Chapter Nine: Justify

Though it grated on him, Adam tabled his questions for Besh. There simply wasn't enough time for them, and given their situation, neither he nor Besh were inclined to waste attention on personal details. With Annea's grief hanging over them, Grimm attacked in ever-increasing numbers. No number of talks could stop her from producing enough negativity to draw every single creature of Grimm for twenty miles. By the end of the first day, Adam was tired. By the end of the second, he was aching. And by the end of the third, he was exhausted.

At night, when it wasn't him disrupting the quiet with nightmares and screaming, it was Annea. She didn't scream, but she moaned and cried. Trained to be a light sleeper, Adam woke up every time, making his and Besh's trading of watch shifts pointless.

The only upside was that they were, despite Annea's best efforts, making progress. The forest was growing denser, the evergreens giving way to their budding brethren as they approached the mountains. In a far more annoying development that still signaled the distance they were covering, they had reached the foothills. What had been relatively flat ground with slow dips and curves had turned far choppier. Visibility was cut in half, then halved again. The Grimm could be all but on top of them before Adam realized it.

Constant ambushes frayed his nerves. Days of always being on alert compounded his weariness. It was almost as though the Grimm had realized they were close to escaping and had redoubled their efforts in response.

Adam cut down the beowolf lunging at his throat and ducked to let its halves crash to the ground on either side of him. Its dissipating body got into his lungs and made him cough. More acrid mist burned his eyes. He staggered back, barely avoiding the vicious swipe from the beowolf on his right.

He threw himself out of the way of the dogpile that followed, and his right arm went numb from elbow to wrist when his roll took him over a stray rock. His aura, too depleted to completely mitigate the hit, flickered. Two of the beowolves on the top of the pile realized he'd escaped, and as he dragged himself to his feet, flexing his fingers to try to force feeling back into them, they broke from the pack and charged him.

With his tingling nerves, he didn't trust his grip on Wilt beyond just holding it. Instead, he flipped out Blush, the sheath already shifting to a rifle, and used the final two explosive rounds he had. Both beowolves blew apart, their splattering remains catching the attention of their ten allies that were still convinced Adam was somewhere under them. He was pretty sure they'd murdered at least one of their own pack in their mad struggle to eviscerate him.

The spent magazine dropped to the ground. Adam loaded his last one. Having used up his Dust ammunition, all he had left was this one magazine of plain rounds.

He was getting some pins-and-needles feeling back in his hand. As the Grimm split apart to rush him, he prayed it would be enough.

He limped back to their temporary camp, the rising sun casting everything in a diffuse glow. With every step, the four gashes in his right calf throbbed. Blood had already seeped into his boot. The wounds weren't deep, but they would take a while to heal. The nearly nonstop combat hadn't let his aura get above half in days, so its healing boost was next to nothing.

Besh and Annea were as he'd left them: the former trying desperately to coax the latter into behaving like she cared at all about her own survival, the latter doing only the bare minimum required to get him to stop worrying over her.

Of the three of them, Besh was likely faring the worst: his eyes were bloodshot and underscored by deep bags. His wavy brown hair was limp and clumped with dried blood and grime. His uniform was worn and torn in a dozen different places, the many bloodstains stark against its gray fabric.

Annea was better only because Besh had been fighting like a demon to keep the Grimm away from her. It was a stark contrast to Adam, who was only keeping her safe out of obligation and not putting himself at risk more than he absolutely had to. Besh was not protecting her out of something as trite as that. Nor could it be argued that he was doing it because it was his duty or his contract. No, he was fighting with strange, desperate fanaticism wholly at odds with how he behaved in every other facet of his life.

It was going to get him killed. Adam cleared his throat, getting their attention. "We need to go."

Besh's shoulders fell. "They've found us again?"

Adam didn't even bother nodding; the blood staining the ground under his foot spoke for itself. He knelt next to his bag and pulled out the first-aid kit. They were almost out of supplies, but what remained was enough for him to clean and bandage the lacerations in his leg and get some of the blood out of his boot. He tested his work, then nodded. It would hold well enough until his aura could close them.

While he chased a couple of anti-inflammatory tablets with a swig from his water bottle, Besh coaxed Annea to her feet. In a departure from their usual order, Besh put Annea in the lead and—the heiress could still manage to head in a relatively straight line unassisted—and dropped back next to Adam while they walked.

"She's not getting better," Adam noted. Clearly, the guard wanted to talk about his last remaining charge, so he wouldn't dance around the issue.

For a moment, it appeared that Besh was going to unravel. He stared at Adam, expression vacant as he no doubt cycled through a litany of cutting responses, but he discarded them all for a simple, "No."

Besh adjusted his pack. Despite how they had been working through supplies and lightening their loads, his had remained constant as he took on more and more of what Annea was supposed to be carrying. "How long do you think we have left until we reach Vale?"

"At least two more days, depending on the mountains." But Besh and Annea wouldn't have to worry about actually reaching the city. Once they hit the limits, which extended beyond the walls for a stretch, Adam would finally be able to wash his hands of them without breaking his agreement…unless his suspicions proved true. He would need his answer before then.

But, at the very least, Annea would die by his hand when they reached the city limits…and no sooner.

Even just a year ago, he would have called his current insistence on holding to his word ridiculous, naïve, and childish. Vows and promises meant nothing to the humans when they stepped all over their postwar reforms, so why should he be any different?

But he had torn his old life down and burned what remained. He had nothing left: no organization to back him nor creed to cling to. His own words were all he had. Whatever his future was, this small thing, this small piece of his new identity, this small dedication to following through, was the only foundation he had to build on.

Besides, if he was going to create trust with the faunus of Vale, then he needed them to believe that he would do what he said. Practicing that had begun the moment he settled on Vale as his destination.

And practice at ignoring the muffled cries of his resurrected conscience had resumed from the instant Autumn Mariner jumped into that cave.

"I don't know if she can last that long," Besh confessed, dragging Adam back to the present. His worried gaze was fixed on Annea's back.

Adam raised his hidden eyebrow. He doubted Besh would last that long. The man already looked a couple of hours from collapsing, and it was the very beginning of the day. At this rate, they were all going to be eaten by Grimm before sundown. Then again, Besh had looked pretty bad yesterday, and they were still alive now. Perhaps he would surprise them all.

"You know her best," Adam said slowly in lieu of voicing his actual concerns. "Is there a chance she gets better?"

Besh, composure finally breaking, looked at him askance. "Gets better? You shot and killed MissAutumn right in front of her. She watched her body get carried away by the Grimm. How could she, how could anyone deal with that while we're all trying not to die?" He bit his tongue, but his self-control was shot and the rest of what he wanted to say came pouring out anyway. "And you know what? Miss Annea was right to be angry at you. I shouldn't have held her back. I should've helped her."

"What would that get you?"

"What?"

Adam stepped around a dip in the ground. He kept his voice cold. "Say you both attacked me right here to get vengeance for Autumn Mariner. What do you think I'd do? Let you take out your anger on me? The faunus are not your punching bags. Nor are we your excuses. Autumn Mariner is dead, and if you keep blaming me for failing to save her, then you're missing the real reasons why she died."

"You said you could've saved her. You admitted it."

He had—but only to himself. Not out loud. In the face of Besh's desperation, his own doubts ceded to his pride, and he scowled. "I didn't admit anything."

Splitting his attention between searching Adam's face and the path ahead, Besh needed a second to respond—but he took far longer than that. He even managed a veneer of equanimity when he finally chose to speak.

"I knew her for almost ten years." He ducked under a low branch. "Ten years."

He seemed to think that number was significant. If it was around half his lifespan as his appearance suggested, Adam could understand why. But that amount of time begged the question of why he had been associated with the Mariners in childhood if he was supposed to be their guard. Legacy hires were just that: hires. No one hired a child.

"Miss Autumn treated me well for all of it." His expression twisted, his tenuous grip on his self-control faltering before he dragged it back into place. But again, even though he seemed to be trying to answer…something, all he was doing was raising more questions. "She cared about her company because she thought its work was important. Because she was trying to help people. Not because she just wanted money or—or because she thought faunus deserved to be worked like the Schnees do. She was a good person." His voice broke. "How could you?"

Oh.

For a second, Adam hesitated. He had never dealt well with raw pain directed his way. Humans typically didn't last long enough in front of him for it to matter and the faunus had never seen him as a therapeutic presence.

Besides, how could he? How could Besh? He was supposed to be their guard, and he had failed spectacularly in that respect. Putting the entirety of the blame on Adam was just denial. This wasn't Autumn trying to understand if she could have done anything to stop events beyond her control; this was Besh failing to understand that he had failed to do anything when he was supposed to be capable of doing so.

Adam had been blamed for failures that were not necessarily his fault before—leading an entire branch and planning missions involving other Fang members made that inevitable—but he had always been able to reason with the person doing the blaming eventually. Even when that hadn't worked, when they were his subordinates, he had been able to work them through spars and drills until they were too exhausted to do anything other than listen to reason.

But there were no combat drills in existence that could distract Besh from his grief and they were all exhausted already anyway. So he sought to eliminate the grief at its source. "She wasn't a good person. There are no innocent humans, least of all Atlesian Dust heiresses. You're deluding yourself."

"You're wrong."

"I don't want to hear that from—"

"You're wrong." Besh clenched his hands into trembling fists. "You're just—you're just wrong."

He was beyond reason. Shaking his head, Adam refused to engage further. In this Grimm-ridden forest, he had other, less aggravating things worth devoting his attention to than a guard too caught up in his own guilt to think straight.