In the context of Miss Casey’s disobedience during Helly’s suicide watch and subsequent break room stint and his walking around with Helly, unsupervised, Mark S volunteers to do the break room time instead of Miss Casey just as he did with Helly’s first triggering of the code detector. Cobel asks him, “Who wouldn’t you go to the break room for?” One might wonder if the answer to that question is “his outie”, who put Mark S in this break room of an existence that turned out to be a life in its own right, drenched in love and grief just as much as Mark Scout’s. And yet, Mark S is going back to the proverbial break room that is the whole severed floor after having sabotaged the finalization of Cold Harbor for Mark Scout and his wife, Gemma, who is alive.

Gemma is outside now, and so is Devon, and so is Cobel, and so is Irving Bailiff, and so is Reghabi. These people have enough information to destroy Lumon (and in doing that, shut down the severed floor and kill all the remaining innies without a second thought if they so wish). Mark S accepts that possibility when he doesn’t leave with Gemma through the fire escape. But this isn’t a selfless sacrifice for the sake of Mark Scout; this is a declaration of personhood, of being a self and therefore capable of being selfish, for every innie he knows and all that he doesn’t. He’s coming home to the equator; this building becomes a continent for himself, and Helly R and Dylan G and Petey K and Irving B and Miss Casey, who is a person, not part of one, and still can’t be alive at the same time as Gemma. Mark S uses the power Lumon gave him by making him indispensable for the completion of Cold Harbor (Dylan was right, page 197 slaps: “Your work needs you, not the other way around”), to help, not harm.

And yet Mark Scout, despite his ostensible selfishness and because he thinks of Mark S as an extension of himself, sends him back to the severed floor even when their last words exchanged were Mark S telling him he doesn’t trust him. Mark Scout trusts his innie with this after two years of everyone else using using both of them by trying to make them each other’s worst enemy. Mark S returns the favor by using his one moment of real agency to give someone else their autonomy back. They’re both in the break room for everyone they know by the end of the Cold Harbor.