by Angel Payne
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.
My senses go numb.
My arms fall limp.
I’m conscious only of letting Lux yank Ira away from me because even he knows Dada’s circuits have just been fried into the realm of beyond-fucked-up.
But in the same moment, I force my senses to weld back together—before blasting them back into the middle of the war zone. A battlefield I’ve been searching so long for. Built a whole command center to find. Pushed my team to their limits, over and over and over again, in a relentless push to locate.
On the other side of the world.
I lurch back up to my feet. Stumble forward, scanning Aliz’s face for a shred of insecurity or dubiety. She’s as certain about her words as if telling me the earth is round. No, worse. She’s telling me the earth is round, and now I’ve got to tell the heathens about it.
I’ve got to be the fucking hero.
But I’m no goddamned hero.
Not right now.
Will I ever be again?
Was I ever to begin with?
In this moment, I can’t comprehend those answers. It’s a dark, lonely hell to simply remember who I am. Who I am, not what. Not the creature I became after Alpha Two was born. Not the unthinking specimen they turned me into. Because thinking made all of it too real. Because feeling made all of it too vivid.
Because resisting made all of it hell.
They do not refuse. Just as none of us do. But you already know that…
“Jesus.” It tumbles from my barely moving lips. They’re still practically numb, reacting to the match of horror that’s touched off the poisoned awareness coursing through my blood. “I— I don’t…I can’t…”
But I have to.
No, my heart and soul blast back.
Proof. I need fucking proof!
I don’t bother asking Aliz for it. I know she already sees the denial across my features and is ready with a smooth swivel as I storm past her, heading for the locked white door in the wall behind her.
But for all the speed of my charge, I’m a brick of paralyzed fear once I brace myself before the doorway. The intensity of my grip burns black scars into the tempered steel frame. I’m so goddamn freaked, my muscles bunch and push against the shoulders of my jacket.
I drop my head. I beg the Almighty and any of his celestial pals to lend me strength. It helps, but only a little. I can’t stand how familiar this is. Too familiar. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen doorways just like this, only from a much different point of view.
Because I was always looking at them from waist height.
Because I was being wheeled through them on a rolling lab table.
Right past the bright buttons and blinking lights of security keypads—like the one I short out now, using a single pulse from the middle of my right hand.
The heavy slab disappears into its thick slot in the wall. Steel scrapes steel, and the sound rips into my senses like starving lions tearing open a gazelle. I keep my head dipped, certain I’m about to watch my entrails spill all over the glaring tile, but it still only feels like my intestines are being dragged from me like a skein of human knitting yarn.
Human.
If that’s what I am anymore.
As I order my feelings back and away, separating them from the horror of the memories.
As I command the rest of my senses to shut down, giving raw instinct its freedom to take over all of me.
Bracing for the impact of what I see.
Steeling for the realization of every disgusting detail.
The monitors. The electrodes. The test tubes. The video cameras.
The steel surface at the center of it all, awaiting a new subject. A new mutant.
The angled corner, just behind the headrest of that slab, where she used to stand. The voice without a body. The mistress without mercy. The bitch without a soul.
The corner where I could never see her…
Because the room is shaped like a hexagon.
Another cell in a huge hive of torture.
A massive center of experimentation.
A reality I impel myself to accept, no matter how shrill the screams in my senses, the gashes in my belly, or the protests in my soul. The truth I thrust to my lips, despite their stinging poison.
Back to the starting blocks.
All the fucking way back.
“The Source.” I whip a burning glare back up to Aliz. “This is…we’re inside…the Source?”
Her awful stretch of silence is all the answer I need.
All the truth I can take.
Before I wheel back around, slamming both hands against the lab cell wall. Searing ten holes into the tiles before letting my head fall again—and losing everything from my stomach all over the floor.
Chapter Four
Emma
Reece can’t speak.
And neither can I.
A million words barrage my stunned mind and shocked soul. None of them sound close to right when I fight to form them on my lips.
And so, the pall of our silence. The air around us clinging and weighing like fog over a graveyard. The echoes of our steps clinical and cold, like prisoners being delivered to a dungeon. And my husband, now looking like a blue-skinned zombie. No life in his gaze but the dark desire for just one normal breath. The desperate, shuffling quest for a meaning in his survival. A nobility in his endurance.
A way back to his humanity.
But he’s shut that switch off. Purposely plunged himself back into the darkness. One more time. One last time.
The dive he has to take.
The journey he must make.
I see that now. I know it. I feel it in every arc of energy that still passes between us, fusing his faint fire to mine through the conduit of our joined hands. Though his light is dim, it’s still there. Still calling out to me as it did the night we first met. Still pleading with me to stay by his side, no matter what kind of a glowing freak he appears to be on the outside.
I’m not going anywhere.
I send the message to him with every step we take down the hall, despite the Tesla coils my neck hairs have become during our progress through the warren of underground passages. We ordered Aliz to accompany our X-15 of a son back up the shaft with Mis and Ira, along with Reece’s terse voice memo on his phone for Sawyer’s ears only. Aliz ensured us she’d do just that, showing off her own electric parkour skills.
Fortunately, Reece seemed to believe her. Sometime between vomiting in the lab room and shutting his brain off, he’d explained that he didn’t yet trust this revelation to anyone but Sawyer. A valid point, since we’ve already passed three partial cave-ins along the halls. Aliz alluded to more, including the massive tunnel collapse that trapped her and the twins in a remote section of the complex, with only a couple of video monitors to disable. By now, we can safely assume the Consortium never ascribed to the wisdom of building all of this to proper earthquake codes. Even if the jolt wasn’t caused by a real quake—a truth we may never know at this point—the effect on these rudimentary tunnels has been the same.
Too bad, so sad. Your loss, assholes.
Or so we’re furiously hoping.
In truth, we have no damn idea of what we’re heading into. I try telling myself this is no different than the insanity of sneaking into the Consortium’s Rancho Palos Verdes stronghold, taking nothing with me but Angelique, Wade, and a lot of guts. I also try justifying that this is no different than what I did a year before that, facing off to Angie in the courtyard of my apartment, back when she was still a Consortium henchwoman. No-go on either. This party is different, and it’s not just about the sparse décor in this part of the underworld. Maybe that’s why Reece is taking the journey at his zombie-plod pace instead of an urgent sprint.
But I don’t think so.
I think it’s about everything I’m not seeing here.
And everything he is.
The mists of his nightmares. The ghosts of his torturers. The pain of his prison.
The essence of what transformed him.
I hope he’ll accept at least that affirmation, but no-go on that as well.
There are some nights the brightest lights aren’t meant to penetrate. Memories the strongest love can’t totally erase. And from the moment I learned my hunk-boss-lover was really the electric hero of my city, I knew I had to accept such darkness as part of him. I had to embrace his shadows along with his radiance, his black alleys along with his neon boulevards.
And the walks through underground hells like this—bearing dim but high torches of hope.
A hope that my brave, beautiful superhero actually summons the strength to vocalize…
As we stop in front of a wall made out of fresh-fallen earth, broken chunks of tile, and giant slabs of concrete.
“Holy God. If I can save just one of them…”
He trails off, exposing the hitch of his own air, lost to the inexpressible emotions that take over his face. But that’s okay. I already have the extra match for his torch.
“You mean if we can save just one?”
He tightens his grip against mine. His touch zaps me with sharper force. A billion fireflies zoom up my arm, across my chest, and all the way down the other arm. It’s nothing different than the effect the man has had on me so many other times, but it’s also wholly new. There’s extra depth to his electricity. A harmony to his thrumming melody. A song his heart has never played for me before—because, I sense, he’s never played it for himself before.
“Do you know how much I love you?” The music resonates in every syllable of his declaration. It fills my soul with an answering song as his dazzling silver stare takes me in. His thick dark hair tumbles against his rugged temples and jawline, turning him into an electric rogue. I flash back a lady pirate grin, indulging just one moment of obnoxious bliss. The man’s most slay-worthy gorgeous glance of his entire life, and I’m the sole creature who gets to bask in it. Though I’ll smell like a dirt clod the rest of my life, which may only be for another few minutes if this tunnel decides to go Armageddon on us, I’ll die with a shit-eating smirk on my face.
“With lines like that, mister, you have two choices.” I practically punch myself for actually issuing the interruption here, but at this point, eye-fucking each other won’t get us anywhere.
“And what exactly might those be, Mistress Flare?” he drawls.
“Fire up my lips, or fire up your diggin’ lasers.”
The hunk has the nerve to ponder the question for another couple of seconds, ensuring my dying smirk will now be a bit wider, before turning and extending his fingers. He flicks them as if tossing off water, which serves as the On switch for those ten bright new blazes. Another unforgettable moment only my eyes will be treated to. Never has the man’s power been more awestriking. Even his fingernails are part of the effort, their edges outlined as if Lux went at him with a silver metallic Sharpie.
Silver metal—that soon turns gold.
Reflecting the sun-colored energy that I summon to my hands.
His gorgeous eyes are a similar mix as the man squares his shoulders, braces his stance, and looks to me for one last, love-filled second. We grab the treat selfishly, acknowledging that it really might be our last.
As in, ever.
But if this is how I’m going to go, this is how I want it to be. Buried beneath the city that I love, next to the man gifted to me by the wisdom of the cosmos, knowing that my son is safe, never to be exposed to any knowledge of this dark world. He was named after light, and I’m determined he’ll always live in it.
As the truth of my heart fills every pore of my body, I affirm it all with one tick of a confident nod toward my surreal hotness of a husband. “Ready to crush this dogpile, Zeus Man?”
Reece lifts a lopsided grin. “When you are, goddess sun at the center of my world.”
REECE
An hour later, I’m truly ready to crown her as that actual goddess.
The incredible creature who made it possible for me to be standing here, stunned beyond speech by the scene before me.
Because this experience is beyond what I ever thought to have. To accomplish. To finally realize. For so long, it’s been my fucking Purgatory, Pandæmonium, and Diyu. A hell I must have imagined, living on only in the reality of my darkest nightmares. A place supported on paper only, despite Tyce’s and Angie’s attestations to the opposite. In the back of my mind, I’ve written off both their accounts
as matches to mine. Ramblings from minds that were stripped of the ability to reason or remember—though through every minute of every hour of every day I was in here, I vowed to never forget.
I swore I’d come back for them.
I dreamed of saving them all.
But began to think it was a doomed dream.
But now, I’m living that dream.
Surrounded by more and more of them by the minute, working my hardest to embrace each one as they stumble free from their newly opened cells, all of them dressed in what look like oversize white potato sacks, steel hoof-like hand covers, and nothing else. On the upper back of each “gown,” there’s a classification label in a garish military font.
Alpha 37
Omega 142
Omega 8
Alpha 210
Every time I see the red ink, my memories rupture open and my throat closes shut. Images, buried beneath the insanity of my first hours of freedom, assault me from all sides. Clear as if it’s happening again, I recall the first sight I ever had of my own designation: Alpha Two. I’d run far enough away to be certain I wouldn’t get caught and then had finally given in to the need to get the sack off my body as fast as I could. Then the harsher need to burn every thread of the fucking thing. I’d shot a furious lightning jolt into the thing, turning it into a massive ball of blue flames.
Hit with every instant of the moment now, I’m stunned I suppressed it. It had been the first moment I’d ever utilized my powers for me instead of the Consortium.
For me instead of her.
But the memory doesn’t stop there.
After frying my clothes, I’d been as naked as the day God made me. I hadn’t cared. I’d sprinted through the Barcelona suburbs until finding some clothes in an unlocked car and made a mental note to send the family a new car for their loss. Another first that night: consciously putting others before myself.
It was the beginning of a lot of changes for me.
But as the flashbacks of that night keep filling back into my mind, there’s also a glaring commonality to them. One detail I don’t try to deny.
