LEGACY LOST (7 page)

The chief and most disturbing difference between
Newton-3
and the others was that his eyes, the standard blue marbles, glowed with a pinprick of red in the center.

Kaizen gulped, peering into a face that was identical to the face that had pummeled him in the chest until its knuckles broke their plating into jagged shards and cut him with long, deep lacerations that would likely never heal. He still had to be tender with the stitches down his torso.

“I don’t need any help,” he informed
Newton-3,
finally finding his tongue. “Thank you, but that will be all.”

“
You are all there is, sir,” Newton-3
went on. His head tilted on his jointed neck, so it was as if he were truly peering deeply at the man before him. “
Disappoint you, and I will cease to be.”

Kaizen scrutinized the oddly existential bot a touch closer. Had Master Addler programmed the languages of the first set? He had to doubt it. Surely, they’d known when to get lost, and they hadn’t said such disconcertingly morose things.

“Augh, okay, then . . . You know what you can do?”

Newton-3
plunged into a low bow, and Kaizen grimaced.

“You can wash the glass plating on the dome,” he commanded. “That ought to give your life meaning for the entire trip.”
Newton-3
hesitated, vibrating as if attempting to assimilate this command with his system, and then rolled from the room without further ado.

Moments later, a sharp tap came at Kaizen’s bay window, jerking him from the nap into which he’d been slipping, half-dressed, on his bed.

The Taliko castle’s Hermetic device clinked steadily against the glass.

Shaking Legacy’s phantom fingers from his hair, Kaizen went to the window and unlatched it, accepting the device and depressing its shell. The light emerged, flickering with the husky cadence of her voice: strong. Soft. Still alive. And commanding him, in no uncertain terms, to forget her.

              Legacy was no longer allowed to take the helm of the
Albatropus,
even though there was no twenty-five mile per hour speed limit imposed anymore
.
As Vector loved to continually remind her, their invisibility shield had been singed away, and now they could maintain forty-five miles per hour all day if they so pleased. Still, Legacy wasn’t allowed behind the wheel, in some very effective form of negative reinforcement, but she enjoyed the view of sunset from the deck nonetheless, and Ray didn’t seem to mind her presence. She could tell herself she was keeping him company, even if he didn’t seem to give a damn one way or the other, and his girlfriend, Izzy, was already there with him. Ray and Izzy had been housemates with Neon Trimpot before he’d defected, and moved aboard the airship prior to its launch, fearful that they would be turned in if they stayed behind.

              “And, you know, it’s not like I was saying he
had
to go
all the way
or anything. Of course. I mean, I respect a man’s decision about that kind of thing,” Legacy rambled. “I
just wanted
to be comforted. Is that so much to ask?”

              “You sound like a man,” Izzy chirped, smirking.

              Legacy glanced over her shoulder at the curly-haired, sandy-skinned girl and glowered. “That’s so sexist.”

              “I think Dax made a really mature and compassionate call,” Izzy continued.

              Legacy shifted as if there was a rock in her boot. “Compassionate, really?” she pressed. “Try selfish. Egotistical? Like, ‘Oh, just love me, forget your needs and love me’ . . .”

              “Instead of, ‘Oh, just fuck me’?” Ray interjected blithely.

              “He can’t help if his standard for sexual activity is high,” Izzy defended him. “It’s admirable.”

              Legacy blanched, remembering her transgressions in the private booth at Glitch’s House of Oil, a seedy drink den in Groundtown, the red light district of Icarus.

              “You’re awfully . . . pink,” Izzy noted, examining Legacy in profile.

              The girl shaded her face. “I’m dehydrated,” she snapped.

              Izzy gasped and tittered. “Have you and Dax already . . . done it?” she pressed.

              “No!” Legacy said.

              “Aw, come on, you can–”

              Thankfully, on multiple levels, the distant rumble of a thunderhead interrupted the scene both trivial and tortuous.

              “Oh my god! Rain!” Izzy cheered.

              “I’ll go get Vector!” Legacy volunteered, racing toward the forecastle. “Rain! Rain! Vector! It’s going to rain!”

              The entirety of the
Albatropus’
innards came spilling out onto the deck, thirsty and jubilant. The swollen, dirty gray clouds beyond were approaching at a steady rate, the wind picking up, with it the smell of earth and water. Vector extended the vertical sheets of non-porous material like blinds on rods, and everyone bubbled and hummed about their pails or the bucket and how quickly they would drink. The wind swelled around the people, plucking at their hair and their clothes, and just as Legacy caught eyes with Dax, standing on the forecastle with Rain, a sheet of water rocketed across the potbelly airship and drilled against its patched balloon. The vessel even shifted, not unlike the ground of Icarus beneath their feet not so long ago, but now they only cheered. They needed the water more than they needed any intangible fears.

              Legacy didn’t have a pail of her own, so she jumped up and down with her mouth open and let it wet her throat.

              “Here,” Saul, so often sequestered in the laboratory, said to her. He shoved a gallon pail brimming with rainwater into Legacy’s arms. “Drink.”

              Legacy opened her mouth to the metal bucket and allowed the fresh, cool water to course so heavily that it spilled down her throat in a wasteful stream. She pulled away, gasped for breath, and took another long pull before isolating Claire Addler, the wan girl with the large gray eyes, and offering her the pail. “Drink!” she insisted, now giddy with relief, certain that the past twenty-four hours had only been a trial, and not a fate.

              “Do you want your own?” Izzy called behind her.

              Legacy turned and pushed her sopping braids from her face. “What?”

              “Do you want your own pail?” Izzy reiterated. “I’ve got a spare in the luggage drawers in the berth!”

              “Oh! Yes! Definitely!” Legacy clapped Izzy on the shoulder and threaded through the crowd of slick, giddy wayfarers, trundling down into the deserted berth. The room was oddly quiet now. It had always been packed with at least ten people, but now – now it was just her, dripping on the floorboards, and all these knobs. Izzy hadn’t mentioned
which
drawer had the spare pail.

              Legacy was halfway across the floor, having inspected many failures, when the door swung open and shut, expelling Dax from the deck.

He skipped down the steps without looking and then came up short at the sight of her.

“Leg,” he greeted breathlessly. “Hey.”

Legacy, too, felt breathless just now. “Hey,” she repeated. “Water, huh?”
You’re an idiot,
she berated herself.

“Yeah,” Dax agreed. “Izzy sent me in here to find some spare water pail of hers in the drawers.”

Legacy smiled in spite of herself.
“Spare water pail.”
She suddenly had to wonder if it had ever existed at all, or if Isabel Whitmore had just incidentally become the coolest girl on the
Albatropus.

              “I don’t know about that spare pail,” Legacy confessed, stepping closer to Dax. She was feeling heady. Brave. “Izzy sent me in here to look for it too, and I haven’t found it yet, but . . . I wanted to talk to you anyway.” She placed her hands tentatively over his, and peered up into his eyes. He looked back at her just as intently. “I think I might owe you an apology for how I acted the other night.”

              Dax frowned and broke eye contact, shaking his head slightly. “Well,” he said. “It’s – Yeah. It’s all right. You were . . . You were upset. It’s cool.”

              Legacy nodded. She was glad he’d looked away. She couldn’t bear to look at him, either. “But – if you want to wait for something . . . perfect and beautiful . . . you know? That’s very mature and . . . admirable.” She nodded again to herself, not daring to glance up again, and missed how his eyes were trained on her. They looked particularly dark at this moment. “I mean, you know, in this ugly world, we should have the right to choose . . . when we want to kiss someone. If we want to kiss them. There’s so little else that we can control.” Dax removed one of his hands from hers, but she still didn’t look up. His fingers went to unfasten the strap over his mouth. “Apologizing is hard for me!” she suddenly exclaimed. “But I – I just wanted to say that I respect your decision . . . retroactively. I – regardless of everything that has happened between us and that will happen between us in the future – I love you, Dax. You know? You’re my best friend. So . . . I’m sorry.”

Now her eyes panned up to his, and she saw the plane of his cheek in stark relief against the hanging leather of the rebreather.

Dax stooped, his fingers tracing up her jaw and cradling her cheek, and Legacy’s eyes flicked up and down between his eyes and his lips, breathless, almost gasping, almost . . .

The door to the berth banged open and Gustav, the surly Chance for Choicer with strawberry blond hair, swung into the room, sopping wet. “Oi, did either of you two find Izzy’s spare pail or what?” he hollered. “We’re almost out of this storm and we need to be gathering as much water for tomorrow as possible, you know! Just in case!”

The lulling couple sprang apart and Dax scrambled to refasten his mask. “No, haven’t found it yet,” he answered quickly, beginning to rip through the drawers in the floor as if he hadn’t just been threading his fingers into Legacy’s braids for the first time in . . . Jesus, how long had it been? How long had it been since he’d really been able to give himself over to her, and to accept her offering of herself, without the specter of the Taliko nobility and the police and the monarchy looming? He supposed the honest answer to that was: never.

Dax wrenched the silver gallon pail from its drawer, too zealous with the discovery to notice the flutter of shadow beneath the floorboards. “Here it is!” he exclaimed, tossing the pail to Gustav. “Sorry about the wait!”

“Hey, don’t worry about it, I just made ten pieces,” Gustav boasted, grinning. “Izzy bet me, when I opened this door, that you two would be kissing.” He saluted his compatriots and ducked from the berth, back onto the deck.

The moment passed, descending yet again into the awkward space between being friends and being more. Dax and Legacy followed Gustav’s lead onto the deck, taking their last few swigs of water until tomorrow. The storm had quieted to a drizzle now, and Legacy noticed for the first time that they’d traveled so far, the Taliko castle was no longer in sight.

It took Neon Trimpot an hour to wash the odor of baby powder and lilies from beneath his fingernails, and another two hours to find Sophie in the expansive castle. She wasn’t in her bedchamber, or in the machinist’s chamber, or at the arbor. When he finally uncovered her hiding place, she was in plain sight, at the helm of the floating island.

“They let you drive?” Trimpot squeaked thoughtlessly.

“She insisted,” a mustached sentry muttered.

“I’ve never felt so ali-i-i-i-ive!” Sophie yodeled, giving the wheel a sudden, whimsical spin. The castle lurched beneath their feet, Trimpot slamming into the stone ledge of the rooftop and the sentry toppling over, scrabbling at the wall and plummeting to his likely death several dozen feet below.

“Sorry.” Sophie drew her shoulders up to her ears and beamed, righting the wheel as if she’d only spilled a drink. “I’ve never been allowed out of the castle, you know!” she piped, glossing over the manslaughter she’d carelessly committed, as if the corpse sprawled, tangled in a bloodied bush, wasn’t there at all. “This is my first chance to really travel!” Trimpot turned away from his long stare at the dead man, ordering himself to clear his mind and remember the role he had to play. Sophie was peering at him, bright-eyed. They were maniacally bright, in fact. Almost reflective. “I mean, Daddy took me to Celestine once, but I was forced to stay in the airship the entire time, and I was never allowed to drive!”

She spun the wheel again, but this time, thankfully, Trimpot was ready for it. He clung to the ledge of the wall with arms and legs both, gasping for breath as the island righted itself and dumped him onto the castle keep’s flat rooftop yet again.

“Sorry, that was the last time,” Sophie giggled.

Trimpot climbed unsteadily to his feet and allowed himself only a second or two to become composed. Perhaps he should’ve been an actor. In a moment, his eyes were even and intimate, his smile warm and worn loosely on his lips.

“You
know
,” he confided, sidling up to where the mad girl, still in that awful, stained chemise, piloted an entire island. “I
may
have figured a way for you to be . . . legal. Have legal standing. A real identity, and
everything
. It wouldn’t even be too hard.”

“Really?” Sophie squeaked. She glanced at the spokes in her hands and Trimpot tensed, preparing to lunge again, when she glanced back to him instead. “What way?” Her voice became very small.

“The monarch wants your brother to give him up a rebel, probably to be publicly executed, you know,” Trimpot informed her.

“Of course,” she said, unblinking.

“And we have spotted a rebel ship, the
Albatropus,
not far from us . . . though they are gaining distance,” he went on. “So, you see, the monarch
wants
a dead rebel, and so, it’s not really bad to
kill
some rebels, is it?”

“Of course not,” she agreed, again not missing a beat. A shadow passed over her face. “They killed all my friends.”

“Right, yes.”
My god, you’re a loon, darling.
“The catch is that the monarch only knows the name of
one
rebel, and that’s Exa Legacy.
All
the other rebels are totally unknown. Faceless. Nameless. Mere people assumed dead in the rubble of Icarus. And so . . . if we could siege that ship and slaughter those aboard, the monarch wishes for only one head to be delivered to him. The rest are just . . .” Trimpot’s hand wound dreamily in the air. “. . . wide open for whosoever may wish . . .”

Sophie’s eyes took on more of a gleam, if that was possible.

“Everyone who’s ever known them would be dead,” Trimpot assured her, stepping lightly just behind her. He delicately braced her shoulders beneath his fingers. “You could take their documents, their belongings, and just . . . become them,” he whispered into her ear. “After all, the archives of the city have been destroyed, have they not? All record vanished. No longer Sophie Taliko, the invisible duchess.”