SAPR

by Scipio Smith

Jailbreak (New)

Jailbreak

The rat crept about the corner of the cell.

It was a grotty corner, filthy, caked with grime, like the grime that covered so much of the floor. It was a corner fit for a rat, like the rat that crept about, dragging its tail behind it; every so often, it lifted its head and glanced this way or that, then lowered its head back down again and crept forward, scratching at the floor and the muck with its paws.

On the bed, in a position to look down on the rat like a bird of prey looking down upon the mouse in the field, Gilda moved very slowly. She was aware that too sudden a movement, that any motion too swift, might disturb the creature and send it scurrying away for its hole in the wall. So she moved slowly. The mattress on which she lay — the mattress that was so old it had springs sticking out of it through the fabric — shifted beneath her weight, but it didn’t make enough noise to disturb the rat.

It just kept on doing what it was doing, crawling about, looking up, looking down, scratching.

Gilda shuffled to the edge of the bed. Her hands were shackled together, which was awkward, but she could still move them enough, she thought, for this.

She watched the creeping rat like a hawk. The rat still hadn’t noticed her presence.

Gilda sprang off the bed, hurling herself down on the grubby floor and on the rat. The rat tried to run, but Gilda was too quick, her hands lashing out to grab the rat tight. The rat squeaked in alarm, it scratched at Gilda’s hands, it bit her — and Gilda felt all of it, with her aura suppressed like it was; each scratch and bite hurt far more than it felt like it should — the rat squirmed and struggled and wriggled in her grasp, but Gilda held on.

She held on despite the pain in her finger, the blood leaking from the cuts. She held on, and even adjusted her grip upon the wriggling rat, moving her hand up its fat body towards its neck.

The rat bit her again, sinking its teeth in deep to Gilda’s forefinger.

Gilda winced, but she didn’t let go; in fact, she gripped the rat’s neck between her forefinger and thumb and snapped it with a sharp twist.

“Please tell me you’re not going to eat that,” Ilia said.

Gilda looked up. Of the group that she had led on their ill-fated mission to kill Dashie and Blake, Ilia was the only one sharing a cell with her. The others were … she didn’t actually know where the others were; they might all be still in the hospital for all she knew. Or they might be in other cells here, or in other prisons. Ilia was the only one whose location she knew.

Gilda wasn’t sure that was altogether a good thing.

The cell in which they were both confined was a grim place; the floor — on which Gilda was lying, getting stains on her grey prison overalls — looked like it hadn’t had a clean in ever, and the plaster in the walls was crumbling in some places, not to mention the hole in said wall that the rat had come through.

There was a nasty smell coming from the toilet on the far side of the room, opposite the bunk beds that … the mattresses could have been better, but Gilda supposed the beds were alright.

They were about the only thing in here that could be called alright, in her opinion.

The door into the cell was barred but open; anyone could see into it if they came down the corridor, although no one showed any sign of coming down the corridor; it had been a while since they last saw a guard.

Gilda wasn’t too surprised; this place was such a dump that she wouldn’t want to come down here either.

She got up onto her knees, and opened her mouth, and leaned forwards towards the dead rat hanging limply in her grip.

“Ugh!” Ilia groaned, turning away and covering her mouth with one hand.

Gilda rolled her eyes as she lowered the dead rat. “I’m not actually going to eat it, come on!” she cried.

Ilia glanced back at her. “You’re not?”

“No!” Gilda shouted, throwing the rat over Ilia’s head and through the bars of the cell doors. It hit the wall on the other side of the corridor and then fell down, motionless, onto the corridor floor. “I just wanted to kill it, that’s all. I didn’t want it crawling on me in the middle of the night when I’m trying to sleep.”

“Oh,” Ilia murmured. “That makes sense, I guess.”

Gilda stood up. “Did you really think that I might actually eat it? A dead rat? Raw?”

“You were just scrabbling around on the floor with a rat,” Ilia pointed out. “Also, those cuts are gonna get infected if you leave them in a room like this.”

Gilda looked down at her hands. They were bleeding, not a lot, but a bit. “I don’t suppose you can help me tear up my sheet and make a couple of bandages?” she asked.

“What are you going to use for a blanket afterwards?” asked Ilia.

“I’m not sure I’ll notice the difference; have you seen these blankets?” Gilda asked. She got up and walked over to the bed, grabbing the thin quilt and throwing it to the foot of the bed so that she could get at the thin white sheet that lay underneath. She started to tug it free. “Hold onto this while I start tearing some strips off, will you?”

Ilia took a step forward. “I also,” she began. “I mean, you are from Low Town, right?”

Gilda looked at her. She stared at her. She dropped the blanket and flipped Ilia off with both hands because that was the only reasonable response to what she had just said. “Seriously?” She demanded. “Seriously? That … that is just … piss on you, okay! You think Low Town is full of people just eating rats? And I suppose you think we have cockroaches for dessert?”

Ilia’s face began to turn blue.

“If you weren’t a faunus, I would say that that’s really racist,” Gilda declared. “Since you are a faunus, it’s just really classist.”

“But you did have rats, right?” Ilia asked. “In Low Town?”

Gilda snorted. “No,” she said. “My parents kept a nice, clean house. It was cold, yeah, there were icicles on the windows, and we didn’t always get a very good CCT signal, and it was a little bit small and pokey, but it was clean, and we kept it clean because it was ours. Our house. Our home.”

Ilia was silent for a moment. “We had rats,” she admitted. “And cockroaches.”

“Did you eat them?” Gilda asked.

A touch of red mingled with the blue on Ilia’s skin as she glared at Gilda.

“Not so much fun when the boot is on the other foot, is it?” Gilda asked.

Ilia didn’t respond.

Gilda continued to pull at the sheet. “So, where was this?”

“Mantle,” Ilia said. “You know a place called The Pitworks?”

Gilda shook her head. “I don’t know Mantle.”

“Never been?” asked Ilia.

“No,” Gilda replied. “Never.”

“You haven’t missed much,” Ilia muttered. “Here, give me that.” She held out her hands; they were shackled together just like Gilda’s.

Gilda handed her the blanket; Ilia took it and held it still while Gilda began to tear off strips.

“Our home wasn’t cold, but it was small,” Ilia went on. “And we had rats, and cockroaches like I said, and … and in the neighbourhood, people used to say that at least we were better off than the folks in Low Town.”

“I guess everyone needs to look down on someone, just to feel a little better about themselves,” replied Gilda. “Would you mind?”

“Sure,” Ilia murmured, throwing the now-torn sheet back onto the bed and taking the strips that Gilda had torn off. She began to wind them around Gilda’s hands, covering off the cuts that the rat had made, wrapping them tightly and then tying them off. “You realise that if we stay the night here, we’ll probably get cockroaches here too?”

Gilda looked around. She couldn’t see any sign of any creepy-crawlies anywhere. “You think so?”

“They’ll come when it’s dark, when the lights go out,” Ilia said. “This place is disgusting. Of course they’d put faunus in a cell like this.”

“Or all the cells are just as bad as this one,” Gilda muttered.

“I don’t believe that,” Ilia said. “That’s … there’s no way they’d put humans in a place like this. This is only fit for animals.”

“Some people say criminals are animals,” Gilda replied. “And a lot of those people write for Valish newspapers. Don’t get me wrong, I know there’s discrimination out there; I’m just not certain this is it.” She paused. “What do you mean by ‘if’ we spend the night in here? Do you have plans?”

“Obviously!” Ilia cried. “We can’t stay here; we have to get out! We have a mission to complete!”

“We failed that mission,” Gilda pointed out.

“We’re alive, aren’t we?” Ilia demanded. “We still have our hands, our legs, our will, and courage. That means that our mission isn’t failed yet. It isn’t over yet. It doesn’t end until Blake and Rainbow Dash are dead, the High Leader gives us new orders, or we give our lives for the cause. We have to get out of this cell.” She turned away from Gilda and approached the doors, putting her hands around the metal bars. “We have a job to do.”

She began to pull at the doors, as though with her aura suppressed, she nevertheless had the strength to wrench the barred door off its hinges and throw it away, then fight her way through everyone who was or might be guarding this place.

She grunted, she heaved, she rattled the bars, but they did not budge.

Gilda watched without lending a hand or offering to do so. She just watched, silently.

She twitched, shifting from side to side; her wings were strapped down to her back, and the forced inactivity was making them restless, like legs that had sat down for too long.

Ilia turned to look at her. “Are you going to help me out?”

“Do you really think that’s going to work?”

Ilia let go of the bars. “Do you have a better idea?”

“I don’t know,” Gilda admitted. “I mean, I’ve broken out of prison before, but I didn’t do it in one night.”

Ilia’s eyebrows rose. “You were imprisoned.”

“For a month and a half, no big deal,” Gilda said. “It doesn’t make me a martyr for the cause or nothing.”

“But it isn’t nothing, all the same,” Ilia replied. “Here in Vale?”

Gilda shook her head. “Atlas. My cell there was a lot cleaner than this, I have to say. The bed was more comfortable too, although because it was memory foam, it remembered the person who’d been in the cell before me, and they weren’t quite my size.”

“I know what you mean; it’s a problem with memory foam, if you don’t get it new,” Ilia replied, without saying how she knew this. “So what did you do? Was it for something—?”

“Not related to the White Fang, no; I didn’t join the White Fang until after I got out,” Gilda explained. “I … I’d been thinking about it, I’d read the pamphlets, got into a fight with Rainbow Dash about it, I was … I’d woken up to what was facing our people, but I hadn’t actually gone and done anything about it yet. Not until my parents left for Menagerie. I…”

She had been all on her own for the first time in her life. She’d said goodbye to her parents with a pack of lies at the docks — yes, don’t worry, I’ll write, things are going to be great, I’ll be fine — and then found herself all on her own, with parents gone, a best friend who didn’t want to know her, and thanks to the discrimination of the system, no real prospects — not that she was without skills; she was a dab hand when it came to electronics; she could rebuild computers, although not scrolls, because they were too small and fiddly. But, because she hadn’t gone to the right school, because she didn’t have a virtual piece of paper on her scroll with a qualification on it, then what she could actually do, the skills that she had, didn’t matter.

It was okay for her parents to go to Menagerie and live out their sunlit years, but the sun hadn’t even risen on Gilda’s years, and she was staring down the barrel of … what? Poverty? The Atlesian army? Taking orders from Dash, yes sir, no sir? Working down a mine? Or in a Marigold fulfilment warehouse as one of the ten percent of organic employees they were forced to keep on alongside the robots?

And so, when she’d seen an ad for an upcoming faunus rights demo up in Atlas, she’d decided to go along. She’d gone up to Atlas … and she’d bought some fireworks. She hadn’t really been planning to use them, but she’d seen some chatter about how the cops might start something, so…

She couldn’t exactly remember how it had started. There had been cops, and the cops wouldn’t let them pass, and then … it had been dark, and there had been a bang, people had started to panic behind her, and Gilda had thrown a firework at the police.

Then she’d charged their line while they were blinded by the flash. She’d hoped to force a break in their line to let people out, but she’d only managed to crack one guy’s visor before the rest piled on her.

She'd gotten sentenced to two years in prison for disorderly conduct and assaulting a police officer. She'd broken out not two months later.

"I kept my nose clean," she said. "I didn't cause trouble; I didn't get sent to the cooler. I bided my time. Then, after a little bit, after gathering the right tools, I was able to unpick the restraints holding my wings down; one day, in the exercise yard, I took off. I was over the fence and away. Then it was just a matter of finding somewhere I could land to get the cuffs off, and … I joined the White Fang after that, and they sent me here to Vale."

"Good for you," Ilia replied. "But we don't have a month and a half — we don't even have a month, or a week — the tournament ends today; you left this until the last possible moment—"

"It wasn't as though we were ever going to be blessed with opportunities to get this done," Gilda replied, her voice rising.

"Blake and Rainbow Dash will be going to Atlas soon," Ilia said. "And how are we supposed to get at them there?"

Maybe we aren't, Gilda thought. Maybe we shouldn't. Maybe we should go back to the High Leader and tell her that we couldn't do it.

Not that she was likely to look too kindly on an admission of failure like that, but what was the alternative? A fool's errand to Atlas? Ilia might say that they needed to get out of this cell and go hunting for Blake and Dashie again right this instant, but the fact was that Ilia's determination alone wasn't going to get them out of this cell. Gilda was in no doubt that they could break out of here, but it would take at least a little time.

"I don't know," she admitted. "But I know that we can't just walk out of this cell because you want to."

She looked around. The walls looked like they might fall apart in time — maybe they were made of that aerated concrete stuff that Gilda had seen in the news a while back, the stuff that had bubbles in it, as hard to fathom as that might be, and fell down after about fifty years or so — but not in time for Ilia's very tight timetable. Above them, there were no convenient ceiling tiles to be lifted up, no sign of any airways that they could crawl into, and on the floor, even if they could break the toilet, then the pipe was too small even for Ilia.

But…

"I…" Gilda hesitated. "I guess I've got one idea. Though I'm not sure it'll work."

"Your last idea didn't," Ilia pointed out. "But go on."

"How was I supposed to know that Blake was going to call for backup?" Gilda demanded. "You didn't think she would either, if I remember."

"That's why I'm still willing to listen to your idea," Ilia replied.

Gilda didn't give her idea; instead, she said, "It seems like she's changed, doesn't it? Blake. And not altogether for the worse."

"'Not for' … of course it's for the worse!" Ilia snapped. "She's with Atlas now; she's with the enemy!"

"And she called for help," Gilda reminded her. "Would she have done that before?"

Ilia was silent for a moment. Her skin turned green. "No," she muttered. "No, she wouldn't have. She would have … I would have been left wondering where she was, hoping that Adam knew where she'd gone, cursing the fact that she had to do things on her own, that she didn't … do you think that she trusts her more than me? Your Atlas friend, Rainbow Dash; do you think Blake trusts her more than she trusted me?"

"She trusts her," Gilda said. "I don't know how much she trusted you." That was about as nice as Gilda knew how to put it, considering that, on the face of it, the answer was pretty clearly 'yes, she does.' "But it seems like, however much she trusted you, being here, and around the Atlesians, has changed her from the Blake we knew. And you just said that you would have preferred the Blake who acts like this than the Blake who used to act like that."

"On our side," said Ilia.

"Obviously, yeah, but…" Gilda stopped. Maybe there's a reason for it. Maybe there's a reason why Blake has become better for spending time with those people, on that side, and not with us. Maybe it's something good about them.

Maybe it's something bad about us.

That hardly seemed like something that Ilia would like to hear, and Gilda didn't want to pick a fight, and so she said, "Anyway, my plan is that if we were to rip this toilet up out of the floor, what would happen?"

Ilia frowned. "Water would spill all over the floor of our cell?"

"Maybe," Gilda admitted. "I'm not a plumber, but I'm hoping that there'll be a big spurt of water that will shoot up like a geyser, and then the guards will open the door, and we can take them out and get their keycards to unlock our restraints and open any doors between us and getting out of here. Of course, even if that works, we'll still have all the other cops between us and freedom to worry about, not to mention the fact that we'll be wanted when we get outside."

"We'll always be wanted, no matter when we escape," Ilia replied. "And once I get my aura back, I can handle any number of Valish cops. I say we go for it; what do we have to lose?"

"We could flood our cell, and nobody cares enough to let us out since we brought it on ourselves," Gilda said flatly.

Ilia smirked, as though Gilda had been making a joke. "Perhaps," she admitted. "But with a barred door, it won't take long before the flooding is in the corridor, not just our cell; it isn't like they can just leave us to drown like animals in a sealed compartment. And besides, great heroes of the struggle have suffered more than a damp room and flooding in the cause; how can we be squeamish now? I say we go for it."

Gilda could have pointed out that the great heroes of the cause — she might have said the great martyrs of the cause — had suffered more and risked everything for a cause that was a lot more admirable than killing two people who had actually helped the cause quite a bit. It was like Dashie had said: she and Blake had done a lot for the faunus recently, and what had they done? What were they doing? They had — and they would again if they got out of here — tried to kill the two people who had actually helped. The shutting down of those rogue SDC facilities — apparently rogue; how true that was and how much it was all SDC damage control was an open question — had done more for the faunus in Atlas than … a lot more than throwing fireworks at the cops, that was for sure. Dash and Blake had done something real, and they wanted to kill her for it.

What would the old heroes and martyrs of the cause have had to say about that, huh?

Maybe I should have stuck with 'there's no way out of this cell right away; we have to be patient' and then let Blake and Rainbow Dash head to Atlas where they'll be safer.

No, there were reasons not to do that. Apart from the fact that Gilda wouldn't mind getting out of this cell more quickly if she could, there was also the fact that, if she thought that Gilda and Ilia and all the rest were lost, either dead or captured with no immediate prospect of escape, the High Leader might not just shrug and put the whole thing on hold until they could escape, if they could escape. After all, she seemed to want them dead quite a bit. It was important to her, important enough that she'd come all the way out here from Menagerie just to give the orders in person. So she probably wouldn't just shrug and accept failure as one of those things; she'd send someone else. Maybe someone more vicious, someone with less concern for keeping it clean. So long as Gilda was in charge of this operation, then she could shape it, direct it; she could make sure that no one got any ideas about killing Blake's mother, or one of Rainbow's friends — yes, sure, Gilda had been about to kill Applejack, but Applejack had brought that on herself by deciding to join the battle. If you chose to fight, then you had no right to complain if you died in the fighting. It was a completely different thing from seeking out Fluttershy and killing her, or even sticking a knife to her throat to make a point to Dash.

Not everyone that the High Leader could send on this job would be so … fair about it. And Gilda knew that because most of the people that the High Leader had assigned to this job wouldn’t have been, left to their own devices. Even Ilia had been on board with killing Blake's mom, although she seemed to be thinking about how the Lady of Menagerie deserved it rather than as a tactic to get at Blake.

Either way, whatever Ilia's precise motives, the point was that Gilda couldn't afford to get left behind. The only way to keep a leash on some of these psychos was to keep herself at their head.

Or leave the rest of them to rot, go with Ilia on a second attempt, and hope that she—

No. No, I can't do that. I might not like her all that much, but I can't lead her to her death, or even hope that the fighting kills her. I'm not that kind of person.

And she doesn't deserve it.

Whatever bizarre ideas about Low Town Ilia might have, and however much she might vindicate Gilda's own ideas about Mantle as being much worse than the place she grew up ever could have been, Gilda understood the other girl. She was angry. She wanted to stick it to the human. She felt betrayed and abandoned. There were a lot of people in the White Fang who felt that way, and Gilda was one of them, and while she didn't share the sense that Ilia gave off of feeling like she was the bearer of the light when everyone around had turned to the darkness, all the same Gilda, would be lying if she said she couldn't sympathise with where Ilia was coming from.

She didn't want to get the other girl shot, see her get her head blown off by Dash or stabbed through the chest by Blake. She didn't deserve that, she deserved … Gilda wasn't one hundred percent sure what either of them deserved at this point, but it was something. Something other than to die like that.

And while she didn't feel as strongly towards the others, they had still been put under her command.

Her command; as long as it was still Gilda's command, then she was going to try and keep her people alive; that was her duty as their leader.

And so she had to try and get out of this cell.

"I'm sure you'll remember that when there's water everywhere and nobody is listening to us," Gilda muttered darkly. She knelt down on the dirty floor and ran her hands around the toilet. It was stainless steel, but while it had avoided rust, that didn't mean it had avoided stains, although Gilda tried to. Luckily, none of it looked very fresh, although that was not the most brilliant consolation ever for Gilda.

I'll probably need fresh bandages after this, she thought as she managed to get purchase under the lip of the bowl. It was awkward, what with her hands being in restraints, but she could get her fingers under there, and then push upwards.

Gilda heaved; even without her aura she still had muscles on her arms, she wasn't completely helpless, and just by pulling up she made the toilet rattle a little bit. She felt it strain against the bolts holding it on the floor, although maybe not straining as much as she would have liked.

"Help me with this," she said to Ilia, who tried to squeeze around onto the other side of the toilet from Gilda, but who found that was too much even for her small size.

So she ended up kneeling down at the front of it. "This is disgusting," she muttered.

"Are you squeamish or something?" asked Gilda.

"No," Ilia said quickly, maybe even a little too quickly.

But she got her fingers in there all the same; she obviously wasn't that squeamish.

"Okay," Gilda said. "One. Two. Three!"

They both heaved, making the poorly-fitted toilet rattled as the water in the bowl swirled around, shaken from side to side as Gilda and Ilia both pulled upwards. The fixtures strained.

Gunfire erupted.

Gilda stopped, turning her head towards the barred door. There was a moment of silence and then more gunfire. A lot more gunfire; the sound was louder than it had been.

Gilda let go of the toilet and slunk towards the barred door out of the cell. The sound didn't sound as though it was coming from their corridor, and when Gilda put her head up against the door, looking through the bars into the corridor as the cold metal pressed against her forehead, she couldn't see anything at all.

But the sound of the gunfire didn't stop.

"What's going on?" Ilia asked as she crept up behind her.

"How should I know?" Gilda demanded in a hushed whisper. She wasn't sure why she was whispering, except that it seemed like a situation where a bit of discretion might be advised.

She listened. She could hear, or she thought that she could hear, assault rifles, the boxy Valish guns that the White Fang used in this kingdom; they were the loudest sound and the deepest, heavy staccato thumping. But she also thought that she could hear pistol fire and the slow-paced bellowing of shotguns.

Is someone attacking the police station?

"Maybe it's our comrades, come to rescue us," Ilia suggested.

"What comrades?" Gilda asked. "And we were only just caught today; what kind of rescue could be mounted that fast?"

"If not the White Fang, then who?" Ilia demanded. "Who would attack the VPD?"

The Atlesians? That didn't make any sense, but at the same time, they were the only suspects that Gilda could think of off the top of her head. Who else would want to? Who else would have the capacity? Who would do something like this? None of the suspects made any sense, but at the same time, someone was committing the crime.

The sound of gunfire was starting to slack off; Gilda could still hear the assault rifles, but she was hard pressed to hear pistol or shotgun fire still. Was that a sign that the cops were losing? The police did use assault rifles, on occasion, but if someone was attacking a police station, then she'd expect a lot more pistols and some shotguns to be used as cops fought back with their sidearms. On the other hand, she'd expect the attackers, whoever they might be, to be tooled up for the assault.

The door at the end of the corridor flew open, and a police officer, a diminutive woman with curly hair, burst through the doorway and started running down the corridor.

She had just reached level with their cell door when a burst of fire, pursuing her down the corridor, slammed into her back. The officer jerked forwards then fell, face down, next to the dead rat.

Blood began to pool out of her, creeping towards the barred door.

The door that Gilda and Ilia both started to back away from,

She couldn't see the door anymore, but Gilda could hear footsteps both hammering and squeaking on the corridor floor, several pairs of footsteps.

Four pairs of footsteps, in fact, to go with the four people — three men, one woman — who marched down the corridor, stepping into the blood around the dead cop, and looked in through the bars at Gilda and Ilia.

They were all soldiers, or at least they all looked like soldiers, wearing Valish green uniforms with blue berets and some sort of polished badge on them, and three white feathers set in the badge, rising out of it to come up above the top of the beret. Three of them had assault rifles, just the kind that Gilda had heard shooting, while one of the men had only a pistol held lightly in one hand.

The three with rifles all had sword bayonets thrust into their belts, the kind that could be used as a short sword or a knife even when it wasn't attached to the rifle.

The man with the pistol — the officer, or at least the guy in charge — looked at them with disgust. His lip curled in a sneer.

"You White Fang scum," he said. "Congratulations, you've just slaughtered your way through a police depot, killing many gallant officers, only to be put down like the animals you are by the valiant forces of the Valish Defence Force." He scoffed. "So maybe don't celebrate just yet."

"You're framing us?" Ilia asked. "Typical."

Gilda wasn't sure that there was anything typical about this. Valish soldiers killing Valish cops? Why? Just why? So that they could make themselves look good by killing the perpetrators? It was a long way to go for some good publicity, wasn't it?

Mind you, I'm not sure we've got room to talk.

She said, "Sure, genius, I'm sure everyone will believe that we shot our way through an entire police precinct without ever leaving our cell. Great plan; you've really thought this one through."

The man with the pistol rolled his eyes. "Open the door, corporal."

The corporal — the woman in the squad — bent down and pulled the dead cop's ID card off her belt. She swiped it through the pad beside the cell door, there was a blaring sound, and the door slid open with a mechanical clank.

The soldiers aimed their rifles at Gilda and Ilia.

"Out you come," said the man with the pistol. "I'd rather walk you to your execution than have my men drag your bodies across the floor."

Gilda walked forward. Time to see how stupid you are. "You know it won't look real unless you take these restraints off us."

"We can take them off your bodies," replied the man with the pistol. "Now move." He gestured down the corridor, the way that he and his men had come.

Not that stupid, then. Gilda thought as she stepped into the cell doorway. "At least take my wing restraints off," she begged. "That's the first thing I'd do if I got free, and these bindings really hurt." She looked at the man with the pistol imploringly. "Come on, if you're going to kill me, then don't let me die with restless wings." She paused. "You'll have a hard time arranging them if you wait until I'm cold."

The man with the pistol hesitated for a second. "Corporal, get them off."

"Yes, sir," the woman said, slinging her rifle across her shoulder.

The sword bayonet on her hip glistened, if only in Gilda's imagination. She kept her hands down, held in front of her in her restraints, and waited.

The corporal stepped in front of Gilda, between her and the two soldiers who had their rifles trained on her. She was smaller than Gilda, her head only coming up to about Gilda's chin or mouth. She started to unbutton Gilda's overalls down the front.

When she had gotten three buttons down, Gilda moved. She threw her head down and forward; the corporal was a little short for a headbutt, but Gilda just about managed it, slamming her forehead straight down and leaving herself with a nasty pain on the forehead, but a pain which didn't stop her hands from moving like a swooping hawk to grab the sword bayonet from the corporal's belt before the corporal staggered back into the other two soldiers.

The fire of his soldiers blocked by his own corporal, the man with the pistol raised his short and stubby weapon, but Gilda had already thrown herself forward, one foot in the dead cop's blood as she slammed bodily into the man with the pistol and drove the sword bayonet into his gut.

A gasp of pain escaped him. The pistol slipped from his trembling hand. Gilda grabbed it before it could hit the floor, fumbling with it for a second as the three Valish soldiers turned.

She aimed the pistol; it didn't even matter that her hands were bound.

Eight shots, best make them count.

She fired two shots, then another two, then two more, and each pair of shots nailed one of the Valish soldiers, blasting them backwards before they could fire their rifles. They fell back into the corridor or into the cell itself to lie at Ilia's feet.

"Nice work," Ilia said. "I wouldn't have expected you to be a good shot."

"I prefer swords, but I know my way around a gun," Gilda replied. "Now come here and stand with your legs spaced apart."

Getting Gilda's point, Ilia held out her restrained hands as she approached and spread her legs out on either side of the dead cop.

Gilda fired one of the remaining shots in the pistol straight down, shattering the middle of the restraint. Ilia pulled her hands apart, then swiftly tore open the useless bounds that remained around her wrists. Then she did the same for Gilda, smashing her restraints into fragments to clatter down on the floor at their feet.

"Thanks," Gilda said as she felt her aura return to her. She felt stronger at once, and only getting stronger still, strong enough to rip that barred door off its hinges, strong enough to punch straight through that wall, strong enough to fight her way through as many friends as these Valish soldiers had waiting outside this corridor.

Strong enough to fly all the way up to the Amity Arena with only her wings.

Once she freed her wings too.

Gilda finished what the corporal had done, unfastening the front of her overalls so fast she practically tore the buttons off, before tearing the bindings off her wings with her bare hands. Her clothes were torn apart as her wings broke through the fabric, beautiful tawny wings emerging into the light once again.

Gilda flapped them back and forth as she twisted her back. "That is so much better."

"Being yourself always feels better," Ilia said as she sidled around Gilda to kneel down at the side of the Valish leader, the man who had held the pistol.

He wasn't dead yet, though there was blood trickling down out of his mouth and a lot more blood staining his green jacket. His eyes — brown — were wide, darting this way and that as though he were looking for a way out.

"Why?" Ilia asked. "What's going on here, why did you attack this place?"

The man gasped, his chest rising and falling. "Vale…" he whispered, his voice hoarse and rattling. "Vale will rise…" His head slumped backwards, and his eyes rolled away, the light leaving them.

"'Vale will rise'?" Gilda repeated. "I didn't know it had fallen."

"Weren't they attacked by grimm not too long ago?"

"Yeah, but I could count the dead on the fingers of my hands; it wasn't a catastrophe," Gilda said. "Or rather, it was a catastrophe for us, because I'd need a lot of hands to count our dead, but for them? What do they have to be sore about, and how is shooting up a police station and blaming it on us going to help?"

"They're humans," replied Ilia. "They always think blaming faunus will help."

"You might actually be right; I can't think of a better explanation," Gilda muttered. She bent down and grabbed a rifle from one of the dead Valish soldiers. "Are you ready to get out of here?"

Ilia also picked up one of the Valish guns. "Let's go."

They crept to the end of the corridor, looking out the door through which the police officer and the soldiers had come in, the door that had swung half closed since. There was no one on the other side, no one alive at least, just another dead cop slumped against the wall, one hand reaching vainly for his pistol. Gilda led the way into the next corridor; there were cells on either side, and all the cells that weren't just empty were occupied by the dead. They were human prisoners — or at least, they didn't have any visible faunus traits that she could see — and they'd been gunned down in their cells like pigs in the slaughterhouse.

But some of the cells were empty, and the doors were open.

They kept on moving. There was another door at the end of the corridor, sturdy and sound-proofed looking and painted white, with a card reader on the wall beside it. Gilda, who had forgotten to pick up the ID from either dead police officer, was about to turn back for one of them, but Ilia held one up in her hand.

She scanned it, and there was a clunking sound as the door unlocked.

Gilda pushed the door open.

On the other side of the door, she could see into the foyer, with the chairs for visitors to wait on — or for people there less voluntarily to await processing — and the booking desk where Gilda and Ilia had had their details entered into the system. Hopefully, they could use that same system to find the location of their comrades.

Right now, though, Gilda's attention was more on the half-dozen or so faunus — with bull's horns or cloven hooves or cat's whiskers on their faces — who had been gathered together in the lobby. Around them lay the bodies of Valish police officers and a smaller number of Valish soldiers. The glass-panelled doors leading outside had bullet holes in them, suggesting that the Valish troops had come in through the front and started shooting up the place. The cops had fought back, at first, and then they had lost, and some of them had tried to run, like the unfortunate who had died outside their cell.

And now, they had rounded faunus out of the cells and were going to shoot them, claim they were all White Fang — and throw in a couple of actual White Fang members to sweeten the pot — and that they had arrived too late to save the cops, but in time to avenge them.

Gilda still couldn't work out what the endgame of all this was, but it didn't really matter. What mattered was that the soldiers were moving the faunus — still wearing restraints — around the room, stepping around the bodies of fallen cops and soldiers, posing the faunus in this position or that, so that the whole tableaux would look right when it was finished.

Gilda tightened the rifle she'd taken into her shoulder.

"One," she said. "Two. Three!"

She and Ilia burst through the door, guns blazing. Two soldiers fell instantly.

"Get down!" Gilda yelled, hoping the faunus would recognise that they were on their side. She rushed forward, trusting her aura to protect her from any return fire as she selected a new target and squeezed the trigger.

Another Valish soldier fell, blown over the booking desk and disappearing on the other side.

Gilda charged the closest Valish soldier, not shooting him but braining him with the stock of her rifle, reversing her grip on it to hit him so hard his head snapped sideways and he fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes.

The Valish were returning fire now, and trying to find cover too, but Gilda didn't bother with her own cover. She kept moving, firing as she moved, partly trusting in her movement to throw off their aim, partly wanting to keep their attention in case they decided to shoot the other faunus because they were easier targets. Ilia was moving too, leaping over the booking desk then over the other side to slam into a soldier and bear her to the ground, strangling her with one hand while firing with the other.

Gilda's bullets tore through a potted plant and into a soldier who had unwisely taken cover behind it. Gilda grabbed the plant by the stem with one hand and threw it, pot first, at a soldier lining up on Ilia; the pot shattered against the back of his head, and he staggered, gun dropping; Ilia shot him between the eyes.

A soldier who had half-retreated into one of the back offices fired at Gilda from the doorway; the impacts staggered Gilda; she could feel her aura dropping; she charged, firing wildly to force the Valish soldier to take cover as she bore down on them. She leapt, her wings unfurling for a moment as she dropped straight on her Valish opponent, hitting him across the face once, twice, three times until he stopped moving.

She grabbed his rifle for good measure, looking like a faunus Spruce Willis as she wielded an assault rifle in each hand, struggling to keep the things level as she battled the weight on one hand and the recoil in the other, rifles bouncing up and down as she sprayed fire across the room.

Yippee-ki-yay!

The remaining Valish tried to fall back; unfortunately, with Gilda stood in the closest doorway, they had to try and retreat right in front of her; Gilda didn't manage to hit all of them clean as they passed — some of them, she only winged — but they went down all the same, caught in the leg or the foot or the shoulder. She finished them off before they could shoot back.

For a moment, the room was silent, the only sound being the crash of Gilda's rifles hitting the ground as she dropped them.

"Yeah, that's right!" declared a short rabbit faunus with white ears growing out of the top of his short-cropped hair. He had been lying down prone on the ground, but now, he got to his feet. "I mean, I was just about to bust out a couple of moves and take care of all these fools when y'all burst in, but I thought I'd let you have this one. You're welcome."

Gilda couldn't keep the grin off her face as she walked towards him. "Is that right? I'm sorry to steal your thunder, buddy." She snapped his restraints, and she and Ilia proceeded to free all the other faunus who had been herded in here by the soldiers.

"Everyone, get out of here!" Ilia commanded. "Go home, change out of these prison overalls, do you what you need to do to avoid being captured; just go, now."

"And may the God of Animals watch over you," Gilda said. "And for those of you who actually did something to deserve to wind up here, why don't you think about second chances and why you have this one? Maybe God means for you to turn your life around from here on."

The faunus left, all running for the door, jumping over — or just outright stepping on — the dead as they stampeded for the exit. The door was thrown back so hard it slammed into the wall with a crunch. As they got outside, Gilda could hear them whooping for joy at their unexpected freedom.

"'Second chances'?" Ilia asked.

"I guarantee at least one of those people has done something to another faunus," Gilda said. "I don't disagree with letting them go — they might be killed if they stay here — but if one person in that bunch can be convinced not to rob his eighty-year-old neighbour for her jewellery, that's a good deed done in my book."

Ilia didn't respond to that except to say, "So you're religious? The God of Animals? A little … problematic, don't you think?"

"Maybe you can tell him that when you meet him in person; he might even listen," said Gilda. "I know a lot of people don't pay much attention to the old stories these days, but … I'd like to think there's someone looking out for us."

"They haven't done a very good job, if they are," Ilia replied.

"The God of Animals could only call the chosen to his island," Gilda said. "It was up to them to get on a boat and sail there." She looked around the room, at the dead soldiers, the dead cops, the bullet casings littering the floor. "Any theories on what's going on?"

A police radio crackled, and a voice emerged before Ilia could speak.

"This is Lieutenant Martinez of the Flying Squad!" the voice shouted. "There are officers under fire at Batterham Power Stations; we are under attack by grimm cultists. Requesting backup from any available units. Repeat: backup requested at Batterham Power Station, all available units. Can anyone hear me?"

"'Grimm cultists'?" Ilia repeated, wrinkling her nose in distaste. "Do you think … could it be that these aren't real soldiers, they're grimm cultists in disguise?"

"I guess," Gilda admitted. "But would a grimm cultist say 'Vale will rise' as he was dying? Wouldn't he say…?" Gilda paused, because her knowledge of grimm worshippers was kind of hazy. "'Long live the grimm' or something? What do they talk about?"

Ilia shrugged. "Either way, it looks like the police have got their hands full. So much the better for us."

"Not necessarily," said Gilda. "If the police are getting attacked everywhere, then our guys could be in trouble. Toss me that keycard; I'll see if I can find out where they are from the computer. You go see if you can find our weapons."

Their weapons had been booked in with the pair of them, so they should be around here somewhere.

"Sure," Ilia said, tossing Gilda the keycard, then heading off into the back.

Gilda herself jumped over the desk and pushed the dead duty sergeant in their chair out of the way to get at the computer. She used the card to sign in.

"Okay," she muttered to herself, bending down to get on a better level with the screen. "Bookings, bookings, there must be a way to see who's been processed across the whole city." She typed into the keyboard. "No, I don't want emails; ah, here it is: Processing Database."

Her ears pricked up at the sound of gunfire from somewhere behind.

"Ilia?" Gilda called. "Are you okay back there?"

"I'm good," Ilia replied.

"Glad to hear it," Gilda called without turning round. She accessed the general processing database and was presented with a grey screen and a lot of blank fields: first name, surname, date of processing, location, nationality, everything that you could conceivably want to know about a prisoner.

Because she was looking for several prisoners, Gilda entered today's date as the date of processing and left the other fields blank.

She was confronted with sixty-three entries, which seemed like a lot, but it was a big city, she supposed. Luckily, all of the bookings had a photo attached — including Ilia, who was one of the first entries on account of her surname, and who was scowling at the camera with a look that would have eviscerated the photographer if only looks could kill. Gilda was a little tempted to scroll through to the end and find out what her photo looked like, but she stayed focussed. She had a job to do, after all.

And that job was to recognise the photos of her team, since they'd all been entered without names. Because they'd been unconscious at the time. Luckily, Woundwort had a very distinctive face, even with his eyes closed.

"I've found them!" Gilda shouted to Ilia.

Ilia emerged out of the back, with a black bundle held in both arms and Gilda's swords balanced on top of the bundle. She put both of them down on top of the desk. "I found our clothes, too," Ilia said. "I don't want to wear this any longer than I have to."

"You'll have to wear it for a little bit longer; we don't have time to change," Gilda declared. "They're being held under guard at Kingsland hospital, and we need to get there now — before any soldiers do."

---

Its name, after the manner of huntsmen naming their weapons, was Red Bow, because Martinez had tied a red ribbon into a bow around the barrel when she'd given the gun to Mike as an anniversary present. It was a large calibre hunting rifle, double-barrelled with a heavy wooden stock and enough stopping power to make a goliath think twice. Martinez had gotten it for her husband to take out to sea with him in case he ran into a Sea Feilong or the like. Besides, it had a wooden stock, and wood was … one of the early anniversary ones, right?

Since Mike wasn't at sea right now, Martinez had asked if she could borrow it, and he'd said yes.

As she unwrapped it now, with her pistol empty and bullets slamming into the side of the truck, Martinez was glad she had.

The bullets were each bigger than her thumb. She opened up the breech and inserted a single round into each barrel — if there was one thing that wasn't great about this, it was the rate of fire.

Still, needs must, and hopefully, it would give those grimm freaks outside a fright.

More rounds slammed into her truck, hitting it with enough force to rock it to one side, denting the side on which they hit.

Outside, Martinez could hear the fire of both the grimm cultists and the cops, although the fire of the cops was starting to slack off a little bit; Martinez guessed she wasn't the only one who had started to run low on ammo. Hopefully, it was a case of people being careful about their shots and not a case of everyone running out like her.

Not that she had any room to talk — way back when she was a rookie, her first sergeant had warned her she was too quick to empty her pistol — but if everyone just ran out, then they were going to be in big trouble.

She held Red Bow in one hand and the box of ammo — not a very big box for the size of the bullets; she'd need to be careful with this — in the other as she shuffled back towards the door out of the truck.

Mallard was crouched at the front of the truck; he was half-leaning around the front and using his sword to fire blasts of dust towards the grimm cultists.

He took cover and glanced at Martinez as she leapt down. "I don't suppose you've got another one of those, El-Tee?"

"Sorry," Martinez said. "You running low on dust?"

"I don't have an unlimited supply," Mallard said.

"Okay, switch places with me and save your dust," Martinez told him. "Let me and Red Bow take a turn." To the large gun, she said, "Okay, honey, let's see what you've got."

Mallard crept around her while Martinez edged towards the front of the truck. She held the rifle upright, so that the top of the barrel could be seen through the shattered windows if anyone was looking that way.

She glanced around the truck, letting enemy fire whistle past her face as she tried to work out where the bad guys were. It was hard to spot them in the dark, but a lot of muzzle flashes seemed to be coming from around the second truck that they'd come in on; like the cops, they were using their vehicle as cover.

Why can't they just charge at us screaming their crap about the end times and stuff like that? Why can't they be as nuts as 'cultist' makes them sound?

Still, while using their truck for cover may have been a smart move, it also gave her a nice, big target to aim at.

Martinez cocked the rifle, dropped down on one knee, and raised Red Bow to her shoulder.

A bullet hit her, but Martinez didn't let it throw her off. She took aim at the truck's engine block.

She fired.

Red Bow roared a deafening roar and kicked back so hard into her shoulder that it did more damage to Martinez's aura than the bullet just a second ago had done.

But that was nothing compared to what it did to the truck that she'd fired at. The whole truck was knocked sideways, tilting forty-five degrees on its axis, the engine half-exploded, throwing off fragments of metal from the front and sides of the vehicle even as flames began to billow out of it. There was a groaning sound as the truck, precariously balanced on two wheels, began to fall onto its side. Martinez could hear the grimm worshippers shouting in alarm as they ran to get out of the way.

Yeah, that's right; you better run, she thought as she aimed her second shot.

She tried to couch the rifle even more firmly into her shoulder this time.

She fired again.

The truck exploded, a plume of fire and smoking reaching into the night sky as grimm cultists howled in pain.

Martinez put down Red Bow and reached up to grab her pick-axe handle from the seat of the truck.

"Okay, let's go!" she shouted. "Everyone, come on!"

Martinez screamed wordlessly as she leapt out of cover and started running towards the truck, pick-axe handle brandished overhead. Now was the moment; they were shocked by the destruction, a lot of them sounded like they'd been hurt or taken out, now was the moment when their nerve would fail them; all they had to do was be aggressive enough, and they could bag the whole bunch — then find out why nobody had come to back them up.

She knew that Mallard, at least, would follow her, and she just had to trust that other cops would follow her as well as she ran around the smouldering wreckage of the truck and brained a grimm cultist with her axe-handle.

There were grimm worshippers on the ground, dead or wounded; the rest were struggling to get it together; they were panicked, vulnerable; they were—

They were getting shot.

Fire mowed them down, fire from the machine gun mounted on top of the Defence Force armoured car that was coming around the corner, followed by two trucks in Valish green. As the machine gun atop the armoured car swept left and right, soldiers leapt from out of the trucks, swarming around the car as they, too, opened fire.

The grimm cultists didn't stand a chance. Ambushed out in the open, taken by surprise, they barely got a couple of shots off before they went down in a hail of bullets.

Martinez stared. The military. The gods-damned military had saved the day.

Well, who'd have thought it, huh?

Some cops were cheering, whooping, yelling out their thanks. Everyone was leaving their cover, even those who hadn't joined Martinez's rush. They walked across the open space in front of the power plant towards the soldiers.

Martinez did the same; holding her pick-axe handle lightly in her left hand, she approached the Valish officer — a major, judging by the crown on his shoulder — and held out her right hand.

"It's Major, isn't it?" she asked. "I'm Lieutenant DJ Martinez, VPD Flying Squad. Let me tell you, there's a lot of people who are glad to see you guys right now."

The Valish major smiled tightly. He brought up his own hand.

There was a pistol in it.

Martinez was raising her pick-axe handle when he fired. The shot hit her in the stomach, the close range making Martinez bend despite her aura. He fired again and again, and his soldiers were firing too, firing on the cops who had emerged from cover to greet the soldiers as their rescuers.

And the major still had that tight smile on his face.

Martinez ignored the impacts, the increasing damage to her aura, to step forward and whack him across the face with her pick-axe handle. His whole body whirled around, spinning, slamming into the front of the armoured car.

Martinez turned. She started to run, she needed to get back to cover, she needed to get the word out, she needed to warn anyone who might be listening that—

Assault rifles boomed, their bullets tearing into her aura, knocking Martinez forwards—

Breaking her aura—

Tearing into Martinez.

Martinez screamed in pain as she was hit in the back. More than once, she'd swear that it was more than once, it hurt like it was more than once in some places.

Other places, it didn't hurt at all.

She couldn't feel her legs. She couldn't feel them giving way to dump her flat, face-first, on the tarmac. She couldn't feel them. She couldn't feel anything. There was pain, there was so much pain, and then … then there was nothing at all.

Martinez could feel tears in her eyes as she tried to drag herself along with her hands; her hands were scraping at the tarmac, tearing themselves up. She had … had to keep moving.

Her boys. She could see her boys in front of her, she could see Tyler and Stuart, she could see them standing there. She could see Mike too, with his hands on their shoulders. He was a good father. He'd take good care of them.

But she didn't … didn't want him to have to. She wanted … she had to get home … had to get back to…

A shadow fell over her. A military boot stepped on her hand. Martinez cried out in pain as the bones cracked.

It was the major, the major with that damned tight smile; he was still smiling as he looked down at her.

Martinez looked up at him. "Why?" she asked.

The major didn't answer. He just aimed his pistol.

BANG!

Comments

[Stet709]

Martinez! No! I liked her...
Darn VDF...
I hope Mallard at least lives so he can take over the Flying Squadron
White Fang is now free, well, most of them anyway...
Yet Gilda has no idea Blake and Rainbow are at Beacon (or they could be heading to the Green Line for all I know...)

[AngelicTitan]

NOOOOOOO MARTINEZZZZZZ!!!!!!!!
I AM NOW FUCKING ANGRY AND DONE I WANT THOSE FUCKERS DEAD I LIKED HER!!!!!
How will Weiss feel now? Fuck. The White Fang escapes, and Martinez ducking dies. You’re cruel as fuck.

[Kiue Jin]

11863270
The alternative to the White Fang escaping was the VDF slaughters a bunch of faunus on top of the rest of the police station and tries to claim with a straight face that the Faunus did all the killing.

As for why the VDF are attacking the police while trying to maintain some deniability for the slaughter, there actually is a well thought out, brutal logic behind it. This is a Coup against the Valish government and the police are not on the side of those doing the Coup: Since the police as an organization have actual authority and legitimacy in the event of a chaotic situation, purging them is literally getting rid of an enemy faction that might try to contest the new military government.

There is also the fact that the justification for the Coup is that of Martial Law and the situation being so far out of control that the Military is the only force that can restore order. The issue being that while the situation in Vale due to the invading Grimm and Grimm Cultists was dire, it wasn't out of control yet and thus the VDF now have to 'justify' their actions by making the situation seem out of control.

This is also why they need to maintain some vague idea of deniability. Because 'all the other authorities being destroyed in the chaos, leaving the military to take over' provides a degree of legitimacy as a new government, whereas 'We've slaughtered everyone who can challenge military rule of Vale' opens the door for other kingdoms or even just groups that can gather enough strength to come in and take over because if you're only actual claim to control of an area is 'we're strong and ruthless enough to take it' without anything else to back it up, anyone else can use that to justify taking it from you.

[LuckyHikari]

Damn

[AdverseFlower95]

How much copium am I huffing if I think that it was someone shooting that major instead of the Lieutenant?

[Dark one]

11863377
Hoping not too much. I need some too.

[Mastermind4892]

The Grimm cultists were insane and genocidal. I will not miss them. But their deaths are still a symbol of what serving Salem gets you.

And… sighs… We all knew we were unlikely to come out of the Fall without casualties. But it still hurts. You were an outstanding officer, Lieutenant Martinez; a credit to your uniform, and an even better friend. The VPD, and all of Vale itself, is lesser for your loss. You will be missed, but never forgotten. Rest in peace.

11863270
Sonata is going to pay for this.

[Stet709]

I just realized (and I don't mean to get anyone's hopes up...) that the last bang at the end of the chapter could be a fake out, like you'd think it was coming from the major, but it could be someone shooting the major like Mallard, (I doubt it's Sunset but who knows...)

[Luviere]

Nah, nah. That bang at the end better be one that saves Martinez. If she dies in the next chapter, we done. Don't kill my girl like that. Nah.

[RedDog5207]

11863459
I like to ask for confirmation. Wasn't Goodwitch, the teachers and a significant number of Huntsman/Huntress students already sent out to Vale to reinforce the police?

[RanmaChaos]

God dammit. I liked her.
This shit right here? This is why you don't let bad guys live.