LEGACY BETRAYED by Rachel Eastwood Page A

simultaneously.
    It was amusing how people who had lived in total silence for so long were suddenly so desperate to let their words out.
    The well-lit building loomed before them, unguarded and unlocked by chaperones who had been told that the children of N.E.E.R. were mentally incapable of exploration.
    The five coal miners ducked inside, but soon came up short. The doors bore letters for words they didn’t understand. How could they possibly find their way to the source of the information they needed?
    They weren’t the only people in here, though.
    Some cliques raided the supply stock, while others hunted for fresh clothes, new rebreathers, a drink, some vitamins . . . but the room with the most people inside, all hunkered down and speaking in a hushed tone, was the room of desks, a ledge sprawled out on top, and an unfamiliar worker glaring down at it. He was an older man, and his right arm was pinned, withered, to his side.
    “They go up again early Saturday morning, at six,” he announced.
    “How do you know that?” Coal asked in awe.
    “They taught me,” he answered. “They taught me how to read so I could file their papers. They said that some people need to know how to read. Not everyone can mine.”
     
    “Oh my god!” Mr. Legacy cried, dragging his daughter inside for a closer look. His robotic arm – a replacement for the arm he’d lost in factory work twenty years ago – sputtered and sparked as it jerked her this way and that, scouring her flesh for bruises or scrapes. “You’re okay!”
    “Exa!” her mother hollered, scrambling down the ladder which led to the loft. “It’s been two days!”
    “Yeah, I know,” Legacy said, allowing the examination, which now involved her mother clutching her chin and peering shrewdly into her eyes. It was fortuitous that she was inebriated. It dulled the pain of the pinching, metallic arm. It was not fortuitous, however, that her mother had always been so much more observant than her father. “How are–”
    “You’re drunk,” Mrs. Legacy deduced, releasing her chin. “So the rumors are true. You have been in Groundtown.”
    “How many times have I said not to listen to that tripe,” Legacy sighed, knowing she herself had been glued to it. Dyna claimed that the duke was alive and well; no word had been given on Kaizen’s condition. And yes, she had outed Legacy as being somewhere in Groundtown. “Listen to another city’s shortwave once in a –Oh, hey. The police didn’t do anything too bad when they were here, did they? They didn’t break anything, I hope?” She tried to examine her father’s countertop of inventions, but he tugged her forward and broke her concentration.
    “We’re fine, Exa, and everything’s fine! If the girl needs a drink, Furnice, then the girl needs a drink, for God’s sake,” he reprimanded. Still, the metallic fingers dug into her arm. “How are you? Where are you staying?”
    “I’m fine, and I shouldn’t say, and I shouldn’t stay,” Legacy added. “I just wanted to see you and say that I was sorry and that it’s okay and don’t worry and don’t tell anyone anything and I don’t have much time.” Legacy was really trying to keep her grip on the Widow’s words of warning, already fading into the slush and slur of present time. Her parents’ faces loomed and swooped around her. Over his shoulder, her father’s newest invention, a spray of intelligent adhesive, was propped on his desk. “Oh, you finished your glue gun.”
    “Yes! I did!” Mr. Legacy replied, shoving the prototype – a silvery weapon with seven or eight barrels, the length of her torso and just as heavy – into his daughter’s arms. She staggered under the sudden weight. “Take it! It’s already loaded with the glue!” Its magazine was strangely warm to the touch. The glue gun’s intelligent epoxy formula adhered first and foremost to the key of the automaton at which it was shot, instantly freezing their abilities. Or