Jules' posture, and his slow, deliberated movements, demonstrated wordlessly that he was unsure himself. His predominant fear lied in invading Ona's space to seize the paper; he was slow to enter, but once he had breached that invisible border, quick to snatch the file away and then retreat back to his side of the desk.

But even when he had returned to base with his spoils, the paper—itself a razor crafted from wood pulp—seemed ready to slice him up, with how he hesitated to scan its contents. Of course Jules knew the truth: that he did not want to see, staring back at him from that slice of paper, exactly what he knew he would.

The man's records were perfect. Spotless. Immaculate, a word they only ever use for Jesus and maybe a saint or two. Taylor had never worked for any of the Big Three before, so the patchers had no reason to suspect old company loyalties of getting dredged up a year or a decade from then. His former experience in the field was intensive, relevant, yet realistic. Even his smile, pinned and bleached and all the rest, reeked of corporate sterility, shining neon-white with all the philosophies which Transcomm wanted in a worker: conformity, congeniality, and a hopeless addiction to money and silk ties. Frankly Jules hated that sort of man anyway, and if there was no cost to it, no chance of getting fired for negligence of work duties, he would have ruined this guy's chances out of spite. But in the interview...when Jules and this Mr. Taylor were in the same room together...

"[color=8d97bf]Not really,[/color]" he said. Ona wouldn't believe him. Of course she wouldn't. Even if Taylor's handsome sun-weathered mug didn't seduce her from the moment she gazed at its mugshot, she would look at the file itself then, the details of his work experience and his attitude and his schedule, and she'd know that he deserved to move along to the next stage. Jules couldn't justify himself to her precisely because she had been called up to the handler's office; because she hadn't met E. Taylor in person.

He needed to stamp it and be done; soil the paper with that fateful red ink-mark, so it would never go any further in this company than the dumpster, and the landfill beyond, no matter how badly Ona wanted to save him. Like a check across which he needed above all other things to scrawl the word "VOID," so the tellers couldn't accept it no matter what anyone said. But he began to doubt himself. If he was wrong about Taylor then he'd be risking another citation. And by his count he had too many of those; one, maybe two left and he'd be answering to the handler himself, just like Ona before him. He didn't know of any patcher whose position at the company had survived such a thing. They had no time to spare for patchers who couldn't patch; who repaired pieces of the net which were already whole, and let the fish slip through the real tears.

Damn it.