CJ has woken up in the middle of a war. Ethos has returned after five hundred years with a plan to plant her pillars and conquer the world, and almost everyone is already dead. CJ and a small number of surviving friends are what is left to stop her. Several of the choices made along the way matter, and one of them determines how the final confrontation with Ethos unfolds. The world occasionally behaves strangely—some walls can be walked through, some details do not hold up under scrutiny—and the reason for that only becomes clear after Ethos is defeated.