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“Above my pay grade.” Jack waved a manicured hand. “But I’m sure I can find out.”

“Jack, I’m not looking for ‘I’m sure’ here unless you actually are.”

Jack shifted in his seat, trying to alleviate some of the weight from her gaze. “When I first jumped into this”—he gestured at his Margaret costume—“I didn’t know anything about S.C.Y.T.H.E. or all the weird shit they do. But there’s an archive in the basement filled with all kinds of info about the company. I spent hours in there reading up on the gig so I could play the part.”

“You spent hours?” Greer cocked her head.

“Reading?” Dale added.

“I always do what I’ve gotta do for a job, you know that.”

Both Greer and Dale nodded slowly at that.

“Point is,” Jack continued, “if that list exists, there’ll be information about it in the archives. I just need to do some digging.”

• • •

Like the rest of the S.C.Y.T.H.E. office, the archives were an ode to fluorescent lighting, linoleum floors, and a particularly diluted shade of beige that would almost be eggshell if only it was brave enough. It required a key card for entry, which Margaret had left tucked safely in the front zipper of her laptop bag, and was overseen by a man somewhere between the age of 70 and 185, if Jack had to hazard a guess. The man, whose name Jack had never bothered learning, sat slumped in a rolling chair behind a little administrative desk, forever reading the same dog-eared old copy of a book called Practical Pigeon-Keeping, the author’s appropriately feathered 1980s hairdo filling approximately one-sixth of the back cover. Today it was open to a page scattered with images of different feathers, each annotated by both the text and handwritten scribbles.

Jack cleared his throat. The man looked up from his reading material, apparently alarmed to be sharing the endless rows of shelves with another person. A pair of thick-lens glasses magnified his eyes to several times their natural size, giving him the look of a startled lemur.

“Oh, Ms. Chen,” he greeted, lowering the glasses and becoming somewhat more human.

“Hi…you,” Jack replied.

“Back again for some more research, are we?”

“We are,” said Jack. “I’m looking for information on where we get our cases from. Maybe a list or something. I don’t know, just spitballing here. Any idea what section I’d find that in?”

“Oh sure,” said the man, adjusting his bow tie in a manner that Jack would almost call flustered. “Anything like that would be in Section 301 D.”

Jack turned toward the row in question. “Great—”

“Of course, that section is only accessible to department managers and above.”

“Ah,” said Jack.

“It is lovely to see you again, Ms. Chen.” The man gave a broad smile and slipped the glasses back onto his nose, ready to return to his book.

Shit. Jack was losing him. It hadn’t been this hard before. The day after Jack took over Margaret, after struggling to understand how S.C.Y.T.H.E. and its agents worked, he’d slipped down here and told the startled lemur he needed to do some reading for a case. Asked for anything in the archives about this strange new world he’d stumbled upon and was pointed without issue toward a section full of training manuals and noteworthy case records. He’d returned every lunch break for a week and absorbed each drop of information he needed to pull off his disguise. Jack had never read for pleasure, and his school report cards didn’t particularly favor the beginning of the alphabet, but when it benefitted him, Jack could be as studious as they came. All he needed was a point in the general direction of where to start. And the lemur wasn’t pointing.

“So, pigeons,” Jack tried, peering at the book.

“Magnificent birds,” the man replied.

“Uh-huh,” said Jack. “Great feathers. Very…gray.”

“Not all of them,” the man said, holding up a finger as if he’d just made a brilliant point in a presidential debate. “The pigeons we see on the street are only one species out of over three hundred. Though common street pigeons do have their charm, of course.”

“Of course,” said Jack. “I’ve always said it.”

“Have you?” He waggled his glasses at that. “Why, Ms. Chen, are you a fellow chum of the Columbidae?”

“The…” Jack tried to remember if that was one of the STIs he’d learned about back in Sex Ed. The man continued to grin at him in a way that suggested probably not, so he said, “Yes. Of course. Who isn’t?”

“I had no idea,” said the man, leaning closer. “You know, I’ve dabbled in a bit of pigeon fancying here and there.”

Once again, Jack found himself trying to decide if this was a sex thing. Well, he was just going to have to go with it. “You don’t say.” He rolled his shoulders back as far as he could, hoping to lift his bosom above his belly button. “I too have occasionally fancied pigeons.”