LEGACY LOST Read online

  And even if he were accepted into Celestine’s fold, would Kaizen still lose his title as duke and become a member of the working class? What would he do then? He had no skills. He’d been almost as sequestered as Sophie. Would he be held responsible for the collapse of his city by the monarch, Archibald Ferraday the Third? Would he perhaps become a courtier? Even courtiers, after all, had their skills. The only thing for which Kaizen Taliko had been known in his week of dukedom was the total collapse of an industrial hub which had been his jurisdiction.

  Kaizen stared blankly out the sweeping bay window, peering across the sprawling property, shadowed and vacant save its bushes and paths. Beyond the glass-plated dome was the night sky sluggishly chuffing along. The scene should have been beautiful. Serene. Even transcendental. But Kaizen only felt . . . hollow. Nauseated. And trapped.

  Behind them, off to one side, he could see an airship sluggishly but steadily approaching. He’d never seen this one before, and it didn’t resemble the rigid blimps with their sleek cabins which were the typical style of the day. He would’ve remembered seeing this amusing little creature, its potbelly swaying over Old Earth, its balloon comically lumpy and apparently heavily patched.

  Hm. Kaizen had been to the aerial docks any time he was permitted to venture into Lion’s Head, the aristocratic haven of Icarus. He would’ve remembered this funny-looking thing. So where had it come from?

  Pivoting from the bay window and striding out into the hall, Kaizen scanned for automata out of habit. Of course, the corridor was dark and quiet. He shared this hall with a gigantic washroom and Sophie’s bedchamber, but no sound came from either. They’d all trundled merrily off to bed, he was sure, and slept soundly now, as if the deaths of their entire citizenry weighed as heavily as a feather in a cap and life as they knew it stood unthreatened. But what was a duchess without her duchy? What was a courtier without a court? Didn’t they realize that they were likely all to be paupers soon enough?

  He ventured down the rotunda, taking them two at a time, and by the time he’d reached the grand hall, he was moving at a full sprint past the tapestries and bouquets. From what township had this airship approached? It was impossible that it was from Icarus, and yet, that was the sole possibility!

  When Kaizen bolted barefoot onto the grounds and ducked around the side of the palace, the airship – airboat feeling like the more appropriate term – was almost on top of them. The balloon, attached by several ropes, wasn’t the only thing patched. The hull and stern were comprised of so many metals, the dirigible appeared to be a patchwork. And at its helm, unmistakable: Exa Legacy, her silver-white braids fretting in the wind, her fish-tail skirt tarrying in the draft before her, whipping her legs, the golden vest, the boots laced to her knees. Alive. She was staring right at him, and it was definitely her. Those round, full cheekbones, that willful, pouting mouth. He’d know it anywhere. It was her.

  Up in the castle’s keep, there were two other people who couldn’t sleep: Master Addler, who was determined to return a functional staff to the royal family within the next two days, and Neon Trimpot, kept awake by the incessant clanging of the machinist’s tools. Trimpot stood at the arched window and peered out across the night sky, silently ranting about manners and station, when he caught sight, first of Kaizen dashing off toward the aerial dock, then of that cumbersome airship – Vector’s airship, if he wasn’t mistaken? – chugging toward the island.

  Trimpot tore across the keep to where Master Addler was stooped, prying open the brains of a brass skull.

  “Do you have a telescope?” Trimpot demanded.

  “A what now?” Master Addler asked, glancing up. Strapped over one eye was a thick, snub scope with blinking emerald lens.

  “Close enough!” Trimpot replied, ripping the device from the old man’s face and skidding back against the window, leaving the shocked Master Addler to his spasms of sputters. Trimpot leaned out the window and squinted into the instrument. Yes, yes, that was definitely the old Albatropus, though it appeared Vector had done some work on it since Trimpot had seen it last. And my, my, that was definitely old Exa Legacy at the helm.

  Hm, Trimpot thought, collapsing the scope and tossing it blithely to the side. Master Addler scrambled after it, rambling about bad programs and poor craftsmanship and how some models would be better left to the scrap bin. Legacy, Legacy, Legacy. Why aren’t you dead yet, my darling?

  One by one, the majority of the passengers aboard the airship Albatropus dropped off into a fitful slumber. After successfully navigating the tail-end of a nasty thunderhead, a grim census of the manifest was performed and tallied: forty-seven in a dirigible originally meant to accommodate five to ten souls. Thirty-nine were members of the New Earth rebel faction Chance for Choice, but there were eight refugees from Old Earth present, easily distinguished by their shaven heads, gray smocks, and skeletal frames. Most did not have real names. Two of them were known as “Coal,” two “Zinc,” one “Boil,” one “Slag,” one “System,” and one unconscious since her arrival.

  She still slumbered, nude and swaddled in warm blankets, in one of the five small cabins available. Most passengers slept on the floor; however, the captain, inventor Vector Shannon, made a special allowance for the two girls who had very nearly almost died: Exa Legacy, de facto Chance for Choice leader, had been literally fished from the sky, arms bound around her rediscovered twin sister. While one bore a tight midsection, chiseled biceps, and a thick head of silver-white dreadlocks, wearing a fishtail skirt, blouse, golden, winged vest and boots, the other was shaven, gray-smocked, and skeletal. However, they both shared their heart-shaped bone structure, a strong nose, and lips uniquely as lush in the upper as in the lower.

  Albatropus had been trundling through the Saturday evening sky for hours now, tethered beneath a large balloon, patched and re-patched much like its hull and stern and sails and everything else. They were headed south, toward the floating city of Celestine, five days’ travel if no stops were necessary. Another airship could have made the voyage in less time, but Vector had designed this darling himself, and while she was home to a laboratory and library, not to mention a giant strategy board and floors of drawers, her body type was not the most aerodynamic of things. He said they couldn’t beat twenty-five miles per hour without a strong wind to nudge them along.

  They’d already been left behind by the drove of airships which earlier fled the disaster site of Icarus, industrial hub of New Earth, duchy of the Taliko nobility, and now, the filling of a deep crater in the surface of Old Earth. It would be the first documented failure of a floating city, this ultimately caused by a maelstrom of factors. The earlier assassination of Duke Malthus had disabled the castle’s manpower, forcing it to leech auxiliary aid from local establishments, including the guard staff of Taliko Center. This, in turn, impeded the security of an illegal chemical shipment from its basement freight lift to the needy New Earth Extraneous Relocation station below. Without that chemical supply, the workers – children raised in captivity and conditioned toward slavery, of which Legacy’s twin sister was one – awoke from their mental stupor, and began to explore their environment.

  When they broke onto the surface of the geodesic island overhead, the citizens of Icarus were flung into a panic, their very presence an added weight on the already tenuous strain on resources. It didn’t take long, however, for those same citizens to realize that these N.E.E.R. refugees were also their children, stolen by the monarchy for violation of the stringent Companion Laws, which stated one child per mandated coupling. They had not been sent to another city as claimed; they’d been sent to toil on Old Earth, providing the city above with the raw materials necessary to function.

  Riots surged throughout the city, punctuated by an accidental rend in the glass plating which sealed the heat beneath its dome, making life over a thousand feet above the surface of the “dead planet” possible. Icarus crashed in less than two minutes, killing all within. The lone survivors were this forty-seven, the f
leeing aristocracy, and those who dwelled on the grounds of the Taliko castle at the moment that it raised its drawbridge and effectively detached itself from Icarus. (That same castle was the sole “airship” still in sight, though it was actually another heated geodesic dome with a propulsion system attached to its rear. It drifted a few hundred yards ahead, little more than a gleam of starlight on glass and the faint silhouette of spires.)

  Chance for Choice stood for a lot of things, but the death of twenty-eight thousand wasn’t one of them. Their name, as of late, had come to be associated with two major tragedies. The first, what was now called The Coronal Massacre, was the assassination attempt of Earl Kaizen Taliko, a misfire which had incidentally blinded the entire staff of royal sentries and killed hundreds of innocent guests, as well as the duke himself, Malthus Taliko.

  And now there was this tangential fiasco, which would undoubtedly be tallied on their resume of destruction: the collapse of Icarus.

  Exa Legacy had been milling around this landslide in her mind for hours now. She couldn’t sleep. While the rest of the boat lightly drowsed on makeshift bunks, even spilling out onto the deck itself, Legacy roamed in her fish-tail skirt, blouse, and golden vest – its jointed wings now folded against the back – for they had dried, and she had no other clothing onboard, this was all so sudden. Legacy roamed, idly fondling her chin, eyes drifting without anchor or destination, and she avoided any pesky outcroppings of mental images from the last twelve hours.

  Instead, she focused on the pearly clots of cloud shifting in the distance.

  Slivers of glass from store windows or busted automatons littered the street, along with an occasional spray of gears or a stray key. Single people ran past Legacy without even glancing back, though there were no groups. Fires poured out of windows, but no one came to extinguish them . . .

  The stars were so bright in the night sky without the fogged, scratched plating of a dome to obfuscate them. Hundreds of the things. And there hung the waning moon, a dusky sliver near the horizon, mysterious and foreboding. Yes. Wonderful. Focus on that.

  The ground subtly tilted beneath Legacy’s feet, and her stomach lurched. The buildings around her groaned as if under the strain of gravity, glass windows crunching like fractured teeth . . .

  The patched sail of Albatropus buffeted in the warm wind, pleasant, hypnotic clinking of metal on metal as it banged against its mast. Stop thinking about the . . .

  She shouldered her way through the gate and onto the metallic grid of the exterior aerial dock, twisted onto the railing – which was now at sixty degrees, somehow, or maybe it only seemed that way to her fevered brain – and leapt, Coal-Radia still slung over her shoulder, nothing but raging winds and sheets of frigid rain above, nothing but Icarus slowly capsizing below . . .

  No, it didn’t. It didn’t. It didn’t. It didn’t.

  Legacy gripped the rail of the stern and closed her eyes tightly, focusing intently now on that blackness, as if only a complete blackout might blot the event from space-time. There was this desperate, clawing sensation in her chest – her lungs – as if an animal struggled to breathe and was pinned . . .

  “Leg?” Vector’s voice was characteristically cheerful and alert, but just now, was sharp with concern. “What are you doing?”

  Her eyes popped open and she glanced over her shoulder. She’d been so lost in thought, or in non-thought, she’d forgotten about Vector, trapped at the helm indefinitely. She scrambled to rub at her damp eyelash and turned to join him at the wheel of the ship, gently shifting back and forth.

  Quirky and creative, Vector Shannon had mischievous, bespectacled eyes, an upturned nose, long black dreadlocks (around which one could find the occasional copper spring coiled), and often wore rigid, fingerless gloves to protect his joints from the delicate mechanical work in which he was constantly engaged. He was nice. He was nice, if not a touch obsessed with his inventions.

  “I thought you’d be asleep,” Vector went on, allowing her to dodge the question of what she’d been doing when the answer was now so very clear.

  “Can’t sleep.” I’m surprised anyone can, she added silently. “What about you? You’ve been at the helm since–” She waved her hand as if to wave away the rest of her sentence. Since it happened. “When are you going to get some rest?”

  Vector shrugged and offered her his best smile of denial. “Well, it’s a non-stop flight,” he explained brightly. “So, in five days, give or take a day?”

  Legacy considered this. “Why don’t you let me take the wheel for a bit? I can keep us on course. And–”

  “I don’t know, Leg.”

  “Why not?”

  He frowned and cast his eyes about as if searching for a physical escape from the question. “We just can’t afford any mistakes. We really, really can’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, do you know anything about cloud harvesting?” he asked.

  “Of course! I mean, a little, at least,” Legacy replied. It was a common technology to the floating cities and to the airships traveling between them. Vertical, nonporous sheets collected the water from passing clouds and siphoned it into a barrel. “There’s really nothing to it. The sheets do most of the work, don’t they?”

  “Technically, it is very simple,” he agreed, although the frustration in his voice betrayed the conflict in the statement. “But there are forty-seven people on this ship, including us. And a healthy body needs half a gallon to maintain, every day. So that’s twenty-three and a half gallons per day that this ship needs just to drink.”

  Legacy nodded. Normally, she found mathematics vaguely annoying, but privately, she also welcomed the distraction from her own problems. “That’s not so bad,” she volunteered. “Clouds have millions of gallons in them.”

  “But what if there’s a cloudless day?”

  Legacy actually laughed, though it was a spiteful kind of bark. “When was the last time–”

  “This ship was never intended to be the living quarters of a movement, Leg! Our water barrel? Holds ten gallons! And what about showers? What if we need to clean something? We’re going to be constantly scavenging for clouds and constantly moving. There aren’t even more than ten pails! And there’s no storage of vitamins here, either, so you can just forget about food!”

  Legacy peered at Vector for a moment and then placed her hand over his. “Let me take the wheel for a few hours,” she offered. The grief of losing her family in the collapse had also given her, strangely, a clear mind unencumbered by panic or exhaustion. She supposed she was in denial. Perhaps her parasympathetic nervous system had kicked in when the city had begun its surreal tilt, and not yet turned off. For whatever reason, she found the world around her very sharply detailed, yet flat and plain. It was comprised solely of emotionless fact. “You need to get some rest, and I’ll be fine. You can take her back at sunrise.”

  “What about you?” he asked. “Did you sleep at all?”

  “I just woke up,” Legacy lied. “I’m as fresh as dew.”

  Vector grimaced but relented. “This map will tell you if you’re off-course or if there are storms ahead.” He tapped the amber globe to the side of the wheel. “If you need to lower Alba in the event of another thunderhead, climb into the crow’s nest and you can open the balloon and let out some air from there. She’ll drift down, and then, just re-patch her and maintain. There’s nothing we can do about a high wind, but the weather tonight seems . . . strangely . . . peaceful.” Vector sighed, almost losing track of his trajectory, and then jolted, returning. “Still, be on the lookout for pirates, all right? Very important. Other than dehydration, pirates are my – our – biggest concern. If an unfamiliar ship seems to follow or attempts to dock with us, you ring that bell and wake every ass on board.” He gestured to a single, dangling brass bell erected in the forecastle. “Our barrel is full right now, so you don’t need to worry about finding a cloud. Just remember to keep her at an even twenty-five miles per hour. Okay?�
� He indicated the fluctuating gauge of her speedometer.

  “See?” Legacy said, however dull, taking the wheel from his reluctant hands. She smiled lifelessly. “Everything will be fine.”

  Vector glared quizzically, suddenly doubting his judgment in relinquishing the wheel. “Leg–”

  “Everything will be fine,” she repeated firmly. “Go get some rest.”

  She was privately relieved when Vector finally acquiesced and disappeared into the ship’s crowded berth. Now it was only her versus her thoughts, and that Taliko Castle in the distance, ensuring the battle was a weighted one.

  A month ago, she could’ve said that the castle was a symbol of oppression, the emblem of the monarchy, some doomed ideology clinging to its scepter with rubied claw. But now . . . that castle was the place where Kaizen Taliko had ripped her chains in half so that her hands could be free to roam his body.

  A month ago, Exa Legacy could’ve said that she was only in love with Dax Ghrenadel, and she always would be.

  Dax. Huh. Amid this maelstrom of new horror, the romantic wounds which riddled Legacy had almost gone totally numb.

  The twenty-three-year-old statistician had bright blue eyes which often sparkled with either wit or annoyance, a long, slender bone structure, and shaggy chestnut hair. He also always wore a rebreather strapped over his nose and mouth, a leather mask outfitted with a large oxygen gauge and a small metallic coil of potassium hydroxide. Parts from the damn thing needed constant refilling and/or replacing, which Legacy’s engineer father had been more than happy to cheaply provide – in life.