"Take us directly into town," said Weiss as she tried to tamp down her panic. "You can land on the pier."

"Roger," said the airship pilot.

Weiss tried her best to control her breathing. It wasn't easy. Per her custom, she'd kept her scroll off to avoid distraction during the rescue. She hadn't turned it back on until they were in the air and returning to Skjulte Perle. She'd expected to find a couple of missed messages, maybe a missed call or two from people trying to figure out why she wasn't answering.

There had been eighteen missed calls and 43 missed messages. None of those messages had said exactly what the problem was, but they all shared a common tone of high desperation and urgency.

Weiss had paid the pilot a little extra to put on more speed to get them back sooner.

Team RVBY, picking up on her mood, kept quiet during the transit back, choosing only to ensure that they could go into battle again if need be. Weiss was pretty sure that wouldn't be a problem, but she didn't know, and the gap between 'pretty sure' and 'knowing' was a chasm.

At last, the airship rounded the final mountain and made its approach towards Skjulte Perle. Weiss couldn't see much from here, other than an unusual amount of stillness. Where was everybody? Weiss' hands tightened enough to put dents into her arm rest.

"That can't be good," said Neptune.

"You don't say," hissed Weiss.

"Hey, he's just saying what we're all thinking," said Yang.

Weiss pressed her lips together but kept herself from saying more.

Even though it took under two minutes for the airship to touch down, it felt like the process took longer than the rest of the cross-country flight back to Skjulte Perle. Weiss had half a mind to throw open the door and use her landing strategy. She didn't. Instead, she waited until the moment the airship bumped the ground to fling herself out into the town proper.

In seconds, she was outside the machine shop. Or, rather, what was left of the machine shop.

It looked like a bomb had gone off, but without the scorches and burns Weiss would have expected from an explosion. Machine parts were strewn all around in an arc away from the center of the machine shop, scraps no longer identifiable as parts of machines reached even further, two of the machine shop's walls had been knocked down and their fragments scattered to the winds, part of the roof had collapsed…

The scene gave the impression of a block castle after a toddler had decided they were done with block castles.

Stakes of solid rock the size and shape of Myrtenaster's blade lay amongst the ruined machinery, while ice coated machines, walls, or the ground at seeming random. Weiss spotted a conveyor belt that was now completely overgrown with spontaneously generated, nondeterministic plant growth. It took some time for Weiss to realize that all these things were the results of semi-processed Dust detonating uncontrolled. That would explain some of the devastation as well: Wind Dust going off and literally blowing apart its surroundings.

It was an utter disaster in every way that something could be a disaster. Weiss wasn't sure if any of the machines in the shop were intact, or how many of them had any hope of repair.

But even that wasn't the worst of it. The worst of it wasn't wasted Dust nor destroyed machinery. No, the worst of it was Cam. They were sitting on their legs outside the farthest arc of the wreckage, seemingly unharmed aside from even messier hair than usual, but their eyes were wide and their face was strewn with tears flowing freely. From Cam's mouth came an endlessly repeating, almost prayer-like repetition: "It's not possible, it's not possible, it's not possible..."

"Say that all you want, but it just happened!"

The explosion of words shattered Weiss' dumbfounded staring, but intensified her apprehension. She saw that Winter was the speaker, and the elder sister was an avatar of fury. Cam tumbled to the ground, wailing, as if bowled over by the force of the words. With Cam leveled, Winter turned her anger upon Weiss in turn. Weiss felt herself shrinking beneath that gaze.

"CEO Weiss Schnee," said Winter in her coldest, sharpest voice, like a razor made of frost. "So nice of you to join us. If you can spare a moment of your oh-so-precious time, meet me inside."

Winter turned and thundered away from them with such force Weiss was amazed the ground didn't crack beneath her.

Weiss knew what was coming, and the thought filled her with dread. Still, she was the one who had to shoulder that; no one else deserved it. "I'll go," she said. "You all can stay out here. I'll speak with her."

"Not a chance," said Yang.

"We were all there with you," said Ruby. "Team RVBY doesn't abandon its own."

"And I'm the one who dragged you all out there to begin with," said Ilia. "If she wants to yell at anyone, let her yell at me."

For a moment, Weiss wondered if Winter actually would yell at Ilia. Winter might be willing to yell at anyone, but did 'anyone' include someone with whom she had a relationship?

There was only one way to find out. As much as Weiss wanted to shield the others from the coming storm, she had to acknowledge that their presence was fortifying. She sucked in a breath and held it to brace herself. "Okay. Here we go."

Winter was at least partially surprised when six people entered the hostel office. She'd expected fewer of them to be willing to take their medicine.

Her surprise was swiftly obliterated by her incandescent rage. The temper of the Schnees, her father's great gift/curse to her, was burning brighter than it ever had inside her chest.

She touched off immediately on how irresponsible Weiss had been, how little Weiss had communicated, how much danger that had put them all in (both those around her and those she'd left behind), what an astounding mistake this had all been…

Her object was to shred the ego and lay bare the truth of Weiss' errors. To that end, Winter used every condemnation and invective she'd picked up over her years of getting yelled at, in exacting detail and specificity. She never lowered herself to petty swearing like some illiterate bully, but she left no possible space for misinterpretation as to how wrong Weiss had been (very).

If Winter was reading Weiss correctly, was understanding how Weiss' face betrayed her frustration with her own inadequacies, the message was being received.

Winter momentarily ran out of words before she ran out of opinions. While she collected herself, she decided to buy time by asking a single question. "Where were you?"

She hoped her tone would impress upon Weiss and her friends the seriousness of this question, and make them understand that no dissembling, half answers, or word salad would be tolerated.

It worked. Weiss, not quite meeting Winter's eyes, said, "We were attacking people traffickers. They were delivering disposable workers to Fall Dust."

It was like someone had tried to douse the fire in Winter's heart by throwing explosives at it.

"Everything we talked about," she said, rapidly losing control of her voice as her throttle broke, "everything we said we wouldn't do just the other day... And you went and did all of it! You did every wrong thing you could think of and did them all at once!"

Weiss started to rise against her. "Rescuing trafficked faunus isn't-"

"In a vigilante op, breaking the law when we are already up to our gills in law enforcement!" shouted Winter, giving herself over to her anger. "That alone could ruin us, if the MPs get a hold of it! Just that, that little piece, could lead to a wipeout of SDR!

"And Fall Dust, of all companies! The company that is already trying to murder us, that we can't defend against at all, that is whipping us up and down the coast, is the one you just had to poke again! At this point, Fall Dust and the MPs are racing to see if they can jail us or kill us first!"

"It wasn't that-" tried Weiss, but Winter was through listening to her kid sister.

"Who was guarding the mine?" Winter demanded.

"You were!" shouted Weiss.

"And when I had to come back because Skjulte Perle was exploding, who was guarding the mine then?!"

Silence.

"In the military," said Winter, "the minimum outcome for someone abandoning their post is a court martial and dishonorable discharge. That's assuming people don't die from the negligence."

"All about the military, again," Weiss muttered.

"If you had one-tenth the discipline I picked up from the military, you'd appreciate it more, too!" Winter shot right back.

"I will not be lectured on 'discipline' by someone who's banging the help," Weiss snarled.

Invoking Ilia did the opposite of calm Winter down. "Fall Dust is baiting us, emotions are down across the board, and you just leave the mine to fend for itself? They could all be dead by now! They could have all been killed while you were off gallivanting around Solitas!"

"We had to save-"

"You want to save someone?! Start with saving your own workers! The people who are depending on you! The people whose lives and livelihoods you took an oath to protect! 'Anything bad that happens to you will have happened to us first and worst,' remember? But you weren't there!"

"We had to hit back somehow!"

"And your 'somehow' is so meaningless it won't touch Fall Dust's bottom line by more than a fraction of a percent, but it will drive Cinder Fall into a murderous rage," replied Winter, feeling some of that rage herself. "Just like your stunt at the gala. You've learned nothing!"

"So we should have just sat here?" erupted Yang, apparently unable to contain herself any longer. "That's your big plan, just sit here and take it?"

"We discussed this the other day," Winter half-screamed, "or were you not paying attention? Or maybe you're just as stupid as Weiss is irresponsible!"

"Stop yelling at them, this is my fault," said Ilia, brushing her way to the front of the group (and incidentally holding Yang back). "I heard about the trafficking, and I went to intervene. They just followed me. If you want to blame someone, blame me."

"And you'd better believe you and I will be talking about that later," promised Winter, "but that absolves Weiss of nothing. She should have known better, she should have communicated better, she should never have attached herself to it, and she should have opposed it as much as she could!

"Instead," said Winter, refocusing on Weiss, "you abandoned your post, abandoned me, abandoned those you were supposed to protect… just to go have fun with your 'friends'."

Winter had deliberately phrased the word like a slap, and Weiss' cheek turned as if she'd felt the force of it as one. Her voice was rich with resentment when she answered. "I'm running with the wrong crowd now, am I?"

"It's good that you're realizing it," said Winter. "You have demonstrated that being around them obliterates your self-control. Just being near them makes you wholly irresponsible. And you seem unable to self-regulate."

"So you'll regulate me for me, is that it?!"

Weiss was flailing. Winter would put that down. "If that's what you need."

"Who says you know what I need?" Weiss demanded.

"You told me what your goals are," said Winter. "One of us needs to understand what it takes to meet those goals. If it's not you, that leaves me."

"Oh, so I'm not measuring up again, am I? I'm not meeting your standards?"

It almost sounded like agreement. Winter might have suspected a trap if her mind was right, but there was no way to stop herself from barreling forward when she felt like this. "The sooner you realize that, the better."

"But I'll never be good enough!" Weiss shouted, hot and furious as Winter herself. "No matter what I do, it'll be wrong, no matter how hard I try, it's not hard enough! I can never be everything you say I should be!"

"You can be better than this," Winter sneered.

"This isn't help, this is control," Weiss said, face twisted into something grotesque. "Gods, you're just like Father."

Time stopped.

All of Weiss' other words had gone first through Winter's head. These bypassed all thought and processing and hit her straight in the heart.

Winter's temper exploded so harsh and hot Winter felt she must burst from it, that she'd vaporize from the inside out—and then she went beyond it. Her anger was so intense it sublimated. She broke through it completely, went to a new place where she was somehow quite calm.

She blinked. Weiss' face had become one of shock, as if she was only realizing now what she'd said. No matter. She'd said it, and words couldn't be unsaid. They were part of Winter's reality now.

The old reality was shattered more thoroughly than the machine shop. Weiss had given Winter a stark and terrible clarity.

Time resumed. "You will leave now," Winter said, voice eerily steadily even in her own ears. "I will have nothing further to do with the exchange students. They will depart, too. You and I will meet again at the shareholders meeting tomorrow, and not a moment sooner.

"Goodbye, Miss Schnee."

Miss Schnee stumbled as if the words had crashed into her. Well, Miss Schnee would reap what she'd sown. Without saying another word, looking dazed, Miss Schnee staggered her way out of the office.

The exchange students followed without a sound.

Winter took a moment to catch her breath. One conversation down, one to go. But when she turned slightly to look at Ilia, Ilia was not matching Weiss' ramrod straight posture, nor the withered crumpling of Team RVBY. Ilia had taken a half step backwards, as if she was slipping into a ready stance.

A combat stance.

"As for you..." Winter began.

"You won't talk to me the way you spoke to your sister," said Ilia firmly.

The force of her words took Winter by surprise. Off-balance and unsure how to start, Winter said, "You are an SDR employee, and I would expect..."

"I was White Fang long before I ever came here," interrupted ilia. "If you think I would ever just stand idly by and let something like that happen to my brothers and sisters, you have another thing coming."

"I would expect you to talk to me," said Winter, trying to fair through Ilia's resistance.

"So you could… what? Tell me no, don't go?"

"We could have done this in a better way," said Winter.

"You just spent your whole morning yelling at your sister about how going on that mission was wrong," Ilia said, and her back seemed to arch. "And since it was my idea, you were telling me I was wrong the whole time, too."

Winter shifted uncomfortably. "I would have preferred you come to me, not my sister."

"I didn't go to your sister," said Ilia. "She volunteered. It's more than you would have done."

"I would have helped!" said Winter.

"Really?" said Ilia dubiously.

"I would have called General Ironwood," said Winter. "He would have..."

She was cut off by a laugh so filled with scorn it might have come from a Schnee. "General Ironwood?! You really think Ironwood gives a damn about what happens to the Faunus?"

"He listens to me," said Winter, feeling herself bristle in the General's defense. "I can call him directly and he responds."

"You are out of your mind if you think I would trust the safety of my brothers and sisters to General Ironwood," said Ilia. "That's a man who's deeper in bed with Faunus traffickers than you ever were with me."

The word stung. It was like this morning was hitting all of Winter's sore spots all at once. "Having second thoughts, are we?" she said harshly.

"I am now," said Ilia, taking a half step back.

The prospect was frightening, so frightening it made Winter forget her anger. "I didn't mean it like that," said Winter. It was as conciliatory as she could be. "I just hoped, since I'm your boss..."

Ilia's hackles raised fully, her head hunching and her shoulders coming up. "I am not your little Faunus pet," she spat.

Alarm raced through winter. She had no words, everything she said was making it worse—could she reach Ilia with something else? She took a half step forward, trying to bridge the metaphorical gap with a physical step. But when she did, Ilia backed away, and her lips peeled back in an open mouthed, animalistic snarl. It was like a feral animal baring their teeth at an enemy.

It took Winter a moment to appreciate what she was seeing, but as recognition hit, it shook her. Ilia was ostentatiously showing all the points she could, no matter how it twisted her face. That was not a natural gesture for a human or a Faunus to make. This was a learned gesture, a practiced gesture.

A White Fang gesture, reserved for the Fang's enemies. Show your teeth.

Winter took a step backwards. It was the only thing she could think to do.

Ilia dropped the snarl only to speak. "If you really think I would place anything, anything above the well-being of the Faunus, you never understood who you were screwing with."

Winter blinked, and Ilia disappeared.

Winter thought she knew where Ilia was for a moment, as she passed through the door- but Winter made no move to follow.

She had no desire to ruin her life any more thoroughly than it already was.

Weiss' shame had smothered even the hottest burn of her Schnee temper. The absolute worst thing she could have said had come flying out of her mouth, something she didn't even really mean.

Did she mean it? Maybe yes, but not like that, not like…

Asfadjh.

Rational thought was impossible. Introspection was a bottomless pit of molten glass. Weiss was trapped in her own feelings, and that wasn't a good place to be.

This wasn't a Malplaquet victory. It was infinitely worse. Weiss had inflicted genuine harm on her sister to no advantage whatsoever, and now… now…

The winter chill outside didn't even touch her as she left the hostel. Her sense of touch was useless when everything she felt was coming from inside. Sight and hearing were little better; one was a smear and the other a buzz. She barely noticed the door opening behind her. Only when Ruby stepped directly in front of her—and she, unnoticing, walked into the younger girl—did her head come up and her eyes, slowly, refocus.

"What?" she snapped.

Ruby was unfazed. Her face was a mask of purpose. "So, what now?"

"What now?" Weiss repeated incredulously. "What now? Ruby, I just had the worst fight of my life, and my relationship with my sister is… is shattered beyond repair. She might not speak to me ever again, and frankly I wouldn't blame her if she didn't. 'What now'? What can we possibly do now?!"

"We can try and save your company," Ruby said, undeterred.

Weiss laughed her cruelest laugh. "Did you miss the whole 'my sister may never forgive me' thing? We're co-CEOs. We can't do anything without us in agreement, and that may never happen again.

"Even if it did," said Weiss, hitting her stride as she looked beyond Ruby to the wreckage of the machine shop, "we have zero income. All of our refining and processing is gone. Just gone. We can't sell Dust now, even if we mine it."

"You can't just ship the ore?" said Ruby.

Weiss slapped her own forehead. "No! We're not putting raw Dust on our train, that's just begging the whole train to blow up! You have to refine, purify, and convert Dust to stable forms before you ship it anywhere or you're asking for explosions.

"And even if we were willing to risk that… it would just mean selling raw ore on the wholesale market, meaning some other buyer would have to refine, purify, and convert before they could sell it. We'd have to accept such a markdown we'd be giving it away. We're doomed, Ruby."

The word crashed down on Weiss. It was more real when she said it. She'd implicitly understood it, maybe, before, but now it was unavoidable.

"Doomed."

Her vision blurred. It took her entirely too long to realize her eyes were welling up with tears. She hadn't cried since she was an infant. Father hadn't permitted it. But this… this…

"…It's insured, isn't it?"

Weiss blinked. The budding tears vanished, half-formed. "What?"

It was Neptune. He'd stepped past her and was pointing at the ex-machine shop. "All your gear. It's insured, right?"

"Y-yeah," said Weiss, reaching through the haze in her mind back, back, back to when she'd made SDR's first purchases. "Not the new stuff, what I paid for, but the old… the baseline equipment, what we need to function, that's all insured. It was a r-requirement of the loan." Huber had insisted. He would be made whole, one way or another.

"Okay," said Neptune brightly. "So, you can get back on your feet. If you can hold on for a bit, your insurance payout will let you get new gear, and you can recover."

"But that'll take so long, we'll go bankrupt first!"

"Worry about one thing at a time," said Blake. "You can't fix the whole world all in one go. Believe me, I've tried. You have to just… fix what you can touch, while you can touch it, and make it add up. Focus on getting your insurance payments first. Take care of the rest as you get to it."

It was an idea, one that reached Weiss… until she started thinking about it. Her heart sank. "No insurance company will pay for this."

"Why not?"

"Because this isn't covered. There's no coverage for…" she waved vaguely.

"For what?" said Yang. "Do you even know?"

Weiss' irritation spiked. "This isn't the time for your nonsense, Xiao Long."

Yang's expression wasn't joking, though, and she met Weiss' snarl with the best straight routine she could manage. "What, exactly, does the insurance not cover that makes you think they won't, this time? What do you think happened? I mean, Dust machinery doesn't just explode. Dust is cooky and all, but you're science-y with it. You know what you're doing. And that means something weird happened. Something changed. You can bet your butt the insurance companies will care what that 'something' is."

As aggravating as Yang was, Weiss' mind sluggishly concluded she had a point. Because Dust was so dangerous, the safety measures involved in building and operating these machines were strenuous and exacting. Almost all Dust accidents happened during mining and initial transport, not processing.

Something else had intervened. What had changed?

She shuddered. "It must have been the new gear," she said. "The new equipment we brought in so that Cam could experiment."

"Do you know that?" said Yang. "Or are you just guessing? 'Cuz, where I'm sitting, it seems like the only person who'd know that for sure is Cam. And they're not in this conversation."

"Let's go ask Cam," said Ruby with a nod. "One step at a time, right?"

Weiss sniffed and tried to compose herself. She was a rotten excuse for a Schnee, but she could still comport herself like a Schnee. "Of course."

Cam was doing no better than before. They were no longer crying, but not because their mood had improved; it seemed they'd simply run out of tears. They were still repeating hoarsely, "It's not possible… it's not possible…"

"What's not possible?" asked Weiss.

Cam snapped out of their fugue and started at the sight of so many people so close. "I didn't do it!"

"Do what?" said Weiss. Ruby winced; Weiss realized her voice had been nearly a roar. She took a breath and tried again. "You didn't do what?"

"That," Cam said, voice and hand trembling as they pointed at the epicenter of the wreckage. "That—any of that! It's not possible! It can't happen like that!"

"How do you know?" said Blake gently.

"I-I've got the logs," Cam answered, holding up a scroll. "E-every device sends its status to a m-master logger. I have the logger synch with my scroll. I can see everything!" They held the scroll by their face and started flinging a finger across its face. Numbers blurred by, all in green. "Everything was working as designed, right up until… until it wasn't!"

"Is it possible you set the normals wrong?" asked Blake. "You know, had the logger confused about what numbers were the okay numbers?"

"No!" shrieked Cam, falling over themselves leaning away from Blake.

"I'm not accusing you of anything," Blake said, raising her hands to be non-threatening. "I'm trying to understand."

Cam still looked like they wanted to flee, but they swallowed and answered. "The logger gets the factory numbers for each device that connects. I double-check those against each device's documentation. I don't change those numbers unless I change the device myself, and then I triple check the ranges before I make them green. And I checked them again after… after this."

Cam's gaze fell. "Which is why none of this is possible. It's not! It can't happen like this! I can't be in the green and get an explosion—I just can't!"

Ruby stepped close by Weiss. "Do you believe them?"

Demanding Weiss to make an emotional judgment at a time like this was incredibly unfair—but since when had life been fair to SDR? Gathering her shaking feelings, Weiss tried to cudgel her brains into thinking.

It was hard. It was so easy to blame Cam, the eternal tinkerer, Cam, who'd made everything non-standard, Cam, who'd they recruited precisely because they couldn't leave well enough alone… who'd been fired from half-a-dozen jobs for that very reason.

Who'd come to SDR on the cheap because they couldn't keep their hands to themselves.

But… that didn't make sense. None of those other companies had fired Cam because something bad had happened, they'd fired Cam because they were afraid something bad might happen. They acted out of fear because they didn't understand what Cam was doing.

Only Cam understood—better than their supervisors did. And that was scary.

Since when had Weiss let fear control her?

Weiss took in Cam, saw the devastation this incident had caused… to someone who'd only ever wanted to make these machines sing, who was only ever happy trying to do the best job they could.

Could Cam make a mistake? Maybe. Could Cam hide a mistake? Never.

"I believe you," said Weiss.

Cam shuddered in sheer emotion. They found and issued one last batch of tears. "Thank you," Cam whispered.

It was gratifying… for a moment, before frustration swallowed Weiss up again. "But that doesn't help us," she said. "We're back to square one."

"I don't think so," said Neptune. "Cam says this wreck isn't possible, and the logger says this wreck isn't possible, but the wreck happened. One of them must be lying."

"I'm not lying," said Cam with a cracked voice.

"And we believe you," Neptune said graciously and without losing momentum. "Which means, logically, that the logger is lying."

"How does a logger lie?" said Weiss.

"Maybe there was a fault in it?" said Blake. "Maybe it had an internal error. Bad data."

Cam shook their head. "I didn't pick some random logger. That's the industry standard, and for good reason. It's never allowed an accident like this, ever."

"In that case," said Neptune, grinding along with relentless reason, "if the logger didn't go bad on its own, someone made the logger go bad."

"Nice job, junior detective," said Weiss snidely, "but who makes a logger go bad, and how?"

"I don't know about how," said Yang, "but I've got a good guess as to who. Who do you know who hates your stinking guts, really wants to hurt your company, and knows everything there is to know about Dust machines, including how to make 'em go boom?"

"Fall Dust," hissed Ruby, a touch unnecessarily.

"Fall Dust is not a bogeyman," Weiss said. "Ugh! I hate blaming everything on them. It's just paranoia, that's what Win—"

She couldn't finish the sentence. Invoking her sister was, for the first time, entirely too painful.

"It's not paranoia if they actually are out to get you," said Yang, somehow sounding both sensible and playful at the same time.

It was aggravating, and Weiss let that aggravation control her voice. "We still have absolutely zero evidence."

"Well," said Ruby reasonably, "then the next step would be to get evidence."

"Evidence of what?!"

"Of some kind of cyber voodoo against your logger," said Ruby.

Weiss looked to Cam. "Do we even still have a logger?"

Cam reached out a trembling hand. "It's… over there. Oh, um, and… also over there. And over there."

"Great," said Weiss. "So even if someone did tamper with it, the evidence is destroyed."

"Cyber stuff doesn't get destroyed as easily as you think," said Ruby. "If there'd been an actual bomb, that'd be one thing, but this was just broken. Maybe not even the important parts! I think we have a chance."

These children's relentless optimism was infuriating. "This is pointless. Even if I knew someone who was good at fixing computers, which I don't, I'd never be able to pay them enough to figure this out for me."

Ruby just smiled. "You may not know someone, but I do."

Five faces turned to give Ruby puzzled looks.

"Who do we know," said Yang, speaking for all, "who's good with computers and willing to help us for free?"

"My friend," said Ruby happily. She picked up her scroll and picked a number off her speed dial.

And then had to hold the scroll away from her ear at the explosion of noise it produced.

"SAL-U-TATIONS!"

Next time: The Path to Isolation