by E. C. Myers
Her Scroll buzzed. You good? I’m all set here. The files are transferring. We should go.
Wait for my signal, Neo sent back.
Roman was counting on her. She darted out from the doorway and dashed across the room.
“It’s Torchwick!” Xiong shouted.
Neo heard his footsteps behind her. She doubted Lady Beat would be able to keep up.
Xiong followed her all the way up the stairs, firing shots after her. She got to the top floor first.
Roman heard gunshots in the house and Xiong bellowing his name.
“That would be Neo,” he said. The files were done transferring, so the data drive itself now was almost worthless. It was almost time to go.
He sat down again and pulled up Jimmy Vanille’s files. He was responsible for pulling a lot of strings in the city, so he had to have something interesting on there.
Something like spreadsheets, contacts, manifests, and information on deals above and below board. Roman grinned. This could be worth almost as much as what he’d just given up. He copied the contents over to the data drive and slid it back into his pocket.
He snuck into the hallway and saw Hei Xiong standing there, pointing his gun at—Roman Torchwick.
Neo appeared next to Roman and made him jump. She gave him a Look.
“What took me so long? I’ll show you later,” he said.
Neo grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the stairs.
“Got nothing to say now, huh, Torchwick?” Xiong said.
Roman opened his mouth. Neo shook her head. At the moment that Xiong fired his machine gun at the duplicate Roman, they bolted down the stairs. Xiong’s cursing followed them down.
“He’ll be happier once he finds that Dust,” Roman said.
They reached the first floor and headed for the front door. Roman opened it.
“Coast looks clear,” he said.
A moment later, a spotlight shone on them. He shielded his eyes and peered out as Neo grabbed his other hand.
A Bullhead was hovering over the lawn, its spotlight and guns trained on them. In the illuminated cockpit, he saw his old friend Brick at the controls, with Lil’ Miss Malachite herself sitting beside him.
“I guess this is it,” Roman said. It was the end of the line.
Neo squeezed his hand. He glanced at her and was surprised to see Carmel Vanille in her place.
“Neo?” Roman asked.
He glanced down at himself and saw he was wearing Jimmy Vanille’s tacky suit and shoes—and presumably his face.
Neo tugged him forward and they walked down the stairs and along the path slowly toward a car parked in the driveway. The spotlight followed them. He looked nervously up at the Bullhead. Lil’ Miss was watching them closely.
“I’d be surprised if she let us go,” Roman said. “Unless you can hold these disguises indefinitely, once they capture us they’ll figure out who we are.”
Neo’s brows knit together, either from concern or concentration.
“We need to give her a bigger target, something she wants enough to draw her attention while we get away.” He stopped walking. “While you get away. She’s mainly interested in me. Drop this disguise and I’ll distract her. You get out of here. And never look back.”
She shook her head defiantly. He tried to pull his hand free, but she only held on more tightly.
The Bullhead moved toward them slowly. He could be wrong. Lil’ Miss might just decide to cut her losses and write this whole thing off as a botched job—wipe out all of them from spite and just to be sure everyone who knew about her operations in Vale was no longer a threat.
“Please. You have to let go.”
Neo’s chin trembled. She glanced back at the house and then up at Roman’s face.
Then she started waving frantically at the Bullhead.
“Neo?” What was she doing?
For a moment he wondered if she was going to turn him in and try to strike a deal for herself. Which he couldn’t really blame her for trying. He even kind of expected it, given his track record with partners. Another day, another Roman might have done the same. Anything to survive.
Neo stared down the Bullhead—stared down Lil’ Miss Malachite—and pointed up at the house. Lil’ Miss turned to look.
Roman couldn’t believe it when the ship slowly turned away from them to face the house. She had taken the bait. But what was the bait?
The spotlight illuminated the upper corner of the house. Two figures were visible in a third-floor window. Their backs were turned, but they were clearly him and Neo. The figures turned to look out at the Bullhead. The fake Roman flashed a rude gesture and fake Neo stuck her tongue out.
Neo dropped Roman’s hand and started running toward her father’s car in the driveway. Roman followed her lead. She looked like herself again, unable to maintain multiple illusions, and not really needing to now that the attention was off them, for the moment.
When Neo reached the car, she opened the driver’s side door and climbed inside. Roman hopped into the passenger side. She was too short to see over the steering wheel.
“Do you need a booster seat?” Roman asked.
She glared at him. He raised his hands innocently. Then he heard gunfire from the Bullhead as Lil’ Miss began attacking the window, trying to kill him. The window was holding up shockingly well, thanks to a hard light force field blocking the bullets.
“It’s shielded?” Roman said.
But the walls around the window weren’t, and they were crumbling under the gunfire. The guns stopped.
Neo buckled her seat belt. She tapped his leg. Roman ignored her and kept watching as the Bullhead fired a missile, which finally broke through the hard light force field.
Then he got it. That room was protected because it was where Jimmy Vanille had been stockpiling Dust.
Roman grabbed for his seat belt and fumbled blindly with the clasp—
Too late. There was a brilliant flash of white light followed a moment later by a tremendous boom and crack of thunder. Then the shock wave came, tearing through the mansion. The Bullhead lost control and came down beyond the driveway, just past the tree line.
When the force hit the car Roman and Neo were in, it pushed the vehicle into the air. It turned over and over until it finally came to a rest on the other end of the driveway.
Neopolitan staggered out of the crumpled car. Her Aura was almost depleted, but she was all right.
She checked on Roman. He had been thrown clear of the vehicle as it tumbled through the air and was lying on his back on the lawn. He was unconscious but breathing. Unfortunately his hat wasn’t going to make it. He had landed on it and crushed it.
Neo looked over at her house, or what was left of it. The explosion of all the Dust packed in her room had leveled the top two floors of the house, and the first floor had collapsed in on itself.
She sat beside Roman and watched the sun rise behind the rubble. She heard sirens in the distance.
Roman gasped and sat up. His eyes squinted in pain. “Wow,” he said when he saw the remains of the house. “Did anyone make it out of that? Xiong?” He hesitated. “Your parents,” he said softly.
Neo shook her head. Papa had been locked in that room, at the epicenter of the detonated Dust. He’d been killed by the only thing he’d truly cared about: his ambitions.
And killed by his daughter.
Lil’ Miss might have been the one to pull the trigger, but Neo had pointed her guns at her father. And Mama …
Roman paused. “You all right, Neo?”
She shrugged. She really didn’t know. But she wasn’t not all right.
As far as she was concerned, Trivia Vanille was buried under that mess, too. Neopolitan was the sole survivor. With her parents gone, she didn’t have anything or anyone to run from anymore.
She was finally free.
“You know, I lost my parents when I was younger than you, and I turned out okay,” Roman said in a lighter voice.
Neo looked at him and cracked a smile. He caught a lock of her hair and showed it to her. It was white. “This is new. It suits you,” he said.
Why would she have done that with her Semblance?
The sirens grew louder. “Soon this place is gonna be lousy with cops, reporters, fire brigades.” He glanced at the destroyed car behind them, then at the Bullhead they had flown in on. “Think we can get that junk heap back in the sky?”
Neo and Roman trudged toward it side by side.
The Bullhead, already riddled with bullets, its windshield shattered and gone, had sustained additional damage from the explosion, but most of the preflight checks turned up green, and whatever that red light was, she would deal with it later.
“You … can just drop me wherever,” Roman said.
She shot him an anxious look.
“Unless you want to stick together?”
She gave him a look that she hoped expressed how incredibly clueless she thought he was. Dum-dum.
“Can’t imagine why you want to hang out with someone like me. With your abilities, you could be anything you want—even a Huntress.”
Neo burst out laughing. She turned to him and briefly transformed into Vale’s most famous Huntress, Glynda Goodwitch. She saluted him.
Can you imagine that?
“Maybe not,” Roman said. “But the criminal world isn’t ready to deal with you yet. I mean, I’m still not interested in having a sidekick—” She glowered.
“But I couldn’t ask for a better partner.”
Neo leaned over and kissed Roman on the cheek. His face went red. It was fun to mess with him sometimes. She tousled his hair for good measure. He needed a new hat.
“Stop,” he said, pulling away.
Neo quickly returned to the controls and started to raise the Bullhead.
“It’s a shame we literally blew a fortune in Dust,” he said. “But there’s more where that came from.” He patted his pocket. “For all his many faults, your father had a decent plan. Control all the Dust in the city, and you control everything else. It’s just too bad he didn’t have you helping him make it work. But with Hei Xiong out of the picture, and Lil’ Miss retreating to Mistral, we’re the only game in town.”
Neo frowned. She didn’t really care about running things, or cornering the market on Dust. She just wanted to do whatever she wanted. And for the moment, what she wanted was to help Roman set the world on fire.
Once they were at cruising altitude, Neo looked at Roman. Where to?
He grinned. “Your choice.”
On the horizon she spotted other ships on their way from the city center. That decided that—she steered them in the opposite direction, at full throttle. She leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes, feeling the warm sun on her face and the wind blowing through her hair. For once, she wasn’t worried about anything.
No one was ever going to catch Roman and Neo.
© 2021 Rooster Teeth Productions, LLC
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First printing 2021
Cover art by Courtney Brenek
Cover design by Jeff Shake
e-ISBN 978-1-338-77514-3
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