Vera went to the ladies’ and splashed her face to break the nausea. She’d already had to take a walk and a smoke when Mitch busted the first-edition deadline. She’d always had a crazy stomach, but this was probably the worst case of empathy ever. It was too bad the scanner was routine and every precinct was tomblike. If she’d had one brief, even a weekender she should be starting, she might get distracted. All she had was a pile of clips to read about F-16 crashes that News Research had put together for her. Stanley thought the clips were a waste of time. Walk around the crash site, he told her. She didn’t have altogether that much faith in Stanley’s reporting suggestions. Plus, he couldn’t seem to remember that so far not one official had been willing to tell her where the site was.

So maybe she wasn’t sick for Mitch. Maybe she was queasy thinking about the pilot story. From Stanley’s first assigning it to her, she hadn’t been too jumped up about it. She had vague ideas how to go about it, but not many. This minute she felt failure coming for her. Look at Mitch—with decades in service, a reporter with sources as deep as earth’s core; he was lost. Stanley would pish that observation. He’d say she didn’t have much in the way of visible signs to prove Mitch was sinking. That gut of hers, though, it told all of her all she needed to know about Mitch’s state of mind. You couldn’t put that in a story though, could you? I could feel the desperation of Mitch because my stomach was flipping. Stanley would hit delete. He liked concrete writing. Tell it clear, like glass, he said to her once.

It was simple when you had a dead body—dissect the corpse. But here, in the fields, how to get at secrets? How to put your hand into the dirt and pull out the root? It could be twenty feet down, or twenty miles at a diagonal. And this thing that had confounded Mitch—it was a report! It was fourth-hand, fifth-hand, ten-hands, and more. A way to defer a decision. A study to make a recommendation to craft a proposal to consider a conclusion.

Before this day, Vera would have disdained getting a report. Getting a report someone else got first—like tap dancing a talent show. But she saw from watching Mitch that he would be considered less-than for this failure. She wondered how the other paper had gotten this report. Why would someone leak to one paper and not the other? If she had more experience, she might understand this government curlicue.

The number I flashed on Mitch’s screen, announcing a new message. Vera felt woozy. Mitch pushed enter, but slowly, Vera thought, as if a gentler touch might bring a kinder message.

Any luck?