Once & Future (Once & Future #1)(46)

A broken toe wasn’t much on the grand scoreboard against Mercer, but he would take it.

Another guard came and hauled Merlin to his feet, wrapping him in a coat that would have made an Arctic parka feel inadequate. Outside of the ship, the atmosphere was gasping-thin, and everywhere the air met Merlin’s skin, he thought it would crack into cold splinters.

“Why bother bringing prisoners here?” Merlin asked. “It hardly seems hospitable.”

The guard must have been bored, or overly used to keeping company with prisoners, because his response was almost friendly. “It’s a great place to dump the dead. No predators here. No summer thaw. No spoilage or surprise diseases. Prisoners here are serving life sentences without parole. Easier to keep the pre-dead where they all end up eventually.”

Merlin looked into the placid face of the guard as the winds attacked them from all sides and his worries attacked from the inside. He had thought he was going to leave this place easily—now he wasn’t so certain. Were Ari’s parents really worth the possibility of getting stuck here? Living out endless tortures on this bastard glacier?

Yes. He’d seen Ari’s memory. He’d been inside of it. Those women had saved his Arthur, kept his last chance at ending the cycle alive. But this wasn’t just about him. It wasn’t even mostly about him. He’d felt Ari’s painful hope at her rescue. Her ache at the impossibility of being loved so much, after her birth parents died.

Merlin had never had parents of any kind. Arthur was the closest thing he’d ever had to family. And now—Ari. She’d seen the worst of his past, and she hadn’t hated him like Morgana had hoped.

They passed by a troop of guards dumping bodies into an icy chasm, a dark deep slit in the ground. He found himself straining to see if any of those people looked like Kay’s mothers, if they bore traces of Ari’s mischief and pride. But there were too many bodies, and they were being rolled down into the darkness quickly, without any respect for who they had been in life.

The guard pushed Merlin along, until they neared the great doors of the prison, yet another slab of ice. “In,” the guard said, dropping his chatty nature and hitting Merlin in the back with the butt of his shiny black gun.

Merlin stumbled forward, then turned. “How does that work in this temperature?”

“Ahhh, that’s the trick, isn’t it?” the guard said.

As the doors closed behind them, the guard aimed his gun toward the disappearing view of the frigid expanse and fired. Literally. What came out was not a stream of bullets but a blast of white-hearted, molten heat.

“An impressive death toy,” Merlin muttered.

The doors shut with a hollow boom, restoring order.

Pre-dead inside. Properly dead outside.

The guard marched Merlin away from the doors. The interior of the prison was not far off from what Merlin expected. The cell they shoved him into reminded him of one he’d inhabited when Arthur 18 was alive, and Merlin was put on trial for witchcraft. He remembered giving his accusers an earful. “Witches prefer candles and spells and herbs. I detest herbs.” But the Inquisition didn’t seem to care about such distinctions.

Once he was inside the cell, Merlin noticed that another person was in there, a human-ish lump facing the wall. He’d never had a cellmate before. Maybe he could recruit this person to help on his quest.

A new guard appeared with a small packet of fabric. “Undress.”

“What?” Merlin asked, already cold at the thought.

“Those are going in the incinerator,” the guard said, pointing at everything Merlin was wearing.

Merlin looked down at his robes. He’d insisted on wearing them even though Val had argued that they were unique, too Merlinesque. But that was why he’d needed them so badly. They kept him anchored in who he was. In what he was—a great magician. He touched the stitching of crescent moons, the worried cuffs. They’d started to fall apart after a dozen cycles, and he’d been mending them ever since.

“Now,” the guard said.

“No.” The word flew out, small and stupid and stubborn.

“What?” the guard asked.

Merlin couldn’t explain it. No one but Ari would understand. She didn’t have many pieces of her past left, either. “They’re mine.”

The guard raised the butt of his heat gun and cracked Merlin across the back of the shoulders. He fell to all fours. The man struck him again, as if every second he didn’t comply was a new crime against Mercer.

Merlin’s back erupted with pain. Bruising ran down to his bones. His hands gave out, and he landed facedown on the floor, the man’s boot stamped into his back. The pain shaded into numbness as his body decided he could no longer handle reality. Magic didn’t matter. He couldn’t stop this.

What was he going to do? Take on the entire prison? The entire planet?

His breath came in short, shameful pants. His mind created a new set of steps. Find Ari’s parents. Make a plan. Get back to Ari.

Nowhere in there did it say, Keep your robes at all costs.

“Fine,” he said, rolling away from the gun and getting up.

He shrugged out of the sleeves, then ducked out of the neck. As he pulled them over his head, he realized that this was the last of him—the final vestige of the Merlin from the old stories.

He was a naked, shivering teenager.