Legacy’s back tightened as she climbed to her feet, Coal-Radia’s arms and legs dangling, when the ominous crackling filled the dome.
She looked back and forth, searching for the source of the sound, when a ribbon of bright green laced over the drizzling mists of the dome and made impact with the northern face of its triangular panels. There was no vibration, no dispersal of the force; the thick glass shattered outward as naturally as if it were crystal.
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, and the mist of condensation swirled overhead with a macabre beauty, like a snow globe. Legacy’s mind went blank, and she vaulted forward. A subconscious compass in her gut pulled her toward the aerial docks, and maybe evolutionary biology would have dictated that she drop the rag doll draped over her back, but she didn’t. It didn’t even cross her mind.
As the sloped angle of the cobblestone streets became more and more apparent, screams of absolute horror filled the sky – except that the sky was turning upside down now, wasn’t it?
Still, Legacy pounded through the streets, weaving around the carriages and rickshaws, which had lost their traction and rocketed blindly by, leaping with the second nature of one who had known this tiny, compact city intimately her whole life. How am I going to make it? a part of her whispered, so afraid of the words that it barely spoke. There’s no time, and they’d be mad to still be anchored.
She could see the aerial docks ahead, but no ships were moored there now. The earth beneath her feet was approaching a thirty degree angle, and her boot slipped. They must’ve been gone. They had to be gone. But then . . .
Even if Albatropus was gone, her chances for survival were still greater if she was outside of the dome. In the dome, the shock of the crash and the sheer volume of pointed, dense debris would surely kill her – kill all of them. But she didn’t think about that. Her mind was airtight, and she didn’t allow thoughts of anyone else inside. It would only get her killed. And she had Flywheel-2, with its silken wings that would extend in a fall. It was possible that she could survive, she and Coal-Radia both, if they landed in the soft muck of the marsh, if they landed upwind of any predators, if they landed close enough to N.E.E.R. to beg for assistance . . .
Legacy gripped the cobblestone of the interior dock with her free hand and hauled herself ever closer to the gaping gate, the wedge of slate sky outside like a window, and she didn’t look back. She didn’t look back, even hearing the caterwauls of misery which likely belonged to her friends, her family, everyone she knew. She shouldered her way through the gate and onto the metallic grid of the exterior 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 over her shoulder, nothing but raging winds and sheets of frigid rain above, nothing but Icarus slowly capsizing below.
The city of Icarus looked so small and controllable from the castle grounds. No longer able to hear the rioting, one would think that it was a normal city, business bustling, laws bidden. But no. There was some smoke in the air from random fires. That was wonderful. His father had never had to deal with random fires. Riots. An entire populace of slaves ascending from a thousand feet below. He’d always been so attentive to the needs of the N.E.E.R. dome. Now Kaizen knew why.
He didn’t want to listen to the radio. Dyna Logan was probably reporting that the constable was dead, and he didn’t want to hear it. There was only so much he could take in one week. How had it all gone to hell so quickly? And Ferraday’s men . . . weren’t they arriving tomorrow?
Kaizen cracked a wry smile.
Perfect.
An automaton carriage trundled through the drawbridge and parked itself at the entrance to the grand hall, where Kaizen sat, contemplating.
Neon Trimpot swaggered out with his arms full of frock coats and top hats.
“Oh! Hello!” he sang. “Just some shopping! You know! Saturdays!” He strode past the young duke, who no longer had the capacity to be surprised by the turncoat’s gall. “Looks like we found that catastrophe to blame on the CC after all!” he called over his shoulder, disappearing toward the keep. Kaizen let him go. The rebels had dropped him quickly after his betrayal, and Trimpot seemed to care little in either direction. He went where the money was, and hell, now he was in a castle.
Duke Lovelace had quickly, however courteously, taken his leave. Kaizen wasn’t too surprised.
And what of Legacy?
She’ll land on her feet, Kaizen deduced, feeling grim. She always does. If there’s one girl who never needed saving . . .
An unearthly crackling filled the air, and Kaizen sat up straighter, glaring after the source. He felt static electricity race along his hair, lifting tendrils into the air, and then came a deafening crack from within the city walls.
A streak of green light and a shatter-crunch as the dome gave way to the force of the blow, and Kaizen shot to his feet, awakened.
“Raise the bridge!” he hollered to his nearest sentry.
The man just stared at him blankly. Of course. He wasn’t a real sentry. He was a damn loaner from Taliko Center. “R-raise the bridge?” he squeaked.
Kaizen roared and rushed past him, diving toward the castle keep, where the drawbridge commands could be issued. He knew he had precious little time. If there was one thing he’d been raised to intimately understand, it was the physics behind a floating geodesic dome, and a hole in the structure . . . that simply would not do.
His father had told him once that it would take two minutes, depending on the size of the leak. The bigger the leak, the swifter the fall. Not two minutes to untether. Two minutes before impact. So his legs pumped wildly into the castle keep.
“Raise the bridge!” Kaizen called, hitting the royal machinists’ hall at full stride.
Trimpot was in a pink top hat, modeling for Sophie. “Raise the bridge?” he inquired. “Whatever for?”
“Raise the bridge, goddamnit!” Kaizen cried, lunging for the lever nearest to the amber map of Icarus: the keep reader. He wrenched the lever backward and the land beneath their feet lurched accordingly.
“Kaizen,” Sophie whimpered, peering up from where she sat in the floor. “Kaizen, if we raise the bridge, you know we’ll be adrift, and you know . . .”
You might be exposed for what you are: alive.
“Yes,” Kaizen replied. “I know. Trust me, Sophie. Okay?” He reached down and patted her unscarred cheek. “It’s better than the alternative.”
How many sentries were in the entire castle right now? How many retinue? Courtiers? How were their supplies until they were allowed to dock at another city? His mind worked through all this and yet concluded nothing at all. Each question was dismissed. Now was not the time. Not now.
Kaizen didn’t think about any of it. If he had any strength, it was sudden action with little forethought, and just now, the drawbridge was retracting into itself, slat by slat, talon by talon, until only the castle remained. Separate from the whole of Icarus, and floating, floating indefinitely, as it had no tether to the Old Earth. The drawbridge turtled into the mechanical floor of the Taliko Archipelagos, and out blossomed chrome propellers in its stead.
The island wouldn’t move quickly, he was sure . . .
And how could you steer an island?
It didn’t matter. There had been no choice. He’d finally done one thing his father would’ve done. He’d finally made a bloodless, heartless decision because it was necessary and logical.
I wonder . . .
He shook his head, as if clearing from it a clinging scent, but the question wouldn’t go. It was the one question that he could not simply shunt to the side.
I wonder where Legacy is, and if she’s safe.
Goddamnit, NO, this is not going to happen, Dax swore to himself, lunging through the common room. He jostled through the hedge of strange
rs, faceless and hostile just now, calling out, “I need a transmitter! Anybody! A Hermetic device!”
“Uh, I’ve got one, I think,” a dark-skinned girl offered. Dax knew her name was Izzy, Ray’s girlfriend, and she used to live with Trimpot, but the information hesitated to occur to him just now. “Hermetic, right?” She produced one of those lightweight, winged silver balls, and Dax snatched it from her.
“Thanks,” he barked, vaulting down into the laboratory. He could feel the floor shifting beneath his feet. They’d lifted off.
“–not only as a textile but –Dax?” Claire, speaking to Saul, broke off in mid-sentence to stare at him, wide-eyed.
“What’s going on?” Saul added.
“I need some of that really sticky silk,” he rapped. “Now!”
“Uh . . .” Saul walked to one of the jars at the end of the counter, spinning it open and extending it to Dax. He curled his nose with barely disguised disgust. “Why?”
Dax grabbed a knot of rope from the top and ran with it, the material unraveling behind him like a white yarn traced with globules of adhesive. He depressed the Hermetic device and inserted the stretching, clinging string before depressing it again, trapping the thread inside. He pounded through the common room, the strange silk catching corners and furniture and clinging there, through the door and out onto the deck again.
“Fuck,” Vector moaned. “Get him out of here. Don’t let him see.”
“Dax,” Rain said, advancing toward him with her arms outstretched, partially to embrace him and partially to guard him from progress. “Don’t look, it’s–”
But Dax ignored this and dodged around her, lunging to the rail of the departing airship, rain pounding down around them all, and cried, “Audio Swan! Grab on!” hurling the Hermetic device into the maelstrom. It winked and descended like a falling star, trailing the gossamer thread behind it.
As Legacy had hoped, the sudden loss of stability caused Flywheel-2’s silken, golden wings to unfold behind her and catch the powerful swell of the storm winds, buffeting her and Coal-Radia actually upward rather than slowly down, spiraling deep into the dark, wet sky. Both women were now soaking wet and shivering uncontrollably, even Coal-Radia, even in her sleep. This is so bad, Legacy couldn’t help but think, squinting against the splatters of rain. Legacy’s breath came now in short, involuntary gasps. The high wind would only blow them off course from the N.E.E.R. dome below, and might give them hypothermia. She didn’t see any airships, and, although the wings occasionally flapped, she couldn’t control them. There was no steering or reason to the rhythm of its beats. Not that she knew, anyway. Only her dad would’ve known.
Dad . . .
No, another part of her brain firmly replied. Don’t. Not now.
She found herself curling around Coal-Radia as if the unconscious girl were her baby daughter. Wending alternately upward and downward, eyelids drooping now, Legacy began to fear that surviving their landing was not her top priority concern. Perhaps she would die in the sky. She feared she would drop Coal-Radia before that happened, but her arms seemed to have frozen in this position. She wouldn’t drop Coal-Radia until she herself was dead. She made the promise in her head.
Legacy’s eyes drooped lower still and she shivered, bowing her face into Coal-Radia’s side.
My sister, she corrected herself. My twin sister.
She held Coal-Radia tighter and prayed that she lived. But then, she couldn’t live without Legacy to hold her up, could she?
I have to stay alive. I have to.
She didn’t think about anything else. Just shivered and clung. Didn’t think about what had become of anyone: her parents, or Dax, or Kaizen. Widow Coldermolly. Dyna Logan. What of Neon Trimpot? The Duke of Celestine? Cook, or Glitch? None of it. She didn’t allow the mental image of the crash to infiltrate her thoughts. Didn’t allow herself to even picture the wreckage down below. There must be so much glass everywhere . . .
A strange bleep awakened her from her dazed, half-dead thoughts, and she peeled her frozen eyelids apart to see a Hermetic device bleating at her, emitting its soft, warm light. Someone had sent her a message, attracted to her coordinates by Flywheel-2.
And attached to it was a thick rope of gossamer ivory, shining with an iridescent adhesive.
Legacy freed one arm from where both had been wrapped and pinned to Coal-Radia’s trunk, shakily intercepting the winged orb.
But as soon as it was in her hand, she felt a tug. There was resistance on the line, which disappeared through the sheet of cloud in which she was mired. Legacy twisted in the air, gluing herself to Coal-Radia and both of them to this transmitter. The act tamped her wings down, and the pair would have plummeted, but the strength of the rope kept them secured to some unknown point above.
Kaizen? she wondered foggily.
The tension on the other end increased, hauling her and Coal-Radia upward, upward, until the clouds broke away and she was in open air, still sopping wet and shuddering, still curled and welded together like fossils of themselves.
Legacy did see the Taliko castle, untethered from the city, but too far away. How could this rope have possibly stretched so far? She felt one lone warmth in her chest, and that was the knowledge that he hadn’t abandoned her. The string would reel her in, and Kaizen would come collect her, peel off her sodden clothes, wrap her in fresh blankets, give her a hot beverage, a soft bed, a bath . . .
Albatropus materialized overhead, and with it a crew of Chance for Choicers, all peering over the railing with anticipation and then cheering at the sight of their bedraggled mascot. Dax had the line looped thrice around his forearm, Vector and Rain holding to his hips and all three pulling until the two girls were hauled onto the deck and sprawled there, barely able to move. Barely able to think.
. . . what?
The crowd swarmed, but Legacy could hardly recognize it as more than a migrating patch of lights. Blurry flesh. All touch seemed to be so warm compared to her. As if she were returning to the womb with her twin sister. Frozen and battered by the world, they’d found each other, clung, and been pulled into this place of safety, family.
Family . . . Legacy meditated with a wordless sadness. She had this unshakable sense that something irreplaceable had been lost.
Rain’s unfocused features swam into view. “We need to warm her up,” she deduced to the swarm of faces. “She’s in cold shock.”
“Our cabin,” she heard Dax’s distant voice chime. “Our cabin is sweltering. Come on. Vector?”
As the two men carried her and her sister, both heads lulling and still wrapped together, Vector said, “Hey, Dax? I’m sorry.”
Sorry for what . . .
“Here,” Dax replied, ignoring the apology. “Help me pull them apart.”
Legacy’s arms seemed to scream as they were separated from Coal-Radia, and then she felt deft, familiar fingers removing her soaked skirt and hosiery, her clammy blouse, even the clever vest which had saved her life. Possibly twice. She couldn’t be angry for long, however, as she was swaddled in warm, dry cloth.
“I told you, Leg,” she heard Dax’s voice say. Her eyes were closed again. She was slipping off. “I’ll never leave without you.”
Epilogue
The city of Icarus drove deep into the muck of the Old Earth below. The dome fractured and shattered upon impact. The crater left in the soft marshland swallowed much of the business district – instantly burying both Dyna Logan and former advisor to the throne, Abner of Lion’s Head, although neither was alive anymore – and half of Groundtown. The antenna of CIN-3 went on reporting the eerie silence of the grave to its enthralled listeners, citizens of New Earth all who sat, ashen, glazed, attempting to fathom the terrible chorus they had just heard. This was an historical disaster. The factories crumbled, splitting apart, and leaking sewage into the fungal atmosphere.
Tentative monsters edged closer to investigate the rubble of steel and brass, and the bodies. All the bodies. There were the twitching automat
a, drowning in the groundwater, but these did not draw the predatory nematodes and lamprey-mouthed fish. A pervasive odor of blood filled the swamp. Arachnids the size of carriages prodded at the bent and busted geodesic frame with their slender legs.
The Widow Coldermolly was immersed in the muds of Old Earth, to her bosom pressed a fallen refugee from N.E.E.R., in his mid-forties and bearing a withered arm. Both would be preserved for years to come now. Mrs. Legacy had been nearly thrown from Unit #4 and sent tumbling through open air as the city turned end over end, but Mr. Legacy had held her fast with his robotic arm. Neither wept, though there had been little time for such things. There had been little time for anything but a breathless, wordless agreement in their eyes: that this was it.
Although the city of Icarus was now silent, as dead and doomed as the forgotten cityscapes of Old Earth laying beyond, the floating cities of New Earth hummed with the reverberations of this catastrophe. Many “residents” of the New Earth Extraneous Relocation program had been killed, but the event served to alert the common folk of New Earth as to their very existence.
“I’ve never even seen one of those domes!” some would insist.
“I’ve seen those domes, but I always thought they were for supplies, or maybe they were old domes, before the transition,” others would say.
“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“We’ve got to do something about it!”
“Like what? Do you want to share your little home with one of them?”
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