LEGACY LOST Read Online Free Page A

forth.
    Quirky and creative, Vector Shannon had mischievous, bespectacled eyes, an upturned nose, long black dreadlocks (around which one could find the occasional copper spring coiled), and often wore rigid, fingerless gloves to protect his joints from the delicate mechanical work in which he was constantly engaged. He was nice. He was nice, if not a touch obsessed with his inventions.
    “I thought you’d be asleep,” Vector went on, allowing her to dodge the question of what she’d been doing when the answer was now so very clear.
    “Can’t sleep.” I’m surprised anyone can, she added silently. “What about you? You’ve been at the helm since–” She waved her hand as if to wave away the rest of her sentence. Since it happened. “When are you going to get some rest?”
    Vector shrugged and offered her his best smile of denial. “Well, it’s a non-stop flight,” he explained brightly. “So, in five days, give or take a day?”
    Legacy considered this. “Why don’t you let me take the wheel for a bit? I can keep us on course. And–”
    “I don’t know, Leg.”
    “Why not?”
    He frowned and cast his eyes about as if searching for a physical escape from the question. “We just can’t afford any mistakes. We really, really can’t.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, do you know anything about cloud harvesting?” he asked.
    “Of course! I mean, a little, at least,” Legacy replied. It was a common technology to the floating cities and to the airships traveling between them. Vertical, nonporous sheets collected the water from passing clouds and siphoned it into a barrel. “There’s really nothing to it. The sheets do most of the work, don’t they?”
    “Technically, it is very simple,” he agreed, although the frustration in his voice betrayed the conflict in the statement. “But there are forty-seven people on this ship, including us. And a healthy body needs half a gallon to maintain, every day. So that’s twenty-three and a half gallons per day that this ship needs just to drink.”
    Legacy nodded. Normally, she found mathematics vaguely annoying, but privately, she also welcomed the distraction from her own problems. “That’s not so bad,” she volunteered. “Clouds have millions of gallons in them.”
    “But what if there’s a cloudless day?”
    Legacy actually laughed, though it was a spiteful kind of bark. “When was the last time–”
    “This ship was never intended to be the living quarters of a movement, Leg! Our water barrel? Holds ten gallons! And what about showers? What if we need to clean something? We’re going to be constantly scavenging for clouds and constantly moving. There aren’t even more than ten pails! And there’s no storage of vitamins here, either, so you can just forget about food!”
    Legacy peered at Vector for a moment and then placed her hand over his. “Let me take the wheel for a few hours,” she offered. The grief of losing her family in the collapse had also given her, strangely, a clear mind unencumbered by panic or exhaustion. She supposed she was in denial. Perhaps her parasympathetic nervous system had kicked in when the city had begun its surreal tilt, and not yet turned off. For whatever reason, she found the world around her very sharply detailed, yet flat and plain. It was comprised solely of emotionless fact. “You need to get some rest, and I’ll be fine. You can take her back at sunrise.”
    “What about you?” he asked. “Did you sleep at all?”
    “I just woke up,” Legacy lied. “I’m as fresh as dew.”
    Vector grimaced but relented. “This map will tell you if you’re off-course or if there are storms ahead.” He tapped the amber globe to the side of the wheel. “If you need to lower Alba in the event of another thunderhead, climb into the crow’s nest and you can open the balloon and let out some air from there. She’ll drift down, and then, just re-patch her and maintain. There’s nothing we can do about a