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Hmm, said the voice in her head.
There was a long pause.
“Hmm,” said Joanna, out loud. Hearing voices in her head probably wasn’t the best sign.
No, agreed the voice in her head. Though in this instance, while something certainly appears to have gone wrong, there’s no cause for alarm.
“Oh, good,” muttered Joanna. “The voice in my head says I’m not crazy.”
She’d just stepped outside for a breather while Robyn and the girls decompressed. Hadn’t signed up for this.
It had been a good day, that was all. She was proud, just tired. Joanna loved watching Robyn work. She was an artist in directing active combat, obviously, but more than anything it was amazing to sit back and watch her play a conversation like a chess match. Setting up verbal traps that she wouldn’t spring for thirty minutes, sometimes. Luring her opponent out with false vulnerabilities only to slam the door on them when they took the bait.
Honestly, this one had been a victory for the whole team. The groundwork May had done meant the verbal battle was won before they started, honestly; Fiona doing crowd control and PR management had gotten even a few traditionally pro-Atlas media outlets to give them neutral-shading-to-positive coverage…
Joanna had helped too.
Listen, she had a healthy self-image and all. Really. She just knew where her strengths lie, and they were mostly in the Grimm-fighting part of this job. She was fine with that. That was what a Huntress did, and she knew she was good at it. If her job when it came to politics was to stand back and let Robyn get on with things, well, they also serve who something or other.
Joanna’s social insecurities were a little less important right now than the voice in her head.
If it helps, the voice said, which Joanna thought unlikely, I don’t believe I’m supposed to be here. Unless you’re about to have a rather profound revelation about your gender identity, you can’t possibly be the host I was intended to bond with. If I had to take a guess—
“Whoa, hey, back up. What’s this about hosts?”
It occurred to Joanna, vaguely, that she should probably be more alarmed than she was right now. But things were weird enough in Mantle already, why not fucking aliens while they’re at it?
Please, Miss Greenleaf. I am many things, but I am as native to this planet as you are. Possibly picking up on the fact that this incredibly normal phrasing wasn’t reassuring in the slightest, the voice hastily continued. As it happens, I was looking for a young man. In all likelihood, it would be more accurate to call him a boy.
“Buddy,” said Joanna, “are you ever at the wrong house.”
The voice sighed.
So it would seem, he acknowledged. The voice...felt male, sounded masculine, was looking for a male host, it was a fair enough assumption. He didn’t correct her, so she guessed she was right. Ah yes. Forgive me. You may call me Oz—Ozma.
Feeling someone stutter in her head was a completely normal sensation that didn’t freak her out in the slightest.
I’m uncertain what’s gone wrong with the process, Ozma observed. I assure you this has never happened before.
Well, that was reassuring. “You say that every time you end up inside a woman?”
Miss Greenleaf! Please. There was a pause. I see. The good news, from your perspective, is that our Auras have not merged. That is to say, in all likelihood I will be pulled away momentarily and you may feel free to move on with your life. This process is hardly an exact science, I’m afraid. An untethered soul, awaiting union with a kindred spirit… Joanna somehow heard his nonexistent lips twitch. Perhaps I was merely pulled off-course by a familiar concentration of irrational self-loathing.
“Hey,” Joanna said. “Loathing’s a little strong.”
Really? And how would you refer to praising the accomplishments of your teammates while negating your own?
“I never said the ghost in my head could psychoanalyze me.”
Forgive me—I do seem to be saying that a lot tonight—but analyzing problems in team dynamics is something of my specialty, Miss Greenleaf. While I’m here I may as well offer you my encouragement. I assure you that your teammates would be as lost without you as you would be without any of them.
“Look, I never said there was a problem with not being as flashy as the others. It’s just the truth. I’m perfectly happy to play to my own strengths. But it’s not like everything would fall apart without me here.” Fiona was indispensable, May was indispensable, Robyn was beyond indispensable, but anyone could play Joanna’s role just fine.
But how many of them have chosen to? That choice in and of itself sets you apart.
Joanna rolled her eyes. “I know more about my life than you do. I’m happy with it. Not everyone has to be indispensable.”
There was a loaded silence.
Well, said Ozma, finally. I suppose we do have some time to kill.
Joanna waited for him to give any indication of what the hell that meant. At least it had finally stopped raining.
“Right,” she said after a long wait, and pushed off the wall. She was not standing outside in the cold waiting for the voice in her head to explain his cryptic musings. The alleyway kitchen door didn’t budge when she tried to shoulder her way in; she jiggled the handle to no avail before finally realizing the door had somehow locked behind her. “Guys?” She knocked. “Robyn! Let me in, Fi.”
No answer.
Joanna rolled her eyes and fished out her keys. Probably distracted by May’s most recent rant about fundamental differences between pancakes and flapjacks, or whatever else Fiona had gotten her started on this time.
The lock stuck badly as she tried to turn it—badly enough that she had to double-check she’d used the right key, actually—and when it finally shuddered open she made a mental note to get some oil in that thing before they broke it.
She took half a step through the door before she froze.
Normally she’d assume that all the lights being suddenly shut off was either an emergency measure or a prank, but something was...off. She wasn’t sure how to place what was so wrong; it wouldn’t be the first time someone threw the main breaker as a panic button to keep a military patrol from noticing the lights on in what was meant to be an uninhabited building..
Moving slowly out of the doorway to avoid giving any potential intruders a convenient silhouette, she waited for a signal.
It finally hit her that one wasn’t coming at almost the exact moment she realized what had bothered her in the first place.
Five minutes ago, the entire kitchen had been warm bordering on uncomfortable, and filled with the scent of slowly roasting potatoes. Five minutes and cutting the power wouldn’t be enough to replace that with the smell of rot and dust, or bring the temperature down to just above freezing this way.
“What the hell,” she murmured, finding her way toward the breaker room by memory. She tripped once or twice on old barrels nobody had bothered to warn her they’d moved; something crunched underfoot like tiny bones or broken glass, but she finally got the breaker panel open. Keeping her voice quiet, she said, “Fi, if you can hear me, I’m turning the lights back on unless someone tells me not to.”
She waited. Nothing.
She threw the switch. Nothing again.
“Great,” she observed to the absolutely no one in the room. “Blackout. Unless the city finally cut our power.” Not likely. Robyn would never let something like that slide, and if she did, May would catch it.
For now, she pulled out her scroll and thumbed the flashlight button. It only took half a step to realize something was very, very wrong.
The shelves were empty, dusty, covered in cobwebs. They should have been full of food stores, spare parts, Dust reserves—there was nothing.
All at once, it struck her how silent the place was.
“...Ozma,” she said quietly. “What’s going on?”
Nothing to worry about, I’m sure, he replied. You were very certain that a world without you in it would be exactly the same.
Joanna thought that over with an increasingly sinking feeling in her gut.
“You exist as a voice in people’s heads so they can’t punch you, huh?”
You’d be surprised. Getting back on track, Ozma added, my power is only a fraction of what it once was; but I have more than enough magic remaining for this. A single point is easily altered. Shall we see how insubstantial your impact on this world really was?
Joanna bit her tongue and managed not to snap back at the bitchy wizard in her head.
“Must have gotten into the wrong building by accident,” she muttered. A cheap enough, old enough lock would probably turn—reluctantly—for any key basically the right size. Accidental breaking and entering, the media would have a field day with that one.
Miss Greenleaf, you were standing right in front of the door.
“I didn’t ask, asshole.”
Joanna let herself out the front of the building, deliberately not noticing that she’d absolutely been in the right one all along. Whatever was going on, she wasn’t going to do anyone any good sitting in the dark.
Turning off her flashlight once she was out under the streetlamps—not that the one or two flickering lights on this street did a lot of good—she irritably swiped open her scroll. Seriously, would it have killed them to have someone drop her a text or something explaining what was going on? If they hadn’t even had a chance to do that, then whatever was going on was even more serious than she’d feared…
The blank contacts list flashed like a mocking beacon on the dark street.
“What…” Joanna tapped rapidly through screens. It was bricked. Some kind of total factory reset. No Huntsman Board app, contacts wiped, no teamsync. “How did—was there a system update nobody warned us about?”
I did tell you, you know, Ozma pointed out. I did you the service of creating a world in which a single woman you identified as largely without influence does not exist.
“Sure,” said Joanna. “That seems like a perfectly reasonable escalation that anyone would appreciate.”
Something clearly had happened. This part of Mantle had never exactly been a great neighborhood; but it had never been a war zone, either. At it had certainly never been a ghost town. Half the street-facing windows were broken, there were no lights on. No Grimm, that Joanna could see at least, and no perimeter-breach alarms. But the main power grid was definitely offline here. The city-run streetlights were connected to a different system, and even they seemed to have taken a beating.
Right. Joanna checked the crossbow at her back. Time to find some people.
It was an eerie walk through the streets of Mantle. Thankfully the bombed-out appearance of the blocks near the hideout faded rapidly; but the sense of wrongness only increased. She kept getting lost.
Lost. On streets she knew like the back of her hand. Joanna Greenleaf was getting lost trying to navigate Mantle.
It was the storefronts mostly. Familiar landmarks weren’t where they were supposed to be. At first she had to assume that was just...overthinking. She was tense and wrong-footed and projecting. But after one too many double-takes, one too many missed steps because she’d subconsciously been navigating by waiting for certain signs in her peripheral vision…
She laughed out loud while waiting for a crosswalk signal to change.
Something’s funny? asked Ozma.
Joanna jerked her head toward the cluster of Re-Elect TAMMY HALL For City Commissioner! campaign posters plastered over a nearby bus stop.
“How long have those been up?” she asked the empty air, grinning. “She got arrested ...what, five years ago now?”
Did she really.
Joanna rolled her eyes. “I was there. It was pretty memorable.” Hall had kept hold of the commissioner position for two decades in Mantle, it wasn’t the kind of position that got a lot of spotlight; which meant her blatant embezzlement and corruption had gone unchecked all that time. Finally dragging her out into the light hadn’t been easy, but it sure was satisfying.
Exactly, Ozma said. You were there.
Whatever.
With a rush of intense relief, she finally noticed a sign she recognized. The newer SDC-affiliate pawn shop across the street, with its hard-light flashing signs, made the Blue Boarbatusk look older and shabbier than Joanna had ever seen, but it was still a familiar establishment. Everyone needed a local bar they could retreat to sometimes, and Capri Cornflower’s Boarbatusk was theirs.
The usual cheery bell over the door didn’t sound as Joanna let herself in; but the place was packed, so Capri had probably taken it down.
Didn’t seem like quite the atmosphere for jingle bells, anyway.
That, more than anything, somehow drove home to Joanna that the world really had changed. The Boarbatusk had never exactly been a high-end establishment, it was only ever a local sports bar at the end of the day. But it was clean and warm and family-friendly, the kind of place you went to grab a drink with your team and wouldn’t be surprised to see people there with their ten-year-old kids.
This was—not a family establishment.
Joanna wouldn’t go so far as to call it sketchy or anything. Decent mix of humans and faunus, mostly faunus; whatever the hell Ozma was, it’d take a lot more than him to turn Capri Cornflower into the kind of person who’d hang out a no-faunus sign. But it was dingy and depressing, no laughter, no real conversation. Bog-standard dive bar.
You didn’t come here to unwind with your friends after a long day. You came here to get as drunk as you could, as fast and cheap as possible.
Joanna could use a drink or several at the moment. But...
There was room at the bar, by a hair. Joanna slid onto a stiff, uncomfortable bar stool and made eye contact with Capri.
The businesslike jerk of the chin, a half-cold acknowledgement, stung more harshly than she’d been ready for. If she hadn’t started believing Ozma already…
She means no harm by it, said the ghost wizard himself, softly. You were never born, Miss Greenleaf. She’s never met you.
“Thanks,” Joanna muttered under her breath. “That makes me feel better.”
“You say something?” asked Capri briskly, placing her hands on the bar in front of Joanna.
“Uh,” said Joanna, belatedly realizing that it would look bad to explain she was arguing with the voice in her head. “No, ma’am, sorry. Thinking out loud.”
“Planning to order?”
“Arrogant Bastard Ale,” Joanna said automatically. It was a small local brewery, but the Boarbatusk had always been close with the Dogwoods and it seemed like a safe enough bet.
The sideways looks she got from a few folks at the bar, and the way Capri’s cold, tired demeanor changed to vague pity, told her she’d guessed very wrong.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “You haven’t been home in a while, have you.”
Joanna’s heart skipped a beat. Did Capri know her after all, or—
“You’re a Mantle girl if you’re ordering Bastard that fast, they’re barely known in the rest of the city let alone out-Kingdom,” Capri explained. “Been in Anima? Up in Atlas maybe, big strong Huntress like you?”
“Not Atlas.”
The slight mockery that had slipped into Capri’s voice faded as her hackles visibly went down. Apparently Joanna’s answer passed muster. “Mmm. The Dogwoods’ whole distillery went down a few years back. Grimm breach. They tried to tell the military huntsmen to watch their fire on that block, but since when do soldiers give a shit what the rats down here think? No harm meant, Tom.”
Tom twitched his whiskers, the only acknowledgement that anyone was present in the room besides him.
“Truth can’t hurt me,” he rasped, without looking up from whatever was in the double shot in front of him. “Nothing hurts me anymore, Cap. Round three, thanks.”
Capri sighed, and opened her mouth to gently cut the man off for the night.
“Try again, stranger,” she told Joanna curtly, pouring Tom another double that he absolutely shouldn’t be drinking.
“Whatever’s—you don’t think that’s a little much?”
“You don’t think I’ve got a business to run?” was the caustic retort.
Joanna managed, just barely, not to recoil.
“...Whatever’s on tap,” she said again.
Capri poured her a beer without another word. Before she could turn away completely, Joanna got her attention again.
“What?”
“Listen,” said Joanna, trying for a reasonable tone. “I’m sorry for bothering you. I’m looking for Robyn, you know where I can find her?”
Capri’s expression hardened. “You want help stalking your girlfriend, find someone else.” At Joanna’s horrified expression, she relented enough to say, “I’ve got a few hundred regulars, kid. I don’t keep track of names and I don’t know who the hell your girl is. And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
Joanna stayed still until she was certain she could control her reaction to that.
“Thanks,” she said finally. “I’ll get going—”
There was a pause.
Ah, said Ozma. You may have forgotten. As you never existed, you’ve never had any kind of employment. No income means—
“No lien, right, of course not,” Joanna snapped.
Capri’s exasperation turned to outright annoyance on the spot. “Oh, for—get out.”
“No, hold on,” Joanna protested on reflex. “I pay my tabs. I didn’t realize. Do you have an ATM or—no, that won’t work.”
For some reason she suspected that if she didn’t have any cash on hand, she probably didn’t have a bank account.
You do not, confirmed Ozma.
Capri pinched the bridge of her nose, and Joanna could actually see her lips moving as she silently counted backward from ten.
“All right,” she said, more patient this time. Joanna’s heart twisted; Capri’s cold exterior was cracking slightly, and underneath she was just….tired. Exhausted. Starting to break down under the relentless stress, like the building around them. “Listen, kid, I don’t normally take Schneebucks, but just this once, because you’re clearly an idiot who’s trying her best...”
Joanna stared at her.
“What the fuck,” she managed finally, “is a Schneebuck.”
There was a burst of rough, bitter laughter from down the bar. “Good question!”
Capri’s unnaturally cynical false smile was back, a perversion of everything solid in the world. She reached under the bar and unceremoniously flicked a small silver coin into Joanna’s face. Once Joanna had scrambled to catch it, she was able to make out the SDC snowflake, with a bar code on the other side to scan—and presumably prevent fraud with. Printed around the outside of the coin were the words Schnee Dust Company Bonus Wage Token.
“You should see your face,” said Capri. “It’s almost cute. Welcome the hell home, kid.”
Joanna ignored the condescension. Quietly, she asked, “Who let the SDC start issuing scrip?”
“Ever heard of something called the government?”
“This can’t be legal—”
“Oh, get out.” Capri threw her dirty rag in Joanna’s face, looking disgusted with them both. “Don’t come back. We’ve got no use for idealists and their fucking pity. I see you in here again you’ll find out you’re not the only one in Mantle with a weapons permit!”
Maybe there really was something glistening in Capri’s eyes as Joanna turned away, or maybe it was just a trick of the light.
“Alright,” Joanna snapped as soon as she was outside and not surrounded by people who’d think she was crazy for talking to herself. “I get the Dogwoods, I was there for that Grimm breach, I get how me not being there could result in the Atlas grunts getting careless. Butterflies and storms and all that. But how the hell does me not being here let the SDC start issuing scrip? Robyn would string Ironwood up from a lamppost if he let that pass muster. She wouldn’t need me for that.”
There was a long, weighted pause.
Miss Greenleaf, Ozma said, in a tone of inexpressible sadness. How many times have you saved Robyn’s life? How many situations in the early years did she escape solely because she had someone to watch her back? How often did you look her in the eye and tell her she was being reckless?
The cold, sour feeling in Joanna’s stomach had nothing to do with the terrible beer she’d hardly touched.
“I don’t think,” she said slowly, “I like what you’re implying.”
A solo Huntress, young and inexperienced, taking on all the evils of Solitas herself. The weight of the world on one woman’s shoulders would crush anyone. Whether she angered the wrong people, or simply had bad luck in a skirmish with the Grimm...in this reality Robyn Hill reached too far too fast. And though the people of Mantle never knew her name, their hope died with her all the same.
Joanna’s fists clenched, a futile attempt to ground herself as her head and stomach lurched dizzily.
“You don’t know Robyn,” she insisted. “This is just—your interpretation. You’re trying to make a point. Robyn’s not stupid, she took the risks she did because she knew she had backup. She would have been more careful—”
Without her voice of reason? Her steadying hand? Her partner, as a matter of fact?
“Bullshit,” Joanna hissed. Like a hypocrite. As if she hadn’t lost sleep over watching the woman she loved overextend herself in the field in a wild bid to reach stranded civilians in time. As if she didn’t fret constantly about Robyn and May and their self-sacrificing tendencies. “Robyn’s a lot smarter than you give her credit for. She’d have been fine.”
Robyn Hill was nearly a prodigy, Ozma agreed softly. With an astounding tactical mind. She was brilliant, and brave, and extraordinarily skilled. And she was alone.
The last thing Joanna ever expected to complain about was Atlas paying too much attention to the Crater.
She’d...wandered, for a bit, while talking to Ozma. Far enough to see the makeshift floodlights strung up along the perimeter wall, to register the increased number of camera drones. That much, at least, was the same; Beacon must have fallen here, too, with the same resulting uptick in Grimm attacks.
The same? Ozma wondered, in his faint, sad way.
Joanna didn’t have to stop and examine the signs of combat damage. Without the Happy Huntresses down here—look, she would normally try not to be arrogant, but at the very least, not having them around wouldn’t have made Mantle less vulnerable to despair.
She wondered vaguely if these were heightened security measures, or if Mantle was really this far gone.
All right, fine. Without Joanna there was no Robyn in the long run, which meant no Happy Huntresses—
She’d frozen in the middle of the intersection, ignoring the nasty swearing from an older man who’d plowed into her from behind, and walked away as fast as she could without attracting attention.
Gods, she was so stupid, she’d gotten so used to thinking of the four of them as a unit—!
What she hadn’t been prepared for was armed checkpoints at the entrance to the Crater.
That was...new.
Oh, there’d been noise about checkpoints, of course. Even Robyn hadn’t been able to stop that entirely. But they’d been...uh, defanged, for lack of a better word...by some very pointed public questions about what neighborhoods exactly Atlas would be focusing those checkpoints on, considering the White Fang threat in Vale had come from out-Kingdom and involved the subverting of Atlas’ own forces in the first place. And how exactly they would be making that determination. And what, precisely, about the makeup of the Crater’s community, already the most vulnerable in the Kingdom to mass Grimm attacks and recently devastated by the aftermath of the Fall, made Atlas now turn and view them as a threat.
(The thing about Mantle politics was that half the time you didn’t even need to openly challenge bullshit; all you needed was someone with Robyn Hill’s reputation, smiling pleasantly and talking about getting along and using resources effectively for the good of all of Mantle’s citizens...while making it abundantly clear that if you pushed too hard, she would be here, in your office, every day, until you stopped.)
So in the end the checkpoints had been negotiated down into, essentially, bureaucratic ID scanners. And even then, they didn’t have any real authority to stop anyone coming or going. Just document it.
These were not bureaucratic busywork posts.
They had the same blinding floodlights as the perimeter walls, four cops at each post. Hard-light airlock-style barriers across the entryways, Dust scanners and metal detectors, the works. Joanna didn’t see anyone get stopped in the few minutes she stood around observing before one of the cops came over to unsubtly move her along, but judging by the tension in the long line of faunus waiting in the rain to be let into their own homes it wasn’t unheard-of.
Joanna didn’t have ID anymore, Ozma, so that was a no-go.
So she walked until she was out of direct line of sight from any of the entrances, shimmied up a nearby building, and jumped the wall. It took about seven minutes.
Things got harder from there. The Crater slums weren’t exactly a grid system to begin with, and there were...it was a lot more densely-packed these days. She gave up on trying to find anything by remembering old routes—even a factory-settings scroll had a GPS, and she’d been here enough times to know what general area she was looking for.
In the meantime, obviously, she looked like a cop, not helped by the weapon on her back that, Ozma, nobody in Mantle could possibly be stupid enough to carry so brazenly without a permit.
Couldn’t be helped.
The point was, she got there. Once she got close, there were enough familiar landmarks that she could navigate without having to check her GPS every few seconds like a fucking tool.
Not...that there were a lot of people around to notice.
Oh, it was far from empty. That was what made this so creepy. She knew the neighborhood was present; there were eyes in the windows that made no secret of their presence, and there were a few people out around fires like always. But...fewer. Far fewer than there should have been. And that meant something down here, because outdoor bonfires were the only real source of heat for two-thirds of these people. Proper Dust furnaces were only inexpensive to people who had money to save—
Gods. What were the odds they even sold those at the SDC “Bonus Wage Token” shops? They probably rented the damn things for a monthly fee—
The point was, indoor furnaces cost money that no one in the Crater had. And even if you could find one secondhand, you couldn’t afford to run it for more than a few hours while you slept. You couldn’t have an open fire in most of these shelters, so if you wanted heat, you had to go outside and find something to burn. It took a lot to drive Crater folk into their houses like this.
And the ones who were desperate enough to be outside tensed when they saw her, like they were waiting for her to challenge them. Nobody was walking the streets, there were no kids outside.
It was late, sure. But...not that late, not for the Crater, where everyone’s shifts were so fucked up that the day/night cycle only meant anything because the cold at night would kill you and the cold during the day only might kill you.
Trying to shrug off her sense of dread, Joanna approached one specific assortment of discard wood and scrap sheet metal, and knocked on the door in as non-confrontational a manner as possible.
There was a long silence. The voices inside had cut off long before Joanna got close enough to knock.
Finally, familiar grizzled claws hooked around the edge of the door and pulled it open the barest possible fraction.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
Joanna smiled as warmly as she could under the circumstances. “Hi,” she said. “I know we haven’t met, but I was looking for Fiona Thyme. Is she here? Do you know how I could get in touch with her?”
Fiona’s uncle—who adored her, who called her his pride and joy, who openly considered her as good as one of his own children—shut down completely at the mention of her name.
“No,” he said. “Goodbye.”
“Wait!” All right, slamming a hand out to catch the door before he could lock it again wasn’t the most diplomatic thing she could have done, but Joanna was getting a little desperate here. “Look, I’m not stalking her or anything, she told me once where her family lived and I’ve—I haven’t been in the Kingdom in a long time.”
A very thin technicality, commented Ozma. But I’ll grant you, not a lie.
“I just wanted to talk to her,” Joanna persisted. “I can leave you my information if you’re not comfortable giving me hers—”
“What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?” her uncle snapped, baring his teeth. Joanna reeled back at the unexplained viciousness. Behind him, a ragtag assortment of adult nephews and neighbors silently rose to flank him, looking at Joanna with a very clear promise in their hard eyes. “What’s the matter, can’t hear me all the way up there? I said she doesn’t live here anymore! Who are you to come around here bringing up old wounds like that?”
No, no, not Fiona too—
Correctly interpreting Joanna’s expression, a young man relented enough to say, “Calm down, she’s not dead. Not yet at least.”
“Dead to me,” someone muttered.
One of the nephews sneered in agreement. “She’s too good for us now.”
A woman who didn’t look to be part of the family—by blood, anyway—winced. “I’m sure she’s...doing her best.”
Their patriarch threw a hard glare back into the room. “Quiet!”
Joanna held up her hands, wisely sliding a boot into the open door at the same time. She questioned her own wisdom when Fiona’s uncle immediately slammed the door against her foot as hard as he could, but the point was, the door stayed open.
“Please,” she said, hoping desperation and sincerity would make up for the fact that she sounded genuinely insane. “I just need to see her, she—meant a lot to me once, I just need to know she’s all right.”
“Oh, I’m sure she’s doing just fine,” snapped the nephew who clearly resented Fiona the most. “Get lost, lady, we don’t want anything to do with her or her friends!”
“Ease off,” murmured an older man in the background. “She had to make a hard decision, and she’s a lot better than most.”
Fi’s uncle still looked ready to tear a chunk out of the corrugated steel and chew it into powder, but while his glare didn’t subside at all, he did heave a sigh that was almost familiar.
“Fiona’s a complicated subject,” he said, a little unnecessarily at this point. “And not one we talk about with outsiders, and certainly not with humans, and not with human Huntsmen! Now. Have a good evening, miss, but you need to leave.”
Oh, that wasn’t concerning at all.
But it was all Joanna was gonna get. Aching to reach out and squeeze his shoulder, call him by his name, anything to get that gruff, warm smile the four of them valued so dearly, she swallowed hard and dipped her head.
“Thank you,” she said, and meant it. “I’m sorry for bothering you.”
“Mmrph,” he said, and slammed the door in her face.
Joanna stood there for a long moment.
“Well,” she said. “Shit.”
How the hell was she supposed to find Fiona now?
She might be closer than you think, Ozma said. Try heading north a bit?
“Oh look, the ghost wizard in my head deigns to be helpful.” But she shook her head and followed the hint. It only took a few minutes.
“You know,” said a bright, young-sounding male voice from around the corner as Joanna approached an intersection. “Gonna be honest. Wasn’t expecting my first assignment out of the Academy to send me back home.”
And then, from beside him, a huff of laughter that was achingly familiar except for the uncharacteristic streak of bitterness in it.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Fiona said, and Joanna’s heart sank into her bowels. “General blew smoke up your ass with that shiny new Specialist commission, huh? Don’t worry kid, we’ve all been there. Cream of the crop of Atlas Academy, but sometimes we’re still gonna get gruntwork that isn’t anywhere in a Huntsman’s actual job description.”
All of a sudden her uncle’s reticence made sense.
“I don’t mind, honestly,” said the young man, no less cheerful. “There are worse jobs than...I don’t know, giving back to the community?”
Fiona snorted. “Sure, Marrow, that’s a word for it.”
Joanna could almost hear Marrow shrug. “Beats filing paperwork, that’s all.”
“I guess. Honestly though, this isn’t normal. I don’t have to tell you they don’t normally bother to send actual Huntsmen down here, much less SpecOps, but the Fall of Beacon has them all paranoid about the White Fang.”
“Who hardly even had an operational presence in Solitas to begin with.”
“Yup! But try telling command that. So we’re stuck patrolling the Crater and snooping around like a couple of stupid beat cops until they’ve calmed down. Guess someone along the chain got the idea that we’d be, I dunno, less alarming than the alternative.”
“Gosh, I wonder why.” Whoever this Marrow kid was, his sarcasm was drier than a Vacuoan wasteland. “I mean, you’re terrifying, but I’ve been told I’m very pretty.”
Fiona laughed again. “Hold onto that sense of humor, kid. Don’t ever try it with Ashe though, trust me, she’s...”
“A bitch?” Marrow suggested brightly.
“You don’t know the half of it. Don’t remind her why she’s on assignment down here with the likes of us unless you want your throat ripped out. But hey, I don’t bite.”
Marrow chuckled, then gave a sigh. “It might be bullshit,” he acknowledged. “But at least it is us patrolling the Crater. Better you and me than, uh...someone else.”
“Don’t expect gratitude,” Fiona responded dully, real pain breaking through under the acid she tried and failed to inject into her tone. “From the way half of them talk you’d think they’d rather we just let every Huntsman in the kingdom be human. But try not to let it get to you. They’re civvies. It’s still our responsibility to be fair and—all right, hold it right there.”
Joanna tensed, instinctively, but it wasn’t her that Fiona had spotted. She risked a peek around the corner and—
The sight of Fiona from behind in a crisp, white, slightly dusty military uniform was a knife to the heart, so she tried not to look at it in favor of a double-take at seeing young Olive Tarandus frozen in the center of the road, turning reluctantly toward the pair of Special Operatives bearing down on her. Joanna knew her, vaguely; bright young kid on her high school debate team, who’d reached out to Robyn a year ago to do an interview for some kind of advanced social studies project.
“What the hell,” Joanna murmured. “Olive doesn’t live anywhere near the Crater.”
In your timeline, Ozma corrected softly. But without you, Miss Hill never established herself as a political force. And without—
Without Robyn, the most prominent spearhead against corruption in Mantle was lost. Joanna was intimately familiar with, for example, the kind of ugly back-door deals cut by Tammy Hall alone; without a unifying voice defending financial assistance for struggling families, insisting social services do their jobs, loudly demanding investigations into shady business practices...without anyone to hamstring the mutually beneficial arrangements between the slumlords of Mantle and the politicians they were willing to pay handsomely to look the other way…
Olive’s family had always been comfortable; not well-off, but they’d never been in a position where they needed to worry. Like any other family in Mantle, however, they were one bad month, one lost job or unexpected accident away from being in trouble.
Shoulders tense and eyes haunted, antlers shaking in the light from the streetlamp, Olive tried to keep her resentful glare focused on the ground.
“Is there a problem, ma’am?”
“Kid, this is like the third time this week we’ve seen you breaking curfew. There’s only so many times I can write that off as you just running late.”
“I—I just had to go to the store after school, there was a line, you know there’s not many grocery stores near…”
“Yeah, so if this was an isolated incident, I’d buy that.” Fiona sounded more exasperated than aggressive, but there was...a hardness in her tone, an unyielding quality Joanna hoped never to hear again. “You know when you’re supposed to be home by.”
Marrow stepped in, his voice even and soothing. “You’re a smart kid, Olive,” he said in a way he clearly thought was kind. “We don’t want to see you in trouble.”
“But we’re in the middle of a crisis, and sneaking around after dark...it just doesn’t look good. I’ve gotta do my job.” Fiona sighed and gestured to Olive’s backpack. “Come on,” she said. “Hand over the bag, kid, let’s get this over with.”
Joanna’s heart couldn’t bear hearing Fiona talk that way for one moment more. “Hey! Leave her alone,” she called, stepping out into the street.
Fiona and Marrow whirled around in unison. Olive, seeing her chance, turned and booked it down an alleyway the moment Joanna had their attention. Good kid.
Fiona pinned her ears against her temples and dropped a hand to the rest on one of the paired bladed pistols at her belt—and was that ever wrong, but why would she ever have switched to their weapon here? “Who the hell—we’re on military business, buzz off.”
“Is that what you call harassing a random kid?” This was—stupid, she shouldn’t be picking a fight, but this was wrong, this was so wrong, Mantle might be worse off without her but Fiona would never let herself become this. “Fi, what are you doing? This isn’t you.”
Fiona herself seemed to disagree. “I don’t think that’s any of your business,” she snapped, wrongfooted that Joanna knew her name.
“Ma’am,” Marrow whispered in an undertone as he nervously reached toward his rifle. “She’s armed.”
“I noticed. Drop the staff and show me your ID, lady. You’d better have a damn good reason for being out down here past curfew.”
I hate to backseat drive, Miss Greenleaf, Ozma said, but perhaps getting arrested isn’t an ideal course of action for us.
“When you’re right you’re right,” Joanna said, prompting a furrowed brow from Fiona.
Before she could recover, Joanna shot out the single street lamp in the area and bolted.
“Hey!”
There was a quick burst of gunfire—what the hell, this was a packed residential area, was Fiona out of her mind? The first shot just barely missed; Joanna was faster than most people gave her credit for at first glance. Unfortunately, Fiona had been a good shot before she had Robyn to hone her skills to perfection.
Joanna stumbled and nearly fell at the impact as the other three shots struck home. If she didn’t have an active Aura shield, if she hadn’t—Fiona had just tried to kill her —
“Marrow!”
“I can’t get a clear shot, Fi, you know I can’t see in the dark!”
With a quick prayer of thanks for small mercies, and the rare canine faunus who didn’t have night vision, Joanna hauled ass out of the slums. She didn’t quite manage to outrun the festering wrongness of hearing that nickname from a stranger, but there were...other priorities right now.
Safely over the wall, Joanna put her back to it and slid down to sit on the cold gravel, panting.
“What the hell,” she said. “Fiona wouldn’t sell out like that. She just wouldn’t.”
What option would she take instead? Miss Hill and yourself might not have known her in the Academy, but you did overlap with her. When time came for her to decide her path, she already had your example. She knew that being an independent Huntress in Mantle was a viable path. But without that?
“She would still try,” Joanna insisted. “I don’t care what your stupid magic fever dream says. She would try.”
You assume she didn’t try, at first.
Of course she would have, Joanna thought viciously. Fiona was indestructible. She would have come home to do her part no matter what happened. She would have…
Turned down a well-paying job that would help her support her family, in favor of coming home with no prospects and no help, to...well, to fight Grimm. The same kind of jobs Robyn had always gotten them, the ones that...that depended entirely on either getting a commission, or trusting the lister to pay the bounty in full after the fact so that you didn’t have to start a lengthy appeals process with the government agency that guaranteed Huntsman Board listings. One in which it frequently came down to your word against theirs.
And Fiona would have been one young faunus, in Mantle, with no backup.
One young faunus, more than intelligent enough to run these same calculations herself before she showed up back at home to be a financial burden on her struggling family.
Joanna really hated how tangible Ozma’s sadness was in the back of her head.
The deck was stacked against her from the start. Maybe, like her partner Marrow, she decided that the military was the only realistic way to help Mantle. Maybe she even let herself believe it for a while.
Joanna closed her eyes, resting her head in her arms. Robyn was dead, Joanna herself had never existed, Fiona was her own worst nightmare.
“All right,” she said flatly. Time to rip off the bandage. “Just say it. May never got out.”
Fiona was bad enough; picturing May in an Atlesian uniform...actually made her feel queasy. Somehow it was even worse if she pictured May as she was now, and not as she’d been when she had worn that uniform in the real world...
There was a very long pause.
Do you recall the circumstances in which you first met Miss Marigold?
“No,” Joanna mocked. “I’ve actually completely forgotten.”
But—no, she realized, straightening abruptly in a flood of relief. May had already left Atlas, in somewhat spectacular fashion, when she first ran into the three of them. She’d been in bad shape; wet to the bone, hungry, Aura failing, lost in more ways than one. But she’d never needed any of them to have a conscience, and she hadn’t known when she ran that there would be anyone there to catch her when she fell.
Maybe the Happy Huntresses existed here after all. It wouldn’t be the same; without them to help her heal Joanna could only imagine the kind of dark, jaded rage May would be alone with. That she’d turn true vigilante was almost a guarantee, left to her own devices...
She was just starting to run the odds on whether May had finally died the same way as Robyn, or if her Semblance might have kept her alive this long, when she felt Ozma flinch in the back of her mind.
“What?”
When he finally responded, it was clear that he was choosing his words extremely carefully.
You know Miss Marigold very well, he finally allowed. And you are...entirely correct. She would, indeed, have devoted herself with all her loving ferocity to the same kind of work as in any other reality, guarding the people of Mantle...if left to her own devices.
Joanna narrowed her eyes slowly.
It didn’t have the same effect when the person she was glaring at was inside her skull, but she was trying.
And she was...thinking. About May, and her wild-animal fear when they’d first found her. The desperation and hunger. Not physical—well, that too, they’d bought her something from a street vendor the minute they laid eyes on her, but—she’d wanted a purpose so badly. Wanted an outlet for all the fury she’d been suppressing. She’d been so ready for someone to give her a way out of a situation that seemed past all hope.
Joanna swallowed.
“Who found her?”
Who found her, if it wasn’t us?
Ozma’s voice was very quiet. I’m afraid that’s not something I can say.
“Oh, bullshit—”
But I can show you.
The sight on the video was the same as the one Joanna had first seen that awful night.
Amity Arena. The Beacon student with the flame-colored hair staring in shellshocked horror at the sight of what she’d done. Doctor Polendina’s daughter reduced to sparking pieces on the ground.
The sight was the same.
The voice wasn’t.
“—reason does Atlas want us to believe they have, for creating killing machines in the guise of innocent little girls? I don’t think Grimm can tell the difference.”
Joanna clutched the cheap headphones at the computer bank so tightly she threatened to break them. It had been a little disconcerting, after Ozma’s ominous non-answers, to end up outside the run-down Mantle public library. She’d started to feel hope again, almost.
That had been a mistake.
“Atlas loves to present itself as a protector, generously offering its technology and power to help the rest of the world. So Vale doesn’t say a word while a war fleet is positioned over the city. Mistral allows Atlesian military bases in its most vulnerable port city. Even Vacuo doesn’t protest total Atlesian control over the CCT net—the system the entire planet is totally dependent on, which can be destroyed by Atlas just switching off its own tower!”
The entire planet except Menagerie, Joanna completed, because never in her life had May ever let that kind of statement pass without completing it.
May, spitting pure venom through the headphones, didn’t say a word about Menagerie. Of course she didn’t. It wouldn’t fit the narrative. Or maybe, whatever had been done to this version of May, she’d forgotten what made her angry enough to leave Atlas in the first place.
“But hey, don’t take my word for it. Maybe they’re completely sincere. After all, just look how generously the Kingdom of Atlas shares its riches and technology with its own citizens in Mantle!”
“She’s good,” Joanna breathed, feeling sick.
“Make up your own minds,” May concluded, disgust dripping from every word. “But do it quickly, because I was born and raised in the highest circles of Atlas, and believe me, this warning may already be too late. First blood’s been spilled. The first shots are about to be fired. And you’d better not guess wrong about who’s really on your side.”
Joanna ripped the headphones off and staggered away from the computer bank, and when she was outside it was all she could do not to retch.
“How,” she asked, pitifully, through shuddering breaths.
The woman who found her in this reality is...an expert at weaponizing the pain of the lost, at forging them into weapons to suit her own ends. Miss Marigold never had a chance against her. I’m so sorry.
“And the world doesn’t have a chance against May,” Joanna whispered. A few tears were squeezed out as she shut her eyes tight.
There was no response.
“...Ozma?”
Silence. No, worse than that—the presence she’d felt all night, painless but alien, somewhere in her mind, was gone.
He’d said that would happen eventually—that his brief fusion with Joanna had been a mistake and he’d be pulled away and back to wherever he was supposed to be at any moment. But she’d assumed he’d get some warning, that he’d at least know via whatever weird magic thing he had going on that it was about to happen, that he’d—
That he’d have a few seconds to undo it.
She’d assumed he was going to send her back.
“No,” she said, hands starting to shake. “No, you can’t—I never asked you to do this! I didn’t need your help! You can’t just bring me here and leave me! I don’t even have a name here, what am I supposed to— you can’t do this to me!” It was raining again, freezing cold, and she didn’t care. “Come back! You can’t rip me out of the world and leave me here to live with it, I have a life, I did good with it, you can’t just t ake that away—!”
A door opened behind her, light spilling into the dirty alleyway.
“Joanna!” called Robyn lightly. “Potatoes are ready and Fiona says if you’re not in here in thirty seconds she gets yours—why are you out here in the rain?”
Joanna whirled around, hope like a knife in her lungs. “Robyn?”
“You were expecting someone prettier?” Robyn asked dryly. “I can give you a moment with the wall slime if you like. Seriously, come inside, you’ll freeze to death. Are you okay—”
She cut herself off with a faint gasp as Joanna surged forward and kissed her, just barely on the right side of desperate, hands framing her face. Robyn hummed softly after a moment, one hand curling in the front of Joanna’s jacket. When Joanna finally let her go, Robyn blinked stars out of her eyes and made no attempt to hide her faint flush.
“The potatoes aren’t that good,” she managed, breathless.
“They could be,” commented May, who was visibly appreciating the show and not remotely distracted enough not to smack Fiona’s hand away from a second potato without turning around. “I would just like to say that I also like being appreciated for my hard work.”
Joanna tried for a flirtatious smirk and failed miserably. It was hard to pull off when you were trying not to cry.
“You…” She managed. “You have no idea how much I appreciate you all.”
"We appreciate you too, Jo," said Fiona sweetly, and Joanna believed her. She'd never needed anyone's help for that.
Robyn’s hand tightened on her arm.
“Joanna?” she asked. “Is everything all right?”
The laugh she gave in response was apparently concerning enough that May and Fiona stopped engaging in psychological warfare over a baked potato to turn toward her in concern.
More honestly than she’d ever said anything in her life, Joanna pulled May in to kiss her forehead and murmured, “I’ve never been better.”
“Alright, don’t get sappy on us,” Fiona teased. “Just get over here.”
Joanna took a potato off the counter, and the world was good.