I’m torn; I don’t want to leave my friends. What if more guards show up with more guns? They’d be outnumbered. But Theodora’s right. Levi and I need to find Ollie and the others as fast as we can. Conflicted, we run. Tears streaking down my face, adrenaline pumping, I blindly follow Levi down the first hall, and as he rounds corner after corner. Then he stops for a beat, abruptly, trying to work something out in his mind.

“What’s wrong?” I take in a breath. Levi concentrates, then starts moving again, this time walking rather than running. I match his footsteps. We don’t hear any guards. I pray that they aren’t on our tails.

“I was confused at first, but now…” Levi reaches for my hand, and I accept it, a thrill going up my spine that’s a mix of fear, adrenaline, and yes, longing. We jog together, measured at first, then increasing our pace. “Emma, I don’t think we’re on Castor Island.”

“Um, did you get knocked in the head when I wasn’t looking?”

“The layout of the halls. It took me a bit to figure it out.” We reach a stairwell and start tackling the steps, going up two at a time.

“Figure what out?”

That’s when an alarm sounds. It’s jarring and earsplittingly loud. I tense, assuming it’s an alert to the guards that we’ve gotten away.

Levi sucks in a breath. “All of the rooms here look exactly like the ones on Castor Island,” he explains. “But now that we’re in the halls, it’s clear—the layout is reversed.”

“Reversed? How? Like a mirror image of Castor Island’s floor plan?”

“Exactly,” Levi says as I follow him to the metal door at the end of the stairwell. “Look. The training quarters should be that way, but based on what I’ve seen in the last five minutes, they’re likely that way.” He points to the right, and that’s the way we run. “It’s so obvious to me now, I can’t believe I’m only just realizing it. We’re not on Castor Island. We’re on its twin. Pollux.”

Rescue

We’re nearing the hallway that will lead us to this windowless section of the compound, the one Levi believes is the “cage” Ollie was referring to. I’m still reeling from Levi’s revelation about Pollux.

“We never knew about this other island, the entire time we were growing up,” Levi explains.

“But when we were on the helicopter,” I protest, still disbelieving. “Wouldn’t we have seen two islands?”