By mid-afternoon, she was still getting nowhere. Hancock puttered around at the workbenches, but she paid him no mind. Sayori and Yukari returned from the hospital and helped as much as they could, but none of the ideas they brain stormed led anywhere. Eventually Hancock finished his work and left, and Sayori and Yukari headed off to dinner, leaving Natsuki alone at her desk, trying to resist the urge to scream in frustration.

    She failed.

    Atria appeared at the doorway, giving Natsuki a measured look. “You need to come to my office,” she said.

    Natsuki shook her head. “What’s the point? It’s not like I’m going to do any better away from my desk.”

    Atria gave her a kind smile. “Just humour me. Besides, you’re working under me, so I can tell you what to do.”

    Natsuki sighed and rose, following Atria next door to her office. Atria sat behind her desk and motioned to her to take the chair in front of it. Natsuki sat.

    “The scream was interesting,” Atria said. “I’ve wanted to do that a lot lately myself.”

    Natsuki stared at the wood grain of the desk. “I’m no further along than I was this morning. Some genius I am – Balthazar outwitted me, and I helped him hurt my friends. And, I know the answer is right in front of me, but I just can’t see it. So much for ‘Detective Natsuki’.”

    Atria nodded, and then said, “Tell me where I went during my lunch break.”

    Natsuki blinked. “What?”

    “You heard me. Where did I go during my lunch break?”

    “You went to a dog café. What does that matter?”

    Atria smiled and leaned back in her chair. “And why do you think I went to a dog café?”

    “You have a dog hair on the right side of your left sleeve. Why are you asking me this?”

    “That just means I met a dog,” Atria said. “But you say I was at a dog café. Why?”

    Natsuki sighed. “Do I really have to explain this?”

    Atria nodded. “Indulge me.”

    Natsuki shook her head. “Fine. You didn’t ask me where you ate for lunch – you asked me where you had gone, which means that your main activity there wasn’t to consume food. The only way you could have gotten a dog hair on your sleeve in that location is if you were interacting with the dog in a familiar way, but you live at the barracks and don’t own a dog, so it can’t have been yours. Your interaction with the dog would have left dog hair all over your jacket, which you would have brushed off after your visit to maintain your professional appearance. The fact that you missed a hair that prominent means that you were in a greater state of relaxation than normal. So, you’d been to a place you could relax where you could interact with a dog – therefore, dog café.”

    Atria grinned. “Very good. Better than I could have done. For that matter, better than anybody here could have done.”

    “What are you talking about?” Natsuki demanded. “You can read people like they’re open books.”

    “I can read people,” Atria said. “I read their expressions, body language, and the inflection of their voice. I can tell at a glance what somebody is thinking, or if they are concealing something. But I can’t look at a hair on somebody’s jacket and figure out where they went for lunch. And how long did it take you to do that?”

    “Not long,” Natsuki admitted.

    “Sometimes, the problem is bigger than the person trying to solve it,” Atria stated. “If you’re stuck right now with the information you’ve got, then perhaps you need to expand your data set, and see if that does the trick. But taking this long to find a solution is a reflection on the difficulty of the problem, not your skill or abilities.”

    Natsuki sighed. “I guess you’re right.”

    “Look,” Atria said. “I’ve got intelligence officer training. Uncovering secrets and evaluating information is something I have been trained to do, and I’m very good at it. But I’m still nowhere near finding out who Balthazar’s creator was or what happened to them that led to this war, and I’ve got a national security level of access. Whoever his creator was, they used a common online alias that lots of other people have used on numerous unrelated sites. To make it worse, the website he first appeared on went down two years ago, so I can’t just get their member information. The best I’ve been able to do so far is to scrub any current threads on other sites and keep him from gaining more powers. The job is bigger than I am...so it’s going to take more time.”

    Natsuki nodded. “I see your point.”

    Atria smiled. “Good. Now, speaking as somebody who can tell you what to do, go and have dinner, spend time with your friends, get a good night’s sleep, and I don’t want to see you back at your desk until tomorrow morning.”

    Natsuki rose and headed back to the barracks. But, as much as she tried to follow Atria’s advice and relax, her brain kept mulling away at the problem of the mysterious room. It was the key to how Balthazar was colliding the worlds...but how?

NEXT: “Dream”