His phone trilled, signaling he had received a message. Mr Holt read it and growled.
"It's Chad," Mr Holt told me. "Look."
The message gave an address, a time set for half an hour. There was an additional message sent as a separate text.
[Little Bluebird will wear 5kg ankle + wrist weights on each limb,] was the additional message.
I put the phone on the table with trembling fingers.
"We need to get going now then," Mr Holt scowled at the phone.
An idea flashed through my mind and I picked the phone back up.
[Hi Chad, this is Kim. I've borrowed Boss's phone. Can you give us another time? I'm dealing with that stuff. I need more time.]
I sent the message and a reply came back almost immediately.
[For you, Little Bluebird, I'll do anything. I'll message tomorrow with a new time and location.]
[Please don't kill anyone else in the meantime,] I sent.
[Oh, Little Bluebird. You're really going to give yourself to me? Thank you.]
[I haven't promised you anything,] I retorted. [Why do I have to wear weights?]
[So you can't fly away, dear. Isn't it obvious?]
[You're planning on taking me hostage?] I grimaced at the phone.
Mr Holt looked over my shoulder to see what we were messaging to each other.
[No. I'm not that rude. I'll have another hostage with me. You'll be the mediator, so if anything goes wrong, you're mine.]
Mr Holt took the phone from my hands and typed his own message.
[This is Howard. Send us the details for the meeting tomorrow. We will be there.]
[Make sure you've cleared up my Bluebird's issues by then. I'm going to ask her. If she's not happy, I will deal with it. And heads may roll.]
[Understood.]
The phone was put down on the table and Mr Holt resumed his seat, waking the computer up and starting to type. With the screen monitor facing away from me, I couldn't see what he was doing but I could guess.
"Sending the director an update," Mr Holt told me. "Please wait a moment."
He copied the contents of the text messages onto the computer to be filed away somewhere. There was a lot of typing and mouse clicking. The computer pinged with the alert for new emails repetitively. Mr Holt stared and concentrated while he typed. Then he pressed his lips together and glanced at me as if something was my fault.
"Our Lady Director has requested our presence in her office. She wants to listen in on what you have to say. She seems to feel that you may need female support to share what is troubling you. Is she right, Kim?"
This time I did squirm.
"Hmm," Mr Holt grunted, his face growing longer. He looked upset and sad. "Let's go, Kim."
He shut down the equipment and walked to the door. At the door, he turned around to look at me where I hadn't moved with an unhappy frown. I didn't want to move or go anywhere. I didn't want to talk anymore. Then he walked back to me to squeeze my shoulders.
"Come on, Kim," he said in a gentle voice. "I'm not upset with you. It's ok. Come on."
I allowed him to pull me up off my seat and lead me to the director's office. On the way, we passed by our team's shared office. Big Brother watched us pass by with a blank face. Mary Belle looked like she was scoffing again, while Flint gave me a wink and a smirk. Sarden looked scared.
"Wait here first," Mr Holt had me stop outside the director's office first. "I want a quick, private chat with her first. Then I'll call you in."
I was left to wait in the director's little reception room. Her secretaries glanced at me and continued their work without pausing. There was one other person in the waiting room with me. He was sitting by the water dispenser, sipping at a paper cup of water while he examined a painting of tulips on the opposite wall.
My mouth and throat felt dry, so I fetched myself a cup of water. Then I sat back down to try and see what the man found so interesting in that painting. To be honest, I found the man much more interesting than the painting.
At first glance, he looked like a rough soldier of a slightly smaller, more lithe build. On second glance, he was more than that. His peculiarities stuck out.
He had silver hair. Pure silver that stood up on his head like it had not been brushed since yesterday. He wore a black sweatband around his forehead and had a charcoal face gaiter that covered him from his neck to his eyes. The only visible parts of his face were his almond shaped eyes and silvery eyebrows. It was hard to tell what age he was. The skin around his forehead looked smooth and wrinkle free.
The rest of him was dressed in an ordinary working shirt of our organisation, signifying he was also a City Agent. But unlike most other people, he was wearing a compact military vest over the top. He wore combat boots and military style army pants. In all, it gave the contradictory impression that he was a rough yet refined man who didn't care what others thought of him. An ancient warrior in mismatched modern day clothes.
If I hadn't known better, I'd have thought he was cosplaying a character from a storybook or graphic novel.
"The painter of this painting is an amateur," he said without looking at me. His voice was a soft tenor with the accent of a Yasian foreigner. "They were copying the work of a greater master but while they copied the basic structure, failed to capture the spiritual essence. See how the brush strokes don't carry any vitality?"
"Didn't the Director paint this?" I pointed at the name and signature in a corner.
"Yes. She needs more practice," the man said with a shrug.
If he could speak about the Director in this way, he had to be one of those senior agents who had been a part of the organisation since forever. To the point they were a part of the furniture. He might have been one of those who had chosen not to try and climb any ranks, being satisfied with where they were, or who had hidden issues that prevented them from ever being given the opportunity for promotion.
The secretaries didn't seem to have heard him speak. Nor did they make any sign that they could hear us talking.
The man pulled a scroll of soft, thick paper out of seemingly nowhere to spread out on the coffee table. The ends were weighed down with magazines so that they wouldn't curl or roll back in toward the centre. From one pocket came a pointed brush - a Yasian styled brush. Quite different from our bushy or fan shaped tribal ones.
From another pocket, what looked like a stone slab was pulled out. Water was dripped onto a stone slab and a rectangular black ink stick came out from a thin wooden box in a different pocket. The man rubbed the ink stick in the drops of water in an elegant and unhurried manner, circling it at a steady speed in a clockwise direction to make ink.
Using the remaining water in his cup, he wet his brush and wiped off the excess water on the edge of the cup, before dipping it in the ink. With a few sweeps of his arms, the brush danced across the paper, bringing forth vivid, vertical lines. I was curious as to what he was going to paint.
"When painting," the man told me, "you must be confident. You cannot hesitate or it will show through in the lines you draw. To bring forth life, you must go with the flow. Be flexible. If you make a mistake, you modify or disguise it into something else. Integrate it to become a part of the whole. Not something that ruins the entire painting."
He was trying to tell me something but I didn't understand what. Was he telling me to live boldly and make mistakes boldly? To be confident, no matter what?
The brush was pressed into my hand.
"Here," he told me with a smile. "Your turn."
"No. I can't," I said. "I'll ruin it."
"It doesn't matter," he encouraged. "Mistakes are a way of life. To err is to be human - in this realm, anyway. You will learn from your mistakes. Come and make your mark."
Truth be told, I found it somewhat amusing that a rough looking man in military styled clothes was moving like a dancer while he painted. Did army guys paint these types of pictures? The world was indeed bigger and stranger than I had imagined or understood from my life's experiences.
Contemplating the painting, I added the swirling lines that signified my tribe's connection to water at the bottom of the paper.
In the tribe, we used to mix our own powders and colours with water to make temporary pictures with our fingers or makeshift brushes on the standing stones by the pond. The colours faded in the sunlight within a week, so that we could wash the rocks and repaint them as often as we liked.
The other kids had often disparaged my attempts and thrown water on my paintings. I found my own private place to paint in. A crack in the giant rocks that dotted the area. A small gap between rocks where people didn't go for fear a spirit was living there among the shadows. I had drawn and painted there to my heart's desire. In fact, I had painted and washed away my paintings there trying to make them as perfect as possible so many times that I had made indents in the rocks.
Carefully, I drew the standing stones into the ink painting. They loomed like gloomy ghosts between the graceful vertical lines.
"I told you I'd ruin it," I frowned at the contrast between his skill and mine.
"A longing for home. A wish to belong," said the man, bringing me out of my short reverie. "So much uncertainty, doubt and fear. Here. Let me help you."
He came from behind me, almost hugging me as he wrapped his bigger hand over mine on the brush. He helped me to paint.
What I had drawn looked unsightly and ungainly compared to what he had done. The strength and speed control of the brush had caused the ink to bleed into the paper in an ugly manner. But as the man behind me used my hand on the brush to draw, a new landscape and picture arose.
It became a flooded forest in the rain. The bleeding splotches of my attempt to paint had become the shadows of tree leaves and bushes. At the bottom of the page, muddy water reflected trees. It looked like it was still drizzling.
"Wow," I looked at the finished product with amazement. "You're amazing."
"Of course," the man smiled at me, taking his brush back and disentangling himself from behind me. He packed his things up to carry to the nearest toilet to clean them, "but then so are you. Don't you forget it. There is a power and a magic in working together with others. Don't isolate yourself. Share."