You’ll all be dead, Merlin’s brain corrected. And I’ll be left alone to mourn you.
Val put his arms around Merlin’s neck, lacing his hands there, keeping Merlin’s eyes at ground level. “If you did die tomorrow…”
Merlin’s finger flew into the air. “I can’t—”
“Theoretically,” Val said, gently rolling his eyes. “What would you want people to say about you, Merlin?”
“Once upon a time, he had a very nice beard,” Merlin said. “He was the teacher of forty-two king Arthurs. He never gave in to tyrants.”
“Your fear is a tyrant,” Val shot back.
“Are you saying I’m as bad as Mercer?” Merlin asked, his offense only mostly feigned.
“You’re worse,” Val said. “Mercer doesn’t tease me and then leave me alone at night to… what’s the Old Earth phrase? Take care of myself?”
Merlin coughed. Violently.
“Are you all right?” Val asked, his smile spreading wide.
Walk away. Leave now. Abandon all hope, ye who flirt with Val.
But Merlin stayed exactly where he was, with Val’s hands looped around his neck. His body was making its own decisions, and they were questionable at best. “You’ve been… because of me?”
“Yes,” Val said, taking a step forward. “How do you deal with it?”
“I lecture myself, mostly. Long, dry lectures.” Merlin’s palms were prickling. His hands were still at his sides, forgotten and awkward. “But sometimes… yes. Sometimes I indulge in other methods. My imagination is rather potent. Shall I show you?”
Oh, celestial gods. What had he just offered?
“You’re killing me,” Val said, his smile as wide as ever.
“Then at least we’re dying together this time.” Merlin raised his hands to the place they most longed to be—Val’s chest. He slowly, slowly, started to explore, fingers moving in circles, rippling outward. He pulled their bodies together, fitting Val’s slightly longer frame with Merlin’s smaller one. Val had muscles that didn’t look prominent like Kay’s or Jordan’s, but they were there, shifting under his skin, glowing blue-purple in the barrier’s light.
Even with so much time to anticipate what this might feel like, each moment of contact surprised Merlin. The slip of hands under shirts. Their faces brushing, cheeks and jaws sliding along each other, lips soft on skin, a long slow preamble to kissing.
“Ohhhhh,” Val said slowly, standing back.
Merlin leaped. “What? What?” Had he ruined everything in some unforeseen way?
“You knew this was going to happen tonight,” Val said with a pleased, satisfied smile.
“What do you mean?” Merlin was genuinely puzzled.
“You shaved for me.” Val ran a finger along Merlin’s jawline, rubbing his curiously smooth countenance. “How did you shave this close during a planet-wide drought? You’re baby soft.”
Those words unlocked a deep fear. Merlin had never so much as set a razor to his skin. Baby soft. This was the proof of Merlin’s backward aging. He would never have a future with Val.
Shut it down. Shut it all down.
He violently cut off the feelings running through his body. The emotions blasting through his heart.
Everything.
The night went dark, and Merlin and Val gasped. For the first time in a year, there was no barrier, no brilliant web of light in the sky.
“Did we just doom the planet by almost kissing?” Val asked.
“No.” Merlin had shut down everything inside of himself—including his magic. Technically, they had doomed the planet by not kissing.
And Mercer ships were already raining down.
Merlin tried to put the barrier back up, but his magic was too weak to create the entire thing from scratch. Besides, Mercer ships were swarming the atmosphere, and now Lionel had an invasion to deal with.
Val and Merlin ran through the castle, waking everyone up, shouting down the stone hallways. They were all going to die, as Merlin looked on, unkillable. And all Merlin could think was that it was a damn shame he’d stopped himself from kissing Val before it was too late.
All he could picture was Ari’s disappointed face.
Everyone gathered by the light of a few stubby candles in the great hall, pulling on clothes. “Merlin, what happened to the barrier?” Gwen demanded. “Why is it gone?”
“I experienced a slight… malfunction,” Merlin whispered, guilt rolling inside of him like great sea swells. “Please, if you’ll let me apologize…”
But before he could grovel, Gwen’s watch lit up, ominously blue. For a year, not a single message had been able to get in or out of Lionel. Merlin’s web of magic had been down for less than five minutes, and here was someone who wanted to talk.
The Administrator’s head popped up. Everyone else looked so different after this year, but he was exactly the same, with his smooth face and bland eyes. “Good-bye, dearest Gweneviere,” he said in a vinegar voice. “We’ll always wish you had accepted our offer on Troy. We miss your wife so much, don’t you? Good news, you’ll be reunited soon—”
The signal cut out.
Killed. On purpose.
“His sense of drama is getting stale,” Val muttered.
“The Mercer ships are landing,” Gwen said. “We’ve sealed the castle doors. Jordan is outside on watch. Hopefully she’s waking people up and gathering her knights.”
Merlin knew that the Lionelian tournament knights had been training for this all year. He also knew that they were dehydrated, exhausted, and didn’t stand a chance in a full-blown fight against a Mercer attack force outfitted with the best killing machines money could buy.
“What now?” Merlin croaked.
Gwen and Lamarack exchanged a glance. “We evacuate the planet,” she said. “Go.”
Lam took off, with a quick kiss of her hand.
“Evacuate?” Merlin echoed. “How are we going to do that with a tiny ship that was far from spaceworthy in the first place?” His voice sounded pinched and hysterical in his own ears. His guilt reached a fever pitch. “Error isn’t even close. How are we supposed to get to her with Mercer forces pouring through the city?”
The cannons boomed, and everyone jumped. “I thought those were ceremonial,” Kay said.
“They work in a pinch,” Gwen said. “We have to keep the invading forces distracted for long enough to get off the ground. Lam and I have it all worked out.”
Gwen grabbed a candle in a stamped tin holder and approached the wall of tapestries in the dining hall. Most of them showed pictures of knights on horsebots. Not exactly traditional, but Merlin had grown to love the anachronisms of this place as much as everything else.
Jordan appeared, pounding down a flight of stairs, looking so red and strained with exertion that Merlin thought she would tip over on the spot. “Are you quite all right?”
“How did you even get inside?” Kay asked.
Jordan knelt before Gwen, her loyalty spotless even under such stress. “I had to get to my queen. I swung over the mercury moat on a hidden rope and scaled the castle walls by starlight.”
“Of course you did,” Merlin said, rolling his eyes.
Gwen ignored the jab. “I didn’t want it to come to this, but with the ships landing, we have no choice. There is another ship in our colony, Merlin.” She pulled aside a tapestry—one of the previous queen at her coronation—and revealed a metallic door that looked strangely like the ones on Error. “You’re standing inside of it.”
Kay spun to her, his face gratifyingly blank. “The castle is a spaceship?”
“The towers, crenellations, and most of the fa?ade were added later,” she said, which explained Merlin’s observations about the additions to the odd metallic base of the castle. “The core of the building is a generation ship that the original colonists converted.”
“But it hasn’t flown since Lionel was established seventy solar cycles ago,” Val said.