LEGACY LOST Read online

  “What else did he say?” Legacy wondered.

  “That the hard part of keeping you happy would be protecting you from things like this. Things that are hard, and unfair. That you didn’t understand them. Why everyone can’t just . . . always . . . be happy. But–” He frowned and hesitated as if he wanted to say something else, but then changed his mind. “I’d only just lost my dad, you know, so I got what he was saying. I was still on the ground myself, and you . . . you may not have realized it, but you – you, and your parents, and that sense of family I had, being with you – it was the only thing that pulled me up again. Your dad, your mom. They were great people, and it was – it was a great surrogate family to have. I miss them too,” he whispered.

  Dax’s fingers crept between Legacy’s, lacing there and squeezing. She squeezed back.

  The radio was still playing, but it seemed to echo from a million miles away.

  “Anyway, you got assigned to Liam, of course,” Dax murmured, laughing huskily, a mirthless laugh. “And your parents seemed to think he was a good guy and shifted their attention elsewhere.”

  “No they didn’t,” Legacy replied quietly. “They always loved you best. But, like you, they also wanted me to have a chance . . . chance at a normal life.”

  “Well.” Dax nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Sorry for the whole Kaizen thing.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry that . . . I didn’t let it be. Let you go. You’re a good–”

  “Dax–”

  “–a good woman, and you deserve–”

  “Dax, stop!” Legacy twisted in his loose embrace, unsettled from the warm nest of memory.

  “You deserve to be happy, and I was blocking it at every turn.” His eyes were deep with anguish, a sheen of sweat on his brow, partly from the heat, partly from the oxygen deprivation. “I just didn’t know.” His eyes flashed away. “Didn’t know when you fell out of love with me. It was so fast.”

  Searching her mind for the moment to which he was referring, Legacy found it was not there. “I didn’t,” she replied simply. Still, she peered at him, though he would not look up. “I never fell out of love with you.”

  Now he looked up. “Don’t tell me that,” he begged. His eyebrows twisted.

  Legacy’s heartbeat kicked up. “It’s true,” she said. “I never stopped–”

  “Stop,” he commanded her, as if desperate, and she froze mid-confession, uncertain why he would want her to stop loving him, why he would say that, when he tore the rebreather from his face and she realized, in the split second she had between that moment and the next, that he hadn’t meant to stop loving him. He’d meant to stop talking. “Just stop.” Like the sheets of rain that had pummeled the dry ship that afternoon, Dax was everywhere at once, wet and cool and musk, quenching. Doing nothing but rampaging over her surface, he still saved her.

  His fingers went into her hair, binding there and pulling her neck open, the other hand – she didn’t feel its coolness – creeping over her legs and pulling them up and open, peeling her backward and down, opening for him and invaded by him, so there was no space his skin did not occupy, no swath of flesh uncrushed in his mouth. Their kisses were both deep and brief, as so much was demanded, the shoulder to be bitten, the chin swept beneath. The oxygen in the room evaporated. His mouth crawled down her torso and her glassy eyes rolled up in a flight of rapture. He paused only to sip at her belly button, grip twisting like smoke over her hips.

  Nails sank into his shoulder as he migrated between her thighs, tongue freeing sharp pleasure sweet and wet as rain. The room blurred and dimmed as she called his name, as if he could save her from what he himself was doing, and she pulled his hair, the grief transmuted into ecstasy for this exquisite moment.

  Then he was back again, mouth tracing hers, taste of salt and enigmatic spice, washing over her with a dizzying speed even as she senselessly pleaded for more. His thumbs roved over even her eyelids. His toes curled against hers.

  Dax’s hands shook as he laid everything between them bare. Her thoughts took to the clouds as he finally joined her, fully, completely. They cringed up and down, open and shut, as if more sickness was the cure, to go deeper the only way out. Sweat poured from them both, one in flames, the other frost, both pouring just the same. Both deaf and blind. Time frittered from their fingers, weightless as ash.

  For just a moment, yet so sudden and excruciating, he pulled away, and Legacy thought she might die. “Don’t go,” she rasped, eyes still closed, and there was a second before he descended again, mouth returning to her ear.

  “Never,” he promised, a strange, breathy giggle slipping from him as their rhythm resumed with all its previous intensity.

  Legacy’s thighs bucked and her back arched, the sudden stop and start having driven her quick to the ledge. There were unintelligible exclamations to God as Dax bowed against her neck and surged, struggling through the shimmering waves that threatened to rob her of him. He didn’t care. He felt invincible. Powerful. Delirious.

  Her hands slammed the wall as she came, invoking his name in a string of whispers that crescendoed into a wail, and he answered in kind, a long and low expression before the vehicle he was driving shuddered and collapsed.

  It took several seconds for Legacy’s senses to return, so frenzied had been their obliteration. The first sense to return to her was that of sound.

  The voice of the monarch on the radio. How long had he been speaking? How had they missed it so completely?

  “. . . floating cities, admittedly delicate. Yet, like the silk which binds our domes, deceptively durable. For, when a fire threatens a home, will we not smother it?” Vague cries of agreement behind his voice, as if he spoke before an auditorium. “If an infection grows in a wound, will it not be eradicated by the immune system?” Another line of cries.

  “What is this?” Legacy wondered dreamily, her own voice seeming to come to her from within a fog, opening her eyes and moving gently to detach herself from their tangle of drenched limbs.

  But Dax – Dax was as pale as marble, deep in slumber, but his lips . . . his lips were a faint blue.

  “Our faithful servant, the young Duke of Icarus, reported that he had detained the responsible party, the figurehead of this careless, reckless movement, whose name I will not sully the air in mentioning.”

  “Dax?” Legacy shrilled, springing onto her hands and knees, tilting his face in her palms. “Dax?” She slapped at his cheek.

  “An idea, my children, is a dangerous thing, like a spark, like a germ. It is possible to topple an entire monarchy with such things, but trust, children. I will not rest as the fire spreads . . .”

  Legacy scoured the bed for his rebreather, placing it over his mouth and fumbling the strap into place. She’d only let herself go for a few minutes, hadn’t it been, just a few minutes, just a few minutes, and come back to find the world shifting beneath her. “Dax!”

  “. . . not rest until the origin of this germ of an idea – that we live in some imagined world of infinite matter – perishes as its victim, Icarus, perished.”

  But Legacy, ripping the sheet from the bed and charging down the narrow corridor of cabins, did not hear this.

  “Rain!” she screamed, vaulting the companionway to the communications center. “Rain, it’s Dax! Rain! Rain!”

  “I will not rest until you may rest, assured that your own rations of food, allotments of space, and placed positions in the workforce are secure,” filtered out the open door of the fifth cabin.

  Chapter Four

  Shortly before dawn that Monday morning, Gustav lay in his bunk, near the door of the berth, trying to convince himself that he was still asleep, even though he knew it was untrue. The night had been so troubled following the collapse of the young statistician, with constant motion and murmurings coming and going; it was impossible to truly slip away, but his body had always been attuned to the rise of the sun. It was likely the
underlying culprit of his surly nature.

  A rattling, shifting sound caused one eye to crack open.

  One of the floor-drawers shuddered out of the floor by itself.

  How surreal.

  But the display was not over.

  A pair of hands emerged with the drawer, laying it flat, and a nude, bald girl as narrow and unsteady as the drawer itself came trembling out of the hole. Hm. It took Gustav a minute to place the wide flare of her cheeks and that peculiar amber shade of iris. Then it hit him. Oh, she looks just like a skinny Legacy. Ohhh. Yeah. The missing sister.

  She glanced around, frantic-like, and Gustav hurried to squeeze shut his one opened eye. He heard the light scrape of metal on metal across the room and opened the eye again. The nude girl had scrambled over the floor and hunched beneath someone’s upturned water pail, drinking so deeply that the water spilled from her mouth and down her chest.

  Gustav sat up, rubbing at his other eye, the closed one, which was crusted shut from the sleep he could’ve sworn he never got.

  The girl dropped the pail with a clatter and splash, scuttling against the wall like a cornered animal.

  “Whoa, whoa there,” Gustav told her, extending a hand to still her. “Ain’t gonna hurt you, love.”

  The girl looked at the hole in the floor and at him, gauging the distance from her to it and from him to it and from him to her, and then she lunged.

  Gustav grimaced. It was way too early for this shit.

  The girl, like some humanoid insect, slithered back into the floor and disappeared, folding the drawer over herself.

  Gustav almost smirked, but it was kind of pathetic and he was too pissy for such a gesture. Yawning, he stood, scratched his ass, and shambled down to Vector’s cabin to let him know that the refugee girl, Legacy’s sister, had been found, and she was living under the floorboards of the common room.

  After a few hours, Gustav figured he was just grouchy because he was literally starving. This was day three of their voyage, and he hadn’t eaten in the past forty-eight hours; even if eating was only swallowing a handful of pills, it still took the edge off. In any case, he was feeling intermittent pangs of sympathy for the slave girl. He almost wished he’d left her in the floorboards.

  She was just sitting in the common room, her little hands knotted into fists and pinned to the side of her lap, a vigilant expression of distrust chiseled into her features. She hadn’t said a word, unless you counted her inarticulate screams when she’d been extracted from the walls. Vector, Saul, and Ray had all descended into the floorboards via the drawer in the floor, then chased her down, wriggling between walls, until she’d been cornered and hauled to the surface like a shrieking, bucking animal forced from its nest.

  Vector had said that Legacy had said that the girl’s name was Radia.

  Maybe she would’ve calmed down if she could’ve seen her sister, but Legacy was refusing to leave Dax’s side.

  Gustav weighed whether or not he could do anything, then whether or not he should do anything, and then whether or not he would do anything. Deciding that, yes, today he would do something, he grumbled and stood.

  Augh, doing things.

  The girl – Radia – watched him with large eyes, surprisingly alert for how malnourished she appeared to be, not unlike the gaze of a hawk.

  “Oi,” Gustav greeted, brusque.

  She just stared at him, measuring, shrewd.

  He supposed he could relate to that feeling, though. The distinct sensation that everyone in the world was plotting against him.

  “Oi, Radia,” he tried again.

  The girl said nothing still.

  “That’s your name, innit?” he asked, collapsing uninvited beside her on the bunk.

  She glared pointedly away, though she had seemed so very interested in him until he’d crossed into her bubble of space.

  “Innit?” he pressed.

  “No,” she spat. “My name is Coal.”

  “Coal? Really?” Gustav snorted, forgetting himself. “Like one of those other slave people? You know, we already have two or three Coals. Might as well change it. Some of them already have.”

  Coal clenched her jaw, shaking her head. “No.”

  “Huh.” Gustav nodded and patted his knee. “Okay, then. Whatever. Why do you look like someone is making you drink piss?”

  She promptly returned to the tactic of ignoring him.

  “I mean, you liked us enough to steal our water, didn’t ya?”

  “I didn’t steal–”

  Gustav couldn’t help but chuckle. He liked to make people do things they didn’t want to do, like this girl, talking to him now, even though she clearly hated his guts and everything else around her.

  “So, have you even met your sister?” he asked.

  Coal didn’t respond.

  “Ya know? Legacy? She’s got dread–”

  “I know who she is,” Coal snapped. “No. I haven’t met her, technically.”

  Gustav grinned. “Technically? You mean, like, unless you count the day you two were born, or what?”

  “I mean that I’ve seen her,” Coal answered, testy. She seemed to be aware that he was making her talk by the sheer manipulation of her contrary nature. “I’ve seen all of you, while I was in the wall.”

  “Mm. Guess you didn’t see anything you liked, or you’d’ve come out, huh?”

  Coal shrugged. “Guess not.”

  “Did you know your sister saved your life?” Gustav went on. He didn’t really care if the two bloody twins ever reunited; he was just interested. He’d never seen someone hate someone they didn’t even know, a relative no less, who had saved their life.

  Coal glared, and seemed to be weighing the concept in her mind. Had Legacy saved her? “That’s just what she wants you to think,” she concluded. “Did you know what a traitor my sister is?”

  Gustav examined the slave girl more closely. “Traitor? Come on now.” He laughed uncomfortably. “How much could you possibly know about the inner workings of our group if you haven’t even met any of us properly?”

  She shrugged. Everything she did had a tight wariness to it. He kind of liked it. “You learn a lot inside a wall,” she replied. “You’d be surprised.”

  He supposed that was true. “So what’s Legacy doing?”

  Now, of all times, Coal tightened the reins and opted to hold her tongue.

  “All right, fine,” Gustav said, patting his knee again. “Fine. Well. We aren’t all bad, anyway. Our cause is quite noble, methinks.”

  Coal considered him from the corner of her eye, but said nothing.

  “Fine!” Gustav exclaimed, throwing his hands into the air. “I cannot talk to this woman!” He shot to his feet and made to exit the berth.

  “Sorry,” Coal blurted.

  Gustav paused and glanced back at her.

  “You’re probably pretty hungry,” he deduced.

  She nodded.

  “Me, too,” he agreed. He took his seat next to her on the vacant bunk again.

  “So . . . what is the . . . ‘CC,’ exactly?” Coal wondered aloud.

  Gustav crossed his ankle over his knees and ran his paw along the bristle shading his cheek, savoring the opportunity to educate another fool. The world was so full of them. “Well, Chance for Choice started earlier this year, under this really vocal, really charismatic bloke named Neon Trimpot.”

  “What’s a bloke?” she asked.

  “Like, a guy.”

  “What’s a year?”

  Gustav started. The history of the CC was going to take longer than he thought.

  Legacy stared at Dax silently. There was nowhere to sit in the laboratory, and so she stood as she had stood for hours now, surrounded by burbling beakers and reams of categorized silk and the fluorescent tank of disembodied arms. The boy who had lost consciousness while making love to her was awake now, and she lingered at the wall shared by the laboratory and the library, which was also the wall closest to Dax’s head. She’
d closed her eyes once – for just a moment, hadn’t it been? But the moment had been so intense, as if crystallized in amber, maybe it was half an hour – and Dax had almost died. She wouldn’t close her eyes again.

  “Hey, Rain?” Dax queried from where he had been stretched for hours, supine on the chemist’s work table. All manner of experimentation had been cleared away to make room for him in the only room which housed equipment appropriate to medical aid, tubes and syringes and small tanks of gas. This relegated the main projects, the properties of the silk and the organic tech, to the crowded, narrow counter lining the wall. Saul had mentioned this inconvenience at least three times. Dax cleared his throat. “Rain?”

  “Yes, Dax,” Rain answered, not glancing up from a chart which outlined water rations for the day.

  Saul, too, totally ignored him in favor of fishing the disembodied arms from their tank with a pair of tongs, laying the dripping limbs onto a tray alongside an array of intimidating instruments, magnifying glasses and tiny scissors and hooks with which to prod them. Legacy noticed from the corner of her eye that the arms now spilled coiled springs from their points of amputation.

  “I’d really like to go onto the deck,” Dax was mentioning casually, meanwhile. “That would be super sweet.”

  “I know, Dax,” Rain murmured, still not rousing from her chart. “But I already told you that you need to rest and I need to monitor your blood oxygen level. Once the tissue–”