“You’ll be meeting with her again for a briefing tomorrow.”

That was what I was told later in the evening that day.

Though I had never asked her, and she never directly told me, I’d more or less figured something like this would be what would happen next.

It’s hard to tell how I should feel about a crippled girl like Priscilla partaking in a terrorist investigation, but then, if anyone were fit for the job, it would be her. I’d thought that she probably volunteered for it herself, so when the next day came, it was quite unsettling to see her usually calm demeanor, replaced with a much more irritated one.

After taking me to an inconspicuous building on the outskirts of the city, Alfred leaves me once again, directing me to head down the cramped hall to the left. There are a few people walking around dressed in important looking clothes, but none of them seem to pay me any attention.

Eventually, I pass by a break in the rectangular shape of the hallway, where a thick closed door stands at the back of the wall. And waiting next to it, a girl in a wheelchair, with a frightening scowl on her face. Instinctively upon seeing this, I take a step back, but I’m noticed before I’m out of sight.

“Hi there.”

“What’s wrong?” Priscilla asks immediately.

“Oh, it’s nothing.”

“Was I doing the thing again?”

I give a few quick nods.

“Sorry about that,” she says, “It’s the people from the Acer Section. They make me a little nervous.”

“Acer?”

The name is a very familiar one. It belonged to all of us back in the Conservatory. Hearing the name again out of the blue catches me rather off guard.

“Don’t worry about it too much. They’ll probably explain it all inside.”

Priscilla moves herself to the door and gives it a few short taps. The dense sounds of her knocking lingers in the air for a moment, before the door is opened from the inside by a short blonde woman.

“Come in.” She speaks.

The two of us enter the room. It’s a rather suffocating little space, the walls curving inward as they approach the ceiling, and between them, a ring of dim light that illuminates the area. Two sofas face each other on the left and right, and an imposing wooden desk occupies the far end of the room. Awaiting us opposite the desk, a man stands facing away from us, seemingly separate from the rest of the world.

The door shuts behind us, and as I peek behind me, I notice it’s now only the three of us left in the room.

As silence begins to fill the air, the man doesn’t move, and neither does he seem to have any intention of doing so. It’s quite obvious he’s doing it on purpose, but even so, I can’t rid myself of my anxious expectation.

I glance down at Priscilla, hoping to find a moment of solace. But her too, though trying her best to hide it, her hands placed on her armrests, shivering.

Finally, after however long we’ve been kept waiting, the man speaks.

“It’s good to finally meet you two.”

An air of silence is left in the wake of his deep tone. But just when I think he is going to be given no response, Priscilla speaks up with a mask of confidence.

“Who’re you?”

The man turns around to face our direction.

“You’ve quite the sharp tongue, don’t you miss? Not too popular with the boys I presume?”

Priscilla dismisses the man’s playfulness.

“I’d just like to know why we’re here.”

The man exhales in a calm retreat, sitting down in his chair and motioning for us to come closer. On his desk, there’s a single thin file.

“This is your next assignment. I’ll give you a moment to look it over.”

As she cautiously reaches for the file, Priscilla keeps her eyes keenly glued on the man’s expression. She briefly skims through the papers like she’s already seen them before, then hands the folder to me. Inside of it, I find the files of what appears to be information about a few specific individuals. Each with a photo, and a quick summary of their past records. In each box labeled ‘section,’ that name comes up again and again, ‘Acer.’

I flip through the eleven files, all of them more or less looking the same as the next. Near the end though, two images in particular catches my eye. The first of an older man named Ambrose Lang, and the second, a younger boy, Emile Enfield.

“Three weeks ago, we received a message from one of the missing members of the HK train station. Though they had all been presumed dead up until now, we have since verified the identity of this individual. It hasn’t been confirmed, but it is very likely that this message was sent from captivity. Your priority is the recovery of our personnel.”

----------------------------------

There are a number of habits that I’d developed over the past few years that I still haven’t been able to shake off completely. It happens that one of those habits is to do a full scan of any room that I enter, checking to see if the walls have any eyes or ears. If there was a bookshelf, I’d check between every open sliver, and I’d make sure to feel the bottoms of every table. I’ve since succeeded at suppressing such paranoid behaviours, but it seems that just like a kettle, you’ll only ever find something when you aren’t particularly looking for it.

Such is the case as I Priscilla and I are shown to our new room. The camera isn’t hidden in any way. Just a big hunk of metal hanging from the ceiling in plain daylight.

“Don’t worry too much about that, it’s there for me, not for you.” Priscilla says, noticing my interest in the camera.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“They’re worried about my health.”

“Doesn’t that seem like a little overboard for just a precaution?”

Priscilla shoots me a quick glance before moving over to open the window, letting the daylight into the blinded room.

“You should probably know that I was the one who put together the team at the train station. That’s probably why we were given this assignment in the first place. So I can’t blame them if they think I’m at least a little bit suspicious given the circumstances.”

No one had confirmed this for me earlier, but it seems all the more likely now. The people at the station were killed by gunfire, I saw it with my own eyes. If these higher ups, whoever they are, suspect Priscilla, than it only seems natural.

“Just a quick question,” I ask, “In those files, there was someone named Emile in them, was that by any chance -”

“Seems you put things together quickly.” Priscilla answers, before I even finish my question. “They wouldn’t be doing a very thorough job if they didn’t at least suspect that it was an inside job, in which case, I would almost certainly fall under suspicion as well. But I’m sure they’ll remove that camera if you asked them too, after they rule out that possibility, that is.”

“Shouldn’t they have ruled it out before giving us the assignment then?”

“I guess it means they don’t think the probability is that high.”

Finding her logic flawless as always, I decide to ask the other question that’s burning on my mind. Once again though, I don’t even have to ask to receive an answer.

“You’re probably wondering about Ambrose Lang.” Priscilla says.

She takes my silence as confirmation.

“It’ll probably make things easier to explain if I told you that the train station team wasn’t there to monitor the station. They were there to monitor you.”

As she speaks, the picture begins to become clearer.

“I chose Ambrose Lang because his daughter was with you. Given that there was a considerable likelihood that something would happen to the two of you, I thought it would only be right to give him the opportunity to protect his daughter himself.”

With one mystery solved out of the blue, it’s hard to tell how I should feel about all of this. In a way, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to blame Priscilla for how things turned out. She was the one who put him in the line of fire. But maybe I just don’t know how he would’ve felt about all of that. Giving up your own life protecting your child, that’s just something I have no way of understanding.

“When this is all over, if you go and see her again, you should tell her everything I just told you. If she blames me for what happened, then I’ll gladly do whatever she demands of me.”

Her tone is very sincere. I’m not sure if its because of that, but I can’t seem to doubt that what she says is true.

“Why don’t we worry about that later,” I tell her, “right now, we’ve got a job to do.”