Dark Matter | JJK

29. Where Insanity Reigns

Petra held her breath.

The air was shrouded in darkness so pitch black that she couldn't even see the silhouette her own fingers when she held them before her eyes. Any moment now, she could get shot to death. Or worse, someone could plunge a dagger into any part of her body before she could even see them coming.

But perhaps life had plans to torment her some more, because a single streak of neon green light flickered across the room, after which her surroundings slowly came into view.

Petra rotated on her feet and saw herself besieged by scientists in white lab coats hunched over alabaster counters, peering through microscopes, stirring beakers bubbling with transparent liquids or mixing bright-coloured substances in test tubes. They might have been over two dozens around her, but none of them seemed to have sensed her foreign presence in the room. She took a step forward with the intent to approach one of them, shake them by the shoulders and demand what this place was, but stopped when she saw the circular wall of glass separating her from them.

As though able to read her mind, a scientist looked up.

The glass wall before him divided itself in two and, shrugging off his lab coat, Kim Gwonhan emerged.

"Did it work?" he asked casually, the soles of his polished black boots clicking in rhythmic tip-taps against the metal floor. He wore a sleek, stark grey suit almost camouflaged by the silver floor he walked on. "Me acting like one of those whip-smart scientists, I mean?"

Within the span of the next few seconds, Petra mapped his thick brown eyebrows, eagle-like nose, paper-thin lips and rounded chin - features so strikingly similar to the man who held the position of her country's President that her breath shuddered. But unlike Kim Hwanwook's grey-streaked hair, his brother's was a shade of tawny brown, and there were no wrinkles creasing his skin or lilac half-moons under his slit-like eyes. They were both nearly carbon copies of each other, but while the President's contours showed clear signs of stress and age, his older brother - ironically - donned the youthful expression of a man half his age.

Petra eyed Gwonhan in his entirety. With every minute that passed, thousands were being kidnapped from their homes back in South Korea, torn apart from their families and loved ones, injected with the lethal substance that coiled around the neurons of their brains and unraveled their minds, stripped them of their memories until nothing remained save for a scavenging, soulless relic of the person they once used to be.

All because of one man and his greed.

"Sorry to say but that is not the proper way to handle a distillation flask," Petra said, shrugging as though she was reprimanding a fellow chemistry student and not the world's most dangerous don. "Didn't even look like you were trying, if you ask me."

Gwonhan narrowed his eyes at her, his lips quirking in a bemused smirk. "Hah!" he snapped his fingers, turning around and regarding the engrossed scientists. "That's because I wasn't! Why do you think I have to try to act like a puppet," he glanced over his shoulder then, still smriking, "when I'm the puppeteer, himself?"

She gritted her teeth to reign in her anger. "Why have you called us here? And where is Seokjin?"

"Kim Seokjin is enjoying the perks of our hospitality above ground in our toy store, probably training my men to win a war against his own army as we speak. As to why I've called you here..." Gwonhan turned to her with his hands clasped behind his back. Petra had the greatest urge to smack the grin off his face. "Tarry a little, sweetheart. What should I get for you? Tea? Coffee? Tequila?"

"I do not have all day," Petra gritted, glaring, "although you seem like you do."

Suddenly, the metal floor beneath her turned transparent. For a moment she thought she would fall right through, but an ear-piercing cry jerked her forward to see a frenzied mob of Aenigmi running towards her in the space below - men, women and children with pale green, bubbling skin and violent red streaks scraping their foreheads - looking up at her with bulging grey eyes, clawing with their chipped fingers at the glass beneath her feet, screeching, scrambling to reach for her.