Ari picked up two ornate Mercer swords and shoved one in Val’s hand and one in Merlin’s. They both looked at them like they were odd hairbrushes. “You two stay with Lam. Help them get those doors open, if it’s possible. Find a way out of here, if you can.”
“Error should be in the docking garage,” Lam said. “When you were unconscious, they were retrofitting her with a bunch of Mercer gadgets. Turning her into a sort of chariot to parade their fake king in. It’s what made Kay lose his cool before.…”
Ari swallowed hard, trying not to picture that scene. “Find her, and get my parents, too—”
Morgana appeared, wispy and miserable. “They are sealing us in from every angle. Escape is improbable.”
Ari apologized to Merlin and slid Excalibur along his arm. Val shouted and Merlin cried out, turning pale. A line of blood shone along the blade, and Ari looked at Morgana, hard. “Optimism, Morgana.”
“Ara Azar,” the Administrator said, voice booming from the surround sound speakers in the stadium. The entire place went dead silent. All of the associates stopped fighting at once, and even Big Mama quietly feasted in the corner.
“King Ara, please return to the dais to collect your queen,” he tittered.
Some people in the crowd actually laughed.
The still-armed associates cleared back as Ari began the long, slow walk toward the dais. When she neared the stairs, she found Jordan, down on her side, bleeding into the red sand. Her helmet was thrown off and her face was full of righteous aggression. “No quarter, no mercy,” she whispered, wincing.
Ari nodded and approached the steps.
“Unarmed, thank you,” the Administrator called out.
Ari dropped Excalibur in the sand and climbed the steps to face the Administrator. She tore away pieces of the clunky, punishing armor as she went until she was just Ari, standing in a shirt she’d stolen from her mother’s room on Ketch. He sent his associates away like a fool, but then, he really didn’t fear Ari. He never had. That was the first thing she needed to change.
The Administrator held Gwen’s dagger to the inside of Gwen’s hip in a way that proved to Ari exactly how much he knew—and that he was threatening two lives at once.
“You’re going to knife a pregnant woman?” Ari asked, voice carrying to the cameras, the projection above their heads still trailing the best of the action. “That’s evil, Administrator. I thought Mercer wasn’t evil, or good. They just are.”
The crowd stilled, all eyes on them.
He released Gwen slowly, a strangely savage look on his face that left Ari spinning with fear. The dagger moved away from Gwen, and he held it up as if he were relenting.
And then he pushed Gwen off the dais.
She fell with a small scream, landing hard on the sandy ground in a crumpled heap.
Ari surged forward and caught the Administrator by those terrible ceremonial robes, pinning him to the altar that only minutes ago he’d tried to use as evidence of his ordained right.
The Administrator’s slick expression didn’t waver. “You forget that they don’t care if I’m evil. No one stands against us, because they need us.” He turned his look to the stands. “Without Mercer you’d die, hungry, thirsty, squawking at each other. You all need us too much, don’t you?”
The silence was answer enough.
Mercer owned the universe, but it was more than that. Mercer made truth irrelevant. As long as they were in control, atrocity would always be excused in the name of convenience and greed.
Ari’s fingers latched on to his throat. She wanted to recoil from his bleached skin. His hollow eyes. The Administrator had nothing inside of him. No hate. No caring. There was only the cold balance of cost and trade. A bank account of sterilized numbers. A mass grave of figures.
Ari pulled away.
And he laughed. “We did not think you would choke us to death for the entertainment of the masses. Didn’t your brother already tell you? You’re no killer.”
Kay’s truth coming out of the Administrator’s mouth was the worst kind of salt on this new wound, and Ari stung all over. She looked over the side of the dais to where Gwen was still crumpled, unconscious or worse. The crowd followed her gaze, murmuring with longing at the sight of the fallen queen. This was proof. They did want more than Mercer crap. They wanted love. Hope. Truth. They were starved for it.
The Administrator flashed a cold smile into the arena, unaffected. “Moving. Truly. How much for the movie rights?”
“I’m not for sale, Administrator. And that’s why you should have been afraid of me a long time ago.”
Behind her, Lam’s explosives cracked the arena wide open, and the place turned into a screaming rush of fleeing people. Morgana shimmered into existence beside Ari, bearing Excalibur. Ari took the sword and drove it through the center of the Administrator’s chest. He slumped, pinned to the stone altar by an antique token of hope.
“It’s true. I’m no murderer,” she said, pulling the blade free. “But I do have an impulse-control problem. And a sword.”
After Ari ran the Administrator clean through, everything was a blur of crowds and running and shouting until Merlin was back on Error, watching the mall explode. A brilliant cloud of red swallowed itself as quickly as it had appeared, the oxygen burned out in a flash, the fire quenched.
And just like that, the flagship of the Mercer Company had been destroyed.
Error was one of thousands of ships that had fled the mall only to pause and take in the beautiful destruction. Merlin was grateful for this moment. Not only was Heritage being torched, he finally had a chance to look over his band of ragtag survivors: Val had taken a stab to the back, Jordan and Lam were bleeding from a few dozen places, although none looked life-threatening, and Gwen had a severe concussion from her fall, and a purple knot on her head that looked troublesome.
Merlin was tired. More tired than should have been possible unless one was mildly immortal. Mildly.
Nin had confirmed it, then. He would die of young age.
And Kay? He was dead. The kind of dead that you didn’t come back from. Val and Merlin had tripped on his body during their mad escape. Merlin had lost precious minutes checking his pulse, hoping for a miracle. But Kay’s heart stayed silent.
Val had had to get Merlin back on his feet as he leaked surprised tears—over Kay, one of his least favorite characters in this over-spun tale. Wonders never cease.
“Good-bye, Kay,” Merlin said. “You were an odd hero, but a good one.”
His friends stood taller as the devastation of Heritage turned into the best Viking funeral he’d ever seen. And he had seen quite a few in his near-endless days. Unlike Merlin’s backward eternity, Kay had been given twenty short solar years, a cruelly brief calendar based on a planet where humans no longer lived.
Merlin turned to Ari. She stood to the side, looking more Arthurian than ever. Grief had been a sizeable part of this story since the very beginning. It made Ari seem like she’d aged all at once, calm and resigned as if she could fight everything except this moment. Excalibur’s point bit the floor of Error while her hands rested on the hilt, majestic—particularly with the soundtrack of the roaring dragon stuffed into the cargo bay.
“Are we safe with that thing in there?” Jordan asked.
Ari chuckled sadly. “She’s stuffed on associates. We’re safe.”
“I thought you said you were only going to blow up the mall a little bit,” Val said to Lam as pieces of Heritage began to separate, floating free of one another.
“Minor miscalculation,” Lam said, with a look that convinced Merlin it was no such thing. “At least Kay is going down with the ship.”
“Gods damn it, he loved that fucking mall,” Val insisted. “Even in all of its Mercer-inspired awfulness.”
“A fitting tribute for a warrior’s death,” Jordan said, folding her arms with a kind of deep understanding.