Page 57 of Twins for the Barbarians

Alicia

I’m strapped to a gurney, my wrists and ankles bound. They took Leela away. I’m told she’s under house arrest until Solomon decides what to do with her. They haven’t found Kingo yet, which does give me a sliver of hope as to how this might end. As long as he’s free, he can figure a way out of the city and back to the Kreek base near Ruby City. He’s got the laser flare, too.

“I assume you’re comfortable. You’ll be here a while,” Solomon says.

He’s been quiet since I was brought in and tied to this gurney. He’s clad in a simple purple and yellow silk robe that flows down his slender figure as he fiddles with beakers and pipettes in front of a work table.

His private study is more of a laboratory—the walls are painted a clinical white, and the floor is covered in white marble. Most of the furniture is made of sterile, bronze-brushed metal. The shelves are loaded with books and binders, all of them pertaining to various medical research. I can’t read the spines in this position.

But the centrifuge keeps spinning in the middle of the work table while Solomon draws droplets of my blood every few minutes or so. The tip of my finger hurts. He does enjoy pricking me; I can tell from the subtle smile slithering across his face when he lifts a sample.

“How am I supposed to be comfortable when you’ve got me strapped to a table?” I reply harshly. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t be foolish enough to try and explore my old lab up on the mountain,” he says, “yet that is precisely what you did. I suppose you figured out a few things by now.”

“Where is Leela?” I ask him.

He gives me a furious scowl. “It’s your fault. Whatever happens to my wife in the coming days…is on you. You should’ve known your place, Alicia. I opened my city’s gates for you. I welcomed you into my home. All you had to do was follow some simple rules. You would’ve gathered whatever information I chose to give you, and then you would’ve gone on your merry way to die with the rest of them like you were supposed to. But no, you had to be stubborn, and you had to have the audacity to consider yourself smarter than me.”

“Smarter than you?” I scoff. “We knew from the moment we walked into Opal City that something was off about this place.”

“This is my paradise, and you will die before I let you destroy it.”

“You created the plague, Solomon Daron. You spread it far and wide with clear intention. You sat back and watched as millions of women died—”

“Women are anything but innocent!” he snarls, almost dropping his beaker as the anger gets the better of him. “Women have been the root of the problem for too long, always thinking you’re smarter than me, always laughing in my face… Well, I showed them. I showed them all and then some.”

I chuckle dryly. “Is that what this is all about? Women threatened your puny manhood, so you decided to wipe out the entire fucking species?”

“They had it coming. Everything that happened, they had it coming. All I did was load the weapon, but they pulled the trigger.”

“How did they pull the trigger? I don’t understand.”

The longer I let this bastard talk, the more time I buy for myself while I try to figure out how to get out of this mess. Solomon sets the beakers aside and looks at me coldly.

“All they had to do was fund my research. The viruses I was working on were designed to protect us from future plagues. I told them it was only a matter of time before another strain would decimate our population even worse than the one before. They laughed and told me to stick to what I knew: treatments for the few ailments the Sunnaites came down with once in a while, mere digestive issues and common colds. Those troglodytes didn’t understand what I was trying to do until it was too late.”

“So you proceeded to virtually annihilate an entire planet?”

“Well, not an entire planet,” he laughs. “Opal City lives and thrives. And Opal City will inherit this world when the rest of it dies off. It’s only a matter of time. And the new era I’ll be ushering in will be a fairer one where women will know their place. I will be their king, their savior, their god. I will have my rightful place in Sunna’s pantheon.”

This man is a megalomaniac, the epitome of greed and vanity with an over-inflated ego and powerful narcissistic traits; a monster posing as a leader, a frustrated little shit who saw an opportunity and took it. All I can do is shake my head in dismay.

“This is beyond embarrassing,” I say. “So much trouble, so much pain and suffering so that you can feel like a real man. It’s pathetic.”

“And yet it worked,” he shoots back. “It will work until I say we’re done.”

“What about Leela? You still haven’t told me your intentions where she’s concerned.”

Solomon sighs deeply, staring at the centrifuge for a while. “She’ll face a trial of her peers. Our laws are clear, and she broke one too many by helping you. I cannot save her from herself.”

“Leela has outlived her usefulness, huh? She gave you two sons and a good chunk of her youth, but the minute she rose up against you, wham, that’s it? She’s disposable?”

“You are all disposable,” he sneers. “And don’t worry. I’ll devise something to get rid of you and your human friends, too.”

I give him a startled look. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, the plague I designed is like a skeleton key. It opens any door if you know how to use it.”

---