LEGACY RISING Read Online Free PDF Page A

keep me safe and sound, tucked away from any possible mayhem or danger.” Legacy frowned. It was odd to hear him speak of the duke as his father. It was odd to think of that man as anything other than a tyrant. “And here I am, so I suppose it worked quite well,” Kaizen went on. “Well, except for now. Now I know you. Legacy. Would you like to sit with me?”
                  “Right here? On the stairs?”
                  “Well, yes,” he said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “There’s nowhere else to sit.”
                  Legacy tried to measure his intentions in the dark, but couldn’t see with enough clarity to gauge his trustworthiness. “And then what?” she asked.
                  Kaizen laughed at her. “I don’t know?” he replied. “We become friends?”
                  Legacy took a step closer to him, squinting up into his face. They were almost touching, she stood so close now. “You’re, like, a real person,” she said, as if inspecting a precious stone.
                  Kaizen tipped his hat in reply.
                  The gonging of the city’s clock tower vibrated heavily throughout Taliko Center. It went off . . . twelve times.
                  “Oh, shit!” Legacy hissed, looking up at Kaizen, then backing away. “I’ve— I’m sorry— I’ve got to go!”
                  Had it already been half an hour?
                  “But—” Kaizen began.
                  “It was nice to meet you!” Legacy called over her shoulder, already trundling down the dark infinity of twisting stairs. “You’re really not that bad!” And with that, she staggered over a velvet rope and into a sentry, aghast.
    “Hey, now!” he commanded, gripping her arm. His eyes were wide with near panic. “Who are you? When did you get up there? Stay right here, miss! I’ll need to be alerting my superiors!”
    “Alerting them as to how abandoned your post was?” Legacy countered, eyes flashing. “Let go of me!”
    The sentry glared, considering, but then released her, and Legacy floundered backwards into the swarm of merrymakers. It was like waking from one strange dream—the solitude of the tower, Earl Kaizen in the shadows, the quiet, intimate conversation—and then being spat immediately into another, a nightmare of lights and laughter, the smiling, porcelain figurines offering their trays, the elaborate, bustling skirts of dancing debutantes.
                  Legacy whirled and frantically swept the crowd with her eyes, but saw no sign of the duke or his family, nor a seated and attentive audience. She wasn’t quite sure how to reach the concert hall. She’d never been to Taliko Center before.
    Returning to the safety of the periphery, Legacy leapt onto a tufted chair and gave the room another scan, revealing an opened pair of double doors so far away that she struggled to discern what lay beyond. Still, she shouldered through the crowd, having located the trajectory of her path, and almost collapsed through the hedge-like horizon of bodies that the party-goers made, into the long, narrow sanctuary of the concert hall, and the duke’s annual public gesture, the founder’s day speech. Of course, the speech had already ended—in truth, it’d ended while she’d still been in that screening line—but now Duke Taliko stood at the podium, murmuring into the microphone about something else. It was either employment opportunity or worker rights, two grim prospects in the city of Icarus. But his answer was punctuated by a slight, sagging smile cut across his short, blond beard, a slow blink of his eyes, and the crowd politely acquiescing to applaud.
    Near the doors, the broadcast crew of CIN-3 was stationed with cameras. Liam stood with his beefy shoulder bearing a blinking green lens the size of a plate, and standing in front of him with