The question is sharp and insightful, of the type he would've expected to hear from Alex, and somehow that makes it all the more difficult to answer. Had the opportunity been presented to her in any other way, at any other time, he doesn't know that she'd have accepted it; Lethe and Sandow had needed to come when she'd already lost everything she'd known in the world and when she was in danger of losing far, far more. They had tracked her for years, their radar picking up a CPS complaint here or a school psychologist's evaluation there, but they hadn't come until they needed her--and when she had no other way out.

"Alex is the only one who can really answer that," he says at last. "I'd like to think she wanted to come, that she wanted...something different than she'd had in California. But I also know how convincing Lethe can be." Darlington lets out a harder huff of breath. "I won't say they made me the same offer, but I was given a similar one."