“Or cattle,” I add, disgusted.

“He’d have to, wouldn’t he?” Theodora asks. “Otherwise, things could go totally sideways, if he had no way of differentiating original from Duplicate. He had to build in some kind of marker to be able to quickly check on his creations, keep them in line.”

Pru’s pacing, thinking this over. “Where do we get this infrared light the Ollie Duplicate mentioned?”

“The science lab,” Maude answers with authority. “I’m sure I saw one there last year when Emma and I were snooping around. I bet I still have access from Ransom’s experiment. I’ll meet you back here. Twenty minutes,” she shouts, already taking off and disappearing into the thick woods.

“If this Ollie seemed so similar to the real Oliver,” Pippa wonders out loud. “Then where did his memories come from? How would he have access to every thought and feeling Ollie ever experienced? How would he know all of Ollie’s history?”

“My guess is that it’s a combination of downloaded thoughts and incredibly meticulous training,” Ansel says, thoughtful. “We already know Gravelle’s been manipulating minds with his portal. And he showed you those memories last year, didn’t he, Emma? Of his time at Darkwood?”

It’s true. Those memories transported me to the time when Gravelle was Johnny Underwood, when he was expelled from Darkwood in his junior year.

“The first Duplicates didn’t seem to have all those memories,” I say. “They didn’t possess all the nuances and life experience that this Ollie clone has. Why?”

“Gravelle kept Ollie on the island for nearly a year,” Ansel reminds me. “Who knows what he did to him, what he put him through? The tests and studies and ‘research’? He could have downloaded every single memory of Ollie’s, every single thought, and transferred it to this Duplicate.”

I lean against the stone wall by the circular driveway and pull my arms around myself, suddenly shivering in the frigid air.

“Where is Ollie?” I whisper, looking from one friend to the next. “Back on the island? What’s he done to my best friend now? What if—”

But I don’t allow myself to say the thought out loud. What if he’s dead. What if I never see him again. It’s incomprehensible.

“I can’t lose Ollie again,” I cry out. My chest feels like someone’s tightening it in a corset, pulling it so taut I soon won’t be able to breathe.

I don’t say out loud what I’m thinking about, which is the way we left things, before Ollie was taken… How I pulled away from that kiss and told him I couldn’t love him that way. If that’s the last thing I ever said to him…

No, no, no. It can’t be. It won’t be.