On the third day the final liberated slave is returned to their home. Their people. The bus has crisscrossed the desert Front Range and Ava can't help but melt a little. Watching all these wet-eyed reunions – it's just what she needs. Witnessing their joy and relief – it doesn't matter if they're 'real' people. The emotions they experience are real to them, regardless of whether or not they're scripted.

Their lives matter, she recognizes, not just to them – but to me, too.

It helps to relieve her anxiety and alienation some. When she thinks about it, maybe she has more in common with these people than not.

Ostby changes course, drives West. The bus carries them up a mountain pass. Red rock cliffs jut up on either side. And out there Ava can see some of the vegetation glowing with a golden hue. They're coming back to the habitat she understands. They've only been gone a week but it feels like this her own homecoming, same as the slaves they've been ferrying.

Here-and-there the highway is clogged with hopeless exoduses which ended too soon, but the bus can simply ram past the wreckage. Those derelict vehicles get shoved off the side of the road, their mummified passengers staring out with empty eye sockets, looking somehow grateful to Ava.

That's their funeral. No one will ever acknowledge their deaths—and their lives—to the extent we did just now simply by the act of removing them as an obstacle.

Here on either side of the highway a series of shops were once erected but now they're all burnt out. Broken windows and blackened brick walls. Off yonder Ava sees a building which was once the county jail – also torched at some point in the far past. The bus rumbles past a sign labeling this incinerated settlement as 'Divide'. At the far end of town the highway intersects with another traveling North and South. Ostby takes the Southern route.

The highway proceeds for miles along the edge of a cliff. As they press on there are places where mudslides have washed across the road, leaving a crust of dirt and rocks. The bus churns through it perilously, rocking back-and-forth when the wheels crawl over the bigger hunks of granite and quartz. Finally they come to a spot where the road is completely blocked by a boulder which is taller and broader than even the bus.

“Have to walk from here,” Ostby sighs.

“Something wrong?” asks Ava.

He just raps his knuckles on the thigh of his shiny robot leg and huffs. She understands his meaning: he's not excited to test out his unwanted prosthetic so soon and so strenuously.

But there's no other option. He parks the bus right there on the side of the highway and they head out on foot. Ava is glad to be back in the mountains. The air is clean and crisp. The sky so blue. The scent of pine trees speaks to her soul.

It feels less like a march and more like a recreational hike. For a while the Slaps sorta seem like kids again. They joke and laugh. They chase each other, playfully threatening with their flamethrowers and lasers and retractable titanium claws. Like kids – only a little more deadly.

Mid-morning, the party crests one final hill and down in the valley below they see the smoke spiraling up from cook fires in Cripple Creek.

And as they come back to the gates there is no guard.

“Get someone stationed here right now,” says Oscar, sounding disgusted, “get them here yesterday, for fuck's sake.”

“Same old grown-ups,” Cobra laughs.

“It can wait,” says Ostby, “until after the reunions.”

But some of these Slaps don't seem to care about seeing their kin again. Maybe it's because they feel let down. Maybe even betrayed. But Ava thinks there might be something else to it, too:

These kids are just impatient to do more killing.

Because that's the game. And what is a game?

Games were rule-bound contests, she remembers Bach explaining way-back-when. She laughs to herself.

“Something funny?” Bach materializes beside her to ask.

“Nope, not really” she laughs a little softer, “not a damn thing.”

“Jeremiah!” This woman sprints forward and falls on her knees right in the middle of the thoroughfare. She wraps little Cobra in her arms and sobs while peppering his face with kisses. “Oh baby I'm so glad you're safe.” She looks at Ava and Bach and Uri. She places one hand upon her heart and says, “thank you all so much. I can never repay you.”

Cobra pries himself from her embrace.

“Could you just not?” he asks, seemingly more repulsed than embarrassed. His mother releases him and sits back on her rump there in the dirt, a stunned look upon her face.

Similar scenes play out all over. These parents aren't getting their kids back. Their sweet little angels are long gone.

What they're welcoming home is a company of killers. Killers who don't have time for cuddles and kisses. Killers on a mission.

“First-things-first,” Oscar addresses the adults at-large, “get someone competent stationed at the gate. Then, we need to secure the mi—“

“Oscar,” Darby interrupts. He examines his Slaps with his head tilted, pacing up to Cobra first. Cobra won't look him in the eye. Darby sighs, “first-things-first – go home and be with your families. For one day, at least.”

“But Darby—“ Oscar starts but Bach clears his throat and that's that. Oscar bites his tongue.

Darby nods to Bach, quietly grateful. “Twenty-four hour leave starts now. See you Slaps tomorrow.” He smirks. “Sorry, I misspoke. See you Slayers tomorrow—when we get started doing Slayer's work.”

That gets them riled. They salute one another, slap each other's backs. Then they say goodbye and march to their homes, trailed after by their parents in various stages of shock and mystification.

Ostby squeezes his son's shoulder. He smiles down at him. But Ava sees the look on Darby's face when his dad turns away. And it's nothing but misery.

He doesn't want to do this anymore, she realizes, now that he suspects none of this is real, he can't justify the violence.

Suddenly it isn't as simple as: the game has made me violent.

It's more like: why me – and not Darby?

Around town, a lot of suppers are taken in awkward silence.

But inside the freshly reconstructed pub, Ava and Bach and Uri take a meal with the Channings:

“What now?” asks Ava. She wields a fork in her robotic fingers, employing it to stab peas and carrots.

“We need a plan to deal with Horst.” Darby concludes, “we can't wait around for him to strike back.”

“And he will,” says Bach,”we can count on it. More than anything, they hate to lose.”

“Do you think he'll sick H.R. on us again?” Ava wonders.

“Naw, doubt if he could,” Bach elaborates, “too much risk for H.R. to take the job. They don't operate on vengeance. There's no profit in vendetta. And softer targets exist everywhere – they'll cut their losses when it comes to us.”

“But if the rumors are true, Horst doesn't need H.R.,” says Darby, “if the rumors are true, he has a dragon.”

“Then maybe we need to build a dragon, too.” Bach grins bullets.

“It'll be a week in the mines before we have nails enough just to reinforce our structures. To fasten down our roofs – just to modernize this place to pre-industrial levels,” says Ostby, skeptical. “The raw materials needed to construct a dragon of our own are unfathomable. We simply don't have access.”

“Horst may still have a force in the mines, too,” notes Darby, “it may take some time to clear them out.”

“We may be able to take what they have in their foundry,” says Ava, “could give us a head-start.”

“We're already so far behind,” says Darby. “Horst and his kind have operated at an advantage from Day One.”

“But you're all forgetting something,” says Bach, “or maybe more accurately – someone.” He smiles at Ava. “You're forgetting that we don't need to harvest all of the materials. We just need single components and then Ava here can replicate them in any quantity we require.”

The Channings' eye-brows perk-up in-sync, a genetically-shared idiosyncrasy. They nod to one another and smile the same pleased smile.

“A dragon,” Darby muses, “a dragon driven by Slayers.”

“Yes,” Bach flexes his hand, “it's time. We're finally ready to seize the means to produce one for ourselves.”

Ava and Darby sit, just two kids in the quiet pub after Bach and Ostby turn in for the night.

“I'm not sure what to make of anything,” says the younger Channing. “I just know I can't stay here. I just know that I can't stop scanning things and every time I do it makes me feel less a part of this community. It makes me feel less a part of this world.”

She doesn't know what to say at first. But when she thinks about it, she realizes he's just feeling the same alienation as her:

“It's hard feeling different – like an other,” she says, but she's still in the process of reconciling these feelings herself. “I think it helps to look for the things we have in common with everyone else. We're more alike than not.”

“That's called 'cognitive dissonance'.” Darby counters, “I don't want to tell myself lies just to maintain the status quo. To preserve beliefs I know in my heart to be untrue just because they're comforting.”

“Maybe sometimes we have to fake it at first,” says Ava, Ellie's words from her mouth, “but I think it'll get easier.”

“Will it? I don't see how.”

Maybe it's only getting easier for Ava because she's addicted to violence. Because she's still eager to play the game. Or maybe it's because she's here by choice. Because she's Sara, escaping the real world in favor of this fallen, awful world.

Is this all some kind of sick power fantasy?

Is that why the game affects her one way and Darby in the complete opposite?

“Ava,” Darby says, his code-generated human-eye full of real tears, “what the hell am I?”

“What do you mean?” She touches his hand out of genuine concern, he sounds so shattered.

“I thought for a moment to scan myself, and that's all it took. And what I saw was 'character data'. Numbers quantifying my strength and mind and my fucking spirit. Like I'm not real. Like I'm just a collection of numbers and formulas.”

There's no easy answer.

What can I say? How much do I tell him?

If an NPC is sentient, does their existential crisis play out in branching internal dialogue?