Authors: Rachel Eastwood
But they’d already waited too long.
Sheets of water slammed into and lashed across the elevator’s glass walls.
“Augh! Forget it!” Dax shouldered the doors open himself, staggering into the maelstrom. The wind howled, clawing at his clothing, and the water poured at a vicious slant. “I’m staying! I’m not going back without her! Don’t you fucking go
anywhere!
You said it yourself! Can’t operate a lift in weather like this!”
While Trimpot, Dax, Vector, and Rain had been examining the records room, Legacy had broken away to follow the milling crowd in which she’d seen that girl. She couldn’t shake the certainty that this was significant. Who was she? And did this relate to why her DNA was able to open the door? Was this the coal miner?
But, when Legacy followed the group, what she found was not an answer.
Everyone waited in a docile line, filing toward a single woman with a large, glass syringe. With dull, listless eyes, they offered her their arms, and she plunged the needle in, depressing the plunger. After each arm, she’d sterilize the needle, refill the syringe with a combination of sickly yellow and dark green fluids, and then go again.
The girl was in the line, waiting.
Legacy stared at her from the doorway, unable to believe her eyes. They looked exactly alike. The girl had her silver hair cropped short. But otherwise, they were identical. How could it be?
And what was being put into their bodies?
Legacy’s eyes narrowed. She could see a back room through a glass panel behind the nurse, and in it gurgled and hissed a drink cart much like that which she’d seen on the third floor of
CIN-3.
Legacy ducked from out of the room and doubled back to the next entrance, which was simply labeled SUPPLY. She ducked inside.
There were two vats there, and cartons full of nothing but syringes. Hundreds of syringes. The vats were huge and brimming to the top. Much like the free drinks at the radio broadcast station, the containers were glass, set on a wheeled cart, and had valves at the top for release.
The first vat was familiar enough. It was a dark, mossy green, and was labeled, TO CALM THE NERVES.
The second vat, the sickly yellow, gurgling vat, was labeled, DULL CURIOSITY.
“Severe storm warning,”
an electronic voice interrupted her thoughts. “
Severe storm warning in approximately thirty minutes. Please return to your units. Thank you.”
Legacy froze, expecting the woman administering the shots to turn and look upon her, but the dance of doses continued unhindered.
Well, they’re already in a dome,
Legacy thought.
But I’ve got to get out of here. Not before doing something, though. Never before doing something.
Hoisting herself onto the wobbling wheel of the cart, Legacy reached and fumbled for the glass valve of the first vat. Discovering it, her fingers tangled there and twisted. She felt the tension give, and mossy green tonic coursed across the floor.
She wouldn’t have much time now. The woman would surely see this puddle spreading from the supply room soon.
Stepping carefully onto the second wheel, attempting to distribute her weight, Legacy reached for the second glass valve and then felt the cart wobble and tip toward her. She had only enough time to twist and kick off, escaping their weight and slamming onto her knees. The vats shattered behind her, puddles of dark green and sick yellow mixing and flooding out of the room.
Because Legacy had landed on her knees, she wasn’t visible from the room beyond. Still, she heard the nurse exclaim and advance. Crawling through the colored fluid, into the hallway, she lunged to her feet and ran.
She hoped the others would do the same, wherever they were.
Legacy couldn’t remember the last time she ran so hard. Harder than the run toward the Chance for Choice headquarters with Dax, and harder than the run toward
CIN-3
with the rebel mob, she ran now. She left her clothes behind in the crate. The long grass whipped at her, the wind moaned, and rain lashed over the earth in sheets. In the distance, there were the cables stretched taut; there was Icarus, looming. It seemed a lifetime away, and she’d never been more desperate to reclaim her little slice of hell.
As she clambered through the bog of half-dead trees, the mud and slush sucking at her bare feet—
Damnit, my boots!
she thought, in spite of it all—a vague shape came lumbering toward her across the wetlands.
Legacy paused to glare. What was that?
It was fleshy and pale, almost totally shapeless, but if a shape had to be applied to it, then it was oblong. And it was rocketing toward her with a sucker mouth clapping open and shut. Although Legacy had never seen such a thing before, it was a nematode. It was a double-ended, predatory nematode.
The thing reared up and shrieked, its sucker opening like a sphincter to reveal rows of lamprey-esque teeth, and Legacy dove behind one of the jagged, decaying trees, into the muck, and shrieked. The nematode crashed toward her, but there came a crunch, and a splintered root whistled through the air. It sliced into the nematode’s abdominals, or what might have been the abdominals of another animal. It floundered, the flesh ripping like tissue, and black, gooey innards spilled from the wound.
Legacy, trembling and blank, crawled backwards. She grasped a warm tree trunk and crept upward, grasping at it desperately, until her shock-addled brain realized this wasn’t a tree trunk. It was Dax. She peered wordlessly into his blue eyes.
“Come on!” he rapped out, grasping her arm and running with it. Legacy yelped at the jolt, but she followed. “They might’ve already left! God damnit, Legacy, what were you thinking!”
“I had to know!” she cried in response, focusing on the elevator cables ahead. “I saw her! A girl who looked like me! And I had to know!”
They broke through the fronds of the bog, and the freight lift stood in view, pelted by rains but unmoving.
“Oh thank God!” Dax cried. The door slid open before they even arrived at it, and the drenched couple collapsed inside, neigh giddy.
“Go, go, go,” Legacy jabbered, almost to herself. “Go, go, go.” The elevator didn’t move, but she didn’t notice. She was delirious with relief.
Legacy sprawled out on the elevator floor, drained, nonsensical, and it was Dax who pulled her into a sitting position, cradling her against his chest. She’d almost forgotten about the rebreather entirely—but he was unfastening hers.
Legacy looked at him now, and really drank him in, as if they were strangers. His white shirt clung to his chest, transparent with rain, and his wet hair, saturated to black, hung in his face. Droplets of rain stood out on his pale cheeks and dripped from his chin. His mask was gone. “Dax?” she asked. “Are you—?”
He tore the rebreather from off her mouth and descended, kissing her as if she were the oxygen, as if he needed nothing else. His fingers raked through her braids, his other hand skating over her cheek, her chin, her neck, as if to memorize this water-slicked terrain.
“Wow,” Trimpot drolled, turning his back. “
Classy
.”
“Never leave without you,” Dax confessed into her neck, burrowing into her hair like Flywheel had. “I’ll never leave without you.”
She knew he needed his mask, but she couldn’t bear to tell him to stop. Her body was submerged in an effervescent sensation comparable to champagne, and her neck went slack, her head tumbling, her smile shameless. She buried her fingers into his hair and only opened her eyes when he was directly over her, peering down, his mouth so close that his breath was hers. “I think I love you,” she whispered.
“I love you,” Dax whispered back.
“Daw,” Rain said.
Vector stared out the glass and politely ignored the entangled couple on the elevator floor. “I think the storm is passing,” he concluded.
“Thank
Christ,
” Trimpot muttered.
The sun had not yet risen by the time the Chance for Choice crew emerged from the glass elevator, back into the crate-filled basement. “I guess we’re not going back down there, then?” Rain suggested hopefully. She still looked rather squeamish from the mention of some tubular, double-ended beast with black guts. “I mean, if you see a monster, you see a monster, right?”
“I don’t mind if we
never
go back,” Trimpot grumbled, extracting the Contemplator from his satchel. “Place
ruined
my shoes.”
As the group surged along the side stairs, no one noticed that Dax’s hands never left Legacy’s hips. It wasn’t entirely sexual; part of him just wanted to ensure that she was safe, and sound, and in his arms. She was, after all, still wearing that muddied smock which spoke volumes of her near-death, of how she’d abandoned her possessions in a crate and still was almost left behind, if it weren’t for Dax’s dedication. Of course, part of this was also the sheer enjoyment of her hips.
Meanwhile, Vector offered hopefully, “I could probably throw something together to combat those monsters, you know.”
“Why
bother?
” Trimpot asked, shoving open the door to the ballroom of the Center. “The only thing
down
there was an adoption front for a
slave
ring.” Perhaps realizing retrospectively how callous this sounded, he amended, “Maybe later, you know, when we have some more
power
.”
“I kind of agree,” Rain said.
The group emerged into the courtyard, where a light rain had precipitated to mimic the driving shower below. Legacy slid her hand into Dax’s front pocket. Like him, she simply wanted to feel close. She wanted to feel as if she were a part of him, and they were one. Turning her eyes up to his, she asked, “They were New Earth orphans?”
Dax’s eyes ticked over her face like a newcomer, lost in uncharted territory. He had to try to find some way to tell her . . . without ensuring that she would immediately return unarmed in search for her long-lost sister.
“
Clearance, please,
” one of the guard automata accosted the group.
Trimpot cranked the Contemplator again, battering the thing with pulses of a sonorous message. “Good
God,
this is handy,” he purred as the turn-key guard coasted off again.
The group moved through the dark and lifeless business district of Icarus, huddled together against the cold drizzle but otherwise not seeming to be felonious revolutionaries. Only Legacy had a suspicious air about her, being as that she was barefoot, and dirty, and wearing a shapeless gray tunic emblazoned N.E.E.R. on the breast. Dax was aware of this, though. It was one of the reasons he didn’t take his hands off of her. No one was going to take her from him. Not for any reason.
After arriving at headquarters, Trimpot, Rain, and Vector diverged, and the lovesick couple moved on through the brass forest, toward their respective units. Legacy forgot about the mention of the orphans on Old Earth. She fluttered like Flywheel, tethered to the ground by Dax’s arms alone. They broke through the brass forest and into the industrial territory. Legacy shuddered and laughed as Dax pushed her hair from off her neck, and then came the sensation of lips on her skin.
“Dax, stop!” she reprimanded, half-serious. “This is the worst place in Icarus to be without the rebreather!”
“Shh,” he replied. “No one—Ah!”
Flywheel came humming and buzzing out of Legacy’s braids, stirred by Dax’s hand. “
Blood pressure hypertensive,
” he noted, circling the boy’s head. Dax snatched the mechanical dragonfly out of the air, holding him gently and firmly in his fist. “
Oxygen level: 81. Warning. Oxygen level: 81.
”
“Dax!” Legacy hissed, whirling. “Put your mask on right now!”
Dax rolled his eyes and strapped the leather rebreather back onto his face. Then he jammed Flywheel into his pocket and buttoned it shut. That would take care of the robotic tattle. Since when had Flywheel ever worked in a way that was trustworthy and accurate, anyway?
The domestic district broke into view, the dark, quiet tower of their shared complex looming closer. There was a black-domed carriage in the lot, but the vehicle was quiet, and neither noticed it among the shadows and reduced visibility of rain. Not when they were so distracted already.
“You’re not going home like this, are you?” Dax asked, one hand running down Legacy’s shoulder as the other braced her hip. The drenched tunic revealed more of her shape than it concealed now. He nuzzled into her braids again, and neither of the pair focused on the winding stairwell so much as they focused on one another.
“I kind of have to,” Legacy answered, smiling drowsily, eyes half-closed.
Thank God,
she couldn’t help but think.
Thank God we got through that . . . weird patch of jealousy over an accidental kiss, once! Or twice!
Legacy stepped onto the stairs, and Dax followed eagerly.
“So, you’re going to go home, and maybe wake up your parents, wearing this weird shirt-dress thing, and all muddy, and no shoes, and tell them you just went for a little walk?” he teased, dipping down to deliver a light kiss to her earlobe. He rubbed his thumbs along her sides, inching toward her nether region. They emerged onto the porch of Unit #2. “Come up to #7. Get a shower. I’ll lend you some pants at least.”
“Do you think that me, coming home in your pants, would be less alarming to them?” The couple crested the porch of Unit #3, and Dax stooped again, nuzzling her ear with a playful, eager mouth. Legacy sighed. “Dax . . . put your damn mask back on!”
“Leg . . .” Dax sighed, dipping down to kiss her throat again. He was not intending to put his mask back on anytime soon. He’d rather die. He spun the girl in his arms and pinned her body to his, binding her there, descending passionately, and Legacy surrendered. His hand roved over her mound, etched in clear detail by the cloying fabric of her tunic, and his thumb nestled between her labia to play. She let him, once or twice; having no bedroom wall, and nothing but a cold, weak spray for a shower spigot, she’d never really taken the opportunity to explore her own body before. And now . . .
“M-maybe I could come up to #7,” she allowed, clearing her throat and turning from him to mount porch #4. “Just for a shower.”
“
Exa Legacy! Halt!
” a formal, authoritarian voice
commanded.
The couple froze.
There were five sentries in the royal uniform of black turtleneck and navy arm band.
Dax’s face lifted from Legacy’s neck, pale and infuriated. He wouldn’t lose her again. Not again.
“
You’re under arrest by order of the Duke of Icarus,
” one of the sentries announced, producing thin, golden shackles from his holster, the chain unusually long and delicate. It was almost like a necklace. The other sentries had drawn their guns and trained them on Dax as well as Legacy, anticipatory of a scuffle. Legacy recognized these guns. Dazzler muskets, their barrels bulbed to operate in rain. And at this height, on such an insecure structure, being disoriented by super-bright light could be fatal.
“Under what charge?” Dax demanded, punctuating the question with a rasping cough.
Legacy twisted to look at him. She touched his face, and her eyes were large and shining with plea. “Don’t fight—”
One of the sentries grasped her free wrist, slapping a cuff over it.
“No!” Dax yelled.
“Under the charge of trespassing, sir,” the sentry answered his question.
“It’s okay,” Legacy told him, even though she was certain that this was a lie. The last time she’d seen the duke, it had been with a suspended sentence. Now she would likely endure the sentence of trespassing, breaking and entering, theft, destruction of public property, and vandalism, if not treason and conspiracy, all combined.
The sentry took her other hand and cuffed it as well. She could see the way Dax’s chest rose and fell with dangerous rapidity. She saw his body tense and shift and knew what was going to happen next.
“It’s okay!” she reiterated desperately.
But Dax lunged for the offending sentry, and was immediately dazzled from every angle. The boy collapsed, groping for anything solid, and by the time he found the door to Unit #4 and used it to pull himself upright again—by the time the colorless clouds in his vision cleared—Legacy was gone, and the sun was rising. He lurched to a stand and staggered down the stairwell, blinking back the spots in his eyes. He was going to the CC headquarters. He was going to get her back.
“I don’t understand,” Legacy said as the sentries led her into the main castle. She wasn’t even wearing a blindfold. Her hands were bound in front of her rather than behind, which also seemed terribly inefficient and hazardous, and the cuffs weren’t even particularly heavy or uncomfortable.
The grand hall churned with busy automata, hurriedly banging dust from drapes and replacing wilted flower arrangements with fresh ones.
“They’re preparing for the coronation, Miss Legacy,” the sentry at her left arm answered.
“No, I don’t understand why I’m here,” she replied, fearing that they were leading her to the royal throne room for her death sentence. But a stairwell came into view. She didn’t remember a stairwell on the walk to the throne room before. “Why aren’t I being taken to the . . .” She winced, remembering the grim walls, iron bars, and the pile of moldy rags. “. . . dungeon?”
“Earl Kaizen’s order, Miss Legacy,” the sentry answered.
“. . .
Kaizen
had me arrested?”
“That’s correct.”
The stairwell twisted and spat them out in another wing of the castle, this lined by dutiful automata, including the blonde, blushing boy one, whom she recognized from
CIN-3
. She’d tousled his hair in passing. He’d had the key removed from his back.
But how did he . . . know? How did he know without the duke knowing? And should I be relieved?
“Where are you taking me?” Legacy asked as the sentries delivered her to the second door. They knocked.
“Earl Kaizen’s chamber,” the sentry replied.
The door swung open, and there he was. Legacy had willed herself to forget about him, and now she was confronted again. She had expected stormy eyes, the sullen mouth, and petulant gestures. But . . .
“Legacy,” Kaizen breathed. He looked peaceful. “Come in, come . . . What are you wearing?”
“Will you be needing our supervision, Earl Kaizen?” one of the sentries asked.
Kaizen glared over at the troop as if annoyed to be reminded of their presence. “Of course not,” he snapped. “You can go.”
Legacy let him take her arm; the pressure of his fingers was delicate enough. Her eyes were thundering, but she let him lead her inside and close the door before speaking.
“Kaizen,” she addressed, harsh with disapproval. “I’m in manacles.”
“Technically, these are much lighter weight than manacles,” he differentiated, touching the chains which held the cuffs together. “It’s a new model, and I rather like them. Apparently, they’re a friendly improvement on the original ‘manacle’ design. Now, seriously, what are you wearing?”
“Kaizen!” she snapped. “You had me arrested in the middle of the night!”
“Shortly before dawn—”
“And brought to your bedroom!” she fumed. “Don’t you know how this looks? It looks like kidnapping!”
“But you really did break several laws tonight,” he mentioned with the pretense of casualness, directing his dark eyes to the floor. “In a way, I’m doing you a favor by neglecting to inform my father.”
“Blackmail!” she cried. “Extortion!”
“You’re just exhausted and . . . barefoot, and . . . terribly, terribly dirty,” Kaizen said, excusing her anger with a wave of his hand. “I can’t let you get into my bed with feet like those.”
Legacy gaped. “I’m not—”
Kaizen smiled. “Relax, Legacy,” he told her. “I just . . . wanted to see you. And I couldn’t . . . think of another way, and I . . . know it’s pathetic. I know it’s an abuse of power, and city resources, and . . .” He shrugged, still not meeting her eyes as he spoke. He seemed so young. “You never returned my message.”
Legacy’s eyes softened. Twenty-four, and he didn’t yet know how to handle the slightest romantic upset.
“So, you’re going to let me go, then?”
“Of course I’m going to let you go.” Kaizen rolled his eyes. “But let me ask you a question, now. Have you ever had a hot bath?”
Legacy frowned with confusion. She’d never even heard the word ‘bath’ used in conjunction with a human being. “A ‘bath’ is something you give a dirty countertop,” she answered doubtfully.
Kaizen snorted and flashed her an impish grin. His smiles were so rare and dazzling. It was staggering to catch one. As disorienting as the beam of an ultra-bright musket. “Look,” he said. “Just let me give you a hot bath. Then, you can go home, if you really want to. I promise.”