Agents died in Horror.

  Far more of them than Management cared to admit died because the Heart ensnared their minds and drove them laughingly into danger. Only in the last moment would mortal terror bring lucidity, and by then, it was too late.

  Other agents succumbed to death by fatigue or inexperience or plain bad luck. They tripped into bottomless pits or mantraps or fragile stair rails. They stepped left when they should have stepped right. They mistook the nature of the Horror. Even after a successful mission, bleary eyes and stum-bling feet might guide them over the edge of the Path and into the voracious Abyss beyond.

  Still other agents died directly at the hands of the Heart. They were suffo-cated, hanged, bricked up, drowned, dismembered and sewn back wrong. They were stabbed with scissors, with cleavers, with harpoons, with fence spikes.

  Hardly any agents were murdered by their partners.

  Regardless of how they died, the fact that so many agents died meant that Horror remained perpetually and severely understaffed; and this in turn contrib-uted to the exhaustion of its agents. It took a special sort of person to work Horror at all; but they said that if you made it to six months, you’d make it your full five years, and then you could transfer wherever you liked or even retire with impu-nity, and it didn’t matter what you’d done before.

  Agent Nebekah Lawrence, twelve-year veteran of Horror, left her new part-ner collapsed in bed. Agent Allen was not incompetent, oh no, but she was physically worn out. She would be sore for their next mission and the next, but she would grow accustomed to the strain or she would die horrifically.

  Lawrence herself was not immune to fatigue and the need to recover before their next mission, but she would not sleep yet. There were certain tasks before her that she never put off. After showering, she therefore sat for twenty minutes, typing a concise but not negligent report, and then left to deliver it to Management.

  The Skeleton was waiting for her. He kept closer tabs on his agents than most of them realized, and he knew both precisely when Lawrence had returned and that she made a point of never deviating from the routine she had developed around him. Such predictability would be deadly inside a scenario, and the Skeleton wondered why habit and instinct hadn’t forbidden it within the Agency. Curiosity had prompted him to ask once, but Lawrence had returned only an uncom-prehending stare.

  The routine went like this: after a mission, barring any need for immediate medical attention, Lawrence returned directly to her suite. Thirty-five and forty minutes later, she left again, to deliver her report to the Skeleton. She entered his office, handed him the report, and stood across from his desk as he read it. She made no attempt at conver-sation. Her gaze rested on the painting over his head that was the room’s only art: a bleak, dark seascape, its distant ships mostly obscured by cracks and neglect. He had not chosen it; it was a remnant of the room’s child-hood as a storage closet. Most of the other remnants had been removed one at a time by people in need of sponges and mops, but either no one had wanted the painting, or no one had dared walk around him to get it.

  The Skeleton had no idea what Lawrence thought about, while she looked at that painting. From an outsider’s perspec-tive, her pose looked like one of respect, or at least weariness, and not of dislike of her supervisor. In turn, his lack of objection looked like avuncular allowance, not fear.

  “You made an effort to keep your partner alive,” he com-mented, finishing the report.

  “I am fully aware,” said Agent Lawrence, eyes on disintegrating ships, “of the regulations concerning partner interactions.”

  “Of your correctness, I have no doubt,” the Skeleton said, concealing his irritation. “Can you say the same of Agent Allen?”

  “Allen performed satisfactorily.”

  “And legally?”

  “She did not ensorcell or otherwise compel me.”

  The Skeleton was difficult to read at the best of times, but so was Agent Lawrence. “Leniency,” he hinted, “is uncharacteristic of you. Are you not known for your ruthlessness? Your last two partners did not survive their first missions with you.”

  “I am fully aware,” Lawrence repeated, without any inflection whatso-ever, “of the regulations concerning partner interaction.”

  “Horror could certainly use more competent agents,” the Skele-ton allowed. “I am pleased things worked out on this mission. Of course,” he added, “if you find this partnership not to your liking, other arrangements can be made.”

  Lawrence gave no response, and the Skeleton discerned no change in her. He said, “Your results are exceptional, as always. See they remain so.”

  “Sir,” Lawrence said evenly.

  Seeing he would get nothing more, the Skeleton dismissed her. She left without another word, and he watched her follow the rest of her routine back to her suite.

  Once her door closed, the Skeleton’s attention lifted. Lawrence stood alone between blocky desks and vomitous walls. Nothing had changed in here, except for the addi-tion of a second rifle and a few other tools meticulously arranged on the previously empty table, and the whiff of expensive shampoo.

  More would change; Lawrence acknowledged this inevitability without assigning any particular emotion to it. Like the weed that was her namesake, Daisy Allen would strive to fill the valley with her own image. Such was her nature.

  How many years had elapsed, Lawrence pondered, since she had last shared her living space? Her two most recent partners had not survived their first missions with her, and had therefore never moved in; the partner before them had been male, and thus granted his own quarters.

  It was rare for Management to pair agents of opposite genders. Not unheard of, but not done frivolously. Lawrence had not requested Agent Casey, nor he her; they had never met before being partnered. Agent Casey had begun in West-ern and worked extensively in Sci-fi. He had wanted to remain in Sci-fi after his old partner’s retirement, but no one was available to partner with him, and the genre was over-staffed anyway. Smelling opportunity, Management made noise over Casey’s achievements in Mili-tary, Oppres-sion/Resistance, and Space Opera strains, and offered him various incentives to join Horror—including an expert partner.

  “You’ll find I’m a dead-shot with a laser-gun,” Casey told Lawrence as they prepared for their first mission. “And I can pilot any spaceship. Might be useful in a Space-Horror or encroachment.” He demonstrated his quick draw, followed by several fancy handling tricks. “Aliens, beware! You ever get aliens?”

  “They occur.”

  “But not often? Then: monsters, beware! Sci-fi is coming for you!”

  This partnership, Lawrence suspected, was a ploy by the Skeleton: if only she’d fall in love, he could use that to control her. Casey was handsome and about her age, with a companionable grin and a laugh-ing quickness that some might find attractive.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  To be fair, Agent Casey wasn’t awful. For several weeks, Lawrence thought he had real potential. He was fully as good a shot as he’d boasted, his work demonstrated a high degree of precision as long as he remained focused, and he could follow direction. Together, he and Lawrence success-fully completed difficult scenarios in half the time she could have managed alone.

  Her good opinion lasted until Casey became comfortable in Horror. Then, Lawrence learned the extent to which he was content to follow direc-tion without committing it to long-term memory, so that she had to teach him anew with each scenario. He talked about his past achievements while becoming lazy in the present, and attempted to distract her with vague fantasies about the accolades their missions would bring. He spoke of advancement while allow-ing her to pull his weight.

  Pull it she did, increasingly disgusted but hopeful . . . until the day that pulling his weight would have killed her along with him.

  They were in a Labyrinth strain, a cave filled with various monsters controlled by the Heart at the center. Lawrence and Casey had fought through two waves of enemies and were progressing deeper down the foul tunnel. Confident in his unsubstantiated opinion that a third wave would precede any appear-ance by the Heart, Casey peeled open a ration bar and chomped into it. He was turning midstride to make some comment about the flavor when tentacles burst through the wall and wrapped him in their acid grip. His machete, care-lessly lowered, had no chance of cutting him free; his gun, carelessly holstered, remained a whisker’s breadth out of reach.

  Making no attempt to free him, Lawrence ducked and weaved between tentacles to strike at the Heart. It sensed her at the last moment and thrashed, tearing Agent Casey in half even as it collapsed beneath her hatch-ets.

  Casey was not quite dead, but he would not survive the trip out, so Lawrence cut off his head in a single, clean strike. In her report, Lawrence opined that Casey’s death had been the inevitable result of his carelessness and that, fur-thermore, his neglect of duty had endan-gered her life. “There was no rea-son-able manner,” she wrote, “in which I could have saved his life; and there is no reasonable logic by which I should have had to.” The analysts took Lawrence’s side, and Management had no choice but to do the same. Lawrence was compensated with half of Casey’s death pay, and that was that.

  Until Casey’s girlfriend came after Lawrence with a knife.

  It was an impulse born of grief, mere hours after some irrespon-sible analyst had circulated Lawrence’s report. Sitting in the cafeteria, surrounded by the hell-ish cheer and good nature of her oblivious peers, the girlfriend spotted her enemy. There she was: Agent Lawrence, looking exactly as she had when Geoff Casey had first introduced them two months ago. Lawrence glanced around the cafete-ria with clear eyes unreddened by grief, and then joined the line to fill her appe-tite.

  There was steak today; the knife was already in the girlfriend’s hand. She was somehow standing—had moved halfway across the cafeteria—was seconds away from her enemy. She did not know what she was going to do except that she was going to take this knife and stab her enemy and make her bleed and maybe kill her like Casey had died, died, dead—

  Lawrence heard the cry of grieving fury, sensed the approach, and turned to face her attacker.

  Seven feet away, the girlfriend’s feet rooted themselves.

  You don’t last long working Drama without a good understanding of people. Grief had brought the girlfriend rage and madness, but it had not destroyed her instincts. With crystalline brilliance, it came to her in which genre her enemy worked, and for how long. She remem-bered what Casey had told her of Law-rence, and filtered out the credit he had taken for himself and the humor he had found in his partner’s personality.

  In that flash, the girlfriend she drew a truer character sketch of Lawrence than she had ever bothered with before, and she under-stood that she was not the first person to charge at Lawrence with a knife, not by a long shot, and yet it was Agent Lawrence who stood unharmed before her.

  The girlfriend’s knees crumpled; the knife clattered to the laminated floor. When she came to her senses, cosseted by a ring of friends, her enemy had long vanished.

  The face of her enemy did not bother the girlfriend again, for in that moment, Lawrence too had learned. She had learned that even in the Agency, she was not safe. She had recognized the look on the girlfriend’s face from a time before her employment at the Agency; and she remembered the various forms of revenge it could inspire. She knew that if the girlfriend had worked a more combative field and approached her from behind or from a distance, the situa-tion would not have ended without bloodshed.

  I have become complacent.

  And yet Lawrence also knew the hideous, crippling exhaustion of perma-nent vigilance. She must not go back to that. She needed a place where she could relax among people she could trust, and she needed the solid food to which she had become accustomed.

  Here in the present, having completed the routine she’d devel-oped around the Skeleton, Lawrence left her suite again. She stopped short of the cafeteria’s swinging double doors and watched agents parade in and out. Their eyes slid past her. Not out of respect, but by instinct. She reeked of the battlefield, though she had scrubbed her body and changed her clothes. It had always been this way after a mission, even when she had been young enough for adults to pretend they thought of her as a child.

  In a moment no one was looking, Lawrence pushed open the door to the kitchen. Heat gusted around her, and spices disguised the coppery tang in her nostrils. She drew the door shut, and then moved her back away from it.

  “Hey—it’s Nebekah! Nebekah’s here!” The speaker was the closest of the cooks, a young man whose brown curls frizzed magnificently under his hairnet. He saluted her with a spoon as he spoke.

  “She’s back?” said the next, leaning around loaves of bread to squint at her.

  “Welcome back!” exclaimed the third.

  “Wait, what happened?” asked the fourth. “I didn’t hear. Did her new part-ner survive?”

  “How can you ask that?” berated the third. “It’s Daisy Allen. Isn’t it?”

  “Everyone loves Daisy,” sighed the second. “Wait, she didn’t die, did she??!”

  All four brothers were here today, stirring stew and washing dishes, scrub-bing potatoes and arranging fruit. Despite the way they called out over the bubbling and hissing and banging, not one of them approached her or crowded her or harassed her; they no more left their stations than if their feet had been nailed to the floor.

  “Agent Allen is alive,” Lawrence said, because she cared enough about them to answer.

  “Thank goodness.”

  “I knew Daisy would survive.”

  “Everyone loves Daisy.”

  Drawn by the hubbub, the head chef emerged from the back office, where he spent his time making food orders and writing menus. His name was Kier-kus Sayers; and aside from getting progressively fatter and balder, he was much as he had been when Lawrence’s first partner had dragged her here nearly twelve years ago. Lawrence had never bothered visiting by herself until after the death of her third partner, when she’d realized she was begin-ning to forget. What the kitchen staff had thought of her appearing that day, empty-eyed and silent, they’d never said; but Mr. Sayers had remembered her name, and no one had tried hard to stop her when she’d taken sponge and brush and scrubbed every crusty, sticky pot until her hands bled—or when, after-wards, she’d pulled on disposable gloves and started on the stove.

  “Lewis!” Mr. Sayers yelled at the undercook, “stew! Soren, rolls! Where are your manners?”

  “Working on it, Dad,” Lewis called back, adding in a baked apple with heavy cream. Mr. Sayers whisked the tray away from him as soon as the last current was placed, and set it on the little corner table. Once he stepped back to give her space, Law-rence sank grate-fully into her seat.

  “I’m glad Daisy made it,” sighed the dishwashing Karl.

  “Everyone loves Daisy,” Lewis affirmed, grinning at his brother—for it was Karl who had said this twice before. But because Lewis blushed as he said it, he was immediately ridiculed in turn. “You hypocrites!” he shot back at his brothers, laugh-ing, because there was always laughter in this kitchen. The Sayers were a happy and affectionate family untouched by true horror and further united by the death of the mother, the only agent among them.

  “It makes sense that Daisy would survive, though,” Karl said. “She’s pretty experienced too, isn’t she?”

  “In Romance,” Soren scathed.

  “Do you like her?” Paul asked Lawrence, who tilted her head noncom-mit-tally around a mouthful of potato.

  “Do you?” Mr. Sayers asked Lawrence privately, as his sons started comparing their memories of Daisy: of Daisy’s charm, Daisy’s smile, and Daisy’s figure.

  After Casey had died, Lawrence had begun coming here not merely sporadically but in between every mission. Sometimes, she took her food and left; more often, she sat and ate in this foreign universe, in safety. She told Mr. Sayers what she would not have told another living soul: “She thinks she was the only one being tested.”

  “And did you pass?”

  “I will not lose to him.”

  Mr. Sayers nodded and left her in favor of wrangling his sons. Lawrence let the talk of Daisy-this and Daisy-that wash over her as she finished her food and cleaned her own dishes. The grill needed work after that. Law-rence kept at it until her vision danced and doubled and the scrubber skit-tered away. Only then did she give in and resume her vigilance for the brief trip back to her suite—to the steady breath-ing in the next room, to the memory of suitcases, to the faint perfume of Romance that Agent Allen probably had no idea clung to her.

  A black binder had been shoved through their mail slot. Lawrence left it on her partner’s desk and double-locked her bedroom door before finally, finally permitting herself to sleep.