“I might be persuaded,” the Duke interrupted his son. Kaizen came to an immediate halt, raising his eyes to peer back at his father. “In return for a show of loyalty and dedication.”
“Well.” Kaizen frowned. “I think it’d be a bit transparent, but I’m sure she’d be willing--”
“Not from her, son. From you.”
Kaizen’s frown deepened. “How could I show you loyalty and dedication?”
The Duke smiled. “Let’s hold a coronation ceremony for you. It won’t mean anything, technically. The responsibilities of the duchy will remain with me until I pass. But the gesture will be meaningful in its symbolism.”
“That’s not exactly customary,” Kaizen replied suspiciously. “Don’t coronations usually get held to avoid the crown being contested by, like, some illegitimate heir?”
“And, in another way, that crown is being contested,” the Duke said. “This will tell Icarus something subtle, yet pivotal. It will tell the people of this city that the Taliko blood is here to stay. Unshaken. Continuing with our customs as if they have done nothing in the streets but jabber as unintelligibly as the birds in the conservatory. To the likes of us, their little demonstrations may as well be death throes.”
Kaizen winced and broke eye contact. “So you want to parade me in front of all the dignitaries, and make sure everyone knows that I’m your little apprentice. That nothing is any different than it was before. And I am as much yours as is Icarus.”
The Duke rolled his eyes. Was he ever this dramatic? “It’s the only way I’ll spare the girl,” he replied, allowing himself a touch of fatalistic flourish to match his son’s.
Kaizen stood there for a moment, not even really thinking so much as seeming to not hear, and then, without looking at his father, he bowed deeply and exited the throne room.
Night had fallen, and still Legacy had not eaten. She’d been taken twice to the washroom, where she’d been forced to urinate in full view of a sentry and his stun gun. Trimpot still hadn’t returned, and she feared he was dead. No one came to speak to her. Now she curled into the pile of mildewed rags beneath the window and tried to talk herself into sleeping. It’s going to be all right. No matter what happens . . . it’s going to be all right, because . . . because . . .
A hopeless tear slid down her cheek, and she buried her face into the rotten cloths. Letting one fall was like allowing a crack to form in a dam, and she cringed into herself, more and more hopeless tears pouring down her face.
“So, I’ve been thinking.” Kaizen’s voice filled the tower. A diffused yellow light crept across the floor as Legacy jerked away from the pathetic nest of old rags. “And I might be willing to coerce my father for you.” Legacy pushed herself to a stand and tried to assume her earlier demeanor before she dared to face him. She hated being interrupted in moments of weakness. Taking a deep breath, she turned. “For a price—Are you all right?”
“I’m just hungry,” Legacy responded, her voice pitchy and ragged from lack of use. “Otherwise, I’m okay.”
Kaizen looked at her and sagged, his brow denting. He sat the oil lamp at his feet and jammed a hand into his oddly bulging pocket. “I’m sorry, you’re right—here. Hold on.” He extracted a large brass key and stuck it into the lock, twisting, and Legacy’s eyes widened as the tumblers fell. Seeing her expression and vastly misinterpreting it, Kaizen beamed and explained, wrenching open the cell door. “Took it from the guard, terrible guard. All he needed was one good threat to give it a—” Legacy impulsively threw her chained arms around his neck, and Kaizen went speechless and still until she relaxed her grip and moved away again. “I’m sorry,” he blurted nonsensically. “Anyway, I grabbed this from the kitchen for you.” He extracted a pale yellow, misshapen ball, waxy in appearance, from that bulging pocket, extending it to her as if this was some sort of solution. “I didn’t figure anyone would miss it. Here. Take it. I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner. I should’ve bought more. I can get more. I’m sorry.”
Legacy tentatively took the thing, manacles clinking. “What is this?” she asked, turning it over in her hands and glaring with distrust.
“It’s—It’s a pear.” Kaizen’s expression was a mixture of notes of amusement and pity. “You eat it. It’s soft. You can bite it.”
Bite it . . . Legacy had grown up on a diet of synthetic vitamin pills. She’d never bitten into anything, really. But she did. She understood the concept of biting, after all.
Her teeth sank into its savory flesh, and a sweet nectar sprang into her mouth from the wound. Legacy moaned as she chewed, its juice rolling down her face. She buried into it with ferocity. Had never tasted anything so . . . good.
This was the taste in his mouth, she realized dimly, one tiny portion of her brain not lost in the ecstasy of the fruit, but in memory. When we kissed, and his breath was smoke and something else . . . It was smoke and . . . pears.
When she looked up to thank him—really, truly thank him—he was staring back at her in complete rapture.
“Kaizen—thank you,” Legacy said, now holding only the stem of a pear.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, as if she’d said something else entirely. “I should’ve been here sooner. I was mad. But anyway, I talked to my dad, and he said he’d let you go in the morning. With a warning,” Kaizen clarified. “So he’d better not catch you with the CC again or anything, you know. This better—” He winced, the joke bringing a fresh welt to his heart. “This better be the last time I have to see you.”
Legacy smiled sadly and lifted her chains with trembling arms, hugging him again. The brief realization sifted through her thoughts that he must’ve really trusted her, to recognize her connection to a rebel faction and yet allow her to wrap heavy iron chains around the back of his neck.
She stood on the tips of her toes and closed her eyes, allowing herself this simple, fleeting exchange with the Earl of Icarus, whom she probably never would see again, whom she couldn’t be with, even if she did, whom she wouldn’t ever be with, anyway, because of Dax. But, for just this second, she allowed her body to relax, allowed her face to tilt against the warm curve of his neck, allowed herself to smile.
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, t
he 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.
Chapter Seven
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.
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