III
Ascent
The elevator room seemed to be a central hub in the dilapidated mine, made for moving equipment, large groups of people, and hauls of Dust quickly from the depths to the surface. At the top, Blake reckoned, was some sort of facility. The room itself was large, and the elevator shaft was recessed into the wall. Four other tunnels branched out from the chamber. The light of Yang's scroll was not focused enough to penetrate far into the gloom below, and Blake's keen eyes, though sharp in the dark, had nothing to report about its depth, either, save for that it was deep, and venturing further below was not in the cards. On that much, Yang and Blake were of the same mind.
"I wonder how far down this mine goes," said Blake, leaning over the edge just slightly. The sight of it made Yang queasy, no matter how surefooted Blake was known to be.
"Where's the cabling?" Her eyes ran up the opposite end of the elevator shaft. Yang was handy and knew just enough about engineering to be dangerous. Elevators were basic. Pulleys and stuff. "If we had that, we could just climb."
"I don't know if I'd trust my life to hundred year old cables. Besides, we still can. Elevators this big need to bear a heavy load." Blake raised a fingertip towards the sides of the elevator shaft. "There are tracks to it." Yang shone her light where she indicated and saw four large metal tracks vertically along the shaft, grooved to accept the teeth of a large gear.
"We can use those as a ladder, huh?" Yang rolled her shoulders and limbered up, her confidence suddenly back. Being able to bounce from leg to leg without a sharp pain helped a lot with that.
Blake put a hand to her chin. "Yes, but. Wait a minute."
"Huh?" Yang stopped bouncing. "Why? Don't you want to get out of here?"
"Of course I do," she sighed. "But what if the elevator platform is still at the top of this shaft?"
Yang took a second to ponder that, mirroring Blake's thoughtful stance. "Good question," she said, skewing her lilac eyes towards the ceiling. Her arm cannon suddenly popped out of its shroud, startling Blake. "And there's the answer."
"Ugh." Blake slid her hand up her face. "You're such a brute."
"Thanks for the input, Weiss," Yang said with a broadening grin. "Now, are we gonna climb out of here or not?" But that was a rhetorical question; Yang was already taking the measured jump to the first of the four rails. Now it was Blake's turn to feel queasy at the sight of it.
"... I do not sound like Weiss." Blake easily cleared the airspace between herself and the rail that Yang chose to ascend. It certainly felt like it would stand the test of time; the metal did not move an inch from the wall and easily bore their weight. The act of climbing was as simple as that of ascending a ladder, and like that the two huntresses began making their way to the surface.
If it wasn't for the light glinting off the other steel tracks, Yang would have thought that she was climbing a ladder in empty space.
Beneath her yawned the abyss. Literally anyone would advise not to look down, but Yang did it without prompting. She was never scared of heights, but the mere appearance of there being no end to the drop set her hairs on end.
"Anything yet?" Blake called from a few feet below Yang, her words echoed in the dark.
"Nothing yet," said Yang. She leaned away from the rail a bit to see if she could see anything. "Wait a minute…"
They at last came to another floor in the mine. There was a door on this one, a large industrial gate, or the remains of one. The wood was rotted and rusted iron wire crisscrossed the space between the beams. Its two parts looked loosely shut. Yang hopped across the chasm and landed precariously on the threshold. From there she tried to pry the doors apart, but found that they were latched together.
She unlatched it with a blast from her arm cannon.
Now they slid apart, but with great difficulty still. They screeched on their bearings as Yang pulled them apart inch by inch. Blake leapt into the opening, and Yang slipped in behind her.
"I need a breather," puffed Yang, flapping her arms across her chest.
"Go ahead." Blake's eyes scanned the chamber. "Maybe there are more clues about this mine here."
"Might as well take a look," said Yang. She placed her arms behind her head, loosening her joints audibly, and followed Blake.
The chamber was like the one they had started from, with openings to other tunnels and a high and vaulted ceiling, as well as what looked like a broad shack propped up on stilts against the wall. A skeletal stairwell led up to a rust colored door.
"That looks like the mine's office," said Blake with a point towards the structure. After a moment's thoughts, Blake suddenly brightened. "There should be a map of the mine in there!"
The door to the old office was little more than a sheet of riveted metal with a port cut out at the top for greeting undesirables and demanding a password, or such was Yang's imagining. Blake tried the door handle only to find that it wouldn't budge, not even a little. It was as though the whole assembly was rusted together.
No matter.
The door clattered a few feet away after Yang had her say with it, a fist-sized dent distorting its once rigid construction. Maybe she was a brute, but Yang was good for making an entrance. Blake walked in among a fog of dust that had lain undisturbed for perhaps a century. She began to cough and as she choked on the acrid dust her thoughts drifted to the people and the hardships that were all but certainly suffered in this place.
The room was as cold as the rest of the mine and obviously unoccupied for decades. A low desk occupied the far corner of the room, and across from it was a long table scuffed with knife marks and deep gouges from years of having tools dropped and dragged on top of it.
The floor creaked precariously, but it seemed strong enough to sustain Blake's modest weight. It complained a bit louder beneath Yang's more robust bootfalls. Realizing the age and fragility of the structure, Blake looked at Yang disapprovingly, who had but a shrug to answer with.
Blake then went about searching the desk and its accompanying cabinet for information. Yang put her attention on the large central table, examining the various marks inflicted on it over its lifetime of service. She noted the tally marks carved into its face.
"You seem to know your way around," Yang said, suddenly.
Blake hesitated. "Half guessing... and luck," she said haltingly. She practically felt it as Yang crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. She paused her rummaging, fingertips twitching. "It's not my first time in a mine."
"Yeah, seems that way. Is that why you've been acting weird you noticed it was one?"
Blake looked up and faced Yang from across the room. She searched for words instead of documents now. "I..." Her ears folded and she used the search for clues as a reason to break eye contact with Yang.
"Fine," Yang huffed, her arms folded. "Guess that's too much to ask."
Blake sighed. She began, slowly. "It comes from my time in the White Fang. Many of the recruits either work or used to work in Dust mines. Or they knew someone who did." The unspoken culprit for the malcontent there being, they both knew, the Schnee Dust Company. "Faunus laborers are made to work in the most dangerous conditions. There were always accidents, injuries—deaths, most of them preventable. Many of them had a chip on their shoulder and used the White Fang as a vehicle for revenge, a way to punch up at their abusers." Blake took a breath. "I may have been involved in a few raids myself." She seemed to find something of importance, and she held a folded up piece of parchment to her eye's level.
Yang shook her head.
Blake frowned, eyes bewildered. "Is there a point to this?" She opened up the sheet and let it fall on the table. "It's not something I'm proud of. But I didn't think it was relevant anymore."
"Yeah," Yang said lowly. "That seems to be coming up a lot lately."
Blake stopped attempting to decipher the map and stared a knife into Yang.
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"I don't know," Yang said with a sulky, sideways glance. "I guess I'm just finding it hard to trust the people I thought I knew."
Blake sucked the chilly air through her teeth. "Yang, you can't expect people to be an open book. Why does it make you angry that sometimes you have to turn a page to find out about them?" Blake balled her hands up, knuckles white and planted against the table. She stared at Yang until she couldn't bear the silence, and she hung her head.
"We still work well as a team. It was rough, but we pulled off Bumblebee without too much trouble." Blake's smile was faint, and it quickly faded. "But… are we even friends anymore?"
Yang's expression filled with doubt. "I dunno," she said sullenly. "You tell me." She walked past Blake, back to the desk in the corner of the office. She chose to face the wall. After a shellacked moment, Blake cast her eyes downward.
"It took me a long time to get back on my feet," she said, staring at the wall. "All that time, I just..." She looked at her hand and saw that it was trembling; she stilled it by grabbing the corner of the desk.
The broken look didn't escape Blake's notice; it cut her deeply, injuring her in a way that the blade that left the scar on her abdomen couldn't. The depth of Yang's wounds became clearer with each episode of impatience. Fighting the fear of her partner's wrath, she approached with steadied steps. She arrived at Yang's side and her hand, alighting upon the blonde's arm, drew a start from the taller huntress. Her alert, rigid stance relaxed when she beheld Blake, and for a moment Blake caught a glimpse of the old Yang smile. Then, she clouded over again.
"This isn't the time for this," Yang muttered, pulling away from Blake. Stunned, the latter looked away, stifling dejection. Her gaze drifted back to the desk and noticed something at the back of the ransacked file drawer.
"Look," Blake said, pointing. She stooped and reached into the desk, and when she pulled back she turned over a thin book in her hand. She was quick to open it. Her eyes scanned the pages, quickly devouring the information within. "It's an operations journal…"
Yang stepped back and waited impatiently for Blake to mention something significant.
Her scanning slowed as she approached the last few pages. Blake thumbed slowly through the pages. After pages of logs, numbers, figures, and general complaints about the inefficiency of an unmotivated, frequently involuntary workforce, she softly took a deeper breath than usual.
"The last entry," she said with a growing malaise. "Here it says, 'Those highborn bastards shut the elevator up after themselves. The lower tunnels are completely overrun by the monsters. The slaves tried to break free and attacked some of our guards with their tools, so the boss told us to blow the rest of the elevator. It's been days now for sure, but sometimes I still hear a scream from the chasm. I don't think they're coming back with those troops from Mantle, so I'm leaving this here for whoever's foolish enough to come back to this damned place: No lode of Dust is worth dying for.'"
Neither one of them spoke for a moment, each processing her thoughts. When they did, it was Yang who broke the silence.
"Grimm."
"This place must be a hive," Blake said distantly. "It's a tomb and a hive." She dropped the journal and walked back over to the table and the map spread across it. She ran a fingertip across its aged surface, approximating their location.
"We could keep climbing, but it sounds like they sealed the shaft up as well. There's another tunnel from here, to a side exit here, but…"
Yang tilted her head. "But?"
Blake twisted her lips and highlighted the marking on the map with her fingertip. "It runs through a chamber labeled Delirium Grotto. I… I don't like the sound of that, Yang."
Yang groaned. "Well, it's the most direct way out of here, right? Unless there's something else."
"If there is it's not on the map." Blake slouched a little, starting to feel something resembling fatigue.
"If we go up the elevator shaft and find it blocked, it'll be a lot harder to backtrack, and I'm not interested in accidentally finding what's at the bottom of this place. On the other hand, this could just be a place with a scary name."
"You're right," said Blake, with a sigh. "Superstitions weren't uncommon then, or even now. We have the Grimm to thank for a lot of that." Blake folded the map and slipped it into her coat pocket.
Blake and Yang stepped out of the dilapidated office and wended their way back to the stone floor. Yang half expected the structure to come down the moment they were clear of it, but stoically it stood, as it had for years and likely would for unsung years to come. She wondered if some other unlucky soul would one day stumble across the same ruin and see the signs of their passage. She and Blake looked at each other, the latter nodded, and they started towards their best hope of an exit.
The tunnel that led to the so-called Delirium Grotto was as unremarkable as the rest, braced with wooden beams, now rotting, and lined with the evidence of a formerly active worksite suddenly abandoned. They walked onwards for several minutes without any changes, and there was no detectable shift in elevation as they went on.
Suddenly, the supports stopped. And before them was a collapse.
The way was blocked.
"Great," Yang spat, annoyance mounting.
"We can go back to the elevator column," Blake suggested, putting forth an effort to calm Yang. "I can use my semblance to jump to the top and see."
The shroud of Yang's right-hand gun snapped back, the barrel deployed.
Blake flinched back and gave Yang some clearance. She threw her fist out with a battle cry and a shotgun blast sent debris flying into the air. Blake shielded her face and held her breath against the dust cloud.
The collapse was loosened enough that Yang was able to push through into the so-called Delirium Grotto.
The chamber was as large as the parlor in the house back in Mistral, perhaps a little larger. The ceiling and walls were close enough that Yang's scroll could illuminate them, if a bit faintly in the case of the more distant surfaces. Crystals glittered in the torchlight.
Yang stood there and gazed around the empty chamber, half expecting a howling Grimm to jump out at her from the space just beyond her field of vision. In that minute that she waited, Blake joined her just in time for nothing to happen.
"I guess it was just a scary name," said Blake, quietly inflecting reluctance to air that thought.
Yang began taking steps towards the anticipated exit. Several paces took her to the center of the room, where the only point of interest in this place was. There stood a formation that looked akin to a large fountain shaped almost like a water lily. However, no water ran here, and the fountain was made from crystals similar to those that were embedded in the grotto's walls. Not Dust but something else; it almost seemed like ice.
"Okay," Blake started from behind, "that is weird. Be careful, Yang."
Yang felt a tug of apprehension, but she approached the crystal lily. She leaned in to examine it, and as she did she saw the refracting light return several images of herself. For the first time that night, Yang was amused.
"Hey Blake, check this o—"
She was alone.
"Blake?" Oh no. Yang began to look around wildly.
Blake's face was mere inches from hers when she turned back towards the crystal. A spark of anger flared as she drew a gasp, and with a quaking hand she reached out and grabbed Blake's shoulder.
"What are you doing?" she said behind gritted teeth.
Blake looked at Yang's hand with an aloof demeanor, and she fixed those electrum eyes on her own with the same look. The lazy aggression left Yang's expression slack with confusion.
"You're so pathetic."
Blake scratched at her eyes. The dust from Yang's breach bothered her still and made her sight bleary. When she cleared her eyes she found she had lost track of Yang. Blake stiffened with anxiety as she felt the loneliness creep in.
"Yang?" Her hand climbed slowly to Gambol Shroud's hilt.
"Over here, loser."
Blake turned and spotted Yang, but something was off; her eyes were deadpan and voice just as monotonous.
"Surprised you didn't run again."
Immediately Blake sensed something was wrong. She knew that Yang could be pointed when she was angry, but this was something else. It felt cruel.
"What are you saying?" Blake demanded. "And what are you waiting for? We can walk out of here!"
"Can we?" asked Yang, glancing towards the end of the cave beyond the formation in the center. It now appeared as a dead end, another glittering wall to this grotto.
"Wha—?"
"Figures you'd mislead us," Yang sneered. "That is what you're best at doing, isn't it?"