Oh, and there was a second one on their tongue. Excellent.
In her mind, this person was also Ketchan. And they weren’t kissing beneath the thermal shades of a lunar colony dome, which blocked out the searing sunlight of the day and the solid freeze of night. They were on the red sands of Ketch, buffeted by sweet, dry winds while the siren birds wrote a melody for the sunset.
It was her usual daydream, her happy place.
The fluid’s hands roved down her chest, her belly, hooking into the lip of her pants just as someone entered the alleyway. Ari steeled herself for the congenial threat of a Mercer associate.
“I bet you think this is terribly clever, don’t you?”
Oh, gods, her gangly stalker was back.
“You have no idea what ‘no’ means, huh?” She turned around and was only surprised to find him staring at the sword.
“I wasn’t speaking to you. I was talking to Excalibur, but now that we’re on the subject of you, how did you come by it?”
“Found it.” Ari deflated. This guy had clearly come looking for his property, although how he was storing things on Old Earth was beside her. At least it seemed like she could beat him in a chase. He couldn’t have been older than her, and Ari’s legs were far longer. “Finders keepers,” she said, lifting the sword and her leg at the same time, about to make a sprint for it. But Ari froze on the spot. One knee hitched in the air. Looking as ridiculous as she felt.
Frozen. As if by magic. Which was ridiculous.
The pretty fluid took off, and she didn’t blame them. In the meantime, the scrawny guy had started talking and talking, but the only word that chimed in Ari’s mind was, Magic?
“Oh, I’m being rude.” He waved his hand and Ari unfroze.
She fell to one knee, her hand wrapping around Excalibur’s handle for support. At that moment, the alley door whipped open and two Mercer associates stepped out. Ari grabbed the skinny guy and tossed him up against the wall—which was as dissatisfying as the previous time had been satisfying. He squirmed like Ari’s body was the worst thing he’d ever touched, and she hissed in his ear, “They can’t see me.” She hoped this weirdo had enough sense to play along. “They’ll arrest you simply for being with me as well.”
“They can’t see you? Oh, you don’t want them to see you.” He whistled three fine notes. Ari felt a stiffening in the air as if something between them and the associates had hardened. They passed by without so much as glancing at Ari.
Ari stared at the skinny stranger anew. “Who are you?”
“Merlin the magician. We’ve met. Forty-one times already. I’ve been hoping one of these days you’ll remember me, but alas. Perhaps I look so different now that—”
“I’ve met you forty-one times?”
“Not you, per se, but Arthur has. The you that’s inside of… you.”
Ari stepped close to him again, gripping the sword and squinting. She wasn’t going to run him through, but the temptation to pin his hideous robe to the brick was overwhelming. “Is there something different about you? I mean, are you translating from another language or are you part android or heavily medicated? Maybe you should be heavily medicated?”
The question folded his expression into a tight knot. “I’m Merlin. It’s not easy to explain, but I’m here, Excalibur has chosen you, and we must get acquainted before…” His pale skin tinged with an almost blue shade of terror. “Before we meet the third wheel in the cycle,” he finished icily, eyeing someone behind her.
Ari twisted around, immediately backing up, pressing both of them against the wall.
A slight woman was watching from the shadows—or perhaps her dress was made from shadows. She seemed wrong in some indefinable way. Even more, she seemed familiar. And slightly transparent. Merlin stepped around her in all of his bathrobed glory. His lips twisted, not a smile. More of a knowing grimace. “Hello darkness, my old friend.”
“Merlin,” the woman said, her voice a wisp of smoke, her body just as intangible. “Look at you! You’re practically a child. Not a day older than your ill-fated little girl Arthur.”
Merlin tsked. “You will let me train her first, Morgana. You’ve never jumped the gun before. It isn’t your style.”
“Haven’t you noticed that nothing is the same this time?” She glanced around at the moon colony and smiled. “I think you’ve been away too long. Too much has changed, old wizard.”
“You’ll find, strangely enough, that I am in my prime,” Merlin said.
This so-called Morgana’s eyes sharpened. “Yes, you do look too well rested. It’s only fair to give you a taste of what you missed.” She rushed forward faster than light, startling Ari into dropping the sword in the ashy gravel. Morgana placed a single, semi-translucent finger against Merlin’s temple. He slumped to the ground, writhing.
“No! No!” Merlin yelled before dissolving into the stifled screams of someone with a knife in their belly. Morgana hovered beside him, and Ari ran halfway down the alley before she stopped. She didn’t want to run; she wanted to know what the hell was happening, and she wanted that gods damn sword—and that weird guy’s ability to give the Mercer associates the slip.
Ari walked back toward them, keeping her distance from the ethereal woman, and stooped quickly to pick up the sword. “What are you doing to him?”
Morgana looked at her as though she was surprised by Ari’s presence. “You should be running. That’s what all the others did the first time they saw me.”
“Are you killing him?”
Morgana laughed. “I’m letting him experience what I saw when I was that miserable oak. Catching him up on the latest Manifest Destiny fever, although I do not envy the headrush.”
“You were the oak?” Ari felt the logic click—the odd moment that came after freeing the sword and the familiarity she’d felt when she saw Morgana. Merlin’s screams turned to pealing groans. “What did you see on Earth? What’s he seeing now?”
“The latest corrosion of mankind. The death of the planet. The exodus of the privileged classes in generation ships.” She cocked her head at Ari, taking in her skin and hair. “Your people, the Arabs, were the first to leave, to turn their back on all that humanity had done to the earth. Not that I blamed them. Their lot on that planet was perpetual war and grief.”
“My people are from Ketch.”
“Revision.” Her smile twitched. “One of the finest tools the human brain possesses.”
Merlin’s groans turned to whimpers, staining the entire alley with his pain.
Morgana watched with ferocious intensity. “I imagine he thinks he’s past the worst. The ruthless wars for the last of the fossil fuels. The collapse of western civilization. The plagues. You’d think that would be enough, wouldn’t you? But while the rich immigrated to galaxies beyond comprehension, the poor stayed behind, their bodies as diseased as the soil and air.”
Merlin’s eyes were furiously shut, his hands in tight fists pinned over his heart while his whimpers melted into silent tears.
Morgana’s voice dropped to a whisper. “They never died as fast as I hoped. They’d live long enough to stumble through hormones. To feel like they’d invented love. To have babies. And then the babies tried to raise themselves. To live on nothing.” Morgana dragged her fingernails down her own arms, making Ari’s skin sting. “They tried so hard.”
Ari didn’t know how to respond.