RWBY YA Novel #3

by E. C. Myers

  He might be able to make a deal and get out of this one … But then what? They’d come after him eventually, and what he really wanted was to eliminate both of them as a threat so that he could take over. And there was probably only one way to do that. And if he was going to do it, he needed to do it quick before they had company.

  But first, he needed to find Neo.

  A Few Minutes Earlier …

  Neopolitan had never seen her house from this perspective before, either, being dragged backward through the halls by her father. Her heels left scores in the varnished wood floors.

  Sorry, she thought immediately, and then wondered why she was apologizing. It wasn’t her fault, and she had no control over this situation.

  An uncomfortably familiar feeling for her.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Papa said, huffing as he pulled her up the main stairs.

  That would be a first. He hadn’t even heard of some of the curses she was yelling at him internally.

  Neo’s mind flailed around in her paralyzed body. Her tongue had never done what it was supposed to, but now the rest of her was traitorous. Useless.

  She was a prisoner in her own body.

  “What is my father doing?” he went on. “What I’ve always done, kid. Doing what’s best for my family. For you. Trust me, you don’t want to get mixed up with Roman Torchwick and the dangerous world he lives in. It changes you.”

  Is that what happened to you?

  He paused halfway up the stairs to catch his breath. “It started out small enough. Hei Xiong offered me an incentive to make sure the contract for Dust transportation in the city went to his family’s business. I didn’t see any harm in it, making a little extra money. They were a good business. And Xiong’s a good person to have on your side.” He scowled. “Which isn’t to say he’s a good person. Far from it.”

  He lifted Neo up again and groaned. “I guess you’ve been eating well at that school of yours.” He chuckled.

  Excuse me?

  “That first job turned into other offers, some of which I was less comfortable with. Higher profile projects, more vendors competing for the same contracts, more interests to factor in. But you don’t say no to Hei Xiong. Meanwhile, the price for yes kept getting higher.”

  He stopped, staring into space. His nostrils flared. “And when things got rough, Xiong was always there to ‘help.’ Pretty soon I owed him money. I had to put myself more and more on the line to pay him back, stay in his good graces.” He lowered his voice to a harsh whisper. “Embezzling. Taking bribes. Stealing from—” He caught himself and his eyes went back and forth wildly. “Shhhh. Shhhh … They have ears everywhere.”

  Eyes too, Neo thought.

  They continued up and when he reached the landing, Papa looked around. “Xiong owns all this, did you know that? He owns me. He owns your mother. He owns you. But now, thanks to you I have something he wants. I can wipe my debts clean. And this time, I’m coming out on top.”

  He dropped Neo to the floor with a thud.

  Ow.

  They were outside her bedroom—what had been her bedroom. But the wooden door had been replaced with a steel one, and there was a hand scanner now connected to a complicated lock that would take her weeks to crack. She wondered what was so important enough to need all that security.

  The door opened with a whoosh, and he picked her up again. He backed through the doorway, sliding her over the threshold and along the floor. It looked like her old carpet.

  He pulled her alongside a canopy bed and hauled her up into it. He rolled her onto her back and arranged her hands across her stomach in a funereal pose.

  Then he reached into her pouch and pulled out the data drive.

  “I’ll be back after Xiong takes this and that crook away. We can have a family dinner again, just like old times.”

  Yeah, right.

  “Don’t go anywhere.” He chuckled. He kept laughing, growing louder and louder as he switched off the lights and closed the door with a hiss and definitive kerthunk. The soundproofed door finally cut off his manic laughter, and Neo was left alone with her thoughts.

  She didn’t know how long she lay there, staring up at the canopy of her bed in the dark and silence.

  Is this what it’s like to be dead?

  She waited.

  After some time had passed, a patch of light crept along the ceiling and she heard the crunch of a car in the gravel driveway.

  She waited.

  Another set of lights, coming in faster. Tires squealing. Gunfire. There was a war going on outside her window.

  She thought about all the things she was going to do to her parents when she escaped from here.

  She thought about what life might be like after this, if she and Roman somehow survived this. If their friendship survived this.

  She wondered if she would ever be free again.

  Eventually she felt a painful tingling in her extremities. She wiggled her fingers and toes experimentally. She was getting her mobility back.

  She still couldn’t feel much, but that hadn’t stopped her before. She forced herself to sit up, nearly tipping over in the bed, and swung her legs down to the floor. She pushed herself off the bed to see if they would hold her weight.

  Not yet. But she could crawl. It felt like swimming in sand and it hurt, but she made it to the window and looked out.

  Lil’ Miss Malachite’s forces and Hei Xiong’s were trading gunfire from behind their vehicles. They were also shouting at each other, likely trading insults, but she couldn’t hear them through the glass. She pounded on the window, but it had been reinforced with an Atlesian hard light force field. There’d be no jumping out of it this time.

  She pulled herself up and stumbled over to the door, more falling than walking. She couldn’t even pierce the steel door to get to the locking mechanism if she wanted to. She tried banging on the door, but her fists didn’t even make a sound on the metal.

  She sat down and looked around her room. It was a mostly faithful recreation of her bedroom, with the same furniture: the bed, the dresser, the bookcase. But it was empty of her belongings. There was no personality. No one lived here.

  Which was strange, because if she didn’t live here, why go to the trouble of restoring her room? Why put a heavy-duty lock on the door and an expensive force field on the window?

  You didn’t do that to keep someone in. Those were security measures to keep someone out. And only one person had access to the room that she knew of.

  The door mechanism whirred. Neo moved fast, as fast as she could manage with her laggy body. She grabbed her parasol from where it had fallen under the bed and extended the blade, pointing it at the door, prepared to rush Papa as soon as it opened.

  Whoosh. The door opened and Neo launched herself.

  “Whoa!” Roman dropped something and dove out of the way as Neo embedded her sword in the opposite wall. Mama wasn’t going to like that, either, but Neo had never liked the wallpaper.

  She turned toward Roman and put her hands over her heart.

  “Ah, don’t get mushy. You would have done the same for me.”

  She looked off into the distance, her mouth pushed up thoughtfully.

  “Yeah. You did do the same for me. But who’s counting? We’re a team, right?”

  Neo grinned. She had really thought she would be trapped in there and would never see Roman again. But how had he gotten inside the room without—

  She looked down and saw Papa’s limp body on the floor. She put a hand on her hip and gestured at him.

  Really?

  “He’s not dead,” Roman said.

  Neo studied her father. Just a little while ago he had drugged her and then locked her in a room, claiming it was because he wanted to protect her. But from here, it looked like he had been trying to protect himself. She hadn’t felt any emotions when she thought about him being dead. Not sadness, or joy, or disappointment. No fear, no love. Perhaps he had been distant with her for so
long, she now felt the same about him.

  “I looked all over the house for you. There must be forty rooms in here,” Roman went on.

  She flashed five fingers at him, and then one hand and one finger.

  “Fifty-six, then. For three people! That’s a lot. And every one of them is filled with expensive junk. No wonder your dad is broke. Anyway, I finally found this door, and it was clear there was something important behind it.” He gestured to Neo. “A father’s greatest treasure, that kind of thing. But seriously, I’ve seen weaker security in a crime boss’s personal vault. I had to go all the way back upstairs and grab the guy so I could use his handprint to open the door.”

  Neo unsheathed her sword blade and pointed to Papa’s hand. She made a hacking motion and then lifted a brow.

  Roman stared at her. “See, this is why I need you around.”

  Neo crouched down and went through her father’s pockets. She came up with her Scroll but there was no sign of the data drive. Roman saw her frustration.

  “Don’t worry, I’ve got the drive. And I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with it. Look, there’s a lot you need to know, but we don’t have time right now. It won’t be long before Lil’ Miss and Xiong decide they should work together to break in and capture us.” He paused. “You hear that?”

  Neo listened but she didn’t hear anything. She pretended to clean an ear with one finger.

  “Exactly. They’ve stopped fighting. Which is bad news for us, because—”

  Several floors down they heard banging at the front door. Broken glass.

  “I think the only way to get them off our backs is to turn the heat up on them,” Roman said.

  Neo nodded. She typed on her Scroll. What do you need?

  “A computer,” he said. “And a distraction.”

  She propelled Roman down the hall to her father’s office. This door was locked, too, but it was just a normal door, a normal lock. Which she kicked in with her normal boot.

  She and Roman piled into the office. He fired up the computer and groaned when he saw the password screen. The camera above the screen lit up.

  “Be a dear and go fetch your father’s head, will you?” he asked.

  Neo shuddered with a grimace. She transformed into her father and let the computer scan his face. The screen lit up.

  Roman sat at the desk and started plugging cables into the data drive. “I think I can get this to work, but it’s going to take a while, and even longer to upload it all.”

  Neo caught her reflection in the mirror over the credenza. Her father’s face looked back at her. She wondered how he became the type of person to risk losing everything to get what he wanted. She wondered if she would make the same choice.

  She thought about how angry he’d been when she set that fire. “You could have blown us all up,” he’d said. It had seemed like an exaggeration.

  But what if it wasn’t?

  Neo bolted out of the room.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine!” Roman called. “Just keep them off my back!”

  She ran down the hall toward her room. Her dad wasn’t lying there anymore. She slowed down and crept more slowly and quietly. She shifted her form until she looked like she had at age six, playing sneak tag with her invisible friend.

  She peeked around the edge of the door into the room. Her bed was shoved to one side, and Papa was pulling long boxes out of a crawl space under her floor.

  What?

  He was muttering to himself. “I’ll give it all to them; it’s the only way. The only way.”

  His head jerked up and he saw her by the door.

  “Trivia?” he asked. “Sweetheart, you didn’t leave! Come here, help me with this.”

  Neo approached warily, so she could get a look at what he had stashed under her bed: crate after crate of Dust crystals.

  Neo’s mouth fell open. She pointed at it all and then spread her hands in a question.

  “I’ve been setting this Dust aside for some time. It’s our nest egg.” He squinted. “Did you change your hair?”

  She didn’t bother with the Scroll this time. She made her question appear in the air in front of her, floating between her and her father.

  In my bedroom?

  He stuck his hand into a box and pulled out a handful of small red gems. Burn Dust.

  “If Xiong ever found out I’d been stealing from him, he wouldn’t be able to prove it if he couldn’t find it. No one would ever think to look in your room.” He tapped his forehead. “I’m smarter than your mother thinks! She underestimates me. Xiong underestimates me! But I had everyone fooled for all these years.”

  He frowned at her. “Until you messed it all up. First you started that fire, right on top of all this valuable Dust!”

  Neo swallowed, the hairs crawling on the back of her neck. The Dust wasn’t just valuable, it was incredibly volatile. She’d been sitting on top of a massive bomb that would have leveled the whole neighborhood. If the fire had sparked it, she never would have known what hit her.

  She was still standing on a bomb, but in this case it was Papa who was unstable.

  He jumped up. “Then you and Torchwick arrived. Were you looking for this? How did you know about it?”

  Neo held out her hands, more in warning to him than out of fear. She changed back into herself and backed away slowly.

  “You’re a witch, just like the ones in those silly stories you read.” He stalked toward her.

  Neo held up a match and ignited it with her thumbnail. He froze.

  She smiled and tossed it toward the box of Dust. As he dove to catch it, she whirled around and fled the room for the last time in her life. She slammed the door on him and leaned against it, breathing heavily. The machinery whirred and rumbled against her back as the locks engaged. She relaxed her Semblance, making the illusory match fade.

  She heard muffled thumping on the door. But Papa was the only one who could let himself out.

  Roman was no computer genius, but because he didn’t trust others to do his dirty work for him, he knew just enough to be dangerous. And when it came down to it, he was fine with poking and trying things until something worked. Fortunately, the data drive seemed fairly plug and play, and soon he was clicking through folder after folder of incriminating and private videos.

  He wished he had some popcorn and a big-screen TV to scroll through the good stuff, but what he really needed was time and a good way to get this stuff out to the public.

  So he called the Vale News Network.

  “I have a hot scoop for Lisa Lavender,” he said when some intern answered.

  “It’s the middle of the night,” the woman said.

  “Something new is always happening. That’s why it’s news.”

  “I’ll take a message.”

  “You will connect me to her right now, or I’ll take my news elsewhere. But she’s going to be extremely upset to miss out on the story of the century.”

  “That’s quite the hyperbole,” she said.

  “Well, it’s certainly the biggest thing to happen in Vale all week.”

  “Who is this, anyway?”

  “Roman Torchwick.”

  She paused. “The Roman Torchwick?”

  “The very same.”

  “I’ve never heard of you.”

  Roman sighed. “Well, Lisa has. So get her on the phone right now.”

  A text message came in from Neo: They’re in the house. I’m leading them to the Dust cache in my bedroom. That should distract them while we get away.

  The WHAT cache? Roman texted back.

  Papa’s been stealing Dust from Xiong’s shipments for years and hiding it in my room. Try to keep up.

  Hei Xiong would definitely want that back. Lil’ Miss Malachite wouldn’t turn up her nose to a small fortune in Dust, either.

  Roman wanted it, too. But if it was a matter of life or Dust, well … He’d have to think about that more.

  “This is Lisa Lavender.” A voice broke
in on the line.

  “I recognize your voice from TV.”

  “Is this really Roman Torchwick?”

  “It is.”

  “What have you got? I’m a big fan …”

  Roman smiled.

  “Of ratings. And it’s not every day that a criminal mastermind calls me.”

  Roman nodded.

  “So I’ll take what I can get,” she continued.

  Roman scowled. “Do you usually roast your informants like this?”

  “Oh no,” she said. “I’m just trying to keep you busy on the line while the police trace your call.”

  Roman slapped his forehead. “I do actually have information for you that I think the police will be interested in, too.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Lil’ Miss Malachite has been spying on people in Vale using cameras hidden in triskelion pins worn by women in very high security positions.”

  Lisa Lavender was quiet for a long moment.

  “Well?” Roman said.

  “Sorry. I, um, just had to throw something out. You were saying. Do you have proof?”

  “A whole data drive worth of it, ready to beam to your server.”

  “Okay, I’ll have someone text you an address and password.” She cleared her throat. “And Roman?”

  “What?”

  “I loved the flowers.”

  Neo figured Roman would be a bigger target for Lil’ Miss and Hei Xiong, so she took on his form and worked her way downstairs. They weren’t as quiet as she was, and she knew every nook and cranny—except the secret one in her own bedroom, apparently. It was a simple matter to sneak around and subdue the Spiders and Xiong’s men, who of course had split up to search the house.

  She encountered Lady Beat and Hei Xiong in the parlor, standing over Mama’s body. Lil’ Miss wasn’t with them. Mama was tied up, but Neo couldn’t tell if she was still alive or not.

  Neo stopped to think about how she felt about that. Should she try to save her mother or leave her to face whatever fate awaited her with her fellow criminals?