Celia and I step away from the grate and pull ourselves back up the elevator. We slide the board back into place in the closet and sneak out. Celia stops in front of the mirror long enough to fix her hair, but gets distracted by her lipstick. She wipes the smudged colors on the back of her hand, and turns to me. "It'll be awhile before Daniel and Mitchell get back. Do you want to hang out?"

I think about it, and even though I'd actually enjoy that now, I yawn. My sleep schedule, or lack thereof, must have finally caught up to me.

"I'd like to," I say, "but I didn't get any sleep last night, and I am really tired."

"Oh, it's okay. I should probably wait for Mitchell to get back, anyway, you know so I can check on Nate's files." She shrugs, and starts for the door.

"You know what, though?" I ask, and she stops. "You could come back to my room and take a nap with me. Would that be too boring?"

She smiles and shakes her head. "No, it wouldn't be boring. We could do that."

I cross the room and grab her hand in mine. "C'mon, Celia, let's go take a nap. Like old ladies."

She laughs, and follows me out of the bathroom and back to room 6.

When I open the door, I find Jane on all fours, viciously scrubbing the floor. I look to Celia who shrugs, and we close the door behind us. I rush to Jane's side, and Celia perches on the bed.

"Jane, please, stop."

She coughs, and a few specks of blood spray the rug. Jane bursts into tears.

I pull her up to face me. "Jane, calm down. What's going on?"

"I'm dying," she cries, "I started cleaning the rug, but then I coughed, and blood went everywhere, so I tried to clean that up, but I coughed again, and it just kept happening, and now I'm sure I'm dying. It's over, Isla, there's no time left. This was my life. I was cheated. I was cheated out of a real life. I should be married by now, with kids, and a nice picket fence, and a job, I wanted to be a lawyer, I would have been so rich." She falls into her hands on the floor. "And now I'm dying."

"No, no you're not, we're getting medicine for you."

She smears the tears from her cheeks. "Thank you for trying to help, Isla." She takes a deep breath to calm herself down. "I'd rather busy myself. When I'm busy, I can't think about how much I hate my life. Is there anything else you'll need today?"

I look up at Celia, whose eyes are wide with worry. "Celia and I are going to take a nap while the boys are still out. Want to stay with us? We've had a terrible morning, but maybe if you were here, you could help us calm down."

She nods, and gestures to the bed. Celia and I lie down and she pulls the covers over us, before crawling between us and sitting against the headboard. I roll onto my side, and curl up on the edge of the bed. Jane's hand moves down my back to calm me to sleep.

I shut my eyes, and almost immediately drift away, but my mind greets me with screams and exploding bodies. "Jane?" I ask, coming back to reality.

"Yes?"

"Could you talk us to sleep?"

"You want to hear a story?"

"Friends share stories," Celia adds from the other side of the bed, and I smile. Jane starts to rub our backs, and I close my eyes.

"Once upon a time," she starts, "there was a girl named Jane Rosen. She lived in a beautiful blue house in Arlington with her adopted parents," and as she speaks, her life plays in my head, like a puppet show, "They lived a very happy life together. After she came home from school each day, Jane liked to play in the yard with her dog, Bruno. She liked to dance ballet, and read mystery books. As she grew up, she learned more and more about what she wanted from her life, until finally she made a plan: She graduated from high school and went to a nearby college for Law. She spent weekends with her parents, and they liked to take her to the ballet. After her freshmen year of college, Jane spent the summer teaching ballet classes at a children's school in DC. She had the most perfect life, and didn't focus on boys or drinking or partying, because she knew she'd have time for that later. But one day, when she was at work, the sirens started blaring, and everyone had to evacuate. Once Jane was outside, she saw the cloud of fire and smoke rising above her. She ran, her and the other teachers and all of their students, a bunch of ballerinas escaping into the metro tunnels, racing against the bomb."

This part isn't comforting, but I'm already lost between dreaming and waking, and I don't have the strength to stop her story.

"The tunnels were crowded and all the girls were separated, like pink dandelion seeds blowing into a tornado. Jane kept running until she reached the subway tracks, she didn't see anyone she knew, but there was a woman pulling a group through the tunnel. She wore a grey mechanics uniform, so Jane trusted her. She looked like Jane's knight in shining armor. The knight pulled the group into a maintenance closet, and shut the door behind all of them before the fire filled the tunnel. The woman, the knight in shining armor, was named Meg, and she saved their lives. The group stayed in the maintenance room until the pangs of hunger were too much to bear, and then they escaped into a new dark and snow-covered world. When some soldiers rescued them, the group of survivors thought they would leave the wintery place, but they were placed into frozen chambers to keep them as they were then, until someone would come to wake them up. Until the world was right again, and Jane could be happy."

I want to ask her about her family, about the students she taught, about Meg and how she transformed from a knight in shining armor to the hopeless body downstairs; but I'm already dreaming, and in my dreams, I move through sheets of ice, swimming between states of matter.

I don't want to fall into the same dream I've been having each night, but I do.

I am in the safe room, except it feels more like the drainage tunnels, and I am cramped. I try to crawl out, but I keep getting caught on things—spikes, thorns, and machine gears—and my skin tears open at their touch, like it did I was thrown back into the bushes. I continue crawling, pushing through the stinging pain, until I emerge from a burrow in the meadow where Daniel and I used to play.

It is supposed to be daylight—somehow I know that—but it is dark in the meadow. I didn't have anything on me when I was in the safe room, but now I somehow have my slingshot, and I run into the woods. In the dream, the woods always lead to the bunker, which, in the dream, is only a door into the earth. I hear thumping, and suddenly the trees start falling around me, so I slide into the bunker.

It's only a room, and all the walls are covered in guns. My dad is hiding there, but he is old in the dream, hunched over in a chair at the center of the room. As the walls begin closing around us, he hands me a gun. "You know what this is," he says, and I do: It's Daniel's Enfield revolver.

"Come with me," I say, but somehow he is so many years older than he was moments earlier, and I know he can't come with me. By then the walls are nearly touching my dad's wrinkled body, so I grab the gun from him, and push myself out of the collapsing bunker, like pushing off the bottom of a lake to breathe again.

Suddenly I'm back in the woods, and I hear my name echo against the trees. I spin around and see my mom running toward me, wearing her old adventuring outfit. Then I hear my name from another direction, and I find Ben and Eleanor running toward me from another part of the woods. All three of them reach me and cocoon me in their arms, until the thumping returns.

We run from the sounds, back into the meadow. But as we run, somehow we become smaller and smaller, until we are as tall as the clovers at the edge of the meadow. Finally, I see what is thumping and springing us into the air. Prowlers. They are scattered throughout the meadow, swatting their claws through the air. Even from below the grass line, I see that these Prowlers are different. They have heads, and all of them wear Cooper's face.

Ben grabs my hand, and says, "I love you like my own." Then he and Eleanor sprint away, disappearing into the grass. Then, I am alone with my mom, so I grab her shoulder and shout over the thundering crashes of Prowler feet, "Where is Dad?"

She shakes her head, tears in her eyes, and whispers, "Outside." It's like we're back to the day he was taken. I look up at the nearing Prowlers, but when I turn back to my mom, she is gone, and I am completely alone. I point Daniel's revolver at the first Prowler, who is nearly on top of me by now, and shoot. As the bullet pierces his skull, his head poofs out of existence and his mechanical body crumbles around me. One of the pieces is about to fall and squash me like an ant, when someone grabs my hand and pulls me up, not only out of the grass, but to a normal height: Declan.

"Run, weirdo," he yells, tugging me into a sprint. We race through the maze of Prowler legs, and out of the corner of my eye, I see Nina running beside us on the other side.

"What's the plan? What's the plan?" she shouts, but I am running too fast to answer her until we make it to the other end of the meadow, and I scream, "Shoot!"

Then, suddenly, I'm surrounded by all my friends—Daniel, Declan, Nina, Celia, Ava, Eleanor, and my mom—and together, we begin shooting. We disintegrate all but one of the Prowlers, who somehow shrinks back into Cooper's human form after I shoot him, like air escaping from a balloon.

Once he has fallen to earth, I stand over Cooper as he writhes and wheezes. I pull out a large knife from some unseen place, the one my mom would use to cut through tough pieces of meat, and stab it into his neck. It doesn't feel wrong or scary, it just feels like cutting through fabric. As I step backwards, Cooper's face changes. Somehow it morphs into the President's face, and he begins to laugh. "You really don't get it," he cackles, "You can't kill me. I'm deathless."

I cock Daniel's revolver and shoot him in the head. Blood from his bullet hole pours out, and pools around my feet. I try to move, but the blood has turned the earth to mud, and it begins sucking me in, like quicksand. I begin to panic as the bloody mud swallows me up to my stomach, my shoulders, my jaw. I gasp in as much air as I possibly can and try not to let the pressure on my chest break me, until I slip into the ground.

I realize I'm still alive, so I open my eyes and see Nate lying on the floor of the President's quarters with a gunshot to his lung. I race to his side. Maybe at least now I could stop him from bleeding out, so I rip the red fabric from the wall, and stuff it into his wound. "Shh," I whisper.

"Isla," he says clearly, and it startles me. I expect his speech to be like it was in the bunker, like it was when he was dying in reality, and then he shatters me, like he does in every dream. "I can't believe you."

"What?" I never expect him to say that.

"You should have died, like you were supposed to."

I close my eyes and begin to scream, "This isn't you! This is a dream! This isn't real!" When I open my eyes, I'm back in the bed, awake, my voice hoarse from screaming and my body hot with sweat. Jane is no longer here and Daniel isn't back yet from work, but Celia holds me until I stop shaking.

She grabs Frankenstein from the nightstand, and opens it to my bookmark. She struggles to read it, but does anyway. She knows me well enough by now to know that reading calms me down.

***

Every time I hear the song below, I think of Isla's dream in this chapter.

https://youtu.be/hbEM9Sr9fi4