I position myself in front of the keyboard, ready to press the three red buttons like Maude instructed me, but waiting until I’ve seen all the boats take off into the water.

Then I hear the door slam behind me. Good. They’ve gone.

But someone’s still here. I can feel it, the presence of someone else behind me.

I turn quickly in my chair. My heart swells in my rib cage when I see that it’s Levi.

“She’s gone,” he says to me, his voice reassuring. “It’s just us now. We’ll wait until we’re sure they’re all safe, and then we’ll do it—”

“Are you insane?” I say to him, my pulse threatening to bust through my veins. “You can’t be here. You have to go. You can’t die for me! I’m not even Emma. Not really. I’m a Duplicate—”

“So am I,” he interrupts, his eyes pleading with me. Suddenly, they look so sad and vacant. “So am I.”

I stare at him like I’m seeing a ghost. What is he saying? Is this a trick?

“I had no idea, either, until we got here, to Pollux, and I saw the evidence. My time stamp,” Levi explains bitterly. “Just like yours. We were played, Emma, don’t you see? Levi the Similar was on Castor this whole time, this whole year, with the Emma Similar. I was sent to Darkwood instead, and you and I…”

We were never who we thought we were.

The enormity of what Gravelle has done to us hits me like a blow to the chest. It’s unthinkable. Levi was a Duplicate, this whole time? We both were?

I’m deep in my thoughts when I hear a gunshot.

Then the door crashes down.

Someone’s kicked it in.

It’s Seymour. Standing there, wielding a gun, and pointing it straight at me.

Control

“Hands off the keys. Now,” Seymour commands, pointing the gun directly at my head.

I don’t lift my fingers from the keyboard. He has more to lose than I do. Which means I have to play this just right. “I know about the fail-safe,” I tell him. “I know that all I have to do is hit the reboot button, and everything you’ve worked for—all your research, all your years of scheming—will be instantly destroyed.”

“You wouldn’t,” Seymour says, his fingers still curled around the gun. “Kill yourself, to save a bunch of people who care nothing for you? Or you?” He swings the gun to point it at Levi. “I made you. I made you both. You are nothing but my creations, born less than two years ago in my lab and rapidly reared and trained. You are specimens. You are nobodies. Don’t kid yourself that any of them care about you, because they don’t.”