I look at the man splayed on the floor, also coughing fitfully. I know this man isn’t good. But why? And what has he done?

The smoke is overwhelming, so I lie down on the floor, gasping for the last clean air, and curl myself into a ball.

The boy lies down next to me. We’re still holding hands, linked until the end.

I try to think of something comforting to carry me through this, but when I grasp for a memory, something to hold on to—there’s nothing there.

Home

Two weeks later, we’re home. Home is Darkwood—with its relentless gossip and impossible standards, its in vitro meat and freezing dorms, and the old abandoned pump house that’s something straight out of a nightmare. It’s the place where I fell in love with Levi junior year, where Ollie and I spent so many afternoons before that, lying on our backs on the grass, dreaming. I’ve missed it so much that my longing for it all is still a gaping hole in me, one it will take months to fill. Every time I walk into the dining hall, or my dorm room, I think of her—my Duplicate—and wonder what my senior year, her senior year, was like.

I was on Castor Island for nearly a year. Away from Ollie and Pru and the Similars and my father. I lost a year of my life because I was Gravelle’s prisoner. The only thing that made it remotely tolerable was Levi.

He was there with me, on Castor. We didn’t know it in the beginning, and those first few weeks were a specific kind of hell, finding myself trapped on the compound with Gravelle, all alone without a soul but the guards in sight. I was so lonely—so desperate to escape. I quickly learned how futile my efforts were. Every time I tried, the guards thrust me into the portal. So I resolved to wait, pacing my stark room, slowly going mad. Gravelle made sure I had plenty to do to keep me busy. Textbooks and coursework would arrive at my room each day—including a syllabus—and assignments would appear on a tablet, with pop quizzes and homework I worked on well into the night. I never lacked for schoolwork to keep me occupied. Leave it to Gravelle to make sure I wasn’t “missing” my senior year—even though I was, in every other sense of the word.