Page 73 of Twins for the Barbarians

A smile stretches across the widows’ faces in a surprisingly melodious unison. It fills me with the kind of thrill I haven’t felt in a while. A sliver of hope dares creep into my mind with whispers that the tide might finally change in our favor after months spent in a languishing limbo of uncertainty.

“Come,” Sarin says. “Take a walk with us. We want to show you something.”

We smile and nod and join the soft-spoken widows as we cross the palace gardens in the company of a hefty royal guard. Slowly but surely, we make our way out through the back gates and up the narrow alley leading up to the city’s northern gates.

“It will please you to learn that Cynthia is just about ready to roll out a first trial of a cure for the plague,” I tell the widows as we walk together. “The research you provided was instrumental in helping her decipher the last of the gene formulas she needed to make the serum work.”

“It does please us,” Sarin replies with genuine light in her crimson eyes. “I’m glad you were able to do something with Solomon’s work. It still pains me that he sat on his cure while the rest of the world died. Had I known…”

“It’s okay,” I say. “You didn’t know. I do hope you haven’t lost any more sleep over this. We cannot change the past, I’m afraid. We can only redesign the future, and we’ll have a cure ready for the surviving masses in the next few months.”

“What you don’t have is a location for those starships,” Neya reminds us. “If the Sky Tribe launches, all your cure will do is provide them with a healthy and growing population of Sunnaite women to serve as slaves for their future generations of human-Sunnaite hybrids. That is still Shaytan Hull’s plan, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so,” Helios says. “And his people have been working tirelessly to disseminate propaganda across the realm on this topic. More and more civilians are inclined to agree that the only way forward for the Sunnaites is to add human genes into their bloodlines so their offspring may never know the misery of this plague.”

“Time isn’t on our side,” Kharo adds. “But if we do manage to shoot those starships down, the cure Cynthia is hard at work developing as we speak will retain its value among the civilians. Without starships, the Sky Tribe will be forced to reassess their entire strategy and sit down with us at the negotiating table once again. Whether they like it or not.”

The northern gates open before us, and a convoy of twenty buggies awaits to pick us up and drive us around the base of a rumbling Kaos Volcano, its peak still glowing orange. Someday soon, we’ll send people up there to collect Sunna’s fire by the gallon because we’ll have a cure to load every drop with and countless lives to save. We’re so close that I can almost taste it.

“Where are we going?” I ask the queens.

“While you’ve been away, we asked our brightest military minds to come up with something that might assist you in your endeavor to destroy the Sky Tribe’s starships,” Sarin says as we get into the buggies, the drivers ready to roll out.

I’m loving the dry heat at this hour. To my surprise, I’d missed it. Sapphire City is kissed by the suns and the sea, and on rainy days, it can become unbearably and uncomfortably humid, and it can be downright hard to breathe. Here, however, my lungs feel happier than ever.

“They, too, considered the possibility of having to shoot the starships down mid-flight.”

“You’ll see,” Neya says, and our conversation is interrupted as we’re driven out of Opal City through the northern segment of the labyrinth, then farther up and around the base of the mountain until we reach a recently built military base.

I gasp at the sight of it. They carved the entire structure directly into the black limestone foundation of the volcano, using sturdy steel beams and thick obsidian glass for the windows. It’s built on two levels atop a massive, rectangular hangar, while three giant towers rise from the back of the building. At the top of each, I notice a rotating mechanism that holds solid steel platforms akin to a lazy Susan system upon which weapons are mounted.

But those aren’t weapons I’ve seen before, and Jewel has shown me pretty much everything in the Fire Tribe’s arsenal.

“What is all this?” I ask, then look at my men.

Helios and Kharo are positively astonished, and they’re not the easiest to impress, so whatever this setup is, it has rendered them both speechless. But more than awe is illuminating their handsome features. It’s hope—the kind of hope we’ve been waiting for, the kind of hope that promises to materialize into something concrete and palpable.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Helios gasps.

“Laser turrets,” Kharo says. “Solomon never mentioned there were any left in Opal City.”

Sarin grins delightedly. “There weren’t. We combed through the military archives in Solomon’s study and gave our engineers a model to work with. These are brand-new, built from scratch.”

“What about the laser crystals?” Helios asks, wide-eyed and excited like a boy unwrapping a Christmas present. “Those are powerful diodes to work with.”

“And the mines beneath Kaos are filled with them,” Neya shoots back. “We had everything we needed, and we didn’t know it until we started reading the king’s journals.”

“King…” Leela scoffs, shaking her head in disappointment. “Had Solomon been a true king, he would’ve led Opal City as a bastion of peace and progress. He would’ve put an end to the civil war and dismantled both warring factions, playing the savior who possessed the cure to the plague. But he chose to isolate us, to lie to us, to control us.”

True enough. Solomon could’ve played his charade much further than he actually did. He could’ve presented himself as the solution to a problem he had created in the first place—and no one would’ve been the wiser. Then again, had he done that, my friends and I would’ve never made it to Sunna. I suppose there are silver linings everywhere, even in the worst of circumstances.

“Alas, Solomon chose to play king in a city he could control and manipulate,” I say, “but none of that matters anymore. What matters is that you managed to make something of his legacy, as nasty as it may be.”

Kharo allows himself a glorious grin as he gets out of the buggy and takes his first steps toward the military base. “I can’t believe it. This may be the answer to our prayers, Alicia. If Shaytan launches those starships, these long-range weapons could easily shoot them down.”

“But doesn’t that depend on the location of the launch sites?” I ask, trying to understand the basis for his enthusiasm.

“That’s the thing,” Helios says, equally excited. “These weapons are a newer generation of a system the Sky Tribe can only dream of having again. The long-range laser beams can go for hundreds of miles in milliseconds, hitting the starships wherever they may be launched from.”

---