Yep, Lars’s finally lost the plot. He seems to be creating scenarios he’d fantasized about in real life but never got the chance to experience…probably because they’re illegal. I mean, I saw some weird-bad shit happen with my androids, but nothing like he’s doing to those holograms. It makes me sick. I wish I could kill him, but that stupid collar keeps me from getting close. I guess I’ll have to hope that someone finds us, and soon.

—Will

For the first time in the dream, I no longer crossed the emerald sea toward the lone tree. Instead, I’d become part of the tree itself, the bark and my skin the same. Acorns fell from my hands as I opened them and placed them flat on the ground. My fingertips, pressing into the earth, grew roots. Not the gossamer strands of springtime, but thick ropes lined with poison-tipped thorns.

They snaked through the soil, erupting up through the soles of everyone on the island. Some became my warriors, others my victims, but all were subject to my will. Death soaked into my roots, nourishing them, the souls of the dying a bitter harvest that fueled me.

Then it was done, and the sky split open, the ash parting to reveal a single-celled sun, dividing, replicating, devouring the ash until thousands of suns covered the sky. They fell to the earth, some sinking into the ocean under their own weight, others into the ground. Everything that had ever lived rose and walked again, until the earth folded in on itself and I was again alone, weaving through the long, waving grass of the emerald sea. I wasn’t alone for long.

In my hand, I soon held another, a smaller version of my own. Onyx hair fluttered behind us, and in her other hand, she clutched a string that led up, up to a kite—a man but not a man, smooth and shiny, with only the suggestion of a face. Ribbons made of flesh and blood flew behind it, twisting in the breeze as we made our way to the tree.

Far ahead, the others clustered around the trunk, just close enough that we could make out their smiles, their hands raised in greeting. A riot of blossoms grew at their feet, and they braided them into a tiny crown.

As we reached the massive oak, she began to climb, her kite clutched in one hand, and a pang of fear touched my heart. Yet, even when she scraped her leg on the rough bark and bled, I let her be. She had to be strong in this new world, though she was but a single blossom in a wasteland. Because, of all the seeds we’d planted, she was the first, the most important. And if she withered, the harvest was for naught.

High in the tree, she raised her hand to shade her eyes against the sun. She turned slowly, surveying a kingdom only she and her kite could see. One by one, she untied the ribbons from him then wrapped them around the slender branches of the canopy. Blood and something else seeped from the bands and ran in delicate rivulets down the channels in the crenelated bark.

Satisfied with her handiwork, she climbed back down the trunk to claim her blossom coronet. The moment it touched her head, I peered into a mirror.

The illusion vanished as she knelt, smiling, and pressed her face into the moist soil, where the wind couldn’t take her.

She was the seed.