Daisy | Simon Riley

|5|

"Right now it's a lot of possibilities. The team has been good at pulling threads, but it's difficult to manifest them into leads. I think we're getting close, at least on two fronts. Hopefully the next few days will give us the information we need."

"Well good work. We'll be lighting fires beneath their ass in no time."

"Hopefully," she mumbled, mind drifting to the work she'd done earlier in the day. Her research on the trafficking ring.

Unfortunately, they'd received confirmation that the ring was active, however they had too little information to act. Nothing on locations, nothing on leaders.

It drove her mad, drove her to scanning through transcripts and ciphered messages until she had to force herself to blink. She was glad she had two cases to focus on because it gave her a break from the frustration.

From the thoughts of violence that people were certainly going through. From the thought that she knew and couldn't do anything about it. From the guilt, because what if she wasn't looking hard enough? What if she'd missed something? She was never good at noticing things, so maybe there was something and she hadn't—

Something knocked against her foot and she blinked, letting the world come into focus again.

She sunk into her chair slightly, realizing she'd been staring at Ghost again. But unlike how she usually responded to his gaze, in that moment she felt vulnerable, her self-pity acting to momentarily strip her of all confidence.

She waited uneasily for his comment, for his warning to stop staring, maybe even for him to have read her mind and confirm that she'd been too dazed to pick up on important details of the case.

But he didn't say anything.

He simply watched her a moment, without a doubt noting her lack of backbone, before looking back to the others.

She blinked again, confused.

Had he kicked her by accident?

Was this some psychological warfare?

Would he say something later?

She didn't know, and he didn't give her any clues. So she mirrored him, falling back into the conversation beside her.

It worked enough to distract her, and then as they moved to one of the common rooms, she found herself weaving herself into the conversation. Challenging Gaz to a round of cards. Then beating him.

Then losing.

By the time she'd retired to her room, she was eager to change into comfortable clothes and to give her hair a break from their daily confines.

Her wind down routine seemed to drag, so when she finally laid down in bed, she thought she'd fall asleep quickly. But wrong she was. Those stupid, guilt-ridden thoughts returned, burrowing into her shoulders like a tick.

She had half a mind to march across the campus to her office—to check if she'd missed something in her hours of work, but she knew that was non-sense. She needed to give her mind a rest, that it needed sleep. Annoyingly though, that fact didn't stop the thoughts.

With a glance at the clock, she pushed up from her bed, switching her slippers for a pair of sneakers, then tugging a jacket over her hoodie.

It was late, but a military base was never quiet. Voices, whether from people or tv's, pushed their way through closed doors. A tired looking private greeted her. The junior officer's common room was still occupied.

When she reached the ground level, she pushed out a back exit to a garden alcove that offered a false sense of nature within the cityscape that was the base. Although calling it a garden was unfitting; a few benches, trees, and bushes were the extent of the landscaping. It was more like a non-cemented rec area—but semantics aside, she just wanted a quiet spot to sit.