“He stays in Chicago.”
Hannah shook her head, “But…” she trailed off.
The hard look on Colin’s face was telling enough.
“I’m so sorry,” she spoke.
Yeah.
Between Armsy taking Taylor’s blame for Mr. Rottendick, failing to stop the gallery heist, and being generally disliked as a leader, this was kind of… well, not expected, because I didn’t think to expect it, but it’s not exactly surprising either.
“It’s the politics,” Colin spoke, leaning back, “I’m good at this. Better than most, if you don’t mind me boasting. Everything I bring to the table, I worked my ass off for. But when it comes to shaking hands, managing people, navigating the bureaucracy… I’m not good at it, won’t ever be. Because of that, I’m getting demoted, and I can probably give up on ever being in charge of another team.”
He’s always been the type to speak his mind, I suppose. Not something the bureaucracy always appreciates.
“I’m sorry. I know how much you wanted-”
“It’s fine,” he said, but it was clear in the curtness and hardness of his tone that it wasn’t.
His precious reputation has taken a hard hit. There’s not much that would be less fine for him than this, really. Well, other than even harder hits.
He turned away and touched his keyboard. In the darkness of the room, his face briefly reflected the blue light of the screen. His brow furrowed.
Hm? Is the Endbringer being detected? It seems like it’s about time for that.
“Dragon. That program you gave me, predicting the patterns of class S threats, remember it?
Sure sounds like it.
I made a few modifications, to see if I couldn’t catch any highlights, I’m running a dozen of them concurrently. One, I called HS203. I want you to look directly at this. I’ve put it behind some pretty heavy security, but if you wait a second, I’ll-”
Man, I hope the thing that interrupted him was the realization that Dragon had already managed to bypass that heavy security.
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