Once & Future (Once & Future #1)(63)

He played down by the mosaic fountain sometimes, the one with the jeweled camels. Yasmeen probably knew his name. Ari would ask her cousin when they met up again, and his name would most likely wake him. That always worked in the best stories.

But when she was only a few steps away, she let go of the dream that he was sleeping. His green eyes were thrown open at the sky. Green and gone.

And yet she swore she saw movement in him. A sign of life. A twitch in his throat that might be a held breath. She knelt beside him and shook his shoulder with a careful hand. His mouth dropped open, pouring black flies into the desert air, into Ari’s eyes and hair.

She screamed and screamed, her father swooping her up as they ran back to the space docks. Ari dropped the racehorses. Maybe they were the bad luck. Maybe they’d caused this to happen. It was the only thought that made sense.

Ari’s parents’ ship took off moments later, running from the sight of Mercer bots in the sky, building something, while a Mercer patrol screeched after them, sounding alarms in the ship that made Ari hide beneath the control panel and bite her knuckle until it bled.

Ari lifted her head. She was on her knees, alone. Morgana was gone. The sun was setting, blue-and-orange fiery light lining the horizon. Even the siren birds were lilting through the air. It was a familiar nightmare that had masqueraded through her hopes as a dream.

Ketch, the entire planet, was a tomb.

She had to get out of here.

She ran first to the space docks, but they were stripped bare. Mercer had poisoned the population somehow and then taken every conceivable ship in case there were survivors. Then they’d sealed the planet away, and when her parents had tried to tell the galaxy of Mercer’s massacre, they’d been murdered.

Ari’s thoughts skittered back to the conversation about Lionel’s treatment with the Administrator. How close was Mercer to repeating its genocidal history?

“Morgana!” Ari swung around, yelling at the skies. “Get me out of here!”

Morgana didn’t appear, the coward, but her voice slid along the wind. “I’d need Merlin’s blood to make another portal to push you through. Why don’t you call your friends?”

Ari looked at her blank wrist again, missing her watch, her only direct com link with Error. Now that the barrier was broken, she should be able to get a message out, but how? She ran back to Ras Almal, up the stairs to the balcony where she’d battled the taneen. She swept the sand off the stone and pressed the hidden buttons, bringing the system online. It still worked. She typed in the fourteen-digit strand of Error’s call codes—the only number she’d memorized in the whole universe. Kay would answer. And Merlin and Gwen would bring them here. They’d pick her up. Save her from this dead place…

Ari pressed Enter. The signal spun and spun until it ended, cut off. THE SHIP YOU ARE TRYING TO LOCATE IS OUT OF RANGE OR NO LONGER IN SERVICE, the system told her.

Ari turned, her back sliding down the console until her butt hit the hard stone. She looked at her hands, stained red from the gritty sand. She’d dreamed of this moment so many times, the blood desert of Ketch coating her skin once again. Now this red seemed to symbolize the heights to which Mercer would rise to wipe out rebellion.

The color of cost.

“They’ll answer,” Ari said, her voice unrecognizable in her own ears. “My friends will be looking for me. They’re safe somewhere. I’ll keep calling until they answer.”

“How could you know that?” Morgana said, sitting beside her. She was not so all-powerful for once, as lost as Ari in her own ways. “They might think you’re dead. I might have—”

“Arthur wanted me to see this place, so this is part of it.” Ari covered her face with her hands. You wanted me to know what Mercer is truly capable of. Is that it, Arthur?

No answer.

“You are an admirable creature,” Morgana said, clearly against her will. “Your entire planet is lost, your people extinct, and you are scratching around for hope like that ravenous dragon, as if perhaps one more meal will make a difference in your starvation.”

“You’re insufferable.” Ari felt herself crumbling in. Morgana had been right; Ari was not the same person, not with these memories unlocked. This truth unfurled her fury. A woken dragon. “Morgana?”

“Yes?”

“Show me everything. Everything Merlin doesn’t want me to know.”





Merlin was awake in the middle of the night again, walking the ramparts of the castle, checking his magical barrier for weaknesses.

The web of energy lines he’d created to keep Lionel safe from the Mercer ships required constant upkeep, and a year of staring at the sky had left his face permanently pinched, his neck aching, his eyesight worse than ever. His magic was always on the verge of being drained. But he did what was needed. He hummed and sent up a few crackling threads to repair a small breach—not big enough for a ship to fit through, but he couldn’t let it grow.

“Nicely done,” Gwen said, her voice bleary. She patted Merlin’s shoulder. “Lionel thanks you for your service.” Gwen rarely slept, always afraid that the next day would bring doom to her people. Merlin worried that the ever-glowing lights of his barrier wasn’t helping, but at least Gwen and Merlin had found common ground on their nocturnal castle-walks. She was the first Gweneviere he had ever befriended. She had even named him Lionel’s official mage.