Free LEGACY LOST by Rachel Eastwood

the fresh, cool water to course so heavily that it spilled down her throat in a wasteful stream. She pulled away, gasped for breath, and took another long pull before isolating Claire Addler, the wan girl with the large gray eyes, and offering her the pail. “Drink!” she insisted, now giddy with relief, certain that the past twenty-four hours had only been a trial, and not a fate.
                  “Do you want your own?” Izzy called behind her.
                  Legacy turned and pushed her sopping braids from her face. “What?”
                  “Do you want your own pail?” Izzy reiterated. “I’ve got a spare in the luggage drawers in the berth!”
                  “Oh! Yes! Definitely!” Legacy clapped Izzy on the shoulder and threaded through the crowd of slick, giddy wayfarers, trundling down into the deserted berth. The room was oddly quiet now. It had always been packed with at least ten people, but now – now it was just her, dripping on the floorboards, and all these knobs. Izzy hadn’t mentioned which drawer had the spare pail.
                  Legacy was halfway across the floor, having inspected many failures, when the door swung open and shut, expelling Dax from the deck.
    He skipped down the steps without looking and then came up short at the sight of her.
    “Leg,” he greeted breathlessly. “Hey.”
    Legacy, too, felt breathless just now. “Hey,” she repeated. “Water, huh?” You’re an idiot, she berated herself.
    “Yeah,” Dax agreed. “Izzy sent me in here to find some spare water pail of hers in the drawers.”
    Legacy smiled in spite of herself. “Spare water pail.” She suddenly had to wonder if it had ever existed at all, or if Isabel Whitmore had just incidentally become the coolest girl on the Albatropus.
                  “I don’t know about that spare pail,” Legacy confessed, stepping closer to Dax. She was feeling heady. Brave. “Izzy sent me in here to look for it too, and I haven’t found it yet, but . . . I wanted to talk to you anyway.” She placed her hands tentatively over his, and peered up into his eyes. He looked back at her just as intently. “I think I might owe you an apology for how I acted the other night.”
                  Dax frowned and broke eye contact, shaking his head slightly. “Well,” he said. “It’s – Yeah. It’s all right. You were . . . You were upset. It’s cool.”
                  Legacy nodded. She was glad he’d looked away. She couldn’t bear to look at him, either. “But – if you want to wait for something . . . perfect and beautiful . . . you know? That’s very mature and . . . admirable.” She nodded again to herself, not daring to glance up again, and missed how his eyes were trained on her. They looked particularly dark at this moment. “I mean, you know, in this ugly world, we should have the right to choose . . . when we want to kiss someone. If we want to kiss them. There’s so little else that we can control.” Dax removed one of his hands from hers, but she still didn’t look up. His fingers went to unfasten the strap over his mouth. “Apologizing is hard for me!” she suddenly exclaimed. “But I – I just wanted to say that I respect your decision . . . retroactively. I – regardless of everything that has happened between us and that will happen between us in the future – I love you, Dax. You know? You’re my best friend. So . . . I’m sorry.”
    Now her eyes panned up to his, and she saw the plane of his cheek in stark relief against the hanging leather of the rebreather.
    Dax stooped, his fingers tracing up her jaw and cradling her cheek, and Legacy’s eyes flicked up and down between his eyes and his lips, breathless, almost gasping, almost . . .
    The door to the berth banged open and Gustav, the surly Chance for Choicer with strawberry blond hair, swung into the room, sopping wet. “Oi, did