Free LEGACY LOST by Rachel Eastwood Page B

tensed, preparing to lunge again, when she glanced back to him instead. “What way?” Her voice became very small.
    “The monarch wants your brother to give him up a rebel, probably to be publicly executed, you know,” Trimpot informed her.
    “Of course,” she said, unblinking.
    “And we have spotted a rebel ship, the Albatropus, not far from us . . . though they are gaining distance,” he went on. “So, you see, the monarch wants a dead rebel, and so, it’s not really bad to kill some rebels, is it?”
    “Of course not,” she agreed, again not missing a beat. A shadow passed over her face. “They killed all my friends.”
    “Right, yes.” My god, you’re a loon, darling. “The catch is that the monarch only knows the name of one rebel, and that’s Exa Legacy. All the other rebels are totally unknown. Faceless. Nameless. Mere people assumed dead in the rubble of Icarus. And so . . . if we could siege that ship and slaughter those aboard, the monarch wishes for only one head to be delivered to him. The rest are just . . .” Trimpot’s hand wound dreamily in the air. “. . . wide open for whosoever may wish . . .”
    Sophie’s eyes took on more of a gleam, if that was possible.
    “Everyone who’s ever known them would be dead,” Trimpot assured her, stepping lightly just behind her. He delicately braced her shoulders beneath his fingers. “You could take their documents, their belongings, and just . . . become them,” he whispered into her ear. “After all, the archives of the city have been destroyed, have they not? All record vanished. No longer Sophie Taliko, the invisible duchess.”
    “Oh, Leo!” the girl cried, whipping the wheel again. But this time, Trimpot was there, and he gripped its spokes, steadying the island before the tilt could spill them both to the ground. She twisted to gaze up at him, and he made the effort to not stare in revulsion at the crude stitch work along her face. His arms were already around her in order to hold the wheel that she had forgotten entirely. Instead, Sophie arched onto her toes and wrapped her arms around his neck, cradling her body against his in an odd combination of innocence and intimacy. “No longer Sophie Taliko,” she sighed.
    “Just a lucky survivor of the collapse of Icarus,” Trimpot said. He looped one arm around the small of her back, hugging her closer, and freed the other to tick the speed of the island a few more notches upward.
     
    Legacy was in bed long before Dax, but kept awake by the clangor of the engine room and the unbearable heat and the distant thunder of laughter and footfalls. Following the showers of the day, the crew of the Albatropus was in high spirits . . .
    For the most part, she thought to herself. Legacy rolled onto her side and stared for a moment, then stretched to power the radio propped on the cabin’s bedside table. The horrors of the world around her were always a good way to drawn out the smaller, more personal horrors of her daily life. After all, how could one cry underwater?
    She twisted the dial to station CHN-1, City of Heliopolis News.
    “. . . industrial-strength breathing apparatuses from fifty pieces or more! You’ll never see prices this low anywhere else in the City of the Sun, so come find Olly Olly Oxygen Free on the corner of Hazzard Street and . . .”
    Legacy grimaced, descending back into the muck of her thoughts.
    That message she’d sent to Kaizen earlier, so terse and dismissive, still made her feel a little bit sick. But it was all for the best. It was what she had to do. If Kaizen could only know that, he would understand it. Of course, she would never be able to tell him or he would not rest until he found her – she knew him now, well enough to know this . . . And so his heartbreak, the lack of resolution, the end of it all, was necessary.
    “Mm, what refreshing flavor of iron is this? Lemon-esque! From Nanny’s Assemblage, the only synthetic vitamin dispensary that guarantees .