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The back door slammed a little harder than necessary.
“Soup,” said Fiona, shivering violently as May glanced up from her notebook. “Dry socks? Soup.”
May rolled her eyes and turned to Joanna. “Did you find anything?”
Joanna rubbed her hands together, a slightly wild look in her eyes. “Soup first,” she said through chattering teeth.
“Cold,” agreed Fiona. “Too cold talk. Where Robyn.”
“She got a call from the coroner, there was another death they wanted her to check out.” Standard procedure when a body was found was to call a Huntress to identify whether or not their wounds could have come from a Grimm. It was grisly, but just another part of the job, and there were a lot fewer Huntresses than there were murder victims in Mantle. Especially lately. “Should be back soon.”
“Where soup.”
May rolled her eyes; Fiona was definitely playing it up. “There’s a pot of onion soup on the stove.” She wasn’t a monster, she knew what preparations to make when people spent a day on the tundra. A quick glance at her scroll as Fiona and Joanna shoved past her to the kitchen showed both their Aura meters well below 15%, and she winced sympathetically. “And check the radiator!”
Ten minutes later, the three of them had finally settled around the slightly wobbly coffee table in the living room. Rather than trust hot soup on a surface that liked to tilt at ten-degree angles without warning they sat on the floor with bowls in their laps or set carefully aside; Joanna and Fiona sighed with relief, having found the wool socks and old blankets May had left on the front hall radiator to warm up for them.
(Well, Joanna had found an old blanket. Fiona was wrapped in Robyn’s bathrobe, which to this day May had never actually seen Robyn use.)
“So yeah,” Joanna started after a hasty gulp of soup. “They’re up to something out there, all right.”
“Really! I’m so glad we dedicated eight hours of surveillance to that.”
“Don’t be a bitch, May,” Fiona grumbled around her spoon. “They’re not just reopening the mine, it’s weird.”
May reluctantly flipped to a clean page in her notes. “Define ‘weird’.”
“As soon as the AceOps had the place cleaned out, they moved Amity over there,” Joanna said, before fishing in her pocket and tossing May her scroll. “Place swarming with troops by the time we left. Even you’d have trouble scoping it out now.”
May set the scroll to projection mode, glanced at the remaining battery power, and immediately fished under the sofa for a charging cable before the strain of a projection finished the poor thing off.
That was definitely Amity Arena. What the hell it was doing being relocated—well, at all, frankly, but especially way the hell out in the ass end of the tundra, to a military no-fly zone located over an abandoned mine shaft—was anyone’s guess. Even that might have flown under the radar; they hadn’t staked out an SDC mine in the middle of nowhere because there were military Huntsmen crawling all over the place. Mobilizing the entire AceOps team for a simple overrun mine, though, that had gotten Robyn’s attention.
Any time the AceOps were activated for something that even vaguely resembled their ostensible intended purpose, it was automatically suspicious.
Not alleviating her suspicions: The realization that their mission today had been to relocate the only independently-stable self-sustaining airborne mobile platform in the world, with all of its attendant advanced technology, storage space, and sensors, away from prying eyes. Or the fact that before she and Robyn parted ways, the first of several military transports full of building material and military-grade Dust had already taken off in its direction.
“Right,” May said. “So he’s building a superweapon.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Fiona chided. “We don’t know that. He totally is though.”
Joanna rolled her eyes. “I’m sure there’s plenty of benign reasons he could be—I can’t even say it. Yeah, this is gonna be some bullshit. Take a closer look though, it gets weirder.”
May squinted at the projection.
“...Who the hell are these people?”
“Definitely not military,” Fiona said, looking mystified. “But they’re walking around like they are. Came out of the mine with the AceOps, so they were part of the initial clear-out team.”
“Hold up,” May zoomed the photo in, which, annoyingly, did not lead to an accompanying increase in resolution. “That’s Weiss.”
“That’s what I thought!” Fiona exclaimed. “But I thought we should ask you to be sure.”
May hadn’t seen Weiss Schnee since...fuck, how long had it been? She hadn’t seen her since a lot of things, that was the point. But who else could that be? Unless the youngest Schnee had turned out more similar to May than she ever would expect—no, yeah, that was definitely Weiss, following in her stupid sister’s footsteps. Wearing the snowflake on her outfit and everything. Ugh.
“I thought Weiss Schnee was dead,” Joanna muttered. “Didn’t she disappear or something?
“Yeah, I remember hearing she blew up at some party and then vanished. Tabloids had a field day.” May shook her head. “Old Man Schnee said she had a breakdown and no one could see her, which, like, yikes.”
Joanna shook her head, jaw clenched angrily. “So who are the others?”
“No idea,” muttered May. Mostly for the sake of the thing, she took out her scroll and pulled up the Huntsman board app. There probably wouldn’t be anything, but… “No, wait. Oh, what the fuck. Look at this.”
She’d mostly been hoping, when she brought up the Active Status list, that they might recognize one of the others; Weiss Schnee would barely have been two years into the Academy if Beacon was still standing. She absolutely hadn’t expected to actually find the kid’s name.
“How the hell—”
“She’s licensed?!” demanded Fiona.
May flicked through the active Huntress board. “She’s not the only one. This—okay that can’t be right. Look at this kid’s birthday, she’s like twelve!”
Joanna leaned over for a look. “She’s seventeen.”
“Oh good, she’s seventeen. What the hell is this, the AceOps Youth Outreach Program?!”
“Ha, nice,” Fiona said. She had the Huntsman board open on her own scroll now, holding it one-handed while she drank out of the bowl with the other. After a second, she choked and barely avoided sloshing the soup everywhere.
“Breathe,” Joanna said.
Fiona shot her a poisonous glare as she carefully put her bowl down, and coughed a few more times before she could make words come out. “What—” she said. “What’s Ghira Belladonna’s daughter doing with Atlas?”
Joanna plucked Fiona’s scroll out of her hand. “You sure that’s her? There must be other Belladonnas out there.”
“Don’t insult me. That’s definitely her.”
“Ouch,” May said. “And I thought I was the family disappointment.”
Fiona snorted. “Funny. No, seriously, this doesn’t add up. White Fang Princess to Jackboot Auxiliary? Something weird is going on here.”
Joanna jolted upright. “I knew the blonde rang a bell. It’s that girl that broke a guy’s leg in the Vytal Festival!”
“Holy shit,” May said, “it is. Well, that’s par for the course, then.”
Fiona frowned. “Didn’t that guy turn out to be one of the people behind the attack? More to the point, what are all these kids doing in Ironwood’s inner circle?”
“And….Qrow Branwen,” announced May. Identifying the Vytal Festival teams had jogged her memory; all these kids had been Beacon students. So, filtering the current Active Status list by kingdom of licensure, she’d turned up...one. One foreign Huntsman. “Not a lot of official mission history in the past fifteen years, uh...temporary instructor at Signal Academy, that’s one of the junior combat schools in Vale...but constantly seen in and around Beacon and there’s a few missions in here that are classified on a level I’ve actually literally never seen before. So if anyone has a guess as to why he’s suddenly chaperoning the Atlas Academy Reserve Color Guard…”
“Or why that’s a thing that exists,” Fiona added.
“Mmm.” Joanna sat forward. “Well, Ironwood’s obviously expanding the AceOps.”
“Yeah, but...” Fiona sounded skeptical. “If he wants to do that, why pull random outsiders? He runs the Academy, what’s the point?”
Unfortunately, May suspected she knew the answer.
“Because he’s not just expanding a military unit,” she said grimly. “It’s the AceOps. His personal attack dogs. Personal loyalty above all else, right? These are Beacon survivors. They’ve got nowhere else to go, and he’s giving them everything. Protection, resources, a support network—”
“A really conditional support network,” muttered Fiona.
May acknowledged that with a half-nod but didn’t stop. “They’re alone, they’re traumatized, and they’re young enough to bond tightly to anyone who...saves them. Trust me, it’s not hard. That’s how he got Winter Schnee.” Joanna and Fiona exchanged a look; Joanna moved as if to squeeze May’s shoulder, and May waved the gesture off with a sharp movement before they could make this weird. “But on this scale, he couldn’t pull from the Academy; you can’t just grab second-year students and license them because you claim they’re good enough already.”
“But there’s no precedent for Beacon.” Joanna ran a hand through her hair. “Fuck.”
“Yeah. They’re already outside the system, it’s a unique situation, and he controls the military and the Huntsman academy. If he says they earned licensure based on field performance? No one can argue. And then they’re not in the Academy system at all anymore and he can do what he likes with them.”
They considered that for a long moment.
“Yikes,” said Fiona.
May rolled her shoulders. “Right.” In the absence of Robyn to figure out what the hell they were going to do about this, trying to at least figure out what ‘this’ was would have to do. “So, he clearly thinks whatever this secret project is will cause an outcry once it’s discovered, he wouldn’t need to triple the size of his secret police otherwise. We need to—oh, thank the gods.”
Robyn closed the door behind her, heavy rain sluicing off her jacket as she hung it up to drip sadly in the entryway.
“There’s soup in the kitchen,” called Joanna over her shoulder.
“Assuming Fiona left you any,” added May. “Robyn, you need to look at this, Ironwood’s up to a lot more than just…”
Her voice trailed off as she finally looked up. Something about the set of Robyn’s shoulders. She looked...exhausted. Weighed down.
“...Robyn?” Fiona’s voice was hesitant. “What happened?”
“Forest’s dead,” Robyn said quietly.
The low hum of the heating unit suddenly seemed very, very loud.
“Forest?” May stared aghast at Robyn. “What, you mean... our Forest? Forest Forest?”
Robyn’s sigh as she collapsed into a beat-up armchair was answer enough.
“...Wasn’t a Grimm, was it?” Joanna’s voice was even quieter than Robyn’s.
Robyn shook her head. “Single stab wound to the heart. He’d just been released from custody for some minor offense again. And they killed him and left him in an alley.”
“But…” Fiona’s voice wavered dangerously. “But he was harmless. He didn’t ever do anything, why would—”
“For the same reason they killed Laura Lyman last week.” May’s fists clenched hard. “Silencing anyone who speaks out.”
“Forest barely even counts!” Joanna sat forward, stunned. “He was almost a liability, this is just...”
Petty, May thought, clutching Joanna’s shoulder. It was petty, and cruel, and above all else...an unmistakable message. A warning in blood.
Robyn’s eyes were closed, elbows braced on her knees.
“I should have been there,” she breathed.
“That’s stupid,” Joanna retorted. “You can’t be everywhere. You had no way of knowing he’d even been arrested.”
“He trusted me.”
Fiona looked wretched. “Robyn,” she said, ears drooping like someone had tied lead weights to the end. “It’s not your fault...”
Robyn rested her face in her hands, breath just uneven enough to be viscerally wrong. It was a long several moments before she finally looked up again. May had honestly expected bloodshot eyes; for all that Forest had been an interminable thorn in their sides and a great deal of their time and energy had been dedicated to actively avoiding him—he’d believed in them. He was a fact of life, a landmark…
Robyn’s eyes held nothing but steel.
“I know,” she said, and the cold anger in her voice made all three of them sit up slightly straighter. “And we’re going to find out exactly whose fault it really is.”
Joanna pressed flat against the bricks.
They were vaguely sticky, and she tried extremely hard not to think about that as she counted down from twenty in her head, listening for any sound of movement. A truck rolled noisily past the end of the alleyway; she stood perfectly still, and either the shadows hid her profile or no one in the truck cared.
Or she’d just been tagged by an unmarked military vehicle and they would all get kidnapped in their sleep tonight. One of the three.
No point standing around worrying, though. It was cold.
The lock turned--realistically, it was nearly silent, but Joanna cringed at every slight catch in the mechanism. Still no sound of charging rifles or bolo activation; she pushed the door open and sidestepped out of the light just in case. Still nothing.
She knocked lightly on the doorframe, a quick four-beat IFF signal, then stepped into the dark and pulled the door closed behind her.
May appeared out of thin air the moment they were vaguely secure. “Have you heard from Fiona?”
A silent shake of the head was all the answer Joanna wanted to risk right now. She didn’t need to ask whether the hideout was secure; if May was the first to arrive, she would have thoroughly checked for intruders before dropping her Semblance, even for Joanna. Still. They couldn’t get carried away talking and risk someone sneaking up on them.
There was a faint sound—similar to the whisper of tires against pavement, and easy to disregard, except that there was no road on that side of the building.
Window, thought Joanna, dropping to one knee on the sheltered side of a steel countertop. May was already invisible.
A long pause.
Then: A light knock, followed by three more in a rapid pattern.
“Here,” Joanna said, voice low, and recognized Fiona by her sigh of relief before she emerged from the storeroom door.
“We’re just waiting on Robyn now,” added May. Fiona jumped slightly as May faded back into existence; she’d reached out to pull Fi in for a hug before bothering to drop the invisibility field.
Fiona leaned into the hug for a moment, before they all broke away to re-check the approaches. The odds that any of them had been followed were slim—they’d done this a hundred times. The other, nastier side of that particular King Taijitu, of course, was that they’d done this a hundred times. Even subconsciously, it was easy to get complacent. Forget to check one diagonal, neglect to skirt around one security camera because, well, it had never been switched on before…
“Clear,” May breathed from the kitchen window.
Fiona was slower, a series of clicks as she checked the locks on her section of the building. Then, softly: “Clear.”
Joanna stepped into a slice of shadow at the front of the old restaurant, dragging careful eyes across the rooflines of the surrounding buildings. Nothing. No movement behind the dirty glass windows. No suspicious falls of rust or disturbed fire escapes...
“It’s a communications tower!”
There was a horrifying series of loud bangs and crashes, as three hardened carbon-fiber bolts struck folded steel at high speed and were scattered across a variety of hollow steel surfaces.
“Robyn!” Joanna hissed as their fearless leader peered over the top of her shield.
Robyn cleared her throat, collapsing the fan once it became clear that her team wasn’t going to shoot her again.
“Nice reflexes,” she announced, punctuating her praise with a cheerful grin.
“Which of us came up with these security measures in the first place, Robyn?” May demanded.
Robyn waved her off. “I saw the three of you here, I knew you’d already have scoped it out.”
“We almost shot you!” Fiona hastily stowed her crossbows; Joanna fixed Robyn with a flat, judgemental look before slowly lowering her own..
“Not important,” Robyn said. “Ladies. I know what Amity is.”
Joanna stared at her. “A communications tower?”
Robyn pointed back at Joanna. “Exactly. Replacement for Beacon, except they’re going to boost it high enough to cover the whole globe, out of Grimm range.”
“How did you learn this while you were supposed to be running for your life?” asked May, who was difficult to distract.
Robyn flapped a vague hand in midair. “Not important. Well—alright. You’re going to yell at me. It was the kids—fisticuffs and the princess.”
“I’m going to yell at you,” Fiona agreed.
Joanna snorted. “Get in line.” When Robyn rolled her eyes, Joanna raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms. “You say regroup back at the hideout, we regroup back at the hideout,” she said pointedly. “If you get sidetracked and decide to investigate, we trust you to call us back in.”
Robyn sighed. “I wasn’t running a solo mission, Joanna.” Mmm. She probably hadn’t been, then; Robyn was the worst liar on Remnant, and Joanna Greenleaf knew her better than anyone. Sincerity burned in those big lavender eyes like torchlight. “They caught up to me.”
May looked like she was reconsidering that stuff about not shooting Robyn in the face. “You got run down by the Junior Varsity Police State and you stopped to talk to them?!”
“Without backup?” Fiona’s ears drooped with distress.
“Lambchop.” Robyn’s voice was kind, but her smirk was all Huntress cockiness. “I don’t need backup to deal with a couple of kids.”
“Yes, you do.” May huffed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Robyn—”
“They weren’t looking for a fight.” Robyn was pacing the room, hands flying in every direction. “I don’t think the AceOps’ new student interns are as deep in Ironwood’s pocket as he’d like to believe.”
Joanna heaved a sigh. “Ironwood will say anything right now, Robyn. Were you able to—”
“Belladonna let me confirm it.” Joanna didn’t try to hide her surprise; if Robyn had been able to work in a handshake, she really had kept the situation under control. “I took her hand. She gave me her hand. Atlas isn’t behind the murders in Mantle, and Ironwood is scared that if he reveals Amity Tower it’ll be sabotaged before it can be launched.”
Fiona frowned. “By who, us? He can’t be that paranoid.”
“Yes he can,” May interjected.
“No, not us,”said Robyn. “The same people who were behind Beacon. And the murders. And...election night.”
Fiona made a small, hesitant noise. “Whoever took me down was too fast for me to get a good look, but...I don’t know. It might have been Penny, it might not.”
Joanna sighed and reached over to give Fiona’s shoulder a quick squeeze. “The kids wouldn’t happen to have, I dunno, given you any details about these mystery villains?”
“Nope.” Robyn spread her hands apologetically. “AceOps started closing in. They led them on a wild Grimm chase while I escaped.”
“Or they didn’t,” May said darkly. “And the International Autocrat Apprenticeship Docket is about to lead them straight to us.” As Robyn tried to protest, she held up a hand. “Fine. Fine. I’m being a bitch about it. If you say they were telling the truth, I believe you. All I’m saying is that you’re taking a lot on faith here, Robyn! Just because they weren’t lying to you doesn’t mean Ironwood isn’t lying to them!”
There was a pause; then, Robyn closed her eyes and gave a long sigh. Suddenly Joanna’s own exhaustion was palpable; none of them had slept properly in months, Fiona was still on the mend from a wound that should never have taken this long to heal...
“I know,” Robyn said quietly, slumping back against a prep table. “They seemed to know what they were talking about, but misinformation is always a risk. But May, think about this. What if they’re right?”
Fiona rested her staff against the wall, and hopped up on the table to nuzzle into Robyn’s shoulder. Robyn ran fingers through Fiona’s curls on reflex, but after a moment she pushed off the counter to start pacing again.
Joanna had to admit, “It would make sense. Trying to shield a communications project from terrorists would explain a lot.”
“Explain?” Robyn gave a vulnerable, broken laugh. “Joanna, it would almost justify it. Almost. Some of it, not all.”
“The secrecy,” Joanna agreed. “Not the theft.”
“Of course not. But—gods. When we lost Beacon Tower we lost the world. People lost families, livelihoods...we need each other. If Atlas scientists can actually make this work, patch the network, stop the bleeding, that would be worth a lot of sacrifice.” Irritation creased her brow. “Not the safety of Mantle, and it’s not a sacrifice if no one consented—”
“We know,” said May flatly.
“—and no matter how important an ideal is, it can’t be more important than the lives of people who depend on you—”
“We know,” said May and Fiona in unison.
Robyn made a rude gesture in their direction without looking up. “But I would understand why he felt the need for secrecy even if his methods were wrong. A last-chance project like that would be precious beyond words…”
“Or they could be wrong,” Joanna reminded her, as softly as she could.
“Or they could be wrong,” Robyn repeated, even softer. “Either way, we’ll find out.”
Fiona strangled the air, too furious to curse.
Very carefully, ears twitching in every direction, she set her scroll down on the makeshift table. Then she muted her own comm bud, checked that the flaps on their jury-rigged command tent were closed, picked up a rock and threw it as hard as she could across the room.
“Fuck!”
It didn’t accomplish anything, but it made her feel better, okay?
She heard the rustle of the tent flaps being pushed aside behind her. “Uh, Fi? Kids running around. Many kids. Lot of them with very good hearing.”
“Radio discipline, Joanna!”
Joanna sighed. “Oh, boy.”
“Basic radio discipline! That’s all I’m asking!”
“The kids haven’t checked in yet?” guessed Joanna.
Fiona threw her hands up in the air and turned to face her. “Worse! They did, and then Yang started freaking out and said they had an emergency, and gave me no details!”
Joanna’s eyebrows knit in concern. “Yeah, that was half an hour ago. Nothing since?”
Biting down on a groan of frustration, Fiona chewed her lip and threw herself down onto a crate. “She cut the line. If it was—if they were more experienced Huntresses I’d just assume that meant they needed stealth, but—!”
The honest conclusion to that sentence was but I don’t have that much faith in them as field operatives, unfortunately. Fiona wasn’t quite feeling mean enough to say it out loud, but she was getting close.
It was a good thing Joanna understood her so well.
“Yeah,” she said, sitting down across from Fiona and handing her a chipped mug with some of the worst coffee on the planet. “They can hold their own. They’re tough. But when it comes to the details...well. I know who Ruby reminds us all of, but...they’re still just kids, Fi.”
Fiona grumbled, taking a sip of her coffee. It wasn’t as bad as she remembered, actually—it was way worse, she’d done a great job of suppressing the memory of exactly how vile this stuff was.
“Not to be all the superiority of Atlesian discipline or whatever...” she muttered uncharitably. Joanna laughed softly under her breath, and Fiona shot her a glare. “What?! We knew basic comm protocols at that age! I don’t know what they were teaching at Beacon, but—”
“They didn’t even go for a full year before it was destroyed,” Joanna said, reasonably.
“And they spent the last few months being groomed for the fucking AceOps! Not to sound like a fucking housepet while Atlas won’t even spare a bullet to shoot us with, but I would have thought they’d at least drill these kids on how to—in the time it takes to say ‘you wouldn’t believe me, we have to go’ you could have given literally any information at all, I don’t...”
After a long moment, Joanna reached out and squeezed her hand.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m worried too.”
Fiona’s guts twisted nastily, with a twinge like when she’d stumbled over Robyn’s name a minute ago. You grew up in Mantle knowing how easily you could lose people without warning. Maybe to the cold, maybe to the Grimm, maybe to a mine accident; maybe to any of the hundreds of conditions that didn’t have to be fatal, that wouldn’t be if only you had any resources, any help at all.
Robyn had been—they’d been so close to being able to make it better—
And no matter how convinced you were that you’d made your peace with how quickly people could die, it was never supposed to happen like this.
They’d already lost Robyn and they didn’t even know how. May was on radio blackout ‘until’ she got clear of Atlas, and they all knew the odds of that happening. And they barely knew these stupid kids with their stupid bright Vale colors and their stupid impulsive kindness but it was just...one thing too many. One loss too many. Too many Mantle dead after last night, and too many about to follow them, and somehow Fiona couldn’t stand losing a handful of selfless young Huntsmen and Huntresses who didn’t even have stakes in this fight to begin with.
Of course, that was the other thing you learned growing up in Mantle. The world never really cared how much you could bear. Sometimes bad things just happened.
“Aw, Fi.” Joanna half-stood and held out an arm; Fiona, who hadn’t realized she was crying until that moment, swallowed painfully and stumbled into her lap. “Hey. I’m here.”
She didn’t say: Everything will be okay. Joanna never lied, not to them.
“I’m here,” Joanna breathed again, holding her tight. Fiona, nuzzling into her chest, wasn’t the only one crying.
The comm beeped.
Fiona whimpered. Her grip tightened reflexively in Joanna’s shirt.
She took a deep breath, forced her hands to lie flat, and let the breath out slowly.
Unmuting her comm with a faint click, she forced herself to smile. “Fiona here.”
“Fiona, it’s Crimson. We’ve gotten the Sector 8 pediatric ward safe on their way, but we’re getting chatter on the Mantle PD comms about Grimm swarming around the Sector 11 hospital. They won’t be able to hold there forever, and they’ve got ICU patients it’ll take time to move. What’s the plan?”
Fiona made eye contact with Joanna. Took a deep breath. Closed her eyes.
“Okay!” she said brightly, pulling the map closer. “So, here’s what we’re gonna do…”
May Marigold was making tea.
Scarlet lightning, hissing and unnatural, forked across the sky. It illuminated the hellish outline of something that made Leviathan-class Grimm look like a bad joke; and smaller, closer, the twisted winged shapes that should never have been seen outside a nightmare.
May Marigold was making tea aggressively.
At the moment there didn’t seem to be anything else she could do. Mantle was burning but her first duty had to be to the critically injured teenager in her care; until they...knew, one way or the other, Nora Valkyrie couldn’t be moved and her friends wouldn’t leave her. Their loyalty spoke well of them, but holy shit, were they ever needed elsewhere right now.
Fighting the urge to throw something across a kitchen the size of her entire apartment, May set down the kettle with deliberate care.
She was restless enough to scream and just barely sane enough to know staying with the kids a bit longer was everyone’s best hope. A few times she’d actually been tempted to go outside and start taking potshots at the Grimm over Atlas, which would be insane as well as pointless. One lone Huntress was worse than useless up here, even if she wasn’t bound to be arrested on sight, which she absolutely was. Heh. On sight…
“May?”
For a house as obscenely large as Schnee Manor, it really was impossible to get five minutes away from them. In fairness, which May was trying so hard to extend, the Schnee standing hesitantly in the kitchen doorway was the least objectionable of the lot. “I was just wondering if you’d heard…”
“They’re both busy,” May said, snapping a bit more than she’d meant to. “Fiona said she’d call me back once they had a lull.” You know. In the Grimm.
Weiss’s wince said she’d heard that last part, and May stubbornly attempted to not feel bad about it.
“If…” Weiss twisted her fingers. “If we knew that Nora would be safe here…”
“I know,” May bit out. She very carefully did not point out that Nora was a hell of a lot safer here, in a quiet, empty house away from the front lines, than literally anyone in Mantle.
Weiss nodded absently. “But my mother...can’t be relied on, to provide...well. And I don’t trust Whitley.”
May snorted. “I’m familiar.” Well. With Willow Schnee, anyway, who seemed to have only deteriorated over the years. The other kid hadn’t been past crayon age when May left, but he seemed to be growing up into a lovely little parasite.
“Right,” Weiss said. “You’ve, um...probably been here before, huh?”
May shot her a look. Probably? Weiss hadn’t been that young, had she? “Mmm. Don’t have the way to the kitchen memorized any more than you do—” Weiss blushed a little, and May tried not to feel petty, “—but yeah. You could...say that.”
“Right,” Weiss repeated, trailing off awkwardly for something to say.
...Oh my gods, May realized. She doesn’t know who I am.
That was actually the closest anything had come to making her want to laugh in, like, days. Of course Weiss didn’t recognize her—Winter’s little sister had been at that most beautifully self-absorbed age at the time, and May hadn’t exactly been sending holiday cards…
May took the now-screaming kettle off the stove, and opened her mouth to explain it.
...Nah.
“Gosh, when was the last time I was here?” May pondered aloud. “You must have been, what...fifteen? Fourteen? Something like that.”
Weiss laughed a little, and May didn’t know her well enough to tell if it was nervous or not, but she really hoped it was. “It’s hard to place things like that sometimes, those stupid company events all blend together...I, um, met Henry a few months back. At the last one I was at.”
May’s grin was almost natural this time. “Didn’t you sic a Goliath on him or something? I popped a bottle of champagne for you down in Mantle when I heard that one. And yes, we have champagne in Mantle.”
“It was a boarbatusk!” Weiss said indignantly. “And I didn’t mean to! Besides, it wasn’t him that set me off.” She visibly rethought. “Well. Maybe a little bit.” Another pause. “...He tried to hit on me.”
“Oh, you poor thing.”
Weiss’ glare said that she did not think May’s sympathy was entirely genuine. May, who’d been smirking the whole time, was not surprised. Throwing the kid a bone, she turned away to pour tea and said casually, “Henry’s always been my least favorite cousin. You could have smacked him with something, Snowflake. I don’t ask for much, you know.”
“Well. I kicked him out of the party. He didn’t even know what it was raising money for!”
May clicked her tongue. “He always was an idiot. What you’re supposed to do at those parties is sneak off and vandalize stuff. Or, maybe that’s just me.” She flashed her Semblance on and off, to emphasize.
“That was you?!”
May gave an elaborate, flourishing bow in Weiss’ direction. “My handiwork precedes me. All I did was make more work for the staff, really, but we were all young and stupid once.”
Weiss narrowed her eyes. “Is that supposed to be an insult? I can never tell with you.”
May tried so hard not to smirk. “Now I didn’t name any names, did I?” She gave a fond sigh. “I always wondered if they suspected it was me. If I’d known you Schnee kids could kick people out yourselves I wouldn’t have put in the effort to sneak around, I’m going to kill Winter. She said she couldn’t get me out of it.”
Weiss rolled her eyes. Her shoulders had tensed, just a bit, at the mention of Winter, but she crossed her arms and leaned against the counter.
“What did you do?” she demanded. “With your Semblance, surely someone would have put two and two together!”
May leaned across the counter opposite her, putting on a deliberately casual air as she examined her fingernails. “Oh, you know…messed with the thermostats, drew on some portraits, stole some random crap—all the matching sugar bowls, your dad’s left socks, your sister’s virginity, that sort of thing.”
It only took Weiss a heartbeat, but May savored it. The poor kid took a step back, startled into the next Kingdom. “I—you— what? But Winter isn’t— wait—”
May grinned. You could almost watch the neurons fire in real time.
She jolted again in delayed realization. “Oh! You’re—I didn’t know, I mean I knew you’d left Atlas but—I mean, um…you look great! Oh gods that was so condescending of me—”
Weiss’ face was scarlet, and May would feel bad for the kid if this was even slightly less funny. I’m a terrible person, she thought to herself with something like cheerfulness, and cleared her throat. “Been trying to place a May Marigold all day, haven’t you?”
Weiss buried her face in her hands, elbows on the counter. “I’m so sorry. I knew you for years and—I’m such an idiot.”
At that moment, Ruby stuck her head in through the slightly-ajar door. “Heyyyyy guys. Everything okay?” The way she bounced anxiously on the balls of her feet belied the forced-light tone, but after a moment she paused. An eyebrow quirked. “What did Weiss do now?”
Weiss did the only thing you could do in this situation, which was moan unintelligibly into her hands and hope the ground would swallow her.
May patted her shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, kid. I set you up so bad.” She was about to grab a tea tray and make her way up the stupid number of marble stairs in this place when her scroll beeped. Fiona’s face flashed up at her.
She actually fumbled the cabinet doorknob, fingers skittering off the metal; suddenly nerveless as pure, uncut relief rushed through her veins.
Weiss’ breath caught too. Across the room, Ruby froze. When she spoke, silver eyes too wide, her voice was high and soft. “Is that…”
May slid three cups of tea across the counter. “Be a good girl and take these to your friends,” she told Weiss, who was most in need of an excuse to flee the room. Ruby hurried forward to take the remaining cups, and May did her best to offer them both a reassuring smile. “I’ll see if Fi can tell me anything about the others yet.”
She didn’t answer the call until the door closed behind them.
They’d hoped, at first, that comm-signal interference from the mine shafts might help.
There’d been a real chance. With everyone running for their lives answering an Atlas ping wasn’t exactly a priority, and very few scrolls had the power to pick up on any kind of broadcast once you got deep enough underground. Hell, scroll signals were spotty in the Crater to begin with; one of the first things they’d done when setting up a field headquarters was rig a proper long-range antenna just to be able to talk to the rest of Mantle.
There’d been a real chance...but it hadn’t been enough. Ironwood’s ultimatum got through loud and clear.
And once that news got out there was nothing anyone, least of all Joanna Greenleaf, could do to stop it. She wasn’t even sure she had the right to try.
“Maybe he’s bluffing,” someone said, deep in the tunnels behind her. “I mean, he has to be, right?”
No one bothered to respond to the man. If he really believed that, more power to him. If he didn’t, he didn’t need them pointing it out. And everyone knew he didn’t really believe it. A few minutes ago, Fiona had hollowly reported overhearing a betting pool; people were putting lien on whether they would die from the bomb, or be overrun by Grimm from the concentrated despair before Atlas got the chance.
Personally, Joanna’s money would have been on the Grimm. It wouldn’t be long now.
Fiona’s fingers clenched in Joanna’s shirt as she took a shaky breath.
“Hey,” May whispered. Joanna tightened her hold on them both by reflex. “Fiona. Don’t...we’re still here. We’re still Huntresses, we still...we still have a job to do…”
For the first time Joanna could remember, it wasn’t enough.
“We were so close,” Fiona choked, voice cracking into a sob halfway. “We were gonna be okay, we were...we did our job, we were going to...he told them to fire on our evac ships and they did it!”
For nothing more than spite.
The thing Joanna couldn’t get over, personally, was the other option he’d given to Penny Polendina. That, if she cooperated, he’d leave Mantle to fend for itself. They’d be left to die slowly, in the same way they’d been abandoned the day before, and he’d framed it as mercy. Joanna had seen some goalposts moved in her time, but that was an impressive feat of goalpost engineering even by Atlesian standards.
“Will they do it?” she asked, as quietly as she could, not even certain what she hoped the answer would be. She was a Huntress with civilians to protect, and her entire soul demanded she keep her people alive for as long as she possibly could…
But the rest of her refused with steely clarity to accept being used as collateral like this. If they were going to die no matter what, let it be with dignity. Let it be quick. Let it be personal and petty and cruel and undeniable, something Atlas could never sidestep the responsibility for. Mantle’s blood would be on Ironwood’s hands no matter what happened; if they were dead either way, she wanted that blood to stain.
A small child was crying somewhere in the tunnels. That made it hard to cling to the comfort of their deaths providing a political statement.
Fiona lifted her head. “May?” she prompted. “Will they…?”
“I don’t know,” May breathed. “I don’t know. They might try something stupid. They won’t just submit to Ironwood, those stupid kids don’t know when to quit, but they’re not just going to let Mantle die.”
“Maybe they’ll figure something out,” Joanna suggested. “I wouldn’t put it past them to pull off a miracle at this point.”
“They did.” May’s voice was flat and dead. “Ironwood just had it shot out of the sky.”
And that was the fundamental truth that was slowly suffocating what remained of Mantle. They’d used the last of their tricks. They’d pooled every resource they had and it wasn’t enough. They’d pulled out all the stops, and the tide wasn’t turning. Every system had been exploited, turned on its head, or ruthlessly dismantled to get it out of their way; every piece of good luck had been taken full advantage of; every single unexpected ally had done their part. And the bleeding just wouldn’t stop.
They were out of time, out of options, and had just lost their last hope.
Joanna had expected panic when the ultimatum went out. The silent, deadened despair slowly percolating through the mines was somehow worse. It was like none of them even remembered what anything else felt like—except that the sharp knife-edge of that brief hope was still lodged somewhere in her gut and it hurt.
There was a loud buzzing noise.
It repeated twice more before May finally stirred, making a tiny pained noise in her throat as Ruby Rose’s face shone up from her scroll.
“Oh, kid,” Joanna sighed. Then, “You need to answer her.”
May’s hand shook wildly. “I…can’t.”
Fiona squeezed her hand and trembled; Joanna frowned slightly. “May?”
“I can’t,” May repeated, three days of stress and exhaustion escaping in one grief-stricken word. “What am I supposed to say? Surrender? Don’t give him what he wants, it’s fine if all these innocent people die? I can’t tell her it’s all right, I can’t—do this anymore, Joanna, I’m not— Robyn, I’m not…”
“Tell her it’s not her fault,” Fiona whispered. “At least tell her we don’t hate her.”
May made a high, incomprehensible noise of miserable frustration and buried her face in Joanna’s shoulder—and then, swallowing heavily, thumbed her scroll open and accepted the call, voice-only.
“...Hey, kid,” she managed, and pulled away to talk more privately. Joanna fought back a spike of panic and let her go, just for a moment. They had at least twenty-five minutes left, she—she would get her back. Before the end.
Joanna Greenleaf closed her eyes and tried to breathe, holding Fiona closer to compensate for the remaining two-thirds of her soul. Maybe, if Robyn hadn’t been shot yet, at least one of them would make it; maybe Mantle would be avenged, at least, and she knew it was a good thing that Robyn was out of the line of fire…
But she couldn’t bring herself to wish that May had stayed up there with the kids she and Fiona had taken to jokingly calling the interns. (That was, they’d decided, what Robyn would have called them.) Even if she’d only come home to die here Joanna was selfishly glad to be able to hold her, to say goodbye. She would have given just about anything for one minute to talk to Robyn again.
May slid her scroll closed and crossed back to them. Joanna reached out and pulled her close as soon as she was near enough to touch, but something was...off. May was pale, stiff, her eyes wide; and she was staring at the scroll in her hands like she’d never seen one before.
Fiona’s shoulders tensed.
“...May?” Her ears turned forward anxiously. “What...is it? What did they say?”
May opened and closed her mouth twice before she could answer.
“...Remember what you said about a miracle?”
Night in Vacuo was a little more comfortable. Well...more recognizably uncomfortable, rather. As if to underline the point, a gust of chilly desert wind chose that moment to blow over the large flat rock where the four—three of them had decided to camp out for the night.
The sand was new.
She could see one of the largest refugee camps in Remnant’s history sprawled out in front of her, against the walls of Vacuo. May...couldn’t let herself think about how appalling their conditions were right now. It was only the first night, and everyone was too exhausted to do more than the bare minimum to stay alive to the morning. They’d get better. They just...needed time.
And help.
May sighed, lay back, and stared up at the night sky.
“Weird being able to see it,” Fiona said beside her.
“Yeah,” Joanna agreed.
Theoretically they were all supposed to be sleeping. May wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to sleep again.
After a few minutes, the sound of footsteps nearby made May sit back up to see who was approaching.
“Um,” said the girl with an awkward wave. “Hi, sorry. I was just...wondering if there’s anything I can do.”
May sighed and dragged her hands over her face. “Not sure there’s much to do right now, we’re still waiting for the next crisis. Just get some sleep, uh...”
She glanced over at the kid anxiously rubbing her elbow a few yards away, and realized she had absolutely no fucking clue who this was. She’d just...showed up? During the evacuation? May hadn’t questioned it at the time because there’d been kind of a lot going on, but...
“What’s your name?”
The kid startled a little. “Oh! Um. Emerald. Miss Marigold. Ma’am.”
May raised an eyebrow. “No, I’m Miss Marigold, ma’am.”
Joanna rolled her eyes, too tired to laugh, and elbowed May in the side.
“Nice to meet you, Emerald,” Joanna said, offering the kid a hand. “You did good work on those Ravagers. You were in Atlas Academy, right?”
That was about what May had figured. The custom weapons, the combat experience; Ruby—and something stabbed her in the heart again—Ruby had picked her up somewhere between the Amity mission and the evacuation, so she couldn’t be from Mantle…
So May wasn’t expecting the girl to cringe out of Joanna’s handshake quite that hard over a pretty neutral question. Clearly, Joanna hadn’t either; she let go like she’d been burned, and held her hands up in a calming gesture.
Finally, Fiona managed to lift her head away from her knees.
“Hey,” she said softly. Her smile was weak and tired, but genuine. “It’s okay. We all went to the Academy, you know, it’s not like we’re gonna hold it against you or anything...”
Fiona trailed off because it was very apparent that every word she was saying was making this worse. “I—no, I didn’t go to the Academy,” Emerald said, arms folded tightly across her stomach. “I just—are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help right now?”
“Easy there, kid,” Joanna said, tentatively reaching out a hand again. “Whatever you’re worried about, we’re just happy to have the—”
“I used to work for Salem!”
Fiona blinked rapidly. “Um.”
Judging by the look on her face, Emerald hadn’t expected to say that out loud any more than they’d expected to hear it. Unable to take it back now, she was cringing like she expected to be struck. “I—was with them. Cinder recruited me back—before I knew about Salem, but that’s not an excuse, and I helped with the Fall of Beacon, and—and I came to Atlas with Salem, and I helped everyone escape from her on the whale and evacuate Atlas but—”
“Okay,” said May, holding up a hand. “Okay, let’s—slow down, kid—”
“Look, I know I should have left sooner,” said Emerald, defensiveness creeping in under the deluge of guilt. “I know it took too long for me to switch sides, I was stupid, okay? I thought—I owed Cinder, I didn’t care about anything else. I thought I owed her for saving me, I thought a lot of stupid shit, and I know I have to earn the right to have anyone trust me. But I’m, you know. Here now. I guess. I mean, I can’t leave, so...not that I want to!”
“Wow,” said Fiona. She nudged May’s elbow. “She’s almost as bad as you.”
“Ha ha,” May growled. “Go back to sleep.” Then she turned to Emerald again, because the kid was likely as not to break in half if they didn’t calm her down. “Look, I’ll be honest. If you helped pull that evacuation off? I don’t care what else you’ve done. Mantle takes care of its own.”
“And I’m guessing Salem’s not the type you can just leave a two-weeks notice with,” Joanna added softly.
That was a really good point, and if she’d gotten any sleep in the past three days May would have thought of it sooner. “Do you need protection?” she asked, sitting up a little straighter. “She knows you switched sides, right? She’ll be gunning for you.”
Emerald flinched again—and May kicked herself because yeah, sure, the kid needed to be told that—but she nodded, shakily. “She—she almost—she caught us, and if Hazel hadn’t...she was going to...”
“You don’t have to say it,” Fiona said, wincing. “We get the idea.”
“Use a buddy system,” Joanna ordered firmly. “Someone you trust. Don’t go anywhere alone for now. We’ll make sure no one asks you to.”
Emerald took a deep breath and clenched her hands to stop them shaking. “I’m—fine, I don’t need any special treatment…”
May looked at her for a moment.
“Fuck,” she finally said. “This is what I sound like, isn’t it?”
“Kind of,” Fiona hedged.
“Every single day,” said Joanna flatly. “Every single day of your life.”
Emerald looked between them, looking vaguely exasperated at their failure to produce torches and pitchforks. “It’s not exactly the same thing,” she pointed out. “I was...like, a minion of evil.”
“Kid,” May said flatly. “I was a Marigold. It is the same thing.”
“Tch,” said Emerald, rolling her eyes expressively.
Behind her, May heard Fi and Jo whisper “oh my gods” in unison.
“Don’t even start,” she muttered over her shoulder. Then she turned back to Emerald and...tried to be reassuring. “And you listen. So you had your crisis of conscience later than you probably should have? Join the club. Our magnificent new Winter Maiden could sure use the company. What matters is you’re on our side now. You’re gonna be fine.”
Emerald stared at the ground for a long time, swallowing heavily. Finally, drawn like a compass needle, she turned to look out into the desert.
They’d all caught themselves doing the same thing, for the past few hours. Gazing for just a little too long at an empty point in the air.
“...It should have been me,” she muttered.
Fiona’s shoulders crept up around her ears. May, a hard ball of iron suddenly lodged in her throat, took a moment to furiously blink away the sand that had clearly gotten into her fucking eyes.
“Like I said,” she managed, finally. “Join the club, kid.”