Weiss worried all the way to Pietro's clinic. She worried about the procedure—how much it would hurt, afterwards, and how long it would take to heal. What might go wrong. Whether it would be enough to reclaim the flight her childhood had denied her. It never even occurred to her to worry about the clinic being guarded.

There were two soldiers standing at attention outside, both human. Her stomach flipped when one of them stepped in front of the door.

"Excuse me," she said, as politely as she could with her heart in her throat. "I have an appointment in there."

"What's your injury?"

Weiss stared at the woman who'd spoken. "Pardon?"

"It's just a precaution," said the man on her left. "The White Fang have been sending people here, since they know they'll get caught if they go to the hospital."

She crossed her arms protectively over her chest and spread her wings. "Well, it's to get these looked at."

The woman's helmet tilted as she examined them with an intensity that made Weiss' skin crawl. "They look fine to me."

"Do you even know what fine is supposed to look like?"

"Don't get smart with me, kid. If you think you're somehow above suspicion because of your dad—"

Ruby stepped in front of Weiss. "We're not saying that! Look, we have an appointment. You can ask Pietro. I mean, um, Doctor Polendina."

The soldier glared suspiciously at her for a moment, then nodded to her partner. He ducked into the clinic. It took a moment of standing there, shifting from foot to foot in the cold, before he walked back out and said, "Checks out."

"Right." Her tone said that she didn't particularly trust Doctor Polendina's word—but this time when they tried to go inside, she didn't move to stop them.

They found Doctor Polendina bent over his desk, looking harried. "Ah," he said, glancing up. "There you are. I'm sorry I wasn't outside to greet you, I've been—well. Never mind." He gestured towards the curtained off section of the room. "If you wouldn't mind lying down there, then we can get started."

Penny greeted her in the exam room, pulling over a pair of rolling tables for her wings to rest on while she lay down. She was already restless. Paper crinkled underneath her as she fidgeted. And when the time came for Doctor Polendina to put her under, her aura flared and blocked the attempt.

"I didn't—"

"It's alright," he said, patting her shoulder. "Take your time."

She took a breath. Let it out. Listened to the soft clattering sounds of Penny on her other side, preparing instruments for her father. Craned her neck so that she could see her team, standing a few feet away to give him room to work. Her heartbeat settled just a little. Just enough. There was a sharp pain in her arm, a leaden warmth creeping towards her heart.

Then she was blinking herself awake, feeling almost as coherent as the morning she woke up feverish with infection.

"Ruby?" she mumbled.

"Hey! How are you feeling?"

Weiss couldn't answer that—she'd just realized something incredibly important. "I can't fight Grimm right now. Goodwitch will kill me."

Ruby broke out giggling.

"You're fine," Yang promised, smiling fondly.

Blake reached out to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. "Feeling okay?"

She squinted, trying to lift her head so that she could see better. It felt odd, like someone had pumped her skull too full of air. Heavy air. So heavy that it was a bit of a struggle to look behind herself at her wings. They were a bit rumpled looking, many of the feathers damp and reeking of disinfectant, and swaddled here and there in bandages. It hit her all at once that they might actually be able to take her weight, now.

Well. Not now, now. Right now they were healing. Though she wondered, lying there on her stomach with the room spinning around her, if she might not just fall into the sky if she went outside. The laws of physics seemed like a feeble joke.

"I feel like I'm dreaming," she decided, after a long moment.

Doctor Polendina stepped into view. As the legs on his chair moved, she got lost for a moment trying to count them and failing miserably. He chuckled and patted her shoulder. "A side effect of the anesthesia. It ought to go away soon enough. In the meantime, let's get you some water."

It took several hours shuffling around the clinic sipping at a glass of water, and two tries at keeping down a light dinner, but eventually Weiss was steady enough on her feet to go with her team back to the hotel. She spent the walk tucked between Yang and Blake—it was cold, and her body and aura were both still recovering. Ruby kept quoting things she'd said while high from the anesthesia and snickering.

The first week passed in a blur and a crawl all at once. She wasn't well enough to go to any of Robyn's protests or rallies, and spent the time more or less confined to the hotel. It seemed like some new conflict in the streets of Mantle made the news every night. Weiss caught hostile stares from her father's supporters in the lower city whenever she and her team went out to eat.

By the time she was strong enough to feel safe walking past those people, they vanished—along with just about everyone else on the streets of Mantle. She walked briskly behind Ruby, glancing left and right, her arms tucked against her sides. Everywhere she looked, it seemed like there was another Atlesian Knight pointing its blank faceplate towards them. "What's going on?" she whispered.

"Supposedly they're here to break up fights," said Blake.

The drones weren't the only unexpected military presence. When they arrived at the old community center Robyn's team used as their headquarters, they spotted a familiar face—Marrow stood stiffly in the doorway, arms folded.

"I really am sorry about this," he was saying.

"Sorry?"

Ruby sped up at the venom in May's voice, and Weiss followed right behind her.

"This wasn't my idea." Marrow looked away. "I just thought I should tell you in person, before the official message came through."

"We appreciate it." Robyn, this time—Weiss could just see her over Marrow's shoulder.

He turned to go, and winced when he saw them. Weiss opened her mouth to offer a greeting, but before she got the chance he ducked his head and hurried off, tail hanging limp behind him. The door was still open. She followed Ruby inside, flinching a little when she saw May pacing back and forth like an agitated cat.

"I know," Robyn sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. "But it's not his fault."

"I don't care whose fault it is! What the hell are we supposed to do now?"

Joanna, who had been standing grimly silent in the back of the room, cleared her throat and pointed towards their team. Robyn turned and winced. "Oh. You're back."

"What's going on?" Ruby asked, shifting nervously.

It was Fiona who answered. Weiss almost hadn't noticed her—she was sitting on a cheap folding chair in a corner of the room, shoulders hunched. "Our licenses just got suspended."

"What?" blurted Yang. "Why?"

"For encouraging people to break the curfew," said Robyn. "Look, I know this sucks, but we did know it was a possibility."

"And how are we supposed to organize when our base barely has time to buy food before their military-enforced bedtimes?" May burst out. "When are we supposed to talk to people when most of them aren't even in Mantle while we're allowed to be outside?"

"May." Joanna put a hand on her shoulder. "We're not out of options. Mobilizing our turnout is the bigger issue right now anyway. We can spend the time helping people get registered."

"Right." She subsided into another foldout chair, still scowling. "And it's definitely a total coincidence that the general's crackdown on curfew violations just so happens to shoot Robyn in the foot a month before the election."

"I didn't say that."

"We have the numbers," Robyn said. "It's just a matter of forcing the system to count them." She turned towards Ruby. "I know the four of you were planning to head home after this—"

Ruby shook her head. "We decided we're staying."

"Great. Then, May? Can you walk them through the registration paperwork? It's usually pretty simple, the problem is that the whole process gets a lot more complicated if you don't have a scroll for ID."

"Which, surprise surprise, a lot of our people don't." May dragged her chair over to a foldout table and nodded to them. They sat. Weiss caught herself fidgeting nervously with some of the papers in front of her.

May sighed and started hunting through a notebook. "Sorry you had to see that. It's—frustrating."

Blake's ears flattened. "I can't believe they can just take away your licenses like that."

"Yeah, well. One way or another, we'll probably get them back after the election. Otherwise Jimmy might actually have to spare some of his Huntresses to deal with all the Grimm that keep getting through the wall." She ripped a page out of the notebook and handed it to Ruby. "Here. I'll walk you through it a few times, but if you forget anything it should be right there."

That was how they spent the rest of the afternoon, going over this case and that—if a person had been born on Solitas, and they had a certificate proving as much, they would have to bring this documentation to that office. If not, they would have to prove that they'd moved here by this date and pay that fee, on and on until all four of them were nursing tension headaches.

The hard part came after—when they had to find the time to explain to people what they'd just learned. They split up to cover as much ground as they could. Weiss spent mornings hunched in the back of a truck trundling its way north to the mines, guiding strangers through the gauntlet of paperwork step by step. Afternoons she paced away her anxiety in the nearest outpost while she waited for the workday to end. No one sought her out, there—they weren't allowed to leave the mine during their breaks, and she wasn't allowed to go inside. So she hiked back to the entrance just in time to board the trucks back, and went through the whole process again while the light faded and the wind tried to snatch away her notes.

At first Weiss marked the days by the fading pain in her wing joints. Then, she could count them by the camera drones that multiplied on every street. Before long she couldn't go outside without one of them following her around. Yang got into trouble for accidentally kicking one of them under a bus—it would have been funny if they hadn't noticed how many more of them tailed her afterwards.

On the weekend they exchanged theory for action. They went in partnered pairs to gather up as many people as were willing to go, and took the registration offices by storm. Weiss felt that she and Ruby made a good team. She memorized all the rules, and bored bureaucrats found Ruby just as hard to say no to as everyone else did.

The Monday after that, one of the cameras hitched a ride in the truck to the mine. Weiss did her best to ignore it—but half the miners spent more time watching it than listening to her. Unnerved, she tried to soothe herself by going over her notes at the outpost. A knock at the door interrupted her. She approached it cautiously, hand on the hilt of Myrtenaster, and opened it to find Marrow standing there.

"What?" she demanded.

He pointed to the drone that sat in the snow outside the outpost. "You've been out here a while. It got flagged."

"I don't know where else I'm supposed to be, considering they won't let me into the mine."

"I can give you a ride back to Mantle."

Her heart jumped into her throat. She was suddenly very aware that her teammates were all sitting in their own outposts, miles away at different mines. "No, thank you," she said, as politely as she could manage.

Marrow winced and held up his hands. "You don't have to, you aren't under arrest. I'm just warning you that spending hours loitering outside a Dust mine is already starting to look suspicious to our analysts."

"You could just ask why I'm here. The truck rides are the only time I can actually talk to these people about how to get their registration paperwork sorted."

"I know. Or at least, I figured it was something like that. But it's getting flagged. I'm going to go now, but they probably won't send me next time."

Weiss wasn't the only one who returned to their hotel shaken that night. Blake and Yang had each had visits of their own—neither had been fortunate enough to have Marrow be the one to show up. For some reason that surely had nothing to do with being the only human in their group who hadn't destroyed a drone, Ruby's behavior had not been flagged as suspicious.

"Don't go back," was Joanna's advice, when they walked to the community center to ask about it. "It's not worth the risk at this point. Better to focus on going to the offices with people."

Two days later, they were doing just that—and rushing quite a lot to get in and out before curfew. Weiss turned a corner, and for the first time she was thankful Blake wasn't there. She stopped dead, so suddenly that Ruby plowed into her back, staring at a gigantic mural of a stemmed rose wreathed in flame. The fire was new, but she recognized the rest. It was the emblem on Taurus' jacket.

The White Fang had already been making their presence felt, if not seen. Mostly it had been in the form of camera drones turning up with their lenses covered in spray paint, or their frames bent so that they flew in drunken circles, or sometimes simply smashed to pieces. It probably wasn't just them doing it, either. Weiss had seen plenty of children throwing rocks at the things.

Then buildings with the rose on them started burning.

It was hard to tell if someone was marking their targets in advance, or if there were arsonists out there taking requests. Either way there were far too many of them for one person. In response, General Ironwood's one-man majority voted to install cameras inside all public buildings in Mantle. They appeared inside the community center where Robyn's team worked, in bars and shops and clubs, even in the lobby of the hotel where team RWBY slept. And, eventually, in the hallways of apartment complexes.

"I wish these measures weren't necessary," Ironwood told the city that night. "But it has become clear to me that until this threat is dealt with and peace is restored, we cannot leave any stone unturned. These cameras will not interfere with your life—as long as you have nothing to hide."

Another speech spread like wildfire across the CCT network, a video of Sienna Khan standing in front of the ruins left behind by a recent arson. "General Ironwood. You tell us to submit to your surveillance, but you've given us no reason to trust you. You have hoarded more power than anyone in this Kingdom has held since before the Great War. Do you remember what happened to our people next? We do."

She gestured to the ashes at her feet. "This is a warning. You will take it as a threat—so be it. I didn't do this. I can't stop it, and neither can you. As long as you sit on your council of one and talk about peace, when we all know it's obedience you're after, this will never stop. You want us to bleed quietly while we work for you and your powerful friends. You tell us it will hurt more if we fight you. We don't care anymore. If this Kingdom cannot find a way to exist without our suffering, then it will burn."

Less than an hour after it appeared, the video vanished. Whether Sienna had taken it down for dramatic effect, or Ironwood had enough control over the CCT network to get rid of it himself, it was difficult to tell.

Through it all, Weiss watched Robyn walk a razor's edge every time she spoke publicly. She had to condemn the White Fang every time she called for an end to the intense surveillance, just to have fewer accusations thrown at her that she was taking support from them. But the real death blow came on a rainy Thursday evening, when curfew left their team huddled around Ruby's scroll on the floor of their hotel room, watching the collapse of the largest mine in Solitas.

It wasn't hard to tell who'd done it. One of the few security guards who'd escaped alive had a burn on his face that mirrored the one Taurus had shown Atlas' highest court.

That night, Ruby and Yang stripped both of the beds down to bare mattresses and built a blanket fort in the middle of the room. It took almost an hour—Weiss did her best to help, but she'd never done anything like it before, and accidentally collapsed as many walls as she built. In the end she wandered upstairs to knock on the hotel owner's door and ask if they could use the kitchen. She returned with a small tray of tea and cocoa to a finished fort.

Blake was inside, curled up with her head in Yang's lap and Ruby hugging her from behind. Weiss settled on her other side and handed out drinks. They stayed like that past midnight, sipping from steaming mugs and talking about anything but the Kingdom outside. Ruby went first, resting a head on Blake's shoulder, speaking in quieter and quieter mumbles until her voice trailed off completely.

Weiss struggled to keep her eyes open a little while longer, before eventually giving up and nuzzling against Blake's shoulder. As she draped a wing over her and Ruby, she sent a silent thank-you to Doctor Polendina for the newfound flexibility that let her tuck them securely beneath it. She drifted off to Yang's gentle humming and the soft rustling of her playing with Blake's hair.

Inevitably, morning arrived. They suffered through father's latest announcement—that he would be moving as many of the employees from the affected mine as he could, and that those layoffs he couldn't avoid would be spread out across all the SDC's mines rather than concentrated among the victims of the attack. He would do everything in his power to get those jobs back as soon as he could.

It wasn't until Saturday that they found the catch. Everyone he'd fired had been spotted at one of Robyn's protests. And clearly, they'd gotten the message. Team RWBY arrived outside Mantle's largest police station to a crowd of less than two dozen—the Happy Huntresses included. The few people who had shown up were restless, shrinking away from the gates of the building and the cameras that perched there. A sign demanding that Ironwood let go of his second council seat disappeared along with its owner.

By the time curfew rolled around, the only ones left to walk home were the Happy Huntresses themselves, Penny and her father, and Maria.

Joanna looked over at Pietro. "Tell me he at least didn't give Jacques those names on purpose."

He shook his head. "I'm afraid I have no idea. I didn't even know he was collecting them until today."

"Does it even matter?" May kicked a loose brick into a gutter. "Everyone knows he can get access to the military's lists, now. Nobody's going to be caught dead anywhere near us."

"It's not over yet," Fiona insisted. "Right, Robyn?"

Silence.

"...Robyn?"

She looked up sharply, as though jarred out of thought. "It's not over yet," she echoed. "But... we should start thinking about backup plans."

Eventually, team RWBY peeled away from the main group to head back to the hotel. They walked in silence. Even Ruby couldn't seem to find anything to say that would make this any less bleak. Weiss ducked her head and turned a corner too fast, skidding slightly on a patch of ice—and when she looked up, she came face to face with the flaming rose symbol.

It wasn't alone on the wall, this time. She blinked once, twice, sure she'd somehow horribly misread—but she hadn't.

We know who you are, Jacques Gelé.

It should have been frightening—it certainly frightened her teammates, judging by the sharp intakes of breath she heard behind her. But she couldn't seem to focus on the bloody insignia.

Everyone knew who he was. They shouldn't get to pretend otherwise.

She looked down. At the foot of the wall lay the shattered remains of a camera drone, probably destroyed when it caught whoever it was who'd painted this.

You tell us it will hurt more if we fight you. We don't care anymore.

"Ruby? How bulky are the microphones in these things?"

"I mean, they've gotta be able to fly so probably not very. Why?"

"I can't convince all of Atlas that my father is a monster." She picked up the broken drone, and mustered a queasy smile. "But I bet he could."