Levi looks over at me. Our eyes meet for half a second, and in that moment, I feel every nerve ending in my body tingle and stand at attention. If I could make everyone around us vanish, so it could be only the two of us… It’s all I want right now, all I can think about. Then he tears his eyes away from me to stare out at Dark Lake, and I feel an instant loss, a hollowing out of my chest, when he breaks our connection. “Gravelle wouldn’t let me leave. Of course I wanted to. I’d never want to stay there with that man of my own free will. But then he changed his mind. Decided to send me back here.”

I notice Maude shoot a look at Jago, who shrugs. Theodora squeezes Levi’s hand, and Ollie and Pru hang back to the side, observing but not wanting to interfere. I’m sure they feel like I do—bystanders who don’t really belong.

“What do you mean?” Pippa finally speaks up. “Gravelle sent you back here, to Darkwood? Or he let you go?”

Levi sighs. “Both, I guess. I’d been petitioning to leave the island for months. Entreating him every minute I saw him to let me go. I wanted out. Being there, in that desolate place—it didn’t feel like my home anymore. It felt like a prison, in spite of all the memories I have of us there. I guess in retrospect, it was a pretty grim childhood, wasn’t it?”

I feel my throat catching at these words, not only because it pains me to hear Levi talk about the Similars’ upbringing this way, but also because now I know it’s a childhood I only barely dodged. You could have been there for sixteen years too. For the first time, I consider that my own formative years after age three, spent with the father I always thought of as cool and distant, were not half bad.

“He put me through things,” Levi says. “Mind control in the portal with those damn virtual reality simulations we all hate. Daily exercises that were grueling, mentally and physically. On one particularly awful day, he tested how long I could stay underwater, to the point of me passing out.”

“Levi,” Theodora says, looking pained, but Levi shakes his head.

“All that stuff wasn’t as bad as the loneliness. Being there without all of you,” he adds. “That’s what made it unbearable. Because before, we had each other.”

I wonder if, in some small way, he’s including me in that statement. Or only the Similars.

“One day, I woke up, went to breakfast, and Gravelle told me I could leave,” Levi continues. “On one condition, of course.”

Maude seems to know where this is going before Levi has to explain. “Why do I have a really bad feeling right now?” she asks.