A timer elapsed.
The virus was programmed to exist for only so long. To conceal its presence, it would delete itself after a certain hour. That hour had arrived.
On every scroll or other device capable of tracking time, the virus erased itself and covered its tracks. It left no trace on those devices that it had ever existed.
It was becoming clear to Weiss just how long the odds were against SDR's survival.
Having already lost its re-export business, SDR's loss of its refining capability meant it couldn't export its own mine's Dust. Taken together, the company's income had dropped to zero.
In consultation with Cristata, Weiss proposed a furlough of almost the entire workforce. She couldn't advance this proposal directly. Winter had made no effort to contact Weiss, and Weiss didn't know if she could ever show Winter her face again. Cristata, to his immense discomfort, had to play go-between for the sisters. That made everything slower and harder.
The insurance company agreed to send an adjuster out quickly, but it would still take days both for the adjustor to arrive and for them to commence work. In the meantime, four of SDR's workers were found to lack sufficient citizenship paperwork for Inspector McCarthy's liking. They were shipped up to Atlas for detention ahead of a deportation hearing.
McCarthy gleefully refused to investigate the destruction of the machine shop. "Looks like criminal negligence to me," she said with a sickening smile, "but that's not the sort of thing I look into."
"What about industrial espionage?" said Weiss through gritted teeth.
"That's not my jurisdiction either," McCarthy said with false sweetness. "I'd be happy to write you a referral though. It should only take a few days."
Weiss wasn't about to hold her breath.
A few days for this, a few days for that, everything took time, but every day with zero productivity was a deathly wound to SDR. The promptest response of all, inside of a day, had come from Ruby's friend. This should have heartened Weiss, but it did not.
Because Ruby's friend turned out to be Penny Polendina.
"Salutations," said Penny exuberantly the moment she debarked a ferry airship. Despite the fact that every day brought the town's already frigid temperatures to new lows, Penny was wearing the same garb that she had in Vale during the Vytal Festival. It made little sense to Weiss. Even Huntresses made some concessions to the cold rather than relying wholly on their Aura, if only to reduce how much Aura they had to burn to maintain temperature.
The answer became clear only after Team RVBY arrived, and the eponymous team leader dashed in for a hug.
"I missed you!" squealed Ruby, having run into Penny with enough force it should have knocked them both to the ground. "I missed you I missed you I missed you!"
"And I missed you too, Friend Ruby," said Penny, in such a voice that Weiss had to wonder if she was capable of insincerity.
"Really?" said Neptune. "It hasn't been that long since Vytal."
"In an absolute sense, perhaps not," said Penny. "But I am still quite young, so even a week is a substantial percentage of my awareness."
It was so oddly worded that it made Weiss wonder... until the specific context of Team RVBY jarred a memory loose. "Penny of Team PeCe," said Weiss. "That means... you're-"
"A swell person," interrupted Yang broadly with a swing of her arm. Weiss glared daggers at the blonde, but Yang showed no remorse.
Right. Penny being a gynoid wasn't public knowledge, Neptune's blabbing notwithstanding.
"And she's a good friend," said Ruby. "Speaking of! Penny, this is Weiss Schnee. She's my friend, too."
Such innocent words should not have caused Weiss' cheeks to flush as hard as they did.
"Any friend of Ruby's is a friend of mine," said Penny. "Hello, Friend Weiss."
It took Weiss effort to restore her composure. Especially when Penny offered her hand for a shake and Weiss foolishly accepted. As she massaged feeling back into her fingers, Weiss said, "Well, Miss Polendina, I presume that Ruby told you why we need your help?"
"To investigate industrial espionage resulting in... well, that," said Penny, pointing at the wreckage. "Wow, the damage looks even worse than I'd anticipated."
Great. "Do you think you can help us?"
"I would like to start by investigating your master logger," said Penny. "It will be a type of device I haven't interacted with before, so it should be exciting!"
"It'll be exciting to me if you find something," said Weiss.
"Then I shall try my best to excite you," said Penny with perfect innocence.
Yang snorted so hard that Blake had to kick her.
Needless to say, Weiss' already vain hopes of identifying the perpetrator were much dimmed after this interview.
It took only the roughest look at SDR's payment schedule to understand the fix they were in. Even if the insurance adjuster found everything they needed immediately, filed their claim immediately, and got it turned around quickly, it would still take weeks to receive the money, buy new equipment, have said equipment shipped to Skjulte Perle, set it up, and resume Dust production. But even if they did that, there was no guarantee of survival, because the types of Dust SDR mined were still selling at a deep discount. Even once they restored production, that revenue didn't look like enough to keep SDR afloat.
Weiss didn't have her trust fund left, either, when this was the sort of fix she'd been saving it for. Most of it had gone into the new equipment that'd burned in the machine shop. The pittance that was left wouldn't sustain SDR a week, like throwing a glass of water at a river run dry.
Which meant a dread reality was setting in: the Schnees would have to go back to Huber and beg for a third loan.
Weiss arranged for the meeting and sent word to her sister through Cristata. No reply came back.
Even that wasn't the worst. No, Winter saved the worst for the stockholders meeting.
At that meeting, Weiss officially proposed the furlough after going over the company's dire financials. Most of the employees took the news with stoic understanding, others reacted with outrage, but everyone appreciated the scope of the disaster.
The furlough proposal passed, to collective dismay. It isn't easy to zero one's own paycheck.
Weiss remembered what Cristata had told her. Most of SDR's workers had little or no savings. A side effect of being poor: you couldn't save money if you didn't have money in the first place. Accepting zero income was as dangerous to the individual as it was to SDR writ large. If this went too long, the result would be the same for worker and company.
Then Winter stood and walked to the front of the stage. "As explained by Miss Schnee," Winter said, making Weiss flinch, "SDR is in mortal danger. Even if we get a new loan, it may not be enough. It behooves everyone to start considering their options for in case the company fails."
There were widespread murmurs at that, and each one of them was a dagger in Weiss' heart.
Winter steeled herself, as if saying these words would hurt her and she needed to gather her will first. "To that end, I have been approached by representatives of Fall Dust."
There were more than murmurs at that.
Winter raised her hand for quiet, and although it took entirely too long, eventually she got it. "Fall Dust is aware of our company's position. Its people approached me to ask about buying out SDR. They told me to put a lien value on all of SDR's assets, and then proposed buying shares of stock from anyone who would sell, at five times that valuation."
Gasps of astonishment rippled through the crowd.
"It should go without saying," said Winter gravely, "but Fall Dust has no interest in keeping SDR as it is. If they buy more than a few shares, they can paralyze this company and kill it. You know how much weight we put on your buy-in. If you buy out, the company is finished."
Winter looked down, gathering herself in a way where she could pretend she was alone, that this savage reality wasn't staring her and everyone else in the face. "That said," she said, more quietly, "that is an awful lot of money on offer. I can't in good conscience ask anyone to turn down that money if they need it.
"Fall Dust's representatives will be here at next week's meeting. They'll bring money to pay anyone who wants to sell. Do what you think is right."
She walked off the stage to complete silence.
And even then, she didn't look back at Weiss.
"Tell me who's the loneliest of all…"
Weiss sat alone on the roof of the machine shop, away from the damage but still in an unsteady place. Winter would surely have chastised her for sitting there, if she were willing to speak to Weiss. The thought stung.
Weiss never thought she'd miss, or even long for, a talking-to.
Being here was as alone as Weiss could get. No one was at the mining site with production shut down, so there was no point in anyone being at the mining site office. Even Team RVBY had withdrawn into town; no grimm would be coming up to the mining site with all the negativity in town instead.
That made Skjulte Perle more crowded than ever. Isolation was hard to come by.
Which was a paradox, because it had been a long time since Weiss had felt this lonely.
There were people, people all around, but the one person she wanted to talk to most might as well have been in the wreckage of the moon.
Her feelings were so intense she had to sing about them, had to let them loose before they consumed her. She reached the final stanza of the song she'd written for herself, let it diminuendo into nothingness. It was almost too apt a metaphor.
"That's pretty singing."
Weiss was shaken from the moment so badly she almost slipped from her perch. She looked over her shoulder and saw, of all people, Yang.
"Is this spot taken?" said Yang.
Weiss went back to sulking. "I'm not in the mood for your antics, Yang, so you might as well buzz off."
"No antics tonight," said Yang, ignoring Weiss' command and coming over to sit beside her. "It just seemed like you could use a friendly ear."
"Friendly," repeated Weiss, as if the word had come from some exotic language.
"Sure," said Yang. "I know repression is, like, a thing among Atlesians, but it's not a healthy thing."
Weiss felt herself bristling. "Oh, so now you get to be my boss? It's your turn to decide what's best for me?"
She had expected the words to start a fight, and it would have been refreshing to lose herself in a storm of anger. Instead, Yang gave her a lop-sided grin that bore no relation to her usual incorrigible self. "You do what you gotta do, Weiss. Say what you gotta say. I'm a big girl. I can take it."
It was so disarming that Weiss' anger sputtered and died. "Why are you here?" she asked, at a loss.
"Because you're suffering," said Yang. "And no one deserves to suffer alone."
"Some people deserve to suffer alone," said Weiss firmly.
"Okay, sure," said Yang with a shrug, "I can imagine people who've done stuff so heinous that they maybe deserve it. But you don't."
"You wouldn't understand," said Weiss, more out of reflex than conviction.
"Try me," said Yang brightly. "I've been a big sister almost all my life, so I know a thing or two about how sistering works."
"You don't know anything!" said Weiss. When Yang didn't respond, it left a void between them there on the rooftop, and Weiss felt compelled to fill it. "My father was not a nice man, but he was still my father. He died before I turned eight. Winter..."
She stopped when saying the name felt like a knife between her ribs.
Yang scooted a little closer, not touching Weiss (which would have set her off), but close enough that Weiss could feel her next to her. Yang felt cozy, like she had a space heater tucked under her jacket and could warm up everything around her just by existing.
It was comforting. It reminded Weiss of the bandages in the first aid kits that had Dust inside. They eased the pain away by warming it.
But pains of the soul couldn't be soothed by heat.
"Winter left me," said Weiss. "I know she wasn't thinking about it in those terms, and I don't blame her for trying to get out of that house, but she was still gone when I needed her. She came back from time to time, taught me how to fight and how to use my semblance, but only for a short while each time. I was always priority two. And if ever... if Mother showed up... Winter would leave immediately."
"Sounds like you didn't exactly have mother of the year," said Yang.
Weiss gave a scornful laugh. "Willow Schnee imploded like a collapsing building," she said, filling her words with all the resentment she'd felt over the many years. "Responsibility fell on her and she broke under its weight. She crawled into a bottle and pickled herself, and eventually it killed her, but not before she did as much damage as possible to everything… everyone… around her.
"I was fourteen when I finally realized she wasn't going to get better. Up to then, I tried to believe that she could pull herself out, that maybe someone could help her, that I could help her. But I was wrong. You have to want to get better. You have to try to get better. I read that in the materials I got for her. Well, she never tried. Nothing was important enough for her to change her ways. I wasn't... The company wasn't..."
"You're gonna say 'good enough'," said Yang, "like it's somehow your fault she didn't get her act together. You know that's not true."
"Well, I had to make myself 'good enough'," said Weiss fiercely, rounding on Yang. "Who else was there? Winter was gone, Mother was drinking herself to death, I didn't know anyone else that wasn't twenty years older than me, or actively trying to take advantage of me, or both. The only person in my life that actually cared for me was our butler, and there was nothing he could do about all the responsibilities I suddenly had.
"I was alone. Completely alone. And now I'm feeling that way again. Only this time, I did it to myself. I did with words what my mother did with her bottle. And I… I can't fix it. I'm more alone than I've ever been."
She found a few flickers of anger and tried to fan them, tried to feel something other than self-loathing. "So don't tell me you 'understand' or you 'know what I'm going through'. You don't know this loneliness."
Yang nodded, seeming to take all this in stride, and to her credit she didn't try to tell Weiss she was wrong. Instead, she said something Weiss couldn't have possibly expected. "Did you ever wonder why my sister and I look so different?"
It was such a seeming change of subject that for several seconds Weiss couldn't get her brain to engage with the words. "Frequently," she said at length.
"Technically, we're half-sisters. I never knew my birth mother. She grunted me out, dumped me off with dad, and bailed on us. I never knew why. Still don't. For a while I chased after her. I tried to contact her and ask that question. But I was never important enough for her to reach back. Eventually I couldn't keep chasing a ghost when my real life was happening in front of me. I still fantasize about getting to talk to her, even once, to just try and understand. At this point, I don't think I ever will.
"But that's not even the point," said Yang to Weiss' surprise. "The point is, Raven bailed on my dad, too, not just me. It tore him up. But eventually his teammate helped make it a little better. Summer Rose pulled him out. And after a couple of years, that gave us Ruby. We were like a real family.
"Then, one day, Mom went on a mission and never came back. I was six. Ruby was four. She didn't really understand, but I did."
Even with her own heart so full of anguish and turmoil, Weiss found in herself a spark of... if not pity exactly, then sympathy. "It must have been hard," she managed, out of a dearth of other things to say.
Yang huffed. "If you think it was bad for me, it did a real number on Dad. He'd lost two teammates, two wives, two mothers of his children. He pretty much fell apart. For days, even weeks, he would just shut down. He wouldn't eat, wouldn't move, he'd just… waste away.
"I know I look like the sort of girl who gets in trouble all the time, but I've only been arrested once. I was ten years old. Shoplifting. There was no food in the house, I couldn't find any money, and Ruby said she was hungry."
Weiss tried to imagine that. She couldn't. She'd never known hunger; the idea of not being able to eat was foreign, and terrifying for its strangeness.
"Luckily," said Yang ironically, "that turned out to be the wake-up call Dad needed. He got a little better after that. Uncle Qrow made a point to come by more often and help when he could. But there would still be times when Uncle Qrow was out and Dad would Go Away. And then? Then I'd be a little girl trying to take care of three people all by herself, with no money in the middle of the woods on a nowhere island."
Weiss had so many feelings, both from her own story and from Yang's, that she thought they would overwhelm her, make it impossible to ever think again because of emotional overload. Her mind was reeling and her heart was straining. Why did Yang have to be so… so…?
Yang looked up at Weiss and gave her a new smile, one Weiss would never have expected her to be able to make. It was a sad thing, but filled with camaraderie, the sort of smile a veteran of a lost war might give to a fellow soldier. "So you're right," said Yang. "I don't know loneliness like you do. I have my own version. And I garun-damn-tee you that Winter has her version, too. We all have things we struggle with, and it's never easy. But you said yourself that the most important thing is to want to get better. To give it your best shot.
"And I can tell you right now, as a fellow big sister, that Winter is trying to be a good big sister really freaking hard."
Weiss gave a humorless chuckle. "She's not doing a very good job of it."
"Nope," said Yang ruthlessly. "She's also trying to be a mom, and a business partner, and a superior officer, and probably half a dozen other things too, while making up for lost time, and with all the stresses you two are facing piled on top. It's not the easiest job in the world, being a big sister. But believe me, you've got a good one. She's trying as hard as she can. You can't really ask for more than one hundred percent."
"Maybe one hundred percent is too much," said Weiss, startled at her own insight. "Maybe she's trying so hard to be 'the good big sister' that she's overdoing it."
"Maybe," said Yang. "But that's something the two of you have to work out together. You'll need to talk to each other eventually. But, whether it's in the meantime or after, I'll listen, too. 'Cuz I care about what happens to you, y'know?"
"You do?" said Weiss, baffled.
"Yep," said Yang, and as flippantly as she said it, the sincerity beneath it went all the way down.
Maybe Yang's warmth soothed hurts of the soul after all. If there was any magic left in this world, this had to be it.
Weiss wasn't alone. That truth made its way to her heart and warmed her from the inside-out. It made all the difference in the world.
Weiss took a deep breath, the first such in a while, and marveled at how much more settled she felt. Nothing had been solved, to be sure. She still had no idea how to reconcile with her sister. But, for the first time, she felt up to trying. She understood the value of the attempt.
She wanted to try.
That had to count for something.
She looked at Yang and smiled fondly. "I like you better when you're empathetic," she said.
She knew at once she'd made a mistake, because Yang's face lit up in mischief. "So you like me at other times, too! Aww, Ice Princess, I knew you cared!"
Weiss blubbered and blathered. "That's not… it's… sh-shut up, Xiao Long!"
"Ah, there!" said Penny. "It would appear the master logger's memory cards are intact. Sensational!"
Cam's shoulders relaxed. "That's good," they said, although they still didn't meet Penny's eyes. Penny had observed Cam appearing nervous (or possibly one of the options her thesaurus function furnished: anxious, worried, wary, unsure) in her presence. As Penny couldn't accurately diagnose Cam's appearance, there was no chance of her understanding why Cam would appear that way.
Such misunderstandings didn't seem to be getting in the way, though. "I was apprehensive when I saw the logger in pieces," Penny said. "Its power supply is destroyed, and it will never work again. Still, all we need for this investigation is the data in its memory."
"Which you have?" Cam asked.
"Which we have," Penny confirmed.
Did you hear that, Dad? Penny sent by message. She could vocalize calls she made using internal networking, but experience demonstrated that people witnessing only one side of a call, especially without a scroll or other visible prop to explain it, reacted negatively 83.3% of the time. Now she saved that method for when it was necessary.
"I did, sweetie," replied Pietro. "Looks like a standard type three connection."
Which Penny could access using a data link in her left ring finger. That course of action would reveal her as a gynoid if Cam saw. Penny selected a countermeasure that, happily, was also necessary. How serendipitous!
(Penny had been delighted to learn the word "serendipitous" and now actively sought excuses to use it. It was too much fun to let it stay in her memory banks, unused. Some of her other favorites: olfactory, heuristic, zeitgeist, cornucopia, and effervescent. Honestly, what would she have done without vocal processors? Some words were so much fun they had to be spoken!)
"I will also need access to any surviving motor controllers," said Penny, "if that is possible."
"Over here," said Cam, turning to one of the walls that hadn't been blown down. Perhaps part of the reason was the large electrical cabinets standing there, regulating the power flow to the machines that used to populate the shop.
It was a sad thing, Penny thought, for a machine to not be able to perform as designed. She pitied them.
Especially if they were thwarted by enemy action!
Cam was talking, describing which motor controller went to which machine. Penny watched and listened, but she also stuck out her left ring finger while Cam was looking away and plugged it into the master logger's memory.
A quick integrity check first… then it would be a matter of copying data over to a partitioned drive for storage, then passing that data to Dad through a virtual network to another partitioned drive on his end, to ensure that any potential viruses lurking in that data had no chance to break out or infect any other systems. Once Dad had it on his end, the real work would begin.
Her friends had entrusted Penny with this investigation, and she would do her best! Why, if she and Dad couldn't find a virus working together, then no viruses existed!
Penny realized that her eyes had gone out of focus as she passed the data. Cam was looking back at her in confusion.
"Are you okay?" said Cam.
Penny smiled in glee. "I am effervescent!"
Next time: The Schnee Way