“A worthy sacrifice, don’t you think?” Pitr asked, snapping Liam’s attention back. “No one to miss him. A perfect vessel of sickness and uselessness and rage. We’ll transmute him into pure misery and pain to open the gates.”

Could Liam do it? Kill him. His own father. Exact vengeance for his mother, for the twenty years of terror this man had wrought on her. The question wasn’t whether he deserved it—because Liam knew he did. What Liam didn’t know was whether it was worth whatever gruesome taint the act would leave on his soul. Whatever further darkness it might invite in.

But Pitr knew him too well.

“Come on, Liam Doyle. Take back your name.” Pitr smiled. “Take control.”

He’d always known just what strings to pull.

Liam shuffled forward until only the thin pane of throbbing air separated him from his father. Kieran’s eyes were rolling wildly, but when they settled on Liam, his whole demeanor shifted. Hatred burned deep in those glassy eyes. From behind the gag Pitr had tied around his mouth, he tried to spit out a few epithets, and Liam was glad not to have to hear them.

“Kill him. Free yourself.” Pitr extended a knife toward Liam through the thick haze of shimmering air. Its handle was ornate; its blade curved. “Take control.”

Liam’s breath caught in his throat. Control.

His fingers spread wide, ready to grasp that knife. Was it wrong to kill monsters? No. Far from it. Nazis, tyrants, abusers—every last one deserved nothing but pain. His father among them. He deserved a muddy ditch and his own vomit clogging his throat, or a bullet in the base of his skull from any number of the cut-rate mobsters he owed.

But for Liam to do it? Now, like this? This wasn’t control. Not like Pitr claimed.

Forever binding himself to Pitr and his father with this act was no freedom at all.

“No.”

Liam dropped his hand. His father snorted, twitched.

With a snarl, Pitr raised his pistol toward Liam’s chest, his grip shaking. Liam felt his muscles tense, as if that would do him any good. But then Pitr shrugged and lowered the gun.

“Suit yourself.”

The first shot shattered Kieran’s kneecap. His scream filled the air, rolling with the rise and fall of the machine’s oscillations. The second shot tore open one of his palms. Blood gushed onto the laboratory floor until it ran and met that wall of warped air, and then it flowed up along the surface of the air—weightless—swirling in the space between the oscillators.

“Look.” Pitr had to shout to be heard over Kieran’s grunting and the machines. “It’s working.”