Rat was loyal to the Camelia. To its people.
He loved the estate and the castle and the lands that stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction.
Even the rapids he was too terrified to get close to.
But he didn't particularly like it. Or the people in it.
He preferred being away on a mission and loving it from a distance. All those people and animals crammed into stone walls. Even with their religious adherence to sleep, the place was always filled with noise. It gave Rat the worst kind of anxiety if he had to spend more than a week or two in the place without a break.
Yuze's request to track down the two missing soldiers wasn't strange in and of itself. He'd tracked down plenty of soldiers missing for innocent reasons, as well as plenty of deserters.
He just didn't normally have to track them down inside the Camelia's walls.
It was surprisingly difficult. It had proven especially challenging to try to track individual people in a place where hundreds of thousands lived in close quarters. Walking over one another's footsteps a dozen times a day.
That wasn't to say he hadn't managed it, but it had been one of the harder tasks he'd ever done. It was a challenging change of mindset, shifting from tracking signs to tracking sightings, tracking habits.
Emmy and Patrick led rather small lives. Like most of the soldiers in the Camelia, they didn't do much outside the estate except fight or patrol. Inside the walls, they went from lodging to meals to training to meals to their lodging and repeated it day after day whenever there wasn't a war.
It would have driven Rat mad if he'd been stuck in that life. But it did make tracking them in this situation slightly easier.
At least, at first.
Before they'd taken up with the Vermeer boy, that had been their entire life since they'd come in off the streets. Their story was so typical of the lower echelons of soldiers in the Crimson and Imperial Armies that it was of no value to any inquiry about what had happened to them.
But their friendship with the Vermeer boy was a different story. It was, as far as he could tell, their first brush with anyone in the nobility, and according to the few witnesses that had seen them interact more than once, it had been an immediate, intense friendship, and they'd spent most of their time with him.
They'd been deeply involved in the investigation into the Vault, too, but he'd searched their rooms and found nothing, no items, no documents, nothing related to the investigation at all.
He'd spoken to the soldiers who had the rooms next to them, to their immediate commander, who hadn't seen them since they were assigned to help Finn, but didn't have anything bad to say about them either. Their peers seemed to like them, described Emmy as serious, an older sister to the core, and Patrick as silly, but harmless unless you were an enemy on the battlefield.
Although apparently even then, he was usually part of the defense, not the offensive force. He'd "lacked the necessary natural aggression needed to attack," according to one of his trainers. The man had shaken his head and then ranted about the disappointment of someone of Patrick's size and natural strength without a single aggressive bone in his body.
Rat had left while he was still talking, sure the man hadn't even noticed he was gone.
The other common thread he'd found was the most concerning thing he'd found.
No one knew what they'd been doing. A few had a vague understanding that they were assisting Finn, but none of them knew with what, and there was no mention of any work for Lord Rong. For a group of people that lived and breathed the same space day after day, it was a startling lack of knowledge. It made Rat worry for the security of the estate.
And it made him worry for Emmy and Patrick. If they'd somehow disappeared so completely in a place with so many eyes…
He couldn't imagine they were still alive after more than a month without contact or a single sighting.
There was always a chance they were just that good at disappearing. Rat certainly knew some people who were, but their age and life experience suggested otherwise. They just didn't have the years necessary to learn those skills.
Which meant someone was helping them.
Possibly against their will.
Which also meant that Rat needed to start factoring in the newest revelations in the investigation into his search.
…He probably hadn't needed to spy to get them, but it was important to keep up his skills.
It was interesting how unwilling everyone had seemed when it came to accusing the Yangs of anything. A rich, noble family always had dirty secrets.
Always.
And the better they seemed, the worse they were.
Clearly, Lord Rong and Princess Soliel had spent too long among them. They'd stopped being able to see the forest through the trees.
He'd start with the Yangs and then the Wens, who, for some reason, had significantly less security than most of the other noble families. Rat didn't know enough of them to know if it was ego or lack of funds or bodies, but he'd find out.
…
He paused.
Perhaps the easiest way into the secretive and suspicious Yang household was via the less careful Wens.
It wouldn't be too hard.
Go to the right pub after dark. Lurk around in a dark corner until he spotted the right family crest. Wait for them to get drunk, and then it was easy.
Drunk people always made lifelong friends under the haze of alcohol.
Rat had lost count of how much valuable information he'd gotten because he'd befriended a drunk idiot.
They always believed anything you told them the next morning.
~ tbc