LEGACY BETRAYED (19 page)

Neon Trimpot swaggered out with his arms full of frock coats and top hats.

“Oh! Hello!” he sang. “Just some shopping! You know! Saturdays!” He strode past the young duke, who no longer had the capacity to be surprised by the turncoat’s gall. “Looks like we found that catastrophe to blame on the CC after all!” he called over his shoulder, disappearing toward the keep. Kaizen let him go. The rebels had dropped him quickly after his betrayal, and Trimpot seemed to care little in either direction. He went where the money was, and hell, now he was in a castle.

Duke Lovelace had quickly, however courteously, taken his leave. Kaizen wasn’t too surprised.

And what of Legacy?

She’ll land on her feet,
Kaizen deduced, feeling grim.
She always does. If there’s one girl who never needed saving . . .

An unearthly crackling filled the air, and Kaizen sat up straighter, glaring after the source. He felt static electricity race along his hair, lifting tendrils into the air, and then came a deafening crack from within the city walls.

A streak of green light and a shatter-crunch as the dome gave way to the force of the blow, and Kaizen shot to his feet, awakened.

“Raise the bridge!” he hollered to his nearest sentry.

The man just stared at him blankly. Of course. He wasn’t a real sentry. He was a damn loaner from Taliko Center. “R-raise the bridge?” he squeaked.

Kaizen roared and rushed past him, diving toward the castle keep, where the drawbridge commands could be issued. He knew he had precious little time. If there was one thing he’d been raised to intimately understand, it was the physics behind a floating geodesic dome, and a hole in the structure . . . that simply would not do.

His father had told him once that it would take two minutes, depending on the size of the leak. The bigger the leak, the swifter the fall. Not two minutes to untether. Two minutes before impact. So his legs pumped wildly into the castle keep.

“Raise the bridge!” Kaizen called, hitting the royal machinists’ hall at full stride.

Trimpot was in a pink top hat, modeling for Sophie. “Raise the bridge?” he inquired. “Whatever for?”

“Raise the bridge, goddamnit!” Kaizen cried, lunging for the lever nearest to the amber map of Icarus: the keep reader. He wrenched the lever backward and the land beneath their feet lurched accordingly.

“Kaizen,” Sophie whimpered, peering up from where she sat in the floor. “Kaizen, if we raise the bridge, you know we’ll be adrift, and you know . . .”

You might be exposed for what you are: alive.

“Yes,” Kaizen replied. “I know. Trust me, Sophie. Okay?” He reached down and patted her unscarred cheek. “It’s better than the alternative.”

How many sentries were in the entire castle right now? How many retinue? Courtiers? How were their supplies until they were allowed to dock at another city? His mind worked through all this and yet concluded nothing at all. Each question was dismissed. Now was not the time. Not now.

Kaizen didn’t think about any of it. If he had any strength, it was sudden action with little forethought, and just now, the drawbridge was retracting into itself, slat by slat, talon by talon, until only the castle remained. Separate from the whole of Icarus, and floating, floating indefinitely, as it had no tether to the Old Earth. The drawbridge turtled into the mechanical floor of the Taliko Archipelagos, and out blossomed chrome propellers in its stead.

The island wouldn’t move quickly, he was sure . . .

              And how could you steer an island?

              It didn’t matter. There had been no choice. He’d finally done one thing his father would’ve done. He’d finally made a bloodless, heartless decision because it was necessary and logical.

             
I wonder . . .

             
He shook his head, as if clearing from it a clinging scent, but the question wouldn’t go. It was the one question that he could not simply shunt to the side.

             
I wonder where Legacy is, and if she’s safe.

             
Goddamnit, NO, this is not going to happen,
Dax swore to himself, lunging through the common room. He jostled through the hedge of strangers, faceless and hostile just now, calling out, “I need a transmitter! Anybody! A Hermetic device!”

“Uh, I’ve got one, I think,” a dark-skinned girl offered. Dax knew her name was Izzy, Ray’s girlfriend, and she used to live with Trimpot, but the information hesitated to occur to him just now. “Hermetic, right?” She produced one of those lightweight, winged silver balls, and Dax snatched it from her.

“Thanks,” he barked, vaulting down into the laboratory. He could feel the floor shifting beneath his feet. They’d lifted off.

“–not only as a textile but –Dax?” Claire, speaking to Saul, broke off in mid-sentence to stare at him, wide-eyed.

              “What’s going on?” Saul added.

              “I need some of that really sticky silk,” he rapped. “Now!”

              “Uh . . .” Saul walked to one of the jars at the end of the counter, spinning it open and extending it to Dax. He curled his nose with barely disguised disgust. “Why?”

              Dax grabbed a knot of rope from the top and ran with it, the material unraveling behind him like a white yarn traced with globules of adhesive. He depressed the Hermetic device and inserted the stretching, clinging string before depressing it again, trapping the thread inside. He pounded through the common room, the strange silk catching corners and furniture and clinging there, through the door and out onto the deck again.

“Fuck,” Vector moaned. “Get him out of here. Don’t let him see.”

“Dax,” Rain said, advancing toward him with her arms outstretched, partially to embrace him and partially to guard him from progress. “Don’t look, it’s–”

But Dax ignored this and dodged around her, lunging to the rail of the departing airship, rain pounding down around them all, and cried, “Audio Swan! Grab on!” hurling the Hermetic device into the maelstrom. It winked and descended like a falling star, trailing the gossamer thread behind it.

              As Legacy had hoped, the sudden loss of stability caused Flywheel-2’s silken, golden wings to unfold behind her and catch the powerful swell of the storm winds, buffeting her and Coal-Radia actually upward rather than slowly down, spiraling deep into the dark, wet sky. Both women were now soaking wet and shivering uncontrollably, even Coal-Radia, even in her sleep.
This is so bad,
Legacy couldn’t help but think, squinting against the splatters of rain. Legacy’s breath came now in short, involuntary gasps. The high wind would only blow them off course from the N.E.E.R. dome below, and might give them hypothermia. She didn’t see any airships, and, although the wings occasionally flapped, she couldn’t control them. There was no steering or reason to the rhythm of its beats. Not that she knew, anyway. Only her dad would’ve known.

             
Dad . . .

              No,
another part of her brain firmly replied.
Don’t. Not now.

              She found herself curling around Coal-Radia as if the unconscious girl were her baby daughter. Wending alternately upward and downward, eyelids drooping now, Legacy began to fear that surviving their landing was not her top priority concern. Perhaps she would die in the sky. She feared she would drop Coal-Radia before that happened, but her arms seemed to have frozen in this position. She wouldn’t drop Coal-Radia until she herself was dead. She made the promise in her head.

              Legacy’s eyes drooped lower still and she shivered, bowing her face into Coal-Radia’s side.

             
My sister,
she corrected herself.
My twin sister.

             
She held Coal-Radia tighter and prayed that she lived. But then, she couldn’t live without Legacy to hold her up, could she?

             
I have to stay alive. I have to.

              She didn’t think about anything else. Just shivered and clung. Didn’t think about what had become of anyone: her parents, or Dax, or Kaizen. Widow Coldermolly. Dyna Logan. What of Neon Trimpot? The Duke of Celestine? Cook, or Glitch? None of it. She didn’t allow the mental image of the crash to infiltrate her thoughts. Didn’t allow herself to even picture the wreckage down below.
There must be so much glass everywhere . . .

              A strange bleep awakened her from her dazed, half-dead thoughts, and she peeled her frozen eyelids apart to see a Hermetic device bleating at her, emitting its soft, warm light. Someone had sent her a message, attracted to her coordinates by Flywheel-2.

              And attached to it was a thick rope of gossamer ivory, shining with an iridescent adhesive.

              Legacy freed one arm from where both had been wrapped and pinned to Coal-Radia’s trunk, shakily intercepting the winged orb.

              But as soon as it was in her hand, she felt a tug. There was resistance on the line, which disappeared through the sheet of cloud in which she was mired. Legacy twisted in the air, gluing herself to Coal-Radia and both of them to this transmitter. The act tamped her wings down, and the pair would have plummeted, but the strength of the rope kept them secured to some unknown point above.

             
Kaizen?
she wondered foggily.

              The tension on the other end increased, hauling her and Coal-Radia upward, upward, until the clouds broke away and she was in open air, still sopping wet and shuddering, still curled and welded together like fossils of themselves.

              Legacy did see the Taliko castle, untethered from the city, but too far away. How could this rope have possibly stretched so far? She felt one lone warmth in her chest, and that was the knowledge that he hadn’t abandoned her. The string would reel her in, and Kaizen would come collect her, peel off her sodden clothes, wrap her in fresh blankets, give her a hot beverage, a soft bed, a bath . . .

             
Albatropus
materialized overhead, and with it a crew of Chance for Choicers, all peering over the railing with anticipation and then cheering at the sight of their bedraggled mascot. Dax had the line looped thrice around his forearm, Vector and Rain holding to his hips and all three pulling until the two girls were hauled onto the deck and sprawled there, barely able to move. Barely able to think.

. . . what?

              The crowd swarmed, but Legacy could hardly recognize it as more than a migrating patch of lights. Blurry flesh. All touch seemed to be so warm compared to her. As if she were returning to the womb with her twin sister. Frozen and battered by the world, they’d found each other, clung, and been pulled into this place of safety, family.

             
Family . . .
Legacy meditated with a wordless sadness. She had this unshakable sense that something irreplaceable had been lost.

              Rain’s unfocused features swam into view. “We need to warm her up,” she deduced to the swarm of faces. “She’s in cold shock.”

              “Our cabin,” she heard Dax’s distant voice chime. “Our cabin is sweltering. Come on. Vector?”

              As the two men carried her and her sister, both heads lulling and still wrapped together, Vector said, “Hey, Dax? I’m sorry.”

             
Sorry for what . . .

             
“Here,” Dax replied, ignoring the apology. “Help me pull them apart.”

              Legacy’s arms seemed to scream as they were separated from Coal-Radia, and then she felt deft, familiar fingers removing her soaked skirt and hosiery, her clammy blouse, even the clever vest which had saved her life. Possibly twice. She couldn’t be angry for long, however, as she was swaddled in warm, dry cloth.

              “I told you, Leg,” she heard Dax’s voice say. Her eyes were closed again. She was slipping off. “I’ll never leave without you.”

              The city of Icarus drove deep into the muck of the Old Earth below. The dome fractured and shattered upon impact. The crater left in the soft marshland swallowed much of the business district – instantly burying both Dyna Logan and former advisor to the throne, Abner of Lion’s Head, although neither was alive anymore – and half of Groundtown. The antenna of
CIN-3
went on reporting the eerie silence of the grave to its enthralled listeners, citizens of New Earth all who sat, ashen, glazed, attempting to fathom the terrible chorus they had just heard. This was an historical disaster. The factories crumbled, splitting apart, and leaking sewage into the fungal atmosphere.

Tentative monsters edged closer to investigate the rubble of steel and brass, and the bodies. All the bodies. There were the twitching automata, drowning in the groundwater, but these did not draw the predatory nematodes and lamprey-mouthed fish. A pervasive odor of blood filled the swamp. Arachnids the size of carriages prodded at the bent and busted geodesic frame with their slender legs.

              The Widow Coldermolly was immersed in the muds of Old Earth, to her bosom pressed a fallen refugee from N.E.E.R., in his mid-forties and bearing a withered arm. Both would be preserved for years to come now. Mrs. Legacy had been nearly thrown from Unit #4 and sent tumbling through open air as the city turned end over end, but Mr. Legacy had held her fast with his robotic arm. Neither wept, though there had been little time for such things. There had been little time for anything but a breathless, wordless agreement in their eyes: that this was it.

              Although the city of Icarus was now silent, as dead and doomed as the forgotten cityscapes of Old Earth laying beyond, the floating cities of New Earth hummed with the reverberations of this catastrophe. Many “residents” of the New Earth Extraneous Relocation program had been killed, but the event served to alert the common folk of New Earth as to their very existence.

“I’ve never even seen one of those domes!” some would insist.

“I’ve seen those domes, but I always thought they were for supplies, or maybe they were old domes, before the transition,” others would say.

“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“We’ve got to do something about it!”

“Like what? Do you want to share your little home with one of them?”

“And if they have been supplying us with our raw goods, how else will we get them?”

“They have rights!”

“Look around. None of us have rights. All anyone has is luck.”

And the talk went on like this, in floating provinces of only ten acres, in floating provinces of over six hundred.

“What will the monarch do?” some whispered. “Will we go to war now, do you think?”

“There’s no reason to go to war with a bunch of dead people, stupid.”

              The castle in the sky moved slowly. The modern airships of some Icarus-bred aristocrats had already fled at high speeds, veering directly into the storm, but the castle was too heavy for such maneuvers. It moved like a pregnant cow along the horizon, impervious to the wind and the rain.

              “I never thought we’d have to use this,” Master Addler mused, extracting a key from his cabinet of the things.

              There were still so many parts of this very castle that Kaizen did not know. “Use what?” he asked.

“Oh, you’ll need to know this,” Master Addler agreed with barely contained delight, as detached from the horror of the destruction below as the castle itself was. He hobbled toward a spiraling staircase which led higher in the keep. “This key will unlock the steering wheel. You see: the castle is itself one gigantic machine.”

              Kaizen sighed deeply. There was so much for which he was responsible, even now. He had his mother, and his sister, the royal machinist, a small staff of sentries, Claude, all on the limited supply of food in the kitchen. Augh, and Trimpot. Where could they dock that would accept their parasitism until further notice? What was a duke without his duchy? Who would look the other way if they saw Sophie? Oh, god, and Monarch Ferraday. His Hermetic transmitter was soon to be arriving, in six hours’ time.

              Master Addler unlocked the highest compartment of the castle keep, which opened onto the fresh air, and peered down from the parapet to the surrounding ground and out onto the open sky, finally beginning to clear as they drifted from the storm.

              A steering wheel was erected at its center, surrounded by some sort of brass patio, levers and gauges.

              “I’ve never been here,” Kaizen murmured.

              “Nor I, not in almost forty years,” Master Addler replied. “But it was part of my training. You can steer, and control the rudders, from here.”

              Kaizen grasped the wheel and took a deep breath. An amber-colored, glass map, identical to that of the keep reader but detailing the entirety of New Earth, was to the left of the wheel.

              “Where . . . where should we go?” he asked Master Addler.

              The royal machinist just laughed.

              “Wherever you want,” he finally replied with a sublime smile and a shrug.

              Kaizen turned this notion over and over in his head.

              The closest major cities, still several days’ flight, were Celestine and Heliopolis. And between the two men he’d have to face – Archibald Ferraday the Third, or the pleasant Montgomery Lovelace – he had to say that the latter was the more inviting.

              “Celestine,” he finally answered. “Let’s set course for Celestine.”

             
It’s too hot,
Legacy thought, kicking at her sheets. They were tangled all around her, as if she’d been literally wrapped in her sleep.
It’s always too hot in here because one, Dad leaves his stuff running and they overheat, and two, it’s a freaking dome in August.
She rolled and sighed, strangely sore all over.
Why are my braids so . . . damp?

Lunging forward and dragging in another breath, Legacy’s eyes bulged open and blinked rapidly. Her heart squeezed and thundered.

Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god.

But it must have been real.

Because the close walls of her cabin with Dax – the cabin beside the airship boilers – Vector’s airship – they surrounded her. And when she glanced over her bare shoulder . . .

There was a shaven, malnourished girl who otherwise bore her a shocking resemblance, sleeping so deeply as to appear dead if not for the rosiness of her cheeks. She, too, was nude and wrapped in a dry blanket.

Legacy pushed away from the girl, onto her feet, the blanket still tucked beneath her arms and trailing now onto the floor. She tried to collect her scattered thoughts, but they were like a dish of nuts and bolts overturned, spinning under furniture. She could hardly bear to touch them, much less grasp.

The way the cobblestones had steepened until she’d been climbing them like mountainside.

And the screams . . .

The gears and pistons from which she was separated by only a thin wall rattled and groaned.

How many people were here, she wondered. Where were they going, and would they have enough food to get there in time before . . .

But no. There’d been enough death for one day. She wouldn’t think about that. Not now. Not freshly upon waking.

But where are we going?
It was an important question.

Who would accept fugitive rebels into their city walls?

Legacy departed from the cabin, allowing the girl – her sister-stranger – to rest, and found her way to the laboratory, empty. Why was everything so very quiet?

But Dax . . . I’d seen him . . .

She climbed to the common room, barefoot, hair loose, and garbed only in the sheet, entertaining the morbid fantasy that the ship had become deserted of all its crew.

Her dazed eyes peered around the berth of the
Albatropus.

Though thronged with people, strangers and familiar both, residents and refugees both, none spoke. Those who did speak spoke only in murmurs to nearby ears. Many sat with distant stares. Two by two, the eyes turned to her as she strode across the room, numb, dream-like.

Legacy opened the door onto the deck of the bow. More people were out here. They leaned on the railing, speaking again in muted tones to one another, slowly halting their sentences to stare after her as the others had. She advanced to the railing, ignoring this, and braced it with both hands, leaning out.

The sky sprawled away from her in every direction, the land of Old Earth far below. The rain had cleared off and the breeze pulled at her hair and her sheet, but otherwise, there was a sublime peacefulness to the view. It was almost imaginable that Icarus –
that what happened,
she corrected herself starchily – had never happened.

She glanced up, and her stomach lurched.

The Taliko castle was floating not far overhead and slightly to the right, its rudders spinning lazily.

Legacy gulped and glared, tearing her eyes from the sight.

Good old Kaizen,
she thought.
Just lift that drawbridge, huh?

She stared down at the sluggishly retreating Earth for a long time.

“Exa,” a familiar, firm voice came from behind her. “I’m so glad you’re all right.”

She turned to face Liam with none of the energy she normally brought to their interactions. Her eyes were as shiftless and dead as Coal-Radia’s had once been, and it brought her ex-Companion up short.

“I’m sorry,” he blurted, eyebrows lowering with sobriety. “But at least–”

Legacy pursed her lips and raised her palm to him, signaling for quiet, and shook her head.
No “I’m sorry,”
she thought at him. She didn’t have the strength to say it aloud.
No “But at least,” either.

Legacy walked past him as if the exchange had never occurred, now toward the stern. Someone had to be driving this thing.

There are decisions to be made,
she thought firmly.
Things which must be talked about.

The way my mother had been sobbing the last time I saw her . . . the last time I’d ever–

No.

Legacy bricked up the thought and whitewashed the wall.

Standing at the helm were a handful of people, but most notably Vector, Dax, and Rain. Vector was on the wheel, gazing out. Rain had her face buried into Dax’s shoulder, and he was stroking her back tenderly.

“You’re up!” Vector called. “Hey!” He abandoned the wheel to embrace her quickly and tightly before releasing her again. “How are you feeling?”

“All right,” Legacy answered grudgingly. “Fine.” She was reminded suddenly of Kaizen, who claimed to be fine at the oil den, even though his father had just been buried. She wanted to ask what happened – had Icarus truly fallen? How had Dax saved her with that amazing fiber? But at the same time, she didn’t want to know. She was sure Icarus had fallen. There was no way it could’ve been saved. And she was sure that it didn’t matter whether Dax had reflexively saved her or not.

Rain lifted her head and wiped at her leaking eyes. “Hey,” she greeted shakily, pulling a breath through her clotted nose.

You weren’t even there,
Legacy thought.

Dax didn’t say anything at all. He merely stared at her from over Rain’s fretting blue hair, eyes intense but unreadable.

“Where are we going?” Legacy asked Vector.

Vector smiled, a rakish, oddly whimsical smile. “I have no idea,” he answered with a terrified, false cheer. “Just had to go, you know?”

The carriages careening down the streets, slamming into walls and turning over . . .

No. Not now.

“We have to go somewhere,” Legacy iterated.

“That’s what I said,” Dax agreed.

“We don’t have the resources to just float,” Legacy went on, accidentally conjuring Icarus to mind with the words. She banished them with a subconscious flick of her hand.

“No argument here,” Vector replied, lifting his hands into the surrender position. “But . . . let’s be real . . . we’re a shitty boat full of felonious rebels. Some that any government would recognize.” He didn’t specify that this meant Legacy. “So who’s going to take us?”

Legacy walked to the wheel, gently shifting back and forth without Vector’s guidance, and traced her finger along the circular, amber-colored glass map to its left.

Roughly three thousand miles south of them were the cloud forests of a continent once called America, if Legacy recalled her schooling correctly. Either Middle America – or Central America – or South?

A star on the land indicated the presence of a major floating city.

“There,” she answered, circling the asterisk with her index finger. “Celestine.”

              Monarch Archibald Ferraday the Third reclined on his throne in the capital city of Heliopolis, his thick fingers steepled. Icarus, a major industrial hub of New Earth, was lost not long ago. He was thankful only that his interrogation squad had yet to arrive when the disaster had struck. He did not know if the young duke had survived the catastrophe. All he did know was that the sudden and inexplicable presence of New Earth Extraneous Relocation fugitives had caused riots to break out across the city, likely leading to its destruction. The only bright side was that the little flame of Chance for Choice had been forcibly snuffed. Exa Legacy was undoubtedly dead. The mobilization of his troops was no longer requisite, and although he would need to address this issue quickly to restore the stability of the whole, perhaps this was truly not so bad. How did the old saying go? To make an omelet, you must break eggs?