“But,” Maude protests. As strong as she is, this is more than she bargained for. “But if you go through with the reset, we’ll be erasing you. All of your unique thoughts and memories from senior year. They’ll be gone…”

Like the night I spent with Levi. I meet his eyes, and we don’t say it out loud, but we both feel it. We don’t want those memories to die along with me. At least, I know I don’t. But what choice do we have? He’ll have to remember for the both of us. I’ll live on in his mind.

“It won’t matter, because I’ll be dead,” I answer her.

“No,” she protests again. “I won’t let you do it.”

“It’s the only way!” I have to make her see. I don’t want this; of course I don’t. I don’t want to be reset. I don’t want to die. “I could never live with myself if I let Ollie and Jane and all the others suffer like that, shut out of their own lives because no one believes they’re who they say they are. We can’t let Gravelle and Seymour win. We can’t. If we do, this will all have been for nothing. My dad’s death. Theodora’s…” I don’t say what’s in the back of my mind: that I have no life to go back to, anyway.

“I’m with Emma,” Levi declares softly. His use of my name guts me. He hasn’t said 002.34.

I watch Maude as she takes it all in. She presses her hands to her temples, thinking, hard. Finally, she looks up at me, spent.

“You’ll move through this series of screens,” she says quietly. “Follow the prompts to the three red buttons. Then the F7 command will appear. Press that, and the orange reboot button will pop up at the end of the sequence. Pressing it will reset every Duplicate, deactivate the implants in the originals and DNA parents, and signal the bombs to detonate.” I commit everything she said to memory. I can’t mess this up.

“Thank you.” I breathe out. “Now, please. Both of you. Go. I won’t do it until I know you’re safely on the boats.”

It’s too painful to look at them. To think of the lives back home that they’ll inhabit, while I stay here to die, alone. If I let myself go there, I’ll never go through with this. So I don’t. I keep my eyes on the beach outside the window. With relief, I see that even as the Similars keep fighting Duplicates and guards on the shore, many of them are escaping. Ollie is climbing into a boat with Pru and Jaeger. Thank God. Ollie’s going to live. He’s going to be okay. Ansel is helping Tessa and Madison into another one.