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She stops herself short again, her imagination clearly taking over from there—and rendering shitty results. With a soft sob, she drops to her knees in order to now embrace the girl. But she doesn’t surrender the stare she’s locked with mine. Heartache etches little waves into her forehead. Fuck. More than ever before, I yearn to scoop her up, along with the twins and Lux, and cast a spell to banish every shred of their collective despair.

Since I can’t do that, I spear Aliz with a pleading stare. “What do you know, damn it?” And let my shoulders fall, gracing her with visible respect. “Please. If you do know anything…”

I trail off as Aliz adjusts her shoulders, hitching them back as if she’s just issued an inner decree to do so. “The girls’ names,” she suggests with steady calm. “They are unique, yes?”

“One way of putting it,” I reply.

“And most people call children names that they would have the child inspire in the world…”

“Unless that person is a bitch who’s wired opposite from the rest of us,” Emma spits.

Aliz dips her head at a practiced angle. “And she has created two life forms for the purpose of attracting those energies instead.”

“Attracting them?” I counter. I unfurl my fist to issue the contest with an upturned palm. “What the hell are you saying? That Ira and Miseria were conceived to be magnets for negative energies?”

Emma rises with careful intent. “Which would make them damn valuable to a woman searching for miserable, angry human beings.”

“The most vulnerable ones of the race.” Before I’m finished, I know every word to be true. Agonizing but true. “Who she’s been screening, selecting, and then using her portal abilities to whisk down here…”

“Where she puts them in a room with the girls, who have been ordered to act like selective emotional vacuums.” Aliz looks both relieved and sickened to be finally putting this shit into words. I feel lousy for making her do it, but I’m sure as hell not going to stop her. “They then extract all the psychic garbage of each recruit,” she goes on. “Miseria for violence, anger, rage, frustration, and pain. Ira for sadness, loneliness, depression, anxiety, and grief.”

Emma erupts with a pain-filled choke. “So they all become blissful blank slates for Faline’s subliminal programming,” she concludes, visibly shaking from head to toe. “And then they’re returned back to the real world as shells of who they once were.”

She’s yearning to add one more part of that. Only three words’ worth—but possessing more intent than the simple trio of syllables. Though she holds them back behind her pressed lips, I already see every drop of their anguish in the turquoise lakes of her eyes.

Like my mother.

For a long moment, I’m speechless. Motionless. Furious. Even when my limbs function again, I can’t decide whether to add my roar to the girls’ grief or drive my fists into the nearest wall. Eventually, I realize the futility of both. Indulging the former will rocket the twins’ stress. Giving into the latter may bury us all alive. Most importantly, goddamnit, I’m the fucking “superhero” here. That means moving beyond my tears, my screams, my punches, my selfishness. It means refusing to dwell in my own hell at Faline’s hands.

It means being more.

And in this exact moment, it means sinking to my knees.

To pull a frightened little girl into the firm fortitude of my embrace.

To murmur into her sweet, shiny curls, “Oh, little mija. No wonder you’re shrieking for your ever-loving life.”

Because her life has had everything in it but love.

Fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck.

I can’t think of any words beyond that. Once more, Emma rescues me with the syllables I can barely comprehend, let alone form.

“Emotional vacuum cleaners,” she grates. “Soaking up the world’s sadness and rage because one bitch couldn’t call a therapist and deal with hers.”

I shoot my stare back up at Aliz, funneling my fury into my eyes instead of my voice. “What happens if they refuse?”

The woman’s stance becomes a steel rod. For the first time, I witness a huge tear plummet down her cheek. “They do not refuse.”

Now Emma’s clearly the one with the comprehension difficulties. She’s my gorgeous avenging angel, igniting like the sun in this world so far away from it while rising to a high kneel. One of her arms remains around Miseria; she drops the other into a fiery fist. “Ever?” she charges.

Aliz isn’t fazed by her light show. “They. Do. Not. Refuse,” the woman repeats, bringing the mettle of every monarch in history behind each word. Despite her emotion, the woman’s volume doesn’t lift above a throaty grit. She saves the truth of her feeling for the depths of her gaze, her irises ablaze with laser-force intensity—suddenly and solely aimed at me. “Just as none of us do in here. You already know that, Reece Richards.”

My brain goes black.