The Collection Agency: The Descension

THE DESCENSION The Collection Agency, Book Two The machine is broken. The door between the living world and the pit stands open, and the one soul who could have closed it went down through it instead. So the collectors go down after her. Ben and Tiffany have spent two hundred years learning that you cannot save a city, only answer one soul at a time. Now they descend into a hell that has caught a fallen grief like a fever, while above them a quarter of the world slides quietly toward the dark and a broken judge fights for it the only honest way there is, one learned name at a time. They are not the only ones on the stair. The living are walking down of their own free will, and something at the bottom of everything has noticed that the good side is losing. Because the whole of creation is a balance, and the balance is failing. There is an old light kept sleeping in the unlikeliest blood, waiting for a dark deep enough to wake it. There is a blade with an ordinary, almost kind face that keeps no side at all. There is a small round man in a coat of mismatched buttons who feeds on the grinding and will do anything, even help, to keep the game from ending. And there is a girl who once poured coffee in the dark for the people the world forgot, whose soul all of them are reaching for at once, because she is the one weight heavy enough to tip the whole scale in a single choice. They will hold the line, small hands against the patience of the oldest dark there is. They will not all be holding it at the end. The Collection Agency will return.