Chapter Text
The streets of Jericho had never seen such a quiet day. A fog clung to the air, dusting the greenery that peppered concrete walkways with a light dew, making dark alleys even less knowable, like a mystery imported through the clouds. What few people walked the city blocks were tucked into their coats and staring at their feet, hustling. Aside, of course, from one pigtailed woman, who moved with elegance, eyes locked on what was ahead of her, unfaltering pace ringing out from her steel-toed boots clicking on pavement.
She wasn’t dressed to the nines, as that would compromise her mission, but that didn’t mean she blended in; no one spared her a second look, though, clad in a jet black unitard, a matching tactical jacket, and combat boots that laced up to her knees. Her hands, unswaying at her side, were fitted with sleek gloves, letting her silhouette become one entirely with shadow. It had proven useful to her before, stealth like a predator throughout the gentleness of the night, and now it was again, the side of her form pressed up against the edge of the block as she trailed ten paces behind a suit.
A clock was ticking between the walls of her skull. Eighty-eight, eighty-nine, ninety, ninety-one… it would not be long now before they’d reach the interception point. The man she kept her eye on kept shuffling forward, his only free fist deep inside the pocket of his obnoxiously thick coat, a fact she noted with amusement, the same mirth that propagates a raven’s chest when it realizes its prey is trapped between the roots of a tree.
When he took a sharp right into a corridor between decrepit once-office buildings, she squinted, peering around the corner when she caught up, just in time to watch as her target slipped through a rusty door and hear the loud crash it made as it slammed shut. Light on her feet, she followed him in.
-+-
A dank, musty smell populated the air when it was disturbed by the careful movement of a rotten door, a click sounding behind Barry as he shut it, adrenaline pumping, listening for the sound of any movement behind him. When his ears started ringing in the silence that met him, he shook his head as if to clear it, instead setting his briefcase down on the table in the center of the room, which looked much too modern and clean in its moldy surroundings. He opened the briefcase slowly, taking out the laptop within, looking over its condition.
“Do such high-ranking academic officials typically conduct their business in uninhabitable spaces? Or is this your way of cutting overhead?”
The laptop hit the floor with a wallet-wrenching crrrraaack as Barry jumped in fright, whipping around to see what intruder had barged in. Standing just inside the doorway was a short, hooded woman, her sharp chin poking out from underneath her feathered and beaked mask, dark eyes piercing through thin slits.
Immediately, Barry’s fists went up and his feet took stance, and he felt like he might catch her by surprise with speed – only for his hand to collide with nothing but air as the woman easily sidestepped his punch. She responded with one of her own to his stomach, clicks popping from her knuckles on impact like the tick of a clock. It sent Barry tumbling backwards, clutching his torso, immediately nauseated and winded at the same time, and he fell onto his back, gasping for air as his attacker stood still like a statue over him.
Between breaths, he spat, “Who are you?”
“A better question to ask is, ‘how may I help you?’” The Ravenwoman kneeled so that she was face-to-face with him, then clutched his neck in one hand, her grip like iron around the soft flesh of his throat. “And I have a couple of suggestions.” The click from her gloves sounded again, only this time they kept clicking, like springs ratcheting tighter, until it morphed into a long creak, the pressure becoming impossibly too much. Barry’s airways narrowed until each sound came out of him strangled. Finally, when the edges of his vision were darkening, he slapped her arm in retreat, begging her to let go. She did, and the tension dissipated from her fingers but never her eyes.
She, gracefully, allowed him to swallow up the oxygen she’d deprived him of before he replied, “What do you want?” He looked pathetic and weak on the cracked tile, nothing like the dean whose smiling face dotted every corridor of Nevermore’s halls.
The Ravenwoman did not take pity on him. “You are going to unlock your laptop, and then you are going to give it to me. Then, I am going to give you five seconds to run.”
Barry crawled over to his hardware, quietly praying that the screen was broken beyond repair. He opened it with shaky hands, heart sinking when half of the display lit up as normal; only the other half was a mix of splotchy colors. Still, he put in his password and handed it over without objection, only the fear of God within him. He waited for her to say something.
She didn’t take it right away, just watched him, silent, until he squirmed under the weight of her gaze. Then the fingers of her right hand flexed, the faint click… click… click of tightening springs punctuating the air.
“Five.”
He scrambled for the door, stumbling over his own feet. Watching him vanish into the fog was almost enough to make the Ravenwoman smile. Almost.
Never intending to take chase to begin with, she simply slipped back out of the building, laptop in hand.
-+-
Enid wasn’t sure what to make of Wednesday bringing home a laptop, and she made that abundantly clear to Wednesday.
“I mean, this is like if a cat brought home a hand grenade, you know? Just… not something you see every day…” she said to justify herself to nobody in particular for the fifth time in twenty minutes.
Wednesday hadn’t even touched it – she was occupied with a gadget on her desk, a crossbow embedded into a gauntlet worn around the wrist, tinkering with the springs, adjusting how far it fired and how its attitude affected its launch.
“Although, I guess if you brought home a hand grenade, no one would be surprised.” Enid kicked her legs above her head as she watched Wednesday work. “Please don’t get any ideas, though.”
That made Wednesday turn around to peer at her roommate with a hint of disgust. “A hand grenade is a child’s plaything. My needs are… higher yield.” Seemingly done with the contraption, she recentered her attention on the laptop Enid was gawking at, pulling it to her person as if it might bite and opening it stiffly. Before she had left she turned off the password protection on the device, so now it blinked open on the desktop, although half of it was still a mess of bright colors.
“Woah, why’d you get a broken computer? The open-box deal couldn’t have been that good,” Enid commented from the other side of the room, still watching from her bed.
“It isn’t mine. It’s Dean Dort’s.” Thankfully, the trackpad still functioned, and the desktop was cluttered with file shortcuts, like the old man was scared of File Explorer. Wednesday navigated to a folder titled Finances and opened it, but squinted when the window pulled up mostly in the dead screen, leaving the important information unreadable. “The pure inefficiency of storing data this way is unbelievable, as a simple hardware error like a cracked screen can compromise retrieval.” She tapped the glass with one finger, as if checking for a pulse.
Enid materialized over her shoulder, snaking one arm over her to use the trackpad herself. “There’s this wonderful thing you can do called moving the window…” Effortlessly, she moved and resized the directory so it was all visible in the functional screen area. “Wow, maybe tech isn’t so bad after all.”
Wednesday sent her a low look, but Enid just smiled. Beaten, she began combing through the data.
Dozens of pages of PDF files documenting the University’s funds, their sources, and their allocations greeted her. They were all titled chronologically – this particular cache seemed to cover all records since Dort had taken up the dean’s office, which wasn’t much time, only spanning three semesters since Dean Weems had passed. They were collected monthly and somewhat coded, the inward cash flow always being hidden behind organizations, not names. Systematically, Wednesday scanned each statement, looking for like terms, any organizations that appeared disproportionately influential. One that kept sticking out, MorningSong , had appeared in Dort’s second monthly statement and hadn’t left since, donating very generous sums to the University like clockwork, outpacing nearly every other foundation and trust alongside it.
“ MorningSong, ” Wednesday said aloud, testing the syllables like a lockpick in her mouth.
“Huh?” Enid asked, and Wednesday had amateurly forgotten she was there.
“Enid, I need you to find out what you can about the organization MorningSong online. I have to leave.”
A little bewildered, Enid stuttered, “Why? Where are you going?”
Wednesday had already shrugged on her jacket and was now pulling on her gloves, slotting her fingers through the metal circlets at the tips, testing the springs before answering, “The library.” She slid her crossbow gauntlet over her wrist then flexed it, satisfied. “I’ll be back before midnight. Pretend MorningSong is the subject of your newest gossip blog.” She disappeared out of the door before Enid could object.
Luckily, her roommate had no intentions of being unhelpful: “That, I can do,” she said, cracking her knuckles over her own desk.
-+-
Moving like a shadow came naturally to Wednesday, whose armored boots could land on concrete like feathers, who seemed to have the superpower of invisibility turned on and off at will, a versatile tool for the art of architecting dread. There was a commitment involved in evoking her ire; one had to be prepared to surrender the night to her entirely. To always fear the corners and alleyways where the unknown may just be the unseen. To check in their trunks and behind shower curtains for her presence. This, to Wednesday, was just as effective as always being there – the image of her fixed so vividly in their minds that she became an apparition, like Schrödinger’s raven.
For her current objective, the cloak of the night was deeply welcome. The downtown district of Jericho was calm, but she knew of the types who lurked here. She wasn’t afraid of a few shady figures or their physical capabilities, only the prospect of completing a task late – there was no tolerance spared for imperfection in her self-image. An unnecessary brawl would merely steer her off course. She clung to the edges of the sidewalk where the dark pooled, staying alert for the sound of footsteps nearby.
She made it to her destination with no distractions, peering up at the clocktower that expanded over her like Babel. It was but one corner of the entire building’s three-point facade beside an intersection: the Jericho Archival Offices. She knew them well, having often spent afternoons in her first year at Nevermore perusing through all of their collected public files, but they were rather fortified and certainly just as guilty of covering up secrets of the public elite as any other governmental institution; she wasn’t naive.
Wednesday squinted as she pointed her right arm upward and fired her crossbow, which sent the skull of a raven careening through the air, flying, then falling until its beak caught safely on the railing of the clocktower’s balcony. She tugged on it to test its hold, then began cranking the reel, which lifted her off the ground and up, up, up, before she rolled onto the brick floor of the overlook. She clicked the raven skull back into her gauntlet, then traversed with her side pressed against the wall. Up here, she could audibly hear the clock ticking, and the subtle vibration it sent through the brick reverberated through her chest.
She pushed open the door that led to the inner flights of stairs, aware it wouldn’t be locked. Instead of walking down, she gripped the railing with her gloves, then slid down.
The ground floor was the most public-facing. If the building were open, this was where the receptionist would greet citizens and ask if they had some police body camera footage they wanted to retrieve; since it wasn’t, there was only the whirring of sleeping electronics. Wednesday vaulted over the front desk and ducked down, looking for some kind of emergency escape plan tucked into a binder in desk drawers, and she found them, separated by story, each with a detailed floor plan and a mapped-out route for fires and tornadoes.
Combing through them, she noted a few things: the second floor was primarily for housing local government records, the third was for public-relevant corporate records, and the fourth was for records with historical significance to Jericho. The fifth, while it had an emergency binder, was not labeled. She filed that in her mental notes as an interesting anomaly to investigate later, then returned to the stairs.
“If MorningSong is a charitable organization, it must have records here,” she muttered to herself as she reached the second floor. It wasn’t freely open, unfortunately, like Wednesday had hoped – there was a keypad-operated door between her and the offices. She inspected the layout, how the door had two giant, floor-to-ceiling windows right next to it, and then she almost smirked before kicking the window in, shattering it. Stepping through the hole she’d made, she assessed her surroundings.
There seemed to be no major rhyme nor reason to the assortment of the records. The employees likely inventoried them digitally, to Wednesday’s chagrin, meaning that she would have to comb through everything manually, like locating a human femur in a pile of pig bones.
“How tantalizing,” she said, pulling open the first drawer.
-+-
Enid was staring at her screen blankly, blinking every few seconds without shifting her gaze.
Her eyes were locked onto the same paragraph, from an article posted three months prior:
“ MorningSong , the philanthropic offshoot of the Barclay Foundation, appears to have deeper roots, ones inextricably linked with Washington D.C., as records indicate a financial connection between the organization and Senator Fairburn, the junior official out of Vermont…”
She couldn’t wrap her head around why the Barclay Foundation would take such interest in Nevermore. She didn’t know how she was going to bring this up to Wednesday. She just knew that there was something obviously incongruent in the skeleton of her school, and now she wanted answers.
Something pulsed beneath her fingers, then faded.
When Wednesday came back, she would have a plan.