The agents walked on under the nauseating sky, upon sand like ash, between furiously listening glass weeds. The land led them where it would: onward, inward, toward the Heart’s stronghold. Ever closer but never close to the vile ting!

  A mirage rose in the darkness, shimmering against the horizon. It approached more swiftly than walking speed justified; and with every step closer, the rain of despair lessened, luring unknowing victims with the false promise of salvation. Willingly, victims would go; and when their despair returned worse than ever, they would blame themselves.

  The mirage neared, solidified, and resolved itself into a table with eight places set before eight chairs. Six of those chairs were occupied by living beings, but not one of them looked over or called out.

  As they got closer, Daisy saw why: the weeds did not touch the ground directly under or around the table. Instead, they clustered in a solid oval around it, fifteen feet away at its nearest point. The shimmering effect was the air above the oval. It formed a one-way barrier that let outsiders see in, and so lured them closer; but prevented insiders from seeing or calling out, from offering entreaties or warnings.

  The table at the center was glass swirled with gray sand and laden with food so perfect and glossy and over-saturated it couldn’t be real. Of the two empty chairs, one was ordinary glass identical to the occupied seats. It lay in wait left of the table’s foot, a single thread of ensorcellment coiled in its seat. A hook-, ready to slip up and around the sitter’s sacrum. It would not harm or control its victim, but it would prevent them from ever standing again.

  The other empty chair was more correctly a throne: three times the breadth of the others, its glass untainted by sand, its back brutally spiked. It, too, was ensorcelled—but its guardian threads were multitudinous and virulent. Any victim who sat upon those threads would refresh them with her life, leaving not even dust behind.

  The five girls hooked to the other seats were victims; the man at the foot was not. Nor was he really a man, for all that he held a man shape. Daisy rather thought, looking at the form of his threads, that he might be a weed.

  He was dressed like an emperor in an old painting, in fur-collared scar-let silk. His skin was glassy gray, and gray hair obscured his eyes. He slumped, his head listing on the chairback, his long-nailed hands palm-down on the tabletop. Though he looked asleep or dead, his overlong ears twitched, alert to every vibration.

  The agents observed and considered. Daisy pointed to the empty seat and held up one finger. Lawrence nodded and pressed her hand down, tell-ing Daisy to stay. When Daisy nodded, Lawrence sheathed her lesser sword and shrank within herself. In a moment, she looked again as she had when exiting the sub-way station. On that occasion, watching through binoculars, Daisy had barely recognized her. She had assumed that, standing this close to Lawrence, and on the very edge of the Heart, she would see past the trans-formation to the expres-sionless professional beneath.

  She could not. The transformation was complete. If Daisy had not known Lawrence, she might have thought her harmless.

  Camouflage of another sort.

  Daisy withdrew her umbrella, compressing it so that it covered only her.

  Exposed once more to the psychic rain, Lawrence trotted toward the oval. She seemed to stumble, miraculously avoided stepping on any of the clus-tering weeds, and crossed the barrier. The others immediately noticed her, and she stopped at the edge of the table—breathless, fighting back tears, awkward and shy. Cringing from the sudden attention, the astonished exclamations, Law-rence’s mouth worked silently before managing to wheeze out words: “Ah—hi. Help. I mean, are you—? Please. The elevator game.”

  The other victims were dressed much as she was, in skirts and leggings. Not one much resembled her photo, but Daisy made a point of memorizing the names and faces of known individuals within scenarios, the better to distin-guish friend from foe. Such knowledge was especially important in a scenario like this, in which analysts had not been able to see what lay beyond the eleva-tor.

  “Are those swords?” demanded the nearest girl, after the first flurry of exclamations had died down. She was about fifteen, with a black bob and a button nose. Nari, Daisy concluded, picking through the twenty options in her mind.

  Lawrence blinked at the girl. “Yeah,” she said. “They were my great-grand-dad’s. No one’s used them since ages ago, but I figured, you know, it might be dangerous on the Secret Floor. The rules didn’t say I couldn’t . . .”

  “But swords are illegal!” Nari protested. “You couldn’t have brought some-thing else?”

  “I brought hairspray,” volunteered another girl. She looked younger, and she wore the sort of low-cut shirt chosen by those who don’t understand what it means yet. That must be Hana. “My mom said—”

  “You told your mom you were coming?” demanded Yeong-Ja. Daisy remembered her especially, because she had something of a reputation as a troublemaker but had also made it to the national spelling bee.

  That left two more. That girl in white was probably Min, which meant that the last one—the one with the bleached pixie cut—

  Daisy stalled. The haircut made it hard, if she had changed it, but the features weren’t fitting either. What was her name? Had she even been on the list of known victims?

  “No, I didn’t tell my mom,” Hana shot back. “I lied to her. So there!” she added, and burst into tears. Lawrence looked uncom-fortable, and the others made no attempt at consolation. After barely a breath, Hana’s tears dried on her cheeks, this place unable to maintain so healthy an emotion as grief.

  “None of us,” Min informed Lawrence, “is ever going home. The rules lied. The elevator doesn’t wait.”

  “Everywhere is the same,” Nari said, motioning broadly. Her hands were lacerated, showing off the muscle. Bits of glass sparkled within, but the wounds neither healed nor bled. “The only thing anywhere is this table, and it’s better than being out there. At least they feed us. And who knows? Something might happen if we fill every seat.”

  It sounded like hope, but it wasn’t. It was the last solution sought by those who have submitted to despair. Daisy could see the rain soaking Nari’s flesh, the deep wells of water bubbling gently as she continuously, unknowingly fed them. It was the same for the others: for Min, for Hana, for the girl whose name yet escaped her. But not, she thought, entirely for Yeong-Ja.

  “Fill every seat,” Lawrence murmured, and Daisy realized with a jolt that she was testing them. Odd, to see someone else at the end of it. “But there are two empty chairs. Maybe it’s just the head that needs to be filled? I am the oldest.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Yeong-Ja agreed swiftly.

  “No, don’t!” cried the others.

  “Sitting on an ordinary chair hasn’t helped any of us; you should sit on the throne,” Yeong-Ja persisted.

  “Don’t listen to her!” cried Hana. “If you do—”

  She slapped her palms over her mouth, pressing her lips shut to cut off the sound.

  At the foot of the table, the emperor’s hand had lifted. Not much; an inch at most. The long nails scraped slivers off the surface of the glass. Hana squeezed her eyes shut; no one else made a sound. After an eternal moment, the hand relaxed.

  Lawrence, busy contemplating the throne, seemed not to notice. She shook her head. “No . . . this isn’t for me. I wouldn’t feel right. There must be someone coming; some special guest more important than that fancy fellow—I’m guessing he’s our host? Why’s he asleep?”

  No one answered, but Lawrence didn’t need an answer. She went on, “It’s better to take a humble spot and be promoted than the other way around, yeah? So I’ll sit by the foot.” Circling the table, she stopped at the chair between Nari and the emperor, across from Yeong-Ja. She pulled out the chair at an angle to keep her sword arm free, and began to lower herself.

  “Don’t!” Yeong-Ja croaked.

  The emperor’s head rolled sharply her way, and the hand lifted again. Yeong-Ja clutched the table edge and stared at Lawrence with desperate, plead-ing eyes. Lawrence met her gaze and sat deliberately atop the coiled thread. It awoke, unwound, and snaked upward to hook her to the chair.

  Brave, Daisy thought, and didn’t know which one she meant.

  The victim circuit complete, the ensorcellment went taut. A message pulsed through the emperor and out to the weeds, streaking away in the direc-tion of the entrancing ting! Most of the victims groaned; all went white. Hana fainted.

  “You idiot!” Yeong-Ja gasped at Lawrence. “Why couldn’t you have sat on the throne like all the others?”

  “You couldn’t have put this off forever,” Lawrence said. “You were already beginning to submit.”

  “I would never!”

  “Then why haven’t you broken free from this table?”

  “I can’t!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s impossible!”

  Lawrence looked at her and did not reply.

  Far distant, but not as distant as before—ting! Daisy shook her head to clear it, but it did not clear. Every other ting! had chimed and then retreated. This one crescendoed and neared. It not only grew louder; it also expanded, filling the world with its undertones of agony and overtones of glass nails and the thudding beat of mindless want.

  Daisy bore it, waiting for it to end. But it did not end, and it did not lessen. It grew, deafeningly loud and hideously beautiful and then louder and more beau-tiful still. The noise beat her umbrella from her hands, dissolving the silver threads to make way for the despair of rain. And then the chime magni-fied again, to fill her head and her limbs. It sang against the rhythm of her heart and redi-rected the rain to flow with it, soaking her in a moment. And it was still getting louder.

  She needed to stop it. She needed to protect herself, to weave a barrier net, to—do—something. She couldn’t think, not past the noise, the noise, the noise the noise the—

  You’ve lost. You always knew you’d lose, one day.

  And that was not her thought. Her hands grasped and shaped, fragments of will failing to coalesce—and her eyes were going to burst and her mind was melting and the noise was still growing. Impossibly, tearingly, vomi-tously loud, and there was nothing beautiful in it and how could she ever have thought it beautiful and yet it had been beautiful and was beautiful and it was so loud and she was impotent against such devastating beauty—

  Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

  (No.)

  —and how had her eardrums not shattered and how had she not died because it was still getting louder and she wouldn’t let it but the noise was everything and no and even she was noise and she would not let it win and noise and she would seize noise if she had to—!

  —!

  —!

  Daisy shrieked back to life embraced by a cocoon of something white and thick, dizzy in the ringing silence. She lay stunned, fingertips glossing over the inner surface. She had somehow become covered in threads of ensorcellment, like the threads inside the glass weeds. No, not like those threads—these were those threads. Some still carried specks of glass with them. They surrounded and enveloped her, and yet they did not harm her. She reached for them, questioned them, and they thrummed in obedient response.

  Wild with repulsion, Daisy scratched the cocoon the away from her face, and threads fell away sadly. She inhaled the arid, metallic air, and propped her-self up on one elbow.

  Every weed within fifty yards lay in rough shards, exploded as the threads had been torn from them. As she had torn the threads out of them. As she had commanded them.

  Daisy pressed her hands to her temples. She had . . . what had she done?

  She had been unable to concentrate. Even at her best, she could not have built a net to withstand that combined psychic attack, that attack that had grown with the approach of—

  Vast, eternal, faceless evil?

  —of the Heart. There had been no delicate manipulation, no tempting with silver gloves. She had ripped the threads out by force and crushed them into subservience. She had commanded them, and they had obeyed even beyond her command, wrapping themselves about her until no flesh remained exposed. Then, sensing only its own threads, the Heart’s attack had withdrawn, vanished, rain and noise together. It had forgotten her in an instant, as it would forget not even the speck of a speck within an uncar-ing universe.

  I did this, Daisy thought; and she giggled, because this was so, so much worse than merely splattering herself with decaying blood and guts to disguise her scent. And she giggled because she had to do something, and it was that or scream, and she would not show weak-ness. Agent Lawrence—

  Lawrence.

  Vaguely, as the ting! had grown, she had seen Lawrence and the others seated around the table, talking. They’d looked disturbed and greenish, but not like the victims of overwhelming psychic assault. That had been for Daisy alone.

  Ting! Her mind was still scattered; she knew it was. She was hearing the ting! again and again, closer but less dreadful for being much smaller.

  She had to get herself together.

  Daisy wrenched her brain around, gripping the fleshy interior of the cocoon. There was Lawrence at the table, everything exactly as before. Except that no one was talking now, because the Heart was arriving.

  It was beautiful. Beautiful and awful as the ting! made corporeal: a glit-ter-ing Abomination of glass and light. It was approximately human-shaped, though its limbs were too long and too jointed. Its face was neither male nor female, but only a collection of surfaces approximating features: a smooth plane in the eye area; angles of cheekbones; a hairline split where the lips might be.

  It descended to its throne, chiming glass upon glass, each move-ment a sliv-ering ting! As it sat, the lips parted infinitesimally. Beyond, inside, lay neither tongue nor teeth but only the blackness of the void. Looking at it, Daisy sus-pected that nothing could fill that void, that no amount of food or destruction, corrosion or decay could in any way assuage it. And yet its hunger pulsed. The Abomination would feast and feast; and with every bite, the void within it would grow—grow endlessly until it broke into the next world, the human world, which it would lay as barren as its own. And at the end of it, it would be hungrier and emptier than ever.

  That was the feeling it gave, and Daisy was not the only one to think so. The victims reacted in a mix of panic, revulsion, and shock, each according to her nature. Hana, awake again, screamed; Min and Yeong-Ja swore and struggled against their hooks; the nameless girl froze; Nari fought for words; Lawrence became impenetrably blank and shifted her weight.

  Daisy held her breath, wishing she had not pulled off so much of her cocoon. She did not for an instant believe that the Abomination could not see through its own barrier; and she was sure that if it saw her, its attack would begin once more, and so strong that nothing could stop it.

  “Are you the guest of honor or our host?” Nari asked, her quiver-ing voice struggling for respectfulness. “Please, why did you bring us here?”

  Sightless, pitiless, unreasoning, the Abomination did not respond. It reached out with a ting! and felt next to it, to where Hana sat. Its long-fingered hands petted her hair and cheeks, and where the nails touched, blood trickled. Hana squeaked and leaned away from it, but the hand followed her and finally clamped over the sand-grayed hair. “Don’t—” she cried.

  The Abomination dragged Hana by the head over the corner of the table. The hook holding her down ripped out her sacrum, and she screamed and screamed and then screamed more as chiming glass fingers shaved off slices of flesh, feeding each through the narrow opening of the mouth and into the void beyond.

  Hana screamed in pain; the other girls screamed in mindless horror; they all strug-gled like hooked worms against the table and chairs. Expressionless, Lawrence drew her lesser sword and swung around, chopping through the emperor’s neck. With a twitch of her will, she snapped her chair’s ensorcel-ling hook and sprang out of her seat.

  The emperor shattered into glass dust, and then new threads rushed in from beyond, bursting from their weeds to form a second emperor in precisely the same position as the first—except that this one was already awake, its hands already lifting as Lawrence swung again.

  Now was her chance! Daisy slashed away the remainder of the cocoon and threw herself into a sprint—across the burst weeds, through the thresh-old, and up behind the base of the throne. There she crouched, hidden from both Abom-ination and emperor.

  A Heart this strong would be tricky to untangle. She wouldn’t be able to subsume it by force, which meant she had to use an isolating net, harmo-nize with it, and turn the Heart’s own abilities against it. That ting! was the key—some-thing like that would definitely cut both ways. If she started with that, used it to untangle . . .

  To untangle . . .

  Daisy stared blankly at her gloves. At her powerful, tempera-mental, delicate gloves.

  At the shredded corpses of her gloves—shredded by glass, stained with blood, shrouded with sand. Utterly, completely, irreparably defeated.

  Hana died, and the Abomination tossed aside what remained of her body. The Abomination had grown larger with every morsel, its lips parting further over the void. Dark flesh bulged beneath its glass surface, separating the plates and facets. Its torso pressed wide against its throne, nubbins wrig-gling between glass plates.

  The Abomination reached out again, patting the air where Hana had sat. Content it had gotten all of her, it moved to the next seat, to Nari. Nari bowed her head, giving in to despair without further struggle. But she screamed as much as Hana had, when it began to slice.

  “This is your fault!” Yeong-Ja shrieked at Lawrence, hurling anything and everything within reach at the Abomination: silverware, goblets, the desiccated flesh of failed victims no longer disguised as food. When none of it made any difference, she changed her aim to the emperor. “Why couldn’t you have left us alone?!”

  Lawrence let a bowl strike her as she stepped in and bisected the emperor’s skull before it could finish forming. Her stance remained steady and light as she bought her partner time. “You had no chance of victory then,” she said. “You do now. Get up and fight.”

  “I can’t!” Yeong-Ja insisted. “Can’t you see that I can’t?”

  “Because you’d rather be a victim?” Lawrence asked. The next emperor crumpled under her sword: flesh and threads to glass, glass to sand like ash. The next emperor formed in its place, more swiftly than had the one before. It not only formed more quickly; it moved more quickly—faster and faster, adapt-ing to Lawrence’s speed and style. If only by a second, each emperor lasted longer than the one before. Soon, it would equal her—and then exceed.

  The Abomination’s nubbins burst into tentacles, and Nari’s screams grew thin. Daisy clenched her teeth, all too aware that she was running out of time. What could she do? She had a short sword, a sturdy double-edged Agency creation. It might be strong enough to take down the Abomination, if she struck soon and in exactly the right place, but she wasn’t confident in it. And if she did kill the Heart like that, the backlash would definitely burst inside the remaining victims. Ordinarily, she would have considered that deeply unfortunate, but these things happened, and what other options did she have?

  Ordinarily—but her situation had changed. Daisy wasn’t fighting only for this life inside only this scenario. There would be the next scenario and the next, and if she was not competent—if she was not more than compe-tent—if she was not indispensably valuable—

  Lawrence wanted a partner, but she did not need one; she had made that perfectly clear. As for a partner who was rendered helpless because she had clumsily destroyed her own gloves—

  Then Daisy might not die today, but she would die sooner rather than later. And the Skeleton, who had condemned her, would congratulate Law-rence on a job well done.

  Daisy trembled and hardened, sinking herself forcibly into deep concen-tra-tion. She peeled off the tatters of her gloves and drew the silver-lined short sword flat over her knees. Then she reached bare hands to the Abomination.

  She could see the knot, the way it tightened and beat within the Heart. Gaps opened and closed as the Abomination grew, that growth both its vulner-ability and its greatest strength. Daisy’s fingers brushed against the glass, and it burned her. She took the short sword and propped it between the glass plates, holding them open as she prepared to do the impossible.

  Ting! That was the tone.

  Ting! Daisy sang back to it, vile and beguiling and razor sharp. Ting! she beckoned to the threads, drew them out to untangle them with her bare fingers. She could not touch them with her shredded gloves, so she had to make her own hands into gloves, had to strengthen them with her will and use that will to unravel, splitting her mind into a dozen fragments. Ting! she sang, and under and within that chime, Obey me!

  The emperor turned abruptly away from Lawrence, sensing the change. Lawrence cut it down at once, but it was no longer interested in her. It reformed and lunged for Daisy, but Lawrence stood before it, not letting it pass.

  Ting! The Abomination, oblivious, ate. Its greenish-black flesh swelled outward, pushing back the glass armor into isolated scales. The glass face moved upward, small upon the forehead, propped care-lessly above the maw.

  Nari died, and the Abomination tossed her remains away. It contented itself that it had missed nothing and moved to the next seat. Lawrence’s seat. It groped the air, became confused, then angry at finding it empty. Its threads swelled, and Daisy snatched back her hands as the knot closed over the path she had made, her hard-won progress undone in an instant.

  The Abomination stretched its void open in a soundless roar and stood. It batted the massive throne away like it was nothing and turned to Daisy. Dozens of tentacles writhed around it, and it roared again, silently and deaf-eningly and yet still with that cutting ting!

  The glass plate upon its forehead, the plate that had once covered its face, slid open, revealing a single crimson eye. Its acid gaze fell full upon Daisy; and too late, Daisy saw her foe as it really was. Saw that without gloves, she had never had a chance against it.

  Daisy snatched up her sword and scuttled back before rising at guard. The Abomi-nation poked one tentacle at her in a testing sort of way. Daisy rolled to the side, and the slight brush of the tentacle sent her sword spinning. Contemptuous now, the Abom-i-nation reached for her.

  There was nowhere to run, and so—crouching, face raised—Daisy spread her will into a shield and commanded it, “Stop!”

  The Abomination paused for an instant, mildly confused, and then reached again. Daisy hissed and leapt to her feet, dagger drawn. She ran at the Abomi-nation—

  And dropped down on her face as brilliant, unsullied light burst through the Heart. Smooth, icy, and searingly bright, it pierced the main knot of threads and kept going, directly into the place Daisy had stood an instant earlier. The Heart beat once against the light and then burst, lashing shock-waves back down its threads, the shattering of bone and glass filling the universe.

  The Abomination crumpled to glass, to sand like ash, and Lawrence stood where it had been: expressionless, infinitely tall and distant, judge and execu-tioner. Daisy looked up at her and saw not the person who had sometimes almost smiled at her but something more terrifying even than the Abomination.

  “Why didn’t you unravel it?” Lawrence intoned, a ripping fury behind the glacial flatness of her voice.

  “I tried,” Daisy said, feeling small and plaintive as she held up her hands. “There was a psychic attack after you left. My gloves—”

  “What good to me,” Lawrence asked, terrible in the light of her sword, “is a partner who can’t do her job?”

  Daisy burned at hearing her own thoughts spoken back to her, her private voice of tempting despair. She raised her head, the fire in her lungs blackening any fear of winter. “Think about your words,” she hissed, “and try again.”

  Lawrence narrowed her eyes, and humanity returned to her face. The artic chill receded and, as if it were natural to do so, she resheathed her greater sword.

  Her vision no longer obscured by pure light, Daisy saw beyond Law-rence, to what remained: to despairing Min; to the girl whose name she had never remembered; and to brave Yeong-Ja, who had held Lawrence’s lesser sword against the emperor in that last vital second. Who held it still, though the back-lash of the Abomination’s death had burst her heart from her chest.

  Lawrence did not look back. She said, “You need to communi-cate with me if there’s a problem.”

  “Oh?” Daisy said. “You mean, like you communicate with me?” She smiled gleamingly at her partner. A false, fragile, vicious smile, but it was her own.

  Lawrence met her smile evenly. “No,” she said. “We both need to do better.”