LEGACY RISING (6 page)

“What words, exactly?” Legacy asked. “How?”

“My words,” Trimpot replied. “My speeches.”

“So, you want to start little riots,” Dax said. His gaze was weighing on the other man quite heavily.

“Why, yes, I do,” Trimpot replied. “I really do. I’m getting
tired
, Dax. I’m getting
tired
of this notion of
civil disobedience
. I’m
ready
to apply a little pressure.”

Dax’s eyebrows settled lower, and for a minute, Legacy thought Trimpot was about to get told off. Those were Dax’s angry eyes. But then he said, “Hell yeah. I’m in.”

The two shared a perfunctory handshake, and Trimpot glanced at Legacy next. “And you?”

“I—I’ll think about it,” she answered.

“Please do. Well. It’s late, isn’t it? I’ll show you two out.” Trimpot led the way back to the door. “Now remember, you’ve got four seconds to clear it or you’re going to get . . . hurt. Only visit at nighttime hours, for the sake of inconspicuousness, please, and we next meet behind the engines factory in the industrial quarter. August 7th, at midnight.”

With that, he checked the periscope and depressed the door’s lever, shooting it open. The newcomers leapt back into the world of Heroes Park—so subdued and common by comparison, so lacking in plots and talk of war—and the door shot shut again behind them.

              The two hadn’t walked very far, still in the thicket of metallic trees between this quarter and the next, when Legacy shifted a look at Dax, then away, up into the canopy of obsidian. It gleamed with the million tiny reflections of moonlight on wet copper. “You agreed awfully quickly,” she couldn’t help but observe. “Not really . . .”
. . . like you.
But she tried not to talk like that with Dax. It was embarrassing to be too familiar, particularly after tonight’s debacle. That damn speech he’d overheard. If only she hadn’t mentioned that she was in love with an ineligible man. “Kind of odd, I mean. So much at risk.”

“I don’t see any other way around it,” Dax replied. “Got to do something, haven’t we?”

“I don’t see why,” Legacy said. “Maybe I’ve got a way with words, but I love my job. I love working at Cook’s. And you, you make good money at the CCSS labs, and you’re good at that, too. You’re good with numbers, and . . . organizing . . . stuffs,” she finished lamely.

Dax stopped abruptly and turned ninety degrees to face her. “Are we really going to keep doing this?”

Legacy stopped and turned, too, though they were being coated in a fine drizzle where they stood. She was forced to search his eyes to read his covered face. They glimmered hotly, like the canopy overhead at high noon.

“Keep doing what?”

“Pretending, Leg,” he said, exasperated. “I didn’t—I didn’t say anything because I thought—you—” Legacy’s eyes widened as if she was staring down a very long fall, and the only urge seizing her was to leap.
Oh my god. Oh my god.
“I wanted you to have a chance,” he went on thickly. “Maybe it was just my imagination, or we were just being teenagers, and I didn’t want to ruin everything, and I wanted you to have a chance at being happy, even if it wasn’t with me, but after tonight—after what you said, I—”

“There is no chance of being happy,” Legacy blurted. “Not without you.”

For a moment, he just stared at her, and if she was gauging his emotion from eyes alone, he was both confused and overworked.

Then, in a swift motion, Dax tore the strap of his rebreather open with one hand, and the mask dangled away from his face. With the other, he reached out to Legacy, threading his fingers along her jaw and into her hair, pulling her close. Her mouth fell open, her toes stretched up, and it was as if this had already happened a million times before when their lips finally met. It was almost a memory. In the saddest of her fantasies, maybe she thought that he’d be weak, maybe she thought he wouldn’t be able, but on the contrary, his now free hand dug into the small of her back and bowed her against him, his kiss evolving into a primal manliness she’d never seen emerge from him before. A whimper escaped her lips in the shape of his name.

As his mouth tore from hers and migrated hungrily down her exposed throat, the rasp of Legacy’s breath suddenly awakened her from this blurred dream. “Dax,” she gasped. “Your mask!”

“I don’t care,” he said, unbuttoning her vest without patience. “You don’t know how long I’ve been-- I don’t-- Leg-- The mask can wait.”

The forest of Heroes Park must have been chilly; Legacy was shivering.

And Dax was wheezing.

But he charged her up against the brass trunk of a tree anyway, its leaves clinking discordantly with the assault. His hands moved beneath her damp shirt, and she felt how they trembled over her breasts. She felt how they were like ice. Because his circulation was already beginning to fail. “You need your mask,” Legacy insisted, wriggling to separate from him.

“I need you,” he countered, snatching her hips and pulling her firmly into his embrace again. He jammed his hands down her pants and clung to her ass, hoisting her easily into the air; even fully dressed, she felt naked. His mouth crashed into hers again and she forgot the entire thrust of her stance. Blood flooded her tingling cheeks as their sexes ground together to the melody of their symphonic panting. How could this be happening? Dax Ghrenadel didn’t think of her like that . . .

But it was his icy fingers tugging her pants down. As if he’d waited all these years, and he couldn’t walk another mile, weather be damned.

“You feel so hot,” he told her, nuzzling into her neck and biting. Sucking. “I don’t have enough hands for everything I want to touch.” His hands moved to peel down his suspenders and then to the buttons of his trousers, fumbling them open without parting from her pulse.

No! We can’t! Oh shit! We can’t, we can’t, we can’t!

Technically, they could, but New Earth had always lacked the components requisite to manufacture birth control. It was one of the reasons for the severity of the Companion Law. If they had sex and she got pregnant, she could either beg Liam to raise and claim Dax’s child as his own, or forfeit it to New Earth Extraneous Relocation, where it’d be raised in an orphanage, sent to work in some mass production unit, never knowing either of them, and she, she’d be a felon . . .

Meanwhile, Dax rubbed into her and moaned from where he remained latched to her neck. He took one wrist and pinned it to the brass trunk, his other hand still clutching her bare buttock. Were they really still in the public park? It had become like a private universe. He was breaking out into a sweat now, she could smell the salt on his skin, part arousal, part oxygen deprivation.

“No,” Legacy sighed, forcing herself to unweld her body from his. “You need your mask.”

For a moment, they shared an anguished stare, Dax’s complexion bright and already exhausted, Legacy’s demeanor firm, however desperately she yearned to stay tangled in this thicket for hours. She ran the palm of her hand down his face, which, however drained, whatever grimace, was still so handsome, and so rarely seen. Her thumb skated mournfully across his lips, and he pressed a kiss there before lowering her to the ground and politely tugging her clothes back into place before fastening his mask.

They didn’t speak the rest of the walk to the domestic district, but Dax threaded his fingers through hers, and that was new. She made sure to keep the pace languid for two reasons. To help Dax get his breath back, and to make this feeling last as long as possible, just in case it would have to come to an end someday.

             
Augh. What happened last . . . night . . . Why do I feel like . . . shit.

              Legacy’s half-asleep brain murmured and fizzled, not unlike one of her father’s latest inventions, to the comforting tune of a drill, crescendoing into a brassy clatter downstairs. It must’ve been morning. Didn’t sound like Mr. Legacy’s ocular bot prototype,
Blink 9,
was coming along so well. Mrs. Legacy was probably already gone for her shift at Nanny’s Assemblage, an eatery which touted the only flavored, synthetic vitamin pills in all of Icarus. (“NEW ARRIVALS: Lemon-esque and Smoked Chip!”) Legacy wasn’t sure how the pills became vitamins. They were made of coal tar and ammonia, among other things.

Legacy cracked one tentative eyelid open, the glint of light refracting off Flywheel’s wing patterns dazzling it shut again. He landed on her pillow with a delicate thud. “
August the Fourth, Two Thousand, Three Hundred and Twelve,
” he informed her dutifully, not to be ignored. “
Thirteen new messages.
”

              Legacy pulled herself into a sitting position, glaring at Flywheel with resentment as he took off into the air again, immediately banging into her shower screen, spinning in a circle, and landing with a plop in the pile of her discarded stirrup pants. She couldn’t even remember peeling them off in her exhaustion the night before.

              As she stood, stretched, and got her bearings on life in general, the first message played. It was her dad.

“
Hey, Ex, we’re about to head home and we don’t see you anywhere and we’re worried sick. Get in touch, all right? The founder’s ball has just let out—
”

             
Oh yeah! The founder’s ball!

“—
and we heard about the commotion in the concert hall—
”

Oh no, the concert hall . . .

“—
but the guards aren’t giving us further info as to
where
you are, or
what
the hell happened!
”

              Images careened through her memory like liquid spilling from a high to low point. Neon Trimpot, the grappling hook, the door in the copper mountainside . . . Vector, and Rain, and the glass cannon . . .

              “Are you up, Ex?” Mr. Legacy called from the ground floor. She could hear
CIN-3
playing from his workbench.

              “Yeah, Dad,” Legacy said.

              “Was everything all right last night? Are you okay?”

              “
. . . good question, is free love safer and more responsible than Companions? Maybe we should have a city just for that romantic Chance for Choicer, and see how fast it comes crashing down! Rumors that the four escapees may have had more nefarious plans which thankfully collapsed or backfired are circulating, but as yet, no formal charges . . .”
Dyna Logan squawked.

              “Yeah, Dad,” Legacy said, staring at herself in the elaborately framed but small and grimy mirror mounted above her dresser drawers.

              There was a disastrous hickey on her neck.

             
Oh my god, that’s right . . .

              Meanwhile, a new message was emitting from Flywheel’s iris-speakers.

              “. . .
see you as soon as possible, and I really mean that, Exa.
” Liam’s authoritarian tone rattled Flywheel’s poor eyes. “
We need to talk.
”

              “What happened, exactly?” Mr. Legacy asked downstairs.

              “Nothing, really . . . It’s a long story. I . . .”

             
“. . . evening for an exclusive interview with Duke Taliko, when he will explain the importance of our Companion system, followed by a very personal, very intimate Q&A with every girl’s earl!”
Dyna rattled.

              Flywheel interrupted Liam’s message to give Legacy a schedule alert. “
Lunch break at Cook’s Glass & Metal Fusion in fifteen minutes.
”

              “Shit!” she hissed, rifling through her disordered drawers for suitable clothing and extracting a slim, plain tank top and a pair of faded, high-cut harem pants with attached suspenders. She was jamming her feet into her shoes as Flywheel continued to play and play Liam’s messages, one after the other, seven so far, all ending with variations on the theme of needing to have a serious talk.

              Legacy trundled down the wide-stepped ladder leading from the top level to bottom, snatching a Pleasant Fizzle Multi-Vitamin pill bottle from the shelf as she went and wrenching it open, dumping half a dozen capsules down her throat dry. Still, Flywheel followed her, and still, Liam’s voice rattled his little iris-speakers.

              “
. . . don’t feel like you’re thinking clearly, really, Exa . . .
”

              “Sorry I didn’t—Honey? What’s that big bruise on your neck?”

              Both Mr. Legacy and his daughter blanched immediately.

              “I, uh, mind if I borrow this?” she asked, darting forward and seizing a dismembered shirt sleeve from one of his many wardrobe alterations. “Gotta go, real late for work,” she explained, winding it around her neck. “Love you! Sorry about last night!” Bestowing her father with a kiss upon the cheek, Legacy fled onto the balcony and down the groaning stairwell, landing on both feet at the ground floor (
Rrrah! Rrrah!
and “Exa!” calling after her from the tiny window), completely missing the mechanical dragonfly who doggedly followed, playing through its eighth message.