Page 67 of Triplets for the Barbarians

“What are you going to do, sweetheart?” he asks. “I’m not letting you get anywhere near that long-range gun. And I’m certainly not letting you get off this roof until you learn to call me your master and submit to me.”

“You’re disgusting.”

Slowly, Yossul gets over the ledge and takes out his laser gun. “Run!” he shouts.

“What the—” Shaytan turns around, but it’s too late.

Yossul fires his shot, and I’m running like the damned wind. I hear the fighting behind me. I know Yossul didn’t deliver a critical injury, but it bought me the handful of seconds I needed to get away from that monster.

The war is reaching its boiling point. The very air I breathe burns my lungs as I struggle to reach the temporary safety of the long-range tower. I’m almost there.

“Die, you piece of shit!”

Shaytan’s roar makes my skin crawl, quickly followed by pained grunts from Yossul. I’m tempted to look back, but I can’t. No matter what happens, I’ve got to move forward—ever forward—until my last breath.

Almost there.

Out of nowhere, Blaze rams into me with his whole weight. It feels as though a train hit me. My body aches as I hit the ground hard.

I roll over, crying out with each thud and scrape. My bones feel like jelly. My skin opens with a multitude of scratches and gashes. I lose sight of my sidearm. It fell somewhere along the way.

“Oh, God,” I manage, trying to pull myself back together quickly, but everything hurts. Everything just hurts, and I don’t think I’ve got anything left in me.

Blaze grabs a handful of my hair and pulls me to my feet. The sting spreads like wildfire across my scalp as I try to fight him, to no avail.

“Where do you think you’re going in such a hurry?” he asks, panting and covered in somebody else’s blood as he glowers at me.

“Let her go, Blaze!” Fadai shouts. He reaches us with a dreadful limp.

Everything has come to a sudden halt up here. Blaze has a firm grip on me. Yossul is on the ground, grievously injured. Shaytan is about to kill him. My men are hanging by the slimmest of threads while I’ve still got a hundred or so feet left to get to the tower.

“Please, Blaze, you have to stop this,” I try to reason with him.

“Kill the Kreek prick!” Shaytan howls. “I’ve got this one.”

“Please!” I cry out, tears filling my eyes, blinding me. “Please, Blaze, listen to me. We have a cure for the plague! We have it! We’ve been working tirelessly for the past year to design it, but we did it! We tested it, and it’s effective. I swear! You have to stop this!”

Shaytan groans with frustration, but his hip wound is still bleeding profusely, gradually draining the intensity out of his red skin. He’ll be a pale pink and hopefully dying but not soon enough.

Blaze, however, looks genuinely conflicted. “That’s what I don’t understand. How’d you come up with a cure, exactly?”

“Solomon was running Opal City,” I pant, trying to find the shortest version of the true story so that it would make sense and drive my point home before it’s too late. “I told you he’s the one who created the plague. He had a cure for it, too. We came here to investigate the origin of the virus, but we had no idea what we were walking into.”

“Solomon planned the whole thing. He wanted to keep Opal City to himself, to be a king for the survivors,” Fadai adds, his hands raised in a peaceful and defensive gesture. “He kept this place hidden from the rest of the world because he wanted to watch us all die. He wanted to be a god to his chosen few, but then we came along and found out what he’d been up to.”

Blaze looks at me and then at Fadai, the confusion muddling the crimson pools of his eyes. “Why would he do that? It still doesn’t make sense!”

“The madness of a megalomaniac never makes sense!” I shout back. “He felt marginalized and unappreciated. His peers thought less of him despite his brilliance, and he lost it, okay? He fucking lost it. His peers were mostly women. High-level scientists who likely looked down on him and made fun of him. Well, he showed them. He devised the single most devastating plague that targeted Sunnaite women and released it in a systematic process until all hell broke loose.”

“They didn’t stand a chance,” Yossul grunts as he tries to get up, but Shaytan kicks him back down.

“I’m not done with you yet!” the commander general snaps.

“Your mother, your sisters, your grandmother,” I say, looking at Blaze with intention. “They died because Solomon felt belittled. That’s the truth, and it is awful and it is ridiculous; I completely agree, but that’s what happened. We have proof. Journals. Written memos. Recorded research. Solomon’s wives managed to save a lot of research and passed it on to us. We had no choice but to kill him when we confronted him with his actions. He destroyed the cure he had stored at the time, forcing us to use his notes in an attempt to reproduce it. That’s why it took us so long.”

“We would’ve come to you sooner about this,” Fadai says. But look at you, Blaze. You’re all still so hell-bent on following this destructive path. We knew we couldn’t make you understand, not without a tested cure to prove it. And we knew we couldn’t tell you about Opal City because, well, look around you!” He motions at the disaster burning all over. “This is what you do! This is what the Sky Tribe does!”

Blaze stares at me with a mixture of grief and disbelief. “It’s insane.”

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