After Declan and I address the second shift of Deathless, we return to our work stations. He goes back to the Captain's dining room to meet with the new General, and I head back to the biology sector; but I decide to make a detour first. Armed with a bowl of oatmeal, I type in the code for the infirmary.

Winston looks up from where he's been waiting at Phoebe's side. "Hey," he croaks, as if it's the first thing he's ever said. No smile. There's not even a shadow of the man he used to be. Even his face looks unfamiliar, sunken and gray in the fluorescent light.

With my free hand, I pull a stool up beside him to sit and raise a spoonful of oatmeal to his mouth.

"You don't have to feed me," he says.

"If you're not going to feed yourself...."

He slouches in defeat and opens his mouth. He swallows the first bite and feeds himself another, taking the spoon and bowl from me. Now that the oatmeal's syrupy scent isn't directly in front of me, I smell Winston. The odor stings my nostrils and I nearly gag. "When was the last time you bathed?" I ask, lifting my fingers to my nose. Anything to block out the stench.

He shrugs. "I haven't left her side."

"Not even to use the bathroom?"

He shrugs again, eating another spoonful of oatmeal. "Bedpans."

"Winston... we're all hurting, but you have to take care of yourself."

"When she wakes up. That's when I'll leave."

I glance at Phoebe. She looks like the painted illustrations of Sleeping Beauty from my now destroyed fairytale anthology back home. Her skin is like porcelain and her lips glow with balm. At least Winston has been taking care of someone. If she ever wakes up, Phoebe won't look any different than she did before her brain was compromised. But that's the troublesome part: Her personality will likely be completely different. Sure, Winston is preserving her body in the only way he knows how without the cryo chambers, but there's no guarantee the woman who wakes up will be the woman he loves.

"Declan's doing a great job leading," I say, scooting the stool just outside of Winston's body odor bubble. "In case you were worried."

He shakes his head once. "I wasn't."

He moves his fingertips over Phoebe's arm in a figure eight, and asks, "Do you know how long I have loved this woman?" Without giving me a chance to answer, he continues, "Gunther introduced us at Harvard. He brought us all together to create the cryo chambers after he and Alex made the antifreeze compound. She shook my hand like you would expect a man to, you know? Strong, assertive, powerful."

"That's kind of sexist, Winston."

"I don't mean it to be. I was never prejudiced against women or anything, it's just... a woman this beautiful... you don't expect her to have such a strong handshake. After that there were no other women for me. I waited for Phoebe. She was the ultimate, and in the back of my mind, I always imagined that one day, maybe when we were older, we would be together.

"She told me about her husband, about their relationship. Greg was a good guy, I liked him, actually. He and I would always end up talking by the bar at faculty parties. But he wasn't good for Phoebe. They met in high school, and she had Curie when she was a freshmen in college. It was a shotgun wedding, but even that didn't stop Phoebe. She'd never admit it, but being a woman in engineering and mechanics... she had a lot to prove, not only to her classmates, but I think to herself too. She went right back to classes within a month of Curie's birth, and Greg stayed home with her. I think he got stuck there, you know? Never really grew up after that. Curie...," he laughs to himself. "She named her daughter Curie, like Marie Curie. I used to fantasize about Phoebe leaving Greg, and dating me. Curie loved me, so it wouldn't have been hard to transition from fun Uncle Win to Stepdad Win."

"I'm sorry."

He shrugs. "It's done. Everything is done now. If I could change the past, I'd give me and Phoebe more time together. I'd make it so Curie was with us too. But...," he stops himself from continuing. He holds his hand to Phoebe's face, then turns to me and whispers, "but if I could change the past, I'm not sure I would stop the apocalypse from happening." He bites his lip, as if he shocked himself. This is probably the first time he's said that out loud. "I would make it so that it was me, Phoebe, and Curie forever. And if it was just the three of us, I wouldn't mind. I'm sorry. That sounds terrible, but I figured... you probably already hate me, so... why not tell the truth." He glances back at Phoebe, at his hand against her cheek, and pulls it slowly to her hand. He cups her fingers in his palms, and kisses them. "I'm not leaving her side until she wakes up."

I look over my shoulder to the bed behind me. Joe Wilkes rests in a coma too, only his lips are chapped, and his skin is coated with a layer of dried cells, like a cracked desert floor reflecting the moon's light.

"Where do you keep the lotion?" I ask Winston.

"Under the bed," he says without looking away from Phoebe.

I bend down to retrieve it, and I see Winston's mess of tissues, toilet paper, food parts, and poorly washed bedpans. This is the stink, not Winston, this. I gag, pulling up the lotion. "Winston, clean that up," I say, pushing the stomach acids back down my throat.

"When she wakes up, I—"

"—No, now," I say. "This is a hospital room, it needs to be clean. Phoebe, Joe, and everyone else in this room could contract an infection because you couldn't handle yourself. You're hurting, I get it. But you're not the only person who has lost someone, and look," I say, gesturing to Phoebe, "you haven't even lost her. Stand up and clean your mess."

He peers at me. "You can't talk to me like that," he says.

I clench my jaw and draw all my confidence in one breath. "I'm your superior now, Winston, and I am ordering you to clean up. If you cannot, I will have people come and remove you. You will no longer be able to stay here or visit Phoebe. Make up your mind."

Phoebe asked that I check on him, not baby him, and I don't have the time or energy to tread lightly on Winston's meltdown. Whether or not I'm being insensitive is irrelevant when he's contaminating the room with filth, but remembering his story, I feel a pang of guilt. "I'll stay with her until you get back."

His mouth, which was always stuck in a smile before the bunker attack, turns down in exhaustion. "Okay," he agrees.

I nod, and as he begins to clean the garbage from the room, I spread lotion over Joe's skin. They'll wake up, I tell myself. They have to. We can't lose anyone else.

The door beeps with the code before opening, and I look back to assure Winston that I have everything under control, when O'Neil and another scientist, a doctor I should know from my sector, walk in. The doctor is older, maybe around 50 years old, and his skin is the same shade as Celia's.

"Oh," I relax. "Hey Flynn. Are you checking in on Phoebe and Joe too?"

"I am. How are they?"

"They seem steady. Winston on the other hand."

"I just saw him in the hall with some bedpans. I was going to ask, but I thought it best not. By the way, Isla this is Dr. Guzman."

I rub the excess lotion into my skin before shaking the doctor's hand. I think about what Winston said about Phoebe's handshake, and I make sure I shake this man's hand with strength. I want to be seen as a strong, assertive woman too. Especially since I'm his 17 year old boss.

"Isla Blume," I introduce myself.

He gives one final shake of my hand before releasing it and retrieving a pen from the pocket of his white coat. "You and Declan gave a very heartfelt plea to the masses this morning. I appreciated your honesty. I'm sure everyone else did too. I know your mother, she has been coming to me for her cancer treatments."

"You're the oncologist," I say.

"I am, among other things. I was one of the Originals at the dam. Before the world ended, I had just started my specialization in difficult to treat cancers, so I'm familiar with the brain. Since our neurologist died in the bunker attack, I've been doing my best to assess the situation with the implants. You have one if I'm not mistaken, but your headband is blocking anyone from accessing your brain, right?"

I swallow hard. "Right." I can almost feel it scraping against the soft tissue in my brain.

"Hm," he hums, examining the headband. "Well, I did some brain scans last night, I wanted to show Winston my results. Will he be returning?"

"He's just cleaning up. Can I see?"

"Absolutely, you're technically my boss, in case you had forgotten," he says with a chuckle. "Though I haven't seen you much in the biology sector."

I fight the urge to say something sassy, and finally land on, "I've been busy."

"I can imagine," he replies, removing a brain scan from the folder he had tucked beneath his arm.

He holds it up to the lights above us, and with the butt of his pen, points to the scan. "Here we have Phoebe's brain. You see there's hardly any activity in the prefrontal cortex, except for these three regions that are lit up."

He points to an area in her prefrontal cortex. "That is the medial prefrontal cortex. It's used for memory and decision making. You can also see there," he says, pointing to another area of activity in an almost all inactive brain, "that her temporal lobe and, there, that her hippocampus are also active. These are other memory storage sites in the brain. Phoebe, somehow, is remembering her life, which supports your hypothesis that her consciousness is stuck in the network until her brain is capable of housing her again."

"It's not a hypothesis, it's a fact," I say. I turn to Flynn. "You saw me go into Ian's mind. Did you think I was faking it or something?"

Dr. Guzman answers for him, "No, it was me who didn't believe you. An implant with the power you described is far-fetched. Especially if it is only located in a couple areas of the brain. Each second, you use your entire brain to function, to think, to sense, to remember. Even with Gunther Quail behind the implants, I didn't believe they could be true. Or rather, I didn't want to believe."

He returns Phoebe's scan to his folder and lifts Joe's. "Here, for Dr. Wilkes, we see something different. He only has an implant on his motor cortex, probably so that he would still be able to recall how to install the implants."

"If his motor cortex was the only part of his brain they touched, why isn't he awake?"

"Whoever put his implant in caused a lot of damage around the area. Right now Dr. Wilkes is in a coma-like state so that his brain is able to heal. Hopefully it will, though it will be difficult as long as the implant is still in his brain."

There is beeping behind the door and then it opens. Winston's eyes widen at the sight of Dr. Guzman and he rushes toward us. "Phoebe's brain scan," he says.

Dr. Guzman has barely pulled it from his folder when Winston tugs it out of his hand and sits back down beside Phoebe to examine it. The news isn't good—it's heartbreaking, actually—but Winston smiles.

"She's still there," he mumbles, barely over a whisper. He raises his head, and I see the wide grin he used to wear daily. "There's hope."

What do you think of what has become of the Deathless so far? Leave your questions and comments below! Thanks for reading! #WeAreDeathless