LEGACY LOST
A LEGACY NOVEL, Book Three
RACHEL EASTWOOD
Copyright © 2015
All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Epilogue
Chapter One
The royal dining hall had a dozen people at the head of an ornate, narrow table. It was six o’clock – dinner time – on a Saturday night, and the Taliko castle floated almost two thousand feet in the air – somewhere over what Old Earth geography would have called “southern California.” To look at the scene, one would never assume that these people were encased – no, trapped – beneath a heated geodesic dome which served to maintain their altitude. One would never assume that these laughing, drinking aristocrats were balloons without tether on a limited supply of food, much less that they had witnessed the carnage of over twenty thousand violent deaths. Albeit, from a distance.
Unless you were to examine Duke Kaizen Taliko, twenty-four, fair-skinned and dark-eyed. His most defining physical characteristic was typically his hair, which fell past his shoulders like a fine curtain of gold, but just now it was his somber mouth. He sat without smile, without comment, with hardly breath. He didn’t touch his immaculate, sprawling plate of raspberry-glazed lamb on its bed of dark green leaves. He didn’t touch his goblet of honeyed mead. He just sat and stared, his decisive brows low and elegant fingers braced upon the arch of his cheekbone, while, around him, his family and courtiers made merry.
“You will have to explain more of these ‘rallies’ you held,” Kaizen’s mother, the former Duchess Olympia, said as she peered into a handheld mirror and primped her pale curls, smirking at her own reflection. Her face was its own palette of creams and blushes, her cleavage glossed and glittered. “They sound fascinating.”
Leopold Comstock, alias Neon Trimpot, leaned toward her and smiled indulgently. The pink-haired revolutionary-turned-courtier was hammered. “Thousands arrived come nightfall to howl and pound the air with their fists,” he told her with an air of scandal and a hint of slur. Forty-two-year-old Olympia tittered like a girl. “I was arrested before dawn.”
“Oh Neon!” Olympia cried, throwing her head back with delight and drawing all attention to that plump bed of flesh sprouting from her corset top. She’d been a widow for one week and a handful of hours.
“Please,” Trimpot replied. “Call me Leo.”
“Veronica!” Kaizen’s eighteen-year-old sister, Sophie, bellowed, waving her empty goblet in the air. She had a coarse tone with the human servants, which was never customary in her address of the automata. Sophie had always been a beautiful, gentle girl, if not obviously depressed and possessed of no social skill. In the past week, however, the long, jagged stitch down her cheek – incurred during the Coronal Massacre – wasn’t the only mar to her appearance. She’d also been wearing the same set of bedclothes for several days straight, a long white chemise which had garnered a few stains since donned, and now, there was an off-kilter, disturbing aura to her presence.
Veronica, one of the few remaining human servants, sprang forward to fill Sophie’s glass with more amber-colored liquor. The royal family didn’t use bots in order to cook, considering that the culinary arts were so very delicate (not to mention almost entirely dead). Veronica had been one of the ten cooks, four of whom had been in the castle at its moment of retraction from Icarus, the fallen air city. These four cooks were now additionally relegated to the position of maids, and stood at the corners of the dining party. The sentries which had been present in the castle at that moment of disconnection had also become personal assistants in this time of “need.”
Most of the castle’s servants had previously been automata, an easily manipulated class of robots with no digital technology or software. These ranged from spider-legged, titanium creatures the size of coins whose only function was to polish surfaces, to life-sized, porcelain-coated, ball-jointed, marionette-mouthed dolls with large keys twisting in their backs. These were complicated enough in their outputs to do anything from the reception of telegraphs to the lacing of a corset to the pouring of a kettle to the opening of a window. Each of these bots, from the polishers to the personal, were linked to a network via the castle’s keep, where the royal machinist, Master Addler, had installed a radio frequency coil in each of them.
This backfired horribly when an automaton was infected with a virus and became homicidal, spreading instantaneously throughout the castle in an event that would mark the history of New Earth forever as The Coronal Massacre. This was the same murderous virus that had caused the former Duke Malthus, Olympia’s husband, to be assassinated, effectively launching her son onto his throne.
Sophie downed her goblet in full, then stood and moved over the seated guests with her surly, suspicious eyes. They had once been such a soft, innocent blue, deep, accessible, human, but now they wore a hard glaze, not unlike marbles. “If Daddy is attending court,” she supposed, shifting onto her hip, “why is Claude in here, and not in the throne room?”
The table shared an uncomfortable glance. Sophie acknowledged that the massacre had occurred; she was very sensitive about the castle automata being singularly disabled until further notice. But Malthus’ death was a gaping blind spot in her mind, and “Daddy” was now perpetually “attending court.” He had always spoiled her best, and Sophie’s sanity had never been exactly . . . exactly . . .
Claude, the steward and preeminent advisor of the court, cleared his throat with a light snort from his large, hooked nose. He glanced at Sophie and smiled nervously. The poor bastard, so pale and wan even before a legally negligible woman half his age, had never learned to lie. “Well!” he piped. “Well, you see, the office of a steward is largely concerned in public events and the maintenance of land, and . . . and because there is no . . . ‘land’ . . . I was excused to dinner?”
Thankfully, Master Addler entered the grand dining hall at this precise moment. Master Addler was in a nebulous old age; whatever he was, it caused wiry gray hair to sprout from his ears and his eyes to fail so miserably that his glasses comically magnified them. His back was hunched from years of stooping over guts of gears and pulley spines, and his utterly bald head shone under the chandelier light. “The simpler automata have been reconstructed to the number of almost thirty!” he announced, mopping at his forehead with an oily rag. “Of course, the personal assistants and much of the maid staff will require longer hours,” he went on, interrupting the polite smatter of applause, “but I thought you may like to dine to the tune of a small string ensemble.”
“Oh, Master Addler!” Olympia cried, toasting.
“Hear, hear!” Trimpot agreed, clinking with her. How quickly the unemployed peasant had adjusted to the life of the bourgeois.
Master Addler clapped his hands twice, and three automata trundled into the room. One was a female violinist, another a male cellist, and the last, a male on a viola. Of course, none of them truly possessed a gender, and none of them were overwhelmingly masculine or feminine in appearance, either. The violinist was barely female, but vaguely female; all three were highly androgynous. It was largely the wig of a chestnut bob sewn into her scalp
that denoted the violinist as female. All were tall, slender, bone-white, and glossy with circles of blush sprayed onto their cheeks and strokes of brown paint for eyebrows.
The violinist jerked, raising the instrument beneath her chin and sawing away at it with no preamble. So, too, did the other automata begin their pluckings and lurchings immediately. Sophie sang, high-pitched and tuneless, twirling around the table. Her golden hair fluttered behind her like a royal flag battered by the drums of war, though she had no mind of how bad she looked, barefoot and stained and scarred. At least she’d forgotten totally about her absent father. “Master Addler, he’s a genius, he’s going to fix us,” she shrilled, lulling and pitching on her toes. “So now I play the lute. So now I play the flute. So now we can roll down into that evil, wicked town!”
Kaizen hardly focused on the madding festivity about him.
How could his mother flirt shamelessly with the turncoat Trimpot, the patient zero to which even the collapse of Icarus could be traced, while Sophie . . . Well, he couldn’t be too appalled at Sophie’s behavior. She’d never been allowed to leave the castle grounds, as her birth itself was illegal. According to the Compatible Companion Laws, she should have been assigned to New Earth Extraneous Relocation (or N.E.E.R.), and sent to Old Earth to toil as a menial slave, doped to the gills and incognizant of anything, even her name, age, or gender. Then again, sometimes it was a fair argument which fate had been worse: to labor and likely die in a coal mine, supplying raw materials to a city which refused to even acknowledge her existence, or to be imprisoned in a lonely castle, satellite to a city which refused to even acknowledge her existence, her only companions robotic servants.
“I’m going to try to rest,” Kaizen murmured, finally speaking. He pushed away from the table.
“But you haven’t even touched–” Olympia began.
“You can have it,” Kaizen snapped in his weighty baritone. “It’s not like we need to conserve anything.”
At this, Olympia paused to smile. “You sound just like your father.”
Kaizen glared and stormed from the room without intending it. That was something no one had ever said before. Malthus Taliko had been a paradoxically stringent and passionate leader, although his lack of bedside manner and aversion toward the general public alienated them from ever truly seeing his passionate side. He believed in the politics of conservation at every level and any expense. After all, they were responsible for the livelihoods of over twenty thousand people on less than a square mile of acreage.
This was the logic behind the Compatible Companion Laws. Without the ability to produce birth control, it was of the utmost importance that population be not only monitored for its growth but for its efficiency. It was a huge crack in his principles that Malthus had allowed Sophie to be born and to remain, secreted away, on the castle grounds. Perhaps it was his sole human moment, a decision of impulse and dream rather than protocol and equation. Kaizen, however, had never been opposed to or in favor of this Companion system. In truth, he’d been born into this entire arena, and never striven for it.
Even when the difference engines of Compatible Companion Selection Services tallied Kaizen’s gene sequence and personality profile within the parameters of the female aristocracy aged eighteen to twenty-eight and had been unable to find a single complementary matrix for the past six years, he had not cared. Let the pistons spew smoke, let him die alone. It didn’t matter. He hadn’t cared . . . until he met Exa Legacy.
Fuck. Kaizen winced as he pounded up the rotunda and toward his chambers. Fuck, Leg. Fuck. Fuck.
He hadn’t seen her since she’d shaken his hand from her arm and fled into the mayhem of the heart of Icarus, almost two hours before the dome went crashing down. Exa Legacy was . . . How to describe Legacy?
Kaizen let himself into his chamber, eyes turning blindly over the dormant fireplace, the writing desk, dusk filtering through the massive bay window and the spacious bed where he’d once lain with his arms around her and just . . . slept.
Now he slid off his shoes, crawled onto the bed, and collapsed atop the mattress, bracing his body against it as if it were a living, comforting thing, and not just a pad of springs and foam and feathers. He groaned and allowed the mercurial woman to fill his thoughts at last. He’d been trying to block her out, but it was as hopeless as a ship springing leak after leak on the open sea.
Exa Legacy. Almost twenty-one. Impoverished, though she didn’t seem to know it. A slight metalsmith, petite yet muscled. An activist turned insurgent. A speechwriter catapulted to rebel figurehead after the betrayal of the ragamuffin courtier, Neon Trimpot. What words to describe her? Purposeful? Well, yes, but also impulsive. Dreamy? No, no. She had an innate and powerful system of logic; it just opposed a bloodless deference to mathematics and economy. Task-oriented may have been the only word without counter. She was always doing something. She didn’t care much for mere words – ironic, considering she had begun as a speechwriter.
When they’d first met, at the centennial, she’d been timid and tender, quiet, solemn, fleeting: little more than a halo of silver-white braids and a gleam of goldenrod eyes in the shadow of the tower. When he saw her next, at the local broadcast station, she’d been loose and friendly, casual and open with a melancholic texture. They’d shared a cigarette, a delicacy he’d stolen from his father, and that wasn’t the only thing he stole. He’d kissed her: a mind-numbing, unfettered expression of his desire. He had to admit that she’d been right about it later: he had kissed her and not vice versa. But she’d let him, however lukewarm the submission, and when he saw Legacy next, she was imprisoned in the castle’s dungeon, manacled to the wall and barefoot in a black gown with a slash that almost exposed her intimately. She’d been frightened and grateful, yet steadfast in her rejection of his advances. She’d told him that there was someone else. But when he went back, this time to free her, she’d let him kiss her once more. She’d really let him, unlike before; he could still remember the way her neck fell open, her face tilted up toward him with closed eyes, willing him to take his pleasure. And her groan of frustration when he was so briefly pressed against her. He’d fled before she had the opportunity to inform him that it’d been an accident or a mistake or whatever else she might doubtlessly say.
Kaizen’s obsession had culminated within days of her release into the township, and he’d had Legacy arrested and brought to this very room. His bedchamber.
He’d bathed her in a steaming tub of rose petals. He tensed at the memory of the sponge trailing down her bronze thighs, of her pouty lips opening to emit the soft cry of orgasm. He’d given her an extravagant gift of silk, taken her to see the lovebirds in the conservatory, and fought with her. Again, she mentioned the other man. He had to set her free, she said. What were they doing, she asked. And he’d agreed. They weren’t doing anything of any real sense or consequence, and he would let her go – as soon as the coronation ceremony was over.
That morning, she’d been tense. Clingy, yet defensive, demanding and high strung. Just strange. Very unlike herself. She’d blurted then that he was the target of an assassination attempt to be perpetuated by her group, Chance for Choice, and that she had a lot to lose by confessing this, but she could not let an innocent man be murdered under her eyes. He’d gone to tell Malthus, but of course, Malthus hadn’t cared. The coronation ceremony had advanced, the automata had gone mad, and his father was killed by his own personal footman, Valkenhayn-2. After all the horrific carnage of the event, his own wounds patched and the dead cleared from the grounds, he’d returned to Legacy, but she’d been gone. Of course. He never quite knew what she was doing, yet he trusted her, implicitly, like an idiot.
She was dead now. He was sure of it. The last time he’d seen her, less than two hours before the collapse, she’d wrenched from his grip and flown from him into those insane streets. If only she hadn’t been so thick-headed, she might still be alive! He could have taken care of her! And he’d heard what the Duke of Celestine
had told her just prior to ascending the royal carriage!
“It seems that Icarus has become quite the hotbed of upheaval and unrest in these most recent days,” he had concluded thoughtfully. “I can assure you that the township of Celestine is a much more hospitable environment to the ideals of your people.”
They would have accepted her there!
How had she died? he wondered morbidly. Like an open wound, he couldn’t help but analyze and prod, ensuring that it would fester and become gangrenous.
If he knew her at all, he would have to say she’d driven straight into the thick of the mayhem: the police headquarters in the business district, embroiled in those riots. Had she perhaps been broken in some way, her skull cracked, bones trampled in the hysteria? Try as he might, he couldn’t imagine this as her ending. She would never have allowed it. She would have survived the mob. But there was no way to survive a fall of that magnitude. Not when combatting such debris.
Kaizen gulped.
She likely perished in the same manner as every other poor soul in that city: clutching some stranger or even a wall or a post, anything, as gravity gave way beneath their feet, until the strain was too dense to bear and they were thrust against the dome, or crushed or impaled or buried in the violent impact of the fall.
Kaizen winced, grimaced, and pressed his face deeper into the pillow.
For the next four hours, he alternated lying in bed with pacing and groaning and calculating the needs of a dozen, no, twenty people? Gratefully, fantasies of Legacy’s obvious death gave way to more practical concerns, and maybe he was a little like Malthus after all. He wondered how much food they would require every day, and when would that well run dry? Should their rations become staggered to imply importance? No, no, he couldn’t do that, but then, what if the crisis reached a fever pitch? The castle was its own island indefinitely, and supplies were not infinite. There was no automaton for the generation of pure matter. And would Celestine even take them? Duke Lovelace had seemed sympathetic, a friend of his father’s, even, but docking an entire castle was more than a favor. In a way, Kaizen was suddenly much like the refugees from N.E.E.R. who had caused those riots, now. Now he, too, was drifting, asking for help from people who barely had anything to give.
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