I gulp, swallowing the emotion building in my chest. If I stay here, I’ll never see Adam again—not the Adam of my time anyway. Future-Adam is the same person, but he’s thirty years older than me, and it just isn’t the same somehow. I’ll never have a future with this Adam. But it’s worth it to save the others. And if I go back and then kill myself, I won’t have a future with Adam anyway. At least this way we’ll all live.

I touch Adam’s face softly, memorizing the curve of his jaw, the feel of the stubble on his chin, the way his eyes shine in the darkness. “I’m sorry, Adam. I wish it didn’t have to come to this, but it’s the only way the others will be safe. I won’t risk killing them.”

Zoe gives me a quick hug, and Trent slaps me on the back. Chris shakes my hand. “You’re doing the right thing,” he says.

“I know,” I say, even if my gut is screaming no, no, no. Adam looks heartbroken, but there are no words that can fix this. It’s better if he just lets me go.

“Elena, you can’t do this,” he says. “You have a life in the present. You can’t give it up now. And I can’t lose you.”

“It’s okay,” I tell him quietly. “I’ll go to your future self and he’ll help me out. You’ll see me in thirty years.”

“We still need a plan,” Chris interrupts. “If we’re not suffering from future shock, we should pretend like we don’t remember anything from the future. And if we are suffering from it…then we won’t remember this conversation anyway. Either way, we don’t want Aether to know what we did in the future or what we found. We need to leave behind everything we bought in the future…and your sketchbook too, Zoe.”

She bites her lip but removes the sketchbook from her bag and hands it to me. I hold it close to my chest, grateful I’ll have this one piece of her to keep.

They remove everything from their backpacks that wasn’t originally in them—flashlights, walkie-talkies, the laser pen, the jammer—and even peel off their fake fingerprints. There’s no reason for me to do the same. I just watch, trying to detach myself from the situation and convince myself I don’t care. Even Adam finally sighs and starts dropping things on the floor, and the sound kills me.