“Didn’t you wonder how I managed to turn all your abilities against you?” Jeremiah asks, his tone unbearably smug. “How I used your Spoken command to make you all immobile, how I used Melody’s and Riley’s to modify everyone’s memories? How could I do any of that if your dad had already removed my power?”

The second shadow I saw through the glass.

The person I thought was some kind of bodyguard, the one who stayed outside and out of sight. But not out of hearing range. Not out of Speaking range.

“No,” I breathe as I look at Kael. Tears fill my eyes as comprehension hits me. I feel like I’m in Smith’s blazing house all over again, only this time I’m not protected from the flames. I’m burning from the inside out, the feeling so acute that I can barely summon my next words. “It was you?”

Jeremiah answers for him. “Kael was instrumental that day. Without his Destroyer ability reshaping your family’s commands, we wouldn’t have been able to get you away from them and into Lengard. That was the plan all along. I knew Vanik hadn’t stopped his experiments after the lab accident. I knew he was so close to developing a serum, but he needed someone with immense power—someone with a Creator ability—in order to perfect it. He needed you.” He starts walking toward my friends, the vial in his hand now joined by a syringe. “And so, you see, dearest Alyssa, all along, you were my secret weapon. We placed you in Lengard for the sole purpose of allowing Vanik unrestricted access to you, so that when the time came, he would unwittingly be the one to turn me back into a Creator, which then would allow for all this”— he gestures around the lab, to my dad, to Arryn, Riley, and Cami, and to the refrigerator full of anti-Speaker serum—“to come about.” His mouth stretches into a smile as he looks down at the syringe and vial. “And now, here we are.”

I can’t breathe. I can’t fill my lungs, and not because of Ward’s grip on me. I hate that it’s him who is binding me. Jeremiah’s cruelty is evident in his choice of captor, as if he knows how much Ward’s touch would mean to me at any other time. I hate that I’m bound at all, when I want to be free to lash out, to run, to scream.

I stare at Kael, desperate for him to tell me that none of this is real, that none of this is happening. That the time we spent together wasn’t a lie, that he wasn’t manipulating me from the very beginning. From before I even remember.

Everyone is lying to you, Six-Eight-Four. Everyone.