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.
For Ari, his loss was a knife twisted into her side by the Administrator himself. Her eyes teared up miserably. “Please, don’t. I can’t talk about him now. I can’t… We have to take the deal. Go back to Lionel. Find some spark of hope and—”
“No matter what Mercer lets us have, it won’t be ours. We will be possessions. And we,” Gwen motioned down at their friends far below, also on their knees, heads cast down, “would rather die. Here. Now. With the universe as a witness.”
Ari felt herself looking up into the dazzling, bright lights, whispering the Administrator’s embittered words, “Martyrs do kill the economy.” She turned to Gwen, the terrible stone of a crown biting into the side of her head. She felt a sting and a warm spot. The edges of it were so sharp it was making her bleed. Gwen touched the side of Ari’s face, fingers coming away red.
As red as Kay’s mouth in his last laughing moment.
Ari shuddered, pain spiraling outward at an alarming rate. “I have an idea, but I need your help. You know I’m no good at pageantry.”
Gwen smiled, ever so slightly. “You are miles from where you used to be, dragon slayer.”
Ari winced, casting a quick look at the enormous mound of Big Mama beside the dais. She hadn’t moved, and Ari’s scheme to keep the dragon alive seemed less and less realistic. “I have an idea, but we have to win the crowd. We need to surprise them. Something simple but attention grabbing.”
Gwen stared at Ari, biting her lip, cheeks flushed.
Was that a suggestion?
“Gwen…” Ari stared at her pink mouth and the bright pain behind her eyes. The crowd was still eating up the video of their wedding. Even the Administrator had his head tipped back, staring up at the entranced crowd, pleased, no doubt, by the mounting roll of incoming credits.
“It would surprise them,” Gwen whispered.
When Ari was marooned on Ketch, she had dreamed about kissing Gwen again. She’d set the stage in her mind thousands of times. There were swooping embraces. Passionate, swirling lifts. Soft, drowsy bedtime kisses. Fierce, needing, rolling, gasping ones…
All of those longings faded now, turned to something so fractured she couldn’t see the image through the shards. She didn’t know what was still Ari and Gwen. There was so much Mercer now. So much Kay. So much King Arthur.
Ari turned away, thinking back to that moment behind the stables when they were young. They’d never gotten along, Gwen and Ari. They’d argued through knight camp so heatedly that their teacher had paired them up as a punishment, and yet it had flipped their magnetism. That moment against the wall, out of view, they’d started to fight about something pointless. Gwen’s shoulder was slipping out of her dress—always slipping out—and Ari had bitten in. A full-on attack of hormones and desire that tumbled them into a knot of unending kisses and hands and hips, skin feverish to meet skin.
It hadn’t stopped their arguments, but it’d inspired new ones. Beautiful ones.
A few million light-years in space and time from those two girls, Ari found herself staring at Gwen’s shoulder. This time her clothes weren’t slipping free; this dress fit like a corset, so tight it left angry red marks where it was pressing in.
But it was also strapless.
Ari’s face dipped low, closer, closer. Her mouth found Gwen’s shoulder, breaking the barrier between them with a playful nip, destroying it as swiftly as Excalibur had demolished the one around Ketch. Gwen cradled Ari’s face, bringing their lips together in a way that seemed to make the whole gods damn universe tremble.
Or maybe that was just Ari.
Gwen bruised things in Ari’s heart. She always had. Her closeness was a continuous tender ache because what would Ari feel, do, be afterward?
New.
Every kiss with Gwen left Ari new.
They pulled each other to their feet—no more kneeling in front of the Administrator—and kept kissing. Their history served them, but so did their pain, knotting their bodies together in a way that could not be faked. Or pulled apart. Ari was only barely aware of the moment when the arena noticed their passion, the applause turning riotous and raw. Screams of joy from so many people who wanted to be this entangled—which only encouraged Ari to deepen the kiss.