I know what happened, now, even though I didn’t see it. My father leaped in front of that bullet to save Levi’s life. And he may have just ended his own.

I am at his side, a bird with broken wings, flitting next to him, pathetic. I feel stricken. I feel like I’m missing my voice and my limbs. A red spot blooms at his chest, making its way outward over his burlap shirt and onto the floor. “No, no, no…” I keep whispering. No. No!

My father tries to get up but is impossibly weak. So he stays where he is, on the floor, reaching for my hand. I grasp it with a muffled cry, tears pouring from my eyes, blurring my vision.

“I’m okay, honey. I’m okay,” he finally says. I know he’s saying this entirely for my benefit because he’s my father, and parents always want to protect their children if they can, don’t they? But I have to be the adult now. He needs me to comfort him, not the other way around.

A part of my brain reminds me the battle rages on around me, and we can’t stop, not now, but nothing matters to me except my father’s face and the hole at the center of him that I am helpless to fill. “I understand,” I tell him, choking out the words. “I know why you never told me who I was. You were protecting me. You loved me too much to lose me.”

“Good,” he replies. I can tell it’s painful for him to talk. That realization cuts a new cleft in my heart, already ripped wide open.

This is so sick. So wrong. Originals and clones shooting Duplicates who can’t help it, who never knew any better. All this fighting and suffering, and for what?

“You’re not expendable,” I tell him, my voice sounding so raw and fierce I don’t recognize it. “I don’t care what they teach those other Duplicates, what memories they give them. They’ll never replace you, not for me.” I wish I had a pharma for him, for the pain. I wish I could rush him to the hospital. I wish I could do something—anything. But all I can do is hold his hand and watch as the world implodes around me.