It was with the detached coolness Ken had learned to dread that Pearce headed to the Archives.

  The central area of the Archives was dedicated to agent reports, and the remaining rooms were arranged by genre: detailed breakdowns of differ-ent genre strains and types, train-ing manuals, trope encyclopedias, and a great deal of other information that some agents took very seriously and others never bothered to glance at.

  Pearce began at the reference desk, where he looked up the start dates of Lawrence, N., and Allen, D. They had started within three weeks of each other—Agent Allen first—twelve years previously, and Pearce jotted down the exact date for each. Previous to this partnership and disregarding encroachments, each agent had worked in the same genre for the full twelve years of their employment. Agent Lawrence’s six previous partners were all listed as (d.), of course. Agent Allen, probably typically of Romance, had gone through several dozen partners, training them before handing them off. A few were even that rarest of terms, (ret.).

  Pearce noted down the reference numbers. Each bound volume included a hundred assignment reports plus their accompanying analyses; before enough were gathered for a volume, they were held in a three-ring binder. Horror was at the very back, and Pearce took a roundabout loop past Romance to reach it. He paused to skim the Romance volumes and stopped at the first that bore her name: D. Allen, E. Balfour. Agent Allen had, over the past twelve years, filled a very respect-able six volumes; her seventh partial volume had not yet been bound.

  Pearce’s hand hovered longingly over the spines. How much could he learn about her, if he read these? It would be somewhat of a breach of deco-rum, perhaps—and he blushed, though he had never blushed while digging through lingerie drawers looking for murder weapons.

  Later, perhaps. After he’d found evidence against Lawrence.

  Horror, though common enough, did not infect the world as often as Romance or even Mystery; three shelves containing sixty volumes were enough to summarize the past twelve years.

  A full third of those volumes bore the name N. Lawrence on their spines.

  Pearce frowned. He didn’t know much about Horror. Was it, perhaps, a very quick genre? One you could jump into and defeat without meet-ing any prerequisites? Or was Lawrence a favorite of Management, and assigned only the simplest cases? That would make sense; Management wouldn’t dare give a solo agent anything excessively difficult. But then, Pearce saw, Lawrence’s name wasn’t the only one repeated again and again; the same was true of every Horror agent. They came and went, but if these volumes were to be believed (and he had no reason to suspect otherwise), Horror had only three currently active teams of agents.

  Was such a thing possible? He had heard the genre was understaffed, but it was still one of the big five. Mystery kept a minimum of eighteen teams and sometimes as many as twenty-five.

  Pearce shook his head, refusing to theorize further ahead of the evidence. He plucked out the first volume (N. Lawrence and V. Ship), carried it to an armchair, and began to read.

  Agent Lawrence’s earliest assignments were written by her then-partner. Pearce began reading and immediately found his sensi-bilities offended: Agent Ship’s style was florid, her conclusions illogi-cal, her digres-sions irrele-vant. Pearce found himself abruptly relieved when a different style took over. It was choppy, the writing of someone who hadn’t practiced enough to learn the flow of words, but at least it didn’t flourish. And, rather contrary to what he had expected, Agent Lawrence’s reports elided past her rather than focusing on her partner’s flaws.

  As the years flowed by, Agent Lawrence’s style evolved into a series of factual statements of the sort analysts liked best—and which Pearce would have liked better, had they given him more insight into her thoughts. It had the telling effect of also simultaneously highlighting and hiding the brutality of her missions:

  “Concluding that the Heart operated in twelve-hour cycles, I waited in the trunk until it had fallen into its sleep phase.”

  That sentence might have meant nothing to most people, but Pearce read into it the agony of muscles cramped for hour upon hour without daring to budge, the fear of discovery upon the smallest noise, the twin pres-sures of bladder and thirst.

  Then there were Lawrence’s depictions of combat which, after Agent Allen’s depiction of her part-ner’s hatchet-throwing, he found he could not dismiss as either exag-gerated or boastful:

  “. . . several hundred ghouls guarding the necromancer. After decapitating the population . . .”

  Whenever Pearce began to doubt Agent Lawrence’s veracity, he checked the accompanying analyst notes; in every case, they either agreed with her or did not disagree to a substantial extent. Agent Lawrence’s missions were as she described them.

  In other words, they were an unending nightmare. In twelve years, Management had never given Agent Lawrence more than two days off in a row, except to recoup from a particularly severe injury; often, she was not given more than half a day. Had Management been trying to drive her insane?

  And the rest of the Horror department with her?

  Pearce kept reading. Agent Lawrence’s writing, clinical though it was, took on a decidedly darker tone with the death of her first partner, and it became progressively more bitter. With uninflected plainness, she revealed each succeeding partner to be incompetent, criminal, or just plain idiotic.

  The gap between partners grew steadily longer, and their lives grew corre-spondingly shorter. The last one before Agent Allen had come and gone some three years previously, a malicious blip on Agent Lawrence’s otherwise sterling record of solo work. They’d partnered for only one mission, a serial killer’s labyrinthine murder house full of shifting traps and prerecorded riddles. Agent S. Rossi had become increasingly antsy and afraid throughout the mission. Her nerves, Agent Lawrence observed, were not suitable for Horror. The narra-tive progressed smoothly until the agents reached the threshold of the Heart’s domain. Then, it became abruptly and suspiciously choppy:

  Outside the camera room, Lawrence wrote. Agent Rossi used her gloves. Stepped back into a wall-mounted flamethrower trap.

  Pearce blinked at the words. He recognized the symptoms of redaction; he’d seen it in his own works, on rare occasions. It usually indicated severe and damaging malfeasance on the part of an agent. Reading through the analyst notes, which had been based on the unredacted version, the picture became clear: Agent Rossi had tried to murder her partner, and Agent Lawrence had responded by not warn-ing her about the flamethrower trap. Possibly, Agent Lawrence had purposefully not warned her even before the confrontation, recognizing—as Pearce had—the behavior of a person working herself up to murder.

  Pearce returned the volume to the bookcase and stretched. It was only afternoon, but he should probably get some sleep; he hadn’t been back to his suite since that marathon run of mystery scenarios. In the morning, he’d finish reading. He hadn’t yet found anything that could be proven against Agent Law-rence, but a good night’s sleep was often the best cure for these things.

  Rolling his neck and shoulders, Pearce headed out for the bathroom. As he washed his hands, observing the rumples in his suit and under his eyes, some-thing truly dreadful occurred to him:

  What if Management had not slowed its rate of assignment after Agent Allen had joined Horror?

  Agent Allen had been productive in Romance, but productive at a sane pace: one case to Lawrence’s three, and always with a partner. It was unthink-ably brutal that Management would not only take an agent accus-tomed to glamorous pleasures and thrust her into the vilest of genres, but also triple her workload . . .

  But Pearce had worked long enough in Mystery to take unthink-able brutalities for granted. Instead of heading back to his suite, he therefore detoured to the central posting board, which displayed every current and immediately forth-coming assignment.

  There it was, under Horror: Agents D. Allen and N. Lawrence, 19:25 depar-ture.

  It had been around 8:50 that morning when Pearce had confronted Agent Lawrence in the cafeteria; he estimated she and Agent Allen had arrived twenty minutes earlier. How long before that had they returned to the Agency? Long enough for them to shower and change and likely sleep, but not long enough for Agent Allen to visit the Agency hairdresser. Definitely not enough time to com-pensate for the hours of battling for her life, or the trauma of being lit on fire.

  Cold certainty crawled into Pearce’s stomach. Agent Allen had worked in Horror for three weeks. Three weeks was about when agents made the worst mistakes, because it was long enough for them to get comfortable but not long enough for them to gain enough experience to back that comfort up. Add in exhaustion and trauma, and you had a recipe for death.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Agent Allen was going to die. Not eventually, not someday, not after a year, but soon. Very soon. Possibly not long after 19:25 tonight, if Agent Lawrence decided she needed to sacrifice her partner to survive.

  Pearce gave only a brief thought to the two weeks he’d just spent in Mystery. Mystery had comfortable beds, if you could avoid being smoth-ered in your sleep. Mystery had solid, filling food, if you could detect poison. More importantly, Mystery’s full staffing meant he wouldn’t be assigned again for several days. Between now and then, no one would notice or care if he went missing.

  “When words fail, actions must take their place,” Pearce whispered, tasting the words. Yes, they were right and appropriate. Though he usually left the acrobatics to Ken, he recognized that there were times when a man must stand up and be a man.

  Two hours and five minutes remained before the Horror Path opened. Techs generally arrived 35–40 minutes in advance. Granting an extra 5 minutes of pad-ding, and assuming 10 minutes back to his suite and 25 minutes to Horror, he had 40 minutes to prepare.

  Pearce proceeded back to his suite, mentally scrolling through and reject-ing supplies. He had no way of knowing the type of Horror assigned without reading the brief, and Mystery supplies were not designed for other genres. The tools he knew Agent Lawrence used time and again—hatchets, swords, and explosives—were beyond his ability to obtain, let alone use. He simply could not be the sort of agent that Agent Lawrence was, so he would have to be the sort of agent he was, and trust that Agent Lawrence would neglect nothing essential in her prep-arations. As for Agent Allen—

  No. As for Daisy, he would protect her against whatever came. And after reading fifteen hundred reports, he had a pretty good idea of what that could mean.

  Holding these thoughts close, Pearce dressed as he felt safest: in a gray tweed suit and hat, with a brown overcoat and sturdy country boots. He slid a knife into each boot and holstered his twin revolvers, one with special ammu-nition, one with ordinary.

  What else? Agent Lawrence’s reports indicated it would be best to travel light, for who knew how far he might have to run. After some consideration, Pearce fell back on the tools he’d found most useful in the past: magnifying glass, flashlight, lockpicks, handcuffs, compass, string, and anti-illusion spectacles. Lawrence had never mentioned anti-illusion spectacles in her reports; but Lawrence, Pearce suspected, had excep-tional eyes. It might never have occurred to her to try them. Another way in which he could not be Lawrence’s sort of agent.

  Not invisible but yet unnoticed, Pearce followed the walkway from Mystery, across the central hub, and down the spindle where Horror lay in the Speculative Quarter. Horror’s Path Room was the furthest out, almost at the boundary. Pearce had not visited it since his new-hire tour eight years previously; but as he never discarded any information that might prove useful, he found it without difficulty.

  No agents, no staff who might have wondered at his presence, inter-rupted him on the Horror spindle; the place lay barren and faintly rundown. Amid this, the Path Building stood proudly, grand and decrepit at once: a cube of concrete, stained with water damage despite evident attempts to scrub it clean. Even from outside, it smelled faintly of damp—completely unlike the tobacco-and-whisky fireside warmth of Mystery.

  Pearce planted himself in the Path Room, round the back of and not quite touching one moldy column. He eased his breath-ing and settled in to wait.

  The tech arrived on time, as did Daisy and Lawrence. Pearce attended to their few, formal words; the bare minimum required. Did Lawrence repress com-munication, or was Daisy too exhausted to chat?

  An inexperienced detective might have given in to the temptation to peek around the pillar.

  “Opening,” the tech said.

  The Path made no sound, not even in the displacement of air; but cold-ness swirled around the column, and Daisy’s soles were soft against the floor. Then they were gone.

  The Path remained open; it would remain open until Daisy and Lawrence returned. Pearce stood silently and counted down a steady twenty seconds—twenty being the maximum he considered wise, so as not to lose track of them. Not having heard anything to indicate other Paths were difficult, he expected the one to Horror to be like the one to Mystery: a maze of something almost but not quite like cornstalks. Included in every Mystery brief were precise instructions: turn right here and left there and stop after this many paces before forcing a gap between stalks and squeezing through.

  Why some agents never returned from solved Mysteries was itself a mystery. Some of them definitely became lost in the maze, for their skele-tons showed up now and then—some stripped of meat, others intact. Pearce had discovered a corpse himself, two years ago: rotten partial remains later identified as belong-ing to one Messilinda Dirk, 37 years old at the date she had gone missing half a decade earlier.

  Some agents theorized a predator lived within the maze; Pearce had never personally examined any evidence supporting this. What he had confirmed was that the not-cornstalks were living plants. They must be able to heal and grow, for he rarely passed damaged stalks from where he or other agents had forced their way into scenarios. Furthermore, either the maze itself changed, or where the Path deposited agents changed. The entry always consisted of a small open area with four possible directions; beyond that, nothing was certain. Not even whether, if the Path could rearrange itself, it could do so while agents were upon it.

  The consensus among Mystery agents was that it was best practice to unravel string as they went, thereby marking the route for their return and leaving a trail for search parties to pursue. That the string would also lead any escaping Heart directly to the Agency was an unfortunate but necessary risk. That someone could easily cut or move the thread in their absence was some-thing most agents refused to consider. That the best and only reliable directions were those stored in your head was inarguable—if your memory was good enough to support it.

  Ken, Pearce knew, secretly kept the brief’s paper directions in his breast pocket. Pearce allowed this without comment. He had no intention of dying in a Mystery, but if he did, he would not trap Ken there with him.

  Did Horror agents use string? Pearce couldn’t imagine Lawrence per-mit-ting herself such a crutch. And if she didn’t, she certainly wouldn’t let Daisy. Nor could he assume that either agent would dally in the entryway, once stepping upon the Path. That was why he allowed twenty seconds and not one second more, after they disap-peared, before screwing up his courage and slipping around the column. He had enough time to recognize that the Path’s open gate-way did not much resemble the one to Mystery before it engulfed him and spit him out upon a suffocatingly cold and perilously precipitous stair at the edge of a yawn-ing abyss.

  Pearce did not cry out or gasp as the cold stole his breath or as the rancid stench from below invaded his lungs. His head spun from vertigo and his knees trembled, but he stifled any noise, for he stood a scant three dozen stairs above Daisy and Lawrence, fully visible. Neither of them glanced back and neither paused. Lawrence was counting as she descended, steady but for a slight hiccup as he entered. Daisy was silent.

  Pearce was not the sort to be shocked with what was so obviously the case: different genres had different Paths, and Horror’s Path was almost as unlike Mystery’s as it was possible to be. This was a fact, and so he accepted it. He gave himself another fifty-five steps by Lawrence’s count to integrate the knowledge, and then started after them. He would have liked to allow more space, but the peculiar reddish fog had begun to obscure Lawrence’s words, and he could not risk missing his exit.

  Eight hundred sixty-two steps down, Lawrence and Daisy sat to rest. Pearce stopped at the same time, lowering himself to lie across the stairs and trusting in the fog to conceal him. He needn’t have bothered; neither agent had glanced back before, and neither glanced back now. It did not occur to him that neither had he glanced back.

  The agents breathed for a minute, and then Lawrence said, “I’ll cover you while you determine cause of death. Don’t wander off.”

  “I never wander off,” Daisy replied.

  “Don’t wander out of reach,” Lawrence clarified. “Stalkers generally prefer solitary victims and ankle grabs.”

  “I have rope, if you want to tie our ankles together.”

  “An excellent way to both hamper our ability to fight and warn the enemy that we know its nature. It will be drawn to us the moment we arrive, but it will try to play with us if it thinks it can do so without danger to itself.”

  They lapsed into silence again—silence apparently being their default state—until Lawrence announced, “Fifteen seconds,” and drew a hatchet. Before Pearce could call out a warning, Lawrence sliced a wound in the air beside the stair and pulled back the opening like a flap of skin. She dropped through, and Daisy followed three seconds later.

  A stalker, Pearce thought, descending to sit on the eight hundred sixty-second stair. He had skim-read so many reports in one sitting that they bled together in his mind. He also, now that it came to it, recognized the other downside to Lawrence’s efficient brevity—and regretted not reading more of the analysts’ notes.

  Still, he knew that stalker meant they were probably deal-ing with a single entity, humanoid or monstrous. It would specialize in concealment and ambush, lurking in and under things, staying out of sight. It might be strong in one-to-one combat, especially if it gained strength over time from picking off victims; however, it would avoid engaging them openly if it could. The best bet was to keep to wide places: in the middle of rooms without vents overhead, and away from low furniture.

  As for Lawrence’s instruction to determine cause of death—that wasn’t dissimilar to determining modus operandi. How a killer killed indicated its abilities and motive, and exposed its weaknesses. Horror wasn’t entirely different from Mystery; it might even be the same story from another perspective.

  (Not, Pearce corrected himself, that Hearts themselves necessarily had a “perspective.” The theory that infections had minds and consciousnesses had never been proven and was generally disparaged by Management.)

  Here again came the question of how much a head start Pearce should give the others. He had sworn to protect Daisy, but what was the best way to go about that? If he remained close behind Daisy, the stalker would notice him for certain, and he would become a solitary victim. His options were there-fore either to join the others immediately (only for Lawrence to send him packing) or to wait long enough that the Heart, stalking Daisy and Law-rence, would not spot him. Then he could stalk it, and ambush it when it meant to ambush them.

  That was a risky proposition and relied on his ability to draw conclu-sions on insufficient evidence. How would he know how long to wait? In his ignorance, he’d cut it too close when entering the Path. Repeating that mistake here would prove fatal.

  Pearce considered again Lawrence’s reports. She seldom mentioned time frames, but her general pattern was to estab-lish her bearings, ensure her imme-diate security, and then move out. How long that took depended on setting, and her past stalker scenarios had included forests and space-ships, houses and shopping centers, caves and cityscapes. Without knowing which this was, an estimate was quite impossible.

  Better too long than too short, Pearce decided. Lawrence had suggested that she and Daisy would be safe for as long as they kept close and seemed ignorant, which meant he could safely wait until they were truly out of range. He wouldn’t be able to tail them, but he didn’t need to; all he needed was to find the Heart before it found him. Which was what the compass was for.

  Pearce sat on the step and waited, by his watch, a full fifteen minutes. Then he hooked his anti-illusion spectacles over his ears, peeled the wound by the stairs fully open, and dropped through.