Once & Future (Once & Future #1)(87)

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.