Chapter Text
Part one.
No monster can cross water; no memory can survive a tide; no dream can’t be drowned in salt. These were the truths the girl in white was raised with; and though they were only true to a certain measure of truth, she took them to heart. When the monster came for her, she took her cloak, and her silver blade, and what scattered hope she could gather, and set out to the tideline.
“Blake.”
The voice cuts through the tenuous thread of serenity Blake had carved out for herself.
“It’s time.”
She flips the little red volume shut before Adam can question it, and reaches for her bag, running her thumb over the little ship embossed in the cover just once before setting it aside for her pistol and blade.
Adam’s carrack is waiting on the cliff side, solar sails catching the last rays of the sun; the largest of Argus’s moons hangs full in the sky above them, cracked open and bleeding Dust into the stars.
“I’m ready,” Blake says, lifting her chin to the sky. I’m ready.
The tideline was waiting for her; all it would take was a bit of hope.
*
Blake’s contact point is in an old starfarers’ bar at the edge of Argus’s port district.
The missive scroll hanging around her neck is indelible proof; on record, Adam’s voice rasping out his plan, how Sienna had to die to bring the White Fang victory. To give them teeth enough to take their rightful place.
It had less to do with teeth and more to do with ambition. That was the quiet realization that had been dawning on Blake for months. Sienna had never lacked teeth; she had them in spades, and wits besides, and the love of the White Fang, and that was the problem, wasn’t it?
That was the real reason he wanted her blood.
A martyr. Blake twists her hands around the little mechanical device. There’s a world in which she was Adam’s martyr; he’d laid that out for her too, giddy with cruelty. He’d rather her dead than gone . He hadn’t meant it, of course, and she’d believed him then. He had so little to lose, it was hard having her. Hard holding her.
But the missive scroll she used to capture Adam’s plan is a one-use device, designed for transporting orders and codes across the stars; it stored voices, and played them back once, before the little Dust enchantments inked into its components took hold and destroyed all trace of information.
Showing it to Ilia might be enough to get her away, but that’s a last resort. Maybe Ilia will just believe her.
Maybe not.
There’s no one else in the bar save a slumped figure in the corner, and the bartender, a Faunus woman with feathered features.
But it’s not Ilia waiting at the usual table.
Corsec and Fennec are wearing plainclothes; there’s nothing to mark them as priests, nothing to mark them as White Fang. She’s shed her mask.
So why does the sight of them have her freezing in her tracks, with the icy hand of fear clamping around her throat? It’s always meant being found out, being caught, and cuffed and tossed into a cell at some port lord or admiral’s authority.
The sealed missive burns beneath her shirt. By now, Adam would be suspicious; by nightfall, he would know for certain she had stranded him.
His voice winds through her mind, with the static of a faulty transmission. Coward .
It was supposed to be Ilia. It was supposed to be Ilia.
She lets her gaze wander around the bar, from the bartender to the singular other patron. Corded and Fennec were alone. But it was against protocol for both of them to be there, even if they were replacing Ilia.
She takes a breath, and drops into the seat across from them.
“Where’s Adam?” Something’s wrong. The words come harsh from Fennec’s lips, and his state is cold.
He betrayed us. The words dance on the tip of her tongue, the ones she had rehearsed inside the rattling hulk of Adam’s carrack. The weight of the missive rests heavily against her sternum, comforting and damning all at once. Break the seal, and they would hear Adam’s voice, spilling forth all his plans for bloodshed.
But something stops her voice. Our plans, Adam had said.
It’s something in Fennec’s voice, in the way he’s watching her. Suddenly measuring.
It’s hardly a shift at all, but it’s there.
“Following,” she says, instead.
The information was bad, she explained; they had to abandon the mission and run, and that meant leaving Adam planetside so Blake could beat the Schnee enforcers back to Argus and spread the word to go to ground.
She left out the ship she’d left a smoking ruin out in the forests of Argus and the trek to the city; the spreading bruise up her side and the way she still couldn’t catch her breath. It would lend her panic credibility.
Across the bar, the dark-haired figure lifts their head; a woman in stained starfarer’s clothes, faded black on black, with Grimm-bone shining in her hair and her jacket.
Corsec and Fennec listen, their expressions twisted in a sympathy Blake can’t quite believe.
It was supposed to be Ilia; she’d decrypted the communications with her own hand, and they’d been done in Ilia’s codes, not Fennec’s. Why was Fennec here?
Where was Ilia?
There was Adam’s hand in this.
The twins exchange a glance.
“We understand,” Fennec says.
“Remain here; it would be best if you did not reach out to any of the others. We do not know yet who we can trust.”
“What do you mean?” Blake asks, some of the panic bleeding into her tone.
Corsec leans over and rests a hand on her shoulder. “Much has changed in your absence,” he says, not unkindly. “But this is only a temporary setback: everything else is going according to plan. All will be well once Adam returns.”
Blake bows her head, bites the inside of her cheek, and lets her lip tremble. She can’t force out words; any that she tried would be caught by the wild beast of fear clawing at her chest.
Corsec and Fennec leaves without another word, and Blake is alone at the table.
Three coins slid across the bar get her a room for the night. She mounts the stairs, and puts her back to the warped wood of the tiny room’s door, and lays out her possessions on the floor.
Taking stock.
A battered sheaf of papers bound into a sketchbook; a set of paints in a beautiful compact, inlaid with jade and amethyst with her family’s seal; a handful of coins; a smoke-stained coat; the latest codes, written in Ilia’s careful hands; a crumpled letter in her father’s hands.
And the red-bound book, the one she had picked up from a pawn shop. The Summer Sea. She’d been using a scrap of pamphlet to keep her place in it.
A cracked mask.
Two pistols, and a broken sword. A handful of bullets, and a horn of powder.
And the missive scroll with proof of Adam’s treachery.
A pitiful heap, laid out like that.
She can only stay in the refuge of her room so long. Corsec and Fennec were suspicious. They must have been. Not being able to watch the door makes her itch.
She descends the stairs and takes refuge at the corner table with The Summer Sea.
Footsteps.
Blake’s ears twitch.
Something clinks onto her table, and Blake looks back to find the woman looming over her. It’s a bottle in her hands, but the blade hanging from her waist looks worn and well-maintained. Blake’s hands curl around the hilt of her saber.
“Looks like trouble for you, little Fang.” The woman gives her a knowing sneer, the faintest curl of her lips.
Blake shoots a glance to the barkeeper, cleaning glasses on the other side of the bar. She doesn’t seem to be listening; this place was Blake’s contact point for a reason. But she didn’t care to have her affiliation shouted from the rooftops.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, keeping her tone flat.
They had done their share of dealings with cutthroats and thieves, those with ideals and those without, but she doesn’t recognize the pattern of Grimmbone talismans and red script adorning the woman’s long coat. Some pirate clan; they wore markings like that.
“Deny what you are if you like,” the pirate says, amusement lacing the words. “It won’t do anything for you. You’re still carrying your mask, aren’t you?”
Blake’s ears flicker, and the woman’s smile widens.
“I would get rid of it. That’ll get you killed as sure as flying black canvas.”
Blake doesn’t let her expression shift an inch. “I’m not interested in your threats.”
“ Threats ?” The pirate laughs. “If I were threatening you, you’d know. Can’t a woman make conversation?”
“I’m not interested in conversation,” Blake says, running her fingers over the contents of her bag. Her fingers meet smooth Grimmbone.
She had shaped her mask herself, under Sienna’s watchful eye, and when she’d put it on the constant wear of fear and helpless anger had coalesced to determination.
It meant protection. It meant justice .
But all she can think of is is the press of Adam’s hands against her face, yanking the straps of the mask until the bone bit into her skin; the rasp of his voice, that beloved voice, turning against her.
The pirate is watching her.
She takes a breath, and keeps fishing in the satchel until her fingers meet the rough texture of dyed canvas. She draws out the book, and opens it, each movement purposeful and nonchalant. Another performance; just a little longer, another day, and she could slip this hellish game of pretend.
It’s never really going to end.
She pushes the thought aside, and opens the book, keeping her ears relaxed, her posture lose as the eyes bore into her.
“Oh, I see. A scholar, Little Fang.” The pirate is still there, still talking.
Blake ignores her, opening the book. The ship embossed on the cover catches the light; gold ink on red, a three-masted schooner with red sails sailing red tides that vanish into the texture of the fabric.
“Where did you get that book?” the pirate asks, suddenly far too close. She smells like blood and whiskey and aether. Her hands are on the canvas, ripping it from Blake’s hold; she slams it down on the table, and turns the pages frantically until she reaches the first.
Her posture goes slack, as her lips move over the title page.
Blake blinks, but before she can answer- ask - refuse to answer- the pirate is leaving, stalking away as if the last exchange hadn’t taken place.
The eyes at the door watch.
Blake looks back down to the book, and turns the page.
She'd skimmed over the author's name before, and looking at it a second time gives her no revelations.
Ozymandias.