Shin Bao returned from the ministry archives three days later with a document case and the particular expression he wore when he had found something he had not expected to find.
I had learned to read that expression over the months of working together. It was not alarm — Shin Bao did not alarm easily — but it was a specific quality of sharpened attention, the face of a person who had gone looking for one thing and had found it next to something larger. There was a stillness to it, almost a withholding, as though he was carrying the information carefully and had not yet set it down. He had that quality in general — a carefulness with things that mattered, a refusal to handle them roughly just because the handling was internal and no one was watching. I had trusted him with precise work for that reason. Some people were accurate. Shin Bao was accurate and also, underneath the accuracy, careful.
He set the case on the table and did not sit.
