He just really, really hated Hargreaves.
“We did.” Robb’s voice was as inflectionless as always, as if Rhys hadn’t basically just shouted at him in averyinsubordinate way.
“So… what happened then?” Rhys asked, after taking a moment to digest this information.
Robb’s face twitched, and James looked concerned, his mouth pulling down into a frown.
Not a great sign,Rhys thought. IfRobbwas showing an emotion, that must mean something had gone extremely wrong.
“They’re all dead.” When Robb spoke, however, his voice was just as calm and cool as ever, as if he was relating the weather.
Rhys, however, was shocked. He sat back in his bed, blinking in surprise.
“Dead?”
Robb nodded. “That’s what I said. Someone called in the sound of gunshots, but we’d had our eye on those guys for a while. Believe me, you weren’t the first person they approached. We were just waiting for the right moment to go make the arrests.”
Rhys frowned. “But you just said they were all dead. How exactly did that happen?”
He knew Robb and James didn’t actually have to tell him anything, and for a moment, he thought Robb was going to say it was none of his business – which, really, it wasn’t. Rhys was more or less used to only having as much information as he needed and nothing more, but this time, he wanted to know how this had happened.
“Well. As far as I can tell, those men who approached you were under orders to die before they could be captured. So when we closed in – that’s what they did.”
“You mean… they killedthemselves?”
Unease bubbled up inside him.
Something about this doesn’t make any sense.
And it really didn’t.
“Okay,” he said cautiously, after a moment or two. “You verified that yourselves, did you?”
“As much as we were able to, after the fact,” James said. “But I don’t have any reason to lie to you, Rhys, and the agents we sent don’t have any reason to lie tome. But when it became clear they were surrounded and couldn’t run, they took their only other way out.”
There was something about this Rhysreallydidn’t like.
But then again…
Was he just overreacting? It was hardly unknown, after all, for Hargreaves agents to do such extreme things. But it just seemed…oddto him that they’d do it over something relatively trivial. It wasn’t as if the Agency didn’tknowHargreaves agents occasionally tried to recruit them for insider info. Why would they do something so extreme?
Rhys glanced at Robb, then at James. Neither of them, at least, seemed to think there was anything amiss, but then, Robb was famously unrufflable, and James, even if he seemed a little more concerned about the whole thing, didn’t seem to find it weird that some Hargreaves agents had killed themselves rather than be captured.
And it isn’t as if you have the best track record right now,Rhys told himself, as doubt crept into his heart.
Could hereallytrust himself on this?
“Okay. Got it,” he muttered, looking down. He wanted to ask more questions, but just for once, he decided to keep his mouth shut. He reallywasin enough trouble as it was, without getting into an argument with his boss and his mentor as well.
And then there was the fact that his memoryreallywasn’t the best right now. He didn’t know whether it was the wyvern venom or the injuries or what, but he felt like ahugechunk of the last couple of hours was completely missing from his brain, and the things hecouldremember were fuzzy at best.
But aside from the fuzzy memories of the men who’d chased him down and apparently shot him full of wyvern venom, Rhys had a feeling there was something else he wasn’t remembering – and it was something big.
You don’t remember?His griffin sounded incredulous.How can you not remember?!
Do I get a hint?Rhys asked it – but the griffin, seeming disgusted, just retreated to a far corner of his mind. Whateverits problem was, it was clearly planning on ignoring him and forcing him to figure it out for himself.
Great.
