LEGACY LOST (15 page)

“Yes, sir.”

Kaizen turned and trod toward the castle keep, the rhythmic shuffle of digging behind his back. When he reached the machinist chamber, he found Sophie on the workbench, still wearing the blood-soaked chemise and porcelain mask, her eyes closed. He thought, at first, that she was roleplaying an automaton that had been powered down, but when he stepped closer – around the body and gore which still remained – he saw the steady rise and fall of her chest, the slackness of her shoulders.

He wondered if she would awaken sane, but then again, wasn’t sure just how long ago that stopped being a given. He wondered if she would remember what she had done, and if she’d feel any remorse at all.

At least that’s one person Trimpot won’t be able to manipulate so easily anymore,
cropped unbidden into Kaizen’s mind. He hurriedly shunted the thought back into his subconscious and went to find Master Addler in his bedchambers. As he walked, the possibilities whirled, a colorful, noisy carousel in his head. They would need to find her help. Someone versed in trauma, in fantasy, in multiple personalities. But then, how to find help for her without the legal identity? In all likelihood, she wouldn’t be allowed to retain the services of a psychiatrist. She would be removed to the nearest N.E.E.R. station and assigned a calling, then dosed with her first syringe of the Kill Curiosity and Calm the Nerves cocktail.

Maybe he could pretend that he was the mad one, and swear the psychiatrist to secrecy. It was always a gamble, who could be trusted with confidential knowledge and who could not. He would need to shop around . . .

Kaizen was heading toward the servants’ wing of the castle when he saw a pink-tipped shadow slinking from the rotunda.

“Hey, Trimpot!” he belted, marching forward. That was one thing about Neon Trimpot’s peacock-like hair. It was no good for sneaking around. “What are you doing wandering about at this hour?”

“Uh,” Trimpot replied. He scrubbed at his face and neck.

Kaizen grimaced. He couldn’t say he was surprised. He’d seen men exiting the royal rotunda doing the exact same thing before: handsome young sentries, for the most part. It was his mother’s lipstick. He’d never said anything, because what could you say to such things? No one in their family had ever labored under the misconception that Malthus and Olympia had been soulmates.

“Well, I was – It’s the funniest thing! I was going to find
you
so we could
talk
all about Exa. I’ve decided, you know, that this small feud between us is just silly. At heart, we both want what’s best for the girl, don’t we? She and I were friends, and maybe I’ve lost sight of what drew us together in the first place, but I want to make amen–”

Kaizen massaged the pressure point at the bridge of his nose. “Augh, for God’s sake, shut up. Look, I don’t care, all right? I don’t care if you bang my mother.
Believe
me, that was something with which I came to terms long ago, back when I had less important things to worry–” It hit him in the gut and he dropped his hand, eyes bulging open.
The helm.
He’d abandoned it at the sound from within the keep, and now, twenty minutes or more had gone by. They wouldn’t run aground, of course, but they could easily drift off course. “Actually,” he added, pointing to Trimpot, “you can actually be of some real assistance . . . for once. The helm is unmanned. There’s been an emergency and I need someone to take the wheel immediately for the next hour or so, until I can return. Your only responsibility is to keep us on course. Am I heard?”

“Like the bell that stirs a flock of–”

Augh.
“Great.” Kaizen strode past him and continued on his route to Master Addler’s chambers. What a damn night. How many fires could spring up at the same time? How did the old saying go?
When it rains, we drown, or something like that.

His fist thundered on the doorframe of the machinist’s suite, and a few minutes passed. Finally, Kaizen heard first a crash, then the tinkle of broken glass, and thirdly a muttered curse, before the knob finally turned and Master Addler poked his head out, one bleary eye open. “Mm?” he croaked.

Kaizen launched, perhaps too quickly, into his recap of the events from the night. The screams in the keep. The strange woman with her eyes gouged out, among other things. The woman who had been stabbed through the chest with the minute hand of the clock in the drawing room. It seemed that automata had been involved. Finally, the trio in the garden, the young girl strangled with a rag, the footman digging a grave as they spoke, and then . . . Sophie. Her chemise. The mask. The way she was talking. The way she was walking. The way she had obediently gone to his workbench and laid down for maintenance.

Master Addler blinked with increasing severity as the story went on.

“And I don’t know what to do,” Kaizen finished in a spill of vulnerability.

Master Addler nodded gravely and scratched at the loose skin of his cheek. “I will update her processes,” he announced.

Kaizen glared. “This isn’t fucking funny,” he snapped.

“Of course this isn’t funny! I will tell her that I am updating her processes. When she wakes up, I will inform her that she has been given the charge of assisting the machinist full-time as a reward for her exemplary performance tonight. I’ll watch her. I can take care of her, son. I mean, Duke Taliko, sir.” He smiled wanly. “She’s a good girl. I know she is. She only needs someone who can play her game. Sometimes I, too, forget that they are only machines. And I was afforded the opportunity to attend a real school, and marry, and have a beautiful daughter, and work at this fine castle. Still, I forget.”

Kaizen grimaced. Master Addler was right. Even those given everything for which they could have asked sometimes fumbled. However, he also doubted that Sophie would ever be sane again. That would require intense intervention, and not to simply be kept and played with, like a large living doll.

“But when we reach Celestine,” Kaizen went on. “Something has to be done.”

Master Addler nodded. “Yes,” he agreed. “When we reach Celestine, something will be done for the poor girl.”

“Thank you, Master Addler.”

Sagging with exhaustion, Kaizen doubled back toward the garden. He never realized how huge the castle was until he needed to run his own errands inside it. When he arrived at the path between the poppies and the lilies, he found
Newton-3
standing, dirtied, holding a shovel at his side, next to two rectangles of freshly turned earth. The girl was gone from the path, and Kaizen gulped back some nausea.

“
Newton-3.
You are dismissed from all tasks. Please stand ready for further instruction.”

“Yes, sir.”

He reached forward and took the thin rag from his former footman’s hand of jointed porcelain, gazing at the boundary of the dome’s glass just beyond. He saw one patch that had been polished so heavily, it was a circle of milky fog. He took from its other hand the shovel. Kaizen stepped behind the thing and yanked the twisting key from its back. The footman’s head sagged forward on his neck, the rest of his body going completely rigid.

Not wanting to possibly awaken Sophie by the usage of clinking, graceless automata, Kaizen removed the third body, that in the machinist’s chamber itself, by himself. It would likely give Master Addler a heart attack or stroke to see it, and he might be less amiable to the stopgap of playing pretend with Sophie until Celestine was reached.

He mopped the gore from the floor himself, wondering at how Sophie could have fallen asleep beside it, much less committed it, and carried her dead weight to the garden, where it was dumped beside the other two graves, a sheet draped over. A row of three hedges might look nice there.
Newton-3
hung nearby, slumbering, eavesdropping on Kaizen’s human shame, for while the automaton could quickly and heartlessly dig two graves, and it would be the same for him as washing two frock coats, Kaizen was a man. He had to sweat real salt as he plunged the shovel repeatedly into the earth of the garden; he had to form real blisters between his thumb and forefinger. Most of all, he had to keep casting glances at the body beneath the sheet, as if it might lunge forth. He had to wonder who it was, why they were here, what had led them to such a grisly demise, and he had to battle the knowledge that his own little sister had done it. He had to fight back real vomit and consider that he was literally covering up a murder – but what could be done now?

And, deep down, he had to wonder if it was for Sophie, or for himself, that he did it.

The monarch had reminded him to not underestimate the tenuousness of his grip, hadn’t he. Three dead women wouldn’t help anything.

Finally, bloodied and dirty and sweating and aching, the job was done. The corpse was dumped, and covered. The grave tamped and the shovel hefted to the side.

Kaizen trudged back up the royal rotunda, intending only to take a bath and change his clothes before returning to the keep and relieving Trimpot of his shift at the helm. His calves ached and his eyelids were unbearably heavy, but he had this driving twinge in his chest which told him that this was his mantle. The castle, and Sophie, the staff and the automata and even his indulgent, philandering mother. Not to mention all the bodies that needed to be buried, now and in the future. All the skeletons in the closet and ghosts in the attic, as the old sayings went.

The bath was very successful, but returning to the keep was not. Duke Kaizen’s muscles groaned and even his bones sang, all a closing chorus of the night’s unfolded agony which tided him off to sleep, half-dressed and slumped at his window.

              At dawn on Thursday, the passengers of airship
Albatropus
congregated in their most drab and formal attire, lining up portside as if awaiting some agreed upon moment. They would be reaching Celestine later that very day – so close, and yet so far, from one of those little intersections where everything could have, but did not, pivot. The young statistician would have no formal burial. A man of his standing, with no family or offspring of which to speak, could never hope to even take up some slot in a well-tended plot of Old Earth, much less a cemetery in New Earth.

              And so perhaps it would simply be better to say goodbye to him in their own way.

              Izzy, who wore the same size as Legacy, had lent her the only black dress in her luggage. It had no sleeves and a high neck, the buttons trailing all the way down to its hem, which fell just below the knee. “You should be the one,” Izzy had explained, her eyes wincing away from Legacy as soon as they would tilt too close, as if she had the intensity of a sunset. “You should be the one in the black dress.”

              In truth, Legacy hadn’t really noticed the color of her dress, though. She’d hardly noticed anything at all. There were times in the past twelve hours, none of which had she slept, that she’d rolled in the bed and fleetingly perceived, through the cruel alchemy of muscle memory, that he laid in bed beside her still. There were times in the past twelve hours that she’d had the thought,
We’re finally going to see Celestine,
as if he were still on the ship. And then these moments would be brushed away like stray hairs from her forehead. After everything – after everything, nothing else could hurt her. Dax . . . She hadn’t escaped this collapse. She’d gone down with him.

              Vector, as captain, was elected the grim responsibility of overseeing this funeral.

              He, too, had managed to find all black, and even donned a large top hat. It was pulled from his head before he began to speak into the morning winds.

              Gustav and Liam toted a slab of material, some patch for the ship, and on it rested Dax’s body. He was wrapped in a sheet. Legacy didn’t know which was worse, seeing him or not seeing him, but then, she decided immediately that seeing him would have been worse.

              Legacy didn’t look at the sheet. At . . . what had been Dax. She found it difficult to focus on anything. Her eyes instead glossed over the wide blue sky splayed beyond the rail. The place where Dax would go. The place where Dax had gone. She clutched
Mudflower
in her hand as if it were some talisman.

              “It’s hard to know exactly what to say in times like this,” Vector offered, adjusting his spectacles. His script consisted of sloppy notes that, as he reread them now, made almost zero sense. “You never expect tragedy, and then . . . It comes in waves. Most of us had only met Dax recently. He and I became fast friends, because we think – we thought a lot alike. He joined Chance for Choice largely because he was ineligible for Companion Selection, and felt he deserved the right to marry and to father a child, even in spite of his condition.”

              As Vector spoke, Liam and Gustav moved around the flat metallic bed onto which Dax’s body rested, securing some rope and a wad of loosely bound fabric.

“He made us all laugh. He made us all think. He helped every time he had the chance. He was a good man, and although it’s difficult to accept this, he was struggling in a way that he kept to himself, and now, the struggle is over. He’d already lost both his parents, the most recent being four years ago, and so . . . especially with the collapse of Icarus . . . there is nothing he leaves behind so much as he leaves behind his best friend, and my friend, Exa Legacy, our former speechwriter, and in truth, possibly our most vital asset. She stepped naturally into the position of our leader, and we should all extend our most sincere efforts to shield her from this sudden misfortune.”

Legacy spoke suddenly, loudly, as if possessed by some outside element. As if drunk. She didn’t even know herself what she was about to say. Nonetheless it poured from her.

“There were times when we were together that I thought, ‘Tell him now, tell him now, tell him, tell him, tell him,’” she confessed. “I suppose, even knowing about his condition, I got used to this idea that we were . . . pre-determined. I forgot that time – that opportunities – were passing me by. I know that telling him . . .” Her eyes trailed the deck, thankful his body was covered. “. . . wouldn’t have kept him alive. But I’ve been in love with him almost ten years, and I think I only told him so once? No . . . twice. Twice. I just wish I would’ve taken more chances . . .” It occurred to her that she was rambling, and her voice had taken on a listing, whiny quality. She cleared her throat. “That was one thing Dax always did. I was content to pretend nothing was happening between us, and he would always tell whatever he felt, even if it sometimes meant a fight. He would always–” Legacy’s voice cracked and she stopped herself. She did not want to cry in front of forty-something people. “So I guess my point is that everything, a person, a moment, a chance, is finite. If the notion crops up . . . don’t risk it. Say it.”

Liam and Gustav nodded, and Vector took a deep, shaking breath.

              “May I ask that we share a moment of silence for Dachs Ghrenadel?” he invited.

              Most of the crowd obeyed with sobriety, bowing their heads, but Legacy just stared straight ahead, her silver-white braids whipping to the side of her face and pulling at the black dress. It wasn’t that she wished to disrespect Vector, or this ceremony, or the memory of Dax, certainly, but she just . . . couldn’t . . . focus. On anything.

              Because her eyes were open, she saw the men lower Dax’s makeshift pyre, setting small flames to the tips of the sheet and then releasing the cradle into the air. A black parachute fluttered open and swung lower, down toward the cloud forests of Old Earth. The wind pulled it – Dax – slightly ahead of them, being as light as it was, but also down. The fire crept along the sheet, but the material of the parachute and cabling must have been flame retardant. He floated away on the air, and Legacy limply raised a hand and flexed two of her fingers in a weak goodbye.

              “Do you see that, there, Sophie?” Trimpot wondered, peering through the magnifying scope which had previously belonged to Master Addler but which was now indefinitely his own. He already recognized it, himself, but he doubted that Sophie could. Not from this distance. From this distance, it would appear to be perhaps a final star not yet blotted by the rays of the morning sun. But, through the blinking lens of this emerald scope, it was a fire on the air. A little teardrop of flame drifting in the air beneath a black parachute.

              And not far above it: a familiar potbellied patchwork, suspended beneath a lumpy balloon of various gases. He could not make out exactly what was happening on the deck, though he did see that many people wore black. Someone had died. Someone had died, and their remains were being sent onto the air in flames. That was sweet of them.

              “I don’t see anything, sir,” Sophie replied.

              Trimpot pulled the scope down and peered at her. She had finally changed out of that vomitous chemise, and now wore a simple blue gown. Master Addler had tenderly convinced her that her attire was inappropriate for a servant of the castle. Considering this sudden and ardent turn deep inside a fantasy in which her bones were made of brass and her blood oil, he found the existence of some alternate reality wherein he had chosen to seduce her rather than her mother equally laughable and sobering.

Both were on the roof of the castle keep, Trimpot maintaining course for the past six hours and Sophie having been freed from the watchful eye of the machinist to venture to partake in the view. He couldn’t lie; this made Trimpot nervous. At least she’d never connected him to The Coronal Massacre. Any implications of his involvement in that had come far too late in her decline, when she was too busy pirouetting and wondering where Daddy was, and now there were stray comments made which suggested she didn’t even recall major events from her life. When he’d requested, quite politely, to have a dish of cold pasta leftovers delivered by her hand, she’d replied starchily that she was under strict orders by “the Duke of Icarus” to conserve rations. The Duke of Icarus? Even Trimpot didn’t think of Kaizen as the Duke of Icarus. Plus,
what
Icarus?

              “
That,
my darling, is the rebel ship
Albatropus
,” Trimpot smirked, handing the masked girl the machinist’s magnifying instrument and nudging a lever forward five . . . ten . . . twenty notches. “We can finally get you those documents . . . a legitimate identity, and no one to contest it, if you so desire.”

              Sophie peered up at him with those disconcerting blue eyes. “I have an identity, sir,” she explained in her odd calm.

              Trimpot’s lip twisted down. This was the last thing he needed. His life depended on the mad girl’s malleability. She chose the day of their arrival in Celestine to have a mental breakdown and become completely unreasonable. “You can’t even leave the castle,” he reminded her.

              “Why would I want to leave the castle?” She cocked her head quizzically. The motion possessed a disjointed quality. “My only wish is to serve. The Duke of Icarus entrusted to me the task of being a machinist’s assistant.”

             
So fucking . . . Okay. Okay. You can figure this out, Leo. Just . . . figure out how her crazy-person logic works.
Trimpot took a deep breath and nodded.

              “Hm. I see. So, you only take orders from the duke, and Master Addler, and perhaps Olympia?”

“The duchess. That’s correct.”

“Oh! I thought I was told that you killed an intruder last night, but . . . I guess that was someone else.”

              “That is correct.” She nodded loosely, as if her neck joints were improperly connected. “The intruder was to the machinist’s chamber.”

              “Hm. But the machinist was asleep, was he not?”

              Sophie tilted her head again, now in the opposite direction. “The machinist was asleep,” she agreed. “That is correct, sir.”

              “So, if you don’t mind me asking, how did you know to kill the intruder without the command of Master Addler?”

             
Haha!
Now she hesitated. “I don’t know, sir,” she finally answered. “I suppose a part of me just knew the right thing to do. Perhaps it was a program.” But he knew a glimmer of the old Sophie peaked through. Her tone suddenly took on a melancholic affect, which an automaton would never even manage. No one wants a melancholic servant! They’re programmed to be dreamless. Hopeless.

So, she claims to be a servant to the royal family, but let’s be real. No one gave her the “task” to come up here and sight-see. Deep down inside, as much as she’s loathe to admit it, she’s still Sophie Taliko, ticking time bomb of psycho but nonetheless likes what she likes and hates what she hates. Which makes her malleable. So it’s cool
.
You can work with this. I mean, for Christ’s sake, the girl thinks she’s an automaton. It won’t be hard to convince her to do what I need done . . . because she’ll want to do it, too. Can’t tell me the same chick who decapitated a total stranger wouldn’t eat Exa Legacy alive.

             
“Are we traveling at a safe speed?” Sophie pressed.

She gave him an uncertain look, but Trimpot continued to smile. “It’s fine. Trust me. The Duke of Icarus will be ecstatic to see what good time we’ve made. Here, let me nudge it forward just a few more notches. Ah, there we go. You know, I think we can catch that
Albatropus
if we hurry.”

              “The
Albatropus
?” she repeated. “I believe our destination is Celestine, sir.”

              “Our final destination is Heliopolis, in truth, my love,” Trimpot replied. “We are docking at Celestine, but the monarch, you know, will want to see the duke regarding recent changes. Oh, but what am I saying!” he added with a dramatic flair. “You couldn’t hope to understand the inner workings of the monarchy.”

              “I understand!” Sophie shrilled. “Sir!”

              “Then you must realize that the monarch wishes to see the duke in order to ascertain blame for the disasters beneath his rule. In fact, he made request of Exa Legacy, the rebel responsible for the Coronal Massacre, who is aboard that ship.” Trimpot smirked as the black parachute drifted beneath their island and disappeared. “We shouldn’t need to be told to procure that terrorist. After all, isn’t the monarch the master of the duke? And it is the monarch’s order to have Legacy apprehended.”

              Sophie was deep in thought. “No one made any requests of this to me, sir,” she reiterated, sounding doubtful.

              But Trimpot smiled. “Of course, of course. It’s not your task, love. It’s none of your concern.”
What was the name of that automaton she mentioned in the throne room, during that argument, again? Robert . . .something. Roberta!
“I am sure the duke intends to deal with those responsible in whatever way he sees fit, and will inform the staff as such. Well, except for
Roberta
, of course. Her face shattered.”