LEGACY BETRAYED Read Online Free Page B

dreadlocks, visage almost rendered unrecognizable by swelling and discoloration, had ridden the deluge of incoming wounded right to the back cot of critical care, where he still slept. In all the confusion of the throne-room-turned-battlefield, the boy had been brought forth with no identification card on his person, with nothing save his tattered tuxedo and the enormous top hat to which he’d been discovered clinging.
     

Chapter Two
     
                  At first, the difference was subtle. It started with her dreams that night. Coal 106 didn’t normally dream at night. When she did dream, she dreamed of plunging her shovel into piles of coal and sending up plumes of soot. It was just like her waking life, except she never grew tired. She supposed these were what they called “nightmares.” The only break from the monotony of the dig and the thrust and pitch and the thrust was the trudge back to the trolley with the other miners, and then, back to the dome. There, she’d receive her hosing down, her towel, and finally return to her unit. Unit 106. The narrow chamber, fragrant with mildew, and the threadbare cot. Her tiny window, and the distant moon.
                  Then she’d wake up, and the alarm would be shrilling. A small gray tunic, freshly cleaned but permanently stained, would be hanging on her door, and the sun would be rising. The trolley would be waiting. The workers would be mulling forward.
    But the night before last, something had happened that had never happened before.
    The regularly administered shots–wide, mean-looking double-barreled syringes of glass, one of sickly yellow and another of deep, mossy green –were halted before she’d received hers.
    Indignation wasn’t a common emotion to the inhabitants of Old Earth, and Coal was no exception. Her anxieties were muted by the chemical cocktail she received weekly. But, if she could have experienced indignation at that moment, she would have. There was a sublime relief which would tide over her as those fluids wove through her veins. Toward the end of the week, when its effects wore thin and she felt a painful stirring in the back of her brain, Coal 106 looked forward to the pleasure-pain prick of the needle. She looked forward to the way the world around her would darken and flatten, becoming familiar again. Less threatening. Less mysterious. A relief. A weight lifted. No, dissolved.
    The shots came to a halt, and had not yet been re-administered.
    The night of the missed shot had been filled with wild, colorful dreams. Pounding feet that melted into golden wings. A chorus of screams, no, a flute-like round of hallelujah trembling from within the clouds themselves.
    These murmurs and shifts of her mind had been merely disconcerting at first. Almost like the mental whispers of a burgeoning schizophrenic. What is that big land in the sky? The faithful instinct to continue shoveling dented and fractured under the strain. How did I even get here? Why am I doing this? It had always felt as natural as divine destiny, though she’d never asked herself these questions. They were uncomfortable, like sitting on a chair above live embers. Prickling.
    She’d continued to work. She could shrug this off. It must’ve been a spell of some sort. Influenza. It would pass. Like that pain when she breathed, or that strange sensation she only felt late at night, like there was a balloon in her heart. She could shrug this off, and it would pass.
    But today had been different. The questions intensified, culminated, and it had started to feel good. This broiling thunderhead of resentment built and built as the shovel thrust into the piles of black stone, upending them into a bin. Today had been different . . . or was it tonight, now? She’d been here so long, and she couldn’t see the sky. How long had she worked? How long did she always work?
    It was hard to tell. The mornings and the nights bled into one another. The work crews of Old