Weiss reached across her desk. Her headache was getting worse again. Time for another round of painkillers.
The train rocked slightly as it bent into a gentle curve, just enough that, instead of Weiss' fingers closing on the bottle, they clipped it instead, knocked it over, sent it tumbling off the desk.
Oh, the indignity.
But typical. "Nothing without aggravation" might as well have been her motto. SDR had withstood the lawsuit onslaught, and when she'd delivered SDR's latest train of Dust to Junction for delivery to the Mantle wholesale markets she'd noticed prices creeping up. Those should have been good things, and Weiss supposed they were. On balance, though, there were so many other irritations, problems, and obstacles for her to navigate that a few things going right didn't feel like a relief.
Mayor Leif had informed her that Holly Hemlock was organizing an anti-Faunus protest of some kind, and the town charter required him to allow it. Aster Cristata had taken Winter's suggestion of paternity leave as an affront, an attack on his position as "the person who cares about the workers" (as if only one person was allowed to care about the workers!), and had drafted a counterproposal for a dozen additional categories of paid leave.
Worst of all, grimm attacks were up, worse every week. SDR's startup loan was all but tapped out, and everyone knew it. The prospect of going to Huber for a third loan was unbearable. That left everyone in SDR—which was most of the local population—increasingly anxious as the days passed.
That put ever more work on the Schnees' shoulders. Grimm attacks were coming twice a week, and even though they were usually weak—just younger, smaller grimm poking at the mine's perimeter and getting vaporized for their trouble—it was exhausting to have to deal with them, then go back and catch up on all the work missed in the meantime.
The sisters desperately needed to do another wide-ranging purge, but that would take Weiss and Winter both, and that was unacceptable when their schedules were so packed already. Hiring Huntsmen to do it for them was out of the question when SDR's resources were running dry.
Put it all together, and yes, Weiss Schnee was getting recurring headaches. She'd earned those headaches, thank you very much.
That sounded much worse when she actually put the feeling to words.
And when she did get back to town, she'd have to catch up with Cam, which was always an adventure. Not the fun kind of adventure, either.
Weiss slid out of her chair and reached for the fallen bottle of painkillers. It rolled slightly as the train finished its slow, sweeping turn. Weiss had to reach further to nab it. Ha! Got it—
Bang.
ASDFGHk.
Trying to straighten up again had just bashed Weiss' head against the underside of her desk, and she hadn't had her Aura up.
Nothing without aggravation.
Winter did her best to ensure the sisters went to bed at a reasonable hour, but she couldn't ensure Weiss would sleep through the night. Full nights of sleep were becoming rarer and rarer.
Train duty sabotaged even that prospect, with the train usually not getting back into Skjulte Perle until late, and then requiring some amount of supervision to secure. Only after all those tasks were done did Weiss drag herself back to the hostel for a few thoroughly unsatisfying hours of darkness but not rest. After that, it was back to the grindstone- in this case, a grindstone named Cam with their weekly update on the processing plant.
Weiss tried to follow Cam's excited chatter, she really did. It was so very difficult. The ambient noises of the processing array were loud, the edges of her vision seemed fuzzy, she felt like there was cotton in her ears, and Cam had immediately plunged head-first into Dust-processing arcana Weiss would barely have followed at her best.
She slapped her cheeks with both hands, trying to force herself to pay attention.
"Are you okay?" said Cam.
"I'll be okay," Weiss said insincerely. "Where were we?"
"Oh, I was just commenting on the quality of the ore coming in," said Cam, gesturing at a belt feed of rock samples with embedded particles or crystals of Dust.
"You mean the Dust is higher quality?"
"No. Well, yes, but also no." Cam stopped, their mouth clearly having run ahead of their brain, and reset. "It is high quality Dust, better than I usually see, purer. That's not what I was after. For the ore that gets shipped back here, there's a lot less dross than industry standards. The miners are cutting closer to the Dust and shipping less waste. Saves a lot of time and energy on this end, that's for sure!"
Cam stopped and looked thoughtful. "I wonder what's driving that. Maybe the Dust in this mine is more obvious and easier to see?"
"Or the workers are doing a better job," said Weiss. "They're working for themselves, not some corporate overlord, so they're more motivated and more careful."
Cam blinked uncomprehendingly. Weiss thought she understood. Cam, as a wholly self-motivated person, would have difficulty imagining people who put more or less effort into things.
"I guess," Cam said at last, before turning back to the technical equipment they were far more comfortable with. "Whatever the reason, it helps a lot. Increases the efficiency up here on the processing end by three to five percent, depending on the species of Dust. Toss in the tweaks I made to the carver—I did tell you about those, right?"
Weiss was sure Cam had, even if she'd be hard-pressed to say what, exactly, Cam had told her. "Yes."
"Good, I was worried I'd forgotten… anyway, that makes that part of the process more efficient, so that's another two or three percent efficiency gains in the crystallization process."
At last, Weiss' sluggish mind was engaging. "A few percent here and a few percent there adds up to real money in a hurry."
"Money? I was just referring to processing time and energy expenditures." Cam paused, as if the thought had never occurred. "I guess those are money. Huh."
"But you're satisfied, right?" said Weiss. "This job is holding your interest?"
"Better than I thought it would," said Cam. "Those free afternoons are wonderful, let me tell you, as much fun as I've had working with Dust in years. That's when I came up with the modification to the carver—did I mention that? Oh, and I have an experiment rolling right now over on that side, I work on it once a week, I'll have to show you when it really starts producing…"
Weiss couldn't fight the currents any longer. Her mind submerged.
For as hard a time as she'd had keeping up with Cam's deadly combination of exuberance and minutiae, Weiss had gotten the takeaway: the processing operation was going well.
It was an interesting thing to chew over as she escaped the machine shop at last. She paused standing outside the plant and looked around.
Skjulte Perle, now that she compared it to her earliest memories of the place, was almost unrecognizable. The line of people ordering food from the hostel's kitchen stretched out the door and down the street. The general store was almost submerged beneath empty crates, their merchandise sold as quickly as it was unboxed. Many of the drearier houses were being repainted or were glorying in new paint jobs recently completed. The collapsed houses had been stripped and cleared, the waste either repurposed or ditched. The ubiquitous gardens were lusher than ever now that people were consciously applying Plant Dust rather than passively tapping what was ambient in the soil.
Most of all, there were people around, doing things, working on the town, bringing it to life. What a difference that made.
Mining boomtowns. They were a trope so much a part of Atlesian consciousness that even Weiss, as far removed from popular culture as she was, still knew about them. Bare tundra one day, a flood of people and money the next, abandonment the day after, either when the Dust ran out or the grimm ran in.
On the other hand, Mantle itself had once been a mining boomtown.
There was zero chance Skjulte Perle would somehow become the next Mantle; Weiss wasn't delusional. (Could a person evaluate their own sanity from inside their own head? Weiss thought she could, but she'd acknowledge the flaw in that premise.) But Skjulte Perle didn't need to be the germ of a new Kingdom. If it could just be a place where people lived and raised families and improved each other's lives, that was a fine destiny for it.
To that end…
There was a company meeting soon, and Weiss had to be ready to present the company's financials. For some odd reason, she found herself looking forward to it.
Was that…
No, that couldn't be right. That didn't add up that way…
…unless it did?
Huh.
There was an energy thrumming beneath Weiss' skin. It was irritating and disorienting, especially since she still was carrying all her fatigue and frustration and having this on top was exhausting. She couldn't wait to let it all loose. Anticipation was a powerful thing.
Winter was bringing the stockholder's meeting to order and getting through the top pieces of business. Weiss waited, almost bouncing in her seat.
At last Winter yielded her the floor. Weiss stood and gestured to Ilia and Cristata.
"Before we dig in to the numbers," she said, "we owe each of you something."
Ilia and Cristata moved amongst the crowd, handing each present stockholder a single One Lien chit. Confusion and hubbub surrounded them as they moved.
"If you're wondering what that is about," Weiss said—ironically, given that she knew perfectly well that was at the top of everyone's minds—"let me explain. That is called a dividend."
There was some immediate excitement, but more wonder and curiosity.
"That is to say…" Weiss gathered herself, and couldn't help the smile that bloomed on her face, "that is everyone's share of SDR's profits."
Everyone understood those terms. More importantly, they all understood what it meant.
They'd turned the corner.
Schnee Dust Reborn had turned a profit. More was in the offing. It would survive.
The excitement built as understanding and appreciation spread. The crowd grew louder, cheerier, more ecstatic, and someone broke into applause, not at Weiss exactly but just in general, and the feeling was contagious and spread like wildfire, and in moments the whole building was full of clapping and cheering and the occasional whoop.
Weiss felt it in her soul, felt it wash her away.
She'd planned to say more—about how they wouldn't issue more dividends for a while because they needed to build up their reserve fund, and it would help more if they could aggressively pay down the extortionate Huber loans… all proper and prudent and blah-blah-blah. There'd be a time and a place for those things.
This was not that time nor that place. None of it mattered next to the enormity of this achievement. There was no stopping this wave of emotion, and Weiss had no plans to try; it felt far, far better to let it carry her.
She felt weak in the knees. She stumbled back into her chair, heaving huge breaths, feeling all the feels, letting the enthusiasm of the company speak for her.
They'd done it.
From nowhere, from nothing, from absolute rock-bottom, they'd started something new and made it work… and they'd done it without indulging in wage-slavery, legal chicanery, or moral compromise.
Weiss was so proud she thought she might die of it.
No regrets.
As the hooting and hollering finally began to wind down, to where Weiss could actually hear other things, she saw her sister approach and lean close.
"You know what this means," said Winter, "don't you?"
"That's… vague," Weiss replied. "It means a lot of things. What did you have in mind?"
Winter's face split in a malicious smile. "It means you have to make good on your promise to Mr. Huber."
Oh.
The condition on the second loan: to attend a social event of Huber's choosing as his guest of honor.
Nothing without aggravation. Even when things were going well, there was a fly in the ointment.
"You're not making me feel bad," Weiss said, luxuriating in triumph and letting that annoyance fall away. "I'll deal with that when it's time. For tonight…" She waved vaguely all around.
Winter nodded, her disappointment at losing out on her fun second fiddle to the good feelings of the moment. "For tonight, we have this."
"Yes we do."
The celebration rolled into the night all across Skjulte Perle. It was most raucous in the Faunus' communal living areas, but it spilled out across town. Even the town's citizens that weren't part of SDR knew a good time when they saw one and joined in.
There was one person not partaking. She was too busy being torn apart.
Ilia's hands shook so badly she almost dropped her scroll. The message she'd gotten was innocuous by design. She knew better.
"When will you be returning to Kuo Kuana?" it read.
The White Fang existed in a world of global communications… which rested in the hands of its enemies. Atlas, the Kingdom with arguably the worst record when it came to Faunus discrimination, owned and operated the very systems the White Fang had to use to resist that discrimination.
There was no way for the White Fang to compete technologically. Even if it'd had experts in cryptography, its resources were nothing like those available to Atlas. No amount of scrambling or encoding could protect their message traffic from Atlas' prying eyes.
The White Fang needed workarounds. The most basic was a preference for couriers. A message sniffer in a CCT tower couldn't detect a face-to-face meeting behind closed doors. Only the most important information could be sent that way, though. Hand-carrying news and meeting in person was inefficient and expensive, especially across continents and for small-scale missions… like Ilia's solo op in Solitas.
When distant messaging was unavoidable, then, the White Fang fell back on other methods, older methods. If they couldn't keep their messages from being read, they could make those messages meaningless except to another member of the Fang.
"When will you be returning to Kuo Kuana?" the message read.
On the surface, it was an innocent inquiry. Kuo Kuana wasn't the most common destination on Remnant, but it got traffic.
If someone knew or suspected Ilia was White Fang, though, they'd correctly think such a question had subtext. Without any other information, they could only guess as to what the subtext was. Was it asking when a mission would be complete? When an operative would exfiltrate? When another signal would be sent?
That focus on 'when', thinking that the response to the message would be about timing, was predictable. It was also wrong.
The question was Ilia's duress code.
Her superiors in the Fang must have gotten her last message, she knew. They must have read what she'd conveyed about the Schnees, and about Schnee Dust Reborn. About how the Faunus were the best-treated Dust miners on Remnant. About how the Schnees placed their own lives on the line to protect the Faunus there. About SDR's unique ownership situation. And about how all these things meant that the White Fang must not attack SDR.
The White Fang operated for the betterment of the Faunus. In most cases, that meant attacking Dust companies at every opportunity. Ilia's report said that Schnee Dust Reborn was the great exception—that an attack on it would impoverish and threaten the Faunus rather than help them.
It was unbelievable, Ilia would freely admit. If someone had told her before the mission that she'd send a message like that, she would have laughed in their face. Everything about it was absurd.
It was also the truth, as hard as that was to grapple with.
Her handlers in the White Fang were clearly having the same trouble she'd had. They couldn't believe Ilia had written such a message. The message must be full of lies, and Ilia must have been captured or killed. Someone must be sending messages in her place, trying to throw the Fang off the scent.
Hence, the duress code.
Only Ilia knew the proper reply. Any other answer and the White Fang would know she'd been compromised. Her previous messages would be voided and the White Fang would cover its tracks that the mission had ever happened.
That was why—no matter how bizarre it was, no matter how queasy it made her—she had to affirm. She had to wave the Fang off. She had to tell them, "Yes, really, ain't that something?"
She went to type her response.
She wasn't going to hurt the Schnees.
Something inside her broke.
That was a ludicrous thing to think. Ridiculous. Her parents had died in a Schnee Dust Company mine. Her life had been ruined by the carelessness and contempt of that family. She'd gone years and years—half her life—indulging ever more bitter and ever more violent fantasies about what she'd do if she ever had a Schnee at her mercy. Her flight from that situation had landed her amongst the White Fang, and there the bonfire of her anger was fed oxygen in the form of similar grievances and even bloodier dreams.
And now she wasn't going to do that?
No, no, it was much worse than that. Not only was she not taking her revenge, not only was she forsaking a punishment the Schnees so richly deserved, she was protecting them. If she sent that message, it would wave off the White Fang from acting against the Schnees in the future.
She'd thought she'd seen the deepest depths of the Schnees' depravity. She'd thought they couldn't do anything worse. But then, she hadn't reckoned on this: that the Schnees would weaponize decency. She'd never imagined that those villains would turn their victims into their shield; that they would use the welfare of the people they'd exploited as their best defense.
There was a linkage there, a direct line between the Schnees' survival and the good of the Faunus in their company. Ilia had seen how hard the Schnees were having to work to sustain this, the lengths they had to go to. If she slit the Schnees' throats overnight, some other company would snatch up this operation in an instant, and it wouldn't be thirty seconds before they'd be working the Faunus here for more hours for less pay under worse conditions, with no say in company decisions and company security "protecting" them. Ilia had seen other mines, had been part of rescue operations to liberate Faunus from other mines. She knew how other companies worked. The thought of condemning these Faunus to that fate…
To keep them from it, the Schnees had to keep doing what they were doing, had to live, insane as that seemed to any committed White Fang.
The great motivators of Ilia's life—love for the Faunus, hate for the Schnees—were colliding in her soul.
"I don't know what to do," she croaked; the pain was too intense for her to stay silent. She had to voice it, even as that made it worse, somehow. She couldn't deny the feelings when she spoke the words. She'd manifested them, and now they were unavoidable.
They were too much for just her to deal with.
"Help me," she whispered, but she was alone. The sounds of people celebrating were all around her and yet she was alone. She'd been alone since childhood, since that mine had crashed down and taken her whole life with it.
Wait…
Not completely alone.
She couldn't call them and ask—secrecy again—but she could imagine what her peers might think. Adam would kill the Schnees. Adam would have killed the Schnees ages ago. (There were reasons he was not assigned infiltration missions.) The humans had to feel the same pain they inflicted, he always said. That message resonated with Ilia; it inflamed the pain in her heart.
She could still do that. Could still show them. Could still get what she'd come for, the reason she'd taken this gods-forsaken mission in the first place.
Her eyes slammed shut in pain and indecision.
It's not so easy, to abandon your purpose of a lifetime.
Adam never would abandon his purpose.
Blake never would, either…
…but what would she do?
Ilia focused on the thought, determined to hold on to it like a lifeline no matter how much pain and regret and longing came with it. What would Blake do?
Would Blake kill the Schnees? Would she condemn her fellow Faunus as the price for her own revenge?
No, Ilia decided. Blake didn't need revenge. As dedicated as Blake was to the Faunus cause, well, her parents were alive. Revenge wasn't her motivation. Belief was. Faith was.
Hope was.
A sudden sob escaped Ilia's mouth. Her clenched-shut eyes wrung tears out of her.
This wasn't forgiveness. Never forgiveness. This was extortion. This was bargaining away her goals, her deepest, darkest desires… in exchange for…
She remembered the faces of the Faunus workers as she handed out those lien chits. One lien each! What a farce. You couldn't buy bubble gum for one lien. You'd be hard-pressed to buy used bubble gum for one lien.
And yet, each time she'd given one out, she'd seen the way faces lit up. It wasn't the money. It was the promise the money kept and represented. The promise of a better life, of something turning their way for the first time ever, of a better tomorrow than they'd ever expected.
The belief that hard work, for once, was rewarded. That they could make something of themselves. That their future was brighter than their past.
Even if the Schnees fostered all that for purely selfish reasons, even if they were in it for profit and vanity and nothing more, even if their every motive was corrupt and unworthy… they were still bringing hope.
Blake would have approved.
"When are you returning to Kuo Kuana?"
"Are you under duress?"
Ilia had never been under more duress, but that wasn't what the question meant, and that wasn't the answer she had to give. With trembling fingers, barely able to see through blurry eyes, Ilia typed out her response.
"When the God of Animals wills it."
"All clear."
Ilia wept.
The door of the mining site office opened. Winter appeared, looking as immaculate as ever.
Well, almost. To Ilia's surprise, there seemed to be dark circles under the Schnee's eyes, and a few stray hairs had escaped their usual imprisonment.
Ilia wondered if she looked any better.
"You look like warmed-over death," Winter said.
So much for that question.
"Late night?" Winter asked.
It had to be rhetorical. Ilia didn't dare answer.
"I know a lot of people were celebrating deep into the night," said Winter, and Ilia said a silent prayer of thanks. Her angst-ridden sleepless night had been covered by something as innocent as a celebration. "I wonder how everyone will stay… safe…" Winter sighed. "Oh, screw it."
To Ilia's continuing surprise, Winter raised her scroll and thumbed over to make a call. "Supe? Yes. Delay the start of the workday by one hour. Give people a chance to wake up, warm up, and get coffee. Yes, paid leave."
Winter looked groggily at Ilia. "You have one hour to yourself. Take a nap, scroll a friend, whatever you need to do. The only condition is that I expect you back here in one hour, ready to go, with a carafe of coffee as black as grimm-skin."
Ilia nodded shakily. "Yes, ma'am."
The office door slammed shut.
Next time: The Physician's Dilemma
