force their way back into the human world, it was like everything could rest. Moments like this were part of why we kept on fighting. Sure, we all had our own reasons to hate the narrative, but that didn’t necessarily mean we had an overwhelming love for humanity. So we loved the quiet instead. The spaces where there were no stories, where anything could happen.

The narrative is an old, dark force that keeps trying to worm its way back out into the light, and sometimes the only thing that keeps it locked away is knowledge. Our weapons are strange and some people don’t recognize them as weapons at all, but they’ve worked for us for a very long time. Don’t change what works.

Everyone thinks of them in terms of poisoned apples and glass coffins, and forgets that they represent girls who walked into dark forests and remade them into their own reflections.

They were the most powerful pieces of the narrative, once upon a time. We fought back, turned them tame, gave them names and labels that pinned them like butterflies in the textbooks of religious studies professors and folklore teachers all around the world.

if I went too far into the story, I wouldn’t come out. Not as Henry, anyway. But that didn’t matter. If Birdie walked away with the Index, none of us were going to be who we thought we were ever again. We would be rewritten into her perfect little stories, and we’d lose. We’d lose ourselves, we’d lose the fight, and we’d lose each other.

There were so many things I could have said. Any one of them would have ended the scene, and would have determined who I was going to be hereafter. I swallowed them all, seeking the one that meant Henry Marchen, the one that meant early mornings and late nights and fights with Human Resources and a brother I never saw and a Shoemaker’s Elf who might eventually be able to kiss me out of a coma. It wasn’t easy. She didn’t have as much of a story behind her. “Birdie Hubbard,” I finally managed, ripping every word out of the blackness behind my eyes, “you are under arrest.”