Sheep [ONGOING]

Chapter 22: January 18 (Part II)

He sealed them away behind his bedroom door, setting the stage of his mundane, polished room as a prison.

A punishment to humble him.

The agent groomed the flyaways from her ponytail, turning around in the process with a tucked chin.

"I couldn't bring myself to interrupt," she spoke flatly.

Ace cleared his throat. "I get it."

She persisted regardless, swinging out her hand to meet him. "Wendy Chien."

He took his hand in hers; the strength of her grip alarmed him, demanding his efforts to ignore it. "Ace Andrews," he answered, nearly sputtering.

"I hope you can forgive me for sticking my nose in," Wendy started, features glazed, "I know it's not my place, but in this case..." She raised her chin, taking a breath. "Mitigating trauma is part of my job—"

"It's fine," he assured her, a white lie—half of one.

A small smile painted her face, shoulders falling. "As is knowing as much as I can about everyone involved," she spoke.

His free hand followed the well-worn path to his pockets. "Right."

"I thought I might have caught you off-guard," she supposed, chest rising.

"Nothing worth stressing over."

Assured, she turned on her heel for a stack of folders, her previous company, and bent over to retrieve what remained at the top of the pile, popping open the cover against the nook of her elbow.

"And there's nothing like it," she continued. "Nothing like this." In silence, her eyes scanned the pages for a moment before she lifted her head to him again, file hanging open. "I've never been called to a case with so little information."

Her remark failed to inspire him; he grappled for a response, fumbling, so lost that silence felt a better response than anything else.

Her eyes flickered from his face to the file, holding to her paperwork. "No one's problem but mine," she supposed, a tenor like honey. "I'm not complaining." She paused. "But I'm seeing a lot of firsts in twenty-odd years doing this. For one, the sheer scale of this investigation, the people involved, the science behind it... it's unheard of."

Ace's head churned. "What do you mean?"

She swiveled his way, the open edge of the folder still pinched between her finger. "About what? The science?"

"Yeah."

She took a breath. "Are you not keeping up with everything as it develops, or no?"

He mentally stuttered, understanding the impact of confrontation from a stranger, but pushed on: "Been trying to avoid it—"

"Ha," Wendy chuckled, shaking her head. "That's a dangerous habit to get yourself into, avoiding a situation you're sat square in the middle of."

Defensive as he was, he lacked the confidence to explain away his reasoning. She surely knew more, anyway; perhaps unbiased criticism, he thought, was based more in the reality of the situation.

"You didn't look at her and seriously wonder how it was possible?"

He swallowed. "Course I did—"

"And you didn't want to know more?"

"I do."

"Yet all your questions are publicly answered," she noted, her faux cheerfulness falling flat, "and you haven't tried to search them out."