LEGACY RISING (13 page)

Kaizen sighed, wrapping his arms around her, lightly nuzzling. She was so tired, and he was so warm and soft. So comforting.

She felt his fingers creeping into her hair, but her conscious mind pushed the information away, because it was nice and she didn’t want it to stop. She didn’t want to think about right and wrong or any notions of ownership or monogamy while Kaizen’s other hand drifted down her backside, pressing her deeper into him, and his face nudged at hers, altering their positions, bringing their mouths closer together. The hand in her hair came to her chin and tilted her face, and still, she kept her eyes shut, and still, she pushed the information away and pretended this was all totally normal.

Then Kaizen’s lips captured hers again, as she must’ve known they would, and this horrible, wicked part of her responded with a gasp and a shudder. She felt as if she were breaking apart, as if her chest had cracked open and something inside of her was reaching out for Kaizen like vines to sunlight. Her mouth opened to his, responding in kind with light touches of tongue. But the lightness was quickly growing heavy, and there was a sudden, crushing absence of all space between their bodies.

“You can’t spend the night in here again,” Kaizen murmured. His hand moved over Legacy’s breast and electricity branched through her torso, down into her womanhood. He easily pushed the fabric of her gown away, eliciting the rough sensitivity of skin on skin as his thumbs traveled over her nipples. Legacy whimpered and he lowered his mouth, suckling at the taut flesh.

Oh, shit,
Legacy couldn’t help but think, eyes rolling into the back of her head. Why did she have to want him so badly?
This is bad . . .

Kaizen’s other hand plunged beneath her dress and raked along the outside of her thigh, hitching the leg up to his hip. Legacy groaned again at the sensation of his rigid erection against her crux, the sound and feeling bringing her vividly back to her senses and what the hell she was doing. Where this would all inevitably lead.

“Stay in my room,” Kaizen offered breathlessly. “Stay--”

“I can’t,” Legacy replied, genuinely anguished. “You know I can’t.”

And as soon as he was there, so warm and inviting, he was gone again. Her arms fell into empty space with the weight of her chains, her thighs and breast cold and abandoned by the body that had been so ardently attending to them only a second ago. With fluid motion, he separated their skin by several paces, and slammed the cell door, firmly on the opposite side. Feeling stupid and exposed, Legacy scrambled to cover her breast and push the raised hem of her gown back into its proper place.

“Kaizen,” Legacy said, advancing. She forgot about the chains, and they wrenched her arms back as she reached him. He was twisting that key in the lock.

“Can’t just leave the door unlocked,” he explained. “It’s nothing personal. Sorry.” He looked up at her, depositing the key into his pocket again. His eyes had grown cold, but not only cold. There was more beneath that black ice. There was pain. “Sorry about everything, I mean. Oh, wait. One more thing.”

He fished around in his pocket once more, producing a familiar brass insect from within its folds. “Here. I found this at
CIN-3
. I believe it to be yours?”

He slid it through the iron bars, stretching to press it into the palm at full extension behind Legacy’s back.

“I think I fixed it, too,” he mentioned.

Legacy stepped back in order to bend her arms again, closer examining the mechanism. She gaped and blinked and gulped and searched for the words. This was her lost Flywheel. He’d found him! And he’d
fixed
him!

Legacy looked up, startled by the fluctuation of light receding from her palm.

“Thank—”

But Kaizen’s head vanished down into the stairwell, leaving Legacy standing alone in the total dark, still fumbling for the right words.

              Legacy didn’t see Kaizen again that night. Her dreams were fitful and convoluted, a labyrinth of clockwork trees overgrown in strangely soft green tendrils. She flew above Old Earth, its patches of mist giving way to deep purple bogs, the movement of its shadows like ripples on the surface of unknown waters. And the dome. Who lived in the dome? Then she was back at the founder’s ball and the duke was offering her that gutless smile.
“I reassure you that Old Earth remains uninhabitable at this time,”
he said.

“But the dome—”

“Questions such as yours are the questions of a concerned citizen,”
he droned on, ignoring her,
“and concerned citizens are what make Icarus the grandest city of New Earth!”

“Get up, you.”

Legacy cracked an eyelid, and a fog of sentries sharpened into view. Each held a stun gun—dazzler muskets—identical to the models which had initially incapacitated Trimpot and her.

“It’s time to go.”

Legacy was guided, now blindfolded, out of the prison tower and across a glass-plated tunnel which led to the greater castle grounds. The ground beneath her feet shifted, becoming that queer fabric of green—almost like hairs—and then the clammy smoothness of polished rock. This must’ve been the castle, for every sound echoed, the clatter of the sentries’ holsters lost in the emulsive clatter of bustling automata. Legacy felt a jab of intuition. Were they unusually busy today? Was something being planned? If it was a maneuver, she could only pray it was not an execution.

Her blindfold was removed when they reached the royal throne room.

She suddenly felt very small, poised opposite Duke Taliko, with his barrier of sentries, all so vigilant and dour, his sweeping throne room with its red carpet, and her, barefoot, in a simple black gown, manacled. Sleep deprived and a little shaky from the malnutrition of the past thirty-something hours.

Kaizen was there, standing with the duchess, but he made no gesture of recognition to her. He looked almost like a different person, although he wasn’t terribly cold. He was only being formal, and she’d never seen him that way.

“Exa Legacy, you have been apprehended for the crime of vandalism and destruction of public property. For this crime, you will be mandated a fee of no less than five thousand, in addition to a sentence of no less than thirty days in prison. However, your sentence is to be suspended until further infraction necessitates execution.” He smiled dully at the ambiguous definition of “execution.”

“That is all. Take her away.”

The blindfold was replaced over Legacy’s eyes, and she was led from the room without ever having been asked to speak.

Bearing naught but a burlap sack into which all her confiscated goods--including the color cannon, which she’d been forced to argue was a painting tool and not a weapon--had been shoved, Legacy pushed open the door to Unit #4 and was immediately ambushed by a barrel chest, one thick, burly arm, and another with tendons of wire and bones of titanium. “Exa!” her father cried. “Are you all right!”

Legacy made an uncomfortable squelching sound in the back of her throat. “Fine, Dad,” she rasped. “I’m fine.”

He dragged her inside, still crushing her shoulder with his robot arm. “Let me look at you!” he insisted, examining her body for bruises.

“Ow, stop!” Legacy said, her father’s robot arm pinching into her chin, tugging her arms this way and that. She yanked away and took a step back. “I’m totally fine!”

“You’re totally barefoot!” Mr. Legacy countered. “Where are your
clothes?
They didn’t
hurt
you, did they? I heard on
CIN-3
—”

“Dad, you shouldn’t listen to that hogwash,” Legacy interrupted, glaring at the rusted radio erected on her father’s workbench, even now droning on and on with its propaganda.  “There are other things you could listen to, you know. Why’d you stop listening to that crafts show based out of Celestine?” Fishing Flywheel from where he’d been stowed away in her braids, Legacy went to place the little lost automaton back into his cage.

“Dyna Logan said you were apprehended with
Neon Trimpot!
”

Trimpot.
So much had been going on, like a damn cyclone with her at its eye, Legacy had completely forgotten the disappeared revolutionary. The last time she’d seen him, sentries had been leading him from the prison, corkscrew barrels trained on his back. But had he also been released?
I should go to the Chance for Choice headquarters and check in,
she resolved.
Maybe they’ve heard from Dax, too.

“Well, Dyna Logan says a lot of stuff,” Legacy replied absently.

Mr. Legacy spluttered after her.

But she couldn’t help it; what could she possibly tell him that he wouldn’t find inflammatory? For a fleeting moment, she actually understood the duke’s dismissive system of answers at the founder’s ball.

“How’s work been?” she asked instead.

“Well, it slowed down a touch when my daughter went missing,” Mr. Legacy explained starchily. “And then it came to a bit of a standstill after I learned that she’d been arrested and was on the Taliko Archipelagos.”

Peering at him with a swell of sympathy, Legacy crossed the room to her father—the ocular bot’s eyeball blinking after her—and graced his cheek with a kiss.

“I’m sorry,” she offered. “And I wish I could explain things better. But all I can say is that it won’t happen again.” She touched his cheek, turned from him, and began to weakly climb the ladder to her bedroom.

“I . . . I don’t know if I like the sound of that, Exa,” her father called after her.

“I’ve got to take a shower,” Legacy explained. But this was also a convenient means to ending the conversation. However, once she was there, it dawned on her how deeply she had needed it. Not only because she’d been barefoot in a prison cell, forced to sleep amid mildewed cloth for any warmth, but also for the rejuvenative privacy of the water’s spray. Along with the dirt and the sweat, the stress was purged from her body.

Emerging from behind the screen, Legacy dried herself and shook out her wet braids, all the while thinking of Chance for Choice, Trimpot, and Dax. Her overflowing drawers offered up a wonderfully clean pair of corded black pants and a permanently grease-stained, but still technically white, midriff shirt. She unfolded some patched stockings over her legs and laid back on the mattress to jam shoes onto her feet, uncontrollably and completely lapsing off to sleep.

The sound of the front door slamming pulled Legacy from her inky slumber.

What time is it? How long have I been asleep?

“She’s home,” her father muttered downstairs.

“She’s
home?
” Mrs. Legacy shrilled.

“Yeah,” he replied, his voice still low. “Won’t talk about it, though.”

Must be sunset,
she deduced.
Mom’s home.

Bolting upright and tangled in her sheets, Legacy almost tumbled from the bed, spinning and kicking to a full stand.

“Ex? You’re all right?” her mother’s voice wafted to her from below. “What happened?”

“I can’t—augh! I can’t talk about it,” Legacy replied, swinging her legs down onto the ladder. “It’s—I have to go!” She reached the floor and turned right into her mother’s glaring gaze.

“
Go?
Exa Legacy, you just got out of
prison!
”

“I know! But I’m fine! It was all a big mistake, wasn’t it? Wrong place, wrong time; I didn’t get any fines or a sentence or anything, did I?” she half-truthed. “Because they let me
go.
It was just—and the thing is—”

As Legacy sought the perfect phrase to tie up all these questions in a neat little bow, the radio on her father’s workbench continued to play
CIN-3.

“. . . primary advisor of Duke Taliko today stated that his son, Earl Kaizen, would be poised to accept the crown in a coronation ceremony next Saturday. Although this was previously . . .”

“Exa?” her mother prompted, attempting to catch her wandering gaze.

Legacy’s eyes snapped back into focus.
God, forget about that! It’s just like everything else those royal people do . . . Even if it does mean something, you can’t stop it, because you’re only one woman.
“Look! I need to see Dax! I need to make sure he’s okay!”

“Dax?” Mrs. Legacy inquired, her features softening. “Why wouldn’t he be okay?”

“The last time I saw him, he looked really . . . sick,” Legacy lied, desperate to escape. “I’ve got to go check on him.” It wasn’t an absolute lie.

Mrs. Legacy nodded, stepping away for her daughter to shoot past. “All right,” she allowed. “Have you eaten anything?”

“Augh,” Legacy reiterated, trudging back to the ladder-pantry and grabbing the bottle of synthetic vitamins from off its shelf. Uncapping, she emptied ten capsules into her hand and shoved them into her mouth, striding to the sink at the back of the house and twisting the faucet. She lapped up the falling stream like a dog and swallowed all ten pills down. She let out a sigh and turned. “There,” she said. She wasn’t going to admit that she did feel better now. She wasn’t going to admit that she’d been shaking when she arrived home, or that she’d lost consciousness without intending to do so. Things had just been so
busy
and
dire,
the little elements such as eating and sleeping had fallen to the wayside.

“I’ll be back tonight, okay?” she said, wrenching the front door open. She didn’t wait for a response before shouting, “Promise!” over her shoulder and closing the door with a clap.

Dax wasn’t at Unit #7. Unlike Legacy, he no longer lived with his parents, and so there was no one to answer the incessant hammering of her knuckles. Swinging from one set of stairs to the next, making the whole apparatus groan, Legacy tore from the top of the complex to the bottom within seconds (
Rrrah! Rrrah!
Widow Coldermolly’s shutters flew open, her beady eyes glaring out), and hit the ground running. She made off toward Heroes Park with legs pumping.

Icarus, unlike some of the greater metropolises of New Earth, was largely deserted at nightfall, save for the occasional maintenance technician. Most jobs let out near sunset, and so foot traffic through the park had thinned to nonexistence by the time Legacy came careening out of the brass forest.

Locating the eastward-facing, flat section of the mountain where the entry to CC headquarters was, partially camouflaged behind a copper hedge, Legacy flung herself against it and pounded her fists twice before remembering that the trigger was installed under Monarch Ferraday the First’s plaque.

Returning to the bald statue, which sorely needed a repainting and a coat of gloss, Legacy stepped close enough to trigger his speech.

She scoured her brain for the exact moment when Gustav had angled a kick down onto the plaque. It had been a specific word, an ironic word, something fitting . . . and Vector had mentioned it by name. She knew this. She knew she knew this. What had it been?

So preoccupied with this question was she, Legacy forgot to scan the park and ensure that she was unobserved.

“. . .
and always be a people whose strength and perseverance was prepared to pay the price of freedom . . .”

              “Yes!” Legacy jammed her heel onto the plaque and heard the secret door skate open. She knew she only had a matter of seconds if—

              “Exa!”

              Legacy whirled, cheeks spotted with the bright pink of a pounding heart, and heard the secret door slide shut again as Liam Wilco approached. Even at a distance, she could see the storm brewing in his gray eyes.

              “Everyone knows what you’re doing!” he bellowed, and Legacy cringed away from the loudness of the proclamation, glancing about.
What is he doing? The stupid oaf! He’s making a public scene! Or he would be, if anyone else was here!
“Oh, sure, now you care what people think!” Liam reached her, but stopped within several strides, as if his anger was physically repellent to her. He pointed and then flung his hand, pantomiming her expulsion. “Do you know what Dyna’s been saying about you? Do you?”

              “Not really,” she answered.

              “She’s saying you’re not only in cahoots with the rebels, but that you’re practically second in command!”

              Legacy gulped. “Yes, well,” she said. “That’s Dyna Logan. She’s a sensationalist fear monger. The woman will do anything to boost her ratings.”

              “Oh? Oh?” Liam spat. “So you weren’t arrested alongside Neon Trimpot on Sunday night? So you weren’t held on the Archipelagos until this morning?”

             
What day is it?
Legacy dimly wondered.

              “I know you’ve been conspiring against the monarchy, Exa,” Liam finished hotly. “I know it!”

              “Oh, you know it,” Legacy said. There was an edge of sarcasm to her cool voice.