In Which the Mad Sorcerer Has Been Defeated. In Which My Prophecy Has Come to Fruition. In Which I Have Destroyed a Man Who Once Was My Enemy but Now Is Anything But.
Ascream of anguish. Something you’d sooner expect from a rabbit in the teeth of a dog, not from a man. Not from Merulo.
“It’s alright,” I said, though I didn’t believe it. The sorcerer writhed in the sand beside me, and I tried, again, to soothe him. “It’s alright.”
“No, no,” Merulo wailed. “I can feel the magic. It’s all around us. She protected it! And I am not transformed.Nothingis transformed. I failed!”
Unable to help, I instead lay back on the cold slope of the dune. A day of sweating and panic had left my throat raw, but nothing clouded the sky, no potential for quenching rain. The night sky was a pit, with only the flimsiest of forces preventing us from falling into it. From falling intonothing. Vertigo made the edges of my vision swim, but I maintained my focus, mapping out the stars that Merulo had wanted sodesperately to reach. I couldn’t see any of the constellations I knew—perhaps because of our foreign location, or perhaps because of the stupidity that comes from dehydration. In the morning, I’d come up with a plan to find water. It would be difficult, escaping this barren desert alive, but for now I lay silent and peered upward.
Merulo’s wails faded as he lost his energy, but his breath still came in dry heaves. And I did nothing. I did not move, and I did not comfort him.
What more could be said to a man whose life purpose had evaporated in a sudden heat, and who now, mangled and drained, had nothing left but me? A paltry prize, given that he’d wanted the entire cosmos.
I stared harder. The stars were moving.
Two pinpricks, of a brighter intensity than their surrounding stars, swam through the night at a leisurely pace. “Merulo,” I said. Then, with more urgency: “Merulo. For fuck’s sake. Look UP.”
Something in my voice must have broken through his anguish, because Merulo obeyed. “The barrier,” he said, his mouth hanging open. “Hydna destroyed the barrier. We didn’t fail, not entirely. They’re coming!”
“Who is?” I pushed myself upright in the sand, staring at the twin stars. The night seemed huge now, every speck of light a possibility. “Who’s coming?”
“Mars,” he croaked. Then his head dropped, crunching on impact with the dune.
Leaning over him, I shook his shoulder with care, not wanting to grip his meatless bones too tight. “Merulo!”
“Hurgh,” said the sorcerer, returning vaguely to life.
“Stay awake, just a little longer.” I quivered with energy, a tantalizing idea unwrapping itself like a gift. Merulo’s amputated leg, lying feet away, contained more magic as a fetid ruin than I’d ever held in my own body. And before me lay the world’s most adept magic-user. “You’ve gotta help me with a spell. The one you did earlier, with your arm. And where are we, precisely?”
CHAPTER 56
In Which the SMSLunatic FreakHas a Whim that Shall Not Be Denied, and though It Dearly Loves Its Captain, Some Things Are Worth Straining a Relationship Over, Such as, For Instance, Rediscovering the Earth.
When the Earth popped back into existence beneath them, the ship wasted no time. It didn’t matter that it carried a bellyful of cobalt and water, stripped from the asteroids that made up its livelihood, or that its fuel was at the lower end of its capacity.WE’RE MAKING HISTORY,the ship said, lurching into a corrected course as the captain swore.STRAP IN!
Speed was a crucial factor. After all, nobody would care much, in the news or in classrooms, about thesecondship that rediscovered the Earth. The ship had begged for authorization to seed its drones into the atmosphere, which the captain granted after eighty-three seconds ofPLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE,scrawling across their eyeglass.
The drone wrangler narrowed his eyes in concentration. “Visuals from the drones are connecting. We’ll see around the planet in just a sec . . . Here, a group of blue people? Andunicorns. A floating church. That’s a dragon, I think. Crystal towers. Dark masses in the sea. This is . . .”
Then a pair of drones captured clouds, curling and shaping into what looked like words, and all other viewpoints shrunk, shoved into corners.
“And no incoming radio waves, electronic transmissions, nothing?” Captain Abel asked, a frown wrinkling their dark skin. “It’s an eccentric way to communicate. Are you sure it’s directed at our drones? What are they saying?”
“That’s Gita’s department,” said the drone wrangler, swiveling his chair to face her.
“The language is hard to place,” said the engineer, her hands dancing across the ship’s interface. “Lunatic’sstill running it through . . . oh!”
“What?” Captain Abel gripped the engineer’s seat, their eyes following the lines of text racing across her display.
“We’re getting a match, but . . . it’s to a conlang.” Gita expressed her disbelief with a head tilt—something the captain usually found quite charming. “Loanwords are plugging the gaps, mostly twenty-third-century Mandarin and English.”
“Aconlang?”
“A fictional language. This one’s from a franchise,Legends of Larnia. It caused some controversy at the time for its socially conservative material, but it peaked in popularity right around Event X. Actually, that timing is a touch close for my liking, let me just—” The engineer began to mumble, conferring with the ship. “Huh.” She sat back in her seat.
Captain Abel hastily released their grip, lest their fingers be crushed. “What now?”
“Ship’s got a theory.” Gita’s honey-brown eyes rolled up tomeet the captain’s, who hovered, tense, above her. “To celebrate the twelfth season of the live action adaptation, the media conglomerate controlling its copyright launched a capsule loaded with books, recordings, and artwork. They likened it to a Noah’s ark, ‘the world of Larnia,’ preserved forever in space.”
