I'll be honest, I feared that I'd made Autumn's death too predictable. I'm glad I was wrong.
And, well. Adam said he was going to increase their odds of survival - he never said they were going to survive.
Chapter Eight: Bereft of Guidance
With Annea unconscious from having her aura shattered and Besh having some actual control over his emotions, they were able to escape the goliaths. Clustered within the cone of an old and densely-needled pine, they stayed silent and still but ready to move until the vibrations of the goliaths' steps were gone—and then for another ten minutes just to be sure.
Only then did Adam relax. He sat against the trunk, its rough bark scraping across his passive aura before he settled. Besh, kneeling over Annea, finally holstered his handgun. The forest was quiet save for muted bird calls and the distant skittering of squirrels up and across the trees.
The heiress wasn't moving; the shock of having her aura broken after the trauma of her sister's death, coupled with the hit it had already taken when she fell, was keeping her under.
Besh sat back on his haunches, unable to actually sit down. Pine needles crunched under his heels. "Did she have to die?"
Adam had no sympathy for the guard's lost human. "She was going to die either way. I only made it faster."
Conflicted, Besh looked back down at Annea.
"Tell me," Adam continued, eyes narrowing, "how did you know there were Grimm in the cave before they were out of the shadows?"
Besh stiffened. Before he could respond, Annea stirred with a quiet moan. His answer would have to wait.
Their flight from the goliaths had thrown them far off the path that Adam had been following. He could orient them back in the general direction of Vale, but he was no longer sure that they were pointed directly at the city. They would need to course-correct once they got to the mountains and had a view of the terrain beyond. Normally, he would use various landmarks and the roads themselves as guides, but they had managed to get deep into a large depression in the ground that made seeing landmarks beyond its edges difficult.
It didn't help, he reflected as he was forced to stop and wait yet again, that the surviving heiress was as much of a hindrance now as Trace had been on his final day despite her being uninjured. Gaze vacant, hair in disarray, she shuffled next to Besh without processing her surroundings save for the bare minimum required to move through them.
Upon waking, she had tried to attack Adam, but after Besh had held her back, her rage had burned out and reality had set in. She had withdrawn so far into herself that no amount of urging from Besh could pull her out again. Her numb grief cast a pall over their group. It wasn't overwhelming, closer to embers than a true fire, but it was difficult to ignore.
Especially when, in her distracted state, she tripped for the third time in twenty minutes. He made no secret of his irritation, but Besh stared back with cold steel in his eyes. If only the Grimm would descend on them again and give him some excuse to end this farce before it dragged on for days beyond what was necessary.
His wish was not granted. They made it to midday without incident, at which point they broke for lunch. Besh had to set his own supply of foraged food in Annea's lap. Adam almost thought he would have to feed her, but after a couple tries, he got her to do it herself.
Still, once she was eating, Besh had no more excuses. Adam didn't even have to say anything; Besh came to him. Before he could voice his question again about how Besh was able to see the Grimm when Autumn could not, though, Besh spoke up.
"Are you going to kill her too?" It was the most emotion Adam had ever seen out of him, and it was a bitter challenge directed solely at him.
Despite his earlier thoughts, he shook his head. "No. I agreed to mutual survival. Even if Autumn is dead, I intend to finish what I started."
"Autumn is dead because you killed her."
"What about her situation aren't you understanding?" Adam growled. "Staying with her would have killed all of us. It was Annea's fault for failing to leave the cave immediately. We all know there are dozens of Grimm species that thrive in caves and underground. It was Autumn's choice to go after her. She knew there was a chance she wouldn't get out. I showed her mercy."
Besh worked his jaw, fingers flexing. He wanted an outlet for his frustration, that was plain to see, but Adam wasn't going to sit back and let Besh use him as an excuse.
Finally, Besh looked away. "It wasn't right."
So young. So naïve. "What's necessary rarely is." He looked past Besh and scowled. "Your heiress isn't eating."
Like an automaton, Annea had wound down until she wasn't moving at all. Her attention was somewhere far beyond the trees. It was the same empty stare Trace had worn.
He had meant his comment to be a distraction from Besh's moralistic stance before he got to the question at hand, but his strategy backfired. Rather than acknowledge Annea's condition and refocus on their conversation, Besh abandoned the conversation altogether to go tend to his poor, grieving heiress.
If Adam's suspicions were correct, then Besh's actions were all the more demeaning. That same disdain he had directed at Annea from the start was beginning to catch Besh in its scope.
Shaking his head, he began picking some of the burrs and needles out of his clothes.
So he'd killed her sister. So she'd seen it happen. How could that render her all but insensate? He'd seen plenty of men and women die in front of him. Enemy, ally, bystander—none of them had ever affected him as much as Autumn's death was affecting Annea.
Was it because they were sisters? Adam had never had siblings, but the deep bond between Autumn and Annea had been obvious even with Annea's childish need to prove herself.
A cluster of needles had gotten stuck near his elbow. He carefully teased them out, trying to avoid more tearing of the threads.
He had been close to Ilia and Sienna for several years, but neither of them had ever gone beyond friends. If anything, his relationship with Sienna had been breaking down long before she sent him away to Vale. And Ilia…he hadn't heard anything from her since handing down his order to assassinate the Belladonna family. Most likely, she was either dead or turned traitor. Not exactly a friend.
He'd only ever truly opened up to Blake. As his partner, she had been the closest thing he'd ever had to family after losing his own—before everything fell apart, at least.
A burr's hooks dug into the pad of his thumb, but he barely noticed. What would he do if Blake put herself in danger to save him, only for someone they both hated to kill her while he could do nothing but watch?
His first response was to think that he would never allow a situation like that to happen. Even when he and Blake had been on the same side, none of their missions had ever forced them into a scenario like that. There had been close calls, but that was all they had been: close. Never realized. He—sometimes Blake, but most often he—had always found or forced a way out. He'd never been too weak to do anything other than stare.
The only time in his life he had ever been that powerless was that first week in Deus's cave after he fell into the water. Back then, his body had barely been able to take a task as simple as walking. For a while, shelving books had been the limit of his physical ability.
He tried to transpose that helplessness onto the hypothetical scenario. He could almost see it: himself, weakened and wounded from some barrage of attacks, triggering a trap. Blake shoving him out of the way and taking the hits herself. Him convinced that there was still a chance she could be saved, only for a Schnee to kill her and tell him it was a kindness.
He rolled that scene around, trying to figure out the sour taste it left in his mouth. It wasn't completely accurate; the Schnee would need to be someone he had temporarily allied with and who he believed could save Blake should they so choose.
So how would he feel, knowing someone who could have saved Blake chose not to even when he had been pleading for them to do otherwise?
It made Annea's blind, shrieking rage against him when she first woke far more understandable, but it didn't explain her current behavior. Anger he could understand. This broken numbness, he could not. Even in a scenario like hers, he would not retreat like she did. That was the final point at which any comparison between them would fall apart. He couldn't and never had been able to abide giving up. He would fight and rage until either the target of his fury was dead or he was. There was no placing a fired round back into the magazine, no healing a skull shot through.
And, as he watched Besh try to coax Annea into eating just a little bit more, no working with a traumatized heiress.
He narrowed his eyes. Annea had eaten barely anything at all. She had not eaten since the Grimm attack, ignoring Besh's offers of snacks as they walked. She had refused water too and turned away all of Besh's worried offers for help whenever she fell.
This heiress was just as self-destructive as he was. She was just far more passive about it.
He had made a vow of mutual survival. He couldn't kill her outright, not when she wasn't essentially already dead, but as she drove herself into the ground, she would get in his way. Slow him down. Put him at risk. Each time they ran into the Grimm, they had to test their luck a dozen times. The Grimm only had to be lucky once.
Besh's shoulders dropped. He had made no progress.
Enough of this. Before he could think better of his actions, Adam was striding across the ground. Besh had stood and taken a step away, probably planning to wait a beat before trying again. Adam usurped his old position.
Seeing him go down to one knee to be at eye level with her was enough to burn new life into Annea's veins—but all she did was frown at him.
"Is that really all you can do?" he asked, making no secret of his irritation. "Pout like a child?" He gestured to the berries scattered in the grass at her feet. "Throw tantrums?"
Her frown grew deeper. Annoyance, punching through the fog of grief, creased her skin.
He let even more acid coat his voice. "I should have known an heiress like you would fall apart at the first sign of trouble."
"The first sign?" she whispered. She finally focused on him. "The first? The first?" With each word, her voice grew in volume. "The ship crashed. Our Dust exploded. I hiked through the wilderness. Grimm attacked. The pilot—" her voice hitched—"and then Autumn—"
She broke down. He stared impassively as she buried her face in her hands, half-stifled sobs rocking her body.
He picked up some of the berries and roots she'd let fall to the ground while she refused Besh's help, gathering them on his gloved palm. Sinnea pulled herself together with a deep, shuddering breath, that detached numbness still hovering over her like a shroud. He knew that the moment she got the chance, she would retreat back into it.
Besh, to his right, only watched. He had the sense to not interfere.
Adam held out his hand. As she raised her head, Annea stared at the food that he was holding out to her with puffy, reddened eyes.
"You need to keep up your strength," Adam said as neutrally as he could. "Turning suicidal puts the rest of us at risk."
Her eyes went wide in indignation, and she hit the food out of his hands. "I want nothing from a murderer like you. You killed her. You're the risk!"
He forced himself to not react to Annea's barbs. Mutual survival. He strongly suspected that was going to become far more prevalent of a mantra in the coming days than it had been since he first agreed to it.
Taking a deep breath, he kept his tone reasonable. "Would you have preferred the Grimm eat her alive?"
She flinched. "Of course not."
"Then realize I chose the lesser of two evils. She was down there because of your actions, not mine."
"I didn't ask her to—"
"But she did. She knew she might not make it out. That was her choice. Don't blame it on me."
"Maybe it was," she whispered, anger kindling anew, "but you were there too. You're supposed to be strong, aren't you? You've fought specialists, haven't you?" The sparks turned to a flame. "So why didn't you stop them? You could've, right? You could've saved her!"
He didn't deny it. In the moment, he'd done the math. He could've saved her, he'd just chosen not to. Oh, there were reasons: conservation of ammunition, the approaching Goliaths, the unpredictability of a Grimm swarm.
But those weren't what stayed his hand. He'd been doing fine with limited ammunition since the start of this train wreck. The goliaths had still been several minutes away—enough time to recover Autumn and still get escape, though it would have been close. And even if an attack from all sides would be difficult even for him, it wasn't impossible. All he would've had to do was hold them off to give Autumn time to escape and then escape himself, something that would likely have left him injured but probably wouldn't have killed him.
No, the honor of justifying his inaction went to one simple fact: he would not put his own life on the line to that degree to save a human's. In the face of circumstances that severe, any pact of mutual survival fell apart.
His silence only made Annea's anger reach new heights. Watching her struggle to give voice to her rage, a strange hollowness kept him from responding in kind. He forced his way through it; if this kept up, they would get nowhere. He had come over here with a purpose, not to provoke argument.
"Look. The deal I made with your sister won't let me finish what the Grimm started or let me watch you starve. The last thing we need right now is another fight drawing attention."
Though Annea's cheeks remained flushed with red, the mention of her sister took the wind from her sails. But she still wasn't moving.
He swallowed his pride. It felt like dragging knives down his throat. "Your sister gave you a second chance and traded her life to do it. Grief is fine. Anger is fine. But this isn't the time for it, and you don't get to pretend like this," he gestured to her dropped berries as an indication of her behavior as a whole, "is something you can't control."
He hardened his voice, letting some of his malice sip through. "Make a choice. Either your life is still worth living or it isn't."
The same choice he had made. Which would the grieving heiress pick?
She stared at him, expression shutting down little by little until there was nothing left but an empty mask. And then, acting like Adam didn't even exist, she began to eat.