LEGACY BETRAYED (5 page)

              “Not all the duke’s looking to pin on her,” Liam muttered.

              “What?”

              “Nothing.” Liam’s eyes panned down to the notice, skimming. “I just –I just want to know where she is, and if you’d cut the shit, it’d really . . .”

COMPANION REASSIGNMENT

              “. . . help me out,” Liam murmured. “What is this?”

              “Well,” Dax said. “It looks like Leg’s legal issues have made her ineligible, is my guess.” There was a pause in which Liam continued staring at the words on the page, suddenly illiterate. “You never ran that story,” Dax said. The words seemed to penetrate from a great distance, and Liam glared up, pulled back into reality.

              “What?”

              “The story about Leg and the earl,” Dax elaborated. He was maintaining eye contact with a stony significance. “Dyna never ran it.”

              Liam took a breath. So Exa had told Dax. That was weirdly admirable of her.
It figures. Just when I want to picture her as a villain, she does something of virtue.
“I didn’t give her the pictures,” he answered, omitting mention of the past few minutes. “Didn’t want to get Exa in trouble, even if –even if she’s –not going to be my Companion anymore.” He also omitted that Exa hadn’t been his Companion for a long time now, regardless of the CCSS mandate.

              Dax still stared, the hardness in his gaze unchanging. “She’s–” He cleared his throat, glanced around, and stepped closer, tilting his head toward Liam’s ear. “Glitch’s, at Groundtown,” he whispered. “But if I go back there, and anything has happened to her?” He stayed where he was, intruding on Liam’s personal space, but tilted his head again so he was no longer whispering in the other man’s ear, but was now boring directly into his eyes. “I will kill you.”

              Liam opened his mouth to respond, a likely antagonistic retort, paused, and Dax patted his shoulder twice and stepped to the side. What an annoying, condescending gesture. “Later,” he called over his shoulder, advancing to the lift without a backwards glance.

              Meanwhile, back in the broadcast studio, Dyna Logan rushed through her mid-afternoon report with a memorized recap of the weekend’s events, and then rushed to her personal automaton assistant: a delicate, silver-wrought rose pin which fastened her bun together. Shaking out her long, crimped tresses – a subconscious gesture of victory – Dyna ordered her automaton to direct a message to the young duke. This was not, of course, her only automaton, but it was her favorite. It was so . . . discreet.

              Rather than being relayed to a recording, however, the duke himself answered.

              “Yes, Miss Logan?” the unmistakable baritone inquired.

“Kaizen, Kaizen, Kaizen,” Dyna purred. Although her voice was normally quite grating, there were times when it assumed an almost silken quality. Those were the times when something for which she’d relentlessly longed had finally fallen into her talons. “I’ve got something sitting in front of me which would be of great value to you.”

“. . . What is it?” Kaizen replied.

              Dyna sighed. There was such predatory satisfaction in a good interrogation. Especially one which was weighted to her advantage. “A series of pictures.” She idly scanned the frames. “Taken here at
CIN-3.
Of you. You, and a suddenly newsworthy young woman.”

              “Oh?” Kaizen said, radiating nonchalance.

              “Can you guess who it might be?”

              “I’m afraid I can’t.”

              Dyna grinned.
So much going on under that regalia, isn’t there?
“Exa Legacy,” she went on. “And you know, darling, I’m juggling so many cover-ups as of late, one of these stories is bound to hit the floor. And
break.
”

              There was a pause. “What do you want?”

              “I don’t know, I don’t know,” Dyna answered, as if she had the whole of New Earth from which to choose. She already had a beautiful home in Lion’s Head. Already had fame. Already had influence. Had the duke in the palm of her hand, even. Then it hit her. A flowery title. She was, after all, Dyna Logan, anchorwoman, of all things. Augh. “Are there any women of the royal court?”she answered him. “I would like to be brought forth as an advisor to the crown. Public relations and media, shall we say? Yes. I want to attend court. Oh, and some
silk.
An entire
crate
of the stuff.”

              Kaizen sighed. “There’s been some workman issues on Old Earth, Dyna. I don’t know if I can get an entire crate right now.”

              “Yes, you do,” Dyna went on, crossing her legs. “And you can.”

There were workman issues on the surface of Old Earth, indeed. The miners had been without their cocktail of Kill Curiosity and Calm the Nerves for five days now. They would soon be two doses behind, but the shortage of manpower in Icarus had caused delays in relief for the staff below. Words and feelings, meanwhile, were surging to the surface of every N.E.E.R. resident like inflated things, pinned at the bottom of a body of water and then released.

In the scramble to equip the units with cameras and locks, it wasn’t difficult for Coal to meet her neighbors. In fact, it was incredibly easy. They were all named Coal.

“I don’t want to be named Coal anymore,” one man piped.

“I don’t think I even like coal that much,” someone else agreed.

“Shh,” Coal 106 begged, clearing her throat. “Even without the locks –we can’t have that much time.”

She’d only just become aware of the passage of time, but now more than ever, it did seem extremely important.

“We wonder why we work, and I think that’s clear,” she went on. “We work for coal. Or whatever else we do. Stuff. We’re here to move or make the stuff.”

“But we don’t use it,” Coal 111 pointed out. “We don’t use anything, really. Just a hose with some water and a gray bag. Our masks. Our shots. We don’t even have lights.”

The group shifted at the mention of these things, suddenly aware of how uncomfortable they were. Although this group was small – ten or fifteen of the miners in this particular complex – these same meetings were occurring simultaneously and spontaneously throughout the dome.

“Let’s be thankful there are no lights right now,” Coal 106 disagreed.

“But there are lights,” Coal 129 said. “There are lights where we get our shots. There are lights where we get hosed down. There are lights sometimes. We see the lights on the cars, too, that come and go sometimes.”

“Yes! The cars!” Coal 106 got too excited and coughed deeply. Several people glared about to see if there was movement in the hall beyond, but none came. “The cars take the stuff we do, and where do they go? If we’re not using anything, who is? Who’s getting all this stuff?”

“The land in the sky,” Coal 129 whispered. “I’ve seen them come and go from beneath there.”

“How does it get up there, then?” Coal 106 asked. “How does it get up there, while we’re stuck here?”

“We’ll have to find out,” Coal 111 said. “Because they must know, right? They know when it comes and goes. Otherwise, they wouldn’t know. They wouldn’t know how much, or who. But it must be somewhere, planned. It would be put down so we see it. It would be under a light. You need light to see, right?”

“Right,” Coal 106 replied. “It must be under lights.”

              For the past day and a half, Legacy had done nothing but lounge in the moldering upstairs rental at Glitch’s and listen to
CIN-3
for nonexistent updates, kicking back and forth what-if scenarios with Dax and, occasionally, with Rain. Legacy was too scared to go home for her own little pile of money, but Dax had left her forty pieces – and she’d spent it all in the House of Oil.

              “Let me get another Calm,” Legacy commanded the turnkey barkeep, whose name, she now knew, was Bart-12. She just called him Bart, as if to divert the automaton from thoughts of his own ephemeral nature.

              “
This is your fourth Calm the Nerves,
” Bart informed her, delivering the beverage. Legacy tossed the last of the coins in her hand onto the bar.

“I know,” she said. She didn’t drink it yet; she held the glass and contemplated its murky, comforting shade, which reminded her of Old Earth. Bart kept informing her of how many drinks it’d been. She supposed it was to avoid any discrepancies, but she found it quite annoying. At least, she’d found it quite annoying three Calms ago.

Now, she couldn’t quite summon the shit to give.

She’d started drinking at sundown, when she’d waited and waited for Dax to show up. The room had gotten steadily darker, and she’d realized that he wasn’t going to show up. Maybe he’d been too tired and needed a real sleep on a good bed. After all, Dax still had to work, didn’t he? Or maybe he’d come down from the high of their escapades, and was starting to realize that he didn’t want this life. Drifting. Shacking up. Maybe Rain had invited him over and they’d lost track of the time.

It was just such a lonely thing, laying low. Lonely thing. So she’d wandered down to the bar for some company. Even if it was only semi-conscious.

Legacy took a sip.

No work – if Cook would even want her back.

Another sip.

No family. Could endanger them, returning home. Probably end up in jail, herself.

Another sip.

No friends. Most people didn’t even know where she was.

A gulp.

No word on Kaizen, no word on Vector, no word on Trimpot.

Gulp.

Just the hole in the floor and the automaton against the wall, registered to Dax’s name.

She drained the dregs of the drink and set the empty glass down with a resounding clank.

This had all seemed so much more insurmountable before the second Calm. But after the fourth? It hardly registered as problematic.

So what if they do hang me? What would I have died of instead? An aneurysm? Cancer? Who cares? Dying is dying and living is living and it’s really all the same. What’s the point of being sad, or afraid, ever? Might as well just do what you want. Life’s too short for little things like legality or convention to come into question. In the end, what are all the little invisible leads we follow even worth? It’s just something somebody said once, otherwise known as “Blah, blah, blah.” Maybe you won’t even get caught. It’s dark out.

Legacy stood with a sway.

She threaded through the haze of sprawled patrons, only stumbling over one errant foot before correcting herself, spinning, and muttering an apology.

Drifting out the door, she pushed herself in the vague direction of her parents’ complex in the domestic district.

Because fuck it.

She was going home.

Legacy thundered drunkenly onto the first porch of the seven-story building, and a familiar, tinny
Rrrah! Rrrah!
emitted from within the unit. This was the robot dog belonging to its tenant, which stirred at the vibration of the floorboards. Gray shutters on the tiny window to Legacy’s right popped open and a pair of shrewd old eyes peered at her. “Exa,” the Widow Coldermolly hissed. Widow Coldermolly was seventy-nine, hunchbacked, and reclusive. People also said she’d lost her mind when her husband died. Legacy was ashamed to admit that she’d always accepted this, by default, as true.

But when the police had gone to collect Legacy from her home a few days ago, the Widow Coldermolly had offered her a basement in which to hunker down and wait. She’d seemed not only lucid, but more aware than even Legacy’s own parents as to what was going on in Icarus.

“Widow Coldermolly!” Legacy greeted buoyantly, traipsing to the opened shutters. “How are you doing?”

“Shh!” The old woman glared up at her. “Get in here!”

Legacy glanced about, deduced that this was a good idea, and nodded. “Sure,” she agreed, going to the front door. As she reached for the handle, it swept open – for the hobbling old woman still moved faster than she did, high as she was – and the Widow grabbed her hand and yanked her inside, slamming and locking the door.

“They’re watching us, you know,” the Widow snapped. “They’re watching us, and they’re waiting for you to come home!”

“I
told
Dax you were always listening,” Legacy said, not focusing on the more pertinent information. “He didn’t believe me. He believes what they say about you. You know. That you’re crazy and stuff, since your husband died.”

Strangely, the Widow Coldermolly smiled. “Oh, is that when I went crazy?” she asked, walking carefully toward her kitchen. “I didn’t know that. To me, losing my husband wasn’t that difficult, because, you see, I never loved him.” The Widow returned holding a cracked jar, its top removed. “I loved someone else. You know what I mean, I suspect.” Her eyes gleamed, and Legacy realized she even knew about Dax, recounting the kisses the boy had stolen from her as they’d ascended the complex stairs. “But he’d already been dead for a long time,” the Widow went on. “My Companion –he was a good man. That’s why I pay extra attention to you, Exa,” she explained, extracting a satchel of coins from within the jar. “Because you want to reform those damn laws.”