“Hold on,” says Maude, who walks right up to Levi and forces him to look at her. “Did he threaten that? Say he’d come after us? Send someone to gun us down, right here on campus? Does he even think that would work—”

“Have you forgotten who you’re dealing with? Gravelle would never do something as plebeian as shooting us.” Levi looks beyond emotion now. Aloof and hard as stone.

“Then what?” Oliver asks, his voice tinged with pain.

“He made sure he would always have a fail-safe way of killing us off,” Levi explains. “Even from afar. He programmed our genes eighteen years ago, before we were born, with Seymour’s help, of course. Added certain characteristics, took others away. Tweaked us to perfection, I suppose you could say.”

“And?” Pippa implores him.

“And one of those tweaks was to insert a stealth virus into our DNA. It’s been lying dormant in our genes for our entire lives. At any moment, Gravelle can choose to activate it. Which means that whenever he feels like it—if we haven’t performed to his liking—he can terminate us. Instantly.”

Stealth Virus

“Don’t you see?” Levi keeps talking. It’s clear that Levi’s been living with this information for a while now, and we’re all scrambling to catch up. “Gravelle wasn’t stupid enough to create us without some kind of an out. The stealth virus allows him to exert control over us, even when we’re not with him. Wherever we live, wherever we go, we can’t escape it. That’s the beauty of it, after all,” Levi quips. “All this time we thought moving to England would be some kind of escape for us. An opportunity to start over, fresh, and leave our bleak childhood behind. What idiots we were, thinking we’d outsmart Gravelle. He’s been one step ahead of us since before we were even born.”

“Would he really do it?” Pippa asks. “He’s been reminding us for years that he’s our only family. That he’ll always love us more than our DNA families do. That he knew we’d always return to him because, eventually, we’d see how cruel the real world is.”

“Joke’s on us, I guess.” Levi shrugs. “I think he’d do it, sure. I don’t think he wants to. He was hoping we’d come here last year and find a world so hardened and bitter toward us that we’d run straight back to Castor Island begging for our old lives back.”

“But that’s not what happened,” I say.

“No.” Levi finally meets my eyes again, this time lingering on them long enough for my stomach to flutter. “So now he’s falling back on plan B. The back-up plan he probably doesn’t want to have to use.”