The creature of Grimm seemed paralyzed for a moment, frozen in time. Tiny white fragments had sprayed from the assassin's mask as the bullet punched through it, first one, then the second. Then, slowly, the Grimm crumpled, its knees collapsing and its—her—center of gravity and momentum from the just-begun attack carrying the corpse forward.

It death, it was as if the creature had been transformed. No more was the assassin a faceless monster. She was quite clearly a woman, just as the one Blake had shot off the catwalk to protect Weiss had been a man. If they were monsters, it was not by their nature, not by their attributes, but by their twisted human minds that drove them to not only kill for money, but to carelessly slaughter the innocent to more effectively do the job.

It was easier to think of them as monsters, atavistic creatures of darkness. They were less frightening that way. Weiss could never become an unnatural fiend, but the differences between what the Grimm had done and what Weiss had just accomplished was a far narrower one, purely a question of moral justification. And while Weiss, even in the shocked aftermath, had no doubts at all as to the rightness of her actions, she also knew how easy it would be to slip over the line, like Garnet's thugs or the White Fang Faunus at Saulbridge.

Her hands ached as she pushed herself up to her feet, throbbed from the recoil of the powerful gun, much heavier than anything she'd ever fired on the target range. In a way, it reassured her. It shouldn't be easy to take a life.

Blake's hands were gentle as they covered hers, taking Gambol Shroud back. Her eyes were gentle, too, but she said nothing, not a word of thanks, or comfort, or pity.

She knows, Weiss thought gratefully. Blake understood what it would do to Weiss's pride to cross that barrier now, and it was only that pride that was fending off the mental shock even then.

"We're almost there," was all Blake did say. "Come on."

Weiss took a deep, ragged breath.

"All right."

They continued up the catwalk, Weiss's first steps still a little shaky and unsteady, but Blake had not let go of her hand, and the firmness of her grip was enough to keep the heiress moving on forward. By the time she reached the corner in the catwalk's path, she was, if not okay, at least not shaking any more. They went about five feet past the turn, now running parallel to the Pavilion wall, and Blake came to a halt.

"This is as close as we're going to be able to get," she said. Even in the dull light of the emergency illumination, the towering stained-glass panel was impressive, depicting the Schnee Dust Company's trademark snowflake insignia as gears and cogwheels in a great machine, the gray metal combining with the white snowflakes and blue background in the Schnee colors.

"Well…it is a little obvious," Weiss said, drawing Myrtenaster. "I think they could stand to replace it."

"It's your family. If anyone has a right to call out their taste, it's you," Blake returned the quip. And now I know she's doing it for me. Blake Belladonna joking in the middle of a running battle!

She didn't say "thank you," but she did give Blake's hand an extra squeeze.

Weiss oriented herself on her mental map of the Gardens, trying to remember what the window overlooked, then dialed up crimson Dust and pulled the trigger. Flame blasted out, washing over the window—and then was followed seconds later by the frost of azure Dust. Superheated, then flash-cooled, the glass was unable to take the stress of the rapid expansion and contraction and shattered, colored pieces showering down in broken bits, inside and out, in some places carrying the latticework with them and in others leaving it behind like some kind of crazed spiderweb.

"It didn't go with the color scheme anyway," Weiss said. Blake rolled her eyes (was that one quip too many for the situation?) and swung her leg over the catwalk's railing, then the other, balancing on the outside, then sprang, dropping to the broad sill of the broken window.

Weiss gulped. "Broad" in this context meant about two feet wide, counting the lip inside, the lip outside, and the thickness of the wall together. Six feet down. Four feet horizontally away.

Fifty-five feet down to the ground.

Sometimes, I wish I wasn't that good at spatial geometry.

She clambered over the railing, praying it would hold the whole time as her shorter legs meant that she actually needed to use it for support instead of just treating it as an obstacle the way Blake had. Weiss teetered on the edge, hanging on to the rail to hold her balance, and cursed her choice of shoes for the dozenth time that night.

"This is a terrible idea," she muttered under her breath. Jumping wildly through space was an exercise for superhuman cat-people!

Then she jumped, pushing off with as much force as she could manage from her position. She had strong legs, despite their slimness; she could have made the jump easily enough given the vertical difference that allowed for a little greater arc.

Except, of course, that her right foot slipped, her balance off on the platform heel.

Blake's face was a mask of horror as she, too, realized at once what had happened, that Weiss wasn't going to make it. She reached out at once—Idiot! She's not braced at all; even if she catches me, my momentum will just pull us both over!—her fingers brushing Weiss's sleeve as she fell past.

Then Weiss pulled Myrtenaster's trigger, and a surge of indigo Dust burst through the rapier, generating the power of attraction between Weiss and the wall. Her empty hand slapped the paneling, finding purchase somehow when there was none, the shock of her plunge stopping shooting up both arms. Something in her right shoulder screamed at her; thankfully unlike when the catwalk had broken it wasn't her own strength she was counting on to stop herself or else she'd have fallen in that moment.

"Weiss! Thank God!" Blake gasped.

"Thank Dr. Verhart for finishing Myrtenaster's automatic Dust selector. Can you help me up?"

Weiss had to dial back the attraction force so Blake could haul her up over the edge of the window frame, and barely suppressed a yelp at the pain that shot through her shoulder when Blake had to pull on her right arm, but soon she teetered on the edge.

Which was when the last of the creatures of Grimm, the one who'd been throwing knives at them (and who had obviously run out, given the number of times they'd been sitting ducks in the past few minutes), landed lightly on the window-ledge, as if to further mock Weiss's troubles. He had a knife in each hand, heavy blades for combat unlike the thin throwing wedges, and he slipped from his landing into a guard stance as easily as drawing breath.

Blake put two bullets in his chest from five feet away, close enough that she could step forward and push the corpse so that it toppled out the window instead of down inside the Pavilion.

"Anticlimactic," Weiss decided.

"I'm sorry to offend your Schnee's sense of decorum."

Weiss sighed.

"I'm never going to master the after-battle quip, am I?"

"Probably not."

"Let's just get out of here, then."

"Uh-huh."

For once, their escape required no particular acrobatics. Blake hooked Gambol Shroud over the sill, and they rappelled down the ribbon. It wasn't quite long enough to reach the ground, so Weiss went first, then dropped the last eight feet, wincing as she hit. Blake slid smoothly to the end and disengaged the hook with a flip of her wrist before dropping the rest of the way.

"How bad is it?" she asked at once.

"Eh?"

"Your shoulder. You didn't think I saw you favoring it when you went down the ribbon. You hurt it catching yourself when you fell, didn't you?"

"That's—" Weiss was about to deny the charge out of instinctive pride, but dismissed that at once as foolish. "I think it may be sprained. It hurts to move it, and if I try to put too much weight on it, it feels like someone's shoving a red-hot knife into it. But I'm all right; thankfully I'm left-handed so it's inconvenient instead of crippling."

"We'll still need to see to it as soon as possible. Ice and compression should help and proper wrapping will help protect accidentally hurting it further."

Weiss shook her head.

"That's going to have to wait."

"What? Why?" Then Blake deduced the answer to her own question and her face fell. "You didn't get what you wanted from your aunt, did you? You didn't have enough time before Winthrop and I got there, and after that the security men and the Grimm made it impossible."

"That's right. So we need to catch up with her before we leave tonight."

"Do you think it will work?" Blake was dubious. "Those security guards will be sure to stay close to her, to keep her out of the way of all the chaos, to say nothing of the creatures of Grimm. We may know those assassins are after you, but that Strauss shouldn't, so he won't take any chances in getting your aunt to safety."

"And they'll keep her that way. Now that they know I'm trying to contact her, they'll watch her constantly. Probably Ashton will learn, too, even if the message gets to him about Garnet working with Hyde. He will end up involved as soon as word gets to him about this incident. He's probably already been called to oversee damage control, both in terms of literally dealing with the physical damage and human injury, and figuratively dealing with the issues of police investigation and the press. In any case, she'll be watched closely and probably surrounded by bodyguards from here on out. Our best chance is to try and get to her tonight, before Strauss and his men can bundle her into a carriage and get her away from here."

"That makes sense. But this place will become a mess of police constables and rescue workers before long."

"True, but most of the crowd will be long gone before they get Aunt Margarethe down. They'll need workers and equipment to get up to that platform, probably with some form of pneumatic lift. Ladders would be too much for the elderly and infirm, including Aunt Margarethe."

"All right, then. I think you and I can hide in the Atlesian Gardens from blundering police constables who aren't even looking for us for a few hours. And it gives us a chance to see if Lutege and Ciel are all right, as well."

~X X X~

Ezekiel Ashton hadn't just been notified; he took himself away from a marquis's dinner party the moment he got the message and proceeded at once to the Atlesian Gardens to assume direct control over the situation.

Upon arriving at the scene, he found Roland Ivory, the manager, trying his best to supervise a situation that was far outside of his area of expertise and, if truth be told, not doing badly at it. No one expects an attack by mad anarchists, particularly of this scale, and a staff trained to smoothly deal with food shortages, drunken customers, and minor mechanical breakdowns wasn't equipped to deal with multiple Dust explosions and hundreds of panicked people. Under the circumstances, to have gotten the emergency lights on, called for medical assistance for the injured, notified their superiors in the company, and sent for equipment and experts to help rescue those trapped on the elevated platforms was a minor coup by Ivory and his people.

One could not say the same for the local police inspector, three sergeants, and a dozen constables who'd been summoned by escaping members of the public and who were making a general nuisance of themselves. Ashton had sent at once to Scotland Yard for Inspector Branwen of Special Branch; the man wasn't bought and paid for but he was at least good at his job and understood the value of discretion. And luckily, the head of our militarized security force isn't here for him to argue with.

"So far we have fourteen confirmed deaths, either from the explosions or just trampled in the panic afterwards," Ivory was saying. His uniform was a mess, there was a smudge of oil on his cheek, and a bloodstain on his right sleeve from where he'd been helping with the wounded. "There are dozens of injuries, some serious and some minor. I'm more worried about the people on the elevated platforms. There are over two hundred of them up there, by my estimate, and getting them down safely is going to be difficult. We have to avoid further panic at all costs. I'm hoping you can expedite that, sir?"

"I can. We'll have equipment brought at once. It's not only the right thing to do, but will play well in the press—'despite being victimized by anarchists, the Schnee Dust Company still recognized its civic duty.' Speaking of which, what do we actually know about the incident? Who did this?"

Ivory shook his head, setting his blond curls bouncing.

"I don't know. The reports are confused and witnesses shaken, as you might expect. Not long after the emergency lights came on, there was a running gun battle in the catwalks, but we don't know who was involved. But we have another problem."

"What's that?"

"Apparently, Margarethe and Weiss Schnee are among the people trapped on the platform."

"What?"

Ivory pointed to a man dressed as a forester in Lincoln green and beckoned him over.

"Lightman, this is Executive Director Ashton. Tell him what you told me."

The story that spilled from his lips was enough to make Ashton's blood boil. Apparently, Weiss had arranged a meeting with Margarethe (confirming, it seemed, the theory that Weiss was missing on purpose), and Garnet had had a whole team of his people on hand to try to take her into custody when she showed up. Lightman was one of those who hadn't been in position to approach Weiss directly, since the team leader, Strauss, had dispersed his force through the Pavilion for thorough coverage.

"I don't know anything about who set off the bombs," he said, "but things got ugly really fast. I didn't want to get trampled, so I found myself a corner to wait out the stampede for the exits, and I saw the fight. Weiss and another woman beat three guys in black, maybe the bombers, and got out through one of the windows."

"You're sure that it was Weiss?"

Lightman's head bobbed up and down like it was on an elastic.

"Oh, yeah. Mr. Strauss warned us about that sword Dr. Verhart made for her, the one with the Dust. That's pretty hard to miss."

Ashton felt his right hand curl into a fist. What was going on here? He was floundering in the dark, a position he despised.

Fortunately, there was still one person here who knew at least some of the answers he needed to know, and she wasn't going anywhere at present.

Yes, before the night was out he was going to have a very long and productive chat with Margarethe Schnee.

~X X X~

There was a part of Blake Belladonna that was composing an article for the Star in her mind while she waited. London's newspapers would be rushing out Stop Presses and extra editions to get this story into the hands of readers, each with stories spun to excite, enthrall, reassure, or horrify as suited editorial policy, publisher's agendas, or just sales figures. The large-scale shock of the violence, the small-scale tragedies of individual losses, they were all, she thought cynically, perfect fodder for the jackals of the yellow press.

There's probably a joke in there somewhere, she thought, about a cat being a jackal. Really, though, it just went to show that the Blake who lived in the human world wasn't just a façade, but part of who she was. And why shouldn't it be? She was a Faunus, not an animal.

The hours passed by, and they watched workers come and go, equipment brought in, police and plainclothes detectives, some of whom might actually be Schnee Dust Company investigators, and various masquerade guests brought out, some to receive medical treatment and others directly into the hands of questioners. Blake and Weiss especially kept watch for further creatures of Grimm, be they a support team following up the initial three or just trying to slink away, but they saw nothing.

"How is your arm?" Weiss asked.

"My arm?"

Weiss pointed to Blake's left tricep.

"Oh, that." She glanced at her arm, where her costume had been cut by the assassin's knife, revealing the skin beneath. "I'd actually forgotten about it."

"Well, it looks like the bleeding stopped, so it can't have been too bad," Weiss decided, peering at it closely. "But make sure to have it cleaned and treated with antiseptic. You're getting too many nicks and cuts out of this business."

Blake couldn't suppress a giggle. Maybe it was just the ebbing of post-battle adrenaline giving rise to mild hysteria, but Weiss's concern over her minor injuries struck her as almost ridiculously funny.

"What?" The heiress drew up sharply, affronted. "What's so funny about me worrying about you?"

"It's funny because you've been hurt much worse than I have. First your eye, now your arm, they're far more serious than any of my injuries. And you're spending your time fussing over my little scratches."

"I'll have you know that I'm not made out of porcelain. Besides, I already know how much I'm hurt, so there's no reason for me to worry about that."

"I suppose there's a kind of logic to that."

They didn't see Lutege and Ciel, but they also didn't see any sign that the bodies of the dead, or the injured living receiving treatment, included anyone whose physiology was distinctly inhuman. That kind of thing tended to produce immediate agitation and activity among the authorities, even at a disaster site. Unless they were among the last of those trapped on elevated platforms, they had most likely extracted themselves from the Pavilion during the initial confusion, where their Faunus night vision would have aided them, like Blake, in moving through the blinded, frightened, panicking mass of humanity.

It was nearly three in the morning when they saw an exhausted Margarethe Schnee escorted from the building. Strauss was with her, and another two of his men. Winthrop was there as well, limping badly and favoring one arm; it was plain she'd taken the worst of it with the crowd (or maybe not; Strauss's other three from that platform hadn't come out in that group at all), for which Blake felt a little sorry. She'd been the one, after all, who'd pushed Winthrop into the crowd in the dark.

When Ashton approached Margarethe, she didn't even give him a sharp look. They spoke together quietly, and then she followed him away, her escort trailing along in their wake.

"That's it, then," Blake said. "Did you want to wait until they're done?"

Weiss pondered this. Over their hours of waiting, they'd of course discussed tactics for approach, what needed to be said and what needed to be done.

"No, we'll do it together," she decided. "If Ashton is investigating Garnet like Aunt Margarethe said he was, then he isn't involved with Hyde's project. And I think that right now, in the aftermath of the bombing, is our best chance to get him to listen to me about the seriousness of this matter."

"It would be nice to get rid of at least some of our opposition by making peace," Blake said. "And if you can get him to listen, you can at least blunt the power of Hyde's access to legitimate Dust Company assets outside of his personal forces. But what if he doesn't listen?"

"Then you and I will be in a lot of trouble."

"I'm being serious, Weiss."

She offered Blake a sardonic smile.

"So am I. I told you what Aunt Margarethe said; Hyde has left the country and presumably took whatever research he had with him. We need to follow after him if we're to have a chance to save you."

Blake sighed.

"And you think we need the Dust Company's resources to do that."

"It might not be the only way, but I can't think of a better one. Whether we need to travel by boat or airship, or enter into a foreign country, the Dust Company can provide it quickly and efficiently."

"Then you'd better be very persuasive, Weiss."

"I know. If we fail here, I'm not sure we'll get a second chance."