LEGACY LOST (9 page)

“. . . 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.

              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–”

Dax sighed heavily, wilting.

“Is he all right?” Legacy snapped, lunging from where she’d been leaning.

“I’m fine,” Dax seethed. His eyes remained closed, and in truth, he did still seem . . . piqued.

Now Rain’s eyes ticked to the couple: Legacy hovering, Dax doing his best to ignore her and his position in the situation. “Maybe you should give him some space,” she suggested. The comment was helpful, but Legacy shot her a withering glare. “He needs to relax,” she went on seriously.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Legacy told her.

There was a stretch of silence in which Rain and Legacy stared each other down, and Saul busily tallied the reflexes of the arm-cables as he thunked their elbows with mallets, pointedly avoiding a single glance upward.

“You know,” he noted lightly, “this biotech experiment is never going to reach its final stages until we have a one-armed person onboard willing to test all of them.”

“Maybe you should go,” Dax said.

Legacy looked from Saul to Dax, eyebrows settling low over her darkening eyes.

“Yeah,” she finally acquiesced, taking a step backward.
Because that’s fair! This isn’t my fault! I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!
“Fine.” She took another step backward, barely looking, and pushed into the swinging door between the laboratory and the library like an idiot. Now she’d have to pretend she’d done that on purpose.

Legacy stared at the door between the two rooms as it clapped shut. There was a circular window set into the metal, so that even when she wasn’t there, she was still there. She could see Dax lying so helplessly, and Rain’s mouth moving as she skimmed her chart while Saul applied electroshock to somebody’s former hand.

It’s not my fault,
she promised herself.

It wasn’t her fault . . . Anyone would’ve–

“I know,” a cartoonishly rounded, deep voice came from behind her.

Legacy whirled to find Claire Addler, the brunette with the sad gray eyes and the bulbous nose between her whittled cheeks. She was a mechanic now mired in literature, crowded between three leaning columns of books with one thick text sprawled before her. Her fingers skimmed its lines, and she didn’t look up. This woman was also the former supervisor of Dax from the Compatible Companion Selection Services lab.

“What?” Legacy asked, blinking as if stepping from one reality to the next, she’d been so entranced by the laboratory scene through the window.

“I know it’s not your fault,” Claire replied, not glancing up from the book.

I spoke aloud? That’s so . . . embarrassing.

“It’s the rebreather,” the woman went on tonelessly. “It was only a matter of time.”

The rebreather . . .