Once & Future

by Cori McCarthy

  Jordan stood forward. “She disappeared after she attacked you. We had to get you all out before associates descended like carrion flies.”

  “Gross, Jordan,” Gwen said, holding up a hand to her knight. “People on Troy came to help us. They carried all of you back to Error and made sure that we could take off.”

  Ari could hear the mournful undertones in Gwen’s voice. “What happened to them?”

  “They were arrested. Some were killed. But not before sending out these rebellion beacons. They’ve reached every Mercer-controlled system. The entire galaxy is waking up, and they want you to lead them.”

  Ari blinked. “Excuse me?”

  Val held out his watch. An image leaped forth of Ari pulling the sword from the stone courtyard and destroying the Mercer Company logo in front of the galactic state department. And then the image cut to Merlin throwing magical green fireballs, fighting off Morgana. The scrolling text beneath it read:

  KING ARTHUR HAS RISEN. MERLIN HAS RETURNED. RISE UP WITH HOPE.

  “Oh!” Merlin explained. “I’ve never made the highlight reel before!”

  Ari looked to her magician and found his wide-eyed expression matched hers. “Did you know this was going to happen?”

  “I’ve never seen it done so efficiently,” he said. “And while I slept, no less!”

  “But it’s part of the cycle,” Ari said, trying to clarify. “I have to do this. To help you.”

  “To help everyone,” Gwen added. “We have a chance to break Mercer’s stranglehold. To help billions of people. First we have to—”

  “Save Ari’s parents on Urite,” Merlin said loudly.

  Kay’s arms dropped, and he stepped forward. “My parents are on Urite?”

  “There’s plague on Urite,” Val said, face falling. “It was all over the media on Troy.”

  Ari stood and went to her brother. She grabbed his elbows. He was shaking his head, but it was more than that. His whole body trembled with a potent combo of fear and anger. “I know, Kay. We’ll help them.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good—” Gwen started to say, but Ari whipped around, causing Gwen to drop the rest of the sentence.

  “Think about it!” Merlin said. “You want Ari to stand up to Mercer? An act of resistance for the universe to rally behind? Imagine if we spirit the parents of the new King Arthur away from a Mercer prison! I’ve never had parents, but they’re generally considered important. And Ari’s parents…”

  Ari looked to Merlin. She could see in his eyes that he now knew why her parents’ freedom meant so much. They hadn’t just adopted her. They’d saved her from a torturous death in the void. It was time to return the favor. It was a freakin’ quest.

  “How?” Jordan repeated. “Urite is inaccessible.”

  “Easy,” Merlin said, standing up on wobbly legs. “Drop me off at the next Mercer-controlled colony. I’ll get arrested, and you’ll have an inside man for the job. With magic.”

  “What about the plague?” Val asked. “No way.”

  “I can’t die.”

  Everyone in the room looked at Merlin. “At least, I haven’t figured out how to die yet.”

  “Those are two very different things,” Val said.

  “Why can’t you die?” Gwen asked, startling Merlin so that he looked at her. Ari had to echo her wife’s curiosity. Why couldn’t Merlin die? Was it his magic? His backward aging? And why did Nin have such a sharp interest in keeping him alive during King Arthur’s final battle? The Lady of the Lake might have been silent since Merlin’s time at Camelot, but she was a part of this. Ari could almost feel her watching. She sent a mental middle finger in the general direction of the being called Nin—and shuddered when an icy laugh clouded her mind.

  Merlin found it quite easy to get arrested.

  Error dropped him on a tiny blip of a planet. Larger planets loomed bright in the sky as he stood in a city square and raved about the evils of Mercer.

  “These corporate greedlords have made themselves indispensable, spreading the lie that you could not possibly live without them!” Merlin’s voice peaked and twirled, fear sending it to new heights as the ubiquitous Mercer associates closed in on the square.

  Merlin’s fingers flared up, ready to spark them into a fried state.

  “No magic,” he muttered. “Not even a flicker.”

  Footage of him slinging fireballs had been shared with the universe, and Ari had made him promise to keep his identity and abilities under wraps. He’d invented a face and a set of fingerprints. Nothing showy. He was now a different teenager, as scrawny as ever, but with nondescript features, short brown hair, and overlarge feet he kept nearly tripping on.

  Not looking like himself was strange enough, but not using magic was like putting a muzzle on his heart. He raged against the powerless feeling as large figures pushed their way through the crowd, casting people to the ground, cracking them with heavy sticks, stepping hard on their hands, crunching finger bones for the crime of listening to the truth.

  Merlin’s fingers sizzled so hard with magic that he had to suck on them to cool their unspent fury. “There is someone coming to save you all from a Mercer-shaped fate,” he cried. “Her name is Ari, and she is…” Did he dare cry the forty-second reincarnation of King Arthur? Would he lose the crowd?

  “Ari,” someone whispered. “The girl with the sword.”

  “No such person,” someone else shouted. “She’s a Mercer invention. They want to sell us a hero and merch to go with her.”

  Merlin’s heart knocked around in dismay. It seemed that Mercer was even in the business of manufacturing false hope for those who hated them, and then snatching that hope back. “The monsters are getting smarter,” he mumbled.

  “I’ve seen Ari myself,” he added for the crowd. “On Troy.” Oh, how he wanted to say that he’d fought alongside her, that he was Merlin. Her Merlin. But he kept his nondescript mouth shut. “She pulled Excalibur, and there is only one explanation. She’s the hero we’ve been waiting for.” Little did these people know just how long he’d been waiting—but the need on their faces was as sharp as the one in his gut.

  The guards got their gloves around his arms, locked him in, and dragged him away from the square.

  “Rise up with hope!” he cried, holding a pretend Excalibur aloft. It probably made him look like a mad puppeteer, but the crowd loved it. They cheered, and then dispersed as more associates poured toward the square. Just as Merlin’s triumph lost its giddy, adrenaline-inspired edge, a guard did him the favor of knocking him out cold.

  When he woke up, Merlin’s head was pulsing, pushing dread through his body. From the cold perspective of a packed prison transport, all of this felt stupidly dangerous. He looked out the tiny porthole window and discovered an unwelcome truth. The prison wasn’t on Urite. The prison was Urite.

  The land was a broken scene of toothy rock and haggard ice. Prison buildings hewn from that ice stretched all the way to the curve where land met sky. They were mostly white, blinding and harsh, with vivid blues, salty greens, and mysterious purples trapped inside the frozen walls.

  The landing of the ship jarred Merlin. A guard came by and kicked at the prisoners with a dutiful swing of boot to stomach. “Get up. Get up.” It was Merlin’s turn. He hummed a single note before the boot made contact with his gut. The guard howled with pain and drew back his foot. Merlin smiled up at him, all innocence.

  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 friendl
y. “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.

  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 piñatas,” Hex said, deadpan.

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

  “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 piñatas 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 i
t. 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.