The sirens I heard inside the program scream throughout the room, and I assume, the estate. Screams and gunshots temporarily halt as the amplifier's effects settle. All of us who were converted are now back in our bodies, discovering where Gunther placed us on his delusional chess board.

I drop the gun and pat myself down to make sure I'm real. I feel my hands against my body. My real body.

"It's me, Isla, it's Daniel. Are you there?" I look up and see Daniel cautiously reaching out to me, as if I might attack him. His lip bleeds and he holds his shoulder in pain. I must have been fighting him before I drew my weapon, but I feel no pain except for the incision from my implant. Even while I was a cyborg, Daniel didn't hurt me.

I smile. His voice stirs something I thought I would never feel again in the computer. At the heart of me, a pained and joyful tingle rises. "Yes," I cry. "You came back."

The incision behind my ear throbs, but that doesn't stop me from leaping into his arms. He kisses every inch of my face, until I am giggling like a giddy baby in his arms, and he whispers, "Of course I did. We all came back."

An explosion from outside shocks me back into reality.

"That'll be the wall. We've got to go," Daniel says, letting me down. He bends down and picks up my gun. He tucks it into the back of his pants, and says, "I'll trade you," reaching behind the amplifier and revealing the real slingshot my mom and Declan made for me.

"Where'd you—?"

Another explosion sounds from inside the estate, and the screams resume. He takes my hand, "Seriously, we have to go." It's not until he pulls me to the door that I realize he's wearing the black uniform of Deathless soldiers. They're alive. They must be.

Daniel opens the door, and I stand beside him to peek out. Just as I look down the hall, a drone, which had been shooting at some soldiers in Deathless uniforms, flies toward us after being attacked by a formerly implanted soldier. We lean back from the door, narrowly missing one of the propellers slicing our faces off.

"Let's go," Daniel says, arming himself. I load my slingshot, and follow him into the hall.

Soldiers from both sides of this war gather at the bottom of the staircase in the foyer, some fighting, some defending, others just trying to figure out what it means to have a body again. As we make our way toward them, Daniel tells me to check all the labs, so we kick down doors and make sure equipment is being loaded up by the Deathless and that no Scientists have decided to fight back. He kicks down Mechanics, so I kick open Biology.

Deathless soldiers have opened the wall with explosives, and, wearing gas masks to breathe through the debris, are pulling equipment, tables, and supplies from the room out to the Immortal, which waits past the wall. The soldiers stop when they realize I've entered the room, and they point their weapons at me.

"I'm Deathless, it's okay," I say, holding up my arms.

One of the masked soldiers reaches into a pocket on his uniform and reveals a photo. He holds it up to my face, and I check it out in my peripheral vision. It's a black and white photo of me, a screenshot from a surveillance camera on the Immortal. "It's her. It's Isla Blume. We found her," he tells the other men, his voice muffled behind his mask. "Come with me, Isla," he says, reaching for my arm. I pull away.

"No, we're fighting. We fight together."

"What did I tell you?" one of the soldiers asks, coming forward. It's a girl, I can tell by her muffled voice, and the fact she wears Celia's spiked armor. "She would never leave her army," the female soldier says, her raspy voice more clear now that she's closer to me. She removes her mask, and my suspicion is confirmed: It's Nina.

I jump toward her and grasp her tightly, just to be sure she is real. The rest of the Deathless soldiers carry on ransacking the lab. Nina pulls away and takes my hand to lead me out of the lab, when I see the rats. No one has touched the rats. I think about Misty and the rabbit and the 10 pilots. I used to be the girl who wanted everything to live. I can still be that girl.

"Wait a minute," I say, digging my heels. I throw off the lids to the four rat cages, and start scooping them onto the floor. Nina laughs wildly and does the same. Some of the rats run past the Deathless, who squeal and dance around to avoid them, but the rest of the rats run out of the room, toward the fight. Nina and I follow them out to the hall, and watch as they climb on the boots of shrieking soldiers. I laugh seeing how easily the people trying to kill each other devolve into frightened children at the sight of rodents.

"Were those rats?" Daniel asks, joining us in the hall.

Nina laughs. "Hell yeah," she says.

Daniel shivers in disgust. He always hated rats unless they were our protein for dinner. "Let's go," he says, leading us down the hall toward the foyer.

It's impossible to tell who we are supposed to be fighting, since many of the government soldiers now appear to be turning on their cause, so I figure we should do what most of the soldiers do: Destroy the machines. "Get the drones," I call to Daniel over the commotion.

We race into the heart of the fight and begin taking down the drones. Here my slingshot is more useful than the guns, since my bullets instantly disable the entire machine. So I fire again and again, watching them fall to the ground, where Deathless soldiers and implanted soldiers alike smash them to bits with the butts of their guns.

A government soldier knocks my slingshot out of aim as I'm about to shoot down the last drone. I duck my head, missing his right hook, and pop up, uppercutting him with my slingshot. Nate would be proud, I think, and just as the soldier realizes I've knocked some of his teeth out, I jab my palm into his nose. Daniel taught me how to do that back home, just like he did for Celia, but Nate told me how to make it lethal. Luckily, he also taught me how to do it with my left hand, otherwise my slingshot would have definitely rammed into his eyes, or worse. I don't kill him, I just make it so painful for him that he can't strike back.

The soldier falls back in pain, and I hear someone cheering on the stairs. I look up. Nina is now at the top of the staircase, her spikes glittering in the light, and she yells down to me, "Yeah, Isla! Look who's comforting now!"

She sprints back down the stairs, knocking soldiers out as she passes. When she reaches me, she presses her hands to her ears, and yells, "Take cover!"

An explosion erupts from Gunther's official office, and fiery papers rain down on us. All the books, I think, but Nina takes a different approach: "I just blew up all his research," she chuckles.

"Not all of it," I say, "Let me show you the rest. Daniel!" I call. He's finishing up with a government soldier on the ground, but punches him square in the jaw, knocking him out. He leaps up and joins us, as the three of us fight our way into the ballroom.

There, Deathless soldiers ransack Cooper's rooms, and throw bombs into the hallway leading to the Reaper's Room. We are actually going to burn this place to the ground.

There is a warrior girl in the center of the ballroom wearing an even more elaborate suit of spikes than Nina. Clawed spikes reach outward from her shoulders, like spider legs from her head. She wears her makeup like a warrior, with thick black smudges around her eyes and blood red lips, and she wields a spiked spear. She fights off drones that buzz around her, and without thinking, I load my slingshot to help. But as I aim, watching the drones fall out of view, I see who this warrior is. It's Celia, and I realize... she doesn't need me anymore. Celia Rivera is not the same person she was when I met her, when she barely had the strength to say her name. She's emerged from her protective circle around the grabbing hands from her painting, and now, she's destroying each and every one of them.

Nina catches me staring, and yells, "That's our girl! Yeah, Celia!" Celia remains focused on the drones, but cracks a smile.

"We told her to stay back, but she insisted," Daniel adds. "She said she had to come back and help her sister."

I continue to watch Celia fight, my heart full. Then Daniel returns my focus to the fight at hand. "Where is the rest of Gunther's research?" he asks over the clanging of metal.

"Behind the clock," I say, running toward it.

"I got it," Nina says, pushing me aside. She adjusts her grip on her semi-automatic, and begins slamming it against the antique wooden timepiece. It shatters beneath the metal, and to finish it off, she kicks the rest of it away, until the pathway is cleared and we are able to enter through the wall.

"Nina," I say, laughing a bit as I lift a piece of loosened hinge from the wall, "We could have just opened the clock like a door."

Nina shrugs, "Oh well." She has the same glint in her eye that I saw my first night here, when she told me I couldn't speak to Gunther the way I had, and she laughs.

We step through the wall, and I show them the bloody mess of glass and papers.

"What is this place?" Daniel asks.

"Gunther's secret office. I found it yesterday after his brother let me out of the infirmary. All of these vials had people's names on them, and were filled with blood. There was one for all three of us. And all these papers soaking on the floor? They documented all of Gunther's genetic experiments to create the perfect race of people. All the Carriers are pregnant with science experiments. It even said whose DNA went into each baby."

"What about my mom's baby?" Daniel asks.

"So she is still alive?" I ask.

"That's why we're here," Nina says. "The Deathless are safe, all of them. Eleanor warned them before the attack, and they evacuated. They were watching the attack from somewhere near the dam. Then those of us who escaped reached what was left of the camp, and we all came back on the Immortal."

"So... my mom and Declan are here? And safe?" I ask, tears in my eyes. I had hoped this was true and possible, but I didn't want to let myself believe it.

Daniel nods, smiling from cheek to cheek. But then his smile fades, and he asks again, "Whose baby is my mom carrying?"

Crap. I shouldn't have said anything. The last thing I want to do is lie to Daniel, but I also don't want him knowing the baby is mine and Nate's. So I fib. "I didn't read long enough to find out. I was too angry. I lost control and just started destroying stuff." It's a plausible lie given my history with anger, and they both nod.

"Well, all of these papers are too soaked with blood to read anymore. Stand back, I'll get rid of what's left," Nina says, and Daniel and I step back and plug our ears. She lifts her rifle and begins firing into the room, shattering all that remains. She turns, smiling, "God, I've missed firing a gun. You two ready to get back out there?"

We nod in exhilaration, and from the foyer, triumphant cheers echo. "Are those our people?" Nina asks, pushing past us to race out of the wall.

I'm close behind her when she steps through the hole where the clock used to be, and suddenly stops. She cries sharply, as if all the air has just been thrust from her body with a tight squeeze, and I feel something too... a sharp, searing pain just above my belly button. I look down.

The spiked spear that Celia was wielding pierces straight through Nina's abdomen, and stabs me shallowly with the tip of the blade. I stand, my mouth gaped in shock, as the pain paralyzes me. It's not even the blade that hurts anymore, but the sight of a spear straight through one of my sisters.

From the ballroom I hear a Deathless soldier cheer, "It's over, we got Gunther and the last of the loyalists. We won!"

Nina collapses at the knees, which pulls the tip of the blade from my stomach, and Daniel clamors to get ahead of us. He checks my wound quickly, and asks me something about it. I can't hear anything anymore, but I manage to utter that I'm okay. He falls to the ground beside Nina, and begins securing the spear in place. He commands her to leave it in, even though she pulls at it frantically.

Everything is a blur, and time seems to move slowly, as if my eyes are moving faster than my brain can process the images, causing the whole world to slur with light. Finally my brain catches up to my eyes, and I see Mitchell Harper standing before Nina, his hands still grasping the air where the spear used to rest. Behind him, at the center of the ballroom, Celia lies on the floor.

I catch Mitchell watching me in terror, and his angular, disgusting lips quiver. "My God," he pants, "I didn't mean to—"

Before he can finish, Daniel leaps up to his throat, his thumbs pressed firmly against Mitchell's windpipe. He tosses the traitor to the ground and pulls his gun to rest directly on Mitchell's forehead. "Daniel!" someone familiar calls from outside the ballroom. "Stop!"

Eleanor, still pregnant with Nate and my baby, rushes into view, and tears her son off of Mitchell. "We will take him into custody," Eleanor insists, gesturing for Deathless soldiers behind her to come and drag Mitchell away, to a cell on the Immortal, probably.

Daniel ignores her and rushes to Celia. I'm so terrified she won't move, but as Daniel pulls her arm, she lifts herself up, cupping her hand over her leg, down which dark liquid streams. She's okay. She'll be okay.

I turn my attention back to Nina.

In the short time it's taken for Daniel to apprehend Mitchell, she's torn the spear from her gut, and blood spills onto the floor. I kneel in the pool and cup her pale face in my hands. I expect this to be an echo of what happened with Nate, but Nina smiles and speaks clearly, "Do me a favor?" she asks, and I nod, tears clouding my vision. "When I'm dead, take me to the Atlantic. So I can be with Terran."

"Of course," I say. "But we can still save you, we can get you to the Immortal. Eleanor?" I call, but Nina takes my hand to pulls me toward her.

"We can't all be deathless," she says, smiling with lips that are turning a light purple color.

"You are, you are deathless," I cry.

She groans in pain. "I will be... through you. You carry the ghosts of all of us who have loved you, like I carried Terran. Like you carry General Sato and Ava." She's breathing heavily now, and her voice shakes. "And like you'll carry me."

I can't stop my tears from falling or my body from aching with grief. Nina sees this and smiles, squeezing my hand. She licks the dryness from her lips, and sings, "My ghost I've seen. We're ghosts, I'm told," she takes a final breath, "it's all a dream."

I watch as her face muscles release and her pupils dilate, and I feel her hand let go of mine. I try not to see all the people gathered around the hole in the wall. I try not to hear the cheers still ringing from the foyer. All I can do is focus on Nina's last words, the lyrics of her song for Terran, "It's all a dream."

I imagine she's right. That life is just one collective dream we're all taking far too seriously, and that when we die, our real lives begin. When we die, we wake up, rub our eyes, and turn to all those we've loved and lost. They awaken beside us on some huge white bed, and we tell them, "I just had the most amazing dream," before our existence vanishes from us like a slipping memory.

"Isla...." Daniel's voice, crackling with sadness, breaks through my blurry thoughts. "It's time to go."

I don't look away from Nina, but in my peripheral vision, I see that Deathless soldiers have come to carry her away, leaving me to stare blankly at the floor. Then I feel hands on me, but they aren't scary like the hands in Celia's painting. They are supportive and warm, and they lift me from the floor and carry me from the mansion and into the sun.