“I wish I could go,” Agent Allen sighed, “but I have an assignment. I’m count-ing on everyone to enjoy it for me and then tell me about it!”

  An assignment! The topic no one had dared broach with her, and here she’d brought it up herself! On purpose? Agent Pearce raised his eyes from his half-eaten roast beef on rye. Agent Allen wasn’t looking at him, of course. He hadn’t added anything to the conversation since joining the table with a faint hello. He seldom spoke a word around Agent Allen, and seldomer more than one. It was enough that he could sit close enough to admire the vibrancy of her smile, the halo that owed nothing to yellow cafeteria lights.

  “An assignment,” Quillan said darkly, taking up the cue for the rest of them. He glared meaningfully past their group, to the nearest corner of the cafeteria. There, sitting as isolated as if surrounded by Plexiglas, sat Agent Law-rence, eating as she bent over some-thing laid out on the table before her. Her case brief, Pearce hypoth-esized.

  Agent Lawrence did not react to Quillan’s glare or in any way acknowledge her partner’s table. She might have come there by chance, except that Agent Lawrence never came to the cafeteria by chance or for any other reason.

  “What’s she doing here?” Berne wondered.

  “Maybe she ran out of dead partners and needed to stock up,” Ken suggested, and burst into satisfied chortles.

  Pearce shriveled inside, head bowing lower. Ken was his partner, and he always felt the association when something particularly awful came out of the man’s mouth (which was often). Ken had his uses, mainly tackling and exorcizing suspects; but in situ-ations like this, Pearce liked his part-ner’s presence as little as Ken liked his.

  “Don’t listen to that moron, Daisy,” Quillan told Agent Allen, before Pearce could form either the words or the courage. “But we are worried. Everyone knows she’s a creep and a partner-killer. You need to get away before something happens to you.”

  “Yeah, come be my partner instead,” Berne offered, waggling his eye-brows.

  Agent Allen laughed. “Poor Quill! See how easily you’ve been thrown over.”

  “He beat me to the punch,” Quillan said mournfully. “I curse him for-ever. But honestly, Daisy. Most wonderful and discerning Daisy, who knows I’m the better bet: I hereby request you ignore him and come be my partner instead. You’ll like Drama—it isn’t so differ-ent from Romance. Or we could go for that opening in Historical. Anything’s got to be better than Horror.”

  “Anything’s got to be better than herror,” Ken corrected.

  Utensils clattered on plastic plates, and agents yelled their orders over the hissing of oil. Pearce drew his cheap paper napkin through his hands, shredding fragments onto the dull, brown clothing he preferred. He didn’t belong to this group; he knew that. He knew it even as he forced his way in. He felt like an oversized worm, both insignificantly weak and disgustingly bloated. Not an accurate assessment, of course: regardless of genre, agents were required to meet high physical standards. Pearce might have been in no shape for Horror, but he could run circles around your average armchair detective. He knew this, and he berated himself for his illogical feelings, but those feelings clung never-theless.

  Agent Allen pinked with pleasure. “You’re all so concerned about me!”

  “Of course we are!” Jenalie exclaimed. “We don’t want you to get hurt!”

  “She’s dangerous!” others cried, and soon all the rest of the table was saying similar things, begging Agent Allen in a chorus to come away with them. Even Pearce, because this was important, managed to murmur underneath and in between their voices, “It’s true” and “you deserve better.”

  “You wouldn’t mind finding a new partner, would you, buddy?” Quillan was asking Berne. “Not if it was for a good cause?”

  “You wouldn’t mind, you mean,” Berne retorted. He met his partner’s eyes and then, as one, the two men turned to Agent Allen and each presumptuously clasped one of her hands. They gazed at her with humor-tinged sincerity, and chorused, “Be my partner!”

  Agent Allen laughed again and shook her head, withdrawing her hands. “I’m not going to abandon my partner,” she said. “No one should have to work Horror solo.”

  “She probably likes working Horror solo,” Ken tried again, in case people found it funnier the second time, “because she’s a herror.”

  Agent Lawrence flipped her brief binder closed and stood. Ken cut off mid-cackle and hid behind Pearce, but Agent Lawrence didn’t glance at him. She tucked the binder under one arm, gathered her tray, and headed for the garbage. As she passed, her eyes caught once at Agent Allen, and her chin jerked.

  Commandingly. Proprietorially.

  “Guess it’s assignment time,” Agent Allen said, untangling her legs from the bench. “You guys have fun!”

  “Hey, don’t go,” Quillan said, no trace of humor lingering in the contours of his voice. He planted his hands on either side of Allen’s blue plastic tray, pinning it and her to the table. “You’re not her dog, to come when she whistles. You don’t have to go. Let her take this assignment solo—you know she doesn’t mind—and go to the Skele-ton. Demand a transfer. We’ll back you up.”

  “Yeah,” Berne agreed, as serious as his partner. “We’ll protect you.”

  “We will,” Pearce whispered among the chorus.

  “Anything for our gal from Romance,” Ken promised with his best winning wink.

  Agent Allen beamed around at them. “You guys are sweet,” she said, “but I gotta go. See you later, okay?” She twinkled her fingers at them and skipped away, leaving the tray under Quillan’s hands. Several agents made to follow, only to abort when they saw Agent Lawrence waiting for her part-ner at the door. They listened to Agent Allen’s peppy greeting and the brief, uninflected acknowledgement; and then the pair was gone.

  Pearce shuddered. Without Agent Allen, the cafeteria oppressed him: the miasma of grease and sweat, the cluttered masses that had nothing to do with him, the stupidity of it all. It wasn’t that he disliked people in general; he didn’t. Or not the ones he met on cases. Not when he was in charge. Not when he knew precisely how to act and what to say and how the rules of the world worked.

  The other agents settled back at the table. In Agent Allen’s absence, they had plenty to gossip about, and soon fell into a thorough assassi-nation of Agent Law-rence’s character. Since they used speculation and imagination rather than evidence—an abhorrent practice—Pearce felt no compunction over gathering up his own tray and departing. In any case, he, too, had an assignment coming up, and it wasn’t as if he could count on Ken to do a decent job at prep.

  The next morning, Pearce and Ken left for their scenario. On the surface, it presented itself as a locked-room murder: Lord Wolfgang Milne was sixty-four years old and the owner of an extensive estate. One day, out of the blue, he announced that he was making a new will and issued invitations to everyone who might possibly want to kill him over it: the sister, the nephew, the niece, the nurse, and the estranged son. Twenty-four hours later, he was dead, face down on his office floor, a dagger in his back. The whole house-hold gathered to see and exclaim over the mystery of how the killer had escaped, when both the door and the window had been locked from the inside.

  It was to this mess that Pearce and Ken arrived. They wore work-man’s overalls and introduced themselves as Greene & Greene Associates, there to inspect the house for damp. This was so uninter-esting an explanation, in the face of a murder, that everyone welcomed and then forgot about them.

  Ken took the opportunity to flirt with three maids at once. Pearce meandered about, listening and examining.

  “Who installed this window?” he wondered aloud, sometime later. “What extremely shoddy workmanship.” He dug his fingers in and pulled the entire window out of its frame. “Ah, I suppose you’d have wondered where this went!” he added, and handed a scrap of cloth to the nurse. “I applaud you—most women your age would have taken the door.”

  Everyone fell silent and stared at the nurse. Under the combined weight of their stares, she burst into tears.

  “I guess it was obvious, wasn’t it?” the estranged son said.

  Just like that, the Mystery was revealed, and the scenario was ruined in the most anticlimactic manner imaginable. The window installation had been intended for a much later discovery, presumably by some amateur detective or neighborhood busybody. Under such a disappointment, Pearce had broken the Hearts of many Mysteries: they had simply given up and fallen to pieces for Ken to sweep away.

  But this Mystery was made of sterner stuff; the innocents showed no break in character. Ken, when Pearce looked over, shrugged. “It wasn’t in her,” he said. “You sure you solved it right?”

  A multi-stage mystery, Pearce concluded. It isn’t defeated, because it knows it has future stages to support it.

  The second stage arrived with two policemen. When they opened the office door to retrieve the body, they instead found a massive and mysteri-ous sea chest, sealed with an ancient iron lock. On the top of the chest, some-one had taped a riddle: If my secrets you wish to reveal, then dusty age and gardens combine, where water earth replaces yet only air resides.

  This was suitably baffling, and surely would have made for a marvelous treasure hunt, had not Ken immediately knelt and picked the lock.

  Again, many Mysteries would have quailed at such an anticli-mactic reveal; and again, this one rallied. The sea chest contained Wolfgang’s corpse, but how had it gotten there? The nurse was too frail to have moved it even if she hadn’t been under guard.

  The scenario became was rather more difficult, especially as a gardener’s boy abruptly devel-oped an aptitude for detective work. Pearce therefore took himself off to do what he’d claimed was his job: inspect every corner of the building. It was nearly three hours later when he wandered up to the nephew and explained that the reason his toilet wasn’t working properly was all the gold stashed in the tank, and that he should really find a different hiding spot.

  The third stage ended, or ought to have ended, but the fourth did not begin. Instead, a maid screamed, and everyone raced to the office. There, they found Lord Wolfgang on the floor, face down, a knife in his back.

  “His door was locked from the inside,” explained a footman to anyone who would listen. “I thought he might have had another stroke, so I broke it down.”

  The sister, the nephew, the niece, the nurse, and the estranged son gath-ered around. They exclaimed about their sorrow and explained about their alibis. The scene was exactly like the one Pearce had first entered, except that he was already there—as were the two police officers.

  In a testing sort of way, Pearce pried out the window and commented on the gold, effectively solving the mystery half a minute after it began. The police didn’t even argue before they took the nurse and nephew into custody.

  They had made it halfway to the front door when a maid screamed. Then, every-one raced to the office, only to find Lord Wolfgang dead on his office floor, a knife in his back. Upon inspection, Pearce found that, although the window had been poorly installed, the wood had warped so badly that he could not pop the frame out. Instead, the latch had been reversed. The nurse had still done it, but not in precisely the same way.

  Ken stopped whining.

  Pearce hardly noticed that his partner had stopped, because he had long learned to ignore Ken. He little guessed that it was not the scenario but Pearce himself who’d effected the change. Clearly though Pearce could see the details and presumptions of Mystery, he could not see himself at all.

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  The Pearce who wandered the Agency, the Pearce who stepped into Myster-ies, was a drab, unprepossessing, balding man in brown. Suspects admitted him unquestioningly and mostly ignored him as he shuffled around, identifying the mis-hung doors, convenient tree branches, loose shingles, and birth records that added zing to Mystery. This dull, plod-ding way was how Pearce worked—

  Unless the Mystery provided something fresh, something compel-ling and tricky, something Pearce could not mundane away. Then Pearce’s gaze would flash and his posture straighten. Ken, who preferred to do nothing and think nothing, would find himself snapping to obey orders and chase down danger-ous killers. Not because he wanted to, but because he was more alarmed by his partner than he was lazy.

  It had been a year ago, after a particularly intense Mystery, that Ken had invited Pearce to accompany him to the cafeteria and meet Agent Allen. During the final showdown with the criminal mastermind of that Mystery, Ken had real-ized how discomforted he had become by the sharp-eyed, razor-minded detec-tive version of his partner, and wanted to see him brought low. And what man would not be brought low by the charming Daisy Allen?

  Ken’s plan both succeeded beyond his wildest expectations and failed miserably, for, after that, he could never shake Pearce when there was a chance of Agent Allen’s company—and Pearce disturbed him as much as ever inside complex scenarios, such as this one was rapidly becoming.

  Pearce towed Ken along, analyzing each mystery in turn. Ken, helpless to resist, obeyed every sizzling command. In this way, two weeks passed. Two weeks of the locked-room Mystery repeating itself over and over, of it mutating with each repetition. Two weeks of it growing increasingly cluttered, bizarre, and improbable. There proved to be nine sub-mysteries in total, and each had to be solved not only in the right order to progress the scenario, but also in the right way—and the longer the agents were there and the more the complexities increased, the more the Heart awoke to their presence, and the more it suspected them. Innocents became hostile toward the foreign bodies, and more than one side character popped into the scenario for the sole purpose of murdering them.

  On the last iteration, Pearce—hampered but not stopped by junior detec-tives, angry gardeners, and a bevy of beautiful women—stripped each mystery bare, unpicking the knotted Heart strand by strand.

  “This house,” Pearce said, exposing the ninth and final strand, “was orig-inally the home of Lester Milne, better known as the magician ‘Les Mysterious.’ Only his direct descendants, the twins who grew up here, know the full extent of the house’s intricate corridors and secret passages; and they have been using that knowledge to fake Wolf-gang’s death and trick everyone. There is really nothing mysterious or mystical going on—any boy growing up in these circumstances could do as much.

  “The twins’ motivations were as follows: to frame their black-mailing nurse, to condemn the thieving nephew, to offload the conniving false wife, to tease their unkind sister, to legitimize their joint marriage to the maid, and to prove themselves the greatest illusionists of all time.

  “They have failed. They are not great illusionists or great men at all. They are only men, hiding like rats in the tunnels of this house. And like rats, they can be flushed out and caged. As proven by my associate, Mr. Greene.”

  Ken dragged the semi-conscious twins in from the next room. The men looked particularly pathetic, for they had been caught while switching between disguises: one wore half a mustache, and the other had lipstick smeared on his chin.

  “There is no mystery in any of this,” Pearce said; “only crime. Officers, I leave the rest to you.”

  That was the end of it. Pearce led the group—including the dashing detec-tive crew from the city, a bevy of servants and neighbors, the milkman, the orig-inal guests, and about twenty others—through the secret tunnels, explaining and revealing everything in such pedan-tic detail as rendered the scenario thoroughly unromantic and devoid of lingering intrigue.

  Back in the office, Ken peeled the weakly lingering Heart off the twins. It withered and died—exhausted of power, trampled on, beaten . . .

  And strangely satisfied at its own conclusion.

  Ken and Pearce did not speak on the way out; they had nothing to say to each other. Ken’s feet shuffled, and the electric energy that had driven Pearce solidified and crum-bled away. The tech who greeted them as they exited the Path, surprised and grateful that they lived despite their lengthy absence, could never have guessed from the drab Pearce and the obnoxious Ken what they had been like inside the scenario.

  Even as Pearce’s energy ebbed in the absence of a Mystery, so did Ken’s flow. He bounced and grinned and made appalling jokes as they headed for the Agency’s central hub. With each stride he bounded further ahead, until no reasonable person could have accused him of walking with his partner. He burst through the cafeteria doors, exclaimed to see his usual group already in place, and verbally pounced on Agent Allen. He didn’t look back even once; and it was for this reason that he, the only one who might have understood it, failed to witness the change that swept over Pearce as he followed his partner in.

  Her hair.

  Agent Allen’s hair, all honey and satin curls. The hair that had once brushed Pearce’s cheek, when she’d jolted to her feet beside him. The hair he absolutely would never be permitted to run his fingers through except after a series of highly improbable but not actually impossible events. That hair.

  Had been cut off.

  Not even at the shoulders, but at the earlobes. Hacked, as if by a toddler with a bright idea and her first pair of scissors. Someone had mostly fixed it in the front but hadn’t managed to do much about the back. Probably, Agent Allen had done what she could in front of a bathroom mirror. It wasn’t like she had the kind of partner who would help.

  Pearce would have helped—but hardly had his mind indulged that thought than he suppressed it. With mechanical legs, he walked to Agent Allen’s table. The seats were taken, so he joined the clutter around them, to watch and listen.

  Apparently, Agent Allen had arrived only a few minutes earlier, and had spent the whole time fielding stray questions in between bursts of laughter. “I’m fine!” she insisted. And, “Really, if you’d let me—” and “No, no, it wasn’t eaten. Agent Lawrence cut it off.”

  “She didn’t!” Berne cried in outrage.

  “She did,” Agent Allen insisted; and Berne rose up in such violent pro-tes-ta-tion that it took Agent Allen five minutes and much peace-making before she could tell the story. “Listen, and then judge,” she told them. “Or don’t you want to know what happened?”

  They did; they did. Pearce could have screamed at them to shut up, they insisted so vociferously that they did.

  “We were in a Horror, of course,” Agent Allen explained. “Subterra-nean Creature Horror, with a tribe of toothy, hairless former-victims-turned-monsters. The locals called them the ‘creeps.’

  “We’d reached the center of the Horror, but the Heart wasn’t there yet—it was the sort you summon. There was an altar setup and these unnaturally red torches that kept drawing more of the creeps. Lawrence suggested we put out the torches, both to cut off the flow of creeps and to attract the Heart. We’d extinguished all but the last two when the Heart showed up. Which was what we wanted, only we didn’t realize it could control not just the creeps but also the torches. Or I didn’t realize it, right until the Heart blew the fire at my head.

  “My hair had come loose, and it caught like mad. Even though I was soaking wet at that point. So I stopped, dropped, and rolled until Agent Lawrence finished off the queen creep and threw her hatchet. Honestly, her aim is unbe-lievable. I probably would’ve chopped off her head or some-thing, if I’d tried. But here I am, safe and sound—though it took me five shampoos and a jar of peanut butter to get my hair clean. Creeper blood is the worst.”

  Pearce did not consider himself a man driven by strong emotions or indeed as one possessing any. He hardly knew what to make of the clench-ing in his chest, the quivers electrocuting his limbs, the furnace rising to his brain. The sensations threatened to over-whelm him, to knock him uncon-scious or into ferocious action. He wanted to roar, to bash Berne aside, to scoop Agent Allen into his arms and run off like some sort of cave-man. He didn’t know what he might have done next, had his eyes not fallen on Agent Lawrence.

  Windswept logic blew into the crevices of his brain. What was Agent Lawrence doing here? Again? She never ate with the agents. Yet there she sat, in the same near corner as before, chewing eggs and sausages as she wrote. Working on her report, no doubt. Agent Lawrence’s reports were infamous for their unflinching details and scathing commentary, or so Pearce had heard.

  What would she make of Agent Allen’s encounter with creeper flames? Was she even now blaming her partner for incompetence, claiming she would never have triggered that trap?

  Agent Lawrence’s pen slowed, then lifted. Driven by the instinct that had preserved her for more than a decade in Horror, her eyes rose to meet his. They observed each other: his thoughts a furnace, her expression shut-tered.

  No pity in her. No mercy. No justice.

  Partner killer.

  Righteous anger steeled Pearce’s spine and lifted his knees. His feet marched him to her and stopped him six feet away. Within easy assault range, his detective brain calculated, along with, but the table will hamper her, and there are witnesses.

  Agent Lawrence must have concluded the same, because she did not attack. She tilted her head back to watch him through half-lidded eyes and tapped her pen nonchalantly upon the laminate tabletop.

  “You need to leave Agent Allen alone,” Pearce informed her, uncon-scious of eyes turning to watch him from the other tables, of the way he was attracting rather than deflecting attention. At that moment, he wouldn’t have cared if he had noticed, couldn’t care about anything beyond the furnace in his brain, the crushing cage in his chest, and the suspect before him.

  Agent Lawrence looked upon his wrath. She didn’t move or relax under it, but her expression broadened with the unfathomable reaches of her scorn.

  “I mean it!” Pearce insisted. His fingers formed fists, though he had never in his life struck a fellow agent. “You’re going to get her killed. How dare you force her to partner with you! She deserves better.”

  “I see,” Agent Lawrence said, her posture unchanged, her pen tapping scorn. “You asked her to partner with you, and she rejected you. So now you’ve come to me, because there’s no way she wouldn’t desire you, if only she were free.”

  “It’s not like that!” Pearce objected, outraged. His thoughts were spiral-ing; he was going to snap. He could feel it roaring forward, the moment of complete—

  —Loss of control?

  Irrational action and murderous violence?

  No. Absolutely not. He refused. With a firm hand, he tamped down the flames to coals. He restrained them not with cold or with water, but with the wasteland, and he ruled over them.

  Agent Lawrence observed him, eyes tightening in interest, blank-ness wiping away scorn.

  Pearce’s fists unfurled and his heartrate slowed. When he spoke again, it was with the emotionality of an empty road. “You are a psychopath, Agent Lawrence,” he stated. “Perhaps you were not always clinically diag-nosable; but Horror, if it can be said to have a mind, is deranged. No one can revel in it as you have without it damaging you as it is damaged. You have come to believe that the only way for you to survive is for you to control every facet of your environment, including and especially your partner. Maybe, inside Horror, you are right.

  “But we are more than the genres we work in. Agent Allen is not a marion-ette for you to direct. She is good and she is pure, and she has those who will defend her. We will not permit her to become as you are; and we will avenge her, if it becomes necessary. If she dies in your care, so too will you die.”

  “Such astonishing powers of deduction,” Lawrence murmured, some of the scorn returning.

  “You like to control people, but that’s not your primary motiva-tion,” Pearce went on. “You want to survive, and you think having a skilled part-ner is your best chance at that. The evidence supports you, but you have pursued the wrong partner. What you need is someone you can trust to watch your back, but whose untimely demise no one will mourn. Release Agent Allen to those who protect her; I will take her place.”

  Agent Lawrence’s pen began tapping again. “You would die,” she said flatly. “If not on your first mission, then soon thereafter. Go back to Mystery, Agent Pearce. I don’t want you either.”

  How interesting: Agent Lawrence knew his name, though they had never met before. Had she been coming to the cafeteria every day, to observe her partner? To identify her friends? A classic technique for asserting control: keep tabs on your target’s activities and associates, and then cut them off. She probably made Agent Allen report to her and punished her for minor infractions. Any-thing, to reinforce the psychological bonds, to make Agent Allen believe escape impossible.

  Unforgiveable, but possibly fixable. Partner abuse was not unheard of, and there were official channels through which it could be reported. Horror’s director was the Skeleton, and he had a reputation for coming down hard on cases like this. If Pearce spoke to him, it might do something. But ideally, it should be Agent Allen who spoke.

  As if summoned by her name, Agent Allen shed her followers and bounced over to stand at the end of Agent Lawrence’s table, making a trian-gle between her partner and Pearce. “Hey, how’s the report coming?” she asked Agent Law-rence, leaning over to look and thereby answer her own question. An uneven curl brushed her forehead, and another flopped over her ear. “And Tom,” she said, grinning at Pearce. She affected a casual pose, but Pearce had opened his detec-tive eyes and could not be deceived. She was concerned. Worried about him? No, more likely about what Agent Lawrence might do. “What’s this? Are you two secretly friends? I’d no idea you even knew each other.”

  Agent Lawrence turned hollow eyes on her. “Your sycophant is attempting to intimidate me.”

  “My sy—oh,” Agent Allen said. She blinked long, fair lashes as she looked from one to the other. Pearce caught her tension in the muscles of her neck, though she fought to keep it off her face.

  She’s afraid, Pearce thought, and doesn’t want me to see it. Or is it Agent Lawrence she doesn’t want to see it? “I have made Agent Lawrence an offer,” he informed her. “You need not work in Horror any longer; I will take your place. You are free.”

  More emotion, which Agent Allen hid behind her hand before Pearce could see it. She wiped her palm over her face to return it to gentle neutral-ity. “Oh, Tom,” she said, “that’s very kindly intended, I’m sure, but you know how Man-agement feels about partner poach-ing—and I don’t like it any better than they do. I appreciate your concern, but I ask that you trust my ability to handle my job and my partnerships. I hope you understand.”

  Pearce understood, and much better than she intended. He’d encountered this too often in Mystery not to understand it: battered wives and children who protected their abusers, thinking they were protecting others from being abused. In almost every case, what they were actually doing was need-lessly chaining themselves when a brief call to the police would’ve solved the matter. Of those who persisted, some would become murderers, some murder victims, and some shattered survivors freed from their self-imposed chains when a third party stepped in to murder on their behalf.

  Pearce thought these things and processed them and drew further back into the protection of his detective self. Though he didn’t realize it, very little of the Agent Pearce who stood on the greasy cafeteria floor, three feet from her side, was one Agent Allen had ever seen before.

  With polite gravity, he said, “Yes, I understand,” bowed, and withdrew.

  He did not respond to the words of gratitude Agent Allen threw at his retreating back; he took them and fed them into the coals of his wrath. He also felt and noted the way Agent Lawrence watched him go, and he filed her quiet comment to her partner: “Are you satisfied?”

  Nasty. Sarcastic. Degrading. But none of that would matter for long. The tables had turned, though Agent Lawrence didn’t know it yet. Pearce had never lost his target; and now that he had her in his sights, he would bring her down.

  One way or another.