The arm bracing hers retracted slowly, allowing Daisy’s own arm to relax down without hurting. Daisy waited until Lawrence had stepped back before rolling to a seat. “Ow,” she said mildly, feeling her jaw. “You need to take a walk? Cool off?” Talk to me where the mirror can’t hear?

  Lawrence offered her a hand up and Daisy clasped it. Behind her, she heard Tinsley’s bare feet thunder down the stairs. Beside her, the mirror watched impassively, the fog on its face a cloud of imper-fection under the moonlight. In the next room, she heard Professor Oswald’s breathing, less subtle than he real-ized.

  “Let’s take a walk,” Daisy insisted. “Fresh air always does you good after one of your sleepwalking episodes.”

  Lawrence nodded and let Daisy grab her arm and pull her away. Both of them already wore shoes—Daisy had slept in hers—and they paused only long enough to grab jackets before heading out the front door and onto the drive beyond.

  The night was deep and chilly, closer to morning than midnight. A partial moon lit their way, and stars pricked the sky around wispy clouds. Daisy shiv-ered in the damp and inhaled the hidden green of dewy grass and night flowers. Too wet a night for a romantic encoun-ter, she thought, and not enough moon. They’d have to sit in the library, in front of the fireplace, pretending they went there to read.

  She kept a hold of Lawrence and didn’t let go even once they’d crested the first rise and sunk beneath the view of the third-floor windows.

  “You—” Daisy began.

  “No,” said Lawrence.

  Daisy shook her head and kept walking, gripping Lawrence’s arm, until they reached the village. The air closed around them, and the sky’s upturned cup of stars faded beyond the orange street lights. The agents walked on, almost to the far edge of town, and stopped under the last squat streetlamp. Then Daisy released Lawrence at last and stepped back to face her.

  She could see nothing clinging to her partner, neither sticky white thread nor any influence that might interfere with that icy wall protecting a mind. She checked Lawrence over anyway, as she might have checked for ticks, and found nothing.

  Daisy dropped her arms and Lawrence examined her in turn and in much the same fashion. Daisy wondered for the first time how Lawrence saw threads, and whether her vision was as good as Daisy’s—or if it was, possibly, even better.

  “You left me,” Daisy said.

  Lawrence didn’t reply.

  “Alone. While I was asleep. Against our plans. Against every-thing that the manual—that you’ve taught me about working Horror.”

  Lawrence turned her gaze up to the misted stars.

  Dust from the road; wood from the houses; a light breeze. “You’re com-pro-mised,” Daisy said.

  “No.”

  “Liar.”

  Lawrence looked down, surprised.

  And where is your mask, that I can see surprise? Daisy wondered. “You promised me a competent partner,” she said. “That means explaining to me when there’s a problem. And it means giving me control if you can’t handle it.”

  Yes, there was definitely feeling in Lawrence’s expression, and Daisy’s stomach churned to see it—and to see water glistening upon the ice of Lawrence’s mind. If they had been in the Agency, she would have rejoiced. But not here. Not inside an assignment. Please not.

  “This isn’t an ordinary mission,” Lawrence said at last. “This is a punish-ment.”

  Daisy blinked and rearranged her thoughts. “You mean—for Tom?”

  “For Agent Pearce,” Lawrence agreed. “For not letting you die. To remind me of his power. To teach you. He must have been saving this scenario, letting it cycle, waiting for the right opportunity. For years, maybe. The timing is too good otherwise.”

  “I wondered why the mirror had so much history,” Daisy admit-ted. “But Horror is so understaffed that I figured . . .”

  “Yes,” Lawrence agreed. “That would be the excuse he used. You have read the Balfour Theory of Internal Scenario Reproduction?”

  Daisy grimaced and, too forcefully, said, “No.”

  “But you’re familiar with the concept: if a scenario runs unchecked, then the Heart can breed inside a victim. That is why, if we ever retreat, we must first kill all remaining victims.”

  Daisy had known that this was Lawrence’s policy. She hadn’t known that that particular analyst agreed with it.

  “But if it is possible,” said Lawrence, “why don’t Hearts breed more often? Why do they almost always come from Outside? There must be other criteria, something to do with what it means to be a victim. For example, you know that if we kill a Heart without unrav-eling it, its victims will die from the backlash. But did you know that in the rare instance that a victim is the one to defeat the Heart, he and all other remaining victims sometimes survive? Balfour suggests that to become a breeding ground for a new Heart, a victim must be a victim in mind as well as body—must have the ‘acceptance and mentality of victimhood.’”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “I see,” said Daisy, watching Lawrence closely beneath the orange light, with eyes that saw in something aside from light. Despite this clinical reci-ta-tion, her partner’s vulnerability had, if anything, increased. Daisy could almost reach out and touch it. And if, instead of letting the Heart exploit that vulner-ability, Daisy took it for herself . . .

  That’s what she wants. It must be. She’s using me as a shield to compen-sate for her vulnerability. Exactly as I asked her to. Does she realize—? Yes, she must. That means . . .

  “This scenario was bred from a victim you knew,” Daisy concluded. “Some-one from your old life.”

  “What the Agency would prefer to conceal,” said Lawrence (and was that a rough edge in her tone?), “is that agents can themselves become victims. You know the name Vivienne Ship?”

  Daisy certainly did. All the older agents did, even if they didn’t mention it often anymore. It was a name from the past, a name that had never entirely gone away, a warning and a threat and an insult. Daisy had barely thought about it in years, until after her first assign-ment in Horror, when Lawrence had revealed the real reason for her reassignment. After that, she had thought it often. This is what happens when you betray your partner: you get reassigned to Horror and to Agent Lawrence.

  Though, of course, Agent Lawrence’s reputation had been very differ-ent in Vivienne’s day. People had pitied her, then.

  “She was your first partner,” Daisy said, realizing that this explained Lawrence’s vulnerability: Vivienne was the agent who had taken Lawrence in, who had trained her at such an influential age. Lawrence had probably viewed her as a parent or elder sibling. Since by all reports, Lawrence had emerged from a particularly ugly corner of history, she might even have considered Vivienne her rescuer.

  “I thought she was dead,” Lawrence said in a rush, as if she couldn’t stop explaining once she’d begun, as if it was a relief to explain. “We were separated in a House strain, Decrepit variant, Haunted type, Over-haunted subtype. After the first layer, I didn’t see her again until I reached the Heart’s domain. The circumstances of her arrival were strange, but I was injured and disoriented, and I accepted her explanation. She told me she had bypassed the layers by passing through a mirror. Mirrors, you see, can be used as portals in Fantasy, and she never could believe that Horror worked by different rules. Horror is speculative also, but the mirrors here—I learned this later; I was too green then—never work as through passageways. They always lead to a separate space, a Horror space, and there is only ever one way in and out.”

  Daisy nodded slowly, not letting herself be hurried, not giving Law-rence any reason to remove her reliance. “You think she went into the mirror and never came out,” she said. “But how? You never entered the mirror space, and yet you saw her again—and you saw her die. Or was it her reflection you saw?”

  “I was disoriented,” Lawrence said. “. . . And that house was full of ghosts.”

  To think that Daisy had looked so long for a crack in her partner, only to be given it freely by Lawrence herself—or by Lawrence’s dead first part-ner. How to hammer her wedge in, without Lawrence flinch-ing or break-ing? Ah, yes. “We should retreat,” Daisy suggested. “A Heart with the memory of an agent is far too dangerous. Especially if it has a grudge against you for letting it die. We’d be suckers to stay . . . is what I’d have said under ordinary circum-stances.”

  Lawrence nodded grimly. “It is better to accept our punishment quietly,” she agreed, “and fight on the ground of our choosing.”

  Insects chittered and sparrows twitted sleepily. Down the street, a light flicked on. Someone going to the bathroom or rising before the sun. It would be morning soon, the warmth of early summer steaming away the dew, stewing among the flowers. Or maybe it would rain today, blearing the colors into a rainbow of grays.

  Daisy asked, “What was she like, your first partner?”

  Lawrence’s mouth hardened, and something like anger emerged with the harsh, “She was a fool who got herself killed.”

  That sounded exactly like everything Daisy had ever heard about Vivienne. “Then maybe this Heart will be too—who knows?” She beamed confidence at Lawrence—confidence in their part-nership, but not overconfidence—and was rewarded by the slight loosening in the other’s face, a return to the calm of professional-ism. “The first step is to make sure it can’t bypass our defenses.”

  Lawrence’s face returned to blankness, her mind to that slick and icy. “The Heart’s information is dated,” she intoned, “but Agency caps haven’t changed much.”

  “Which we can use to set expectations and thereby make into an advantage,” Daisy said. Standard Agency psychic protection gear—such as their silver net caps—worked in much the same way as dream-catchers: attract-ing and redirect-ing external psychic power along safer lines. The main down-side of any psychic barrier created by a third party was that it could catch an agent’s own power when carelessly used, such as under circumstances of extreme distress. For that reason, no agent was permitted to use a cap except in scenarios with a high proba-bility of either extremely subtle or totally overwhelming psychic attack.

  In order to allow agents to continue using their abilities, silver caps were created as nets rather than solid shields and located only upon the primary attack zone—the brain. The gaps—“arrow slits” was the technical term—gave agents specific spaces to target through and were too small for Hearts to easily locate. Or that was the theory. It tended to fall down against Hearts with extreme preci-sion—and against Hearts that already knew how caps worked. Daisy and Lawrence were fortunate to have discovered the Heart’s knowledge on such a shallow layer, before it was able to take advantage of it. Because, diffi-cult and draining though it would be, Daisy was capable of building an alternative.

  It wouldn’t be a complete protection; that sort of shield was too intense to hold for more than a few minutes. A stripped-down psychic-only shield would work much better here. She’d have to main-tain her concentration, but she’d have Lawrence to defend her. It was, Daisy thought, their best bet—but they’d have to race down the layers for her to keep it up.

  Now, how to design it? A dreamcatcher was too weak, too broadly spaced and rigid. Something stickier would be better, like a spider’s web that would sway with movement and breeze and alert her even as it stopped the attack. Like the cocoon in that Cosmic Horror of glass and sand, Daisy mused, and then quickly banished the thought. No, better to make it like a tunnel spider’s web. Enveloping, tightly woven, easy for the spider to move in—and a trap for its prey.

  Spiderlike, her fingers wove the web around them, pulling the extremely fine threads into place. Lawrence watched and waited without comment, and Daisy thought she wouldn’t have to warn Lawrence to stay nearby. Safe, tight, and close. A few holes and traps to lure the Heart. Elegantly, she spun the final touch.

  . . . And the village slid away from them like rain on fresh paint. Orange light to white, concrete sidewalk to ugly floor, buildings to wood-and-plaster walls. Mist swirled around them, and the mirror’s face rippled like dark water. They stood in the mirror room, as they must have stood this whole time.

  Daisy’s heart slammed in her chest, but she didn’t give the mirror time to recover. She stepped up and backhanded the glass hard with the diamond ring on her right hand. The ring skittered against the surface and away. Mist puffed around her, and she reeled back, eyes stinging, hand throbbing.

  “You fool,” came Lawrence’s voice, distant through the mist. “We aren’t on the deepest layer. You haven’t broken anything except your own concentra-tion.”

  “I haven’t,” Daisy protested. But, of course, Lawrence was right. . . .