The Similars (The Similars #1)(81)
Though I don’t like staying silent, I do, but only because I don’t know what good it would do to confront Ransom now. Levi and I are focused on the big picture: Gravelle.
It’s a dismal Thursday morning when I grab my small backpack and place the straps securely over my shoulders. I meet Levi outside Cypress. I’ve left Pippa a vague note telling her not to worry about us. I don’t want her to know too much and have to lie to Ransom. Levi and I say little during the walk down the path to the edge of campus, and then to the bus station on the outskirts of town.
Boarding and finding seats next to each other on the self-driving bus, we look like any other teens setting out on a road trip. Only we aren’t enjoying the view of the Vermont countryside as it rolls past our window—we have work to do. Levi pulls out a tablet and begins sketching a map of the island, as much as he can piece together from memory. Using an app that allows him to configure hallways, doors, and windows, he puts together a sophisticated blueprint and talks me through it. I don’t have to lean far to see it, sandwiched together as we are in our cramped seats.
“The island is several miles off the coast—you can’t see it from the mainland. It’s completely man-made and ecologically sound; it doesn’t interfere negatively with marine life, and the entire foundation of it is made up of materials recycled and ground into sand. The compound where we lived is composed almost exclusively of glass and steel. Everything that happens there is guarded, planned. Every delivery, every visitor—they have to arrive via boat or helicopter. The keepers are not allowed to bring devices on the premises, and it wouldn’t be in their best interest to tell anyone what they know; they’re desperate to please him. Gravelle pays them well for their silence.”
“How big is it?” I ask.
“The actual structure? Big—but I don’t know square footage. I know the layout of the entire place like the back of my hand; every hallway and passage, even the restricted ones. But it’s difficult to have a sense of scale when you’re inside it. The only word I can think of to accurately describe it is that it’s floating, which in some ways, it is—the whole island is like some sea monster jutting out of the surf. But that much glass, I don’t know if that’s ever been done anywhere else. Gravelle paid the architect who designed the compound to keep the whole endeavor as top secret as a CIA initiative.”
“That’s why there aren’t any photos of it.”
Levi nods.
“So if it’s glass everywhere, does that mean you never had any privacy?”
“It’s only glass on the perimeter. Once you’re inside, unless you’re in one of the outer chambers, you could get completely lost in darkness. Our lessons were held in windowless rooms for hours at a time. There were days when I didn’t know if it was midnight or noon, morning, night, or something in between.”
“He kept you locked up like prisoners?”
“We had outside time. But it’s an island—where would we have gone?”
Levi pauses for a second, looking at his tablet. He zooms in on a corridor.
“We shared rooms—my roommate has always been Jago. Our bedrooms on the compound weren’t all that different from the setup at Darkwood, though they had every technological advance, whereas the Darkwood dormitories are, shall we say…”
“Primitive?” I supply.
Levi nods. “Our rooms had touch screens to operate every function, from the lights to the toilets. I never knew anything different. Now I see it was a little bit like living on a ship or a space station.”
Levi highlights a section on his drawing. “Here’s where all the classroom areas were clustered: an art room, a room for martial arts, a dance studio, a theater, a science lab.”
He hovers over another block of rooms.
“What’s that area?” I ask.
“Gravelle’s quarters. They were strictly off-limits. Code Purple, he called them. None of us ever saw the inside of where Gravelle lived and worked. Code Yellow rooms—the library, for example, which was glass on all sides, including the ceiling—were always open to us. That was my favorite room,” he adds, highlighting it in yellow on the floor plan. Levi fiddles with a setting, and suddenly the whole drawing changes perspective, from a flat, two-dimensional rendering to a 3-D view of the space. Even as a sketch, it’s beautiful. “Every book you could imagine was contained within those walls. The ceiling was twenty feet high. If you wanted to read a book that was shelved at the very top, you could request it, and the entire room would shift like a factory assembly line to bring the book down to you.”
“Why weren’t they all just digitized?”
Levi shrugs. “Gravelle valued physical books.”
We spend the rest of the bus ride planning the next leg of our journey. I fall asleep with my head on Levi’s shoulder. I dream of the compound, of intricate mazes of hallways, and of Gravelle, towering over us, his face twisted and ugly. When I wake up, we’re at Bar Harbor.
The bus ride has taken much more time than anticipated—most of the day, in fact. It’s getting dark now. We have to stop for the night. I find a nondescript hotel in town and pay for a room in cash. There’s only one queen-size bed that takes up most of the space. For dinner, we eat snacks from the hall vending machine—chocolate bars and chips.