The difference between a happy, or at least a content Agent Solitaire and an unhappy Agent Solitaire was quite subtle, unless you knew exactly what to look for. Two years of practice had taught Stephani some of the clues. The problem was that even if you knew he was unhappy, it was not a trivial task to improve his mood.

The challenge with Agent Solitaire was that he did not appreciate success, the way other people did. He wasn’t opposed to success, by any means, but more important to him was intent. Second was competence. Failure despite the right intentions and effort? You’d get away scot free every time, no problem at all. Success achieved using the wrong intention? Not good, even if you did succeed. And quite obviously, failure due to incompetence was never appreciated.

Now, many could argue they had good intentions behind any action. All well and good, if it was true. But you’d have to explain your intentions to Agent Solitaire, face to face. And if you tried to lie, you had a problem. Namely that Agent Solitaire could gauge the truthfulness of any statement.

It wasn’t completely infallible, she’d learned that much. He could only gauge whether the person in front of him honestly believed a statement was true or not. If someone honestly believed something that was objectively not true, he wouldn’t spot the unintentional lie. Then again, that wasn’t a big problem for him, since intention was more important than whether something was universally true.

One hint that Agent Solitaire was unhappy was impatience. Like now, when he suddenly walked into her room and requested a situation update. She brought up the relevant information as quickly as she could.

“I’m afraid there are no new developments, Agent Solitaire,” she explained. The map she had brought up showed all the places agents had searched for Mr. Kinsley, as well as all the places they had surveillance on. There were a lot of places they’d checked. But the forest was way bigger.

“If Mr. Kinsley has died somewhere off the roads and main paths, it could take months to find his body.”

She decided not to tell him that Agent Willow had requested a different task eight times already. Walking back and forth through the forest trying to sense life was not something he enjoyed. He was uncouth enough in the first place, and it got increasingly worse with each request until it was just a long string of swearing. To put it mildly, he was not a nature person.

Agent Solitaire had personally spoken with Mr. Kinsley’s family. They had honestly believed he died at the Mansion, and no one had contacted them to hint otherwise. Mr. Kinsley’s profile listed family as one of his main priorities, so it made no sense for him not to contact them if he was still alive and able to. Not that it would be easy for him to do so undetected, they were watching every single phone and device capable of communication in the family’s possession, as well as his friends.

Agent Solitaire appeared to be deep in thought for a while. His hands clenched and unclenched. Another tell.

“Assuming he is still alive, he must either have sought refuge with a family within reasonable distance, or escaped our net. How many residences are registered within the search area?”

“According to this survey from eight years ago, 159.”

He took a deep breath.

“I believe it is not a good use of resources to keep the search up at this level of magnitude,” he begrudgingly admitted. “Pull out all the agents except one, whose job it will be to keep an eye on all electronic tracking. If anything unusual happens, I want to be notified immediately.”

“Yes, sir,” she nodded.

“Once you have finished reassigning the resources, I will need to discuss the latest phenomena in sector D8. The symptoms are consistent with a rift, yet we have been unable to find anything. I will set up a preliminary plan to detect any incursions.”

With that, he walked out of her office, forgetting his coffee cup. Another tell.