Once & Future (Once & Future #1)(32)

“Nine minutes, people!” Kay said, emerging from the engine room with grease smears all through his gray hair, arms lofted high.

“We’re cleared to continue,” Gweneviere said over the radio.

Error coughed her way back to life, but she flew smoothly enough. Merlin joined the rest of the crew at the window. The Mercer ships were no longer a sign of their impending doom. “It worked,” Merlin said, shock lifting the edges of his voice.

“I thought you knew it was going to work the whole time,” Ari said. “Aren’t you my wise and all-knowing mentor?”

“I used to be.” Now Merlin was walking without a tether, toward an unknown future. And it felt brilliant.





Error landed on Troy’s sterile atmospheric docks, the shining silver platforms connected to the city by tethered elevators.

Ari’s band of knights couldn’t resist making a few faces in the small ship windows of their armored escorts. Ari tasted a wild humor at having trounced Mercer in this simple—and yet bizarrely satisfying—way. She displayed her middle finger for the shouting, shoving associates, while Kay dropped his pants and gave them the pressed ham on the glass.

“We only have minutes,” Gwen said heatedly, drying out everyone’s laughs. “Merlin, block their communications.” Merlin complied, fingers dancing while various sensors and dishes crumpled on the outside of the Mercer ships. Ari’s sense of lightness crumpled as well.

They dropped into the city in a glass elevator. Merlin’s jaw hung open as he took in a planet that was entirely human-made. One enormous city covered the entire thing, without interruption. “Troy has no indigenous nature,” Lam explained. “Just barren rock coated and recoated by skyscrapers. Bet you haven’t seen anything like it.”

“I have,” he said. “This is quite like Mumbai or Tokyo or New York City in the twenty-third century, but even then, we had… sky.” Merlin’s eyes pointedly turned toward the pale atmosphere that glowed digitally, changing advertisements at swift intervals.

Ari put an arm around her magician. “It could be worse.”

“It’s worse,” Kay said, pointing to a patch that lit up with Ari’s picture. WANTED. DANGEROUS. KETCHAN. DO NOT APPROACH. The words scrolled beneath her scowling face, the image taken from too close—from when she’d used that couple’s watch to take tourist photos on Heritage. She could see the visor of the knight’s suit pushed all the way up. She should have kept the damn thing on to talk to them.

“Shit,” Gwen said, and Ari looked at her wife, startled into a smile by how sexy Gwen sounded when she swore. “Val?”

“They can’t detain her once you’re inside the government offices,” Val said. “It’s a bizarre sanctuary loophole left over from when Troy had its own government, before Mercer swallowed it. You’ll have to get there before anyone spots her, though.”

“We move fast,” Jordan said, her armor taking up most of the elevator. “The people here aren’t strong enough to stand up to Mercer. They do as they’re told. They’ll report us.”

Lam took off the purple scarf they were wearing and draped it around Ari’s head. “And we’ll go separate ways. We’ll draw less attention if there are fewer of us traveling together.”

Gwen took control with a succinct tilt of her head. “Jordan and Ari are with me.”

Ari touched Merlin’s shoulder. “You’re with the boys and Lam. Take care of them?”

“No harm will come to them,” Merlin promised, holding up two fingers as if making some kind of strange pledge.

She squeezed his thin shoulders and ruffled his red hair. “I trust you,” she whispered. She never wanted to catch him staring into the void like he had during their spacewalk—as if he were about to be eaten whole by a cruel, pointless universe. Ari had felt like that after she lost her family, before she settled into life with Kay and the moms. “You’re one of us now, got it?”

Merlin nodded with those large brown eyes that had grown on her so much that it felt like they’d always been familiar. The elevator slowed and stopped at the ground level of Troy. When the doors opened, they shot out into the city like a flock of birds from a tower window, splitting apart and yet staying in formation. Gwen knew the way, so Ari followed, and Jordan brought up the rear. Ari kept one hand near her shoulder, at the spot where Excalibur was strapped to her back.

The overcrowded nature of the planet helped matters. No one looked at Ari’s face. They were too busy hustling—a rushing river of humanity that would not pause its flow for anything. The same force that was keeping her anonymous had a dark side, though. Troy had a history of terrible riots. People trampled beneath the heels of hysteria. Bodies strewn like litter in the aftermath. Which was why Mercer kept such a tight lockdown on the entire planet; she wouldn’t be surprised if every single person was monitored.

Ari shivered as they wound down several streets and approached a wide, circular stone courtyard bearing an enormous gold statue of the Mercer Company logo. The gleaming building behind it wore the—much smaller—silver words GALACTIC STATE DEPARTMENT.

“They’re not even trying to hide Mercer’s control over the government,” Ari noted. “They’re bragging about it.”