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(Saphron POV)

"Cinder is gone. She didn't check in. We should assume big brother and those others got to her," Violet said easily. The death of Cinder didn't seem to bother her at all. And why should it? She wasn't family. She was just an adoptive step sister.

"Good riddance. We didn't need her," Lavender responded back.

"The loss of the maidens is serious, you two. We needed the power," I cut in on them.

"We can get it again, it isn't gone," Lavender shrugged. "Mother has us now. She doesn't need other substitutes. Not anymore."

"I think we all know that it's big brother that's the problem," Violet muttered. "He's powerful and we can't feel him very well."

"Big brother acts like he's not a member of the family," I muttered. "It breaks my heart," I clenched a gloved fist tight at my side near where my dagger hung on my belt opposite to my pistol. The spine of the blade was black and it had double silvery edges sloping to it off of which light gleamed. The pistol was gunmetal grey and shone with polish. They were both well looked after, even for Titania forged instruments.

The pistol was well oiled and sleek. It had a certain comforting weight when held in conjunction with the stacked leather hidden tang handle of the dagger with a straight tapering tip.

It was of course possible to set things up so that both weapons were one and the same. To make it some sort of bayonet. But I preferred the gun and dagger to be separate for different maneuverings. To shoot while I steadied my hand with the life and thrust beneath the gun in a separate fashion. It matched the double-attack nature that was so inherent to my style of offense. I double tapped my enemies. Especially when I had my ghost at my back.

My long red coat completed the cloak and dagger appearance. The red also matched the specter my semblance summoned, at least in part. Red with a black under vestment.

My sisters lingered beside me, Lavender was leaning on her bike and was examining her own weapon. A pistoning gauntlet which could smash through cement with a punch and a flare of the spiked mechanism inside. Violet stood next to me with the double blade she wielded hanging by her belt, curved and nearly down to her ankles, the metal of the blades shone softly silver in the dazzling synthetic Atlesian lights.

The lights overhead created little ponds of yellow hue and the garage was mostly empty. It was the perfect place to stop and chat for a minute and figure out our next move. Or moves as it were.

"What are we going to do about it?" Lavender asked. "He isn't interested in the reunion..." Lavender sniffed.

"Don't cry, Lavender," Violet whispered comfortingly.

"He won't listen to us and he won't listen to Mother," Lavender went on. She wiped the corner of her eyes.

"Plus he is strong…" Violet chipped in. She gave up on comforting Lavender. "He isn't weak for the one that wasn't supposed to work out. I always thought he would be more… feeble. That's always the picture I had of my big brother. What about you two?"

It was the image I had of him as well. He hadn't meant to be like this. But now that he was he needed to be dealt with. But just how to deal with him? He wasn't going to come quietly.

The low concrete parking garage hung over our heads while we waited and talked. We would need to find a place to stay, either in Atlas or in Mantle but that could be worried about later. It would be easy enough to find some place to squat in or bully our way in to. We did have some money, courtesy of our father, that we could spend on securing an establishment to rest in.

"We're going to remind him that he's a part of this family. Mother can set things straight for us. Have faith in her," I answered.

"But he won't go to the reunion," Violet muttered, her arms folded under her breasts. "He refused."

"So if he won't go to Mother we'll bring Mother to him. Or a part of her at least," I decided.

"You mean a seer..." Lavender trailed. "That could work… Mom could convince him where we have failed."

"He broke free of her once. He didn't bring us the relic of knowledge," Violet pointed out. "What makes you so sure another proxy would do any better? As far as I am concerned he can break free."

It was a valid question and point of concern. He shattered the influence before. There was no reason he couldn't do it again. But there was also no reason that I could see which implied that he could. Once was merely happenstance, it didn't establish a pattern. Jaune's chances of resistance may well be as thin as wet paper. We were all vulnerable to Mother.

"I'm not. Not for certain. And we have to bring the seer to him first," I answered. It wasn't a whole plan, but it was the start of one. He was holed up in the academy.

Mother's influence was a tricky thing to put your finger on. Somehow it was simultaneously subtle, something that you barely noticed, and it was all encompassing, a great portion of your very self. It was easy to imagine, though. It was as though she were a great creature whose flesh my sisters and I were embedded in. We were a part of her. A part of her very body. Our minds were inexorably linked to her own will. We were just fragments of a greater whole. Big brother was no different. He must be in terrible pain from his resistance to our Mom. If only he could see it didn't have to be that way. Our connection to Mother was a beautiful thing, even if it was terrific to behold and understand. But life was like that, all of life, not just our natures.

Glory and madness were different sides of the same coin. And make no mistake, the connection between our minds and Mother's was majestic. If only Jaune could be shown that. If only I could open his eyes and mind to the possibilities. If only I could make him see how things were supposed to be - how they ought to be. He was supposed to be one of us, our big step brother. He belonged to us.

But Jaune was going through the madness of it and the madness only. He was alone. When Mother broke me down I had had my sisters to draw strength from. I had them to share in my suffering before I became whole. Before I was made whole, that is.

Now I couldn't remember a time where I was without it. Big brother must be so lonely. I had my other sisters: Lily, Kolumbine, Juniper, Iris, Lavender, and Violet. He had no one who understood him. Not really. He was becoming a part of a greater whole. His confusion must be awesome. His despair must be majestic.

Instead he saw Mother as something to be fought and resisted. He somehow believed that we would want to be free of her, whatever that might mean. It was impossible. We could never escape ourselves, so we could never be rid of Mother's voice on the surface of our minds.

Her tendrils ran deep inside of us and twisted about until I couldn't be sure where I began and she ended. There was nowhere to go. There was nothing. It was a seamless blur of me into her.

And big brother was missing out on that. He didn't understand. Was that on purpose or was it a mistake? Was it just happenstance? He was supposed to be one of us. We didn't care that he was our step-brother. It didn't bother us. And that was only in a technical sense anyways. It hardly mattered. We all were one through our Mother. Even our father didn't get that. He was forever on the outside of things, no matter how much he would like to think otherwise. And he was only loosely our father. Not like our Mother who was certainly our Mom without any question.

Whatever had happened to Jaune, something had gone wrong. It was all misaligned, corkscrewed. He was all mixed up in the head and in the heart. But we could set it right. He could be made whole like the rest of us and once he saw the grandeur of it all he would fall to his knees and weep. He would grovel for forgiveness. He would see. He would understand. He would feel Mother, really feel her. Then he would know. Just as surely as 'I think, therefore, I am' he would know.

"Well are we going to summon one or not?" Lavender asked.

I took a small round ball from inside my jacket pocket and held it aloft to the rest of them. Inside the orb was a swirling mass of black mist and white taloned tipped worms slithering about caught inside the ball of glass. I gazed into it.

All I had to do was shatter the orb and Mother's seer would be summoned. She would be able to talk to us directly and give us direction. She would know how to handle Jaune, our lost brother.

But I didn't crush it. Not yet. It wasn't time. "Once we break into the academy we'll find him and summon it," I decided. It would be easier than trying to bring the fully realized seer into the military fortress. Better to smuggle in the glass ball than the floating mass of tentacles which would be formed from the contents inside of it.

"Breaking into the academy won't be easy…" Lavender trailed.

"We have to. The maidens are in there, certainly. As well as big brother," Violet insisted.

"I know. I was just thinking maybe we should bring our other sisters. If it's for big brother and the maidens they should be a part of this too," Lavender defended her statement. "Reinforcements would be nice to have along with us."

"Don't forget the relic of creation and the relic of knowledge are probably there inside with them," I said, looking into the crystal ball of swirling black smoke. As though to divine the answers I sought from the hazy contents. "Yes… we'll need help from our sisters. And think about how happy big brother will be to see us all. And, with the seer, we'll take the family reunion to him. Then he'll see. Then he'll give this pointless tirade up and become one with us."

"They'll have huntsmen of all sorts. And robots and guards and airships. We'll need to be stealthy. We'll need a distraction too, if possible," Lavender stood up from leaning on her bike. I knew my sister. She was game. Besides it was what we were for. It was what we were ordered to do.

"Like the one that happened at Beacon. Say what you will about Cinder, but she pulled off a hell of a heist. And Atlas is even better defended than Beacon was," Violet agreed.

"There will be the seven of us. And we'll have father's help. And Mother's pets. And our summons." I was still examining the ball, rotating it slowly in the light and watching the contents spill over themselves. "We'll break in and save Jaune. Or Cloud. Or whatever he's calling himself today."

It didn't matter. Why should it? We were still made from our Mother's flesh. We still sprouted from her body like a hydra. What did it matter what Jaune decided his name was. He was an Arc. One of us. Just another head on the same beast. He was a link in the same great chain. He might lie to himself about it. Maybe that was how he got along. But I knew the truth. There was no escaping from this any more than a person could escape from their own thoughts.

A person was their own thoughts. Run from that, I challenge you. Rename yourself whatever. You still were a living thinking person regardless. A droplet of water couldn't stop being a droplet of water by becoming a cloud. And neither could Cloud.

It was dizzying to think of myself as a part of a greater whole but I knew that it is what I am. I was an appendage of a larger organism. I couldn't fight that. Couldn't resist that. It didn't make sense to try. It didn't make sense to want to try. It was something to welcome, not to withstand. It would be like cutting my own fingers off or plucking my own eyes out.

Which, granted, some people have done. But people only do things like that in the throes of madness. I wasn't crazy. Jaune though… Jaune might be. I worried about that. He wasn't made like the rest of us were. There were all sorts of complications which could arise from growing a person. Particularly their mind.

Jaune could be confused but that didn't seem quite right. He had talked about saving me as though I was the one on the outside. He was the one eclipsing himself and cutting himself off from the rest of us. He was the odd one out and not just because he was a guy.

And Jaune didn't have the stability that the rest of us or Mom provided. He had been alone. That was scary. Maybe he had lost it. It would explain a great deal. It would explain why he demanded the crack of the mistress's whip. Maybe he took some kind of sick pleasure in it. He could be the kind of crazy that just liked it. People devote themselves to self harm out of fear and despair all the time. This could just be an avenue for that.

That still seemed like madness to me. Just of a very certain, delicate kind. Maybe that was why we thought of him as the weak one. He was just fragile. His mind made brittle by those processes that had formed him. Maybe he had snapped.

It was a disconcerting thought. It struck me in the chest like I had swallowed glass. Running down my throat and into my stomach where it settled and hung there from my belly like a weight on a thread.

But how to save him from his madness? Mother would know. She was at the center of this whole thing. She was at the center of myself. I just had to trust her. She would see things through for poor big brother.

Or if his madness couldn't be cured… she would do what was necessary.

I didn't like that thought very much. He belonged with the rest of us. He was a piece of us. Without him we weren't whole. That was why we could feel one another. It was even stronger amongst us girls and harder with Jaune but that could be from any number of reasons. He had a different father, for example.

"Poor big brother…" I whispered aloud.

My sisters looked at me in empathy.

"He's hurting," Lavender murmured.

At the same time Violet said, "he's confused."

"I think he might be crazy. How do you fix crazy?" I asked. I looked between their faces. They looked away from me and worriedly at one another.

"Mother may know… she's very wise..." Lavender trailed at last.

"I'm worried that he's too fragile and that he'll try and resist her and she'll just break him on accident."

"Mother is very powerful… it's a possibility. What are you thinking, Saph?"

"I don't know Vi. I'm just worried about him is all. He's… dividing himself from us. You feel it too, don't you. This… separation." A great gulf existed between me and my big brother whereas my sisters and I sort of ran together. Like a river overflowing the tributaries and swallowing the land between them. There were differences between us. Iris here, Lily there. But there were also places that couldn't be named in such a cut and dry way. Places that could only be called a part of the greater whole.

"I don't feel him at all," Lavender spoke sadly.

"Maybe I'm just imagining it but I think I can feel him a little. It's a trickle, a brook where there should be a mighty river. It could just be my mind playing tricks on me. Giving me what I want to see. You know what I mean?" I asked. "You both felt him at the warehouse, right?"

"He was so close then," Lavender muttered, hardly moving her lips.

"You felt him more sensitively than either of us, I think." Violet chipped in.

"Maybe… but I'm not sure I felt him first. How is he doing it? Cutting himself off from us?"

"Better question, why is he doing it?" Lavender asked.

"Ozma is with him? On both accounts." Vi tried. But they didn't have any real answers for me.

We'd just have to execute and trust Mom.

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-WG