There was quiet in Team BXPS' dorm the next morning.

Not a comfortable quiet. It was like the gap between lightning flash and thunder roll—a fleeting moment between two expressions of violence.

"Now that I've had a night to think about this," said Weiss, "let me see if I have it all straight. You, Blake Belladonna, were in or around the White Fang your entire life. The reason you can fight well enough to get into Beacon Academy is because you were raised to be an actual child terrorist."

"Freedom fighter," Blake corrected weakly.

"But the Fang got too extreme for you, so you ran off to become a Huntress," Weiss continued, "even as your old comrades try to drag you back in. The Fang wasn't too extreme when it was attacking mining sites, killing mining site personnel, or executing members of my extended family. It only got too extreme for you… what, when blowing up people at random became the new M.O.?"

"We never…" Blake shut her mouth, clenched her hand until her Aura shimmered, regulated her breathing. "I'm not going to defend what the White Fang has become or the role I played in it, but I won't apologize for being a member for as long as I was."

"I wasn't asking you to," said Weiss. "I was trying to get the full picture. It's given me a lot to think about."

"It has?" said Blake in mild surprise.

"About complicity," said Weiss, eyes unfocused and distant. "About being part of something you think is admirable, even as it... gets away from you. As it turns out to not be half as admirable as you'd thought."

"Look, I'm glad you told us this," said Yang, "but I don't see what any of this has to do with Penny."

"I don't think any of this has to do with Penny," said Blake.

"Yeah? Then why was she coming out of the same Dust shop we were going into? The same Dust shop where she and I beat up some crooks a few nights before Initiation?"

"I honestly have no idea why she was there," said Blake.

Yang crossed her arms. Both her irises and the whites of her eyes were red: the irises from her anger, but the whites from her frustration and lack of sleep.

"Well," said Weiss, "why did we go to that Dust shop? You said your contact was someone in the White Fang, and they wanted to warn you the Fang was still after you, right?"

"More than that," said Blake. "He wanted me to know that he agrees with me. We both think the Vale Branch is out of control and up to something a lot more dangerous."

"Like knocking over Dust shops?" said Weiss. "That seems pretty petty to me, if it even was the White Fang that did it."

"It's a change in behavior," said Blake. "The White Fang needs Dust to operate, of course, but we usually got all we needed from attacks on the SDC. Panzoa knows we had enough other reasons to go after the SDC."

"Panzo- what now?" said Weiss.

Blake blushed. "It's not important. The point is, we never attacked a Dust store unless it was grossly discriminatory and we needed to teach a lesson. This is a new policy, which means something's changed. There's some new goal, some new idea driving them, and I don't know what it is."

Weiss looked as perturbed by this as Blake felt. "Yang, what do you think?"

"I think," said Yang without making eye contact, "that if Penny is mucking around in White Fang business, especially if she doesn't know it's the White Fang she's messing with, then she's in more trouble than ever. And I'm done waiting for her. Things have gotten too real. I'm calling her."

Weiss went to object, but Blake spoke first. "That's a good idea. We need to get ahead of this and understand where we all are."

"Alright," said Yang, surprised by Blake's decision but grateful for it. "Here we go."


Yang was calling Penny.

Penny wanted to pick up, wanted to hear from her friend again, wanted her to not be panicking over whether Penny could be reached.

At the same time, Penny didn't trust herself with how that conversation would go. She needed more information. New plan: she would let Yang leave a message and judge the next step from there.

The call timed out, but Yang didn't leave a message. Instead, she hung up, and then immediately called back.

Penny judged that Yang had chosen the next step for them. She picked up. "Hello, Friend Yang."

"Are you alright?"

Penny smiled. "I am cheered that you think so much about my welfare."

"Of course I do, you're… look, you're staying away from us, but we've seen you out in Vale. What's up with that?"

Penny's cheer died. She was caught—caught between a truth she didn't dare say, especially like this, and lies Jiminy wouldn't permit and that Yang wouldn't believe anyway.

"I'm sorry," was all she could manage.

"I don't want your apologies," said Yang with more heat than ever. "I want to know you're okay. Something's wrong, I know it, and you're…"

Yang sucked in a breath.

"…you're going away."

Penny could hear the import of those words. Even if she didn't know what they meant to Yang, she could feel how loaded they were.

"I promise you, it's nothing about you or Team BXPS," said Penny. "It's… something about me. Until I know…"

"If it's safe, I remember," said Yang impatiently. "But I still don't know what that means, and you won't tell me!"

Penny lowered the scroll from her ear.

This was the damage her keeping secrets had wrought. She'd been worried about what would happen if she told her secret. She hadn't appreciated the damage not telling the secret would do.

The bus she was riding in came to a stop, and the jolt shook Penny from her thoughts. Even if it was time for big reveals, she couldn't do it here, now, like this—down in Vale City, in public, talking over a scroll. This was a serious discussion, one she knew she could only have face-to-face and in private.

Plus, she was already on her way to another Dust store, trying to gather more information for her new investigation, and Friend Garnet was supposed to meet her there. She couldn't just abandon Garnet!

Oh. That was a thought: if she couldn't leave Garnet to tend to her team, then maybe she could bring her team to where she was meeting Garnet!

"Hello?"

She raised her scroll back to her ear. "I am okay for the time being. I'm actually conducting an investigation, which is very exciting, and I—honestly, I need your help."

"No kidding," said Yang.

"I should have asked sooner," Penny said contritely, "but when I have said all there is to say, you will understand my hesitation."

"Sure? I mean, what's one more seismic shift to my world at this point? Penny, I… I just…"

Yang didn't sound angry anymore, and that somehow made Penny feel worse. "Friend Yang, I won't stay away from you. I never wanted to. Can you meet me down in the city? Then you might understand."

"…sure. Shoot me the address."

Penny did, and when she received a promise from Yang that BX_S would be there shortly, she felt a new, unexpected calm come over her. She was going to stop hiding things from her teammates at last.

She'd expected to feel more fear, and it took Analysis two minutes longer to figure out why.

Even in the worst-case scenario where her teammates rejected her for being a gynoid with limited control of her own thoughts, she would still have other friends. She'd still have Jaune, who'd given his word he'd always be her friend, and Garnet, who understood her in a way few others did.

Of course she preferred the maximum number of friends, but either way, she would survive.

It was a bracing thought, and with it in mind, she dared to hope.


"Well?" said Blake.

"It's the address of another Dust store," said Weiss as the three ladies stepped onboard the ferry airship down to Vale City. "In the same genre as the last one, about the same size and inventories. Lower reviews, but that seems to be a judgement on the employees, not the store."

"And it just turned up on the VPD crime blotter," said Yang. "Looks like it got hit the night after From Dust Till Dawn." Yang winced. "Robbery wasn't the only crime, though. Looks like the night-shift employee got the bright idea to try and stop the robbers and got shot up for his trouble. He should have left the heroism stuff to us, right?"

Blake's feelings on the matter were too complex to unpack and explore with Yang. "Anything else in that report?"

"One thing else. It looks like these stores have been getting hit every few nights."

"With the result that Dust prices here in Vale are up 15% in a month," said Weiss. "It hasn't moved the international markets yet, though. Just the local ones. That might change if this keeps up."

"I still don't know what anyone would need this much Dust for," said Blake.

"Maybe we're over-thinking it," said Weiss. "Maybe the whole point is to drive up prices so they can sell the Dust back at higher rates."

"You mean basically what the SDC does?" said Blake keenly.

"I have no defense."

"Dust is super easy to fence," said Yang. "There's no way to track where it came from or how it got to you."

"So you two think it could be common criminals after all," said Blake.

"It could be White Fang," said Yang with a shrug. "It could be common criminals. It could be an unusually intelligent grimm."

"Don't joke about things like that," said Weiss.

"The point is, we can't prove anything with the info we've got," said Yang.

"I should point out here," said Weiss, "that it's not our job to prove anything. Some of us have already gotten in trouble for vigilante behavior, meaning we're already on Professor Goodwitch's watch list."

"If you're waiting for me to apologize, don't bother," said Yang.

"I would never think so highly of you. Regardless, the point stands. This is a matter for the proper authorities, not for us."

"Yeah, because the 'proper authorities' have done such a bang-up job so far," sassed Yang.

Blake took heavy breaths, trying to steady herself. "It might not matter to you, but it does to me. The White Fang won't stop looking for me just because I ignore it. And honestly? I don't think I could stay away from this fight for long. Not with the White Fang going in this direction, and getting worse every day.

"You said the police already have all the information," she went on. "But that's not true. They don't have me."

"Then go to the police," said Weiss. "Tell them what you know."

Breathe, two, three, four, out, two, three, four. "Okay, Weiss, I know you made that recommendation out of ignorance, so I'll just tell you that going to the police is about the stupidest thing that a lone, young Faunus can do."

Weiss looked more troubled than ever, like she had no idea why Blake had said that and was disturbed by the possibilities. Of course. Weiss had been raised amongst institutions that preserved the status quo. Her family's wealth and power relied on those institutions. They had always served her interests. She'd never conceived of the possibility they could do harm.

"Headmaster Ozpin, then," Weiss suggested. "He's not the police, but he still has the power to act on your information, and he made you team leader, so he must see something in you that he likes."

That was a better argument, but Blake still hesitated. Once burned, twice shy. "Maybe," she said ambivalently, "after we get more information and know what we're up against. For now, I need to know how to protect myself and my people's reputation. For now, this is just me."

"And me," said Yang, without even a hint of hesitation.

Weiss did hesitate, but she nodded, too. "I swore I'd learn how to be a good follower. Where you go, I'll go, too."

Blake felt a great weight lift off her shoulders. Was it really gone? No, she realized—she just had other shoulders helping her to carry it. That was better.

"Okay," she said. "Let's go meet Penny and see where we are."


In broad strokes, the plight of Dust Works was the same as From Dust Till Dawn. One door completely removed, every speck of Dust except possibly Plant stolen, but no signs that any other merchandise or money had been taken.

The particulars were a little different. Dust Works wasn't a stand-alone building, but the corner store at the end of a line. It wasn't the front door which had been removed, but a side door that functioned as a fire escape. Penny wondered about that. Her understanding of building codes was incomplete, but she had opened a fire escape in one of Beacon's schoolhouses while seeking more efficient routes around campus, and the resulting alarm had frightened her until it was reset by a stern but understanding Professor Goodwitch.

An alarm like that should have drawn much attention to the robbery, potentially thwarting it. What had happened? The police report was silent on the matter.

"Penny!"

Penny felt elation rising within her. "Hello, friends," she said as her team approached.

"Do you still think of us that way?" said Weiss warily.

"Indeed I do," said Penny. "I never thought any less of you. My concerns were wholly about myself. But we will speak more on that later, because we have an investigation to conduct!"

"You stay away from us for three whole days," Yang said, voice thick with emotion, "and now you want to act like nothing happened?!"

Penny could hear the hurt in Yang's voice. She never wanted Yang to sound like that again. "Yang, my first friend, I owe you a deep apology. I promise to explain everything once we're up at Beacon, with privacy and time. I am incapable of breaking that promise."

"Sure you are," muttered Yang.

Thesaurus couldn't tell if that was affirmation or its opposite; higher consciousness had to disregard. "While we're here, though, we should conduct our investigation as planned. It is urgent, clues tend to fade over time."

All Huntresses, Penny knew, were trained on how to compartmentalize. Emotional matters could be held separate from tactical concerns, and tactical concerns given priority, in crisis situations. Anyone who fought the grimm had to be able to do this, or the one would compromise the other.

Penny could compartmentalize by her nature; Yang, she knew, could do so by her training.

Even if she didn't want to.

Yang looked away; she didn't seem mollified at all. After long seconds, she huffed, "Fine. Let's get this over with."

"We cannot go in," Penny said before her teammates could step towards the front door. "There are employees inside inventorying what goods remain. I asked them earlier if I could go inside, and they… said no."

Specifically, they'd told her to go away using terms neither Thesaurus nor Jiminy would have ever let Penny use.

"That's okay," said Blake to Penny's surprise. "Let's go down the side-street towards the open doorway. That's where the action was."

They stopped a respectful distance away, not wanting to chance another argument with the employees. The doorway was marked off with police tape; the door itself was nowhere to be found.

"That is something I found curious," said Penny. "Why didn't the door alarm?"

"Because the alarm's been disabled," said Blake. "I can tell that from here. Any White Fang recruit who's been in for more than three months can disable a cheap fire alarm, and these people sure didn't spring for an expensive one."

"If alarms are that easy to bypass, couldn't anyone have done it, not just the Fang?" said Yang.

"Maybe," said Blake as she kept on walking down the side street, "which is why I need to be sure."

She didn't elaborate, and her team followed in various degrees of bewilderment as she walked further down the side street. As she approached another establishment's side door, she said, "No, no, too far. If they were marking the Dust shop it would be closer…"

She retraced her steps, looking intensely at the wall. She was about halfway back to the open doorway when she stopped. "There it is," she breathed. She pointed to a set of dark smudges on the wall that barely stood out against the general grime. "This may look like a set of Beowolf claw marks, but it's actually a targeting mark used by the White Fang."

Penny felt like her mind was stretching, like she had more capacity for taking in and processing data than she'd had before.

"Real claw marks would all be aligned," Blake went on. "But see how the bottom mark here is offset to the right? That means the target is the building with its door to the right of the mark. A White Fang team put this here to ID their target before the robbery."

Penny vacuumed this new information up. Information on threat organizations had absolute priority for ingestion and retention.

"It's clever, I suppose," said Weiss, "but that seems like a lot of trouble. Everyone has a scroll these days. Couldn't they send the address electronically and use the navigation in their scrolls?"

"If scrolls were secure, we… they would. But the Kingdoms, and especially Atlas, have access to all traffic that passes through the CCT system. Atlas has programs designed to sniff out suspicious messages. The White Fang learned. Now it keeps as much information as possible off the network. Older methods like this are slower but safer."

"This was the White Fang, then," said Penny.

"It sure looks that way," said Blake.

"You kids still lurking?"

One of the store's employees was ducking under the police tape into the side street, a garbage bag in his hands. "This isn't some peep show," he said gruffly as he walked to the dumpster with his bag. "My shop getting sacked isn't for you clowns' entertainment. Now buzz off before I call the cops."

"Excuse me, sir," said Penny, "but what's that smell?"

"It's a dumpster," the man said with the slow contempt of someone saying the obvious.

"No, sir, I mean the smell coming from your bag. I smelled it coming from your shop earlier, but could not place it. It's much stronger now."

"That would be blood," he said quietly.

"Oh," Penny said, suddenly sorry for prying.

"Stupid kid thought he'd be the hero and stop them," the man said as he put the trash bag into the dumpster and closed it again. "If he'd just cooperated…"

Penny felt a surge of pity within her, but there was no way to express this, because the man appeared to have lost his concern for Team BXPS. With unfocused eyes and self-directed mutters, he ducked back under the police tape and reentered his store.

Tactical informed Penny that she was the center of attention. She turned back to her team and saw three sets of eyes staring at her. "What is it?" she asked.

"I thought you didn't have a sense of smell," said Weiss.

"I… don't?" said Penny, no longer sure of that answer.

"You literally just said you smelled blood," said Weiss.

Yes, and a system query showed that Penny had been speaking the truth. "It appears I can smell blood, and perhaps only blood."

"Well," said Yang, "that's seriously disturbing on a number of levels."

"Three levels, by my count," said Weiss.

"Hold that thought," said Blake, curious. "Penny, is the smell anywhere other than the dumpster and the shop? If it is, that means a member of the Fang got blood on them."

"I will check," said Penny. Now that she understood what she was detecting (and how smell worked), she reallocated sensory perception to focus on this alone. The directionality of smell was poorer than she'd hoped. She rotated in place, looking for… oh. Yes, there. Leading up the side street.

She opened her eyes and started walking, following the smell. The team fell into place behind her. On she walked, walked, walked… and reached the end of the side street and stopped.

"It goes no further than this," she said.

"That's it?" said Blake.

"It makes sense," said Yang. "How suspicious would a bunch of guys in uniform carrying big cases of Dust look? I'm guessing they all piled into a van or truck and went from there. That's why the smell cuts off. They took a vehicle the rest of the way."

"Great," pouted Weiss, "our big lead took us all of one street before a dead end."

"Let's get out of public," Blake said, backing the team onto the side street again and away from curious eyes. Her brow was knit; Penny wasn't sure how that freed more cycles for Blake's analysis routines, but she'd seen meat people make that expression often enough to believe it did something.

"All this Dust they're stealing? It has to go somewhere," said Blake. "Normally, the White Fang sets up lots of small caches for Dust and weapons. That way, no single bust or betrayal can disarm the cell. But this much Dust is more than the White Fang has ever stolen before. They've got something bigger in mind, something that means the usual strategy won't work. I bet they're pulling it all together and concentrating it somewhere in the city."

"Like a warehouse?" said Yang.

"Some sort of proper storage facility," said Weiss. "Remember, they're stealing granular Dust as well as crystals, they'll want to take precautions. Either they have a facility for converting it to crystals, or they have a large and dedicated holding facility with proper safeguards."

"So, a warehouse," Yang said again.

"I suppose that would do," said Weiss skeptically, "but that's not much to go on. How many warehouses are there in Vale?"

"Plenty," said Yang, "but if you're looking for the shady ones, those are mostly in the southwest near the ocean."

"Dare I ask how you know which warehouses are the shady ones?" said Weiss.

"You probably shouldn't. The point is, if you add up all the warehouses in Vale, and cut out all the ones that are too public for crooks to use, you get rid of maybe two out of three. That leaves a reasonable number for the four of us to search."

"Not to be the voice of reason, again," said Weiss, "but firstly, it's not all four of us who can do the search. It's two, because only Blake knows the White Fang and only Penny can smell the blood, and we have no other clues. Plus, if these really are criminals, then by definition they've got firepower and won't hesitate to use it on nosey trainees like us, because we will look seriously suspicious snooping around down there."

"So we need to narrow it down more," said Blake. "Focus our search so there's less ground to cover and less chance of discovery. Does a Dust storage warehouse look different from warehouses that store other things?"

"Not necessarily," said Weiss. "If you had the budget, you'd use a warehouse with cellular storage and a perforated roof, built so that a Dust explosion gets channeled safely upwards instead of laterally to start a chain reaction. The most important things, though, are having the Dust in stable form, using shock-proof cases and crates, and handling it all safely, and you can't see those things from the outside."

"Forgive my ignorance," said Penny, "but do many people work at warehouses?"

"Not usually, and especially not at night," said Weiss. "The whole point of warehouses is keeping things in storage long-term and efficiently. You don't need many people around to do that."

"Except that a bunch of people will be at the warehouse we want," said Yang. "They're bringing in so much Dust, they'll need people to process and store it, and at weird hours compared to the legit warehouses."

"Sure," said Weiss, "but how are we going to tell which warehouses have people in them? I don't think any of us can see through walls."

"Only at very close range," Penny said apologetically.

Uh oh. They were staring again.

"There is my jetpack," Penny said by way of diversion. "I can search large areas faster and with less chance of discovery."

"And less fidelity," countered Weiss. "I don't know how close you have to be to smell things, but I doubt it works from any altitude."

"That is true," said Penny, gaze dropping. She'd been so sure she had something to offer the group beyond more frustration.

"You're looking for the ones who did this?"

BXPS' eyes looked up. The shopkeeper was poking his head out of his shop again, an intense look on his face.

"Yes," said Blake. "We want to stop these raids."

The man gave a small headshake. "You're just kids, though."

"Excuse me," said Penny mildly, "but we're more formidable than we appear."

Penny's teammates glanced at her, then nodded in unison.

The man looked at them a moment longer, as if measuring them with his eyes, before he huffed. "If I help you, will you promise not to run off and get yourself killed?"

"It would take very much to harm us," said Penny.

The man looked down, like something was pulling him towards the pavement. "I… I just can't get over how that… that kid, blown away just because he…" The man shuddered. "I can give you the shop's security footage. Only one camera got anything, and it didn't see much, those… animals were all in those stupid uniforms…"

Blake flinched at the slur, but rallied. "It's better than nothing."

She stepped forward, holding up her scroll. The man mirrored her, and a few seconds later they'd transferred the file.

Blake stepped away, hesitated, then firmed her face and reached up. She pulled her bow up—enough to reveal the ears beneath.

The man sucked in a breath.

"We're not animals," said Blake, her voice trembling. "We're people. And, like all people… some of us make mistakes. But I'll try to make those mistakes right."

The man had gone very pale, but he nodded with some difficulty. "Good luck."

The man reentered the store without another word nor backwards glance. "I hope he feels better," said Penny.

"He'll probably feel better if we can crack this," said Yang. "So let's open it up and see what we've got."

Blake obliged, swapping her scroll over to projector mode so they could all see. There was no audio, and the clip was very short. It showed part of a vehicle pulling up outside the shop, visible through the front windows. At the same time, someone in White Fang livery appeared in the bottom of the camera's field of view with a pistol in hand. The pistol pointed at the camera and the feed ended.

"Sloppy," said Blake. "In an op like this, you're supposed to cut security feeds before you or your transport enter their field of view. These thieves mostly did that, which is why none of the other cameras have any decent footage, but they messed up the timing on this one."

"I don't see what that gains us, though," said Weiss. "Other than the White Fang uniforms, what else do we see?"

"Their getaway vehicle," said Yang. "Can you go back to just before the bad guy enters the picture?"

Blake obliged. Yang peered closely before saying, "I couldn't tell you the make or model, but that's definitely a sixteen-passenger van with slide-panel doors, and probably painted white."

"You know from cars?" said Blake with mild surprise.

"I built my motorcycle from parts," Yang said, which Penny found very impressive. "I know a thing or two about cars."

"Great," said Weiss with false cheeriness that made Thesaurus stumble, "because surely there aren't dozens of vans just like that one in this city."

"I'm sure there are," said Penny, "but instead of searching for that van specifically, we can use it as a search parameter."

Her teammates looked expectantly at her, and Penny felt pride swelling up. "I have compiled everyone's contributions to this discussion into a single search set. We are looking for a warehouse in the 'shady' district that Yang defines, potentially with cellular storage, that is either closed to all visibility or has shock-proof Dust crates in or around it, that is active especially at night, with one or more vans of this type in its vicinity.

"Searching for any one of those things would return too many possibilities, but searching for all these things at once narrows the field."

"And you think you can do the initial survey with your jetpack?" said Blake.

"In a matter of minutes," said Penny. "Once we've identified candidate warehouses, then your knowledge of White Fang procedure and my extraordinary senses can focus on probing only those candidates."

Yang cracked her knuckles. "And then we go bust some heads, am I right?"

"We'll see what it looks like then," said Blake. Blake set her shoulders, and there was a new and unusual firmness to her posture. "Okay, team. We'll get to the bottom of this. Whatever needs this much stolen Dust can't be a good thing, which makes it exactly the sort of problem Huntresses need to resolve. Let's go be Huntresses."

As her teammates made affirmations, Penny felt vindication. Division of labor was powerful. Her team did know more as a collective than as individuals. This was how she could tackle any problem—not alone, but together.

Anything that pushed her team apart she had to despise. Including secrecy. Maybe especially secrecy.

"Outstanding," said Penny. "When Friend Garnet contacts me, I will update her on our progress."

Her teammates looked at her in surprise again. Penny had expected that this gesture would become less uncomfortable over time, or at least less frequent, but she continued to be wrong. "Who's Garnet?" said Yang.

"A friend I met yesterday," said Penny. "She and I worked the first steps of this investigation together. I had intended to continue with her today."

"And you trust her?" said Weiss.

Penny cocked her head. "Is there a reason I should not trust her?"

Blake looked up. "That's about the most Penny reply you could've made."

Thesaurus decided that was a compliment.


"Could you meet us there in an hour?" said Penny.

"I want to," said Garnet, "but that might be out of bounds."

"What bounds?"

"There are places I'm allowed to go and places I'm not," said Garnet without adding any actual clarity. "But I can always ask for permission, especially for something like this."

"Well," said Penny, "could you give me your scroll number so I can contact you if we get closer?"

The line went quiet for a moment, not just from Garnet not answering; all ambient noise from Garnet's side cut out, like the whole line had been muted. After a long enough wait to make Penny uncomfortable, Garnet spoke deliberately. "I can't give you my number, but I can call you every fifteen minutes to check in. If it ever looks like you're getting close to something big, that might help me get new permissions."

"Outstanding," said Penny. "I will keep in touch."

"Stay safe, Penny," said Garnet.

"I have my team with me," said Penny. "I am as safe as I could be."


Next time: Into the Centinels' Nest