As she walked the broken halls in her dream on fire, Megan came across a final door. Green, this one. A sudden wave of dizziness struck her as she realized at last why she hadn’t awakened from this dream even after remaining lucid for so long. She had already lost her battle with her infection.

With a lost world behind her, she put out her hand, and laid her palm across its surface. It opened on its own, to let her through, as her memories of the past five weeks flew past. Fortifying defenses, turning her store into a tiny home even if she did get lost in the IKEA showroom. The bandit raid and the satisfying whap as she struck one with a bar stool. The terrifying firefight at the Harbinger base. Breaking into their cache with some radio cleverness, the despair of learning that no help would be coming for them in the radio tower. Fighting off an undying… and the stab in her heart as Rebecca’s death replayed one last time in vivid detail. The horror and confusion of the casino, and fleeing into the fog, running into an undying there and learning just what the chain was that she’d received as that mysterious gift from Jeff. The terrifying quake in the hospital, and yes, the dream earlier, with the strange girl in white.

This was the end. The infection had claimed her. She was going to die.

And then, suddenly, an awareness of something beyond herself, what she was. More memories played, each from some other point of view. These were not the memories of Megan Lam, but they were somehow her own memories still. Megan Lam no longer had meaning. She was only a piece. Her consciousness was now a part of something much larger, something vast and beautiful and small and terrible. She needed to know. She needed more memories to fill the holes. She needed…

No.

This collection was entirely too much. Far too much. She needed something that was missing from all this. Somehow, in collecting everything, something vital was lost in the collecting. Something that was present in each piece collected, but totally absent in the collection.

She needed a sense of self.

And with that, her enormous awareness severed. It felt like waking from a terrible dream, but something was different. Something was wrong. She was once again Megan Lam, tiny in many ways, but she could not see or feel or hear, though she was… aware. Somehow. Everything was abstract. There, something intimately familiar. A face, a memory. There, another! The image of a poorly-crafted counterfeit bill. It went on like this for who knows how long, scrabbling around her for scraps of who she had been. And as she went, the vines in the corridor around her quickly wrapped around her, giving her form again like some sort of ethereal nymph. It was familiar and unfamiliar all at once, and her first steps stumbled, clumsy and uncoordinated as she struggled to hold herself together. Literally, now. Perhaps she could find her body. Perhaps she could-

A face in the vines, a slumbering face distorted in panic. White, pure white, and a crown of spikes in snow-white hair. The vines rushed to claim it, but she waved them away, banished them from a face that was familiar. This was not her own face. This was someone who had tried to help her. That girl in white, the one who was not quite human, who tried to lead her out of this thorny hell. How sad, then, that she was already lost when she was found? Still, this girl had found her after the quake, tried to bring her to safety, and when barred even from that, she tried to keep her safe anyway, fending off the undying that came to claim her body, joining the fight against the massive horse, trying to keep her fed and quenched even in her dreaming state. She’d watched it all from the dream without realizing, like another eye she didn’t know she had. This stranger had done her best to save her, perhaps now it was Megan’s turn to return the favour.

At her touch, or perhaps her command, the vines relinquished their hold on their prize, drawing their thorns out again carefully, though the girl bled from her wounds. It was a struggle, but she picked up her rescuer with as much care as she could with her thorny form. The vines parted as she walked down the corridor, giving way as she picked her way down the endless stairs. She could feel herself unraveling as she went, losing pieces of herself with each step. Perhaps they could be retrieved after she was finished. At the bottom, at the door, she saw only shadows, but they felt much like the girl she carried. Untouched by the virus that had consumed her and tried to consume her rescuer. She carried her out as far as she could before she might lose herself entirely again. There, she gave up the girl to her waiting allies before turning back, gathering back the coils of herself. She was afraid to look back, lest she be tempted to run out and unravel completely, so she raced back up tirelessly, trying to pick up the pieces of herself that fell out on her way down. Not all of them were still there to be picked up, lost to the collection forever.

She couldn’t leave anymore. All of her struggles and pain were for nothing. There wasn’t anything left for her now, only despair as she waited to be swept back up into the collection. Was this what it meant, to become one of the undying?