The Similars (The Similars #1)(95)

I look at Oliver—is it really Oliver?—wondering if it could possibly be true. “Ollie?” I ask, afraid to say his name out loud and jinx this, whatever it is.

“Ah, young love,” Gravelle says, grinning. “So wonderful for you, Oliver, to finally have the reunion with Emma that you deserve.” He claps his hands merrily. “Doesn’t feel good, does it?” Gravelle addresses Levi. “Now you understand what it was like for me, when I was so cruelly abandoned by my wife and child.”

“You can’t turn me against her,” Levi snaps, and I understand why he looked so sad before. But I can’t think about that right now. I have to deal with this. I have to be rational.

“If it’s really you,” I say forcefully, for everyone’s benefit, “prove it.”

“My mom’s cookies,” the Oliver likeness says.

“What?”

“You loved the lemon meringue the best, but you didn’t want to hurt all the other cookies’ feelings, so you always ate a chocolate chip and a sugar cookie, so they wouldn’t feel left out.”

“What else?” I whisper, hanging on to his every word.

“Fifty years, fifty years—I’ll be your best friend for fifty more years.”

“And after that?”

“You have to reapply.”

My whole body tenses. It’s really him. It has to be. No one else would—no one else could know those things… I stare at Oliver’s face, his expression dulled by months of pharmas. Oliver. Oliver! I could stare at him all day. It isn’t long before panic consumes me. What if the pharmas have altered his personality irrevocably?

“Where’s Prudence?” I demand. “We’ve been waiting long enough.”

“You certainly are an impatient one, aren’t you?” Gravelle tuts as he hobbles toward the far wall with the skinny windows. He calls up a virtual control panel and begins typing commands into it. As he types, I notice the opposite wall beginning to open. There is space behind that wall. A long, narrow compartment, or room of sorts.

There, chained to the wall in shackles, is Prudence.





Escape


“The gang’s all here,” says Gravelle, surveying Pru with satisfaction. “Together again, and all that jazz. Don’t you just love happy reunions?”

I run toward Prudence. “What have you done to her?”

“I’m okay,” Pru says bravely. But from the look of her, she’s anything but.

“You were never a good liar,” I tell Pru as I suppress a sob. Pru is much thinner than when I last saw her all those months ago, and the shackles binding her wrists to the wall are abrading her skin. I feel like I will be physically sick.

I turn to Gravelle, my body heat rising as my ire grows. “Why is she in that—that contraption?”

“Emmaline, Emmaline,” Gravelle chides. “You do tend toward the dramatic. Pru paid me a visit, and it turned out to be quite convenient timing for her to assist me in some research.” Gravelle comes over to fiddle with some wires at Pru’s feet.

“He means I’ve become a human lab rat,” Pru says.

Gravelle laughs. “Prudence has been a useful, if uncooperative, subject.”

Peeling my eyes off Pru for a moment, I take in the room. So much was hidden from our sight before the wall was opened. The space is filled with equipment, shiny and metal and foreboding. I see monitors, sharp instruments gleaming on aluminum trays, and rows of test tubes and beakers.

“You’re impressed by my laboratory,” Gravelle notes. “It’s quite extensive, as you’ll soon see. Oliver, Levi… This can, and will, all be yours one day.”

“As if we’d ever want any part of this,” Levi mutters.

“I’d advise you to speak only for yourself, son.” Gravelle moves through his lab, absentmindedly stacking some glass jars. “Oliver’s spent the last several months enjoying all this compound has to offer. Seeing just how powerful he might become by my side. You’d be surprised to hear that he disagrees with you…”

“I don’t,” Oliver snaps, and I glimpse my best friend again, deep below the surface of the pharma haze. “I want to go home to my parents.”

Gravelle’s face ripples with anger. “Too bad. You’re both staying here for the foreseeable future. Levi’s had years of training on this compound. You have a lot more to go, son. Levi, have you forgotten what awaits you back at Darkwood? You’re still a suspect in dear Prudence’s attack. Here, you’re safe—”

“Levi didn’t do it,” Pru interjects. “It wasn’t him. Emma and Levi saved my life. If it weren’t for them, my attacker might have done me in. She was scared she’d get caught and left the boathouse before Emma found me.”

“She?” My heart pounds wildly. “But it wasn’t Madison. She was meeting her tutor, if you can believe it…”

“No, not Madison. Tessa Leroy. She bludgeoned me with a rowing oar and left me for dead in that canoe.”

“Tessa?” I’m bewildered. “But why?”

Pru sighs. “I knew about the experiments Ransom and Fleischer were going to be running on the Similars. I found out over the summer, from my dad. Someone in the Quarry gave him a tip. I’m not sure how they knew. But I confronted Tessa so I could stop it all before it started. I asked her to meet me at the boathouse, warned her that they wouldn’t get away with it, that the Quarry would stop it, that she needed to get on our side. But it quickly became clear that Tessa wasn’t going to see reason. She said the Similars deserved the treatment they were getting. She said Theodora ruined her family, and it had all started with me. With my father.”