Daisy bent her legs to absorb the impact as she landed next to her partner. Neither of them spoke. Lawrence was listening keenly, unmoving as she took in the room. Daisy raised her rifle to cover the entrance and they waited for several long breaths for something to attack.

  Nothing did. The analysts had done their work properly. Lawrence sheathed her left hatchet and drew a compass.

  This assignment’s Horror began in the back of a ruined church. Stacks of gray stone piled untidily around them, some ankle high, some towering. Looking out a hole in the side wall, Daisy could see more ancient stones arranged like blueprints, each casting deep purple shadows in the dying sun. More stones stood upright, worn blank by wind. This place, wherever it was, had birthed and buried and forgotten its citizens for over a thousand years. There were stories out there, in that churchyard of three centu-ries past, but the assigned Horror was here: in and under the sole intact building.

  The agents had dropped in a side room barely high enough for them to stand upright and twice as wide. In the center, close enough to touch, a narrow plinth sup-ported a massive, ancient tome.

  A record of the dead, Daisy ascertained, peering at it while staying well clear. It reeked of human flesh and of suffering and of things more vile. It looked infectious, was possibly the entry point, and was most definitely doing a poor job of masquer-ading as the Heart. Daisy could see the thread of ensorcellment that wove around it and streaked into the floor like a spiderweb.

  Daisy knew better than to touch it, but the truth was that such traps had caught agents in the past, many times, and in many genres. Daisy had heard stories, sometimes from devastated agents describing how their partner’s last stand had held off the enemy just long enough for them to escape, sometimes from a fresh set of agents, sent to finish what their predecessors had begun.

  Agent Lawrence was watching her. Daisy raised her eye-brows and sidestepped the plinth with exaggerated care. Satisfied, Lawrence pock-eted her compass, pulled on a plastic glove, and passed through the archway into an octagonal space with upright coffins on the cardinal walls and a catafalque in the center. It had four exits: to the out-side, to the room they’d just left, to another like it, and to a set of downward stairs.

  As Daisy covered her, Lawrence ripped open each coffin in turn, split the dead sentinel’s chest open with a hatchet, shoved a small explosive inside, and shut the lid. There was a minor boom, the clatter of rib bones against stone, and that was all. At the last coffin, Lawrence peeled off her dripping glove and tossed it in before closing the lid.

  Daisy wondered if one day she, too, would casually stick her hand inside the rotting chest of a dead man. But it’s not that gross, she told herself. No worse than holding the girlfriend’s hair as she pukes her guts out on you, remem-bering what she’s done.

  The lingering daylight stretched to the first three steps of the stair-case, and no further. Beyond that, the darkness was absolute. The agents would have to feel their way down, squeezed sideways one at a time, fumbling for steps that might vary between anywhere from four to ten inches deep.

  Daisy took a breath and then another, readying herself to venture in. She was not inherently afraid of the dark, but this was the dark of Horror. It was hard to remember that even as this dark hid the dead from them, so too it hid them from the dead and thus afforded them something touching safety.

  Lawrence struck a magelight and set it to float ahead, above, and off to one side.

  “What are you doing?” Daisy breathed, clutching Lawrence’s sleeve. “Regulations state we light no unnecessary lights. You’ll draw the dead right to us!”

  Lawrence gave her a sarcastic look and kept the light steady. “Fear is a greater enemy than anything dead.”

  “I’m not afraid!”

  “Would it please you better for me to think you a liar or a fool? Shut up; there will be wanderers.”

  “Put out the magelight!” Daisy hissed, but her heart wasn’t in it, and the influence slid off Lawrence’s wall of ice. Daisy opened her mouth to try again, then stopped herself, pressing her silver-gloved hands to her abdo-men. She had acted out of long habit, but the regula-tions stated agents should light no unneces-sary lights, and—

  —and Lawrence has survived in Horror for twelve years.

  Feeling shamefully grateful for the illumination, Daisy stopped protesting. Lawrence was ignoring her anyway; she had already begun down the stairs.

  Daisy followed. The air, stale and edged with foul-ness, clung to her tongue and filled her nose. No sounds inter-rupted them save those the agents made themselves. Save those Daisy made, for Law-rence moved as silently as a ghost.

  Nothing attacked them, and nothing continued to attack them as the claustrophobic stairway released into a chamber two stories deep and half again that wide.

  This place was also stone, save for a wooden balcony and a few frag-ments of furniture. Four stone caskets stood empty along the oppo-site end of the room, their lids shattered against the wall behind them. Grave dust coated everything and rose into the air when disturbed. The agents drew their neckerchiefs up, but Daisy’s nose and lungs burned anyway.

  Exchanging a series of gestures, the agents searched for evidence to explain the nature of this Horror, to expose the weakness of the Heart and to suggest the location and condition of any victims. There weren’t always clues to find, but Agency policy was to check. If nothing else, anything the agents reported would help the analysts detect and predict future Horrors and even—if they could ever under-stand what caused the infec-tions in the first place—prevent them.

  Daisy’s head ached from the expectation of attack, from the terri-ble ten-sion of not knowing when the enemy would come. How could this place be so empty? How could she win, unless the dead showed them-selves? It couldn’t be only the sentinels above. It couldn’t be. She wouldn’t mind fighting, if only she had something to fight!

  Lawrence brought the light closer, and Daisy’s anxiety settled into a more comfortable high alert. The agents nodded to each other, and then Lawrence led the way down a second set of stairs. This one branched at a midway platform, the left side leading to a wooden door, the right turning once and then broadening as it sank. Lawrence consulted her compass thoughtfully, then began with the wooden door.

  The room beyond might have been an old-fashioned study, part doctor office and part alchemy lab, except that Daisy could feel the echo of distant moans of pain reverberating down the ages. She was reminded forcibly of that certain subgenre of Romance that thought the height of beauty was its hero comforting his or her recently tortured love inter-est. Usually long before any medical care could possibly take effect. And once she undid the ensorcellment—

  Daisy concentrated on the echoes, trying to parse them, and sensed something else. Some-thing closer and stronger. A creeping horror of a different sort.

  Lawrence’s head snapped up and she vaulted the desk, grabbed Daisy, and dragged her against the wall behind the slightly parted door. The magelight snapped out even as the door sighed open and another glow filled the room.

  A Presence entered.

  It did not see them, and although its back was no more solid than a mirage, Daisy could not discern its face. She thought she might throw up if she could. She cast her eyes lower and saw that something trailed between the Presence’s legs, though the Presence was otherwise approximately person-shaped.

  This . . . was not one of the ordinary dead. This was not like any-thing Daisy had encountered before, and she could not even think of lifting her rifle, consider doing anything that might make it look at her. Then the Presence had fully passed, and Lawrence was gone, slipping out the door and up the stairs. Daisy fled after her, mincing her feet to keep from tripping, biting her lip when one knee cracked.

  Lawrence waited for her atop the platform, magelight relit, and Daisy dared to stop and glance back. The wooden door had closed, and she could not tell whether there was any glow streaming from the crack at the bottom. She shuddered, and slapped her hand over her mouth to cover the small noise that escaped. The slap was louder than the noise, and Lawrence caught her arm and dragged it down, bringing the magelight close and staring into her face.

  Daisy stared back, defiant, her heartrate settling against the challenge. Lawrence’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t speak; she turned away and drew her hatchets.

  Daisy tilted her head, straining until she caught the faint shuffling noises that had drawn her partner’s attention.

  Her grin crept back for the first time since meeting Lawrence. She petted her rifle. At last.

  As they descended once more, the stairs widened until ten could have walked abreast. Traps and side rooms honeycombed the walls, and the dead swarmed out, drawn by the smell of life. These were more what Daisy had been expecting from this assignment: the ordinary dead, not fast but per-sistent, held together by the Heart’s will and the threads of ensorcellment.

  Lawrence hacked through the dead that got close, cracking skulls and kick-ing sternums so that the corpses tumbled down the steps, knocking over their fellows and breaking into useless piles of bones. Daisy picked off the more distant enemies, shooting them with the pellets of plasma that vaporized heads and torsos in brilliant bursts. Every step, Daisy also swung around to check for stragglers. She never spotted any—you had to be very thorough to work Horror solo—but that didn’t mean the Heart couldn’t call up more. Or that Something couldn’t be following them from a distance.

  Down the stairs the agents went, deeper and deeper. There were a few breaks, when they had destroyed every nearby enemy and could dare pause to catch their breath. During one moment of calm, Daisy offered Lawrence a clean hand-kerchief. Not that she thought it’d do much good; Lawrence was drenched in separated blood and flaps of desiccated flesh and other bits that Daisy didn’t look at too closely but couldn’t help smelling.

  Lawrence shook her head. “Camouflage,” she explained. “Living breath’s the real giveaway, and the only solution for that is not breathing until your enemy leaves. But this helps.”

  She did not attempt to smear anything on the pristine Daisy, and Daisy did not offer. Even aside from the obvious aesthetic preferences, her silver gloves were finicky and protested disrespectful treatment. She needed to stay on their good side, if she wanted to unravel anything later.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  More enemies rustled into the room, and the agents pressed onward, killing what had long been dead and venturing ever deeper. Daisy didn’t know exactly how long this continued, but she suspected, without exaggeration, two or three hours. Adrenaline lit her brain red hot until she wanted to scream with it. Yet there was also a crazy joy in the way she and Lawrence moved together, each fulfilling her purpose, each covering the other and trusting the other to cover her. And then, long past the point when Daisy thought she could bear it no longer, they came to the deepest part of the crypt.

  A roughly circular cavern spread out before them, two hundred yards across, its ceiling too distant to reach with either the sparks of sun pellets or the faint blue glow of magelight. Innumerable dead milled below. In unspoken agree-ment, Lawrence and Daisy unhooked their grenades and threw them high above the crowd. The grenades burst apart midair like fireworks, and thou-sands of sun pellets rained down.

  Flesh burnt and smoked, and the dead returned to death. The few survivors stumbled over broken corpses to get at the agents, who picked them off at their leisure.

  “Even Romance never smelled this bad,” Daisy panted cheer-fully.

  “I imagine not,” Lawrence replied. “Stay alert. Your night vision is shot, and there are always more of the dead.”

  “I know better than to get overconfident!”

  “Avoid firing again until we reach the Heart, if it’s some-thing I can kill.”

  Although the walls of the cavern were cragged and unfinished, the floor had been laid out in a mosaic of concentric circles, drawing one inward. Lawrence crept forward, rifle again exchanged for hatchets, stepping around, over, and occasionally on the corpses. One or two attempted to rise, but she slashed them, and they collapsed.

  Daisy had glimpsed the temple at the center of the cavern from the stairs, but it wasn’t until they reached it that she spotted the ragged curtain that served as a door, the fres-coed scenes along the walls. She averted her eyes immediately from the writhing, eviscerated forms, but Lawrence brought the magelight nearer and studied them.

  Daisy shuddered but stood to the side to watch for the enemy—for this was most definitely the Heart’s domain. Threads of ensorcellment converged upon the temple, streak-ing in from above. The closer threads floated and curled above the bodies of the fallen dead, discon-nected and aimless, but plenty of the distant ones remained intact, and the Heart could always produce more.

  There would be many traps here, Daisy thought, tracking the taut, active threads; and there must be tens of thousands more dead that the Heart could animate and bring to its aid. If the agents alerted it prematurely, it would build its army into such numbers that they’d never escape this Horror, even if they managed to destroy the Heart.

  The threads above the fallen dead curled, lost and unhappy. The Heart had been somnolent until now, but the broken threads would wake it soon. The agents needed to hurry.

  Daisy poked Lawrence and leaned close to speak under her breath. “My turn,” she said. “I’ll unravel it while you cover me.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Daisy slipped past the ragged curtain and into the temple, to where the Heart awaited them. It was even colder in here, and her breath fogged the air, blue in the magelight.

  Daisy sheathed her rifle and stretched out her arms in their silver gloves, flexing fingers and shaking out locked elbows. The threads of ensor-cellment, she now saw, converged not on this whole building but on a single book—or rather, on the Book of which the one above was an echo. If they had destroyed that book, this one would have known and sprung its trap upon them. But if Daisy unraveled the threads within this Book, destroying it, the dead would lose their purpose, and the Horror would end.

  Only after discerning this, only after deciding on her course and step-ping closer, did Daisy widen her focus enough to spot the victims.

  There were two of them, both small, a boy and a girl. They lay alive but unconscious on the north and south of the four altars surrounding the Book. Aside from the hooks that kept them asleep, no ensorcellment bound them. They were victims, not innocents, and would not attack even after the Heart realized what she was doing. Good.

  Daisy finished mapping out the threads and reached for the thick-est part of the tangle. She was preparing to twine her gloved fingers into the web when Lawrence grabbed her shoulder and yanked her back.

  “Don’t!” Daisy cried, slapping her hand away. Shaking herself, she added, more quietly, “It’s all right; I have it figured out. You keep watch.”

  “Wait.”

  Daisy shook her head. “We can’t wait! We have to destroy it before it realizes we’re here!”

  “Wait,” Lawrence repeated. “You haven’t—”

  “No! Protocol demands we destroy the Heart immediately, and I agree!” Couldn’t Lawrence sense the way the taut threads vibrated? The Heart was beginning to waken, beginning to seek them. Surely, Lawrence had to realize it, had to listen to her!

  Except Lawrence wasn’t listening, clear as clear. Daisy clenched her fists, tears of sheer frustration prickling her eyes. Even now! Even this partner! To think she’d believed that for once, she’d gotten a competent one!

  Fine, then. Fine. It would be just like always. And just like always, she’d do whatever she had to to survive.

  Almost snarling at her partner, Daisy pressed inward. Her fa?ade vanished, the brightness in her eyes piercing rather than friendly. She didn’t need her gloves for this, but she used them any-way, grinding her influence into a harpoon that she hurled at that terrible wall of ice surrounding Lawrence’s mind. “You need to trust me.”

  The harpoon skittered along the ice wall and fell away without leaving a scratch.

  Lawrence smiled at her. It was not a nice smile. She said, “That’s the third time you’ve tried to ensor-cell me.”

  All the breath went out of Daisy’s lungs and roared like wind in her ears.

  “I told you that what passes in Romance won’t in Horror,” Lawrence went on scornfully, “but you were too wrapped up in your grievances to listen.”

  “How—” Daisy whispered, and then realization, horrible and despair-ing, overwhelmed her. Her fingers tried to weave shapes, hardly knowing what they were doing. Defend? Attack? The web formed in clumsy knots, uncertain and incomplete. “You—the Skeleton—”

  “Knows what you’ve been doing to your partners, yes,” Lawrence said, toneless and watchful. “That is why he assigned you to me.”

  “So you could kill me,” Daisy croaked. “That’s why—”

  “Management likes to give me criminals for partners,” Lawrence said, “but what I do with them is my choice.”

  Defend. Daisy’s fingers steadied and she pulled her hands apart, the web growing into a shield of shimmering silver that vibrated with power. Neither rifle pulse nor thrown hatchet could penetrate this shield; she had spent more than a decade perfecting it. It would even protect her from close-range attacks, if they didn’t last long. “I’ll run,” she warned. “I’ll run and leave you here to deal with the Heart alone. You can’t stop me.”

  “I won’t try.”

  Something in Lawrence’s tone made Daisy stop, made her think, made her remember—

  Lawrence has worked Horror solo. For twelve years.

  What would Lawrence do, if Daisy ran? Disturb the Heart, so it called up more dead? No, that would endanger her and doom the mission. Besides, if Daisy ran swiftly enough, she could probably escape before more dead got into position. After all, the agents had disposed of every dead thing they’d come across on the way down—

  Every dead thing, that was, except one.

  Daisy’s hands shook, and the threads of her shield faltered. “Is that what your other partners did? Run?”

  “Two of them. One attempted to kill me first. The agent who trained me,” Lawrence added off-handedly, “tried to save a victim while the Heart remained intact.” She nodded at the mangled spell in Daisy’s hands. “Are you going to use that or play with it until it falls apart?”

  Daisy’s brain ticked her fear cooled. Then she clutched the spell web to her heart and drew it back in.

  For the third time, something like approval came into Lawrence’s face. A split-second later, she lunged at Daisy and hauled her back against the wall, hand muffling her scream. The magelight vanished, only to be replaced by a pale, unearthly glow from the entrance.

  The curtain fluttered open, and the Presence flowed in. The Book lit up with a glow of its own in response, and Daisy finally understood what Lawrence must have recognized from the moment they’d first spotted the Presence:

  No threads clung to it. No threads controlled it, which meant it couldn’t be a slave of the Heart. But nor could it be the Heart, without sending out threads. Rather, it and the Book were the same, were two facets of one being.

  This had been another trap, and Daisy hadn’t spotted it: if they had attacked the Presence and somehow managed to disperse it, it would have reformed here; and if they had destroyed the Book, it would have drawn the Presence to them while they were most distracted. Book and Presence had to be destroyed together, if they were to be destroyed at all.

  The Presence paused just inside the curtain and turned its head back and forth, sniffing the air. As it turned their way, Daisy caught a glimpse of its face and nearly fell. Lawrence pulled her more tightly back, one filthy, dead-soaked hand covering Daisy’s nose and mouth.

  Daisy held her breath, and the Presence lowered its face and flowed past them, its intestines dragging behind it like a tail. It stopped at the north-ernmost altar and sniffed the girl before crawling on top of her and drawing one fingernail from her sternum to her crotch. Steam rose into the air. The Presence inhaled greedily, then dug out a bundle of intestines to make room and burrowed in head-first.

  As soon as the face was buried, Lawrence pushed Daisy forward; and again, Daisy understood: this was the moment, perhaps the only moment, when the Heart was vulnerable.

  Daisy ran to the altar, fingers weaving ultra-precise and lightning-fast patterns, drawing a web down over Presence and child and then tugging out the Book’s threads through them, unraveling the ensor-cellment. Threads sizzled against her silver gloves as the Heart struggled against her.

  Behind her, Daisy could hear Lawrence repeatedly firing and hacking at something, and the Book’s resistance abruptly vanished. She could feel too, through the Heart’s connection, more dead rising and falling, threads severed as Lawrence destroyed them. Daisy turned this knowledge against the Heart and tore at it, unraveling its threads, shredding its web.

  It faded into nothingness, and Daisy came back to herself, sweat-ing in the terrible cold. The girl beneath her shifted and moaned, and Daisy gave the child what mercy she could—what mercy Romance had never allowed her. She used her knife, which was not a weapon for fighting the dead.

  “Hurry,” Lawrence said, appearing beside her. She’d slung the boy over one shoulder and held her rifle tucked under the opposite arm. “About half of this space was never meant to exist.”

  Daisy didn’t need to be told; she ran, firing at anything that moved and sling-ing reinforcements at feeble walls and ceilings that, without the threads of ensor-cellment supporting and expanding them, began reverting to their real forms. Lawrence let her lead the way, covering their backs, her breath rasp-ing under her extra burden. The boy woke, briefly, only to be jolted uncon-scious again.

  Daisy’s legs and lungs shrieked, but she kept running and kept firing until the dead were no longer awake or asleep but merely dead, and the world had reverted to what was real. Then the agents emerged from the claustrophobic stair into the catafalque room and, at long last, into the grave-yard beyond.

  Lawrence laid the boy on the grass. He was bruised and would wake horri-bly hungry and thirsty and traumatized, but there was a village nearby, and he would survive. That was as much as you could hope for, after a Horror.

  While Daisy leaned against the wall and wheezed, Lawrence stripped off her outer layer and stuffed it in a bag. Then she boosted Daisy back through to the Path and sealed the entrance behind them.

  Daisy collapsed on the stairs, aching. Lawrence’s face was drawn in fatigue and her muscles shook, but her voice when she spoke was as flat as it had ever been. “We have five minutes to rest, but it isn’t good to let your muscles get cold. There are six hundred steps to climb.”

  Daisy buried her face in her arms. She’d thought she was too hurting and tired to feel fear, but there it was again, welling up from its endless spring. “What now?” she asked, voice muffled. “You’re not going to push me off?”

  Lawrence didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I never kill my partners,” she said. “When they die, it is from their own incompe-tence. You of all people understand how it is, being saddled with partner after partner who can’t hold their own, who through their laziness and incompetence will drag you down with them. You choose to bind them to your will; I choose to let them die. Except that this time, you have a competent partner—and one you can’t ensorcell.”

  “Whereas you still have one you can let die.”

  “Whereas I’m given one,” Lawrence corrected, “who was compe-tent enough to survive, and who will continue to survive for as long as she remains compe-tent.”

  Daisy hardly dared raise her eyes. “I wasn’t, though,” she admit-ted, her words tinged with shame. “You saved me twice, didn’t you? In that study. And later, when I would have attacked the Book. You could have let me die both times.”

  “Horror,” Lawrence said, “is better worked in pairs. You will learn.”

  “So what, you’ll save me as long as saving me won’t endanger you? No, that isn’t right; it did endanger you. As long as it won’t kill you, then.”

  Lawrence smiled, and this time it might have been a real smile. “Consider your reassignment a punishment from Management,” she said—“or a reward. Isn’t it what you wanted?”

  Daisy groaned as she pushed herself to her feet. Six hundred steps was a very long way to climb, even while fresh. “I think our five minutes are up,” she said, and hesi-tated only a moment before offering her hand. “Partners?”

  “Don’t die,” Lawrence said, and shook.