LEGACY LOST Read online

  “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 fin
d 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.”

  “Oh, Leo!” the girl cried, whipping the wheel again. But this time, Trimpot was there, and he gripped its spokes, steadying the island before the tilt could spill them both to the ground. She twisted to gaze up at him, and he made the effort to not stare in revulsion at the crude stitch work along her face. His arms were already around her in order to hold the wheel that she had forgotten entirely. Instead, Sophie arched onto her toes and wrapped her arms around his neck, cradling her body against his in an odd combination of innocence and intimacy. “No longer Sophie Taliko,” she sighed.

  “Just a lucky survivor of the collapse of Icarus,” Trimpot said. He looped one arm around the small of her back, hugging her closer, and freed the other to tick the speed of the island a few more notches upward.

  Legacy was in bed long before Dax, but kept awake by the clangor of the engine room and the unbearable heat and the distant thunder of laughter and footfalls. Following the showers of the day, the crew of the Albatropus was in high spirits . . .

  For the most part, she thought to herself. Legacy rolled onto her side and stared for a moment, then stretched to power the radio propped on the cabin’s bedside table. The horrors of the world around her were always a good way to drawn out the smaller, more personal horrors of her daily life. After all, how could one cry underwater?

  She twisted the dial to station CHN-1, City of Heliopolis News.

  “. . . industrial-strength breathing apparatuses from fifty pieces or more! You’ll never see prices this low anywhere else in the City of the Sun, so come find Olly Olly Oxygen Free on the corner of Hazzard Street and . . .”

  Legacy grimaced, descending back into the muck of her thoughts.

  That message she’d sent to Kaizen earlier, so terse and dismissive, still made her feel a little bit sick. But it was all for the best. It was what she had to do. If Kaizen could only know that, he would understand it. Of course, she would never be able to tell him or he would not rest until he found her – she knew him now, well enough to know this . . . And so his heartbreak, the lack of resolution, the end of it all, was necessary.

  “Mm, what refreshing flavor of iron is this? Lemon-esque! From Nanny’s Assemblage, the only synthetic vitamin dispensary that guarantees . . .”

  And how could they dance, when none of them had a friend alive in the world outside of this vessel? Perhaps they were punchy on the false sense of victory brought by the storm, as if they had brewed it themselves, as if to have enough water to live another day was some kind of great achievement and not a stepping stone to the battle of tomorrow, as if the weight of the next four days had yet to settle on anyone, much less the weight of Celestine. Did none of them think . . . that maybe the parting offer made by Lovelace could have been polite, automatic, ingenuine? And he had invited her, yes, but maybe it’d been a trap, and even if it had been genuine, no one had invited forty-five of her closest–

  The door swung open and Dax staggered inside, such a sharp, bright contrast to the shadows which crowded Legacy, hovering and smothering. His rebreather was on, but she could tell that he was smiling nonetheless.

  “Hey,” he huffed, collapsing onto the bed in a full sprawl. His clothes were damp, as were his hair and face.

  “Are you drunk?” Legacy asked from where she was curled.

  “Really not,” he replied, kicking off his shoes. Next he pulled long, wet socks from his feet. “Just danced my ass off on the deck. Started to rain again. Refilled all the pails and the barrel. Nobody can party like a rebel ragamuffin, I tell you!”

  “Oh. That’s good. I was worried. Because, you know. Alcohol dehydrates you.”

  Dax’s gaze shifted to where the girl huddled in the corner of the mattress, bleak eyes staring out as flat as gold in shadow. “You look terrible,” he informed her.

  Legacy broke eye contact. “Thanks.”

  “No, I mean–” He twisted and crawled to her, drawing his legs criss-crossed in front of himself. “I guess it is kind of weird to be at a . . . party.” He nodded, eyes shifting sideways. “After everything.”

  “No, it makes sense,” Legacy replied, following the natural shift of finding the negative space in a conversation and filling it. If someone is noted to be a jerk, someone else will feel compelled to note the o
pposite. “In times of tragedy, everyone wants to move on as quickly as possible, or pretend it never even happened.”

  “Everyone but you,” Dax said.

  “Well. I do. I do want to do those things. I just . . . can’t.”

  Dax scooted to the head of the bed, uncrossing his legs and opening his arms, gesturing for her to come to him. Legacy just stared, like he was crazy. “Come on,” he coaxed, leaning over and gently collecting her. He unfolded her cradled between his thighs, her back reclined on his chest, and draped the length of his arms over hers, as if he could be a shield for her. The scent of moist leather vivified her senses, and Legacy inhaled deeply yet subtly through her nose.

  “Did you know I had ‘the talk’ with your dad when I was, like, nineteen?” Dax blurted, seeming to suddenly find this too funny to hold in any longer.

  Legacy again knew that he was smiling, but couldn’t bear to join him. Her heart ached at the mention of her absentminded, soft-hearted father. “The talk?” she prompted weakly.

  “Yeah. The talk where a father says to a young man, you know, ‘how would you treat my daughter,’ and stuff.”

  Now he had her full attention. Legacy twisted to examine Dax’s face, but concentrated on the eyes and didn’t notice the oxygen gauge’s needle trembling over a yellow stripe. “I thought those conversations went out of style with the choice to marry. Why ask a mandated Companion about his intentions?”

  Dax shrugged. “Your dad also wasn’t supposed to be working freelance as an engineer, especially of knock-off medical equipment,” he mentioned, and the tone was so good-natured, she almost didn’t notice how he had to use the past tense. “I don’t think he had much respect for convention. And he seemed to think that there was something between us strong enough that . . .” Dax’s eyes lowered as he searched some secret pocket in his mind for the next words. “. . . that maybe we’d end up together no matter what.” He closed his eyes. “And your dad – Mr. Legacy – he told me about how you didn’t care about money, really. You didn’t notice how shitty the life around you was. So I didn’t have to worry about that. Or about looks, you know. About . . .” He gestured to his rebreather. “. . . this. You just cared about people treating people right. And so, he said, it was easy for a good man like–” He faltered. “–like me to keep you happy.”