Once & Future

by Cori McCarthy

  “But… you’re the one who gave me the steps,” Merlin said. “That’s the last step. And Ari will be the one to finally do it. She knows that bringing people together doesn’t mean making them the same.” Merlin felt everything inessential begin to slip away. “She’s more like the first Arthur than any I’ve trained. I can’t leave them.”

  The Lady of the Lake’s smile curled like a burning page. “What makes you think Ari will live through the day? You could be giving up everything for a dead girl and a wisp of ancient spirit.”

  The idea that Ari might be dying only made Merlin more desperate. But what Nin had offered still glimmered like diamonds on water in the dying sun. Merlin wanted to stop aging backward so much he could taste it. It was a meal with his family. A kiss finally shared without fear. Only that kiss wouldn’t be with Val, and that family would be far away from Ari—if she even survived.

  Merlin had made this mistake before. He’d taken Nin’s bargain, and let Arthur die.

  He might not have started the cycle, but if he wanted to end it, he was going to have to stop making the same mistakes. It wasn’t just a question of plodding through the steps, again and again and again.

  Merlin had to change the story.

  “Let me go, Nin,” he said, the depths of his commanding old-man voice returning for a single moment. He had one card left to play, and he would throw it down. Nin had brought him here twice, and both times she’d bargained with him to stay as if he did have the power to get himself out if he wanted to. Merlin pointed his magic straight at her. A song came to him: he hummed the sprightly tune to that old Camelot musical.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.

  “Using the power you’ve already given me,” Merlin said, her doubt encouraging him. After all, Nin had only started bargaining when Merlin looked for a way out of the cave. If he was truly trapped here, she would not have offered a deal.

  “Do you believe you can touch me with magic?” Nin asked, her voice fading into the air as her form vanished.

  “It’s like you said before, this isn’t a battle.” The first sparks flew out of Merlin’s hands and hit the cave wall, crumbling a section, letting in the blinding light of pure time. “This is a prison break. Fortunately, I have some practice with those.”

  More magic flew out, and another great chunk of the wall fell, rocks hitting water with a great crash. He didn’t need to give Nin a body, like he had with Morgana, if he wanted to use his magic on her. The cave was her body—it was her physical creation.

  All he needed was a way out.

  “Stop that,” Nin said, her voice shaking the ground.

  “Let me go!” Merlin cried.

  The cave blasted white as all of his magic came out of him at once.

  Merlin returned to a room filled with medical equipment and Mercer associates, all of them scattered in a rough, broken circle. The ground was covered with jagged white scorch marks.

  So the explosion had done more than release him from Nin’s cave.

  When Merlin stood, his body weighed several thousand pounds, and his brain might as well have been a briny pickle in a delicate glass jar. “I’ve been heavily sedated,” he said, but it came out more like, “I’be en hemily sebated.”

  He hated the thought that Mercer had been taking his blood and running tests, but he didn’t have time to destroy whatever evidence of his magic they’d collected. He needed to get to Ari before Mercer killed one of his friends.

  Merlin gave himself a tremendous smack, which succeeded in shocking away the worst of the sedative. He began to stumble out of the medical facility, but one of the bodies on the floor caught his eye. This one had been locked to a chair—and taken down along with it. Scorch marks had fileted her skin with white burns. Merlin pushed the black hair back from her face and whispered her name, “Morgana?”

  Nothing.

  In a moment that melted the color from the body, Morgana materialized beside him, freed from Merlin’s corporeal gift—and no small amount pissed.

  “That is the last time you kill me, old man.”

  “Apologies,” Merlin said. “Truly, it was collateral damage.”

  “There are worse ways to die, I suppose,” Morgana admitted. “Those people,” she cast dirty glances at the dead associates around them, “would have taken apart our cells, if allowed. I locked several of them in the asylum of their worst memories, but more just kept coming.”

  Merlin wanted to tell Morgana about his run-in with Nin, but there was no time. He asked the only question that mattered. “Where are the others?”

  “They were speaking of a ceremony.” Morgana’s body faded back to its familiar transparent state. “This way.”

  Merlin chased after her, stumbling out of the medical facility, into… a mall, of all places. The white lights made him blink while the sterilized air left a dead taste in his mouth. At first he spun around in the hall, but then he caught the sounds of a great, cheering crowd. He followed it to a huge set of double doors just as a great roar went up from behind them. Were they cheering on Ari—or the dragon she was fighting?

  “Tickets,” a Mercer associate asked, barring the way and pushing out a hand.

  Merlin didn’t have tickets. He did a quick bodily check—no magic, either.

  Morgana had already slithered past the associate and was watching him with frantic impatience. Even she was terrified on Ari’s behalf.

  Merlin gave the Mercer associate a high five, and then used his momentary confusion to run past him into the stadium. “A trick as old as time!” he cried as he took off, hoping the associate wouldn’t fire his gun straight into a crowd.

  As he ran into the massive tiered stadium, the vicious cries for blood summoned his worst fear. He could only hope that this time, he hadn’t reached his Arthur too late.

  Big Mama’s jaws snapped tight on Ari’s thigh.

  A half-moon of pain pierced the chain mail, sinking into Ari’s muscle and causing her to scream. She brought Excalibur’s pommel down on the taneen’s nose, knocking the dragon in what she knew to be a sensitive spot.

  Big Mama snorted and reared, letting Ari escape. She limped across the red sand floor of the massive arena, warm blood sweeping down her leg from a dozen new punctures. Ari ducked behind a large stone dais in the center, trying to catch her breath.

  To make a choice.

  All around, the endless screams of the crowd and the flashes of thousands of cameras kept Ari’s heart thundering and Big Mama’s roars furious. Mercer had spared no expense for this show. The million-seater auditorium rose up for half a mile around them, the uppermost tiers barely in sight. It felt like being at the bottom of a well—and just as hopeless.

  Big Mama didn’t care who Ari was or how long they’d known each other. Like Ari, Mercer had piled the dragon heavily with armor. They’d starved her strategically. They’d killed her baby in front of her. Ari had half a mind to let the grieving taneen eat her, but that wasn’t the game, was it? Ari had to win.

  That was the only eventuality the Administrator would allow. If Ari died, there would be no king to place a cursed Mercer crown upon. Her friends would be erased from existence like Ketch had been. And yet none of that truth made it easier to kill this dragon.

  Big Mama scuttled around the dais, head bleeding from two spots, the red washing the taneen’s vision. Ari scaled the stones, swinging one-handed when Big Mama’s teeth snapped at her arm. Once she’d rolled over the top edge, she kept herself in the center. Big Mama was as tall as the dais, but she couldn’t fit on it. She spun around it a few times, roaring in disapproval, Ari just out of reach.

  Ari had to find a way to get the taneen to remember her. If she could, maybe there was a way to avoid turning the dragon’s death into a spectacle for an uncaring, unfeeling universe. Maybe she could show them that this was not a senseless beast to destroy…

  Ari wished she still had some lamb jerky as she ripped at the pieces of the King Arthur armor Mer
cer had fitted her with. Nothing would budge but the helmet, so she tore it off and held her sword behind her back in one shaking hand.

  Big Mama had her front legs on the edge of the dais, jaws snapping at the air.

  “Hey… it’s me. Remember me?” Ari mimed taking a piece of jerky out of her pocket. Big Mama’s dark, liquid eyes roved over Ari’s empty palm. “I don’t have anything for you. They’ve taken everything from me. And you. They…” Her voice choked up as the words rose out, broken and excruciating. “They killed Kay.”

  Both of them.

  “And we can’t… we can’t beat them all. Neither of us can.” Ari moved closer, sword arm still held back. Her other palm was held out emptily, offering nothing but friendship to the enraged dragon.

  “Do you remember how Kay would play dead?” Ari snuck a few steps closer. The taneen was taking in the tears in her eyes, the flush of pain in her words. Ari had wondered how much she could understand. Kay had been limited, but then, he was just a baby. “Do you think you can do that, Big Mama? Can you play dead?”

  The taneen’s jaws closed, her head cocked. She understood Ari, maybe.

  “I’m going to shove this sword through that terrible armor. I’m going to get it off of you. But you have to stay down afterward. Do you hear me? Play dead.”

  Ari couldn’t tell if this would work. She doubted it, and yet, what choice did she have? She closed her eyes and took one last step closer. Big Mama could have snapped her head off, if she wanted.

  But she didn’t.

  Ari swung Excalibur around, slicing across the terrible armored plates Mercer had tied to Big Mama. The armor fell away at the same time that the dragon teetered upright on her hind legs—and then fell backward with an enormous, bone-crunching crash that shook the arena and left it in silence.

  Ari rushed to the edge of the dais, unsure if she’d convinced the dragon, or if Excalibur had been too sharp. The taneen’s long, thick neck, now free from the armor, was bleeding into the red sand. Were those injuries from the armor or Ari? She couldn’t tell.

  And Big Mama didn’t move.

  The crowd went berserk, and the great rolling doors at the end of the arena opened, filling the floor with an army of Mercer associates, as well as her friends on horseback, and the devil himself, the Administrator.

  Ari knelt against her will.

  Her eyes were stuck on the sand smeared across the stone dais. Rusted red. Ketchan sand; she would have recognized it anywhere. Stolen from her planet and spread across this sick arena. This touch of detail was so cruel, it made it hard to breathe. To be killed on soil that had been stolen from her murdered planet was one thing.

  To be made into a puppet figurehead upon it was something else entirely.

  The Administrator’s performance was one of gracious words and swelling musical accompaniment as he placed the cursed crown—Kay’s blood erased from its shining points and jewels—on Ari’s head.

  Beside her, Gwen was wearing her old crown from Lionel. They had been positioned together as dual sovereigns. King and queen. A pair for the Administrator’s living chessboard.

  The crowd erupted in polite cheers while the Administrator began to talk… and talk. He spoke of Ari’s life like it was an inspirational book he’d read, and Ari could do nothing but suffer the weight of that crown. It truly was heavy. At least ten pounds. Maybe even lined in lead; she wouldn’t put it past Mercer, after all, they wanted her to know she was under their yoke. Everything she did, believed, chose, breathed was because they allowed it.

  At the foot of the stone dais, too far away, Ari could feel her friends’ heartbeats as if they were her own. Lamarack’s resistant pound, Jordan’s loyal drum, and Val’s tenor. In between those beats, she heard the silence as well. The voided places where the people of Ketch now resided, shadowed by Mercer’s lies. Her birth parents, too, were in that silence, blasted into it.

  And Kay.

  Ari couldn’t remember him with thick shoulders and shaggy hair. She saw only the chubby nine-year-old who’d sat outside her hammock after she’d been saved from the crash, unable to speak their language and frozen by hundreds of stiff, slowly healing burns. Young Kay had poked food through a gap in the zipper, one chip at a time. For hours, for days. None of his words had meant anything, until they started to. Kay, kay, kay. Kay. He had said it until little Ari whispered it back, and then he’d crowed throughout the ship like teaching her his name had been the highlight of his entire life.

  It had made Ari smile… after the trauma of her birth parents’ murder, after the torture of the water barrel. An impossible feat.

  A gasp slipped out as she returned to the present, head bent beneath the scorching lights of the arena, bearing the suffocating armor. Gwen stirred beside her, and Ari returned to the idea of heartbeats. Gwen’s was so close, so steadfast, and it wasn’t alone, was it? There would be a baby. A new person who would come into this ruined universe, who’d grow up to look at her and ask, Why? Why would you want me to exist in such a broken place?

  The Administrator’s voice droned on, and Ari squeezed her eyes, trying not to imagine his vile heartbeat along with the rest. Loud and cruel, fast and stabbing.

  How do we fight back, Arthur? she asked that deep, silent voice inside.

  No reply.

  “How do we fight back?” Ari whispered through gritted teeth.

  “Ari?” Gwen answered, the smallest whisper of a voice.

  “You’ll die.” Ari glanced at Gwen’s face, her stomach. “Both of you. If I fight now, you’ll die. All of us will. I can’t…”

  Gwen slid her hand over Ari’s. The Administrator was still regaling the crowd with images and videos from Ari’s life. The moment when Jordan had thrown the fight on Lionel. When Gwen had come down from the stands with the unwavering look in her eye and had kissed the daylights out of Ari.

  Gwen had been getting her back for leaving all those years ago, without so much as a good-bye. It had been such a delicious punishment; everything Ari’d missed out on, every heated moment she’d lost, shining through those brief seconds. And all of a sudden, Ari wanted a long life with millions of disagreements; she wanted Gwen to punish her like that forever.

  The crowd in the tiered arena was just as entranced. They watched the 3D video of Ari and Gwen’s marriage on massive screens, and Gwen leaned in close.

  “He is not giving us our lives, Ari. He’s taking them from us. Like he stole Kay’s.” Gwen’s grief was so new, a shine on her skin, a light rain that had fallen over her.

  For Ari, his loss was a knife twisted into her side by the Administrator himself. Her eyes teared up miserably. “Please, don’t. I can’t talk about him now. I can’t… We have to take the deal. Go back to Lionel. Find some spark of hope and—”

  “No matter what Mercer lets us have, it won’t be ours. We will be possessions. And we,” Gwen motioned down at their friends far below, also on their knees, heads cast down, “would rather die. Here. Now. With the universe as a witness.”

  Ari felt herself looking up into the dazzling, bright lights, whispering the Administrator’s embittered words, “Martyrs do kill the economy.” She turned to Gwen, the terrible stone of a crown biting into the side of her head. She felt a sting and a warm spot. The edges of it were so sharp it was making her bleed. Gwen touched the side of Ari’s face, fingers coming away red.

  As red as Kay’s mouth in his last laughing moment.

  Ari shuddered, pain spiraling outward at an alarming rate. “I have an idea, but I need your help. You know I’m no good at pageantry.”

  Gwen smiled, ever so slightly. “You are miles from where you used to be, dragon slayer.”

  Ari winced, casting a quick look at the enormous mound of Big Mama beside the dais. She hadn’t moved, and Ari’s scheme to keep the dragon alive seemed less and less realistic. “I have an idea, but we have to win the crowd. We need to surprise them. Something simple but attention grabbing.”

  Gwen stared at Ari, biti
ng her lip, cheeks flushed.

  Was that a suggestion?

  “Gwen…” Ari stared at her pink mouth and the bright pain behind her eyes. The crowd was still eating up the video of their wedding. Even the Administrator had his head tipped back, staring up at the entranced crowd, pleased, no doubt, by the mounting roll of incoming credits.

  “It would surprise them,” Gwen whispered.

  When Ari was marooned on Ketch, she had dreamed about kissing Gwen again. She’d set the stage in her mind thousands of times. There were swooping embraces. Passionate, swirling lifts. Soft, drowsy bedtime kisses. Fierce, needing, rolling, gasping ones…

  All of those longings faded now, turned to something so fractured she couldn’t see the image through the shards. She didn’t know what was still Ari and Gwen. There was so much Mercer now. So much Kay. So much King Arthur.

  Ari turned away, thinking back to that moment behind the stables when they were young. They’d never gotten along, Gwen and Ari. They’d argued through knight camp so heatedly that their teacher had paired them up as a punishment, and yet it had flipped their magnetism. That moment against the wall, out of view, they’d started to fight about something pointless. Gwen’s shoulder was slipping out of her dress—always slipping out—and Ari had bitten in. A full-on attack of hormones and desire that tumbled them into a knot of unending kisses and hands and hips, skin feverish to meet skin.

  It hadn’t stopped their arguments, but it’d inspired new ones. Beautiful ones.

  A few million light-years in space and time from those two girls, Ari found herself staring at Gwen’s shoulder. This time her clothes weren’t slipping free; this dress fit like a corset, so tight it left angry red marks where it was pressing in.

  But it was also strapless.

  Ari’s face dipped low, closer, closer. Her mouth found Gwen’s shoulder, breaking the barrier between them with a playful nip, destroying it as swiftly as Excalibur had demolished the one around Ketch. Gwen cradled Ari’s face, bringing their lips together in a way that seemed to make the whole gods damn universe tremble.