My stomach rises up in my throat as I stand in front of these women, all staring at me with hopeful eyes and lab equipment. They expect me to be their leader? I shrink into myself. It's enough pressure just to be the last Deathless here, but to be the last Deathless and a leader? I don't know if I can.

First thing's first, I tell myself. "Where are we?"

"We're in the run-off shafts. The estate is protected against any natural disaster, including floods. If water levels should ever get high enough, they'll run down here and leak back into the underground water reserve," Nina explains.

"And you girls stole all of that?" I raise my chin toward the case of chemical samples.

Some girls look down in shame, but most just smile. "With all their technology, it's amazing what they don't see," one of the girls says. I haven't met her yet, but her hair is like a golden lion's mane around her thin face.

"Even the chemical case?" I ask, smiling in disbelief.

The lioness smiles and turns to Nina, who begins laughing.

"They threw it out, so we brought it down through a drain from the yard when they were all gone to unload equipment from the trains. I can't believe it still works," Nina says.

"How many of you are there?" I ask.

Nina turns back and counts. "34," she says. Some army. "35 including you."

"Is this all of the Comforters?"

"No... that's why we have to meet down here. We can't trust everyone. A lot of them believe the crap Cooper says."

"So... what do you want from me exactly?" I try to hold back my skepticism, but I don't even convince myself. I can tell that some of the girls sense it to, as that faraway look leaves their eyes and they lower the instruments they were carrying.

Nina is temporarily speechless and looks around at all the girls before looking back at me, with an expression that asks, "Are you an idiot? Isn't it obvious?"

"I just told you," she says. "We want to take Cooper and this whole operation down, and we need someone to lead us. I would if I knew more about the science behind everything, but I don't. I know how to fight, but I don't know how to fight off the drones. I don't know how to use any of these chemicals. But you do, and you showed all of us at the party how brave you are."

"I can't do that stuff anymore," I mutter.

"Don't pretend like you can't or you don't have time for us or whatever, because we know what you did at the bunker. You can do that again, and we want to be your army. We weren't scientists, but we were survivors. We know how to kill. We are good soldiers."

I look at Celia. She's a good soldier? Her bony shoulders are arched like support beams to her ears, and she turns the glass beaker around with her spidery fingers. Without her poofy dress, I can see her actual size, and I feel like if I coughed in her direction, she'd fall over.

Nina continues, her arms crossed in front of her chest. "You were meant to come here, and lead us out."

With all their short sleeves, I can see that no one has the controls on their arms. They are all human. There's no false belief, no manipulation, not like Nate. These girls really believe in me, like Declan and my mom. Like Daniel. The guilt burns inside me. I shouldn't have said what I did, I crossed the line.

I decide not to let anyone else down, and to keep the promise I made to Jane before I lost my nerve. "Okay," I concede, even if I have no faith in myself. At least they do. "Sorry it took me so long to answer, of course, I'll lead you."

The crowd erupts in wide smiles and sighs of relief. "So, what's first?" Nina asks.

I try to think about how General Sato began things: He briefed us on the entire situation.

"Let's all take a seat, and brief each other on what's going on," I say. They put down their instruments and chemicals, and move into a large circle on the damp floor. Through my thin pajamas, it feels like I'm sitting on ice.

Once everyone is situated, I ask, "So, what do you know about the Deathless?"

No one says anything. Finally, a girl to the right of me, whose dark skin looks dusty in the fluorescent glow of the chemical case, answers me, "Cooper told us that the Deathless rebels are criminals and traitors who committed treason when they split from the government and stole our equipment." The room is silent, and she peeks out from behind the tight black curls that dangle in front of her eyes. "No offense."

"Has anyone heard anything else?" I don't hear anything, but I see a few subtle shakes. "Okay, well, I can tell you that what Cooper has told you is not true."

I go on to explain how the world ended. I talk to them about Roberts and Cooper, and about the President, but I can't talk about him for very long without shivering. I tell them everything I know. Everything about the Deathless, about the immersions, and about the whole sick plan Roberts and Cooper concocted before destroying the world 25 years ago.

"How did you get together with the Deathless?" the lioness asks me.

I tell them about how my house was destroyed, and about the Prowlers.

"We have those here," the lionness tells me. "They keep us inside the walls. If we get too close, the machines pick us up and bring us back. That happened with one of our girls once."

"We never saw her again," Nina says. "I think she became a Carrier. That's what happens when we misbehave."

I continue to tell them about the Prowlers' hatches, and about how many aren't equipped for sustaining life, and they all nod in sadness.

"How did you save all those people from the bunker explosion?" one of the girls asks.

I tell them about the new DNA Nate designed to keep me conscious in the bunker, about herding all the knocked out people into Gunther's tank—it's called The Beast, I'm told—and about sending my dad away after the explosion. Then I tell them about being in the cell and meeting Jane. I tell them about how sick she and Meg look, and about the promise I made to Jane. I'm finally done laying my life out before them, and I see my own anger about the situation reflected in their faces.

"So... what resources do we have to help us get out of here?" I ask, changing the subject. I don't need them to feel pity for me. "We have this lab, which I can help put together. We have Daniel, so you don't need to be afraid of him. We have Jane to be our ambassador for the Caregivers. Anything else?"

"We have Mitchell?" Celia asks with a wispy lilt.

"No... No we do not. I want everyone to be very clear: Just because he was Deathless does not mean he is Deathless. He is an opportunist, and being Deathless is no longer his best option."

"Ok, so no Mitchell, but some of our men are ready to help," the lionness says.

"We'll have to be very careful about that, though," I say. "Captain Jones was the one who left the Prowlers at my house. He cannot under any circumstance be trusted."

"Well, duh," Nina says. "He's a prick."

"He knows I hate him, but I think that's part of the attraction with him. He wants to earn me or something," the lioness says, and I want to slap myself for not recognizing her from dinner. With her hair down and no make-up on, she looks like an entirely different person. "He still has no idea I have a boyfriend," she laughs.

"Flynn can't be trusted either," Nina says. "But I think he's getting frustrated with Cooper and Quail. He worked for years to perfect his geothermic energy converter, and now they're trying to replace it with Daniel's thing. He may be able to be persuaded, but not yet."

"Okay, keep an eye on that, Nina. And, I'm sorry, what's your name again?" I ask the lionness.

"Ava Ward. Nate was my cousin. I'm sorry to hear about what happened to him." Her words are matter-of-fact, and devoid of sadness. "It was kind of you," she says, "to not let him suffer at the end."

My throat burns, and all I want to do is cry, but Nina interrupts the moment, thank God. "Any other resources?"

"There's Ian," Ava says.

"Ian Becker?" I ask in shock.

"Yes, I'm Captain Jones' Comforter, but Ian's my boyfriend."

"Sorry, Ava, but Ian cannot be trusted. Didn't you see him up there with General Sato and Winston? He is one of the people torturing them. No, he is not a resource, he's a monster."

A deep voice echoes behind me: "Hey now, is that any way to talk about old friends?"

I whip my head around, and find Ian Becker, in full uniform, standing by the metal slab elevator, like he just happened to be passing by. Ava stands and saunters to his side.

"Ava, get away from him, he can't be trusted," I say, and I hear laughter from behind me. It reminds me too much of Gabriela holding the President as they laughed at me, and I yell in panic, "I'm serious, get away from him!"

"Hold on," he says.

"No, you're going to ruin everything," I say, and approach him with my fists up, ready to fight like Nate taught me.

"No. Isla... hold on."

"What?"

"Should I explain, or you?" Ava finally asks.

"I will," he says, "Isla, I'm not a bad guy here. Didn't you get my note?"

He wrote the note? "Hold on?" I ask. He nods. "Then what were you doing with Sato and Winston tonight?"

"I volunteered to take care of the Deathless leaders, so that I could make sure they're safe."

"Safe? Were all those wounds on them your idea of safe?"

"You ladies aren't the only ones who know how to use make-up, you know," he says, smiling. "You remember my mom, right? She was obsessed with appearance. I knew how to use make-up before I knew how to walk. Only some of their wounds are real, but they were from before I took this post."

"Why would you do that?"

"Isla... you're talking to me like you have no idea who I am. We were friends at one point, remember? You can trust me."

"I remember, Ian. But I couldn't really trust you then, either."

He laughs. "What are you talking about?"

I stand and put my hands on my hips. "You tried to make a move on me."

"Oh, c'mon, you were flirting with me, and you know it. You probably just wanted to get Daniel going, didn't you? He was always super jealous of us when we would hang out."

"Was he?" I ask, feeling myself fall into the same rhythm I would always have when talking to Ian.

He's right: He and I did get along pretty well, and I knew that was probably why Daniel and I didn't hang out with him too much. But I cared more about protecting Daniel's feelings than having friendly banter with Ian.

"Yeah, 'cause you and I got along. He's kind of possessive, that guy."

"Well, if some girl had her hands on Daniel, I'd be upset too."

I didn't mean for that to be a jab at Celia, but a pang of guilt rips through my sides. I don't want to be cruel, so in a way, I hope she didn't notice, but in a way, I hope she did so we can just switch already.

"Okay," he laughs. "But I wasn't just some guy. I was your neighbor, and you trusted me, and you know it."

I cross my arms. "That doesn't mean I can trust you now. Let me see your arms."

"Isla," he smiles. "Would I be down here if you couldn't trust me? I'm on your side."

"Arms, please."

He folds his sleeves up, and I see that he's clean of any controls.

"I fell in love here," he says, looking at Ava. It's the kind of look I never saw from him, but I always saw from Daniel. "I want a real life. I don't want to be here anymore. Men go missing all the time, and you know where I always find them? In the Workers ranks, without any idea of who they are or what they're doing. Like Phoebe. And like the General and Winston would be now if it weren't for me. Now soldiers are starting to come back to us like that. There's an entire company made up of controlled soldiers, and those of us in the higher ranks will be next. I am risking my brain and my rank being here right now, so trust me, I want out just as bad as you do." When he sees that I haven't let down my guard, he continues, "Let me show you."

He holds out his hand, and Ava comes to my side to guide me.

"Trust us," she says.

Her smile leaves deep dimples in her cheeks. I look back at the girls, and none of them—not Nina or even poor Celia—look worried, so I go with it, and take Ian's hand.

"Like old times, right, Isla?" he asks, smiling.

"Sure," I scoff. "Except instead of the nice, friendly woods, we are in a drainage system beneath all the evil in the world. But sure."

He pulls me to a dark corner of the drain, behind the makeshift elevator, until I see there's a vent ahead of us, a subtle blue glow leaking from between its cracks.

"Look through there," he says, his face more serious than I've ever seen it.

"What will I see?" I ask.

He sighs. "You'll see the Workers. You'll see how they are being treated, and you'll see the ones who haven't been given the implants yet in cryogenic chambers. The ones who have been converted to cyborgs can't be in cryogenic chambers, because the cold will make their implants malfunction. If you look closely, you'll see Sato and Winston in the chambers, so you'll see they're safe for now."

I'm not used to people being so honest, and, despite the message, it's refreshing to hear. "Thank you, Ian," I say, and approach the vent.

I peek through and see something worse than the Caregiver's situation. Metal stakes are sticking up from the floor, and around each stake are four or five chains, which link to shackles around sleeping men's ankles. They are all sleeping on their backs against the cold cement floor with their arms crossed over their chests, like corpses I would see pictured in coffins or piled up on battlefields.

There must be at least a hundred converted workers.

There are only probably 30 or so cryogenic chambers at the back of the room, and only some of them are lit blue with frozen men inside. I see Sato and Winston toward the front, and other than being frozen, they look safe. For now.

I step back from the vent. "Can I see them tomorrow?" I ask, and whisper, "I want General Sato's advice for leading these girls."

Ian purses his lips. "Probably not," he says. "Besides, you'll have to go to Cooper's class tomorrow. Cooper's Version of History 101," he jokes. "I will be on Sato and Fowler duty, but maybe I can bring them all up to the yard to do some work outside, and, like, conveniently look away if you come around. I don't know, I can't make any promises. You'd have better luck asking Daniel to get you access, since he's a Leader."

"Not to cut us short," Nina interrupts. "But we all should be getting back to our beds. Especially those of us who aren't sleeping in the Comforter Quarters tonight, like Isla. The drones keep track of how long we're out."

"Okay, but one more thing," Ian says. "I want you to know it's not just me and these girls. There are soldiers who want out too. Soldiers and scientists. You're not the last Deathless, but you'll have to be the last Deathless leader, until I can get Sato and Winston out. We're going to need some big escape though. Something where everything is in chaos, so that we can all do our best to get out."

"When should we meet next to talk about it?" I ask.

"It's up to you, fearless leader," Ian smiles, but there's belief behind his playfulness.

"Okay... not tomorrow night, it'll look too suspicious, but the night after. We should come up with some sort of system, actually, to avoid this all together. I'll move to the Comforter's quarters to cut down on attention from the drones in the hall."

"Deal," he says. "So, I guess, you trust me now?"

"Sure," I smile. "But I don't have much choice."

"Touché."

Ian climbs back through whatever less conspicuous vent he came from, and the girls and I take turns going back upstairs on the elevator. Once we're up, the girls who sleep outside of the Comforter's quarters take turns leaving the bathroom, holding their stomachs like they're still suffering from some sort of food poisoning (they all agreed to say they ate the scallops, and that they were probably bad). I'm the last to return to the bathroom, since I was the last the arrive, and one of the girls returns from the hall.

"Isla," she says, "Daniel is in his doorway. He asked I get you."

I say goodnight to the girls, and walk out. The drone stops me, scans my body, and says, "Comforter 1-0-3 Isla Blume report to Room 6 with Leader Daniel Crowley."

I move past the drone and Daniel's open doorway. He's sitting on the floor beneath the tall window. Blankets and pillows surround him, and before I can ask what he wants, he says, "I reassigned you. After you left, I went across the hall to ask Mitchell about it, and he agreed."

I shut the door to the room I now share with Daniel, but don't say a word. He straightens his posture, and in the dim glow of the night sky sneaking through the window, he looks like he did in the safe room the night he asked me to marry me, with the same vulnerability painted on his face.

When he sees I haven't moved yet, he continues, "I don't want you to feel alone. When I left the house, I thought I could stop it. I was the kid who always did everything, and I thought I could still be that boy. Like, if I didn't leave, I would be disappointing our parents, you know? I never wanted to disappoint them."

The anger I'm still holding on to dissolves like the last patch of snow melting before spring. I walk to join him on the floor, with only starlight to guide my path. "I know what you mean. I just wonder if we'd both be home still if you hadn't left, or if our parents weren't outside when the Prowlers came... if we didn't decide to get married."

"Don't say that. It's not our fault. The Prowlers would have kept coming. If we weren't taken that day, we would have been taken another, and then maybe we wouldn't be here. Maybe we would have been cyborgs now, because I wouldn't have been motivated to become a scientist at the bunker to send out that transmission. And maybe you would be like the Comforters who don't realize how terrible Cooper is, because you would have never known the Deathless. And your dad would be a mindless worker, and your mom a sick Caregiver or pregnant Carrier. That's if you both even survived the trip. Everything happens for a reason, Isla, even the bad things."

I smile and scoot my body closer to him. "You always know how to make me feel better. Why are you so good to me?"

"We were born for each other, remember?"

Heat rises to my cheeks and I fall into his arms playfully. "You're so corny," I say, a reflex from when I used to try to fight away my feelings for him. I fold the blanket over our bodies and reach over to tuck it around his back. We lie back on the prickly rug, and I ask, "So, what are we doing on the floor?"

"We're not fancy bed people," he says, smiling and lying back to join me.

"We're floor people? That's pretty depressing."

"No it's not. It's like we're back in the safe room."

Which reminds me of my night in the drainage system. "Speaking of which," I say, "guess who was at my meeting with Nina and the other girls?"

"Who?"

"Ian Becker. Apparently he is with General Sato and Winston to help protect them. We can trust him."

"I'll believe it when I see it," he says with disdain, and clears his throat. "So any plans for escape yet?"

"No, we're going to plan in two days, but they want me to do something crazy."

"What?"

"They want me to be their leader now. I have an army."

We turn to face each other, both of us lying on our backs like we used to on the roof as we watched the stars. "That's not crazy," he says in sincerity. "The girl who couldn't kill a rabbit ended up saving us all."

I swallow hard. I didn't save us all. There's no right time to talk about his parents, but this is as close as we'll get. "I wish I could have," I start, but I'm not sure how I can continue without crying. I swallow my sadness and speak through it. "When you were taken... did you see your parents?"

"I did." He looks away, staring past the window to the sky. "My parents are together now. Knowing that keeps me sane."

"What happened?" I ask. "How did you survive?"

He takes a deep breath in preparation. "My mom and I were in the same Prowler. It was equipped with an oxygen system, but my dad's Prowler wasn't. He died in the hatch."

I don't want to picture it, but Ben's face, gasping for air and turning blue, is stuck in my mind like a thorn. My second father died alone in a metal monster, and that hurts more than the explosion did. All I can say is a tearful, "No."

He remains focused on the night sky above us, trying to keep himself together. "When my mom saw him, she started crying out for him to wake up. One of the soldiers shot her in the leg, and she started losing a lot of blood. They took her off to the infirmary, but it would have cost more resources and energy to keep my mom alive. I just wish I could have been with either of them when they passed," he says.

I wish I hadn't asked him. Before I could hold on to whatever shred of hope I still had that they were alive. I could still have hope that when they were taken, they were able to escape. That when I didn't see them on the list, it just meant they were taken to a different place where they were safe. But then again, if I never asked Daniel what happened, that hope would have always eaten at me. I would have always wondered when they would be coming home.

"After my mom was taken away," Daniel continues, "we waited to be slotted into jobs. Most of the men were chosen to be frozen and wait to be given the implants, and most of the women were transferred immediately here. When they got to me, they asked me what skills I had, so I told them everything I knew about science before I even mentioned hunting. I wanted them to know that my brain was different, you know? They transferred me to Gunther, and I started working in the Control Room. In my boredom, I created plans for the gamma ray detectors, decided they wouldn't work, and then sent out the transmission instead. And that's when I was removed from the Control Room and started receiving messages from Nate and the other countries."

"Wait—other countries? I thought the whole world was gone."

"Cooper's organization, Roberts and Cooper, planned all of this. They weren't only from the United States. It was a global organization. They have allies alive in all parts of the world, all getting ready for Robert's crew to return from Janus." His words make me cringe. "Doesn't the Deathless know that?"

"I don't think so, not unless that was something else they hid from me. They didn't trust me—they thought I was the mole, remember?—so I didn't hear much."

"They might not have known, actually. It was top secret. Any way, we knew that you all would be coming to attack the bunker, so we began moving things over here. That's when I met Celia and realized what a mess it is here. Then Nate reported that you all had reached the refugee camp and were preparing to attack, so the President decided to keep me hostage in the bunker until I told them the plans for the gamma ray detectors. See, I wrote some of it down, but I kept the rest of it in my mind. He needed me. Every now and then Gunther would come into the room where you found me, and he would take care of me. He would give me protein and more water, and read to me. He wanted to keep my mind sharp. I thought he was a better man for a long time, but I see now that he wasn't taking care of me as a person, he was taking care of my brain so I could finish the project."

"If only Alexander saw that."

"Is that what he wants to talk to you about?"

"Probably," I say, even though I know that's what he wants. "I don't care. He thinks Gunther's going to change, but he's not. He'll figure that out sooner or later."

Daniel's eyes are fixed on the sky. "I should have known the New Star wasn't really a star. It's always there, no matter the season."

I peer up and find it glowing more brightly than I remember, and without the ring around it anymore. It's getting closer. "How much longer until Roberts' crew lands?" I ask.

He squints in thought. "A couple of months maybe?"

I sigh. "Let's just hope Alexander can change Gunther's mind in time."

We lay beneath the stars like we used to on the roof back home. In hardly any time, Daniel drifts off to sleep, but nightmares about Prowlers, fueled by their mechanical marching below the window, keep me awake.