Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You learned a lot of things when you grew up on the streets of Mantle.

No combat school or Academy could provide that kind of education. You learned how to run, make threat assessments, memorize street layouts; how to scan diagonals for cops and particularly touchy gang lookouts, how to judge distances. How and when to lie—and how and when to tell the truth.

Tonight, Robyn was learning quite a lot about flour.

Contrary to what you’d expect from a girl with blood as blue as her hair, May was actually a very good cook, having made it a point of pride to learn long before she came down to Mantle. Fiona was a wizard at making a grocery budget stretch and Joanna was...resourceful with an empty pantry, in her own way. But neither of them had much skill with anything that didn’t come pre-frozen, and as Robyn’s sole experience with cooking involved skewering things with sticks and holding them over a fire, May’s ability to work with actual ingredients made her a gift from the gods all over again.

Still. Robyn grumbled unflattering things about Atlesian socialites that weren’t really fair as she shifted the unwieldy paper sack under her arm. Flour was flour.

Bread flour, Robyn. We need bread flour, not all-purpose. That’s why I wrote “bread flour” on the grocery list, right there. It’s stronger, better structural support, that’s absolutely essential when you’re working with yeast, otherwise—never mind. Anyway, don’t feel bad, it’s easy to miss. I only underlined it three times! And highlighted it! With an arrow, pointing to the word ‘bread’. How could I ever have expected you to see something like that.

Come to think of it, being the leader of this little band really should make Robyn immune to being sent back out in shame to purchase the right kind of fucking bread flour for May Marigold’s sensibilities. 

Despite Joanna’s gleeful mockery when she’d complained about it, Robyn did not actually think ten pounds of flour was heavy, per se. But it was awkward to carry, to put it mildly, especially wrapped in plastic against the rain. It’d be less annoying if the four of them weren’t all so damn principled, honestly; there was a perfectly suitable chain supermarket just around the corner from their apartment, but Robyn always insisted on buying from independent, locally-owned grocers. 

Even when it was fucking cold out and May was being a tyrant and sending her to make a second several-block walk to get her stupid fucking flour.

She should have brought Fiona. Robyn lamented this in the privacy of her own head, since gods knew she’d never admit it out loud. Fiona, bless her for her loyalty in the midst of the callous betrayals of the rest of her team, had actually offered to help. Well, she’d expressed concern about Robyn being out by herself after dark, which was close enough. But no, Robyn had to have her pride and her consideration for others, and Fiona had been run ragged over the past week ever since the latest perimeter breach. She deserved a rest.

Besides, as Robyn had assured her team, it was very unlikely that she was going to get hit by a falling rock between here and the apartment. She stopped for a moment, rolled her neck to pop the kinks out. She would have put her precious cargo down for a moment to rest, but there was no point to taking a break in this damn rain. 

Actually...scratch that, this was as good an excuse as any to check in with Pietro. It’d been too long since she’d been able to stop by, and the light was on at the clinic this week.

She knocked her foot against the base of the door three times before bumping her shoulder against the pressure pad to buzz herself in. It was just about after hours, but the pad would send an alert through to the residency if he’d locked up for the night.

Naturally, he hadn’t. It’d be a cold day in Vacuo before Pietro Polendina shut down operations at normal hours, for which Robyn was far from the only citizen of Mantle to be grateful.

Pietro looked up in surprise from where he’d been examining something under eight increasingly large focal lenses. A wide smile split his face. “Robyn! It’s been too long.” His chair shuffled backward and delicately sidestepped his workstation so that he could approach. After a moment, his welcoming expression faltered. “Has something happened?”

Robyn’s smile was warmed by the clinic’s heater as she pulled the door closed behind her. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said teasingly. “Me showing up on your doorstep unannounced after dark has always been a good omen!”

Pietro sagged with relief, gesturing her back toward the residency. “Well,” he sighed. “I don’t complain about quiet nights, that’s for certain. Come in, sit down! What can I help you with tonight?”

“Do I need a reason to check in with an old friend whose office has a really high-quality heater?”

Laughing softly, Pietro pulled out a chair at his battered kitchen table. Robyn deposited her bread flour on the seat and reached around him to turn down the heat seconds before a pot on the stove boiled over.

“Oh!” Pietro looked embarrassed, but only just. “Yes. Thank you. I had...well, never mind that. How are you holding up? How are the girls?”

“Fiona and Joanna are doing just fine,” Robyn said cheerfully, “May is dead to me because apparently her sourdough starter is too good to eat all-purpose flour . I didn’t even know…”

Robyn blinked. She’d just noticed that behind Pietro there was a young girl tentatively poking her head around the doorway. Mid-teens, Robyn guessed, bright orange hair, freckles. Not a patient, if she was back here.

Robyn cleared her throat. “Hello? I don’t believe we’ve met.”

The girl jumped badly, seeming to only just realize that being able to see into the kitchen meant she could be seen from the kitchen. With a muted squeak, she leapt back around the corner.

“No.” Pietro’s voice was soft and his smile was softer, even though Robyn could recognize the tension in his shoulders. “No, I don’t suppose you have. Penny, it’s all right. Robyn’s a friend. Come and say hello, she won’t hurt you.”

When the girl—Penny—appeared again, Robyn flashed her most disarming smile. “Hi, there. I’m Robyn Hill, I’ve been a friend of Doctor Polendina here since...I was about your age, actually.”

After a pause of a few seconds, Penny smiled brightly and waved at her. “Salutations, Robyn Hill! You don’t look like most of my father’s friends that I’ve met.”

Robyn’s lips twitched. Pietro was a good sort, but he was deeply embedded in Atlesian society, so that wasn’t a surprise. And then her brain caught up to her ears, and her head snapped back around.

Pietro scratched the back of his head, sheepish and looking absolutely nothing like the young woman biting her lip on the other side of the kitchen. “It’s…a long story.”

“I’m adopted!” Penny clarified, before hiccupping and clapping a hand over her mouth.

“You—” If Robyn was being honest, it wasn’t remotely a shock. Pietro had a small cadre of orphans from all parts of Mantle who’d relied on him for a bed and a hot meal every so often for years. He was part of the city’s beating heart, and he was exactly the kind of man who should be a father. That he’d finally given in and made it official was only a mild surprise, compared to the fact that Robyn hadn’t heard anything until now. “That’s wonderful, Penny. How long…?”

Pietro coughed. “Well...that depends on how you define it, really.”

“I’ve...known Dr. Polendina for several years,” Penny said, glancing at him for some kind of signal. When he nodded encouragingly, she brightened and continued. “He’s been very kind to me while I was in Atlas. The other doctors think I’m ready to leave the facility now! As long as I’m with my father.”

Something in the back of Robyn’s head pricked its ears at that phrasing. A hospital setting, then, or some kind of juvenile facility, but Penny’s demeanor and talk about doctors suggested the former. Poor kid. No wonder she’d wormed her way into Pietro’s heart.

“The adoption process takes several years,” Pietro explained, awkward and embarrassed for some reason. “And until we were...certain, you understand…”

Penny hugged herself, briefly unhappy. Robyn nodded to Pietro in acknowledgement that any further information was private; it was no one’s place to push the girl, least of all hers. His daughter’s medical history was none of Robyn’s business.

She sat forward and offered a hand—soft and open, palm up, rather than a businesslike handshake. Beaming, Penny bounced forward and took it in a crushing grip.

Ow. Whatever health problems she’d been dealing with, they clearly hadn’t caused any muscle damage. 

“You two deserve each other,” Robyn told her with admirable warmth and steadiness, gingerly extracting her throbbing weapon hand. “I’m glad I got the chance to meet you, Penny.”

“Likewise!” Shyness having been left at the door, Penny dropped into an empty seat. “Are you a Huntress?”

Robyn grinned. “Did the crossbow give it away?”

“Oh, it’s a crossbow!” Penny was practically vibrating. “You’re not dressed like an Atlas Huntress though! Are you not with the military? Have you gone rogue?” She gasped dramatically. “Are you on the run from the law?!”

“Darling.” Pietro looked on the verge of a heart attack, but Robyn just laughed.

“No, Penny, I’m just an independent Huntress in Mantle. We do exist, whatever Ironwood wants you to think.”

Penny gasped again. “Oh gosh, you’re like the Huntresses in the storybooks!”

Robyn exchanged a fond look with Pietro. “Not exactly like the stories. But you’re not the first one to make that comparison. Even if it’s too high praise.”

“Mmm.” Pietro shook his head in disapproval. “You’ll never convince me, Robyn. Though I’ll admit, before too long you may not be the finest young Huntress under this roof anymore.”

Penny bounced in her seat, making the wood creak. In answer to Robyn’s curious look, she exclaimed, “I’ve been accepted to Atlas Academy for the spring semester! General Ironwood says I’m combat ready!”

Robyn tried not to let her surprise show—she knew better than most how deceiving appearances could be. “That’s fantastic, Penny. Maybe you’ll be watching my back in a few years.”

“I sure hope so, ma’am.” The faux salute Penny threw her was deliberately overacted and she smiled, but there was a serious determination behind the banter. “General Ironwood says that when I’m older and I have more training, it will be my duty to protect all of Remnant, not just Atlas and Mantle.”

Robyn’s eyebrows raised. “Did he now?” That certainly didn’t sound like him, but before Robyn could say anything else Pietro shot her an exasperated look. Alright, fine, no radicalizing his teenage daughter at the dinner table. Spoilsport. “Well, Remnant will be in great hands. You want to see my crossbow up close?”

That led to several minutes of Penny excitedly fawning over Robyn’s left forearm, babbling strings of rapid-fire questions about its design at her, and after that came even more questions about what it was like being a Huntress. Pietro, keeping the pasta warm by the stove, didn’t even try to get the girl to sit down and eat. Robyn happily answered them all until she finally glanced at the clock and bit down on a curse.

“This has been lovely, but I really do need to get back home,” Robyn said, getting to her feet. “See you around, kid.” 

Penny waved. “Goodbye, Miss Hill! I hope that we see each other again soon!”

“Me too.” A thought occurred to her. “And hey, if you ever want any tips on how to get away with stuff at the Academy without Ironwood noticing—”

“Robyn.”

The rain had let up, which was a small mercy but one Robyn would take.

Penny Polendina waved enthusiastically from her father’s open doorway, warm light spilling into the street; Robyn shifted her bread flour under one arm to wave back.

“Goodbye Robyn! Do not get eaten by a creature of Grimm!” Penny called, hands cupped around her mouth.

Robyn laughed. “I’ll do my best. You keep an eye on that one,” she added with a nod toward Pietro. “He works too hard and forgets to eat.”

Pietro muttered something about hypocrisy that Robyn chose not to hear. Penny for her part shot off a sharp, wildly incorrect military salute before turning and dramatically marching Pietro back inside.

Smiling to herself, Robyn hefted her flour sacks and made her way down the dark street.

The heating grid was working at maximum power, with someone pressed close against it in the street every few hundred feet; inches made the difference between life and death at night here. But there was no technology in the world that could actually blunt the knife edge of a Solitas winter. Not really. If you curled up directly against the grid the temperature was dragged just barely above fatal; but any further and the cold cut you open.

Adding to the city’s charms, the fluctuations in that heating grid meant that snow melted before it hit the ground, then froze as the heat was tugged away by a sharp breeze, then melted again, lather, rinse, repeat. Atlas, with its more modern, steadier heating system, often failed to understand why Mantle’s infrastructure needed such frequent repair.

A lot of Mantle’s music and poetry made heavy reference to black ice, was the point here.

A young man with fluffy, black-tipped vulpine ears glanced up at her, sidestepping absently out of her way. He didn’t pay her much notice; his attention was focused on a faulty lighter as he tried to light a cigarette.

“Evening, ma’am,” he murmured, a rote call-and-response. Robyn nodded politely in his direction as she passed.

Maybe it was the cold, or the exhaustion, or the lingering glow of unexpected happiness from the Polendinas; maybe it was the distraction of her own internal monologue as she mentally workshopped how to, once again, try to explain to Atlesians what constant melting and refreezing did to building facades and plumbing systems and, gods, the roads . Maybe it was her seventeenth impromptu ice-dancing routine as she hit yet another patch of invisible ice on the sidewalk that ruined her awareness.

Or maybe she was just stupid that night.

Robyn didn’t fall for this shit. She was—well, she was a wily little fox who knew a trap when she saw one. She was crater trash through and through, she’d grown up on the worst streets in Mantle and she knew how to survive them. She didn’t get mugged. It just didn’t happen.

One step past the mouth of a dark alley, the homeless man whose tense shoulders Robyn had noticed stood and shrugged off his coat. Another step, and he moved to block her path. She paused halfway into the third, and had just enough time to register that he was wearing very high-end body padding for one of Mantle’s homeless before the fox faunus slammed a nightstick between her shoulder blades.

She stumbled forward, reflex rather than instinct extending her gauntlet fan; she nearly slit her own throat as the feather blades sprang open, but it blocked a blow to the face from the man in front of her. He pushed forward, using his weight to force her back, and Robyn realized they were trying to manhandle her into the alley—like hell was she going to let that happen. 

Almost before she completed the thought, she heard a loud clang from a fire escape above her; the feet of the third assailant. He swung down, kicking her in the chest, and sent her sliding into the alley before she could react.

There were two more of them waiting, and Robyn felt real fear for the first time. Five on one, close quarters—

One of the two men she’d just been kicked into grabbed her by the elbow. Robyn’s left hand flashed before she could catch up to her whirling thoughts, slicing at his eyes. The blow missed, but he jerked away regardless and she was able to shake her arm free.

She ducked under a swipe from Alley Goon Number Two and dropped the grocery sack to free her right hand. Grabbing one of the sacks of bread flour, she spun and flung it directly into Fire Escape’s face just as he was dropping to street level.

As an improvised weapon, it was actually a little more effective than planned. The flour— bread flour—struck him dead in the face and exploded, knocking him off his feet and causing the other two in the alley mouth to swear and cover their faces.

Robyn had intended to use the distraction to rush past them and run for it, but then Alley One grabbed her by the scarf, and in the precious seconds it took to shove him off, Body Armor and Fox had recovered to block her path.

Shit.

New plan. She was halfway to her wallet—rule one in the crater was that when facing odds like this, you were never carrying anything more valuable than your life—when she realized it wouldn’t do any good.

Something was...off. They weren’t moving like back-alley thieves, that body armor was too good, the weapons were too uniform. It was the same weapon, over and over, a sleek black baton with no identifying marks, as if she were stupid—

As if anyone in Mantle could mistake an SDC standard-issue baton when one was whistling toward their head.

She ducked and struck upward, driving the fox back one last time before Fire Escape finally got the rest of the bread flour out of his eyes and grabbed her wrist.

Robyn was able to block Alley Two’s strike to the head by throwing up her right arm; the impact sent pain spiking from her wrist to her shoulder, but she didn’t think anything was broken. She wasn’t able to block the next. Suspicious Body Armor swung his nightstick under her guard, straight into her ribs with a violent flare of emerald as the blow skittered off her Aura. Alley One grabbed her free arm and yanked it behind her back, and there was no way to block the next one.

Fighting down panic, Robyn struck out with one leg as Alley Two moved in for another rib strike, kicking him behind the knee at exactly the wrong moment; his forehead struck the edge of a dumpster as he went down. Fire Escape, distracted by the movement, didn’t notice Robyn’s fingers flexing until another round was loaded. By the time he realized he was controlling her gauntlet by pinning her arm against his chest, she’d already fired point-blank into his face.

“Fucking—!”

Someone drove a knee into Robyn’s gut; she buckled, nearly, but managed to twist enough to brace one foot against the alley wall and kick. Alley One, still holding her arm behind her back, was slammed against the dirty bricks and swore against her ear.

It wasn’t enough. If she could just break their hold on her—the back alleys of Mantle were Robyn’s motherland, this was her natural habitat to a degree these SDC mercs couldn’t begin to comprehend. The moment she could move she could lose them, but someone had apparently given the goons a briefing. They were making damn sure someone always kept a bruising hold on her somewhere, and in close melee combat she was—going to lose. Sooner, rather than later.

She lost track of where the blows were coming from, trying and failing to break loose. Fox grabbed her weapon arm again, this time twisting it behind her back and holding her against the wall. It was definitely Alley Two that slammed his elbow into her throat, but all she saw from a sharp strike to the back of her head was stars.

And she had no idea who was behind the brutal backhanded nightstick into her sternum that finally shattered her Aura.

There was time—just barely enough time—for Robyn to realize they weren’t going to stop, before she felt a rib snap. Whoever broke her nose didn’t even bother with the baton, an open palm strike that made her entire face explode with pain; and then, just as Robyn had the crystal-clear searing understanding that they were going to kill her, they stopped.

“You’re good,” Body Armor said, panting. “Knew you would be, but still.”

Robyn spat blood at him. “You know, it’s considered polite to introduce yourself before you kick the shit out of someone.”

He didn’t laugh. “You’re way too good a Huntress to be wasted on this town.” He spun the nightstick in his hand and cracked it across her jaw, making her vision flicker as her head snapped to the side. “So get out before something like this happens again.”

Robyn grinned. “Send Kiera Poole my regards.”

Body Armor’s glare turned even darker. “Oh,” he said. “You don’t get it, Hill. Let’s see if we can explain it so you—”

At this range, the explosion was deafening.

Body Armor staggered back, the remains of a Fire-infused crossbow bolt falling to the ground in front of him. Another Fire bolt whistled out of the dark from the opposite direction, the force spinning him through a full three-hundred-sixty-degree turn before he tripped over his own feet and fell to the ground.

The two behind her were startled enough that their grip slacked; that was all Robyn needed to wrench out of it and roll forward to her feet. By the time she turned to fire, a tiny green-white blur was crashing into them from above, screaming.

“Evening, Fiona!” Robyn called out breathlessly. Fiona was too busy tenderizing One and Two with her staff to respond with anything but an angry growl in Robyn’s general direction. 

Fire Escape made an admirable attempt to make himself useful, but the moment he raised his baton another bolt flew out of what was apparently empty air down the alleyway. This time the impact released a concentrated burst of raw gravity, flinging him across the street and through a line of trash cans.

“Watch the trick arrows, May!” Robyn called over her shoulder as she leaned against the wall for support, training her weapon on Fox. “Some of us haven’t got an Aura up!”

May shimmered into existence, planting her staff upright against the wall as she crossed her arms. “And whose fault is that, exactly?”

“Hey,” Robyn protested as the sniper across the street—Joanna, she had to assume—took out Fox from behind. “Does this look like it was my idea?”

“I don’t need a bodyguard to buy bread flour, Fiona,” Fiona mocked, driving the blade of her staff into Alley Two’s stomach and spinning to crack his friend across the face as Alley One moved to tackle her. “I’ll be fine, Fiona! I’ve survived entire trips to the grocery store without any armed backup at all before, Fiona! Get fucked!”

That last was, in fact, directed toward Alley Two, but it took Robyn several seconds to be sure.

The SDC goons had apparently had enough. Body Armor and Fire Escape were long gone; Fox was moaning quietly on the ground, and Robyn used her foot to nudge him up against a heating grate so he wouldn’t die of exposure before he got his feet back under him. Alley One and Two, when they were finally able to dodge through Fiona’s whirlwind of death, were actually crying as they bolted down the street. Joanna apparently felt bad enough for them that she didn’t even take a potshot as they ran.

Robyn took a deep breath, and immediately regretted it.

Oh, that was a rib. That was at least one rib. The rest of her wasn’t doing great either.

Fiona popped up at Robyn’s elbow the moment she swayed, big eyes equal parts angry and concerned. May was just barely behind her, and Joanna dropped to the street to join them.

“Robyn?” whispered Fiona. Robyn reached over and ruffled her hair gently in answer, turning to exchange a look with Joanna. May likely hadn’t seen enough street muggings in her life to tell the difference, but a glance was enough to confirm it—the two of them knew this was different.

“You’re alright?” May’s death grip on her staff, the way her eyes darted over every shadow in the area, belied her casual tone. She pulled out her scroll, extending it just enough to show the default team-status display any Huntress in the world kept set as their lock screen. “Your Aura started dropping like a rock, we figured you could use a hand. Obviously you had it taken care of, though.”

“Oh, yeah.” Robyn tried for a wry smile, which was probably ruined somewhat by the blood dripping down her entire face. “Off-duty SDC guards, I had them right where I wanted them.”

Fiona’s ears twitched wildly. “SDC? You’re joking, they can’t just—do they think they can get away with that?”

“No uniforms,” said May, grim. “No paper trail, no proof. They probably disabled the cameras on this street, too.”

Fiona was shaking—Robyn gave her credit for most of that being the result of incoherent rage. She put an arm around Fiona’s shoulders all the same, and Fiona immediately pressed into the contact.

Joanna’s expression was serious; but after a moment she sighed and shot Robyn a smile. “Eh,” she said. “You’re fine. Come on, it’s freezing out here.”

Robyn went to roll her shoulders before thinking better of it. Ribs screaming in protest, she bent down and picked up the surviving bag of bread flour, shoving it in May’s direction.

“I am not replacing the one that got broken,” she informed her beloved teammate.

“You’re going home and going to bed,” agreed Joanna. Fiona nodded firmly, the set of her ears and determined grip on her staff suggesting she was not above breaking several more of Robyn’s ribs if she was difficult about this.

“All right,” Robyn conceded. “All right. And thank you.”

“Of course,” said May, quiet and gentle. Then, “Robyn, this is whole wheat!”

Chapter Text

An old-fashioned dinner bell rang over the bar, and conversations paused all around the crowded room.

Capri Cornflower, owner of the Blue Boarbatusk, hopped onto a stepladder to be seen over the heads of the crowd.

“Important update!” she shouted, gesturing toward the giant paper thermometer set up in one corner. “As of our most recent pint sale, we’ve reached the halfway mark!”

A cheer rose up around the bar. Robyn joined in, raising a glass to toast the milestone. Across the room Fiona skipped in place and hurried to pull the cap off her oversized red marker. Very carefully, she traced along the 250k Lien mark and filled in the empty space beneath. A larger man, buoyed by the enthusiasm in the room, got up to drop a few bills into the donation box.

As voices rose up around them, louder and more cheerful than before, Joanna leaned close and lowered her voice.

“Think they’ll make it?” she muttered.

Robyn finished off her drink while she considered her answer. “I don’t know if they will,” she decided. “But I know they can.”

Joanna considered her for a long moment before nodding silently and clapping her on the shoulder. 

“I’ll go help with the raffle,” was all she said. Robyn tried not to wince as she nodded in response.

Even Robyn’s cautious hope was what most people would generously call overly optimistic. When the SDC set its sights on a small, genuinely independent Dust shop, there was nothing anyone could do to save it. It was a miracle that Partington’s Dust & Dust Accessories had survived this long, triangulated between three Schnee-controlled “independent” stores that had been undercutting them for years.

But people knew the Partingtons. People liked the Partingtons. They were honest and their prices, while higher than the SDC shops, were fair. They bought from fair-trade mining groups. They’d sponsored some kiddie sporting teams, back when they could afford it, before the SDC started targeting them. Instead of “No Faunus” signs on the window there was always a set of flyers, or a box of overpriced chocolates and peanut brittle on the countertop, for whatever local school was raising some lien to pay for something like band uniforms this month. They were a business no one in the neighborhood wanted to watch go under.

So Capri had offered the Boarbatusk for a night’s fundraiser—all the profits from tonight would go to the Partingtons, in the hope that if they could just make rent for the next few months it would give industry inspectors time to shut down the calculated pricing-out of SDC competitors. Maybe it was a vain hope, but it was all they had.

The sound of someone lightly tapping a microphone filled the room, as an older man with a full beard stepped onto the bar’s makeshift stage.

“Y’all hear that?” The voice of Cliff Bucking, local mine union rep, boomed out over the crowd. “That’s us halfway to sending Schnee’s sorry ass packing back up to the clouds!”

Cheers and whoops broke out, scattered around the room along with a few choice insults aimed at Jacques Schnee’s general existence. Joanna gave a short whistle of support.

When the noise had died down, Cliff continued. “I’d just like to thank y’all for coming out tonight! We couldn’t’ve got this far without each and every one of you, and especially not without Miss Cornflower’s lovely catering!” 

He paused for another round of raucous applause in Capri’s direction, at which she buried her face in her hands to hide a grin.

“But I’m not here to give a speech tonight,” Cliff continued. “This ain’t actually a union event, even though I’m pretty sure more than half of y’all work with me! So instead I’m gonna pass the mic off to the lady who actually organized this thing!” He jerked his hand, somehow managing to roll his whole body with the motion. “Robyn, get on up here!”

Robyn’s protests were roundly ignored. A combination of whoops, friendly shoves, and Cliff catching her forearm with the corded muscle of a man who’d spent more decades in the mines than she had on Remnant dragged her through the crowd and up onto the stage.

Briefly, Cliff covered the mic and leaned in.

“You did a good thing tonight,” he told her, voice low and covered by the applause. “Now you just keep it going.”

“I’ll try, sir,” she replied, equally quiet. Then she raised the mic and turned to face the crowd, and smiled.

She’d never seen the Blue Boarbatusk even half this busy. Fiona waved up at her from where she was updating the giant thermometer; May, across the room, was sitting with one of Capri’s waitresses double-counting donations and transferring cash in lump sums to the safe in the back. The SDC snowflake had been painted over the dartboards along one wall, with the end result that darts was suddenly the most popular game in Sector Eleven.

Robyn swallowed a lump in her throat.

“Well,” she said, voice wavering just slightly on the first word before she mentally shook herself. Pull it together, Hill. “That’s a very polite excuse to get back to those sliders, Mr. Bucking.” 

A few of the miners clustered around him chuckled. Robyn flashed him a grin before she continued.

“But it’s also giving me a lot of credit I don’t deserve. I trust—I hope —that everyone in this room tonight knows you are the ones who made this happen. I know that a lot of people in Mantle depend on small businesses like Partington’s. They support smaller, ethically-run mining groups, with fair pay and workplace safety that actually meets the standards.” Cliff nodded silently as she met his eyes. “I’m a Huntress. I’ll be honest with you, money’s tight. I go through a lot of Dust. Ask Joanna—or Fiona over there in the back!” 

Fiona looked up in surprise, and waved as Robyn lifted a hand in her direction. Obligingly, the crowd cheered her as well, and Fiona was so flustered by the applause that she fumbled her marker and had to dive under a table after it. The bar patrons laughed—but there was no cruelty in it. Fiona was laughing, too. 

Robyn’s lips twitched as she paced slowly along the edge of the stage. “But more than anything,” she said, drawing attention back to her before Fiona actually combusted, “We need to know that the equipment we’re getting is exactly what it claims to be. No technicalities, no cover-ups. And at the end of the day—what? Capri?”

Capri, rushing between tables, had suddenly done a double take and then made a small gesture like she wanted to get Robyn’s attention but didn’t want to interrupt. Now that that ship had sailed, she tapped two fingers just under her nose. Mirroring the action, Robyn was surprised when her own fingers came away sticky.

“Nosebleed?” she asked, and a few people nodded. “Damn. Must be the dry air out there. Can someone hand me…”

Joanna passed her up a napkin.

“Thanks.” Robyn made a face, finally noticing the taste of blood. “Anyway. Where was I? At the end of the day...we need to know that the Dust we use trying to defend this community doesn’t do more harm than good. Shooting one Grimm, knowing the Dust in that cartridge caused enough pain and suffering to attract ten more? Look, I’m crater trash through and through, but even I can do that math. Doesn’t add up.”

Another round of muted, scattered laughter.

Encouraged, Robyn went on. “We need people and businesses like the Partingtons in Mantle. They’re members of the community— our community. We depend on them the same way that, right now, they’re depending on us. We need each other a lot more than we need more snow down here.”

It was not a good joke. It was the single most tired, hackneyed joke in Mantle. It had been made in every single conversation regarding the Schnee Dust Company since Jacques Schnee took it over, and for very good reason, because it never failed to cause riotous, gut-busting laughter in any sufficiently tipsy crowd.

Some things were just funny.

But Robyn was on the verge of wearing out her welcome. Besides; despite the napkin, her mouth tasted more like blood than ever. She should probably deal with that. “Keep up the momentum, guys,” she said. “We’re halfway there and we’ve got hours left. Call your friends. We can do this. That’s the thing about snowflakes in Mantle. Joking aside—when they get too close to the things in this city we care about? Snowflakes melt.”

Cliff raised his glass to her. “Well said! ” Raising a hand in acknowledgement of the wave of agreement that swept around the bar, Robyn accepted Joanna’s hand off the stage and was grateful for it.

She might have had a little more to drink than she’d previously thought; she really shouldn’t be this short of breath after a short, mild speech. Or maybe she was just nervous. She never liked public speaking... 

Joanna reached out to shake her affectionately by the shoulder, as Robyn dropped back into her abandoned seat.

“Top one percent in her year at Atlas Academy,” Joanna teased. “Robyn Hill, everyone. Finest Huntress of her generation. Forgets how to use Aura to heal a nosebleed.”

Robyn rolled her eyes. Unable to rebut what was a very fair point, she instead told her beloved Academy partner, “Shut up. I didn’t notice.”

She also, belatedly, flared her Aura. There was still dried blood on her face, but Fiona popped up with a glass of ice water; Robyn dipped the edge of a paper towel in the water, cleaned off the rest of the blood, and took a long swig to get the taste out of her mouth.

“There,” she said, unable to keep from smiling at Joanna’s smug look. “Happy now?”

“It’s in our name, isn’t it?” Fiona deadpanned. Joanna groaned.

Robyn’s lips twitched. She wasn’t sure who the hell had coined that stupid nickname, but it had spread like wildfire and they couldn’t escape it now. It was the price of not being able to easily form a name out of their initials. May had weakly pushed for RJTM—but “Argentum” sounded a little too Atlesian to catch on, and anyway Robyn suspected she secretly loved the name as the sign of Mantle’s acceptance that it was.

She took a deep breath, or tried to.

A combination of her heart fluttering from the adrenaline of that little speech, the long hours they were pulling, and the close, hot packed bar were clearly having an effect on her. There was no relief in the long, slow breath; it felt like trying to inflate a balloon while it was inside a soda bottle. Air rushed in, but hit a barrier before her lungs could inflate all the way.

“Robyn?” Fiona shifted so that she was perched halfway on Robyn’s knee, looking concerned as she flicked pale bangs away from Robyn’s face. “Are you okay?”

Robyn flashed a weak smile. “I’m fine, lambchop. Just tired.”

It was the truth. It felt like the past three months of hard work had suddenly crashed over her at once; she was thirsty, but her hand shook so badly when she went to pick up her water glass that she didn’t bother trying.

Unfortunately, Joanna was starting to look worried too. “Uh,” she said. “You sure about that? I don’t think ‘tired’ makes your mouth bleed.”

Robyn frowned. Before she could protest that it was just the nosebleed and she’d just healed that, thank you for your commentary, Joanna, she tasted iron and salt.

“I don’t…” she said, weakly; then, struggling for breath, she tried again. “I don’t think that’s a good—”

There was no such thing on Remnant as a hospital waiting room that was anything but fucking miserable.

It was silent enough to be driving May slowly out of her gods-given mind, but with just too much background noise to let anyone relax. The lights were at least on the warmer end of the spectrum—most hospitals in Atlas went with searingly blue-white incandescent lights but even the shitty hospitals in Mantle sometimes knew enough to put something less painful in. Unfortunately, while the lights might have been a comforting yellow there was one that hadn’t stopped flickering for three hours, and May was just about ready to pull out her bowstaff and shoot it.

“Don’t,” muttered Fiona the moment May’s weight shifted. She hadn’t even touched the staff yet, but didn’t bother protesting when Fiona obviously knew her intentions. “They’ll throw us out.”

“Because we’re doing so much good out here,” May snapped back. “If we get kicked out they wouldn’t be able to tell us anything. Oh, wait.”

She regretted venting her frustration instantly; Fiona didn’t even flinch so much as crumple. Tears threatening to finally spill over, she hugged her knees tighter and shrank into herself. Fuck.

“Hey.” She got up and moved the three spots over to slide onto an uncomfortable bench-style seat next to Fiona. “Hey, no. It’s not you I’m mad at, Fiona, hey…”

“I know.” Fiona’s voice was smaller than she was, which was saying a lot. May had been worried she’d throw off her touch, but Fiona launched herself into the tentative offer of a hug the moment May was in range. “I know, I just…”

“Yeah.” May pulled her tight against her chest, burying her face in woolly curls as Fiona trembled in her arms. “Yeah. Me too.”

It already felt like years since Robyn had been hit with that first seizure. Somehow May was finding a way to blame herself for not being there when it happened. She’d been on the other side of the room, helping count and secure cash donations; hadn’t realized anything was wrong until the ripple of alarm spread all the way across the bar. By that point Robyn was already on the ground, and…

And no one here would fucking tell them anything.

Look, May understood the rationale behind the policy. That didn’t make it less infuriating. Obviously hospitals couldn’t just go around sharing private information with anyone who happened to follow a patient through the doors, but Robyn was their leader, they were her team —at the very least, Fiona should have some idea of what was happening to her.

If it was May, there was a good chance her family would already know everything about every breath she took, and May had gone to no small pains to plaster “DO NOT COMMUNICATE WITH BLOOD RELATIVES” all over every conceivable form of emergency ID on the planet.

What pissed her off more than anything—what made her blood boil—was that a Huntress team had the legal right to act as next of kin in these circumstances. But only officially registered teams, and for flexibility’s sake and due to Atlas making registration such a fucking nightmare in order to preserve their control over the military, technically Robyn’s team was just a cooperative group of independent Huntresses. Legally speaking.

So here they were, and the only one with the ability to get any information at all was Joanna. May had never been so pathetically grateful that James Ironwood had once in his life possessed the common sense to make her Robyn’s partner in the Academy. That, at least, was an official military tie that the hospital could put on their paperwork.

“Hey,” she said again, tightening her hold on Fiona. “Listen. If anything bad had happened, Joanna would have come to tell us.”

It wasn’t the best possible moment for Joanna to walk through the double doors on the other end of the waiting room.

Technically speaking, this was Robyn’s first time in a hospital. Overall? Would not recommend. 

“Hey guys,” was all Robyn had time to whisper before her arms were full of a shaking Fiona. “Oof— easy, lambchop, I’m plugged into like seventeen different things right now.”

“Sorry,” whimpered Fiona, making no attempt to move.

Good; it wasn’t like Robyn had broken anything, Fiona could stay exactly where she was for the rest of time as long as she didn’t pull out any important...tubes. Or wires.

Robyn closed her eyes for a moment, holding Fiona close, then opened them to smile tiredly at May. “I’m here. Easy. I’m here, I’m—watch the IV watch the IV—May—!”

“Shut the fuck up,” May muttered into her hair. “Don’t ever do that to me again.”

“Don’t plan on it, princess,” Robyn replied. “What the hell did I even do this time, though?”

“You drank rat poison, Robyn,” Joanna said flatly. “You fucking idiot.”

Oh.

Well.

That explained a lot.

Then the second half registered and Robyn shot her beloved partner an indignant glare over Fiona’s head. “How is that my fault?”

May looked pained but sympathetic. Joanna, after giving Robyn a look of agonized pity, closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. She took several calming breaths.

“Robyn,” she said, voice carefully controlled. “Did you...at any point last night, for any length of time, lose sight of your drink?”

Robyn’s incredulity mounted. “Joanna, it was a fundraising event, I was in seven places at once. How am I meant to remember the answer to that question?”

“Yes,” May translated.

“Robyn!” said Fiona, lifting her head from Robyn’s clavicle to look horrified.

Joanna threw her hands in the air. “And you kept drinking it! That glass was dead to you, Robyn! You don’t—how do you not know this?”

Robyn felt her metaphorical hackles raising and forced herself not to bite Joanna’s head off. It was a reasonable question, on the surface; Joanna was also dirt-poor Mantle stock, and Robyn was from the deepest part of Mantle’s ass—it was reasonable to assume that any piece of self-preservation the other three knew, Robyn had been living by since she was eight.

“I’m not exactly fluent,” she said slowly, “in bar culture. It’s expensive, and it makes you vulnerable. I had the three of you with me, I should have been perfectly safe even if—I don’t think anyone was expecting poison. How many others are affected? And for that matter, if rat poison got in the beer, how was putting my drink under 24/7 surveillance meant to do anything, short stuff?”

She thought that was a perfectly good point; her mind was already reeling with the implications. Robyn was the opposite of a heavy drinker; and she was tall, with a Huntress’ build and metabolism and an active Aura. If she was this badly affected, the death toll would be…

“Capri’s too careful to let her drinks get contaminated by accident,” she murmured, ignoring the looks the other three were sending each other; they’d get caught up in a moment. “She’s not stupid enough to ever have rat poison out around food, someone has to have...this was intentional, it has to have been targeted. A community event, resistance against SDC interference—”

“Robyn,” May interrupted. She had a stricken, pained expression. “You’re the only one who got poisoned. Someone slipped it in your drink when you weren’t looking and vanished into the night before it kicked in.”

Robyn stared at her. “What?”

“Someone tried to murder you, Robyn!” Fiona snapped.

“What?”

May groaned, sat down on the bed again, and buried her face in Robyn’s shoulder next to one of several sensors monitoring the gods only knew what.

“I’m serious,” Robyn protested. “Who would bother? Why target one random Huntress? Cliff was there, half the miner’s union—Capri, or—if the goal was to shut down the idea of community resistance, demoralize everyone, the Partingtons were there! Why—”

“Why were they all there, Robyn?” May lifted her head again and fixed her with an even stare. “Whose idea was this? Who talked to Capri, and Cliff, and the Partingtons? Who can’t go fifteen minutes without pulling an inspirational speech out of her ass?”

There was a sinking feeling in Robyn’s stomach, and this time she was fairly certain her uneven, pounding heartbeat had nothing to do with rat poison. The burning sensation in her missing tail certainly didn’t either.

Fiona, satisfied that Robyn was not currently at death’s door, had pulled back enough to fix her with an open, sad expression. Joanna’s sternness had worn off into something that was mostly tired—Robyn realized with a spike of guilt that Joanna had to have been awake and at her side all night, and she had no idea how late in the morning it was now.

But there was something in May’s eyes that just…ached.

“Robyn,” she said. “You’re not a random Huntress. You haven’t been a random Huntress in a long time. We’re with you. We’re with you until the end, but you have to understand that you’re important.”

“I’m not though,” Robyn protested. “It’s not about me, it’s—”

“—About everyone, I know, but you’re the one who inspires people. You’re fighting for everyone, but you’re the one who’s fighting. ”

“Not just me,” said Robyn, weakly. Her fingers tightened in Fiona’s hair. 

May glared, but Joanna shook her head silently. Still looking unconvinced, May stood down with a sigh and rested her head back on Robyn’s shoulder.

“Move over,” Joanna said, quiet, and Fiona wriggled onto Robyn’s other side, slotted between her and May, as Joanna somehow managed to squeeze onto the other side of the narrow hospital bed.

“This is probably setting off one of these sensors,” Robyn pointed out, doing absolutely nothing to discourage any of it. Then, “Do you know if we made the funding goal?”

“For fuck’s sake,” May muttered into her neck.

“Yeah. We did,” said Fiona, voice beginning to turn sleepy. She nuzzled more into Robyn’s chest. “Capri texted me a few hours ago.”

Robyn closed her eyes and smiled. “Good.”

They lay that way, quiet and warm, watching the reassuring spikes on Robyn’s heart monitor, long enough that Robyn was beginning to fall back asleep when May spoke softly near her ear.

“I mean it.”

Ever articulate, Robyn responded, “Mmm?”

“We’re not the only ones in Mantle who would follow you anywhere, Robyn. You need to figure that out soon, because our enemies sure have.” May shuddered. “And take it from me; they don’t mess around with anyone they think is a threat.”

Chapter Text

They weren’t desperate, exactly.

Robyn tapped through a few pages of the team’s budgeting app on her scroll, rubbing her tired eyes and hoping that maybe this time the numbers would change. They did not.

Still. They were ready for this. There was a reason the four of them used weapons with mechanical rather than explosive-based ranged capabilities; crossbows could fire without the use of Dust. And that was good—because if things kept on like this, Dust wouldn’t be in regular supply for quite some time. 

It was the health and safety bust in Schnee Dust Company Mine D-37 that had done it. Jacques Schnee didn’t even have the grace to pretend otherwise. If there was one thing that man had an endless supply of other than money, it was gall; he was actually trying to spin this as corporate accountability.

Because of course, the higher-ups at the SDC had no idea the condition of the most infamously unsafe mine in Mantle. They’d kept up their legally required inspections, of course. They had a paper trail to prove it. Clearly, Jacques Schnee’s honeyed-acid concern on all the major Atlesian news networks for the past several months was completely genuine.

So, equally clearly, it was a sign of immense good faith and responsibility for the SDC to go above and beyond in performing serious investigations even though no legal order had been issued. It had been the safety protocols associated with Dust processing that were the problem; so of course, until thorough internal investigations of all the problem mines were concluded, highly-processed Dust would be put under special scrutiny. 

Weapons-grade Dust. Military-quality Dust. The kind of Dust needed by Huntsmen and Huntresses, as anything lesser was unusable for their line of work.

Oh, but not to worry, Schnee had said with that oily smile, slick with appeasement from every camera angle. The slowdowns wouldn’t affect supply to Huntsmen and Huntresses around the kingdoms, and the SDC was even willing to graciously accept a loss of profits by not raising the overseas price of military-grade Dust accordingly. After all, it had been the company’s own misplaced confidence in D-37’s management and inspection teams that caused such a terrible oversight.

May, hurrying around the cramped kitchen, almost tripped over a chair. On autopilot Robyn pulled it out of the way, and slipped her Scroll into her pocket before May had a chance to see what she’d been doing. Realistically speaking, tonight’s menu was a waste of money they didn’t have, but she didn’t want to make the others feel guilty about a night of modest indulgence—they all needed it.

And only partially because of the sudden Dust shortage.

Not that there was any shortage of Dust in Solitas, according to Atlas. They had simply stopped supplying weapons-grade Dust to most “independent contractors”. That was a misnomer already; while most Schnee Dust sales weren’t actually through its own overpriced flagship stores, they had a brutal exclusivity agreement—especially in Solitas. But to “ensure there’s no risk of interrupting our continuing supply of high-quality, reliable Dust and Dust products to our valiant Atlesian military,” they could justify locking down even that much competition. The few, tiny independent Dust mines couldn’t meet the demand, driving prices through the roof; and even at SDC stores, if Robyn and her girls were willing to lower themselves that far, prices had skyrocketed.

Not that anyone was ever likely to acknowledge it. Ironwood wasn’t even here to feel the squeeze and hadn’t been for a while, not that he would have noticed it anyway. After all—continuing his very public and extremely profitable penance, Jacques Schnee had personally guaranteed that any Atlesian Huntsman or Huntress could acquire weapons-grade Dust for its previous market value until the investigations were over.

They need only show their official military ID.

Robyn could picture that man’s smug, evil face in her mind’s eye. Your move, Hill. The retaliation for Robyn using her status as an independent Huntress like a blunt instrument to make that health and safety bust happen could not have been more obvious, and yet trying to point that out just made her sound like a conspiracy theorist.

“Hey Robyn,” Joanna nudged her shoulder as she walked past to grab a drink refill. “Quit brooding at a plate of chicken wings, it’s almost time.”

“I am not brooding,” Robyn informed her indignantly.

“Brooding is like, your default state,” Fiona said around a mouthful of popcorn. “You sure you’re not actually some kind of hen faunus?”

Robyn threw a picked-clean chicken wing bone at her general direction, but couldn’t suppress a grin at the way Fiona yelped when she dodged it. “See, there’s some kind of fox-in-the-henhouse pun to be made here, but I can’t think of it.”

“Holy shit,” May called, balancing a bowl of chips in one hand and with three bowls of various homemade dips dangerously held against her chest in the other. “Robyn Hill is at a loss for words. Somebody alert the media. And help.”

“One sec!” Fiona scrambled over the back of what passed for a couch in this season’s apartment, rescuing the salsa just as it made its bid for freedom.

Robyn’s smile was softer this time, less of a grimace. 

They needed this. The Dust shortage, they could survive; it was stress and exhaustion that would get them killed if they didn’t take care to relax sometimes. They were running dangerously low on trick bolts, but for everyday Grimm encounters the standard piercing heads were adequate. They would just have to leave Search and Destroy to military Huntsmen, and hope there weren’t any major Grimm incursions for the next few months. They’d be hurting, in that case. 

Still, the four of them had been doing less and less of the rank-and-file job-board listings and a lot more unofficial, under-the-table work for the past year anyway. A lot of community organizing, a lot less coordination with the military.

The pay was shit, hence the steadily declining state of their accommodations as a rule. But they pocketed a lot more than lien, most days.

“Finally,” Joanna exclaimed as a familiar logo spun into place on the flickering projector screen. “I was starting to think we had the wrong channel.”

“Welcome back!” This year’s commentating pair was, truth be told, Robyn’s favorite; even the Vacuo announcers weren’t quite as much fun as Vale’s, and ‘Stache was a big jovial man with a big jovial voice perfect for switching your brain off and just enjoying a mindless evening of mild blood sport. “To tonight’s promising restart of the singles round in the 40th Vytal Festival Tournament!”

Joanna snorted at the other end of the couch. “Yeah, let’s just gloss on over that.”

“Not like ABN’s been making us watch that poor kid’s leg get broken on loop all day,” Robyn agreed. 

Look, she was willing to believe the fisticuffs kid had seen a neutral movement and flinched, but she didn’t know what Beacon had been thinking letting someone with that kind of reflex get progressed to tournament-level competition. They’d failed that girl horribly unless she was a much better actress than she looked—news pundits and civilians who’d never been exposed to those kinds of trauma reactions had been ripping her to shreds on the CCT net ever since.

“Barty, remind us of the rules!”

“Absolutely Peter. Remember that unlike previous rounds, there will be no bracket system! Random selection…”

“Right,” said May, letting ‘Stache and Motormouth banter their way through the Vytal finals system. “So, this is cheese…”

Gods. Robyn was careful to keep her expression from changing as she watched May lay out her movie-night buffet with deserved pride, but she could feel the smile leave her eyes. She was barely able to half-listen to May’s explanation of different chip dips and an experiment she was running with the salsa. Gods. They deserved so much better than this.

It had been different when they started. Always lean, always a week away from desperate, and it had been a long and thankless slog to earn any faith in those early days. But—they hadn’t always needed to be so rigorous about information security. About keeping location tracking disabled on their scrolls at all costs, taking circuitous routes home. Always working in pairs. They could probably afford better apartments than they ended up in, but it was impossible to get those when they couldn’t risk more than a three-month lease.

If the last few years had proven anything, it was the very real danger of anyone learning where Robyn lived and the routes she took to get there. Robyn, mostly—but it wouldn’t take much to realize what it would do to her if any of her girls were hurt. It wouldn’t take much to figure out that killing blow.

It hadn’t always been like this—and Robyn had made the enemies that drove them to it.

Fiona dropped into her lap with absolutely no attempt at grace whatsoever.

“Auchg— spleen!”

“Brooding,” Fiona retorted.

“Tell you what,” gasped Robyn. “I’ll quit brooding if you get your elbow out of my solar plexus, lambchop!”

Fiona flushed. “I can work with that.” Apologetically, she draped the offending arm over Robyn’s shoulder instead. Robyn tweaked her nose in vengeance, to which Fiona responded with a faux-angry pin of her lovely ears before leveraging her grip on Robyn’s shoulder to pull her in for a firm kiss.

“So there,” May translated. Then, “You two are so cute I’ll even kill you quickly if you let these wings go cold because you’re too busy cuddling to appreciate them.”

Robyn flipped her off, but she also leaned over to snag another wing. Fiona grumbled at being dislodged, but only for the look of the thing. She shifted willingly enough in order to help herself to some of the chips, and Robyn let an arm fall around Fiona’s waist as they settled in to watch the randomizer tick through its last few rotations.

“It looks like our first contender will be...Penny Polendina from Atlas!”

Robyn cheered, and the others joined in. Fiona produced a pennant with Penny’s sigil out of thin air alongside several silver flags of varying size; Joanna took advantage of her distraction to steal the popcorn bowl. Look, if anyone asked, it was just because this was Penny. No one could prove that they always cheered for Atlas Academy in the Vytal Festival.

Some loyalties died hard.

“And her opponent will be...Pyrrha Nikos, from Beacon!”

“Oof.” Joanna winced. “Sorry Penny, it was a good run.”

“Don’t count her out just yet,” Robyn said. “I think she’s got a good shot.”

“Yeah, but that Nikos kid is a freak of nature.” May shook her head. “We were not that good when we were in the Vytal Festival.”

“Maybe that’s why we all got destroyed in the first round,” Fiona said dryly.

“Excuse me.” Robyn dug her fingers into Fiona’s side, making her wriggle and shriek. “Some of us got destroyed in the doubles round.”

“And I’m sure you would have gone all the way if you’d had someone other than Clover watching your back,” Joanna said. “Someone like, oh, I dunno—”

“Elm?” May asked sweetly.

“See, I’d tell you to get fucked, but this salsa is really good so you’re getting away with it.”

“Hey,” protested Robyn on principle. “I said you had the best chance in the finals, putting me forward wasn’t my idea—”

“Shh.” Fiona forced a hand over Robyn’s mouth. “They’re starting!”

Robyn licked Fiona’s hand in retaliation, because she was a grown adult faunus, but settled in to watch the match. May wasn’t wrong; Nikos moved like a hardened veteran, not a first-year from a purely tournament background.

But Robyn wasn’t wrong either. Even as a first-year herself, Penny was good .

“Good match,” Fiona murmured under her breath as Nikos pulled off a phenomenally clean leg-sweep. “This could be anyone’s game. How’d that happen?”

It was a good question. One time, Robyn had patted Penny on the shoulder and watched the girl topple over backward with no change of expression. But now she moved like Fiona had, at that age.

“They’ve both curb-stomped everyone before this,” May said around one of her wings. “It’d’ve been a shame if we didn’t get to see them go at it.”

“She’s faster than I expected,” Joanna acknowledged. “Penny always seems so deliberate, I wasn’t sure how she’d stand up, but—oh! Oof.”

“Call it now, mercy rule,” agreed Fiona.

Nikos was disarmed—that, Robyn hadn’t seen coming, but it had been done fair and honest, and she groped around for her drink. “Good girl . Now...oh, come on, kid!”

“Quit being such a good sport!” Fiona laughed as Penny stood back, swords poised for the finisher but giving Nikos a chance to react. This was, after all, the Vytal festival; it was meant to be fun, and the crowd was cheering the show of sportsmanship. “Kick her ass!”

Smiling fondly, Robyn glanced over her shoulder in search of her mysteriously vanished drink.

After a heartbeat, it registered that everyone—her girls and the crowd in Vale—had gone deathly silent. 

She turned back around, and—

She wasn’t quite sure what she was looking at, at first.

There was no blood. For some reason, some part of her brain that seemed to have understood something the rest of her was still catching up with thought that was important. There was no blood, there’d been no cry of pain, no sound of weapons fire. Only an Aura flare, and a scrape of metal. The sound of a sword piercing the floor.

Nikos hadn’t even moved, that Robyn could tell.

And there was no blood, only electrical sparking, so what was the source of so much horror—

Finally, the part of her mind that had been desperately refusing to understand what it was looking at was jerked sharply into alignment with the rest of her.

“No,” she breathed, over the sound of rising hysteria from Amity; the spectators had understood before she could. The commentators didn’t even have the presence of mind to turn off their booth mic, but Robyn’s ears were ringing too loudly to process any of the frantic words leaking across that open connection.

“...you doing? Kill the feed! ...What? How is—”

For a moment she thought someone had finally managed to cut the broadcast. The ghoulish image of Penny’s corpse—whatever form that took—was interrupted by a holding screen, an overlay of saturated blood-red.

“This is not a tragedy.”

Robyn’s lungs flooded with ice. 

She was only dimly aware of locking an arm around Fiona’s waist as she leapt to her feet, just enough—just barely—to keep from dumping her onto the ground with the suddenness of the movement.

“This was not an accident.”

“Robyn?” Joanna’s voice was the smallest Robyn had ever heard it. She held up a hand, trying to focus, forcing herself to listen to the speaker’s exact words. There was just enough truth in them. Just enough, in a haze of pain and fear, to get its claws into your head. Just enough to make you want to take the rest as fact, too…

Ironwood, she thought, agony closing a fist around her throat. What have you done?

But what had he, regarding Penny Polendina? What did they know, that this smugly self-righteous unnamed person speaking over an innocent girl’s dismembered body hadn’t told them?

Robyn held no love for Atlas, she could easily believe that every accusation being made here was true; and wasn’t that convenient. Wasn’t it convenient, that she was being told exactly what she’d always feared to suspect? That it slotted so well into her paranoias, that it was delivered so convincingly?

That whoever this chess piece was had known it would happen?

Atlas was building a synthetic army, Beacon had amassed too much power and the unstable elements it accepted were tainting the Huntsmen, the Academies had lost their touch with the common people, the faunus were stealing jobs from humans, and if the people of Mantle would only obey the police their city would thrive and be stable.

Robyn had learned this lesson a long time ago—how far you could trust the motivations of someone holding a microphone while you were angry and scared, telling you who to blame.

“Grab your gear,” she said, very quietly.

Fiona’s ears were flat against her head, eyes wide and teary. “Robyn…?”

Robyn’s eyes didn’t leave the screen. “Now.”

Robyn knew better than to trust what this woman was saying. But she also knew that far too many people wouldn’t. What this entire gruesome spectacle seemed tailor-made to bring down on them. Mantle was going to need them tonight like it had never needed them before.

“...existence of peace is fragile, and the leaders of our kingdoms…”

“Robyn.” May’s voice was barely higher than a whisper, but Robyn twitched anyway; her ability to process anything hung by a fraying thread that threatened to snap at any moment.

Penny. Pietro’s daughter, who’d wanted to protect all of Remnant—no, suddenly there was something dark in that wish that Robyn refused to look full in the face without real evidence. 

She gestured for May to continue, tasting blood as she listened to whoever was responsible for this muse casually about nothing but generic fearmongering. But they were good at it. They were so, terrifyingly good at it…

“Robyn.” May pressed the gauntlet and a quiver into Robyn’s nerveless fingers. “We have nineteen trick bolts left, that’s it. Even if it comes down to looting, if we have to take the time to make more, I don’t...”

Already, faintly, it was possible to pick up the sound of perimeter guns firing from the city walls.

“So I ask you. When the first shots are fired…”

“Take five each,” Robyn murmured as red-alert sirens began wailing in the distance. “I’ll take four. Make them count.”

“...who do you think you can trust?”

The last thing Robyn saw before the feed cut was Pyrrha Nikos falling to her knees.

Chapter Text

“Where the hell did the ursa come from?!”

There was no time to discuss Robyn’s extremely good question. The beowolves were on them.

“Between twenty and twenty-five sabyr,” Fiona mocked, stepping forward to beat the lead trio back as Robyn fired into the heart of the pack. “I’m going to—on your left!—find whatever idiot the SDC hired to scout this place, and I’m gonna—”

“Down!” interrupted May. She barely had time to brace the base of her staff against the ice before a particularly large one, leaping over an ice ridge, impaled itself on the raised blade.

“Thanks.” Fiona ripped her staff blade free of the dissolving beowolf in front of her and finished the thought, “And I’m gonna do something violent!”

“What did you expect?” Robyn pointed out, reloading her gauntlet. In the brief pause as they held the pack at bay, she risked flashing Fiona a wry grin. “Competence?”

Joanna snorted, but didn’t smile. “They’re cutting us off.”

Robyn’s brief mirth faded quickly. “Yeah. And the ursai were not on the mission board listing.”

“Neither were beowolves.” May was breathing heavily. “It takes skill to mistake these for sabyrs.”

Robyn was trying to keep spirits up, but this situation was...bad. The job listing they’d taken had been simple. A nest of subterranean and tundra Grimm attacking transports. It had been presented as a large number of small, weak Grimm—sabyrs, creeps, and at worst a possible centinel nest. 

Solitas beowolves were neither small nor weak. Most inter-Kingdom Grimm reference guides considered beowolves a fairly minor threat...but not here. Not these ones. Tundra-bred they were massive, fast, and intelligent, and while a pack of twenty sabyr roaming the ice caves might barely make Robyn’s girls break a sweat, a pack of twenty Solitas beowolves…

That would be bad enough on its own. And the pack, which was now between them and the passage that led toward the exit, wasn’t remotely alone down here.

“We need to regroup,” she decided. One of the larger beowolves decided to mock-charge in an attempt to scatter them; Joanna put a bolt through its eye. “This isn’t adding up.”

“Get ‘em in the open?” suggested Joanna.

“If they follow we can pin them in the cave mouth,” Robyn agreed. “Let’s go, before any more of them show up—”

That was when the centinels showed up.

Fiona yelped as a massive segmented body burst from the ice between her feet, barely managing to scythe her blade down before it could turn and latch on. Two more broke free of the wall Robyn had put her back to; three ripped their way up from the ground behind them. 

And the massed beowolves, the terse ceasefire broken, saw their chance.

“Fall back!” Robyn got off one shot—an Ice-tipped arrow that exploded on impact into a sheet of blue spikes, impaling one beowolf and temporarily blocking the mouth of the tunnel, forcing the rest to break their way through—before she had to give up on ranged attacks entirely, slashing at the nearest centinel with her fan blades. “Joanna! Behind you!”

Too slow.  

Joanna was still turning when the centinel lunged, glistening mandibles sinking deep into her shoulder. Her Aura flared, still strong but dropping; with difficulty she managed to disengage from the centinel in front of her, slamming her assailant back against the wall at just the right angle to crack its carapace. The bug dissolved into ash, leaving acid stains on Joanna’s shoulder, and there was no time to check in.

May and Fiona were finishing the rest off behind them; but the beowolf pack was beginning to break through Robyn’s impromptu ice barrier, and their absent siblings appeared to have joined them now.

Along with another damn ursa they hadn’t been warned about.

The worst thing they could do was allow themselves to be herded deeper into the cave; they needed to get out, they were overwhelmed. But there would be no exit that way.

“Further in,” Robyn ordered. “Get to another cavern, get room to fight. Move.”

It was easier said than done. These ice caves were treacherous, full of unexpected twists and turns; and every so often where there’d been some kind of heat fluctuation over the long winter the hard, rough surface would become smooth as glass. Other passages opened up to their sides; one spat out a pair of beowolves almost before any of Robyn’s girls could react, forcing them further down the passage and away from the surface. Another was already full of waiting, hungry centinels.

“May,” Robyn ground out. May, fighting at her side, was panting too hard to respond with more than a jerk of the head. “Get to the surface and call for help, we’ll hold them here.”

There was a spasm of pain on May’s face, but she didn’t waste precious time arguing. With a savage twist, she finished off the Grimm in front of her, stepped back to allow Robyn to move into her place, and vanished.

It wasn’t perfect; invisibility might confuse the Grimm, but it wouldn’t hide May or her fear from them for long. She still had the only chance of any of them to get back to a Scroll signal alive. Calling for help via the Huntsman network was a blow to their pride, but Robyn would rather have their lives saved by Atlesian military Huntsmen then not have them saved at all.

Joanna grunted, “Can we hold that long?”

“We should.” The others looked as tired as Robyn felt; but with the majority of their pursuers bottlenecked in the passage and just enough room for the three of them to spread out and fight effectively, there was a good chance they’d be able to maintain the status quo long enough to get a response team to May’s location.

Fiona glanced over her shoulder, but Robyn had chosen their location with intent; the cavern they’d backed into was a decent holding position, with minimal ‘backdoor’ passages to flank them with. There was one slot in the ice at the back of the cavern, leading down—but none of the nasty, poisonous small Grimm could survive in Solitas, and nothing big enough to be a real threat could come up through it.

It came as a surprise, then, when Fiona stiffened so badly that Joanna had to beat a centinel away from her head.

“Stay with us,” Robyn snapped, nearly overlapping with Fiona’s warning bark of:

“Ravagers!”

Without missing a beat, Joanna swore and spun to put her back to Robyn’s. She was just in time; half a second later, Robyn heard the impact of a heavy blow, and the shriek of scimitar claws off steel.

Robyn thought a silent apology toward Fiona, the only one of them who’d possessed the sense to check the ceiling, as a dozen and change bats the size of rabid foxes fell on them from behind. The Huntresses couldn’t hold, there was no hope of trying; the hair-raising sound of flickering Aura echoed off the ice and vibrated behind her teeth.

She shoved her gauntlet between the dripping canine fangs of one ravager and pivoted, flinging it into the jaws of the ursa she’d turned her back to in order to keep it from snapping her neck. The ravager instantly exploded into choking powder, which did nothing to help the situation as a whole.

“Back!” Robyn shouted, praying the others were still on their feet to hear her, and that May had gotten clear. “Down! Follow the crevice!”

To her immense relief, as Robyn fell back toward the narrow opening Fiona dove flat across the slippery floor and slid through the gap between her legs. Joanna was stranded only a few feet away, fending two ravagers off her throat as Robyn fired one trick bolt after another into the advancing mass of Grimm. Finally, she managed to throw the ravagers off her staff and, in an act of reckless faith, flung one end of the staff behind her without time to spot her target. Robyn lunged forward, grabbed the end, and hauled Joanna through the gap inches ahead of slavering beowulf jaws.

Joanna’s thanks were exhausted and wordless, Aura flickering badly even as they retreated down the crevice.

The large Grimm couldn’t get through; the crevice stayed tight and narrow for at least twenty feet back, as Robyn shoved Joanna behind her and tried to cover their retreat. There would be no digging through that gap, no forcing it open.

The ravagers, unfortunately, were only slightly larger than your average fruit bat; and the ursai and beowolves frothing in the entryway would only block their entry for a few seconds. In a perfect world Robyn would plug the entrance again. Unfortunately, she’d already used her last Ice bolt.

Ravagers began pouring through the gap as the three of them backpedalled down the narrow spiral. There was no room to swing a weapon and barely room to shoot; the ravagers couldn’t fly in such close quarters, either, but with their vicious little claws they could climb the ice walls like leathery spiders to lash out at their prey’s heads. One of them flung itself over Joanna’s head and straight into Fiona’s face, and Robyn had to spin and leave herself open to a hard piercing blow to the back in order to shoot it off.

Finally, as the light grew ever dimmer, the passageway started to open up. Suddenly Robyn was beside Joanna instead of crammed in front of her, with room on either side to swing her fan; she bisected one ravager before the Grimm had time to notice the shift, which left only seventeen of the damn things left. And now, with room to spread out, Robyn realized with a sinking feeling that they were too fast for a human to shoot in the dark.

“Stay close!” she called. “Keep them in the passage, don’t let them fly!”

It was a good call—and then, out of the corner of her eye, something moved. Something very, very big.

“Ursa on your right!”

Fiona whirled to face it, cutting their available firepower against the swarming ravagers from ‘not nearly enough’ to ‘immediately fatal’. But someone had to hold off—

“Robyn,” said Fiona, voice several octaves higher than it should be. “Not an ursa. Not an ursa!”

“What?”

“It’s an odo—ow!”

Robyn whipped her gauntlet to the side without looking, ripping the ravager’s wing off, but didn’t have time to turn around properly before whipping it back in the opposite direction and beheading one of the larger ones mid-pounce.

“Odoben—”

Two ravagers struck at Robyn from opposite sides of the crevice; she dodged one, Fiona cutting herself off to leap backwards and slice the other across the gut.

“Robyn, it’s an odob—”  

Joanna risked a look over her shoulder and translated Fiona’s attempts. 

“BIG FUCKING WALRUS!”

In the split second while Robyn tried to process that information, the cavern was suddenly filled with an impossibly low sound, resonant and discordant, like the roar of a rusted drain motor from the depths of hell. Ravagers all but forgotten in the rush of heart-stopping terror, Robyn dove to the side and pressed back against the dark ice.

The cavern was small, and what was worse, shaped nearly like a flattened globe—the walls sloped upward at the sides, leaving a great deal of empty area that didn’t translate to floor space. The whole cave smelled like salt; most of what little open floor existed was nothing but ice, and much of that had been shattered and melted into a circle of black water, a subterranean exit that must eventually let out to the sea. A breathing hole.

A breathing hole for the monster rearing up in fury to fill almost the entire cave.

The odobentusk bellowed again, then fell.

Three of the ravagers were unfortunate enough to be under its bulk at the time, Robyn avoided joining them only at the last possible moment, flinging herself face-first against the side of the cave to the monster’s left.

She felt its passing like the delicate whisper of a cargo ship being dropped screaming off the side of Atlas—and then the shockwave hit. If she hadn’t already been pressed against the wall she’d have been thrown into it, like Fiona and—

A flare of maroon at the edge of her vision, burning bright before dissolving out of existence.

“Joanna!”

“Not dead!” Her voice strained. “Aura break!”

Meaning if that thing hit her again, she would be.

“Get back up the passage!” she ordered. “Stay alive and keep the ravagers off us!”

Odobentusks had shit vision, this one’s bulging red-rimmed eyes twitching and swollen as it tried to find them. But they could hear. 

It one flung itself around toward Robyn’s voice, faster than its sheer bulk would suggest it was capable of. Its rippling back half nearly crushed Fiona; she all but pole-vaulted on top of it, rolling over to safety on the other side, and ten-foot yellow tusks gouged rents in the cave wall from top to bottom as it tried to crush Robyn beneath its enormous mass of bone spurs and blubber. Only the split-second use of her last Gravity bolt let her skid out of the way in time.

Robyn extended her fan and lunged. It was a hard, solid cut; the serrated blades ripped deep, buried to the gauntlet and carrying through, opening a two-foot gash in the odobentusk’s hide.

It didn’t even twitch. Grimm couldn’t bleed; but there was no hint of even the ashy substance that passed for flesh, just a kind of white, unliving fat under its hide. She’d done no damage at all. The odobentusk didn’t even seem to have felt it.

A ravager, sensing her moment of distraction, latched onto her shoulder and bit down. A shot from across the cavern and it burst into ash, but they’d lost precious moments of reaction time.

This wasn’t a fight. An odobentusk was a leviathan in the oldest sense, massive and intelligent and ancient. Three Huntresses in an enclosed space weren’t even prey to this monstrosity; they were just ants standing in its way.

“Fiona!” Robyn briefly made the mistake of watching the horrifyingly long tusks, when the real danger was its crushing size. She gestured Fiona around the creature’s other side. “Split off! Flank it, keep its attention off Joanna!”

Fiona nodded and made a game attempt at slashing the odobentusk’s thick hide in passing, to about as much effect as Robyn had managed. Robyn made to break in the opposite direction, one bulging eye fixed on her with an expression of raw hate, and the odobentusk heaved itself forward with the clear intent to intercept and splatter her against the wall like a mildly irritating mosquito.

She probably could have dodged; but she never got the chance.

The rolling mass of Grimm was more than the cavern could bear. One flipper sent deep fractures racing in every direction at the point of contact; the ice around Robyn’s feet split from a sheet into a series of islands, and the island tilted upward to nearly ninety-degree angle. Her fan blades did nothing but carve a shallow divot into the ice as she fell through into the black water, and the ice sheet fell neatly back into place, sealing the brief opening with clinical detachment.

The cold burned immediately, and Robyn’s brain reverted to raw animal panic. Aura would protect her from shock and hypothermia for a time; it wouldn’t protect her from drowning. She groped at the ice above her, trying to hack at it with her fan, but she couldn’t get momentum underwater and whether the current was pulling her towards the hole or away from it she still wasn’t certain exactly where she was in relation to where she’d started; salt stung at her eyes and cold stung at her nerves and her lungs ached for a breath and it was only a matter of time before—

She could barely see, but Robyn could still make out the rush of bubbles and the sound of ice shattering above her head, before strong arms gripped her under the armpits and hauled her above.

The moment she was above water she gasped for breath and instinct forced her eyes shut, but she still recognized her rescuer’s voice. 

“Gotcha, Hill.” Harriet Bree slapped her once on the back, politely deactivating her hydraulics to do it. “Stay down. We’ve got this.”

Then the arms around her vanished in an electric flash, and Robyn somehow managed to groan in the middle of coughing her lungs out. Of course, that was the perfect end to today, she just had to get her life saved by the fucking AceOps.

The odobentusk thrashed; Robyn felt the reverberation in the cracking ice and Joanna’s hands under her shoulder, guiding her back into the sheltered crevice where she’d been dropped. Her eyes were streaming too hard from the salt and the pain of hacking up lungfuls of seawater to see anything.

“Harriet, immobilize it!”

“On it!”

Robyn wiped salt from her eyes in time to see a blurry flash as the odobentusk staggered from a sharp blow to the back of the head. Its tusks were impaled to the whisker in the wall of the cave; a white blur against white ice that was probably Clover made an indistinct movement, and only once Elm was already whiplashing through the air did Robyn recognize the maneuver of using Kingfisher to slingshot into an enemy.

A wave of nausea prevented her from seeing what happened next, as Fiona slid into the gap just in time to pull Robyn’s hair back while she vomited half the northern ocean onto the ice; but the odobentusk was clearly not dead, as the rasping noise of its tusks being wrenched free and Elm’s cry of shock made clear.

It gave another of those unnatural, engine-motor bellows. The shadows changed as it lurched around—

“STAY!”

The odobentusk didn’t round on the new voice; Robyn didn’t have time to wonder why, because Elm had finally gotten a clean shot. Robyn’s Aura shuddered in the blastwave of several rocket launchers going off in an enclosed space, but didn’t quite break.

There were no more roars. As an added bonus, someone had dealt with the ravagers.

The air shimmered briefly, and May dropped into a graceless cross-legged position on Robyn’s right.

“Thanks,” Fiona whispered.

Robyn seconded the sentiment with a weak gesture, finally able to sit up. “The AceOps?” she asked, voice hoarse from salt.

“I know.” May shot her an apologetic look. “Is it still too late to feed ourselves to the Grimm?”

“Be nice, May, we just saved your lives,” Clover’s voice was entirely too teasing, but as Robyn’s vision finally came into focus she could see concern on his face. “You okay, Robyn?”

“Never better,” she said, punctuating it with another cough. “Hope we didn’t interrupt anything important.”

“We were flying out to another search and destroy when we picked up May’s distress call. Keeping people alive is always a priority.” He sighed and crouched down beside her. “Robyn, what were you thinking? You almost got yourselves killed today.”

Robyn glared at him. “Can it, Clover, the bounty listing said ‘two dozen sabyrs, heavy creep activity, maybe a centinel nest’. You wouldn’t blame a soldier for getting bad intel."

“Oh good,” Harriet said flatly. “She’s fine.”

Robyn briefly considered flipping her off before deciding it would take too much energy. Clover frowned, digesting that. “Hmm. It must have gotten worse fast if the threat assessment didn’t update in the time it took you to get out here.”

“Or the SDC’s scouts are as competent as their mine inspectors,” Robyn snapped. 

Clover rolled his eyes fondly before getting up, removing a shock blanket from an emergency kit strapped to his back, and going over to Joanna. “Robyn, since when do you even take SDC jobs?”

Suppressing her instinctive urge to unhinge her jaw and swallow him whole, Robyn stumbled to her feet. Fiona’s field discipline was too deeply ingrained to hover; but there was still a warm hand under Robyn’s elbow as she slipped, steadying her as subtly as possible in front of Clover’s team.

“Well,” she said. “Apparently, the military was too busy to do anything about all the workers being killed on the trip back to Mantle. Someone had to clear out the nest.”

Clover sighed. “Robyn,” he said patiently. “We are defending the convoys—”

“The Dust shipments, Clover! You’re defending the Dust shipments, don’t kid yourself!”

“We’re defending caravans,” he insisted. “We’ve told the miners time and time again to stay with the armed escorts and not go out on the tundra alone. What do you want us to do, Robyn, bring those personnel transports in line by force? We can’t stop them from taking shortcuts, knowing the risks. We tried to tell them it wasn’t safe.”

“The one, single armed escort convoy that goes straight to the SDC Dust processing plant?” Robyn clarified mercilessly. “That’s nowhere near the parts of Mantle where these people live. It’s nearly two hours out of their way. You expect them to add that much time to their commute after a twelve-hour shift?”

Clover sighed again. “Look, you’re not wrong, and we want to have more escorts, but since the Fall of Beacon we’ve been spread thin out here.”

Spread thin doing what, Robyn thought bitterly, suppressing anything that even resembles a White Fang cell in Mantle?

But there were some arguments that she genuinely didn’t want to have with someone she used to consider a friend.

“The SDC did screw up though,” Clover continued. “They should have scouted this place out more before putting out a bounty listing.”

With the rush of adrenaline finally starting to subside and giving her room to think, something unpleasant stirred in the back of Robyn’s mind. “Yeah,” she said. “They really should have.”

That immediately got a look from Clover—evidently he still recognized that tone. “What are you thinking?”

Beside her, Fiona had stiffened, and Robyn didn’t have to look over at where May was helping warm Joanna up to know they both reacted similarly. “I’m thinking it seems a little convenient that they would put out a listing for four huntresses to protect workers from Mantle that turns out to be a death trap.”

Clover’s eyebrows shot up into his hairline. “Robyn, don’t be ridiculous. There’s no way anyone could have known about the odobentusk. Sometimes people make mistakes; it’s not always a conspiracy.”

“I’m not talking about the stupid walrus, Clover! No one is so bad at their jobs they could mistake Solitas beowolves for sabyrs, and no one could possibly miss this many ursai. I’m not exactly willing to give the benefit of the doubt to people who have wanted me dead for years!”

Clover pressed a hand to his forehead and sighed once again. “Robyn, you can’t actually prove that.”

A muscle popped in her jaw, and she forced herself to bite down on half a dozen retorts before they could even form in her mind. “I know you’re not stupid, Clover, who the hell else—”

“Okay!” A new voice interrupted her. “Not to interrupt, uh, ma’am, but maybe we should go back to the airship before your friend here gets hypothermia?”

Robyn turned her head. Belatedly, she realized that she hadn’t recognized the voice who’d yelled stay earlier, and now she found it belonged to a young man who couldn’t be far removed from the Academy. “I’m sorry, who are you?”

He had his mouth half-open to answer before Harriet beat him to it. “That’s Marrow.”

Oh. Right. Robyn had seen on the news that Tessa Dyne had been killed in action the night Beacon fell, in the defense of Mantle against the resulting Grimm attack, but in all the chaos and loss that night it had quickly been buried in her mind. Ironwood wouldn’t have let an AceOps vacancy stay open for long; Harriet would have to have been given a new partner.

Marrow coughed awkwardly, shooting a quick look at his partner before reaching for something behind his back. “Second Lieutenant Marrow Amin at your service, uh, Miss Hill.”

Robyn heard Elm’s snort across the room. “Calm down, kid, you’re gonna break something.”

A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth—military Huntsmen as green as the tundra wasn’t were not, generally, her favorite people to meet, but something about Marrow just seemed...endearing. For a baby bootlicker. A split second got the smile under control and then allowed her to express it the way she wanted. “Nice to meet you, Marrow. And please, it’s just Robyn.”

“Of course.” Something flicked behind Marrow’s back that registered to her after a moment—and then she very, very carefully kept a reaction off her face. A faunus in the AceOps? I’m shocked, Ironwood, I didn’t know you had it in you.

Clover was looking at Marrow with a knowing smirk; after a moment, he turned back to Robyn. “Well, he’s not wrong. We should get back to the airship and get you guys back to Mantle.”

Robyn nodded and walked over to Joanna, sighing as she did so. The sooner they were out of the AceOps’ hair the better, she thought, and she was sure the feeling was mutual. She could fume about how the SDC used its own workers as bait to kill her later, with her girls. Arguing with Clover had never been worth it.

Joanna gave her a quick, affirming nod as she helped her to her feet. “I’ll be fine, Robyn.”

Fiona was at her other side though, fit to burst with worry. May, true to form, had vanished; after a moment Robyn heard her voice from across the cave. “You know, Marrow, it’s not too late for you to ditch these losers. We have a very attractive benefits package.”

Marrow sighed.

Chapter Text

“Be serious, May,” Robyn complained.

“I’m dead serious. Robyn, you have to at least try, you’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t.”

Robyn rolled her eyes and took a sip of her beer.  “You should be careful what you wish for,” she countered. “What if I actually won? We’d have to get an apartment in Atlas.”

May did not look amused. “I’m pretty sure Council members have official residences, actually.”

Robyn groaned. “That’s worse!”

“You’re deflecting,” May snapped. “You’re making excuses because you’re scared to try—”

Robyn scoffed. “I am not scared of a bunch of empty suits in the sky, and nice try, princess. You’re not goading me into this.”

“Chicken,” May muttered into her glass.

“May.”

“Coward.”

“May!”

“Well,” said Capri, passing behind Robyn through the half-full Boarbatusk. She slid a large basket of fries onto the table that they hadn’t ordered and probably—despite Robyn’s attempts to protest—wouldn’t be paying for, and began setting down their food. “I’d vote for you.”

Robyn glared at her. “Shut up, you’re not hearing anything.”

“I mean it! I can’t think of anyone I’d rather vote for.” Capri raised her voice over the din of conversation. “Hey, who here would vote Robyn for Council?”

A chorus of affirmation followed. Everyone in the bar raised their hands, and Robyn dropped her head to the table. Joanna took a very smug bite of her burger, throwing Robyn’s suspicions about this whole idea not being solely May’s malicious brainchild into sharper focus.

“Put your hand down, Fiona,” Robyn said into the table. “You don’t count.”

“Your position on the voting rights of faunus has been noted,” was the immediate retort, before Fiona began tearing into a paper basket of hot wings.

“Shut up.”

“Robyn.” May had yet to make any move toward her fish and chips, which was as much a sign as anything that she was more serious than Robyn had given her credit for.

Robyn gave a heavy sigh. “Stop. Even if I had a snowball’s chance in Hell—May! You know the kinds of resources a Council campaign takes. We can’t afford it. And don’t even think the word ‘fundraising,’ it’s not just money, it’s time. ”

“Robyn, the last time Mantle’s Council seat was open was eighteen years ago!” May exclaimed. “If you pass this up it’s not a chance that’ll come back around again any time soon. Are you seriously going to let our representative in Atlas be Jacques Schnee?”

“You don’t know that’s going to happen,” Robyn said, rubbing her temples. “He hasn’t announced—”

“He will by this time next week. Don’t play dumb, you’re bad at it.”

“Then if he does, obviously I’ll back whoever opposes him to the hilt,” Robyn insisted. “I can’t—I don’t have actual political experience, you don’t just go from being an independent Huntress to being one of the five most powerful people in the Kingdom!”

“Oh, come on!” Joanna slammed her burger down. Beside her, Fiona had also made a disgusted, exasperated noise around most of a chicken wing. After several seconds of indignant sounds and frantic chewing, she swallowed heavily and immediately yelled:

“Robyn, what is wrong with you?!”

Whatever collective agreement they’d obviously made to let May take point on what Robyn had begun to suspect was an intervention, she’d clearly damaged their resolve.

Having seen the writing on the wall, Robyn rolled her eyes. “Setting up a community garden doesn’t exactly translate to world leadership, thank you.”

May cleared her throat, and the other two resentfully subsided.

“First of all,” she said, now irritatingly calm. “Four most powerful people in the Kingdom, Ironwood’s still tap-dancing on the corpse of democracy. Secondly, you’re full of shit. You’re the single most recognizable community organizer down here and you have been for at least the past year. You get calls every day from citywide activist groups, half of which you helped found, begging you to give a speech for them. And don’t pretend that being the most prominent independent Huntress in Mantle means nothing to these people!”

“You get how the city works,” Joanna insisted, sitting forward. “You know what people actually need, and you’re pretty damn good at getting it to them.”

“And you listen,” added Fiona, quietly. “You really hear people when they talk. You know how rare that is down here. They need you.”

“That’s what I’m saying. They need me doing what I’m good at a lot more than they need me schmoozing with politicians up in Atlas. I’m not dropping everything to run an electoral campaign!”

May reached out and gripped her hand. “You’re doing more than any other three activists in Mantle combined right now,” she agreed. “And it’s not enough. We’re barely keeping people’s heads above water as it is, and it’s getting worse. It’ll get worse a lot faster once Schnee ends up running functionally unopposed, because there’s one person in Mantle who might be able to beat him and I’m looking at her.”

Her sincerity made Robyn’s heart ache. “May,” she sighed. “Joanna. I—you’re all biased, lambchop.” Fiona shook her head stubbornly when Robyn turned to her in a desperate appeal for sanity. “People like me don’t win Council seats!”

“People like you,” May retorted without a hint of pity, “Don’t come back to a shitty apartment in Mantle when they’re all but offered command of the AceOps.”

“May.” Robyn pinched the bridge of her nose. “Please be realistic, this isn’t—”

“Miss Hill?” said a hesitant voice at her elbow. “Ma’am?” 

Robyn looked up, startled, and gave a wide smile. “Oh, Paige! It’s good to see you, can I help you with anything?”

While her girls exchanged a look with each other that Robyn refused to acknowledge, Paige Partington tugged anxiously at the sleeves of her blouse and glanced over her shoulder before sidling closer.

“It’s actually more the other way around,” Paige said in a low voice. “Look, I had someone in the store earlier today. Real suspicious character, gave me a bad vibe. Wouldn’t give me a name. And she was asking about you.”

Fiona and Joanna exchanged worried glances. May just arched an eyebrow and turned to fix Robyn with a pointed look.

“Shut up,” Robyn told her. Calmly, she turned back to Paige and offered her another reassuring smile. “Thank you. Can you tell me what she looked like?”

It was raining heavily in Mantle.

What a surprise.

The young woman picking her way down a poorly-maintained street blinked water out of her eyes with visible irritation, but hurrying through the rain seemed not to be worth it. Rough-trimmed black hair barely brushed her shoulders as she pulled the hood of a worn navy poncho over her head in a futile attempt to keep dry.

She ducked under the awning of a 24-7 convenience store, a flashing neon light amid crowded advertisements in the window clashing horribly with an outfit consisting mostly of sky blues. The brightness settings of her scroll, when she pulled it out and tapped a contact icon without looking, were turned so far down as to make the screen nearly impossible to see.

The woman crossed her arms and leaned back against the dirty window; she didn’t have to wait long. Whoever was on the other end picked up after half a ring.

“Talk to me, Loxi.”

“Regina,” Robyn responded, casually avoiding eye contact with a young man walking past her. “You would not believe how hard it is to find a bar around here that knows how to pour a decent Ausvanderer.”

She could almost hear Joanna rolling her eyes on the other end of the line; the code names were a little much, but Robyn would rather be paranoid than dead. And this was...not her part of Mantle. She was...not popular here, in the immediate surroundings of the main SDC processing center, where the most hardcore conservative neighborhoods popped up. She talked too much about Mantle to get much traction in places with this many Atlesian flags flying from vehicles and storefronts.

Also, there was probably someone trying to murder her.

“You giving up?” asked Joanna.

“Hell no.” The carelessness was probably convincing if you weren’t listening for anything more. “Night’s still young, I’m gonna hit a few places along 47th. I’ll let you know if I find a spot worth coming back to.”

Joanna sighed. “Stay safe. Don’t leave your drinks out.”

“Yes, mother.” Robyn ended the call, then switched off all networking capability and locked her scroll. It was a risk, and she knew it stressed her girls out beyond belief, but—she didn’t trust Atlesian security, and she didn’t trust how much access Jacques Schnee already had to essential networks. If there was someone gunning for her, she wasn’t going to risk them being able to track her.

Truth be told, she’d rather have her girls watching her back. But she was distinctive enough on her own despite her efforts to disguise herself, wearing clothes borrowed from Paige Partington with her hair dyed and green contacts against her natural lavender turning her eyes a forgettable shade of brown. All four of them together would scream their true identities, especially allowing for Fiona in this part of Mantle; and a contract killer would have to be competent enough to notice a trio of bodyguards holding sniper positions on the rooftops. Instead, Fiona and May were conspicuously guarding an unrelated location, and Joanna was out doing this same thing in another part of the city.

Robyn brushed water off her rain poncho as she approached Dive Bar #4. For the look of the thing, she gave a cursory glance at the menu—and forced herself not to react to the No Faunus sign next to it.

Every inch of her tail stub tingled as she stepped carelessly through the door. 

The barkeep hardly glanced at her as she sat down, and Robyn made a show of thinking over the menu before ordering something cheap that she wouldn’t drink. After a minute or two, she waved him over.

“I’ll have an Ausvanderer,” she said, flashing her most disarming smile. “Also, I was wondering if I could ask you something?”

He did not look impressed. “Who’s asking?”

“Loxi Flynn,” Robyn said. “And I’m looking for someone. Not a local.”

He grunted, which was the best Robyn was likely to get.

“Pale woman, dark hair, black eyes, fairly tall,” Robyn continued with the same friendly smile. “Mid to late forties. Has a scar running from her temple to her jawline. I’m trying to get in contact with her.”

“Never seen her,” said the bartender, and walked away.

A woman two seats down at the bar gave a rough scoff. “You’re looking for Gal Gisborne? You’re looking for Gal?”

Robyn turned to face her. “That’s right. You know her?”

The woman shot her a sour look. She was generically blonde, blue-eyed, more stocky than tall, and wore an expression that suggested she had smiled exactly one time in her life and it had been at her grandmother’s funeral. “Fuck off. I’m not here to talk to stupid kids. Get me another one of these,” she added to the jaded barkeep.

“Put it on my tab.” Robyn raised an eyebrow at the glare this earned her. “If we’re being technical, you talked to me first. Someone piss in your beer too, or is that just what your face looks like?”

“You don’t like my face you’d better quit looking,” was the blunt reply. “Quit looking for Gal, too. You won’t like what you find. That’s a seasoned killer, not some tundra hare-skinner.”

Robyn fought not to bristle at the accidental accuracy. Her own weapon was far too unique to risk wearing it while undercover; she’d dug out her old compound bow and hunting knife instead. And those would let her pass as the amateur hunter she’d once been—no Huntress, no matter how bad her financial straits might become, would rely on such weapons. The insult still rankled. 

The woman finished her judgemental once-over. “What do you want with her, anyway? You wanna commit suicide, just walk out on the tundra. Let the Grimm have you. It’ll be cleaner than what Gisborne’s willing to give you.”

“I’ve heard of her, thanks. Most people have.” Robyn had to play her cards carefully, now. “But I heard there was a reward out,” she lied. It was the kind of rumor that floated around Mantle constantly—that you could get some easy lien by this, that or the other thing. “For information about someone or other. I wanted to ask who she’s looking for. I might know them.”

“Mmm.” The woman took her time over her drink. “You probably do. Don’t waste her time unless you’re damn sure you know Robyn Hill better than someone else in the city who’s already talked to her.”

“I might,” said Robyn. “What does she want with Hill, anyway? I thought Gisborne was from Mistral.”

She wasn’t, as it happened. Robyn hadn’t known the identity of whoever was trying to track her down until this moment; but Gal Gisborne was infamous. The worst kind of fallen Huntress, and one of the darkest stains on Beacon Academy’s reputation. But she was playing an ignorant yokel to the hilt at the moment.

“You have to ask?” The woman took a sip. “Gal Gisborne killed her own brother for fifteen thousand lien. Figure she’s gonna invite the bitch to a tea party. Paint each other’s nails.”

Robyn gave a mirthless snort that was actually genuine. “She might be biting off more than she can chew even with the information I can offer,” she suggested. “Hill’s a Huntress, after all. Unless Gisborne’s got some kind of trap set up.”

“Wouldn’t know. But I don’t think she’ll need one.” The woman looked amused at something. “You think Hill’s good, don’t you.”

Robyn had a perfectly healthy ego, thank you. Barely managing to suppress a smirk, she replied innocently, “I’ve heard people call her the best Huntress in Mantle.”

“She probably is.” The woman finished off her drink. “But that’s not saying anything worth shit. This pig sty of yours isn’t the whole world. You want to talk to Gal, I can show you where I last heard she was staying, and that’s just because I don’t want some Mantle trash thinking I owe her for the drink. I’m leaving. Stay or don’t.”

“You could write down the address and get rid of me faster,” Robyn pointed out.

“Idiot. You think someone with that kind of rap sheet hangs out somewhere with a street address? In a little over your head, don’t you think?”

Robyn affected a careless shrug. “Lead the way.”

She followed the short, unpleasant blonde back into the rain, making a note of the area as she was led down the backstreets. There was no way it could be far; her guide wouldn’t take that kind of time. She’d get an idea of where the building was, then get back in contact with Joanna.

Of course, there was always the very real—and likely—possibility this was a trap of some kind that she’d willingly barged into. But if Gisborne was looking for Robyn—had been hired to do so—then setting traps for random Mantle hunters would only interfere.

Unless she intended to use their grisly murders as bait. Also a possibility, and not out of character. In which case, suddenly finding herself against an actual Huntress would hopefully be enough to tip the scales. As best she could tell, this short blonde conspirator in her olive drab colors wasn’t even armed.

“Up there,” grunted her guide, pointing up a side street. “Third door on the left. Get lost.”

“Thanks.” Robyn glanced at the nearest street sign, then stepped out of obvious sniper lines before she began scoping out the surrounding buildings.

There was no warning. No shifting shadows, no scrape of metal against a sheath.

Aura flared in blinding emerald behind Robyn’s eyes as she staggered forward under a stunning blow from the sword her erstwhile guide absolutely had not been carrying a moment ago.

Robyn had no time to react; the blackened steel blade was whistling back toward her from the opposite direction. Her fingers twitched, reflexively trying to extend a fan that wasn’t there, and the moment of hesitation nearly got her killed. She leapt back against the brick wall of the alley just in time; the sword missed, and before her assailant could recover Robyn plucked a Gravity-tipped arrow from her quiver and stabbed it into the wall between them.

A rippling shockwave threw them both back, scrabbling to keep their footing; Robyn was just able to extend her old bow by the time her attacker had come back to a ready position.

Her attacker shimmered, an unsettling effect like spilled oil rushing over the woman’s body. It was as if she were...melting, just for a moment, blonde hair darkening and flesh molding into candle wax, and what had to have been an illusion fell away.

Oh.

“Yours is better,” Robyn said breathlessly.

“You really thought you were clever,” said Gal Gisborne, sounding disgusted. “Cheap hair dye and you changed your clothes? I’m making this slow just for the insult.”

“Sure you are.” Robyn put tension on her bowstring but didn’t draw, not fully, not yet. She wasn’t about to underestimate this woman again. She didn’t have a quick-load crossbow anymore. If she missed, or Gal dodged, a fast melee fighter could be on her before she could get another shot off. “Nice trick. Explains how you’ve avoided justice so long.”

“Full-spectrum self-focused sensory illusions, is what it said on my transcripts.” Gal didn’t bother with any taunts or blade-twirling, which was a shame, because they would have given Robyn an opening. “Or would have, if I’d let them keep that kind of information on me. But don’t give yourself so much credit. Illusions are cheap, mimics are common as dirt. I’m alive because Huntsmen are stupid.”

All five senses, that tracked. The voice was very different, suddenly; the blonde woman’s voice had been low and raspy, but now it was in a slightly higher register and that was the only noteworthy thing about it. Everything about her was utilitarian; dark brown hair cropped unartistically close, hard-tanned leather armor over undyed cotton. The sword was blackened and the guard was ugly and simple, rough leather wrapped around an unadorned hilt.

“Well,” Robyn allowed. “They got ‘self-centered’ right.”

Gal snorted. “I see why someone’d want you dead. I don’t usually waste my time in this frozen shithole, but I think cutting you open is enough of a public service to warrant that pardon they promised to arrange.”

That sent a wave of fury through her, but Robyn forced another of the grins that Gal evidently found so annoying. “They went to that much effort for me? Aw, I’m t—”

Unfortunately, Gal Gisborne didn’t do pre-fight banter very well. She charged mid-sentence.

Robyn’s first shot was deflected off the blackened sword and burst into a useless clump of ice against the wall; she managed a second that Gal dodged before she had to dive out of the way of a two-handed swing toward her ribs.

Robyn rolled to one knee, a third arrow between her fingers, far too slow. Her bow was lightweight steel, and that was all that saved her life; Gal had recovered from her missed swing alarmingly fast, and the next blow buried itself in the mechanism. The bow dented badly, useless now; but didn’t shatter. It was enough, just enough, for Robyn to disengage with her head still attached.

She now had a hunting knife and a quiver of arrows, only a handful of which were tipped with Dust, and nothing to shoot them.

To put it lightly, she was not equipped for this fight.

Gal had driven her too far into the blocked alley to bolt for the exit. There was no alleyway in Mantle that was a match for Robyn Hill, this was her native habitat; but in order to vault the barricade she would need a few seconds to scope it out, a running start, or the ability to turn her back to her opponent.

She could get over it, no problem, as long as she didn’t mind getting impaled halfway up.

The tight quarters of the alleyway were not conducive to broadsword fighting, which was Robyn’s only advantage; the hunting knife was smaller and faster. All the rest of the advantages were in Gisborne’s hands, because this wasn’t a swordfight. Robyn couldn’t get near her past the reach of that sword, and couldn’t retreat beyond it.

Gal backed her up with thrusts and lazy swipes until the hair on Robyn’s neck stood up; another half-step back and she’d be pressed against the debris barricade. No more time to be careful—

Gal swung again, and Robyn dove.

It only half-worked. Robyn slashed at Gisborne’s tendon as she rolled; the blade glanced off her blood-red Aura, and Gal simply turned with her own momentum and dragged her blade directly across Robyn’s spine.

Emerald light flickered and flashed in the dark alley; Robyn’s Aura was still up, it hadn’t shattered, but another hit like that—

She spun and flexed the fingers of her right hand around the hilt of her old trusted hunting blade. The left, she slipped into her pocket and fumbled for her scroll.

Of course there was no choice but to try to back down the alleyway again; Robyn didn’t expect that strategy to work and it didn’t. Gal pressed her for a few meters at best before rushing in with a hard, straight thrust that forced Robyn to dodge to the side and allowed Gal past, blocking her exit again.

She could unlock her scroll by touch, but had to glance down to navigate to the networking options. She wasn’t an amateur, and Gal’s attempt to cut under her guard—such as that was, when she had a hunting knife with barely any crossguard against a hand-and-a-half broadsword—went nowhere. But half a second later, Gal feinted with the blade and stepped in to ram a knee into Robyn’s ribs. It was a mistake, Robyn was inside her guard now and only lightning-fast reflexes saved her from a vicious slash toward the jugular; but the impact knocked the scroll from her fingers, and Gal stomped on the screen as it fell.

“Don’t bother calling your little harem just yet.” Gal swiped across Robyn’s torso, forcing her to leap back. “I’ll pay them a visit when I’m done with you.”

Robyn gave a vicious laugh. “That’ll be the last mistake you ever make. They’ve faced worse than you.”

Gal didn’t react to the taunt in the slightest. “They haven’t.”

“Your party trick won’t get you close to them,” Robyn insisted. “Not looking like yourself won’t matter, we didn’t know what you were supposed to look like until tonight anyway.”

She didn’t respond. But as Robyn watched, the woman’s appearance began shifting again. The hair grew longer and lighter, unhealthily pale skin gained color, the rough leathers in their harsh undyed shades softened to Mantle earth-toned layers.

Black eyes turned to lavender.

“I’m fine, guys,” said Robyn’s doppelganger, in a voice that sounded more like Robyn remembered hearing on video than her own did. She took a step back, horror rising along her spine like impending lightning as she tried and failed to find an imperfection in the effect. After a moment’s thought, the illusion shifted to reflect Robyn’s current, disguised appearance instead. “Really. Joanna. You can stop fussing.”

She looked Robyn in the eye, and for the first time, finally gave a dark smirk that looked viscerally wrong on her own features.

“I’m just tired, lambchop,” murmured Gal Gisborne. “Come to bed?”

She barely got her ugly sword raised in time to keep Robyn from tearing out her throat.

Caution was doing no one any good. Robyn pressed, forcing herself inside Gisborne’s guard. Without a ranged weapon or the space to use it she gripped an arrow in her fist and drove it into Gal’s shoulder—and her Aura visibly flickered.

That—shouldn’t have happened, though Robyn wasn’t complaining about her unexpected good luck. Robyn’s own Aura was flagging, but Gisborne was the only one who’d gotten in more than grazing blows. Her Aura should be nearly as good as new, if she hadn’t been injured and hadn’t...been overtaxing her Semblance…

In the moment she understood, she saw furious understanding reflected back from her own eyes. 

The doppelganger slammed her forehead into Robyn’s nose and her dying Aura. Robyn, heart pounding with renewed hope, lunged.

Gal Gisborne was a hardened murderer, and worse than a murderer. But Robyn was crater trash through and through, a wily little fox faunus from the worst streets in Mantle, and she could no longer afford to lose this fight.

She launched herself at Gisborne and refused to let go; the knife barely came into play, this far inside the reach of a sword. Robyn fought with teeth and knees and open-fisted blows as often as she bothered using arrow tips as melee weapons; Gal didn’t hesitate to use her fists either, but she had to balance a sword. Besides. At the moment, Gal Gisborne was fighting for her life. Robyn was fighting for so much more.

Green and red flickered together off the dingy walls. For a moment, driving a plain-tipped arrow again and again toward Gal’s eyes, Robyn nearly had the upper hand—and then, teeth bared around her flashing Aura, Gal ripped her sword arm free and slammed the pommel into Robyn’s temple.

The crack was deafening, and the wild dancing flashes of emerald that exploded in Robyn’s eyes nearly whited out her vision. She staggered, tripped over a loose brick underfoot, and the impact of falling back hard against one shoulder proved to be too much. Her abused Aura snapped and dissolved around her, and Gal Gisborne’s black sword drove toward her chest with the clear intent to pin her to the ground like a dying beetle.

There was no time to think. Robyn dropped her knife and grabbed the blade with her bare hand, rolling hard with the motion to force it aside.

The black sword impaled itself in the bricks with a dull metallic clink, a gush of blood and the horrific grinding noise of metal against bone. This time Robyn’s vision did go blank, a hazy searing white from the pain; it was too intense to scream, she couldn’t have stopped herself  from curling in on her savaged hand for anything in the world; she felt and heard the blade being ripped from the ground, was vaguely aware of a dark shadow raising it again. The fingers on her left hand were bloodless and trembling as she tried to grip another arrow, desperately searching for a second Gravity bomb to buy herself just a few seconds, knowing she wouldn’t be able to pull it off in time.

Gal gave a grunt of pained effort. The adrenaline of raw terror only made this harder, arrows skittering away from Robyn’s useless fingers as she braced. There was another rush of air above her, another sliding sound of metal against something hard, and Robyn convulsed reflexively at the sensation of—

Nothing.

Blinking, ears still ringing from the agony of her mangled hand, Robyn lifted her head. The dying-ember flickers of a broken Aura, falling like flakes of rust or dried blood, swam in her bleary vision. Gal had staggered away, sword shifting in her hand to point at something over Robyn’s head, behind her—  

Something that Robyn, frankly, did not care about. Her stupid fingers couldn’t manipulate something as delicate as an arrow; but they found her fallen hunting knife. A split-second lunge was all it took before she jackknifed to her feet and buried it to the hilt in Gal’s throat. 

Gal Gisborne’s eyes went wide as Robyn ripped the blade free, and she clutched feebly at the gushing wound. One, two, three steps back, and she toppled over backward.

She didn’t get up.

Robyn stood there for a moment, panting, before she finally looked over her shoulder. 

“Oh. Hey, Joanna, when did you get here?”

Joanna lowered her bowstaff and sighed. “Robyn, you’re not allowed to go on solo missions anymore.”

Robyn pulled her hood off, pressing it tightly against the blood pouring from her hand. “I can’t imagine what you mean,” she said, voice wavering slightly. “Clearly, I had everything under control.”

Joanna reached out to steady her under her good arm, and Robyn looked up and hoped her unspeakable gratitude could be read in her smile.

“How did you know which one was me?” she asked.

“Well, one of you was getting her ass kicked in six directions,” Joanna said flatly, “So I figured that one was you. The knife,” she relented when Robyn glared. “You’d drop a sword and fight bare-handed if it was your only option, you’re terrible with them. There was no way that was you. And I broke her Aura.”

Which had broken her Semblance and thus the illusion. Sensible.

“My ping went through?” That was a surprise. She’d been certain she hadn’t managed to open the network yet when her scroll was destroyed; but Joanna was shaking her head.

“I just…” She hesitated. “I had a bad feeling.”

“Thank you,” Robyn whispered. “Really.”

Joanna put an arm around her shoulders. Robyn let herself be pulled into a hard, desperate hug, and politely didn’t comment on how hard Joanna was trembling.

Finally, Joanna took a deep breath and let her go.

“Let me see that hand,” she ordered, and Robyn held it out meekly.

While Joanna worked over the wound with a first-aid kit, Robyn’s gaze was drawn toward Gisborne.

“She was offered a pardon,” she said after several long moments. “For killing me. That was her fee. Someone offered to arrange a full pardon, and she believed they could do it. That means the Atlesian government, or someone with a lot of influence on them.”

Joanna’s eyebrows shot up. “Someone planning to nab a Council seat, maybe?”

Robyn winced, only partly due to her throbbing hand. Joanna grimaced and went back to cleaning it. “Look, Robyn. I know what we were saying earlier, but—it’s okay if you’re scared.”

Robyn thought it over for a moment. “I’m not scared of losing,” she eventually said, softly. “Or of someone trying to kill me. I’m afraid I’m going to win.”

Joanna glanced up. “Yeah?”

Robyn swallowed, forcing herself to look away from Gal Gisborne’s cooling body. “I’m afraid I’ll—you all believe in me so much. I know you’re right, I know people will follow me if I ask. I don’t know if we can beat the machine but I know we have to try. I just...people join Atlas with the best of intentions and it eats them alive. I’m afraid I’ll make it and forget who I am. I’ll start...making compromises I can’t make. I’ll start believing they’re necessary. It’s so easy to lose perspective up there, where everything looks small. Most of Mantle you can’t even see.” 

There was a long, thoughtful silence.

“Robyn,” Joanna eventually said. “This is gonna hurt.”

Robyn waved her good hand. “Lay it on me,” she said with a wry smile. “Whatever you think I need to hear, you’re probably right.”

“No,” said Joanna, “I mean, this is gonna hurt like a motherfucker.”

“What—”

After Joanna had upended a bottle of disinfecting alcohol over Robyn’s hand, and after Robyn had stopped swearing the paint off the walls, her old partner squeezed her shoulder.

“You already made it,” Joanna reminded her. “If being in Atlas was enough to make you forget what Mantle means to you, you wouldn’t have come back the first time. Besides. If you do start going mad with power, I’ll beat you with a stick.” 

“Thanks.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I.” Robyn smiled. “Let me borrow your scroll, I need to tell May and Fiona that we’re in. Also, I need to report that I just killed a wanted fugitive in self-defence. Also—oh, shit—”

Joanna caught her as she passed out.

Chapter Text

“Special delivery!” Robyn said cheerfully as she shouldered the door open. 

A cheer went up throughout the room. People looked up from scrolls and printed-out lists of scroll numbers and addresses—the network signals in Robyn’s campaign headquarters were normal for Mantle, i.e, not super reliable—and their tired faces brightened when they saw her. One group had clearly just come in a few minutes ago from a canvassing run and were still warming up by the heater; they cheered like she’d just freed them from a Grimm siege.

One of the volunteers had the presence of mind to clear flyers and posters off one of the many crowded fold-up picnic tables so that Robyn could deposit her precious cargo: a comically tall stack of pizza boxes. 

“All right everyone, we’ve got pepperoni, cheese, sausage, and I put my money where my mouth is about supporting all of my constituents, even including the ones who are objectively wrong, and got one with pineapple.”

A low chuckle spread through the crowd, and the volunteer standing next to Olive elbowed her playfully in the ribs. 

“Thanks, Miss Hill,” she said, blushing deeply as she ducked her head. It was easier said than done; the sprawling tangle of reindeer antlers arching over her head made lowering it in a dense crowd a public safety concern. But Olive knew exactly where her antlers began and ended, and no one so much as had to shift out of the way.

Robyn plucked the insult to pizza off the top of the stack and dropped it next to the others on the table. “Go crazy, weirdo. I couldn’t do this without every one of you kids.”

She waved off the immediate surge of red-faced, self-conscious protests that they were happy to be here, ma’am, really, and caught the pack of paper plates May tossed her in mid-air.

“I know at least half of you have school in the morning,” she informed them all sternly. “So eat, get warm, and I expect you all to tell me if you need bus fare home, understand? Good.”

While the volunteers fell on the pizza boxes like a band of winter-starved hyenas, Fiona strolled in from the back room and began matter-of-factly producing two-liter soda bottles and plastic cups from thin air.

“You know,” she said under her breath as she laid the drinks out. “I could have carried the pizzas too.”

Robyn leaned over, smiling faintly, and whispered, “Optics.”

Fiona rolled her eyes, glancing up with a fond twinkle. “Sure,” she retorted. “It’s definitely not because you still can’t believe you’ve got this many people fighting for you and want to personally thank your volunteers so they know how much it means to you. This is totally just a calculated political move.”

“Obviously.” There were a few veteran organizers here, people Robyn had preexisting relationships with or who were particularly ideologically dedicated. But Schnee had poached most of Mantle’s professional campaign workers immediately by being able to offer incredibly generous salaries that Robyn’s grassroots campaign couldn’t hope to match. 

So most of her campaign workers were volunteers; young, fresh-faced college-age kids, more than a few high school kids with stars in their eyes, people who had to squeeze volunteer hours between shifts of their minimum-wage jobs. And the fact that they were all doing this because they believed in her... Robyn just hoped she could be what they deserved.

Fiona’s grin widened. “Because you’re a soulless politician now and not even a little bit the same person you’ve always been.”

Robyn ruffled her hair, tugging lightly on one ear in retaliation and grinning when Fiona shot her a badly-feigned glare. “See, now you’re getting it.”

“You’re ridiculous.” Fiona shoved her lightly, which still involved a surprising amount of force for such a tiny body. “I’m getting pizza.

“You do that.” Robyn aimed a playful cuff at the back of Fiona’s head, making her jump as she walked off, and leaned against the whitewashed back wall with a smile.

She was right, of course. Robyn knew, deep down, that they weren’t going to win no matter what the polls said; but that didn’t make the fight meaningless. And there were nights—sometimes even these ones, the tired weekday evenings that highlighted how desperate they really were, because even these nights reminded her what Mantle could do—when she nearly believed…

Her scroll buzzed faintly against her leg.

7:34 PM
Pietro: hello Robyn…...hope you are doing well. Things are slow here but that’s a good thing…...lol. miss talking to you but I know you’re busy….are you somewhere private right now? Call me when you get a chance…...hope to see you soon….good luck

Robyn winced while she read through the painfully earnest message. It was true that she hadn’t gotten much chance to talk to Pietro since...well, since it happened. It was hard for him to talk about it when almost every detail was actually highly classified.

7:36 PM

RH: I’m standing in my campaign HQ right now, if that counts as private. What’s up?

A few seconds later, her phone rang. She realized belatedly, as Pietro’s smiling face appeared over the call notification, that he’d been contacting her on her personal line and not the official campaign number.

That might be significant, or it might not.

Joanna’s sharp gaze was burning across the room; Robyn glanced in her direction and made a don’t worry about it gesture as she stepped away from the carnage of the pizza boxes toward a slightly more private corner of the room.

“Pietro,” she said warmly. “Is everything all right?”

“Robyn!” Her shoulders relaxed slightly at his jovial tone. “How goes the campaign? I keep meaning to buy some more of your flyers.”

Robyn couldn’t help but laugh. “Repair your ceiling, Dr. Polendina. You’ve done too much for me already.”

Pietro had been one of her most enthusiastic supporters even in the depth of his grief; he’d already met the legal limit for campaign donations and was now purchasing bumper stickers and Robyn Hill For Council posters at a prodigious rate. He’d overridden her objections by pointing out that those were not legally donations and anyway he was redistributing them to campaign supporters who couldn’t afford the extra expense.

“Well, we’ll see.” He hesitated. “Say, Robyn. You haven’t stopped by the clinic in a while. You should come around soon. There’s something I think we should talk about.”

With another twinge of guilt, Robyn checked the time. She usually made sure to drop by the clinic every other month or so; it wasn’t that she’d been neglecting or avoiding it, but Pietro was right in that it had been some time. “I’ll do my best, Doctor. When will you be in Mantle next?”

“I’m in tonight!” was the too-quick response. His voice was light and cheerful, but something in Robyn’s hindbrain raised its hackles. Something felt off. “Now I know you’re busy, Robyn. But if you could spare a few minutes, I think you’ll be glad you did.”

Oh, that wasn’t concerning at all.

Mind racing, Robyn fought to keep her voice even. “I see. I can’t make any promises, Pietro, but I’ll certainly see what I can do.”

She was more than concerned enough now that she would absolutely be in position to scope the place out within the next two hours. She just suddenly felt it would be a bad idea to confirm that future location over the phone.

“Oh, of course, I understand.” Pietro’s veneer of casual ease was slipping badly. “You know, if you can’t make it tonight, feel free to come by tomorrow morning! There’s nothing wrong, Robyn.” At that, curiously, his voice relaxed by a lot. That much, at least, was sincere. “I certainly don’t mean to worry you. I’d just like to sit down with you for a few minutes tonight or early tomorrow."

Robyn considered this.

“So, uh,” she said, meeting Joanna’s eyes across the room and jerking her head to call her girls over. “Early tomorrow meaning before...around what time, do you think?”

Pietro cleared his throat awkwardly. “Oh, nothing specific. About...an hour before two PM Atlas Standard.”

“I can work with that.” Not specific at all, thank you, Dr. Polendina. Robyn gave her scroll a wry look at her friend’s acting skills before feigning light carelessness again. She lied, “I’ll text you when I have a chance to look over my schedule. Take care of yourself, Doctor.”

“Of course, Robyn. Of course. Take care.”

Her girls had popped up by the time Robyn tapped the call cancel button. Joanna raised an eyebrow almost invisibly, and Robyn—just barely—silenced her with a tiny shake of the head.

“Back room,” she said, trying to project calm for the sake of the volunteers. “Team meeting. Now.”

Okay, this didn’t look like a trap.

Joanna, flat on the roof beside her, lowered her binoculars to lean into Robyn’s ear. “What’re we thinking?” she muttered.

Robyn flicked her eyes carefully, deliberately from point to point over the cheerfully glowing clinic.

“Best case scenario,” she said, “I’m going to have to explain to Pietro about campaign finance law again.”

“Worst case scenario?” asked Fiona.

Grimly, Robyn responded, “Someone’s got a gun to his head.”

Fiona’s ears twitched in acute distress. “He said we have until one o’clock tomorrow, right?”

“He said we have until an hour before two o’clock,” Robyn corrected in a low murmur. “Which is not how anyone would normally phrase it.”

“Uh,” May coughed. “So, remember that mystery press conference Ironwood’s got scheduled for two tomorrow?”

“Yeah, I was thinking about that too.” Robyn lowered her binoculars. “Probably not a coincidence. Maybe it’s just something he’ll be busy with.”

“Or maybe he wants to give us a heads-up about something?” Joanna asked.

Fiona raised two fingers tentatively. “I’m not sure I like either of those options?”

“No idea what you mean.” Robyn shifted slightly to get a better line of sight on Pietro’s back door. “What could possibly be concerning about a tip-off from our close friend on the Atlesian experimental weapons development board, right before a major announcement from the man who’s definitely not a dictator?”

“Focus,” breathed May on her other side. “How are we playing this, Robyn?”

Robyn closed her eyes and tried to think.

There was no obvious sign of a struggle, not from the outside. The clinic was open. All the blinds in the residential apartments were drawn tight, but the front windows were unshuttered and everything visible through them in order. Every so often, Pietro would come motoring through the front room to grab something or other. May had run recon around the back and hadn’t turned up any electronics that shouldn’t be there.

So they were fairly sure he wasn’t being held hostage by another serial killer.

Which left only every single other option on the table.

Robyn opened her eyes.

“Right,” she said. “I’m gonna knock on the door.”

“I’m gonna kill you,” May responded calmly.

“I’ll sit on her,” volunteered Fiona.

“Very funny.” Robyn sent her a withering look. “All five pounds of you?”

“Shut up!”

“The truth hurts, lambchop. May, cover me—”

“Robyn,” May said in a rush. “No. You’re too important, one of us should—”

Fiona groaned. “Don’t open like that, now she’s never gonna listen—”

“I don’t actually,” said Robyn with more than a hint of testiness, “remember opening this to debate—”

Joanna placed a heavy hand on her shoulder, and Robyn had no choice but to look up. For several seconds Joanna just looked at her; then, sighing with just a hint of a smile, she squeezed Robyn’s shoulder once and vaulted over the edge of the building. She scrambled nimbly down a series of drainpipes, air processors and supplemental heating units before rolling to a silent landing in the alley.

Robyn’s girls were nearly as good at running the Mantle backstreets as Robyn herself, these days.

Carefully, Joanna sidled up to the back door and knocked. After several moments and the sound of movement inside the residency, the door opened.

The building did not instantly explode, and Joanna’s eyes visibly darted over every surface inside the kitchen in a rapid threat assessment as Pietro’s shocked greeting filtered over the background noise of the city at night.

Finally, Joanna leaned back and signed an all-clear toward the rooftops.

Robyn jumped down on Joanna’s path, sure to throw in a few extra unnecessary flips—she had a title to defend—before rolling to a landing next to her.

“Hi, Pietro!” She grinned breathlessly. “How can I help you?”

Pietro, a hand over his heart from watching her descent, took a moment to steady himself. Finally, he managed, “Robyn! Well! I’m so glad you found the time, I must have...missed your text…”

“Network problem with my scroll,” she answered smoothly. “Can we come in?”

He jumped slightly. “Of course! Of course. Come on in out of the cold, all three of you.”

Fiona waved.

“Thank you.” Robyn blinked. “Three?”

There was a horrible creaking noise from their right; hands flew to weapons, but May, hopping off the lowest steel step to the alley level, just rolled her eyes.

“There was a fire escape, Robyn,” she said flatly. “There were stairs.”

Fiona, gods bless her loyal heart, protested, “Joanna started it.”

“Why, Miss Marigold.” Pietro gave a gracious seated bow. “It’s been too long. Come in, come in!”

Fiona hopped over the threshold and into the heat without further ado; Robyn followed her, with May nearly glued to her right side and Joanna bringing up the wary rear.

Pietro’s kitchen did not manifest invisible assassins.

“Can I get you ladies anything? Tea? I should make some tea—”

“Pietro,” Robyn interrupted gently. “Please, just tell us what this is about. You’re starting to make me nervous.”

He made an embarrassed wave. “What could there possibly be to be nervous about? It’s just—well, it’s—it’s probably better if I just showed you—”

“Hello again!”

Robyn’s head whipped around to the doorway that voice had come from, and—

And standing there, waving awkwardly, was someone who shouldn’t be there.

“...I’m gonna make that tea,” whispered May.

Robyn nodded, vague and stunned, as Penny Polendina edged into the kitchen. She looked—different, actually, older, a young woman rather than a girl, her hair was longer—but there was no sign of any injuries, no scars from—

“Penny… how?”

Penny rubbed the back of her head sheepishly, as if it’d only just occurred to her that her sudden return from the dead might be a bit much to take in.

“Well,” she said, slow and hesitant. “I...I suppose it must not have been as bad as it looked,” and hiccupped violently.

“It’s all right, darling.” Pietro held out an arm and squeezed Penny’s shoulders when she leaned into him.

Steadied, she said, “You—I’m sure you know now that I’m a synthetic person. When I...in the Vytal Festival, my core processors and data storage weren’t damaged. And the Grimm didn’t seem to notice...me. So, when General Ironwood brought Amity Arena back to Atlas…”

“We were able to recover the core,” Pietro finished with a gentle smile. “She’s going to be just fine.”

Robyn swallowed heavily. “But...Penny, that’s amazing, but—your Aura, we saw…”

When Aura vanished entirely—not projected Aura, activated Aura, the kind measured by combat sensors or tournament computers—the true Aura pool, the life force, when that was gone—that was death. That was irreversible. Doctors could restart a heart, sometimes, they could compensate for failing lungs; in a few miraculous cases, brain activity had even restarted after a person was presumed entirely gone. But without an Aura there was no hope.

“...I’m the same person still,” Penny said, a little timid. “It’s—complicated, but...I’m still me. Promise.” After a moment, she held out her hand.

It took a second for what Penny was offering to register. “Penny,” she said, “I believe you, you don’t have to—”

“I want to,” Penny insisted.

Robyn couldn’t refuse that. She reached out and took Penny’s hand.

“I’m still the same person that you knew,” she said firmly. “I’m not a...computer program, or anything like that. I have the same soul.”

Aura flared green between them.

After a moment, Robyn let her Semblance fade and took her hand back.

“You never had anything to prove to me,” she said.

Penny worked her hands together, shoulders high and tight. “I…” She glanced at her father. “I know what that woman said. About the project to build me, and General Ironwood, and...I would understand if you had concerns. But I really am back, and I’m ready to help!”

Comprehension dawned. “That’s what the press conference tomorrow is about.”

Penny nodded excitedly. “Yes! Now that I’m combat ready again, General Ironwood is appointing me the official Protector of the City of Mantle!”

Robyn...took a moment to recover from the hard, concentrated knot of emotions that had just hit her in the face.

Penny Polendina was a fine, compassionate young Huntress in training. Atlas, frankly, did not deserve her—and Mantle desperately needed young and enthusiastic Huntresses. Penny would do far more good down here than several squadrons of Atlas’ finest, to put it lightly. Even if that weren’t true, far be it from Robyn to turn down any help.

But at the same time…

She knew Penny, she trusted Penny. But she knew James Ironwood too, and this...oh, she wanted to believe there was no ulterior motive to this, that it was exactly what it appeared to be and nothing more...but she knew him.

She’d spent the past three months pleading, cajoling, demanding, negotiating, and otherwise doing absolutely everything in her power to force the Atlesian military to actually deliver the defense resources Mantle desperately needed. The resources that had, in fact, been set aside specifically for the defense of Mantle and which Atlas was non-negotiably required to give them. And this whole idea of making a media spectacle of Penny’s return, of making her the benevolent protector of Mantle after what had happened with Atlesian forces in the Vytal Festival—

Oh, she could just hear it in the bastard’s voice. Giving the military presence in Mantle a more human face.

And that’s exactly how he’d phrase it, too.

Belatedly, she realized Penny was waiting for a response. “Penny, you’re—you’re a first-year student?”

She gave a small, nervous laugh. “Well, not really. I don’t actually need to attend Atlas Academy. That was just...the cover story, since my existence was a state secret! But now that my secret is out there’s not really any point pretending anymore. Especially when there’s lives that need to be saved! I know I’m not a real Huntress, but—”

“Yes you are,” May said, with a fervor that nearly made Robyn jump. When she glanced over, she could swear there was a hint of tears in her eyes. “Don’t you ever let anyone tell you different.”

Fiona moved to May’s side, squeezing her elbow and bumping her head gently against what little of May’s shoulder she could reach. Joanna squeezed her gently from behind.

Robyn would check in with her later; for now, May was in good hands, and Penny was shifting anxiously and fussing with her hands. Even Pietro’s gentle attempts to coax her into relaxing didn’t seem quite enough to help.

She was just a kid.

Robyn’s heart broke a little farther. Penny Polendina was just a girl. She’d already been through more than any first-year Huntress—any person in the world, frankly—should be expected to cope with. She’d been murdered, for pity’s sake. She couldn’t have been...back...for very long; Amity had taken time to return to Atlas. There was no way she’d had time to truly process what had happened to her—no way she’d had time to even truly sit down and determine whether this was what she wanted to keep doing with her life. No one would judge her if—

No one whose opinion Robyn was inclined to listen to. None of them would judge Penny, if she was no longer able to face living her life as a Huntress.

Gods. Did Penny even have a choice? Ironwood was shamelessly using her as a tool for military propaganda, and did Penny even have the option to refuse? She was just a girl, her...medical condition...was just that; she had an Aura.

Did she have the right to refuse?

And whether she did or not—she wasn’t. She’d suffered, very literally, something that no living Huntress had ever endured. And what scared her now more than anything was the idea that Robyn might reject her.

She’d come back smiling and earnest and wanting specifically to help Mantle, and even now she expected to be pushed away.

Robyn forced down her fury at Ironwood and his tone-deaf policies, her fears about how the friendly neighborhood face of the police state would inevitably be exploited—her deeper, more personal fears about where Penny would fall, if the military’s heavy-handed approach to Mantle continued and Huntresses in the city had no choice but to start taking sides.

She stepped forward and pulled Penny into an embrace. “Penny, we’d be honored to have you.”

After a brief moment of shock, Penny hugged her back fiercely.

“...Penny.”

Penny hugged her tighter. “Yes ma’am, Miss Hill.”

“You're gonna break my ribs.”