The door creaked inward on rusty hinges, and Vivienne stepped through first. Her flashlight illuminated an octagonal entry room that had once been full of expensive stained glass and elegant furnishings. Now, like the house’s exterior, the interior had degraded into grayness and neglect.

  From outside, the Victorian splendor of the original had bloomed in Vivienne’s imagination: the splintery paint had once been yellow, the cracked tiles of those conical roofs red. That iron fence had stood proudly upright; those front steps had risen even and firm.

  Here in the dimness within, it was both easier and harder to picture the house’s former glory. Dust clung to everything, and a black layer of soot obscured the ceiling. The inner door’s glass clung in ragged shards; heavy shades and grime coated the windows. Vivienne ran a finger up the wall. Vertical wood panels on the lower portion, the bump of a wainscot cap, and plaster above. Shin-ing her light close, she could make out the fine swirling of what must have been an exquisite pattern. She traced it, but too much plaster had crumbled off and lay in chunks and powder among the filth of the floor.

  Threads surely ran inside the walls, but Vivienne could not see them from here, and she could not reach them. The Heart would not be vulnera-ble until its layers had been peeled back.

  “What a lovely house,” Vivienne said. “Can you imagine it, when it was new? So much thought went into this. Look, they even inscribed virtues above the doors. ‘A good example is the best sermon.’ True! Such nice people must have lived here.” She turned slyly to her partner, but that person did not react. Vivienne clenched a fist.

  The hallway before them was quite grand, though narrower than in modern structures. A staircase broad enough for three abreast climbed ahead and to the left of the entryway; a curtained doorway led to the space beneath it; and the hallway continued straight ahead. Like many decrepit House scenarios, this place had been stripped. Not a table remained, and only bent nails and wires remembered their pictures. The gaslights in the chandeliers had been cold and dark for years, and chill air hung stale.

  They were not the first visitors here. Footprints marred the dust in over-lapping patterns. “Look how small they are!” Vivienne said. “This Heart must have attracted children.”

  That person half-turned to her in amazement while keeping her eyes averted. “What do you mean, ‘must have’?” she demanded. “Didn’t you read the brief?”

  “When could I have read it?” Vivienne retorted. “Do you have any idea what it’s like, to arrive home and find your stuff laid out and your partner gone, when you didn’t even know you had an assign-ment? I was in a panic to get to the Path Room before you left me behind. You should have told me!”

  “I didn’t know where you were.”

  “Did you look?”

  “I didn’t think you wanted to be found.”

  Well, she was right about that, but only because Vivienne didn’t want to see her. The idea of what the Skeleton would say, if Vivienne failed to show up for her last mission—!

  Did that person even understand why Vivienne might avoid her? Was she capable of feeling enough actual human emotion? Or was she acting this way for some other reason?

  What was that person hiding?

  Why wouldn’t she look Vivienne in the eyes?

  “This is a House strain,” that person said in a monotone, as if she had to tell Vivienne the obvious. “Decrepit variant, Haunted type. The latest known victim’s mother brought him here six weeks ago but only reported him missing last week. Analysts tracked down the guard-ians of four previ-ous victims. In each case, the victim was rejected by its guardian as being inconvenient or unpleasant. Shortly afterward, the guardian received a phone call from ‘Granny,’ who offered to watch the victim. The guardian brought the victim here, left, and didn’t think any more about their child until asked. Then, they began to realize the strangeness of the situation and remember they didn’t have any such relative.”

  How inhumanly she told the story, Vivienne reflected. But then, that person could barely be called human. “So we’re looking for a trigger connected to a grandmother.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then we’ll find it,” Vivienne resolved, and swept past that person, not touch-ing her, chin held high, thoughts clouded with memory—with a version of the past her partner would have been hard-pressed to recognize.

  It began, of course, with heartbreak and noble sacrifice, false accusation and unjust condemnation. It continued with a sacred trust: take this tragic, malnour-ished, damaged child and transform her into a balanced and produc-tive member of society.

  Such a task would not be easy. The child had gained many unhealthy tendencies from her early experiences. But to care for and heal the disad-van-taged was the duty and the privilege of the strong, and Vivienne’s sacri-fices would not go unrewarded.

  In her endeavors, Vivienne accomplished some early successes. She intro-duced Nebekah to decent people and took pleasure in watching her emerge from her shell. She provided her with good food and taught her hygiene, and Nebekah’s phys-ical improvements were immediate. She imparted her knowledge, and the girl’s mind improved. True, Nebekah remained rough around the edges, but time would solve that. . . .

  Except that it did not. Except that no matter how civilized Nebekah acted inside the Agency, inside the scenarios, there was . . . violence.

  It wasn’t the fighting that bothered her. Hadn’t Vivienne battled the orc hordes to reach the Dark Lord’s palace, just like everyone else? She knew how it went. You shot someone with a bolt, and they died. You didn’t use your crossbow to—to—

  She couldn’t stop seeing it, even alone in her bed at night. And if it had been only that one time or only a few times, that would have been manageable. If it hadn’t been day after week after month. If it hadn’t started to feel normal. Yet it had. In fact, far from incalculably extreme, Nebekah’s actions began to seem reasonable to her. And if it were reasonable for Nebekah to act that way, so it was reasonable for Vivienne. Only to defend herself, you understand. She was a nice person. She didn’t do anything unnecessary.

  Their teamwork, never poor, improved dramatically. The Skele-ton praised them, and their tech was amazed at their speedy returns. Vivienne positively floated after the analysis of a certain mission came in. She was so proud of it that she couldn’t not share. The Skeleton had forbidden her from seeking out her old Fantasy associates, but it couldn’t hurt to sit with them in the cafeteria, could it? Not to simply sit there and tell them about her great success.

  There was silence when she finished. Then someone said, “Geez, Vivienne,” and someone else changed the topic.

  It would be hard to overemphasize the impact those two words had on Vivienne. They rang in her ears and lambasted her heart. They convicted her. She began by blaming herself, but that was unpleasant, so she tried blaming the world. But if the world were to blame, then the world wasn’t an inherently nice place and people weren’t inher-ently nice; and if that were true, then the philoso-phy by which Vivienne had lived her life was false, which was nearly as unpleasant as blaming herself and therefore couldn’t be true. The problem was therefore not herself or the world but whatever had caused this unpleasantness, and when had the unpleasantness started?

  Obviously, with Nebekah. Nebekah had joined the Agency and Nebekah had insisted on working Horror and Nebekah had needed a partner. Everything that had happened had started with Nebekah, and therefore Nebekah was to blame.

  This realization was an enormous relief to Vivienne, for it meant that the universe was what she’d always known it to be. It was nice; she was nice; and if anything seemed otherwise, it was only because Nebekah had misused, manipulated, and victimized Vivienne in an attempt to bring her down to her own level.

  “Geez, Vivienne,” the Fantasy agent had said, appalled at what Vivienne had been forced to endure at the hands of her partner.

  Reinforced with the armor of righteous clarity, Vivienne returned to her missions—only to find that the misery of before was of nothing to now, for now, she had nothing to shield her from witnessing the full horror of her situa-tion. Everything about that person revolted her, from the lingering accent in her voice to the saliva of her swallow to the glisten of her soulless eyes.

  She would kill me rather than let me go, Vivienne thought, cloistered within the infection zone of the decrepit haunted house.

  The house was proving as extensive as it had looked from the outside. The first room on the right (“A good example is the best sermon”) was desolately empty. Beyond that was a room (“Gratitude is the finest season-ing”) with built-in cupboards for silverware and plates, and beyond that a front kitchen with an attached back kitchen, and stairs. Across from the kitchens were two public rooms of unknown provenance; after them, the hall turned and finished with the backdoor, a bath-room, and a final room.

  The next floor up felt, if anything, even larger. It was full of filthy, naked bedrooms and oversized bathrooms reduced to plumbing holes and depressing expanses of hexagonal tiles.

  “Can you imagine living in a mansion like this?” Vivienne breathed as she might once have, because she must be careful, she must not let that person suspect anything had changed.

  “Yes,” that person said.

  “Not like it is now,” Vivienne said. “I mean, like it was in its prime. That must be what those poor little children and their parents saw, when they came here. They thought they’d arrived at this gorgeous old Victorian where dear old rich Granny was preparing to pamper them, and they never guessed what the house was really like. Though I suppose you think differently.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  “It must be only the back stairs that go up to the third floor,” that person said. “They were this way.”

  Vivienne had hardly been able to absorb it, when the Skeleton had summoned her and promised her her freedom. Elation had burst upon her like the sun, and her first instinct had been to rush off and tell her partner the good news. But caution and sense had followed on swift wings, and then fear. Vivienne had returned to the Skeleton and begged him to keep his counsel, impressing upon him the desperate importance of Nebekah’s ignorance. “She’d think I was betraying her, if she knew I was leaving,” she’d explained between short little gasps. “She’d do some-thing terrible; I know she would.”

  The Skeleton had promised his silence, and Vivienne’s heart had eased slightly—but only slightly. She had too long been accustomed to the way Nebekah knew things that Vivienne had never told her. As for how she knew them—Vivienne had an ugly suspi-cion regarding that.

  It had long been obvious to both of them that the manifestation of Nebekah’s psychic powers was very different from Vivienne’s. Unlike Vivienne, with her strong control abilities, Nebekah would proba-bly never be more than minorly competent with silver gloves; nor had she ever shown much in them. Instead, her talents fell into the equal opposites of perception and concealment—of discerning the nature of the Heart and of hiding from it. That by itself wasn’t a problem, until Nebekah revealed she had been permitted to skip basic training, which meant her abilities had been fully formed before entering the Agency. And how had she formed them, except by using them against humans? Nebekah hadn’t told Vivienne much about what she’d done before entering the Agency, and in the early days, Vivienne hadn’t thought to ask. Now, she put together what hints she had been given, and her fear elaborated on them.

  Nebekah’s abilities were perception and concealment. Was it so far-fetched, that her perception might include the ability to distinguish intentions—and her concealment, to disguise hers?

  So Vivienne must give her no reason to suspect, no reason to look closely. But after this mission . . . after, Vivienne would take pleasure in revealing her departure, and in seeing what reaction she got.

  Vivienne shook her head, banishing this thought lest that person discern it. She arrived first at the back steps, which were wide enough for only one abreast, and ascended hurriedly.

  The stairs ended on the third floor, at an entry landing. The ragged remains of a rug rolled and sprang back beneath her soles. The child footprints were harder to see here, but Vivienne could track a deer through the woods, and did not miss them.

  No adult footprints accompanied the children’s.

  “Either the Heart doesn’t have a solid physical presence, or it avoids the first layer,” Vivienne concluded. “I’m beginning to get the picture. Mom arrives here with her kid and leaves him with Granny. Granny says, ‘I have a special treat for you! I’ve put your room in the tower, where you’ll have a view all the way to the horizon.’ The kid is thrilled and carries his suitcase up, not realizing anything is wrong. He settles into his room, goes to sleep—and that triggers the scenario.”

  “The scenario was already triggered,” that person said, “or Granny wouldn’t have called.”

  “Excuse me, the next layer was triggered,” Vivienne said, barely controlling her irritation at that person’s tone, at her constant contra-diction, at the way she wouldn’t even look at her. “I’m sure you knew what I meant.”

  That person sighed and bowed her head, as if it were Vivienne who was being unreasonable. “This is a haunted House,” she said. “It may react to strong emotion.”

  The first of their final three missions hadn’t been so bad. Easy, even: a toothy goblin that styled itself St. Nick and gnawed on carolers. Nebekah had fixed it in place with a nail gun, and Vivienne had unraveled it. Not a single caroler had died, although one had lost a handful of fingers.

  During that first mission, it had seemed to Vivienne that Nebekah’s studied avoidance of her eyes was a good thing. Maybe the Skeleton had called her in and told her to lay off the staring and the stalking. Maybe things were getting better.

  That conviction had not survived their second mission.

  “‘Strong emotion,’” Vivienne said. “I guess that’s never been a problem for you.” She stomped away from that person and began flinging open doors. There were three leading off the third-floor landing: a barren linen closet to the left (“A clean conscience makes a soft pillow”), an equally barren but much larger room on the right (“Imitation is the apology of the sincere”), and a suite of rooms in the middle (“A pious heart is the purest treasure”) made up of a bedroom, a short hall with a bathroom, and a second bedroom. A strange arrangement, but that itself wasn’t strange, in a House scenario.

  That person followed Vivienne, not meeting Vivienne’s eye, and why wouldn’t she look at her? It couldn’t be out of shame for what she had done, for her actions in the second of their final three assign-ments.

  That mission had taken place four hundred years Post-Agency Time. In a certain town, there was a certain hospital that offered a certain service. Patients could come to be injected with genetically modified bacteria that would mutate their bodies. This one would melt your skin and reharden it like rubber; this one would elongate your fingers into bone-less worms; this one would make your liver bubble and ooze out; this one would open countless pits in your back. The injections were agonizing and disgusting but strangely attractive, and once one got the first, all resistance vanished . . .

  The Heart resided within the hospital; but whether it had manifested as the bacteria or a doctor or something else, the agents didn’t know, for it never came outside.

  “If it has mutated,” Nebekah said, “killing the Heart might not destroy it. We need to contain it.”

  “We’ll collect the patients in the hospital for a mass exorcism,” Vivienne decided. “Those poor people! They’ll need medical help anyway, the second the scenario lifts. Let me think. A place this advanced must have a city-wide emergency announcement system. I’ll use it to summon everyone; you make sure any victims outside the hospital return there.”

  Nebekah agreed and set off at a jog. Vivienne didn’t see her again until hours later.

  The alert message was a success. Vivienne returned from the broad-casting studio and stood at a safe distance to watch the last of the mutators wheel, flop, and scuttle into the hospital. They clutched books and stuffed animals and whatever else their lingering humanity found comforting. Vivienne was glad; they’d need that comfort, after the Heart died and they realized what they’d done to them-selves.

  Nebekah came around the side of the building, carrying a welding torch and wearing dark goggles. She waited until the last of the stragglers entered, then sealed the door behind them.

  “Not a great idea,” Vivienne said. “How are we going to get in? I can’t climb the side of the building. Or did you find a secret entrance?”

  “Over here,” Nebekah said, beckoning her across the street.

  Vivienne frowned and followed. As she stepped foot on the oppo-site side-walk, the first explosion rocked her forward. She spun, ears ringing, and saw black smoke billowing through the fourth-floor window. She shrieked and lurched for the hospital, but Nebekah stopped her with a hand on her collar; and no matter how Vivienne struggled, she couldn’t get free.

  A second explosion. A third. Twenty in all. Within a minute, the entire hospital was a furnace in which no creature could have survive. Terrible heat roared at her, and Vivienne ran from it, covering her head. Nebekah ran next to her.

  The world within Vivienne heaved and cracked, and an inferno erupted in her chest. How had Nebekah done it? Climbed the build-ing and rolled explo-sives inside? No, too many things could have gone wrong. She concealed the explosives in books and stuffed animals and let the innocent carry their deaths inside.

  “You did this!” Vivienne choked, when she could breathe again.

  “Yes.”

  “You—you killed them!”

  Nebekah wasn’t even looking at Vivienne, now they had stopped running. She was watching the fire. The incinerator. The cremato-rium of the living.

  “We could have saved them!”

  “I bear them no grudge,” Nebekah said. “I know they aren’t to blame, but I could not allow the bacteria to spread.”

  “I would have stopped it! I would have unraveled the Heart!”

  Nebekah didn’t answer. They both knew Vivienne could not have unrav-eled the Heart from outside the hospital and could not have gone inside with-out succumbing.

  Vivienne snarled against the burning pain in her chest. “You could at least have had the decency to kill them first!”

  “How?”

  “You—”

  “How could I have killed them without spreading the infection?”

  “You could have tried! Burning is a horrible way to die!”

  The fire lit Nebekah’s face with flashes of orange and red. Her eyes feasted upon the hospital where so many had perished in scream-ing agony by her hand. She did not react when the Heart died and the world reverted around them.

  Vivienne fled from her, back at the Agency. She showered in the public restrooms, because she could not bear the idea of stripping vulnerably naked in the room next to her partner’s. She hid and might have hidden forever had not the urgency of completing her final mission brought her back.

  And now they were here. In this house. Alone together.

  To Vivienne’s triumph, the furthest-back bedroom contained not only the broken remains of a bedframe, but also a window with a magnificent prospect of the town and the wheat fields beyond, silver in the moonlight. She could see the view, because a child-sized hand had cleaned an oval of the glass.

  “Look how recent this is!” Vivienne exclaimed. “The dust hasn’t begun to cover it back up! This must have been cleaned within the last couple of days, which means there’s definitely a living child in this house. You were wrong about the Heart killing them!”

  —That person had said no such thing about this Heart, but that didn’t matter, because they’d had this conversation often before; and it didn’t matter, because Vivienne was right.

  “Dust takes a long time to settle on windows,” that person said.

  Vivienne’s eye sockets burned. “You just don’t want anyone to survive!”

  “The last victim arrived six weeks ago. This house doesn’t have running water.”

  “You don’t know that!” Vivienne snapped. She was fraying, she knew she was, but she couldn’t help it. She had discovered, as many before her, that there is nothing so unbearable as an unbearable situation you have almost escaped but must endure a short while longer. “I know they’re alive, and I’m going to find them!”

  At that moment—

  “Hello?” called a voice. It was a child’s voice, tremulous and high. A boy five or six years old. “Hello? Please, is anyone there?”

  “I’m here!” Vivienne called back, because it was a child—and because she knew that person would hate it. “I’m coming!”

  That person caught her arm. “What are you doing?”

  Vivienne looked that person full in the face—at the gaze fixed on her arm, at the healthy skin and sleek hair, at the tight muscles and brushed teeth—and revul-sion overcame her. “Let go.”

  “This is a trap,” that person said, in her grating monotone. “It’s been listen-ing to us.”

  “I don’t see what business it is of yours what I do!” Vivienne snapped. “Let go or I’ll—I’ll—” (that person didn’t understand anything except violence) “—I’ll break your fingers!”

  “Please!” called the child’s voice, and Vivienne tried to whip her arm away. “Please, help me!”

  “Vivienne,” that person said, hanging on with both hands now, saliva in guttural tones, glistening eyes averted, “please. You’re smarter than this. There is no child. It’s a trap.”

  “Obviously, it’s a trap,” Vivienne snarled, revolted beyond fear, disgusted beyond sense at those fingers touching her. “But it doesn’t matter, because there might be a real child also, and so I have to go even though it’s a trap. Because that’s what makes me human.”

  “Help! Oh, please help me!” the child hiccupped, in between terrified sobs.

  Vivienne shook her arm and braced her feet and tried to pull away, but that person held her harder, curling in to clutch Vivienne’s arm to her chest. She was almost of a height with Vivienne now, and Vivienne thought she really might have to break her fingers to get free.

  “I know you hate me!” that person burst out in a rush.

  Vivienne fell slack in astonishment. Hate? She didn’t hate anyone. She wasn’t the sort of person who hated.

  “But please, Vivienne, please!” that person insisted. “Let it go. Stay safe, just a little longer, and you’ll be out! Just get through this last mission—”

  The universe fell out from under Vivienne’s feet. She knows. Her eyes stared and her mouth gaped and the void battered her and she knows she knows she knows she knows she knows.

  “Help me!” cried the boy, a voice in the darkness.

  “Vivienne—”

  Vivienne’s hand hit Nebekah’s face, harder than she’d ever hit anybody in her life. Hard enough that Nebekah crashed to the floor at her feet and finally, finally, looked up and met her eyes.

  Vivienne didn’t know which shocked her more: that she’d hit Nebekah, or that Nebekah had let her. They stared at each other. Then the boy screamed, and Vivienne spun and sprinted out to help him.

  She made it two steps before the door slammed shut behind her.