The partner who had been assigned to train her, Nebekah concluded after care-ful consideration, was insane. There was no other explanation for her persistent and powerful delusions.

  Things did not begin badly. The Skeleton, determined not to lose his prom-ising new agent, made a rare exception to his mission assign-ments by handpicking a simple scenario, one that activated upon entry. Analysts had seen it clearly and labeled it a Slasher strain, Psycho!Romance type without prob-able complications.

  It began in a high school. Nebekah knew it was a high school because the brief said it was; it looked like no school she had ever seen. It was five stories tall and four times as wide, all flat concrete and windows. Inside were straight hallways, creamy desks, bumpy-smooth blue chairs, blinking lights, and futuristic technology not unlike what she’d seen in the Agency. The particular classroom they landed in also hosted a collection of glass devices and metal fixtures. Vivienne said they ran experi-ments in that room, and Nebekah believed it, though she wondered how Vivienne could speak casually of such atrocities.

  “This really takes me back,” Vivienne declared as they exited into a long, smooth, clean hallway. Windows lined one wall and innumer-able gray doors the other. A warren of environmental hazards, makeshift weapons, and hiding places.

  As they stood there exposed, the scenario recognized the presence of intrud-ers, and the air shifted. Shadows darkened and took on a bluish tint. Pulsing veins streaked over the windows, reinforcing them. Other veins coiled about doorknobs, sealing their seams so that no kick could open them—so that nothing could open them, unless certain conditions were met.

  “Where are you?” called a girl’s voice, high and teasing.

  Vivienne held a finger to her lips, as if expecting Nebekah to get caught by the enemy’s lure.

  “Are you hiding from me?” the girl called. “I can hear you!”

  Nebekah sank into a too-deep shadow and quieted her breathing.

  Vivienne, boldly in the middle of the hallway, consulted her compass. “See this?” she said a minute later, when the footsteps had faded. “This com-pass doesn’t point north; it points at the greatest concentration of the Heart’s power. Which is often its corporeal manifestation. As you can see, we’re safe for the moment, which means we can establish some param-eters. First, do you see what I was talking about, with the threads? It’s okay if you don’t—you don’t have to be able to See to be an agent, though most of us can. It makes things easier, and you have to have at least that much psychic power, if you want to use gloves.”

  Nebekah didn’t like this hallway. Remaining unprotected in the enemy’s territory was tantamount to suicide. She wanted to slink away, to track down the enemy and attack it on her own terms, not to wait for it to execute its preferred strategy against her.

  She did not for an instant make the mistake of assuming this enemy’s powers would match those she had encountered in the capital. On that occa-sion, she had returned in the small hours of the morning to make her report, only to find the captain looking very odd with a pulsing dark vein plunging through the back of his head. He had welcomed her with unnatu-rally stilted language and offered her a small box he called a gift. When he wouldn’t take no for an answer, she cut off his hand and kept cutting until she uncovered the alien parasite clinging to his brain.

  Other parasites sensed his death and came for her; she cut them down too and escaped to the rooftops.

  By morning, the invasion sprawled over the entire city. She hid and fought, slaughtering countless hosts and parasites, moving ever inward—track-ing the pulsing veins to the very center of the infection. There, she found the mother entity, a massive and bloated creature continually birthing more parasites.

  An honor guard surrounded the mother, protecting it. Nebekah recog-nized most of its members: comrades and enemies alike, the city’s most skilled swords-men. Far more than any single individual, however talented, could hope to defeat.

  Nebekah observed all she could and then retreated. She returned six hours later, carrying a small ceramic pot of homemade Greek fire. She inched above the mother and then dropped down, sword cutting a deep gash in the mother’s side, where the veins pulsed most thickly. She shoved the pot inside and smashed it with her sword.

  She expected to die, after that, to be cut down by countless swords. She was not. The mother died, and the backlash of its death exploded in every para-site—and in the brain of every host.

  The capital fell that day. Aside from Nebekah and the lucky few who had avoided detection, the only survivors were the teams of agents sent to combat the scenario. Those agents had been observing from nearby buildings when Nebekah ended the scenario, and all six ran excitedly her. Nebekah regained her senses in time not to kill them.

  The agents called the mother “the Heart” and the invasion a “Mega-Scenario Sci!Horror Encroach-ment,” and congratulated her roundly before leaving her in the ruined city to hurry back home and tell the Skele-ton about her.

  Several of them had worn silver gloves, like Vivienne now wore.

  “This scenario has a pretty immature Heart,” Vivienne told her. “You can tell by how limited it is: simple environmental control with no external mani-fes-tations. It’s important never to be overconfident, but for an experi-enced agent, taking down something like this is no big deal. That’s why, this first time, I want you to stay back and observe. Unravel-ment will be easier to explain once you’ve seen it done once.”

  A shrill voice giggled. “There you are! That’s not how you play hide-and-seek.”

  At the end of the hall stood a mass of throbbing veins, raising an extension of itself: an eight-inch chef’s knife in appearance but a proboscis in function. Beyond that, the enemy’s eternal form resembled a fifteen-year-old girl, smiling and blonde, in a blue school uniform.

  “That giggle is a form of psychic attack,” Vivienne explained. “That’s the Heart, but don’t be deceived! There may be a real girl beneath. When a Heart controls a human, we call that person an ‘innocent.’”

  While Vivienne talked, the giggler halved the distance between them. Seeing Vivienne not even raise her weapon, Nebekah fired her crossbow at a major vein.

  The giggler stopped. “That wasn’t very nice,” it said, and pulled the bolt from its neck. “I’ll teach you to play by the rules.”

  Nebekah shot again, this time at the largest cluster of veins in its chest, but the giggler only plucked out the second bolt and dropped it clatter-ingly to the floor. “Shall we play Murder in the Dark?” it asked.

  Nebekah discarded the crossbow and drew her sword. She lunged close, drawing the blade across the giggler’s gut. Veins spilled out, but the giggler only laughed and put them back in.

  “My turn!” it announced. It raised the chef’s knife and stabbed repeat-edly at Nebekah—overhead stabs, steady but not particularly swift. Nebekah side-stepped easily, bringing up her sword to turn the blade. But the giggler was surprisingly strong, and Nebekah found herself hurriedly backtracking, drawing the giggler away to the side to give Vivienne an opening.

  Gleeful at Nebekah’s perceived weakness, the giggler ran at her, knifing the air mechanically. Nebekah waited for it and then stepped in on a down-swing. She stabbed the air in the crook of the giggler’s arm and stepped in, levering her sword between the top of the giggler’s forearm and the back of its bicep so that the knife continued down in an arc and penetrated the giggler’s belly. The proboscis knife expanded and buried itself deeper, slurping eagerly.

  Nebekah retreated, but it wasn’t necessary; once the giggler had gotten a taste, it couldn’t stop. It stabbed again and again into its own gut, giggling uncontrollably. It died, and the power inside it snapped and lashed along its veins. The streaks locking the doors burst; the reinforce-ments on the windows crumbled. Shadows lightened and shal-lowed; traffic noises seeped in from outside.

  Nothing else attacked. Nothing else was going to attack. What-ever would happen tomorrow night in this school, it would not be a Horror. There wasn’t even any blood on her sword.

  Nebekah turned, grinning, to her partner, and hardly even cared about the aghast expression, about the hand pressed to the sternum. Adults always acted like that: treating her like a child when they first met, making concerned speeches and demanding awkward hugs. Their concern always ended when the violence began.

  “You just about gave me a heart attack!” Vivienne cried, leaning heavily on her quarterstaff. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

  Nebekah did not understand, and so she did not reply.

  Vivienne blew out a breath. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been an idiot, haven’t I? I didn’t listen to the Skeleton, and I made assump-tions. I should be saying what I’ll say now: Good job, Nebekah! You’ve completed your first mission!”

  Nebekah lay wondering eyes on her and, after a difficult pause, said, “Thank you.”

  “But,” Vivienne added sternly, wagging a finger at her, “you can’t just go killing Hearts like that! It worked out this time, because there weren’t any inno-cents or victims to be killed by the backlash, but you can’t count on that! There’s a reason agents work in pairs, you know, even in simple scenarios like this.”

  Nebekah stayed silent. Whatever Vivienne said didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Nebekah had won. She had fixed the Horror so that it would never, ever come back. Just like the Skeleton had promised.

  “All right,” Vivienne said, “I won’t ruin your victory. But we are definitely going to talk about this later—and you’re going to listen!”

  Back in their suite, after the fourth miraculously filling meal Nebekah had eaten since joining the Agency, Vivienne began to explain.

  “Scenarios,” she said, “are—actually, we don’t know exactly what they are. People used to think they were a natural phenomenon, like a festering wound in the world—but, well, wounds don’t fester if they aren’t infected by something external, do they? And then analysts found the breakthrough points—”

  She caught something in Nebekah’s face and laughed. “I’m being confus-ing, aren’t I? Sorry; like I said, even we don’t know everything. A good short-hand is thinking of scenarios like parasites. They enter the world at an infection point and take physical form, which we call the Heart. All Hearts have two basic abilities: psychic power and thread production. How they combine these and the extent of their power varies from Heart to Heart, but will always reflect the type of food the Heart eats—what we call genre. Obviously, Horror feeds by creating horror, which is what makes it so horri-ble. Horrify-ing. Any genre will attack agents if it feels threatened, but Horror goes out of its way to attack everybody. Constantly.”

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  Nebekah nodded. She understood the desperation of starvation.

  “The general term for the Heart’s power is ensor-cellment,” Vivienne went on. “The only way to undo the Heart’s ensorcellment is to detangle the threads within the Heart itself. That’s why unravelment gloves are an agent’s most important tool: only they can be used to accomplish our primary task of unraveling the Heart.”

  “No,” said Nebekah. “I killed it.”

  “Yes, and you did a good job of defeating that Heart,” Vivienne said. “But defeating the Heart is only half the battle; the other half is saving people. Destroying a Heart by force is like chopping off your hand to get rid of the parasite nibbling your fingertips. It works, and it’s better than letting the para-site eat your whole arm—but on the whole, it’s better to detangle the parasite and save your hand. That’s why agents always work in pairs: you can kill the Heart working solo, but it’s just about impossible to do that and save the victims and innocents without a partner.”

  Determining that Nebekah had absorbed as much as she could in one sitting, Vivienne ordered her off to bed: “It’s important to get a full night’s sleep so you can grow up big and strong!”

  Just how young did Vivienne think she was? Nebekah wondered. She knew girls her age who’d gotten married—although that wasn’t considered ideal, even in the country of her birth. And yet she somehow did not care to correct or rebuke her partner.

  Nebekah mused on that as she double locked her door and set her sword beside her. Vivienne’s treatment of her was baffling, certainly. But it was not, she decided, entirely unpleasant. . . .

  That was Nebekah’s early impression. Only over time did she conclude that Vivienne’s delusions regarding her were one small subset of her greater madness—a madness that had no place in Horror.

  Yet Vivienne was not all bad. She was not cowardly and nor was she unable to fight; for although she hated and feared them, Vivienne never hesitated to enter a new Horror; and although she preferred nonfatal strikes, she was extremely competent with longbow and quarterstaff.

  No. The problem, the insanity, was that Vivienne was nice—and that she really, honestly believed that other people were nice and the world was nice and even Hearts (if you dug deep and got them good therapists) were inher-ently nice. Each time they entered a scenario, Vivienne would say something like, “What a pretty house! I bet nice people lived here. I hope they’re all right.”

  After hearing this a dozen times, Nebekah ventured to ask, “Wouldn’t they have to be victims if they lived here, and probably already dead?”

  Vivienne blinked at her. “No. They might have gotten away.”

  “Then wouldn’t someone else have to be a victim? There always is some-body—the Heart has to feed. You taught me that.”

  “If there are victims, we’ll save them!” Vivienne announced, pumping her fist in the air. She said the same thing in the next scenario, and the next. She never seemed to learn, and Nebekah suspected she didn’t want to learn. Believ-ing the truth wouldn’t be nice.

  And what is niceness, anyway? Nebekah wondered, on the Path back from a Satanic Ritual strain, Demon Pregnancy type. What is it, except insanity?

  Time passed. Nebekah’s cheeks filled out and bloomed a rosy pink. Her hair grew in thick and lush, and she found herself abruptly so much taller that her bones ached. Protein strengthened her sinewy muscles, comple-menting and counteracting her body’s discovery of fats and sugars. She began having to disguise her breath from the dead. Though day after day she ventured into Horrors, she found nothing in them to disturb her—for no Horror was more twisted, more perverted or perfidious or cruel than the country of her birth. She hadn’t been able to right that place no matter whose orders she followed, no matter which people she obediently slaugh-tered; but here, when she vanquished Horrors, they never, ever came back.

  Yet even as Nebekah flourished, Vivienne frayed and decayed.

  “It’s like she’s feeding off her partner,” people whispered, when they thought Nebekah could not hear, and they hurried to ask Vivienne if she was quite sure she was all right.

  “I’m fine,” Vivienne would say, looking tragically heroic. “It’s just—Horror, you know? It wears you out.” She would smile bravely at them with those words, and they would believe her. She smiled at Nebekah too, but Nebekah never missed the shadows lurking behind the smile, or the way they multi-plied.

  As the year rolled over, Nebekah took to tracking Vivienne. Even if Vivienne merely announced she was going to bed early, Nebekah would follow her and make conversation or simply watch her until she fell asleep. She seri-ously con-sidered locking away their weapons each night but suspected that wouldn’t do any good. She had known enough suicides to understand how clever and creative they could be—and if Vivienne did turn that way, better it be a quick death by blood loss than the hours of retching and agonizing contortions that so often accom-panied poison.

  Besides, the greatest danger was not in the long, dark hours of the night. It was in the work of the day.

  Ever more desperate to discover some underlying niceness in Horror, Vivienne began taking risks and becoming distracted by trivial details at crucial moments. Occasionally at first, then every other mission, then five times a day. She would have died long ago, if not for the outstanding skill and devoted deter-mination of her partner. And then she exceeded even that partner’s ability to compensate, and Nebekah found herself frequently having to execute the Heart prematurely.

  “There were victims!” Vivienne would scream at her, after. “You killed them!”

  “Not I,” Nebekah would reply; and Vivienne would turn to self-recrim-ina-tion—or pretend not to understand—or fake acting like normal—or accuse her again—or all of these things in rapid succession.

  Nebekah didn’t know what to do with her. Everything she tried wors-ened the situation. And yet, there were also times in between, when Vivienne seemed her old self. Then, she would talk cheerfully and skip around the Agency and insist on brushing Nebekah’s hair or treating her to vanilla-and-orange-swirl ice cream.

  Perhaps those occasions, and the desire not to lose them, were why Nebekah waited so long, before making supplication to the Skeleton. But she made it at last, helpless to do otherwise.

  “Her mind is damaged,” Nebekah told him, “with an injury that will continue to worsen as long as she remains in Horror. You must retire her. Make her an analyst or a cleaner. Make her anything but an agent.”

  “Her sin has not yet been expiated,” the Skeleton replied. “Her sentence was for five years.”

  “She will not survive another month,” Nebekah said. “Reassign her. Or expulse her, if you must.”

  “Oh?” the Skeleton asked. “Expulsion? Is that truly what you wish for her?”

  Nebekah looked at him, and suddenly she was back in the capital and nothing had changed and nothing would ever, every change.

  “There are sometimes things I want done unofficially,” the Skeleton said. “Things that must be kept secret forever. Assignments, of sorts.”

  “Vivienne is not suited to accompany me on those.”

  “No,” the Skeleton agreed. “But I am. I will rely on your honor for your agreement.”

  How deeply in her past had he examined, Nebekah wondered, to know with which words to trap her? And yet she had asked for him to take advantage of her in this way, as just payment for her love and gratitude toward the one person who had ever been truly kind to her. Well, let this pay her debt.

  Nebekah bit her thumb until blood beaded the pad and then pressed it to the Skeleton’s forehead. Not to the gold filigree that guarded his face, but to what-ever lay beneath. He allowed it, knowing that only by loosening his grip on a few secrets could he bind her to him more securely than any ensorcellment.

  “Conceal yourself in this room,” he instructed her afterward, “and watch.”

  “Do not let her know of my involvement,” Nebekah warned.

  “She will think it her own idea,” the Skeleton promised. He sent the message, and neither of them spoke again until Vivienne arrived.

  If Blaze Fireblink had met Vivienne as she was now, he would never have both-ered to think her pretty. Her youth was spent, her plump face haggard, her inno-cence burdened by edginess. Her hunted eyes flicked back and forth, forever on defense against the attacks that constantly bombarded her—for they were attacks of principle.

  “You have worked in Horror for fourteen months,” the Skeleton said. “It is past time that I reviewed your performance.”

  Vivienne fiddled with her cuffs, eyes on the desk. “Am I in trouble?”

  “In the meantime,” said the Skeleton, “the Fantasy scenario you isolated has spread. Instead of infesting only a forest, it has enveloped all the surround-ing towns—quite an astonishing rate of growth, and indicative of enormous power. Countless innocents have been incorporated into the scenario, and yet we have no way of helping them or even stopping the influence’s growth. Fortunately, our analysts predict the scenario will soon encroach upon Romance. When it does, we will access it from that Path and shut it down.”

  Vivienne raised her head. “You mean to murder Blaze,” she said, a spark of her old passion returning—but an unhealthy and wild spark. “Even though he’s done nothing wrong!”

  “There are two possibilities,” said the Skeleton. “Either he has willingly relinquished control to the Heart, or he is acting entirely of his own agency. Either way, he is not someone you should protect.”

  “Lise—”

  “Abandoned the Agency. You condemned yourself to work Horror; together, by your betrayals, you condemned her to a fate far worse. Pray that our intervention will save her—or that death will release her.”

  Vivienne burst into tears.

  “How promising,” the Skeleton said; “you finally comprehend what you have done. In that case, you should be pouring your efforts into your work and saving as many as you can in Horror. Instead, you have become a burden on your partner.”

  Vivienne pressed her palms to her head and sobbed. The Skele-ton watched her, letting her drain herself into hiccups. At last, weak and blotchy, she cried, “I can’t!”

  “Tell me.”

  “I can’t!” she screamed. “I can’t take it anymore! I tried, all right? I tried my hardest! I tried everything, and she’s still like that!”

  “You’re afraid of her.”

  “Everyone’s afraid of her! I’m not sure she’s even human! The way she stares at you, like there’s nothing behind her eyes—or like the only thing behind them is horror. I tried, but she’s—”

  “Have you spoken to her about this?”

  “She’s like that doll,” Vivienne said dully. She stared at the space beyond him, and there was nothing behind her eyes but horror. “The creepy, possessed doll in that mission. She’s always following me around, watching me. Even when I sleep, I can sense her there—in my room, in the next room. When we’re on assignment, I hardly know if I should be more afraid of her or of the Heart.”

  “Agent Lawrence has no history of attacking allies. In your report—”

  “Yes, yes, I know, all right? I know; I know! She’s been keeping me alive, and that’s what scares me the most! What is she keeping me alive for? And how long before—before—” Vivienne broke off with a gasp, squeezing her eyes shut, scrubbing the salt on her cheeks. “You read what she did to the Heart’s guards in our last mission.”

  “She protected you while you unraveled the Heart.”

  Vivienne’s face contorted. “There’s only so much a person can take,” she rasped, small unto nothingness. “Please. Reassign me. Send me in solo. Expulse me. Haven’t I done enough? Haven’t I suffered enough?”

  “Lise suffers still. So do the others.”

  “Then send me there! Send me into the encroachment when it breaches! Let me prove myself! Just, please, don’t make me go back to her. I can’t bear to go back.”

  The Skeleton fell silent for a long time, but Vivienne didn’t inter-rupt him. Her head was bowed, her gaze vacant. She might have forgotten he was there.

  “I see I’ve been too harsh on you,” the Skeleton said at length, and Vivienne’s head rose in amazement—for this was exactly what she had fanta-sized he might say to her. “I did not realize how your partnership weighed upon you. But I cannot reassign you immediately. You have pend-ing assign-ments, and Horror has no agents to spare.”

  Vivienne opened her mouth, but the Skeleton held up a hand to forestall her. “Three more missions,” he said.

  “. . . Three?”

  “You can manage that, can’t you? Three more missions, and you’ll never work Horror again.”

  “Three,” Vivienne whispered, the word sinking into her heart. She clasped her hands, and for the first time in a long time, something like pret-tiness came into her face. “Really three?”

  “You have my guarantee.”

  Vivienne spun upright. “Thank you! Thank you! I’ll do it, I swear. I’ll be the best Horror agent you ever saw—for three more missions! I won’t let you down!”

  “See that you don’t,” the Skeleton said, and watched her skip from the room—swinging the door behind her, practically singing. He waited until she was gone, and then turned his attention to the silent, watchful shadow in the corner. “Sufficient?”

  “You should have released her immediately,” Nebekah said, her tone flat as despair. “Anticipation makes people careless.”

  “It wouldn’t have been realistic,” the Skeleton said. “If you are concerned, then watch over her.”

  “Of course,” said Nebekah, and fled the room before he could take anything more from her.

  What a delusion niceness was. What a despicable falsehood. What a brutal pretense, in a world ruled by horror. Niceness was nothing but a hollow shell of manners to replace goodness, an empty smile instead of virtuous action. Another tool people used to control you.

  And yet . . . and yet that had not been true. Vivienne had been kind to her, and she had been generous. She still was, despite every-thing. It was only that she was weak and broken, and that Nebekah could not fix her. Nebekah had never been able to fix anything, except for Horrors. She should have expected this.

  But she still couldn’t believe how much it hurt.