LEGACY BETRAYED

by Rachel Eastwood

  “Widow Coldermolly!” Legacy greeted buoyantly, traipsing to the opened shutters. “How are you doing?”

  “Shh!” The old woman glared up at her. “Get in here!”

  Legacy glanced about, deduced that this was a good idea, and nodded. “Sure,” she agreed, going to the front door. As she reached for the handle, it swept open – for the hobbling old woman still moved faster than she did, high as she was – and the Widow grabbed her hand and yanked her inside, slamming and locking the door.

  “They’re watching us, you know,” the Widow snapped. “They’re watching us, and they’re waiting for you to come home!”

  “I told Dax you were always listening,” Legacy said, not focusing on the more pertinent information. “He didn’t believe me. He believes what they say about you. You know. That you’re crazy and stuff, since your husband died.”

  Strangely, the Widow Coldermolly smiled. “Oh, is that when I went crazy?” she asked, walking carefully toward her kitchen. “I didn’t know that. To me, losing my husband wasn’t that difficult, because, you see, I never loved him.” The Widow returned holding a cracked jar, its top removed. “I loved someone else. You know what I mean, I suspect.” Her eyes gleamed, and Legacy realized she even knew about Dax, recounting the kisses the boy had stolen from her as they’d ascended the complex stairs. “But he’d already been dead for a long time,” the Widow went on. “My Companion –he was a good man. That’s why I pay extra attention to you, Exa,” she explained, extracting a satchel of coins from within the jar. “Because you want to reform those damn laws.”

  She reached forward and took Legacy’s hand in her own, unfolding it. She firmly pressed the satchel into the girl’s palm and closed it. “Take this. It will help you get by and move forward,” she promised. Then her eyes darkened. “But don’t use it on that drink!” she snapped. “It dulls your mind. Makes you forget what’s smart, or even just what’s important, even just how you feel, all right?”

  “I knew you were always listening,” Legacy replied breathlessly.

  “You don’t get to keep living in an air city by not paying attention,” the Widow said. “Not at my age.” She hobbled toward the door, gesturing.

  “What do you m–”

  “Just that the monarch likes to get rid of people.” The Widow nudged Legacy forward. “You knew that already, though, didn’t you? Go on, now, get out of here. Keep the money. I have plenty.” She opened the door and thrust Legacy through it. “Go,” she said, and closed the door, locking it behind her. “And stop being so damn loud, damnit,” Legacy heard her mutter bleed through the shutters.

  Meanwhile, a small troop of Old Earth workers snuck through the dark, deserted street of their small dome. They kept to the shadows instinctively, knowing that there must have been some periodic observation at this time. As the Widow Coldermolly suggested, the elderly were shuffled off somewhere with meager provisions if they didn’t have the savings to stay in New Earth. They were given jobs that they were told would be as easy as babysitting blind kittens. Of course, this didn’t happen all too often. The environment of New Earth was likely to kill you before Old Earth would have its chance.

  “I think I might like to be called–” Coal 111 chirped.

  “Shh,” several people hushed simultaneously.

  It was amusing how people who had lived in total silence for so long were suddenly so desperate to let their words out.

  The well-lit building loomed before them, unguarded and unlocked by chaperones who had been told that the children of N.E.E.R. were mentally incapable of exploration.

  The five coal miners ducked inside, but soon came up short. The doors bore letters for words they didn’t understand. How could they possibly find their way to the source of the information they needed?

  They weren’t the only people in here, though.

  Some cliques raided the supply stock, while others hunted for fresh clothes, new rebreathers, a drink, some vitamins . . . but the room with the most people inside, all hunkered down and speaking in a hushed tone, was the room of desks, a ledge sprawled out on top, and an unfamiliar worker glaring down at it. He was an older man, and his right arm was pinned, withered, to his side.

  “They go up again early Saturday morning, at six,” he announced.

  “How do you know that?” Coal asked in awe.

  “They taught me,” he answered. “They taught me how to read so I could file their papers. They said that some people need to know how to read. Not everyone can mine.”

  “Oh my god!” Mr. Legacy cried, dragging his daughter inside for a closer look. His robotic arm – a replacement for the arm he’d lost in factory work twenty years ago – sputtered and sparked as it jerked her this way and that, scouring her flesh for bruises or scrapes. “You’re okay!”

  “Exa!” her mother hollered, scrambling down the ladder which led to the loft. “It’s been two days!”

  “Yeah, I know,” Legacy said, allowing the examination, which now involved her mother clutching her chin and peering shrewdly into her eyes. It was fortuitous that she was inebriated. It dulled the pain of the pinching, metallic arm. It was not fortuitous, however, that her mother had always been so much more observant than her father. “How are–”

  “You’re drunk,” Mrs. Legacy deduced, releasing her chin. “So the rumors are true. You have been in Groundtown.”

  “How many times have I said not to listen to that tripe,” Legacy sighed, knowing she herself had been glued to it. Dyna claimed that the duke was alive and well; no word had been given on Kaizen’s condition. And yes, she had outed Legacy as being somewhere in Groundtown. “Listen to another city’s shortwave once in a –Oh, hey. The police didn’t do anything too bad when they were here, did they? They didn’t break anything, I hope?” She tried to examine her father’s countertop of inventions, but he tugged her forward and broke her concentration.

  “We’re fine, Exa, and everything’s fine! If the girl needs a drink, Furnice, then the girl needs a drink, for God’s sake,” he reprimanded. Still, the metallic fingers dug into her arm. “How are you? Where are you staying?”

  “I’m fine, and I shouldn’t say, and I shouldn’t stay,” Legacy added. “I just wanted to see you and say that I was sorry and that it’s okay and don’t worry and don’t tell anyone anything and I don’t have much time.” Legacy was really trying to keep her grip on the Widow’s words of warning, already fading into the slush and slur of present time. Her parents’ faces loomed and swooped around her. Over his shoulder, her father’s newest invention, a spray of intelligent adhesive, was propped on his desk. “Oh, you finished your glue gun.”

  “Yes! I did!” Mr. Legacy replied, shoving the prototype – a silvery weapon with seven or eight barrels, the length of her torso and just as heavy – into his daughter’s arms. She staggered under the sudden weight. “Take it! It’s already loaded with the glue!” Its magazine was strangely warm to the touch. The glue gun’s intelligent epoxy formula adhered first and foremost to the key of the automaton at which it was shot, instantly freezing their abilities. Or maybe it could just sense mobile points.

  “I can’t take this, Dad, it’s your prototype,” Legacy replied, remembering the eye of the Ocular Bot she’d taken, which had likely been confiscated from headquarters by the police. It was his first successful prototype, and the tenth. He’d already told her she couldn’t take it, and she’d taken it anyway.

  “Take it,” Mr. Legacy insisted.

  “Dad!” Legacy cried, hefting the thing. “I can’t go walking through Groundtown with this thing!”

  Mr. Legacy took it from her, placing it into a nondescript chrome case. “Here,” he reiterated. “Take it, and take this. I’ve been trying to get in touch with Flywheel, and he’s down,” her father went on, rummaging in a tin full of mechanical assistants. There was every variety of instrument within, dragonflies and figurines and tiny top hats and coiled snakes of glass. They were probably his best-selling and most reliable
product, easy to make, if you knew what you were doing. Through trial and error, Mr. Legacy had learned. Kind of. Mostly. He’d been getting better.

  Mr. Legacy extracted a golden waistcoat from the pile; it was delicate enough to shift with movement and gleam only faintly, so that, upon first glance, it seemed cloth. But a closer glance would reveal the small key, fashioned to resemble a corsage, plunged into the lapel, and the tiny speakers rather than buttons. “Perfect,” he said. “This one hardly talks at all. Good for . . . for stealth.” He shot his daughter a look of understanding and dire importance. “It’s got a lot of tools,” he said, idly extending a pair of matching silken wings folded onto the back of the vest, “but–I–I know we don’t have time, so just register this, okay? Register it under . . . Patch, okay?” Patch was her father’s name. Or, rather, it was a nickname applied to him so often after he began his career of slipshod creations that it had replaced his formal name, Patrick.

  “No, no, no,” Mrs. Legacy interjected. “They’ll know to scan for that. Register it under . . . Audio Swan.”

  Legacy smiled. Sometimes her mom could be so cool.

  Mr. Legacy draped the vest over his daughter’s shoulders, guiding her arms through it.

  “Have you been listening to CIN-3 at all?” Mr. Legacy asked. “They –they say the duke is alive. But they don’t know about the earl . . . If the earl is dead . . . I’m sure the duke will . . . kill . . . And they’re looking . . . you know. For you. You and Trimpot. But we told them you didn’t . . .” As he went on, his eyes became progressively large and dark. “That, that you couldn’t . . .”

  “You should go, Exa,” her mother interrupted, first sympathetic and then stern. “You should go before they come, and don’t –don’t tell us where you’ve been staying. You’re right. It’s better that way.”

  Her mother pressed a hard kiss to her cheek, and her father gave her a hug that cracked three vertebrae in her back.

  Kaizen had arrived at the strip of towering apartments while Legacy was still inside her parents’ home, receiving gifts of skittish invention and teary farewell. Although he hadn’t had the manpower to spare, that was true, there was no father lording over him anymore, admonishing him for his rash, emotional logic, and so he’d directed two of the auxiliary guardsmen to stake out Legacy’s home. He knew she’d come back. He didn’t know how he knew – except that he felt as if he knew her well enough to say.

  They’d contacted him as soon as she staggered across the lot, and so he was well on his way within minutes, flying into a carriage and pulling the hood of his frock coat down low. He didn’t know why he had to go, had to see her, and he told himself it was just to know what was happening, to confront her, to see the look in her eyes and gauge . . . but those were all weak half-promises to himself.

  Deep down, he probably really just wanted to see her.

  When he arrived at the lot, he gestured to the two sentries to go, and though they glared in confusion, they obeyed. He ascended the narrow set of stairs as nimbly as he possibly could, reached Unit #4, and reclined on the railing. He could hear them inside. He could hear her parents fussing over her with such pitchy, desperate tones, and then Legacy’s own voice, the husky murmur.

  He pulled his hood down lower and stepped to the right as the door opened, expelling a loose-limbed, silver-haired girl hefting a chrome case large enough to house a guitar.

  “Hey,” he murmured, drawing her attention to the side.

  Legacy turned and her eyes flew open wide. They weren’t only wide. They were filled with joy. They looked like honey caught in a beam of sunlight.

  “Oh my god!” she choked, dropping the case with a crash and rushing to him. She threw her arms around his neck, and Kaizen, mildly stunned, slowly rose his arms to encircle her. They’d only barely connected, however, when she pulled away to examine him again. “Kaizen!” she gushed, grabbing his face. “I thought you were dead! The radio . . . The stupid radio never said, and I thought –I thought it was being kept–” His hand, possessed of some will not entirely pre-approved, went into her hair. The other went to cup her cheek and tilt her face. Her eyes shone up at him. “I was worried,” she finished, and the two met in the center as naturally as she and Dax once had. He hadn’t wanted to, hadn’t meant to, but was caught in an avalanche. She stretched to reach his lips, her hands locking behind his neck and pulling him down, and his arms snaked fully around her, forgetting, crushing.

  This hadn’t been the plan.

  The plan had been to coldly, logically evaluate Legacy’s response to the sight of him. To determine exactly how authentic her loyalty – so to speak – was. Maybe even to interrogate her, or take her to the palace, or something else, maybe, of which his father or the monarch would’ve approved. Something stiff. Something . . . unyielding. Who had he been kidding?

  Now here they were, unraveling, mouths cracking apart and coalescing, his hands exploring beneath her shirt, catching flame and consuming all they touched. He raked his fingertips over her nipples and Legacy moaned softly, undulating like a dancer against him. She moved her own swath of heady torment down his neck to his rampaging heart, and he didn’t know how it happened, except that his body and his mind and his soul were both divided and united, like the sea and the storm and the ship all at once, screaming at one another while rushing forward as one. Kaizen drove Legacy against the railing, which whined with the force, pinned her hips with his and pressed hard. She peeled away only to breathe and rasp his name.

  Kaizen ground against her, beginning to see red. She leaned farther and farther back, cringing with euphoric agony, oblivious to the fall.

  Suddenly the political intrigue bullshit was just some fragile vehicle on top of a landslide, destabilized and crushed, the plaything of forces much older and stronger. Something intrinsically engrained rather than externally imposed.

  Remember to think, a distant thought urged. Try to think clearly. Remember . . . Ferraday . . . Trimpot . . . Everything outside of this . . .

  “Don’t go to the rally,” Kaizen blurted, rousing Legacy from her trance. He realized her hands had been working to unbutton his pants. Right here? he wondered. What’s gotten into you?

  “What rally?” she asked foggily.

  “Trimpot is going to message all his CC contacts to attend a rally this Friday,” he explained. He, too, felt drugged. “But don’t go. Okay?”

  “Oh,” Legacy said. “I won’t get any messages; Flywheel got ruined at the coronation. I don’t have any registered automata anymore.”

  Kaizen trailed a finger along her jaw, wondering when he’d see her again, how he’d ever find her if he let her go tonight. “So there’s no way to . . . talk to you?” he wondered. He descended again for another kiss, this as deep as those before but much more gentle. “I mean,” he murmured, parting, “if I needed to.”

  Legacy cleared her throat. “I’ve got, uh . . .” She shook her head clear. “Audio Swan. Scan for Audio Sw –Wait . . . wait.” She shook her head again. Her pupils seemed to shrink in diameter, just a fraction. “Why wouldn’t I go to this rally?”

  “It’s a trap. They’re all going to be arrested on sight.”

  “Arrested?” Legacy repeated, extricating herself from their anti-gravity knot of limbs. “Did Trimpot defect?”

  “Well–”

  “What, is he in alliance with Malthus now?” Legacy demanded. Her passion had cooled to calculation.

  “M-Malthus is dead,” Kaizen replied. He broke eye contact, still unsure how he was supposed to feel. If he should’ve felt anything at all. Why did he have to feel anything at all for that prick?

  Legacy pulled a deep breath. “Then it’s you,” she said. “He’s in alliance with you, and you’re arresting all the rebels.”

  “It’s for their own good,” Kaizen retorted, looking up to her again. “You don’t know.”

  “When is a trap ever in someone’s best interest?” Legacy asked, moving away from him. “And if it was, why woul
d you tell me not to go?”

  “Do you want to be arrested?” he countered.

  “Do they?”

  “I have my reasons,” Kaizen said. “You wouldn’t understand, Legacy. You think –you think everyone can win. But sometimes –sometimes there are only degrees of loss. Trust me–”

  “Trust you?” Legacy stooped to wrench the broad, metallic case up from the porch where it’d fallen. “Why, because you have nothing to gain by arresting the rebel force beneath you? You just want to snuff out the fire.” She moved rapidly down the stairs, using two hands to tote the unmentioned instrument. Kaizen glared and bolted after her, uninterested in its nature. Legacy called over her shoulder, “You want the fire smothered because it’s under your ass now!”

  “Do you think I care about the damn crown?” he demanded, circling down to the third porch. “Have I ever led you to believe that I wanted, really wanted to be the duke? I was born into this, and I’m just –doing what I have to!”

  “Yeah, well, everyone was born one way or another,” Legacy replied, thundering across the second porch. “And that’s what Chance for Choice is about. People who weren’t born into stations quite as accommodating as royalty.” She trundled down the last set of steps. “The CC isn’t fighting for themselves and what’s ‘best’ for them. They’re fighting for people everywhere, people never given the choice to be anything else. People like Dax.” She pounded down onto the last porch with both feet, setting off a shrill, tinny Rrrah! Rrrah! from deeper within.

  Kaizen, distracted, glared toward Unit #1 for a moment before turning back to face Legacy.

  “Who’s–”

  But she was already halfway across the lot, carrying that case as if it were a child and heading toward the line of dumpsters that signaled the boundary between the factories, the domestic district, and Groundtown.

  Meanwhile, Dax Ghrenadel gazed down onto the retreating figures below. Having heard the bang of the falling case, he’d slipped onto his porch to discern its source, and there found Legacy three floors down, lulling backwards with a shameless expression of rapture, being mauled by every girl’s earl. He hadn’t been able to hear everything they’d said: something about people wanting to be arrested, Legacy seeming incredulous that she should trust Kaizen, Kaizen seeming incredulous that he had struck her as ever wanting the crown.