“Don’t you think I’d prepare myself for that? I’ve had years to practice shielding my mind from yours. Which means, I’m afraid, you won’t be getting anything from me. Don’t take it to heart—your talent’s still remarkable.”

I don’t answer him. I just silently fume as Levi steps up next to me.

“What now?” Levi asks, his voice sounding dead. “You’ve won, old man. You got us here. The others are presumably locked up here too. What more could you possibly want from us?”

“You are critical to the next phase of my plan,” Gravelle says, almost reverently.

“And if we don’t cooperate?” Maude cuts in. “Then what? You’ll terminate us all, just like that?”

Gravelle paces, clunking his cane down on the concrete floor, the sound reverberating in the cavernous room. “I’d hate for you to go the way of Headmaster Ransom, that sad old fool. Of course, for you it will be worse. The stealth virus wasn’t designed to completely wipe Ransom out. He’s on the mend, actually. Still comatose, but alive. The virus was designed to specifically target your red blood cells and gray matter. It’s stored in your plasma and can be remotely activated via a trigger mechanism built into its cellular structure. I haven’t had the opportunity to study its effects outside of the lab, but, by my estimation, it would, once activated, only be a matter of minutes—an hour or two at the most—before every organ in your body begins to fail.”

“You say that like there’s no choice in the matter!” Pippa speaks up, indignant. “It’s entirely in your power to make sure that virus is never activated!”

“No, my dear Pippa, it’s entirely in your control. Do as I ask—and I’ll be more than happy to never bring up the stealth virus again.”

“But…you raised us,” Theodora finally speaks up. “All those years, you told us we were special. You said there was no one like us in the world, and that’s why we’d never be understood by anyone but you. All those days in our lessons, you proselytized about how the world would never accept us, but that you would. Was that all a lie?” Theodora chokes. “Did you mean a single word of it?”