It took seconds for Penny's rocket locker to arrive. It took longer to clandestinely put on her flight module and install it, given that she was clinging for a few more hours to the fiction that it was a jetpack. Yang used the time to look at some maps and, with Blake and Weiss' assistance, sketch out the warehouse district writ large and the suspicious parts in specific.

Penny reviewed the data with them, deployed her wings, tilted fifteen degrees to get her preferred launch angle, and blasted off.

She cleared the rooftops of the city in the blink of an eye (not that Penny needed to blink except in the dustiest conditions, but Thesaurus insisted on using that idiom). As ever, the change in perspective from ground level to airborne was fascinating. The city stretched out below her in all directions, laid out haphazardly in no orderly patterns Penny could identify, and which in practice was crowded and snarled and drove people into roundabout paths instead of simple, direct ones. Up here was different. Up here, all paths were direct, and she could go where she needed to without interference or obstacle.

Things were simple when you could fly. Penny longed for that simplicity in the other parts of her life.

Enough of that. Penny was up here on a mission, not for the fun of it. She checked her dead-reckoned position against Yang's maps and concluded she was too far north and inland. Banking port while still climbing, Penny corkscrewed around to point towards the warehouse district.

There were seventy warehouses within the bounds Yang had drawn. Of those warehouses, forty were buttoned up tight to conceal all visibility within. Of those, four were drawing unusual amounts of power while also exhibiting cellular storage. Of those, only two warehouses had sliding-door vans in their vicinity, in addition to a third warehouse that had such a van but no cellular storage.

Three high-value candidates, then, and she could always expand her search if those didn't pan out.

Tactical noted that regardless of whether Penny ever made another friend, no one could deny that she was useful.

Penny wanted to take comfort from that fact, but she didn't. A broom was useful, but no one had any sort of emotional attachment to brooms. Useful wasn't enough.

Nope! She was too busy to think about things like that. Attaching a suspense timer to that line of thinking, Penny started her return flight to her team. As she went, she noted some activity around one of the sliding doors vans. She couldn't tell the specific activity at this altitude, and it would have been reckless to go lower. There seemed to be a transfer going on between the van and the warehouse—not of Dust or Dust paraphernalia, but perhaps of clothing.

Either way, this site had just leapt to the top of her candidate list.

She was back on the ground a few minutes later and relaying these findings. "Those might have been uniforms," said Blake. "Some members of the Fang don't have their own uniforms if they live in a place with too much surveillance. Loaner masks are pretty common, too."

"And we've got a good idea why they had to shuffle some uniforms around," said Yang. "At least one of them got their uniform bloody the other night. I bet it takes extra detergent to get blood out of clothes like that."

"You don't sound definite," said Weiss waspishly. "I find it hard to believe you never got your clothes bloody until now."

Yang grinned. "Not with my own blood."

"All of that qualifies as speculation," said Penny. "We will need to do close investigations first."

"You're right," said Blake. "Penny, mark the targets on this map and we'll plan the next step."

No Huntress needed to take buses around town.

Buses were convenient. Taking them saved effort and was less conspicuous. In a pinch, though, a trained Huntress could easily outrun cars moving at highway speeds. Aura, as ever, was such a hack.

They reduced their speed to pedestrian level as they approached the warehouse district. They didn't want to go into a dangerous place having already burned resources just getting there, so they took the last three minutes at a sedate pace while they caught their breaths and regenerated Aura.

The tension rose the deeper they got. Penny didn't detect anyone following them, but she saw half a dozen cameras that held her team in their field of view, and twice she passed people working in or around warehouses. There was no way to know how many of those people and cameras were paying BXPS any mind. Nor was there any way to know if anyone was tagging Yang's bracelets or the bulges under Penny's expansive sleeves as potential weapons.

Tactical warned her that its job was made harder when Yang was telling loud stories about things that had happened in their classes and the corridors between. "…so I said, Now that's a katana!" said Yang.

Weiss groaned. "I can't believe it took you ten minutes to get to that punchline."

"You should be glad I ended it there," said Yang with a grin. "I could've kept it going for another three minutes at least."

"Friend Yang," Penny said as Emotion Signifying choked her voice to convey her tension, "it is hard for me to remain alert when you're speaking so loudly."

Yang's voice got only slightly quieter. "That's because you're solving the wrong problem. You're not supposed to look alert. When you don't belong somewhere, the worst thing you can do is tell everyone, 'I don't belong here'."

"The voice of experience?" said Weiss.

"She's not wrong," said Blake, indicating her bow.

"The more nervous you look," said Yang, "the more other people think there's a reason why you're nervous. It's better to act casual, like of course you go there. Come on, haven't you ever heard the term 'fake it 'til you make it'?"

Jiminy raised multiple objections to that idea, even as higher consciousness was aware of how uncomfortably close to the truth it was.

"You can stay alert," said Yang, "just don't look like you're trying to stay alert. Which reminds me... Remember how Professor Port is always talking about vigilance? Some upperclassmen were telling me he likes to test his classes' vigilance sometimes. Wanna guess how he does that?"

Penny found it difficult to engage with banter like this; Tactical was hogging most of her system resources, leaving little for the other subroutines (and only scraps for Thesaurus). Still, she wanted to take Yang's advice, so she gave it a try.

All the while, every step took them deeper into danger.

As they neared their first target, they split into pairs with exaggerated goodbyes and see-you-laters. Blake and Weiss went one way that would allow Blake to look for distinctive White Fang markings. Penny and Yang went the other direction to take them past the warehouse's loading and unloading docks.

"Just so we're clear, I'm still angry at you for ditching me," said Yang brightly.

"I am sorry," said Penny, recalculating how many times she'd have to say that before it stuck. "I never meant to hurt you and I always meant to return."

"I know," said Yang. "Which is what's making it so hard to stay angry with you. It's actually kind of annoying, y'know?"

Penny didn't trust herself to respond to that.

Unluckily, there was someone standing on the docks above and behind the white van Penny had seen from the sky. It was a surly, middle-aged man smoking a cigarette and eying Penny warily.

Penny felt parts of her try to resist going forwards, to avoid this situation all together. Any challenge from the man on the docks would compel Penny to either reveal their intentions or try to force a lie past Jiminy, both of which were terrible outcomes. Several subroutines, Jiminy most fervently, recommended calling off the search, especially as a quick, subconsciously-ordered scan identified the man as a hidden Faunus.

Yang wouldn't let her go. She gave Penny a sort of check with her shoulder as she kept advancing. "We belong here, right?" she said.

"Right," said Penny, and hiccupped. They kept walking, even as the man on the loading dock stared at them. Penny could see him loading up to say something when Penny's scroll binged. Penny checked her internal chronometer and realized she knew who was calling without even looking.

Garnet's fifteen-minute check-in.

In a place where Penny could absolutely not talk about the investigation Garnet was calling about.

Penny froze with indecision.

"Aren't you gonna answer?" Yang said a little loudly.

"It's Garnet," hissed Penny. "What should I say to her?"

"You said you two were friends," said Yang. "Just talk to her like a friend."

What did Penny know about talking like a friend? She had the least friendship experience of anyone in this whole district! She'd only ever talked to Garnet about the exact investigation she was trying to hide!

Her scroll rang again, and Yang nudged her again, and Penny, with as much difficulty as if her myomer bundles were pulling in the wrong direction, brought her scroll to her face.

"Yes?" she said tepidly.

"Penny! Oh, good. I was starting to get worried, if you didn't answer I was gonna have to track you down by your scroll."

"I appreciate your concern, Friend Garnet," said Penny, "but I am fine for now."

"Oh, good."

"Wait, you can track me down by my scroll?"

"Pfft, like it's hard. Anyway, what's the latest?"

Thesaurus trialed several dozen ways to talk around the investigation without implying to the man on the docks that this was an investigation. None of them were satisfactory. With rising panic, Penny defaulted to more basic responses. "It is a lovely day today, isn't it?"

"Okay, that came out of nowhere."

"Not exactly nowhere," said Penny, still feeling the eyes of the man on the docks on her as she and Yang walked past. As her subroutines vomited up increasingly unhelpful suggestions, it was Jiminy, somehow, that put forth the most cogent one: Be honest. "Have you ever been in a position where you don't know what to say?"

"All the time," said Garnet. "I don't have a good relationship with words. Words are hard."

"I haven't studied much history," said Penny, "but I estimate that a fifth to a quarter of the bad things in history could have been prevented if people could talk to each other more effectively."

"I know even less history than you, so I'll take your word for it," said Garnett.

At last it felt like Penny had some control over the conversation, but as she tried to generate more words, a new sensory input crashed across her net and interrupted everything.

She smelled blood.

She whipped her head towards the loading dock before she could suppress the gesture. Yes, it was coming from there, and most probably from the van parked there.

Right next to the man who was taking a renewed interest in Penny.

Penny turned her head away and grabbed for any fragment of speech she could muster.

"Did I tell you about what happened in Professor Port's class?" said Penny with high desperation.

"I don't even know who Professor Port is."

There was a story here that Penny was supposed to tell, but all of the details had escaped her and none of the memories were tagged with any importance and anyway with Retrieval as resource-starved as it was she wouldn't have been able to find the right words in any event, so she just grabbed another snippet from short term memory.

"So Yang said, Now that's a katana!"

Garnet's confusion was audible. Penny could picture her friend cocking her head in that curious way she did. "What was weird about that?"

"That is an excellent question," said Penny almost manically.

"Was it not actually a katana?"

"That's a good point," said Penny, latching onto the subject with the speed, force, and insistence of a magnet smacking into metal. "I find that most times people use the word "katana", it's not for a katana at all."

"I know, right?" said Garnet. "If the blade's straight…"

"Or it's double-edged…" said Penny.

"And if it's shorter than seventy centimeters or longer than one-twenty…"

"…it's not a katana!"

"Finally," said Garnet, "someone who gets it!"

Penny and Yang were well past the loading dock now, and a ping from Penny's other sensors suggested she was in the clear. The man on the dock seemed to have lost interest in them; he was stomping out his cigarette while digging into a pocket.

A great deal of tension left Penny all at once. "Thank you, Friend Garnet," said Penny.

"You're welcome! Wait, what did I do?"

"You held a conversation with me on harmless topics," said Penny.

"Okay, this is easily the most bizarre call I've ever been on."

"I'll explain it to you later," said Penny.

"I'm guessing this will all make sense eventually?"

"I can't make that promise," said Penny, "but I will do my best."

"Good enough."

The call ended. Penny lowered her scroll and replaced it in her pocket. As she and Yang rounded the corner, she looked at her teammate to see her bursting with laughter.

"Penny," said Yang, "my sweet summer child, we have got to work on your improv skills."

The two pairs of students reconvened two blocks away from the target warehouse in the shadow of several idle train cars parked on a side track. Free from the pressure of having to act casual, the team compared notes.

"The van smelled of blood," said Penny. "The warehouse is so secure the smell could not have come from it, only from the van."

"The warehouse had heavy duty power lines going into it," said Weiss. "The sort you'd need if you were running Dust conversion machines inside that weren't part of the original installation."

"Which you're familiar with because of your experience with that equipment, right?" said Penny.

"Hardly. I've seen administrative paperwork for warehouses, but I'd never been to one. I'm sure that if I had I would have noticed some things sooner," she said with a nod in Blake's direction. "But I was paying attention during our walk in. While Yang was yammering on with her inane babble…"

"Camouflage," said Yang.

"…I was mentally noting each warehouse's utility draws. Our target has them all beat by a large margin."

"We saw a guy on the loading dock," said Yang. "Yeah, he's totally a sentry. He had a whole pile of cigarette butts next to him. If that was a place where everyone went to smoke, they'd have set up some kind of ashtray or trash can by now. But it's just the one guy puffing away while he's bored and nervous. Fifty lien says he's going through a whole pack while he's standing there keeping watch. Legit businesses don't post sentries, especially ones who aren't supposed to look like sentries."

Penny hesitated as she tried to weigh whether or not to speak. Blake must have picked up on her discomfort. "What is it, Penny?"

"It might not be appropriate to say," said Penny.

"We need all the information we can get," said Blake. "Appropriate or not."

Penny logged the words in case she needed to repeat them back. "That man, sentry or otherwise, was a Faunus trying to pass as human."

Blake flinched as Penny had feared she might. "I'm sorry," said Penny. "I should not have spoken."

Blake took a breath. "It might matter," she said, though her voice sounded awfully thin. "Are you sure? How could you tell?"

"I can always tell," said Penny, and it was extremely unnerving both to know and to say.

Blake sighed. "I believe you. The warehouse bears a White Fang mark. You can't tell just by looking how old the mark is, or why it was made, but with all of this together, we've got a pretty good idea."

"Is this the target?" Penny said eagerly.

"All the signs are there," said Blake. "We still can't say for certain, though. Not without seeing the inside."

"Piece of cake," said Yang. "We'll grab one of the trucks in the parking lot. I'm sure Blake can hotwire it, and I can drive it. We'll say we're making a delivery, except that the 'delivery' is all muscle!"

Penny gasped. "Because a bicep is a muscle!"

"Not the time for puns," said Blake.

"Hold on," said Weiss. "We said we were going to do an investigation, and we have. This is more than enough evidence to hand over to whichever authorities we trust most. But you jumped headfirst into crime! Now you're talking about grand theft auto, perfidy, and trespassing. That's way beyond what we can justify with curiosity and provisional licenses."

"But if we report this," Yang said, "and word gets back to the bad guys about it, how long do you think it takes them to bail out? We'd be back to square one."

"I still—"

"Wait," said Blake. She turned her head, clearly (to Penny, at least) angling her ears and aiming her hearing.

Penny knew why at almost the same time, her extra senses giving her the heads-up she needed. "We have incoming," she said quietly.

Yang raised her hands into a fighting pose and quirked an eyebrow, silently asking if Blake wanted her to draw her weapons. To Penny's silent surprise, and Weiss' vocal surprise, Blake shook her head.

"Good morning, girls," said a voice rounding the corner. The voice belonged to a tall, muscular brunette woman in a uniform that looked almost but not quite like VPD. There was no name tag, for starters. "How are we today?"

Penny was not fooled by the casual tone. The woman was resting her hand on her hip just above her holstered sidearm, and Penny detected two other people moving into position while the not-cop had her team's attention.

"We are doing just fine, thank you," said Penny, which was true enough for Jiminy.

"Are you sure?" said the not-cop. "You seem like you might be lost, wandering around on private property and all that."

"Not lost, touring," said Weiss with dignity Penny found striking. "None of us are from around here, so we like to walk around and see the sights."

The not-cop looked Weiss over, taking in her eyes and hair. "You're a Schnee, aren't you?"

"What if I am?" said Weiss.

"It's… interesting," said the not-cop. "This doesn't seem like your sort of neighborhood."

"I find novelty appealing," Weiss said.

The not-cop did not look impressed by this argument. The woman looked like she was devoting her cycles to Analysis for several more seconds, before saying, "You know, I don't believe you kids. You look like you were up to trouble."

"We won't be if you let this slide, Officer," said Yang.

"I don't think so," said the not-cop. She whistled sharply. As Penny had predicted, two more people joined the scene; one was on top of the train car looking down at them, the other coming around from the rear of the car. Both had drawn guns, and not simple pistols either, but heavy-looking submachine guns.

"I'm gonna need to bring you kids in so you can answer a few questions," said the not-cop.

"You make it sound so easy," said Yang. Penny could feel her teammate flexing her Aura. She wondered if the not-cop could.

To Penny's shock, Blake stepped in front of Yang, looking squarely at the not-cop. "So, you're taking us into the Centinels' nest, aren't you?"

Penny's subroutines returned 'no content' warnings; Weiss and Yang shifted uncertainly.

"If you wanna put it that way," said the not-cop. "Now, I suggest you come quietly. Hands up."

Blake raised her hands, but just before they reached their peak, her right flashed into a novel shape.

No—not novel. Thesaurus found it. That was a Huntress handsign.

Follow.

Analysis made the connection. Into the Centinels' nest. They'd studied Centinels in class. The important point, they'd had drummed into them, was to destroy the nest. If you just destroyed the Centinels you found, and even if you collapsed the tunnels they dug, you just set yourself up for future disaster, because as long as the nest was intact, they'd keep coming, more numerous and insidious each time.

To truly solve the problem, you had to trace the Centinels' tunnels back to the nest and purge it.

Follow.

Blake was going in.

BXPS followed.

They were halfway back to the target warehouse when Penny's scroll rang again. "You don't need to answer that," said the not-cop.

"I think you're right," said Penny truthfully. When Blake gave her a curious look, Penny smiled and made a few more rapid handsigns. Understanding dawned. Penny's scroll went through two cycles of rings, then it went silent and stayed that way.

The trip back towards the warehouse was quieter than their other walks. Partly this was because Yang, apparently not feeling the need for camouflage anymore, was staying silent. It took Analysis some time to determine the other cause: no people were out and about. The few people who had been working outside of warehouses during the infiltration had vanished. It was just BXPS and their escorts.

Penny was unsure what that meant, but it felt ominous.

The not-cop led them to a warehouse personnel door just past the loading docks. The sentry was still there, yet another cigarette in his hand. "See, I told you there was something up with them," he said.

"We'll see," was the answer. "One of them's a Schnee, I bet the boss finds that real interesting."

The sentry grunted but opened the door for them. As they entered the warehouse, Penny peered deeper into the building for any intelligence she could gather. The warehouse, as she'd seen from above, was cellular. There was one main hallway down the length of the building. To either side in a checkerboard pattern were enclosed storage spaces with walls that went up to the ceiling. Presumably, those were for Dust storage. No two cells touched, but were separated by more conventional storage spaces with mundane crates sitting on ordinary shelves.

Before Penny could see any more, the not-cop made a sharp turn away from the interior, and one of her associates prodded Penny in the back with the barrel of a submachine gun. They were being led towards the office area at the front of the warehouse instead of into the storage spaces.

A few people at desks noticed the team and stared as they entered. Penny identified all three as Faunus. Unwilling as she was to imbue that with meaning under other circumstances, the team's suspicion that this was a White Fang operation changed that calculus. They didn't look armed, at least.

BXPS was led towards the biggest office in the area, one which boasted its own door, on which the not-cop knocked. "Hey, Supe, I found something interesting."

At a muffled yell from inside, the not-cop opened the door and led BXPS through. Two more people were there, apparently having been deep in conversation over some paperwork, but all attention went to BXPS as they entered.

"I found these kids snooping about the warehouse," said the not-cop. "Thought they were being clever and subtle while sneaking around. What do you want to do with them?"

The man sitting behind the desk stared intensely at the team. His eyes drifted down to Yang's wrists, where they focused for several seconds, then went wide with fear. "You idiots, you shouldn't have brought them here! These are Huntresses—"

"Now!" said Blake.

Penny whirled on the spot, shouldering the submachine gun against her back out of alignment before following with a punch to the solar plexus. When there was neither resistance nor Aura shimmer, Penny dialed her Power setting from Three down to Two before throwing the gunman against the wall. A body-shaped impression was knocked in the drywall, while the gunman's head found a support beam to knock against.

He fell limply to the ground.

Penny turned to help her team, but it was already over. Yang had handled two of them, Weiss was lording over a terrified office worker, and Blake had the supervisor pinned uncomfortably to the ground with his arm behind his back and just enough pressure applied for him to feel it.

"What's the White Fang doing here?" said Blake in her most demanding voice.

"Wouldn't you like to know?" said the supervisor.

Blake applied a little more pressure. The supervisor swore and started swatting the ground with his free hand.

"I would like to know, actually," Blake said. "What's the White Fang doing here?"

"This is a warehouse, what do you think? Ow, ow, ow!"

"What are they storing?" Blake said.

"I don't know, it's just freight to me, I'm not involved!"

"I believe you," said Blake, "but I can't have you calling for help."

"May I?" said Penny. When Blake nodded, Penny knelt down, swapped to infrared for precision, reached to the supervisor's neck, and squeezed.

Before Blake's cry of alarm became coherent, the supervisor passed out; Penny released him and his head thunked against the floor.

"I didn't want you to hurt him!" said Blake, shooting to her feet.

"I did not," said Penny, verifying that he was still breathing. "I performed a blood choke. It was the method least likely to cause lasting harm."

"I've been trained on those, too," said Yang with an unexpected scowl, "and they can go really wrong really quick. I was taught never to use one unless I was willing to risk the victim dying."

Distress seized Penny. "That is… not…"

"Ladies," interrupted Weiss, "may I remind you that we are way, way behind enemy lines right now?"

Blake shot one last nasty look at Penny before her face went neutral. "Right. Yang, we'll need our weapons."

She grabbed her scroll and pushed a button. "Incoming."

"Weiss, now you may call VPD."

"Finally!"

"Penny, how long until your reinforcements arrive?"

"Uncertain. I don't have Garnet's number. I would presume she's less than fifteen minutes away because that's the length of her check-in interval. Therefore, seven minutes or fewer."

"Right," said Blake. "Our goal is containment. We want everyone who's here now to still be here when…"

An alarm blared in the main warehouse.

Yang looked behind them into the office area. "Shit, the office hacks! They bailed when they saw us draw!"

"Change of plans," said Blake as she walked to the office door. "Hold out until help arrives."

Penny saw movement through the office windows looking into the main warehouse. Movement that made Tactical send three alarms in rapid succession.

"Down!" she called, tackling Weiss herself.

0.4 seconds later, the first bullets shattered the office windows.

Neopolitan was bored out of her skull.

She understood Roman's instructions, she knew why he'd set it up this way. He didn't trust these White Fang loonies either to manage or to guard the warehouse effectively, which meant one of Neo or Roman had to be there full-time. Since he preferred to operate at night so he could oversee the robberies, that stuck Neo on day shift.

Which was booooring.

At least Roman had the option to go with the robbers when he got stir-crazy; Neo didn't. She would have been fine on day shift if Roman was, too, because being around him was always fun, and he understood her without ever trying to change her. The perfect man, in many ways.

Present company did not qualify.

A hulking Faunus who was always in a sleeveless version of the White Fang uniform, complete with crude, oversized weapon on his back, stalked through the warehouse, yelling instructions seemingly at random. "No," he was hollering now, "seal the crate before you unseal the cell. And why do you have two cells open? No more than one cell open at a time! Do you idiots want to be blown to the moon?"

Neo held out faint hope that there would be some kind of accident. It would be interesting, at least.

Oh, but much more interesting was the alarm. And the three out-of-breath dorks in office casual that were running towards the White Fang doofus.

"Banesaw! We… we got intruders," one of them gasped. "Maybe a Huntress!"

Neo's boredom evaporated. The White Fang goober—Banesaw or whatever—turned towards her. "Are you ready to fight?"

Neo pocketed her scroll, grabbed her parasol, and hopped down from the crate she'd been sitting on. A humorless smile split her face. It'd been so long (almost forty hours!) since she'd been able to hurt someone.

She was going to enjoy this.

Next time: Force of Nature