Page 78 of Robb

“Ah,” muttered Robb. “That might be a bit of a problem.”

Tahnee’s heart fell.

“Oh. And why is that?”

“Because the Sydney office just got trashed by Hargreaves,” Robb murmured. His lips barely moved – obviously he’d had the same thought she had. “From all accounts the place is badly damaged, lots of staff injured, and there was a jailbreak to boot. It’s on lockdown to outsiders at the moment, so I don’t think your people could even get in to talk to anyone. And our friend Bruce – the lyrebird, I mean – made it so that my team aren’t feeling as well disposed towards me as they might otherwise.”

“Oh.” Tahnee winced. “That sucks.”

Robb’s poor, battered face twitched. “Yeah. You could put it like that. Especially since the jailbreak involved a shifter called James Eyre, who was a Hargreaves mole within the Agency for years. Now that he’s free, he’s on his way here to join the party.”

“Ah,” said Tahnee, trying to digest all of this new information. All of this really shitty information.

“Well,” she said after a long pause, forcing brightness into her tone, “that just means that we can come up with an even better plan. Which is a good thing, since the old one was pretty crap. I just kind of threw it together on the fly. You know how it is.”

Robb choked out what she thought was a laugh, and her spirits rose a little.

“Hey,” she said, doing her best to brush his leg with her own. “I know we both said a lot of things that we regret – well, I know that I regret them, anyway.”

“Me too,” Robb said, and the relief that Tahnee felt was enormous.

“But we can sort that all out later, right?” she went on. “There was nothing there so huge that we can’t work through it. Later, though.”

Robb nodded.

Feeling happier than she had in days, despite the pretty objectively terrible situation they were in, Tahnee pressed on. “Okay. Now that we’ve got that sorted, fill me in. Why do they want me to make gold?”

Robb sighed, and then coughed, a horrible, hacking sound that shook his whole body. When he could breathe again, he said, “The woman’s name is Anne McIntosh – or so she says, anyway. She’s the head of Hargreaves.”

Tahnee felt her eyebrows going up. “As in, the whole of Hargreaves? You really know how to piss the wrong people off, Robbo.”

Obviously not having the energy to go off on that particular digression, Robb continued, “They want to wake a dragon that’s asleep underground somewhere in Victoria.” He paused to catch his breath. “They plan on doing this by luring it with a whole lot of gold.”

“Oh.”

Tahnee grasped the implications immediately.

Make the gold, or Robb dies. Wake the dragon, and a whole lot of people die.

She could only imagine that that was the only reason an organization like Hargreaves wanted to get their hands on a whole dragon.

She paused, trying to find the words that could possibly encompass how she felt about the situation.

“Um. That’s bad.”

It wasn’t exactly Shakespeare, but it would have to do – she wasn’t exactly in the right frame of mind for eloquence.

“Yeah,” Robb wheezed, before another coughing fit came over him.

“Hey, are you okay?” she asked. “I mean, obviously not, but wyvern venom is deadly. Is your condition getting worse?”

“Don’t worry,” Robb mumbled. “She won’t let me die. I’m too valuable as a hostage. It was an extremely low dose anyway, but if I can’t shake it off, then she’ll just shoot me full of antivenom. She’s already done it once.”

Rage flowed through Tahnee’s veins.

Free him, urged the brolga. And make them pay.

Oh, don’t worry, Tahnee replied, her whole body tense with anger. I will.