Once & Future (Once & Future #1)(47)

The guard checked his watch, confirmed something, and said, “We’ll be back for you soon enough. Don’t go anywhere.”

A short laugh rose from the lump known as Merlin’s cellmate. The guard left them, sliding a panel of ice into place, a clear one that Merlin could see through like window glass. He pulled on the uniform that had been left behind. It was warm enough to keep him alive, but not nearly warm enough to give him that sparkle of comfort he’d started to feel on Error.

“My name’s Hex,” Merlin’s cellmate said, swinging around to greet him. This person looked barely twenty—which seemed young until Merlin remembered he was seventeen. “What did they pick you up for?”

“Disturbing the thing that passes for peace,” Merlin spat. “And yourself?”

“I stole seventy-two pi?atas,” Hex said, deadpan.

Merlin’s lips pinched with fresh puzzlement. “Why did you need seventy-two pi?atas?”

“I didn’t,” Hex said. “I just needed to do… something, you know? Stealing Mercer goods was what my hands decided on. And a dozen of the pi?atas were done up to look like the Administrator, so my friends got a good crack at him before we got caught.”

“You would fit in well with my new friends!” Merlin said.

He wanted to explain about Ari, and how she was going to save them all from Mercer. But there was no time to waste—if plague had come to Urite, the contagion would move faster than Merlin ever could.

Setting his hands against the burning-cold ice, he hummed a warm bit of a lullaby, and watched as the cold gave way to his blazing anger. Water puddled at his feet, and soon he could crack his way through the thin, paltry remnants of the ice.

“That’s something I’ve never seen,” Hex said, cocking an eyebrow as if that was all he’d give Merlin for melting the damn wall. “You still don’t want to go out there, though.”

“What could possibly make ‘in here’ a better option?” Merlin asked, wiping his hands off on his crinkly uniform.

Then he heard the sounds from the hall, ricocheting off the cold walls.

The coughing, retching, whimpering that added up to death.





Merlin walked up and down the hall, touching the ice panels that separated him from the pre-dead. They lay there behind sheets of ice, their pain so complete that few of them even looked up as he passed. Their eyes were clouded, throats swollen closed, lymph nodes so shiny and inflamed they looked like grapefruits—except for the ones that had already burst. Plague spots turned tender flesh dark.

Pain, everywhere.

So much that Merlin felt it in his own skin.

He had seen plague, and believed that he’d outlived it. There were so many foul ways to die, and this was one of the worst. Merlin knew that his magic could do nothing to stop the sickness. He’d never been a healer. His physical magic was blunt, external. He couldn’t reach inside a person and untwine sickness from their cells.

He ran back to Hex.

“The guards must have vaccines. Or a cure that can be used in the event of infection,” Merlin added, already thinking of how he could steal from their stores to keep himself healthy. And Ari’s parents. Hex, too. He wished that he could find enough to go around, but he highly doubted it. The idea of leaving so many people to die raged through him like another form of sickness.

The guard who’d confiscated Merlin’s robes came around the corner with two others. They registered the melted door at the same moment. Merlin and Hex ran. Two of the guards rushed forward, grabbing Hex and Merlin before they could make it down the hall.

The third guard was right behind them.

He pricked Merlin with something—a deep, lasting jab.

And that’s when Merlin understood. This plague wasn’t passing through contagion. It wasn’t the uncontrollable sickness of yesteryear. Mercer had tamed this vile death like a pet, and they were giving it to these prisoners, one by one.

And now, they’d given it to Merlin.

He cried out as the needle pressed into muscle, a hollow soreness.

Hex was grunting and twisting. The guard hadn’t jabbed him yet. Merlin spun the sound of his pain into a song, shouting the lyrics to “You’ve Got a Friend” at the top of his lungs—a turn of events that made the guards stare. Or maybe it was the fact that Merlin’s red hair was growing back into place, falling down in front of his eyes. His face shifted, nose thinning and cheeks turning rounder.

Sparks flew from his fingers.

He apologized for breaking his promise not to use magic as he took down the guard with the needle. Then another apology—“sorry, quite sorry”—as he zinged the one holding Hex.

“Why are you being so nice to them right now?” Hex asked.

“I’m British!” Merlin cried. Some things were hard to shake, even after centuries away from home.

He turned his fingers on the guard who’d been holding him, and the guard leaped back, his hands up in surrender.

Good. Merlin needed someone to play along.

“Would you like to take another swing at Mercer?” Merlin asked Hex. “Grab his heat gun.”

Hex trotted over and took it from the guard’s side, playing with the features until a long spout of flame came out, inches from the guard’s face. “Oops,” he said, not looking repentant.