[ @allbains | corsac // for cinder ]
Give us a week. It’s already been two. If those children moved fast enough, they’ll be in one of the other academies by now, and the lamp will already be locked safe and sound inside another vault. Cinder grits her teeth.
Atlas, or Shade. If she were to hazard a guess, she would place her bet on Atlas—but this is too delicate an operation for gambling.
She has to be certain.
Even so, Cinder really cannot afford to waste one more week laying low in the shadows of this starveling under-city. Her injuries have healed; the memory of her unscarred face is still haunting newscasts at irregular but frequent intervals. She has nothing to gain and much to lose if she stays–
—but nothing ventured. Skulking upward to lurk around Haven Academy is a greater risk, but one that stands to offer greater reward. Salem had not been at all pleased with the news of Sienna Khan’s death; and that was before Menagerie had rallied around the Belladonnas and scraped together a militia to answer the coup.
There’d been something on the news last night about a new movement, a revival, announced with a flourish alongside a raft of new faunus-rights legislation the Mistral Council has been persuaded to consider. And one of the broadcasters had mentioned in an aside that the militia is being housed temporarily in the shuttered campus, on the council’s lien and over the protests of the academy’s wealthy human neighbors.
Cinder knows dry kindling when she sees it.
The police barriers have all been taken down by now; the campus stands open to the public and unguarded, save for a few affectedly casual sentries whose wary glances ease when she smiles, waves, lets them see her claws.
Not quite human either, is she?
Then it’s a simple matter of folding herself cross-legged onto a bench in one of the less-traveled niches of the campus, half-hidden by a barrier of flowering shrubs, to pick slowly at her dinner and wait for someone suitably unhappy-looking to pass by. It does not take long.
“You know,” she calls out silkily, “I wouldn’t have expected Menagerie to come to the defense of a human institution. I doubt anyone in Mistral would disagree.” Her head tilts. “One would think the humans whose precious academy you saved would show a little more gratitude, hm?”
