LEGACY RISING (15 page)

But all Trimpot did was snatch it from her, spin it on his fingertip, and say, “
Marvelous,
” before throwing it back. Legacy caught the fragile part with a terrified yelp.

Trimpot gestured and the group moved into the courtyard. They’d only crept two paces when an automaton—a smiling, brown-haired “man” in a blue watchman’s uniform—skated over to them. Legacy had never seen security staff automata before, but if any one building would have them, of course, it would be the Center. The duke wouldn’t have to pay real people, but it’d still discourage trespassers—like them. She should’ve realized. After all, she’d seen more automata at the founder’s ball than she’d seen in her entire life. Until she’d gone to the castle, anyway.

“
Clearance, please,
” its marionette mouth chattered.

The last time Legacy had seen the Contemplator, Trimpot had been springing away from its wailing horn, explaining sheepishly that it still had a few kinks.

But tonight, their pink-haired leader brandished it proudly. He turned the crank, the gears and celluloid churned, and from the horn vibrated a low, pleasant pulse. Legacy wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but the security bot swung low at the waist and gestured for them to pass. He pulled himself erect again and chattered,
“Thank you.”

“H-how did you do that?” she had to ask.

“It’s quite simple, really,” Vector chirped as they slunk, one by one, through the courtyard and into the foyer of the Taliko Center. “All automata follow an explicit program, but are capable of bypassing or modifying said program. The only reason they don’t is because to do so invalidates that program. It’s like us, having all the parts necessary to move by cartwheel instead of walking. Basically, they’re not intelligent enough to change their behavior, but most of them can. Now, the Contemplator projects a modified or a bypassed simulation of a generic program onto a specific, localized target—one automaton, or maybe two, if they’re really close together—and hopefully the automaton is running that generic program, or else it won’t work, but in this case, we anticipated that it would be a simple guard program, although bypass is obviously easier than modify, and one target is obviously easier than—”

“
Shh,
” Trimpot hissed, waving at him. “Stairs are this way.” He ducked through a side door, and the other four adventurers spilled after him.

“You know this place well, Neon,” Vector noted, unfazed by his harshness of tone.

“Came with my mom to work sometimes,” he mentioned idly, pushing open the door at the bottom of the stairs.

“Oh? What did she do here?” Vector asked.

The room beyond was as large as the ballroom and stacked to the ceiling with crates. There, at the center of the room, stood a transparent, strangely large elevator.

“Oh, perfect!” Vector cheered, forgetting his question. He pranced to the glass apparatus. “I’ve never gotten a chance to see the Cipher-Scope work from the inside!”

Attaching the intricate box to the elevator door, he twisted its key and the mechanism vibrated, its slender metal appendages coming forward, then detracting, patiently learning the ins and outs of this unique, transparent lock. Its hum kicked up to a whir, and Vector glanced up at all the waiting faces and smiled. “Should be just a few minutes,” he explained. “If anyone needs to use the washroom.”

Legacy glanced at Dax. What if something happened down on Old Earth, and her last solid memory of him was a half-hearted goodbye?

“How are you doing?” she asked, stepping toward him and subtly pulling away from the group. She hadn’t truly been in his physical space since before the arrest. The last time she’d really been with him, they’d been holding hands, running with a mob. “What happened to you on Sunday night?” she asked, realizing this.

“It’s been almost a week,” Dax half-laughed. “You just get around to caring?”

Legacy glared. “No, I—Dax! Seriously, what happened? I looked for you everywhere!”

“Well, I was looking for you, too,” Dax replied. He leaned against a cargo box, incidentally nudging its top open. “I guess we just missed each other.” Now he stared at her without mercy.

Legacy nodded, exposed. She didn’t know quite what she wanted from him, or how to get it. “Dax—”

“Look, Leg, I know—things didn’t turn out quite like we planned,” he interrupted. “And that’s fine. I mean, that’s life, isn’t it? So . . .” His eyes, so hard, finally panned away. “So it’s fine. You don’t have to explain. You don’t have to play nice. I’m not Liam.”

“I know you’re not—”

“What did I expect, anyway?”

“Dax—”

“
It’s fine, Legacy,
” he seethed.

“But—”

“
I don’t care.
”

“Cipher-Scope’s done,” Rain’s voice floated to them. They jerked, awoken from this nightmare of a conversation, as the blue-haired nurse advanced with a metallic coil in her hands and a leather rebreather on her face. “Hey, Dax,” she said warmly, incognizant of the tension between the couple. “Before we go, do you want me to change your carbon hydroxide scrubber?”

“Thanks, Rain. Sounds good.”

“No problem. Here, Legs, you’re going to want a rebreather. Just in case.” Still oblivious, she handed the glaring girl the last rebreather. “Oh, wow, look in here,” she said, stepping closer to Dax and peering into the crate on which he leaned. She dipped a hand inside and extracted a sheath of white, lacy fabric. “Crazy,” she whispered. As she threaded the fabric through her fingers, testing its texture and durability, Dax unfastened and removed his own rebreather. Legacy experienced a pang, remembering the last time she’d seen his face. “Where did this come from?” Rain wondered aloud, glancing up at him.

Dax shrugged. “Maybe the answer’s down there,” he replied, handing the other girl his rebreather. Rain winked at him, and it was adorable, before she began the work of unscrewing his worn filter.

“Do you need help with your rebreather, Legs?” she asked, noticing the girl was just standing there, staring, holding the thing.

“No,” Legacy replied, finding her tongue. “I know how to do it.”

“Okay! Well! We’re all set, then!” Rain returned Dax’s rebreather and strolled toward the elevator. Dax went to follow her without another word to Legacy.

Legacy grabbed at his arm, feeling desperate. Feeling out of control.

She opened her mouth and, “Are you seeing her?” came spilling out. She winced at the sound of her own voice. It was unfair to be jealous at all, and no one saw anyone of their own volition, especially not an ineligible person like Dax, but then again, Rain was a rebel, and people were wild-hearted and impossible to predict . . .

Dax just glared at her and shook off the clinging hand. Legacy watched him go, feeling as if something critical had been lost.

Kaizen’s quill scratched over the aged parchment on his chamber desk. Sometimes drawing helped him to escape. He smeared the ink with his thumb, intentionally darkening the large eyes to goldenrod.

He hadn’t expected Legacy to return his message. He really hadn’t. But then, the day moved on, and he still hadn’t heard anything, and he supposed that maybe he had thought she would return his message.

              He shaded the arch of a round, tight cheek.

Didn’t she remember that kiss in the tower?

The lips . . . almost perfectly symmetrical.

Since then, he’d found it difficult to avoid thinking of her. But who was he kidding?

Now to add the braids.

He’d been thinking about her all week.

For the third time that day, he rang his desktop bell and listened to the approaching clatter of the porcelain-jointed assistant. Newton-3, for the time being. “Any new messages for Kaizen Taliko?” he asked without turning.

“
No new messages for Kaizen Taliko.
”

Kaizen flicked his quill across the desk, spraying ink on the sketch of Legacy as it skittered. “That is all,” he grumbled, crumpling the paper.

I wonder what she’s doing right now.

Not that it matters. I mean, she made herself pretty clear, didn’t she? Going her separate way. And I’m going mine.

Then again, this entire fallacy of a coronation ceremony is because of her. Maybe I deserve to know what she’s doing. Maybe I deserve a message!

Kaizen pushed himself up from his desk and stormed to the castle keep.

Aside from being the Taliko stronghold, the keep was where the royal machinist could be found. Master Addler had wiry gray hair, thick glasses, and a hunched back from his years of painstaking servitude to the castle automata. He had once been brilliant, shrewd, and serious. The years of solitude, save the accompaniment of machina, had taken their toll. Now he was still brilliant, but also, a little mad.

“Master Addler.” Kaizen announced his arrival with a sharp tone of import.

The old man hunched over the reclining chair, where a narrow, gleaming white body was draped, jerked, and whirled. “Egad,” he murmured, adjusting his glasses. “So lifelike, this one.” He stepped closer, and Kaizen saw that the automaton on the workbench had its porcelain face lifted to expose the brass bones of its skull. Screws, gears, and springs were removed as he fished for the obstruction inside: a battered, blue marble eye. Ah. He was fixing Newton-2. Great. Life had been so empty without it.

Then Master Addler grasped at Kaizen’s face and pried his mouth open, peering inside. “Where are the gears?” he whispered.

“Iff we, Maffer Awwer,” Kaizen snapped, jerking away. “Blagh! Earl Kaizen!”

“Of the Talikos?” Master Addler asked, glaring up at the man. “Oh, I see it now. Yes. Of course. What can I do for you, sir?”

“I need to get a read on the location of a castle automaton,” he half-truthed. “It’s coil #98.”

Master Addler hobbled to the keep reader, a glassy, amber map of Icarus. The reader radio illuminated clusters of bright emerald glimmers, each symbolizing an automaton which had been engineered by Master Addler and installed with a specialized coil, linked to the energy emission of the keep reader. These coils linked the automata to one another, enabling their awareness of an unwinding fellow bot, but also separated them by number and allowed for easy location tracking.

“Hm,” Master Addler said, pressing his nose to the map. “I don’t see #98 on the castle grounds.”

“It’s—well—it’s in Icarus, I think,” he explained, hoping the old man wouldn’t ask.

“Hm.” Master Addler’s nose trailed across Icarus. “Ah! There it is! Very faint . . . and getting fainter.”

“
What?
”

“Well, yes,” he said, pulling back and rubbing his nose. “It appears to be in the Center’s freight lift shaft. The keep reader can only read across so much distance, you know. It’s fading.”

“It’s going
down?
”

“Yes, sir,” Master Addler replied. “It appears to be going down.” As he spoke, Kaizen whirled and exited the room, off to locate a member of the castle sentries. “Now—what class of automaton did you say this was?” He wiped his glasses on his apron and replaced them on his nose. “I imagine it’s some sort of pai—” He frowned and glared around the room. “Kaizen? Earl?” He would’ve believed that perhaps the entire incident had been imagined, if not for the fading emerald glimmer of coil #98, descending in the elevator shaft.

              The glass elevator descended slowly and steadily. Each of the crew peered down into the dark clouds, struggling to decipher details in the grim landscape below, but it was night now. Otherwise, all else was eerily quiet, save an occasional rumble from the sky. As the elevator neared the ground, it became obvious that there was a road extending away from it, but that road was broken and heaving, metallic tracks laid across it. In the distance, off to the right, was a small dome, and a murky marshland sprawling between the two points.

The group collectively tensed as the elevator shuddered to a halt, its doors coasting open. A wet, fungal air filled the cabin. The world seemed so open beyond these doors. The swollen sky suddenly so big. The fractured road which wandered off into some ruined cityscape. Even the shape of the small dome in the distance seemed as far from them as the space between the stars, and Legacy felt the vertigo of navigating an unfamiliar place clutch her insides.

“How are we going to . . . find our way back?” she whispered.

“Look for
Icarus
, then look
down
, and follow the line,” Trimpot snapped.

“Stay close to me,” Vector whispered helpfully. “I’m wearing the attractor.”

“What’s an attractor?” Legacy asked, the group shuffling, one by one, out of the elevator.

“It’s quite simple, really,” Vector replied, stepping onto the spongy, brown earth. “Holy shit.”

              “
Holy
shit,” Trimpot elaborated. “All right, let’s . . .
focus
. We only have a
few
hours before this will start to get
really
real. There’s a
dome
over there. We can get there in, what,
half
an hour? If we book it from A to B. I’m saying a straight line. If we take
this
damn road, we might as well go home now, because that’s how caught we’re going to get.” He gestured for the group to follow. “Let’s
try
to keep quiet, stick together, and wear our heads on tight.”