Amogh Raghuvanshi was, by the unanimous agreement of everyone who had ever worked under him, a man of few words. He did not waste breath on instructions that could be given once and understood the first time. He did not repeat himself, did not soften a directive with unnecessary padding, and had built, over years of exactly this discipline, a reputation that required almost no talking to sustain itself — his actions, consistently, said more than his sentences ever needed to. He was strict about deadlines, exacting about paperwork, and punctual to a degree that had, more than once, made junior officers privately check their watches against his arrival simply to recalibrate their own sense of what "on time" was supposed to mean.

Today, something was different, and it had nothing to do with any file on his desk.