The chartered airship's interior was cold.

Weiss had expected that, intellectually. They'd chosen this airship service for its low cost, so amenities were lacking—including interior heat, apparently. Flying at altitude across Solitas, with whole mountain ranges between them and Atlas' controlled microclimate, meant that temperatures in the cabin were so low Weiss felt the bite against her Aura.

The logic of all of this hadn't prepared Weiss for the reality, which was uncomfortable and annoying and never went away. It wasn't even productive to look out the window: with the angle of the sun at this time of day, the reflection of the sun off the snow was blinding.

"We're approaching the drop-off point," came a barely-intelligible voice over a cheap speaker by the Schnees' heads.

"Good," said Winter, finishing her weapons maintenance routine and packing up the kit.

"Just in time?" said Weiss.

"Hardly," scoffed Winter. "I knew how fast we were traveling and how far we had to go, and I know from experience how long Eiszhan's maintenance takes, so I set myself up to finish during final approach."

"Nice and precise," said Weiss. She folded her arms. "It makes me wonder, though."

"Oh?" said Winter absently, capping her weapon oil.

"You make a point of perfect timing and accuracy for yourself. You hold me to the same standard. But you seem awfully lax about other things."

Winter arched an eyebrow with enough skepticism to stun. "Do tell."

"Like this trip. You extended the time we spend at each site."

"Yes," Winter agreed.

"And you added in buffers to a lot of my cost estimates."

"Are you saying I was mistaken?"

Weiss felt her cheeks flush. "I agreed to them, didn't I? The insurance, for example—I cut it too far. You're right, grimm are a risk to our shipments, even if the White Fang isn't, so we still need some coverage. Your adjustments were prudent and I included them. I just mean in general. It's strange you're so tolerant of imperfection."

The eyebrow lowered, and Winter gave off a faint impression of amusement. "I strive for perfection for myself, of course. I hold you to the same standards in the hope that, one day, you might actually achieve them."

Weiss' blush intensified.

"But to demand perfection of the world," Winter continued, "would be optimistic to the point of foolishness. Our world is too full of hazards, and too full of people who aren't striving for perfection. You must learn to expect disappointment. When you have that expectation, you build extra time into the schedule, and extra funding, to make up for the catastrophes you don't see but know are coming."

"We don't have much margin for catastrophe if we're going to make this work," Weiss mumbled. "And not many extra resources to make buffers. We know we have to take more risks than other Dust companies, remember? We have to be audacious, or we can't do anything."

"True, but audacity doesn't mean idiocy. For example." She gestured over her shoulder at the boxes in the back of the airship. "The survey gear back there. You know how it works?"

"Of course I do," said Weiss indignantly. "I read extensively preparing for this trip. My scroll is loaded down with operating instructions on which I've made copious annotations and notes…"

"I'm sure," interrupted Winter. "But have you ever used any of it?"

"Well, how could I?" said Weiss, and she hoped at some point she'd be able to stop blushing, even if that possibility seemed remote. "There wasn't a whole lot of Dust mining to do at Schnee Manor. But never mind about me—what about you? Have you ever done a site survey for setting up a forward base?"

"Not since my Logistics practical at the Academy," said Winter. "All of which is why I set aside more time to get this done. There will be kinks to work out. I don't know what they are, I just know that they'll happen."

Of course, her sister was right, Weiss didn't actually know anything. She could plan and study until her eyes bled, but she'd never done it, she'd been stuck inside forever. She wasn't oozing experience the way Winter was.

Stop that, she chided herself. Jealousy was unbecoming. If a Schnee wasn't the best at something, she didn't grow envious; she buckled down and worked until she was the best.

Starting here and now.

The airship jolted beneath Weiss; she had the sick-making sensation that the floor had vanished, only to reappear with a harder jolt a moment later. The whine of nearby turbines changed pitch. Weiss felt a surge of adrenaline as her senses went into overdrive, thinking she was in danger—but no, it didn't seem like they were under attack. The airship was just beginning its descent. No danger there.

No immediate danger, anyway. They were still being dropped off in a hostile landscape that was (for all they knew) teeming with grimm, in a lethal climate, with no hope of extraction for the four days Winter had planned for this operation. The danger was real. It was just a subtler danger than a crashing airship.

It still sent goosebumps racing up Weiss' arms.

She took a steadying breath and stuffed her nerves down. This would be a normal thing, a standard thing, if her plans played out like she wanted. If she couldn't handle this, she might as well hand in Myrtenaster now and beg one of the other Dust companies for employment.

Ha! Not in a million years.

There. That was the proper attitude.

The airship shook, shuddered again; the turbine sounds shifted even lower; out the windows Weiss saw terrain intruding where before had been naught but sky. Winter snapped shut her weapons care kit and returned it beneath her seat; she kept Eiszahn in her lap.

There was a climactic thud which Weiss felt everywhere, and then the low-level vibration that had been a constant of this trip seemed to vanish, or at least recede to being barely noticeable. The view out the windows went completely steady and was dominated by hills.

"We have arrived at your chosen coordinates," came the scratchy voice over the speaker again. "You may now debark. I'm lowering the rear ramp so you can fetch your gear. Ramp raises in ten minutes."

"Nice to see they're being punctual," Winter muttered, but it sounded far from a compliment.

"They don't want to waste fuel," Weiss said reasonably as light flooded the compartment from the opening ramp. "Especially not in a place with a grimm rating of… what was it again?"

"Invalid," said Winter as she gathered her things and stood. "The last survey happened over two years ago. You can't trust surveys that old."

"All the more reason our pilot doesn't want to hang around," said Weiss, moving towards the back of the airship. All the more reason we shouldn't want to hang around, she added to herself. She quashed that line of thinking before it could dig in.

It didn't take them ten minutes. Aura made them strong enough to handle the crates easily. There were four crates in all: one holding their shelter and survival gear, one holding rations and expendable supplies, and two containing their surveying tools. They continued moving the crates away until they were sure they wouldn't be splattered by snow when the airship took off. When they finished, Weiss advanced far enough to catch the pilot's eye and give him the all-clear to take off; he returned a sardonic salute.

The airship rose, and Weiss wasn't on it. How novel.

Her eyes tracked it as it faded into the distance, as it got smaller and smaller, shrinking into a speck too small to see.

Then it was gone.

Weiss took a breath. It was the only sound.

A whisper of wind added noise for only a moment; when it faded, silence descended upon Weiss like a weighted blanket. It was oppressively quiet. It bothered Weiss more than she thought it would. She'd dealt with silence before—her bedroom in Schnee Manor had been creepily quiet, especially as the Manor emptied near the end—but not like this. This was worse, somehow.

She turned and walked towards Winter, who had one of the crates open and was checking its contents against her scroll. "It's quieter than I expected," said Weiss—and, to her surprise, she swayed slightly, slipping off course. She looked down, frowning, wondering why her footing was so bad. When she looked up, Winter wore a hint of a smile.

"You're missing the Song," she said.

"What song?"

"The Song of Atlas," Winter said, as she—seemingly satisfied—stowed her scroll. "The systems that keep Atlas in the air make a hum, which you feel more than you hear. It's subtle, but it's there. That's the Song. Over time, it becomes your norm. You've lived your whole life in Atlas. You've never been without it."

"I was without it these past weeks in Mantle," Weiss protested.

"Yes, in Mantle," Winter said, reaching into the crate to draw items out of it. "Another city with very high ambient background noise, enough to cover up the absence of the Song. Out here? This is true silence. There's no Song here. That's what you're missing."

Weiss assessed Winter. "This is the voice of experience talking, isn't it?"

Winter hummed something. "I first missed the Song during a training mission for the Academy. We were out on the tundra beyond Atlas, not too far, but far enough. It was an overnight mission. I ended up taking all the night watch shifts because I couldn't sleep. The next day, one of my classmates explained about the Song." She narrowed her eyes. "Apparently, my discomfort was funny."

Weiss felt a great swell of pity for whomever had dared to laugh at Winter Schnee.

"Regardless," she said briskly, "we should get our shelter set up. Survival first," she said, preempting Weiss' thoughts about getting started on the survey. "Live first, everything else second."

She was the expert. "Of course," Weiss agreed, and the two of them got to it.

Winter explaining about the Song somehow made its absence more acute. Weiss didn't miss it as much when she was active, as the sisters were banging and clanging their shelter into place. Once it was established and the Schnees paused to plan their next step, the silence fell on them again, and it made Weiss squirm.

"Let's review the plan," said Winter.

Something to focus on. Thank you, Winter. Weiss turned to the north and pointed to the first in a rolling line of hills. Near the hill's base was a cave mouth, one so low as to be almost invisible even at this angle. "The first few overflights and surveys of this area found nothing notable, but four years ago, that cave mouth was seen for the first time and the maps updated. It was tagged as a potential mining spot not because any Dust was found, but because the cave would give a head start to mining operations if any Dust is around."

"Why aren't we taking shelter in the cave?" said Winter.

"Because if there is any Dust in the cave, it's not a shelter, it's a deathtrap."

"I see."

"On the plus side," said Weiss, "no other survey teams have been out here, so there's not much competition for it. The longer SDR stays under the radar, the better."

Winter didn't even give a verbal response this time. She raised an expectant eyebrow instead. Weiss got the message: These are all things we've discussed before, get to the good part.

"So," Weiss said, rubbing her hands together, "we'll start by going into the cave together to get an idea of its extent. Then, I'll use our surveying gear to look for Dust, while you do a site and logistics survey to plan out what a mine here would look like."

Winter opened her mouth, as if to start sharing her opinions on the site right away, but she contained herself. "Very well."

Weiss retrieved two powerful electric lamps from one of the crates, each of which had headstraps so that the sisters could keep their hands free. Once both were prepared, they made their way across the short distance of their landing zone, the lone level area with hills on most sides, towards the cave mouth.

The cave beyond the mouth was lower than the ground outside, so that they'd have to drop down as they entered—which would put them, briefly, out of contact. Winter looked at Weiss and, once again, raised her eyebrow.

This was a test, Weiss knew, but she had no idea what the subject was or what the right answer might be. Was Winter testing her assertiveness? Would she want Weiss to press forward out of confidence, or from determination to put herself at risk first? Or would that look impetuous or greedy?

As the moment stretched out with the two of them motionless, Weiss felt the loss of the Song more than ever.

The unbearable pressure of the moment forced her to action. "You're the stronger fighter," she said, "so you go first. If there's anything down there, I'll cover you, and you can either fight back or extract on your judgement."

Winter said nothing, made no gesture; she simply approached the mouth. Weiss didn't know if she'd answered correctly. It made her feel like something was writhing inside her chest.

The sisters turned on their lamps and drew their weapons. It would have been a tricky ingress, but glyphs simplified things: Winter drew one just underneath the lip of the cave mouth and eased herself down onto it.

After scanning her surroundings for a moment with the aid of the lamp, Winter stepped down again. The lack of glyph beneath her showed that'd she'd touched ground.

"Your turn, Weiss," she said.

Sucking in her breath, Weiss stepped down towards Winter's glyph.

Which vanished before she had her foot on it.

Weiss barely managed to salvage her dignity with a glyph of her own; she ended up sprawled gracelessly on it, and when she'd gathered her wits she saw it was only just above the cavern floor anyway.

"Ex-cuse me?" said Weiss, shooting a withering look at her sister.

"I didn't mean for that to happen," Winter said, and she did look chastened. "I wanted you to make your own glyph so you were relying on your own strength, but you were… further ahead than I'd thought."

Weiss gave a final "hmph" of indignation, returned to her feet, and extinguished her glyph. "Well, let's at least get started with the job."


It was rough, difficult work. The equipment was rugged, built for durability under all sorts of conditions—like the ones the sisters were enduring—and certainly not for ease of use. Weiss had read the manuals for the detectors and done dry runs, but that was a far cry from actually, say, driving wire coils into solid rock to try and find Lightning Dust by generating a current from the Dust's standing magnetic field, without igniting any Dust in the area in the process.

And that was the easy one.

Weiss found it equal parts annoying and satisfying. On the one hand, sweat was gross, the cold never quit, and by the end of the day she had all-over-aches that her Huntress training hadn't prepared her for. Hauling heavy equipment around used different sets of muscles in different ways from swinging a sword while leaping from glyph to glyph. Aura healed the strain but did little to dull the pain.

Weiss had never valued hot showers more than at the end of that first day. (Which was saying something. Hot water had been the very last utility turned off at Schnee Manor.)

The upper classes Weiss had grown up in didn't have to work like this and bragged about it. White gloves were horribly impractical, the sort of thing you wore only if you never worked with your hands, which was what made them fashionable.

Then again, it was Weiss' first time doing something hands-on. Everything she'd done before had been abstract, disconnected, dissociated. There were layers of bureaucracy and hundreds of klicks between her and the mines the SDC oversaw. If she pressured a failing Willow or an obstinate regent into doing something, how could she even know it'd been done?

Here, the feedback was immediate and unforgiving. If she did something wrong, the machinery (at best) gave her no reading or (at worst) tore itself from her grasp. By the same token, compiling a complete set of Dust scans, gathered by her own effort and sweat, gave her a contented feeling she'd never known.

It wasn't that different, she supposed, from how she'd insisted on getting Huntress training from Winter. Few of the people at those lavish galas and receptions would have been able to lift a weapon in their own defense, let alone willing. Why would they, when they could just pay people to do that for them, and spare their own efforts, hides, and sensibilities?

As if Weiss would ever allow herself to be helpless!

No. She could, so she would. Getting her hands dirty was worth it to know the job had been done and done right.

So she told herself, at least, in an attempt to cheer herself up at the end of that day. She'd only surveyed half the area she'd planned for. The results were not encouraging, either: she was finding only trace amounts of Dust. She was grateful for those; if her scans had come in completely blank, she would have had to believe she was using the equipment wrong.

"I don't mind that outcome," Winter said as the two of them rested in their shelter, nursing pre-packaged dinners. The sun was taking its sweet time setting, but both sisters knew they ought to be sleeping soon.

"Why not?" said Weiss.

"Because, logistically, this site is a disaster," Winter replied. "It's remote and the terrain between here and existing infrastructure is very rough, which is a bad combination. The mining site is at the lowest elevation in the area, meaning we'd have to work twice as hard to clear away the effluent. Water sources are limited to whatever Water Dust we find and whatever snow we melt—there's little natural melt here, even in high summer."

She took a bite and perused her notes, checking if she'd missed anything. "Tomorrow I'll try to do a layout of where structures might go up, but I'm not hopeful. This is the sort of area that alternates between frozen and mud. As I said, I'm glad you're not finding much Dust. If there were a lot here, we'd almost be tempted to try and make it work. As it is, we can write it off with no regret."

"Other than the time and money we wasted surveying the place," Weiss huffed.

"It's not a waste. It's… an investment," and Winter, her eyes glinting. "You know about those, right?"

Even Winter could be a troll from time to time. Weiss knew better than to engage. She settled for a sullen glare.

"This is why I put our low-odds spot first," Winter went on. "We're free to figure out the best ways for us to do surveys without as much pressure. Now, when we go to places that might be good mining sites, we can be more efficient and accurate. I would hate having to do all our trial-and-error at a site we actually wanted with the clock ticking."

Weiss blinked as pieces clicked together. "Planning for imperfection again?"

Winter gave a slight nod of approval—high praise by her standards. "So that it's perfect when it counts."

Weiss wanted to appreciate that. She wanted to feel the same satisfaction Winter seemed to feel. She couldn't quite get there. Something was nagging at her. Maybe it was just the overwhelming strangeness all around her, from the freeze-dried food to the rough shelter to the uncomfortable ground barely softened by the cheap bedroll.

Winter's scroll beeped. "Bedtime," she said. She did a final bit of cleanup, wriggled down into the bedroll, and closed her eyes.

Weiss, certainly, couldn't fall asleep on a schedule or on-demand. She wondered if that was a class at the Academy. What would the exam be like? "You have five minutes to fall asleep—and we're monitoring your brainwaves so you can't cheat. Ten points off for every five minutes you stay awake."

Absurd. She almost laughed.

Whatever they did, it seemed Winter had learned those lessons well. She was still as the mountains looming all around.

Not just still, though—quiet.

Weiss was missing the Song again, she realized. This place was nearly lifeless, with only some low lichen daring to hold on against the surfaces of exposed rocks here and there. Lifeless, noiseless except for the wind which was a curse… all the same.

Without Winter, she truly was alone out here. If they disappeared into the wilderness, they would never be found. Just one more unfinished survey. She'd seen several entries in that genre in her review of potential mines. Survey incomplete, surveyors missing, search abandoned after two weeks with no new findings.

She frowned at herself. Letting herself dwell on this sort of thinking was twice unhelpful. It made her feel worse and it might attract grimm. There was no ignoring it, though, no shaking how she felt.

The thing to do, then, was to externalize it. Push it out of herself.

Lowly, slowly, she began to sing.

Challenging. It's not easier to sing at low volumes; it's difficult to maintain enough airflow to hold the notes while limiting the noise. It was doubly so for Weiss because her song was also slow, at least at first.

She went at it all the same. She needed it like she needed to breathe.

Low and slow, long, legato notes, a few quick steps up her register, a slow descent. Maintain perfect pitch, vibrato on the long notes, maintain posture to let the air flow…

All the technical bits of singing which she knew, and focused on at first, seemed to fade bit by bit as she got to the meat of the song. Accelerando, crescendo, airflow, push the notes out, all came automatically as the emotions of the song took preeminence and swamped petty mechanical considerations. There was no awareness of Winter, or worries about her predicament, or annoyance at her discomfort. Those fell away as she dove into the song.

Her feelings were in the driver's seat now, and they dictated where the song went. Accelerando, faster, music you might dance to, music you could fight to, but never brighter, never warmer, staying in the minor key, music that knew emotion, music that knew pain.

Fermata, draw the note out, put everything into it, sustain, sustain, sustain...

Now let it fade, diminuendo, like catching your breath after a run. A quiet coda, reflection, reprise, the notes lingering in the cold air like they were frozen in place.

Weiss' shoulders shook like she'd been exercising for an hour. She felt like some of her turmoil was outside her now; she felt emptier; she felt freer. She'd spent her emotion. There was less of it still inside.

"I didn't know you sang."

Weiss nearly toppled over in surprise. She blinked rapidly, like doing so would help her understand where that had come from, even though there was only one possibility.

"Well, still sang," Winter corrected herself. "I knew Father started you on it, but I never heard you after he passed."

Weiss, still trying to collect herself from her own emotional wash, looked down at her hands. She hadn't been self-conscious at all during her song, but the sensation was now drowning her. "I… well, I didn't mean to make it public or anything. I think Father wanted me to perform professionally. Obviously I never cared for that."

"Obviously."

"But I missed it," Weiss said. "I liked singing, even if it was just for me. Maybe especially if it was just for me. It became… a comfort. A talisman."

When Winter didn't answer, Weiss felt compelled to go on to fill the void. "It was cold in the Manor, you know? And empty, especially near the end. Singing helped." She frowned. "I guess it's easier to describe what it wasn't than what it was. It wasn't a campfire, it didn't keep me warm or brighten the place. It didn't push back the cold or anything as dramatic as that. It just…"

"…let you express what you were feeling," Winter said, to Weiss' surprise. "It represented the emotions, but in a way that was outside of you, and that made the feelings more tolerable."

"Yes," Weiss said warily. "How would you know that?"

"He had me try music first," Winter said. "Father, I mean. The violin. If he'd had his way, a bow would have been the closest thing to a weapon I ever held.

"Unfortunately for him, I turned out to be completely tone deaf, and my violin play was mechanical at best. It was never music, it was just notes. I would never have been able to meet my own standards. Eventually even Father realized it. He had a tin ear, too, did you know?"

"No. But then why…?"

"A music career would have been another way for us to be in the public eye," Winter said with a new edge to her voice. "Another way to garner praise and acclaim for the family. Meaning him."

"…oh. I didn't know. I guess he died before I realized it."

"Lucky you." Winter sucked in a breath. "I still appreciate music, though. I can discern good from bad, I just can't reproduce it."

That gave Weiss an unexpected bout of nerves. "When you say you can discern, are you saying…"

"That you sing… well," said Winter, as if the words were being squeezed out of her.

Well. It was a generous comment by Winter's standards. Weiss couldn't really expect more than that.

"And also," said Winter, audibly bracing herself, "I have to admit… I do still miss the Song of Atlas from time to time. Not to the same extent as you, but some. Well, I didn't remember I was missing it when you sang."

Weiss frowned. "So… my singing was background noise?"

"No. It was home."

The breath froze in Weiss' throat.

Winter rolled over, turning away from Weiss. "It was like home, I mean," she mumbled. "Just a figure of speech, a… well. You don't need to sing any more tonight. On other nights… if you wanted to… er…"

The elder sister couldn't put it to words any more than the younger could, but Weiss thought she understood. "Another night, maybe."

"Very well," Winter said brusquely. "Good night, Miss Schnee."

"Good night, Miss Schnee."


Weiss was enormously relieved when, after four days, the airship returned to bring them back to Mantle. She was done with survival food and sleeping on the ground.

She was less relieved when she remembered she'd scheduled four more site surveys after this one.

"Yes," Weiss said grumpily. "You were right. It was best to do that one first to get our techniques down before going to better sites."

Winter didn't deign acknowledge. Of course she was right. Would she have insisted on doing it this way if she thought it possible she was wrong? Weiss always came off like this, like she learned only under protest.

Still, she did learn, which was more than Winter could say for some Academy graduates.

The second site survey was going much better so far. It was a better location, for starters: the mining site was elevated above the surrounding terrain, and it was mostly tundra, flat and clear almost all the way back to Atlas. If they chose this site, the logistics would be much easier, which made it simpler and cheaper to build and defend long-term.

Winter frowned at herself and tried to make herself take the extra step. Lower operating expenses were good because… it meant more profit. There it was. Thinking like a businesswoman was taking some doing. It would be easy to delegate to Weiss, let it be Weiss' problem, but… well, her sister was carrying enough as it was. More than someone her age ought to be.

This was one of the difficult problems Atlas Academy faced, Winter mused as she adjusted her sight lines and recorded some figures. One of the military's strengths was that it could specialize. It could have people be dedicated to certain tasks or fields and build deep expertise in those alone. Division of labor was a powerful thing.

Huntresses didn't have that luxury. Huntresses could expect to operate alone, sooner or later, which forced them to be generalists. They had to be able to fight and make and maintain their own weaponry and handle their own logistics and know wilderness survival and be experts in grimm taxonomy and behavior and and and

Atlas Academy had to straddle those lines. It had to be able to produce both military specialists and Huntress generalists. No wonder the Kingdom threw so many resources at its academy.

It was good for Winter that they did. If she hadn't had the broader grounding from her Huntress training, tasks like this would have been impossible.

A frisson of anger coursed through her, one she put down quickly. For all of Atlas' faults, its Huntsmen and military were honorable for defending it. Whether or not it deserved to be defended honorably was a separate, and valid, question...

...for another time. She put those thoughts down with her best Schnee control, then refocused her sights. Yes, if they laid down Stone Dust in this direction, they could very easily get some basic paving here, and once they were clear of the mining area they would—

Winter frowned.

That didn't look right. She could have sworn that the ground was level in that direction. It had been a virtue of this position, but looking at it now she saw a series of ridges or humps, all pointed in the same…

…direction…

Winter jerked back from her equipment, followed the lines with her naked eyes, and panicked.


"Weiss!"

The shout of her name caused Weiss to shake and nearly knock over her equipment. She swore shortly. Gravity Dust was tricky enough to detect as it was, if she knocked the gear out of calibration or, worse, damaged it when its sensors were so sensitive to displacement…

She took a moment to secure the sensors in place and brace the drilling gear before she turned to see what Winter wanted.

She didn't see Winter, though, because just as she turned to look, there was an eruption of rock right in her face.

She shielded her head and sprang backwards with all her might, brain flooded with adrenaline and panic. When she had enough wits to look (skidding backwards across the tundra), all she could see was a mass of black and white and unnatural blazing red.

An inhuman scream blasted at her, shot unimpeded from ears to brain stem, and fried her remaining nerves. Through the rush of emotion, a single thought managed to break through.

Weiss was seeing her very first grimm.


Next time: Chasing the Unseen