Min Wilder

"'You must've slaughtered your own people in the simulation to get here … Doing anything it takes to survive is nothing special. Animals can do that.' I nodded at my classmates. 'We found a way to save our entire class. It took us a while to learn the right lessons, but we didn't leave a soul behind. You call it stupidity, but it's the reason you'll never beat us. We're simply better people than you.' "Melinda "Min" Juilliard Wilder is one of the Fire Lake sophomores. She is described as being slender and short with chin-length straight black hair (shoulder length in Chrysalis) and gray eyes.

Min has a fiery personality and a short temper but she is well suited to the leadership role she falls into during Genesis. She is fiercely loyal to those she cares about but often has very little patience for them. However, she can be gentle, overly uncertain, excessively lenient, and morally rigid to the point of insensibility. Doubts and insecurities crowd her mind, but she never allows them to interfere with her goals.

Early Life
Min was born on September 17th, 2001, and lived in Rocky Ridge Trailer Park her whole life. Her parents were Virginia Wilder and Juilliard Bolton, who conceived her by accident one night while Juilliard was inspecting the town of Fire Lake for Project Nemesis. She became a beta patient for the project, leading to her murder every other year on her birthdays. She regularly saw a psychologist, Dr. Gerald Lowell, but never trusted him and always suspected that he knew more than he was letting on.

Min was never popular at school, growing up separated from the wealthier kids in her hometown, but the rift deepened after she missed an important birthday party due to one of her biennial murders. She was never again included among her classmates the same way, and they picked on her openly for it. After several years of isolation, she became comfortable with it and had a hard time trusting people. This was also due to the trauma inflicted by the Project Nemesis beta testing.

Min had an unsteady relationship with her mother. Though the two loved each other, Min also suspected her mother's involvement in (or knowledge of) her murders as well. To cover for her birthdays, she kept an irregular schedule at home and seldom alerted Virginia to her comings and goings. She was resentful that she knew nothing about her father and hated him for leaving her mother alone. Of everyone she knew, Min was closest to her best friend, Tack Russo, who lived in the trailer park as well. Though she never explicitly stated that she returned his romantic feelings for her, it was implied several times that she was not sure of her feelings and that a future for them was a possibility. She was unceasingly protective of him and cared about him deeply. She also briefly dated Noah Livingston before the two entered the Program.

In the Program
Tack's immediate decision to antagonize Ethan set him and Min on the run at an early stage in the Program. After the events of his alleged death and Noah shooting Min in the back, the two camp out in the trailer park until they come up with a plan to unite the valley against Ethan. After a few failed attempts at this, Min winds up in prison for the second time, where she witnesses Devin Carver's permanent death and shoots herself with Toby Albertsson's gun to escape the cells.

Aiming for the silo, where she and Tack decided to meet, Min runs into Noah. He walks her there at gunpoint and, upon reuniting with Tack, the three agree to an uneasy truce and share the information they know. Their second silo trip proves to be educational. Here, Min learns the rules of the Program and finds the clone lab, clueing her in to the knowledge of the original regeneration process. However, their silo exploration is cut short when Sarah Harden and Ethan Fletcher show up and take over the building. Tack sacrifices one of his lives so that Min will have a spare and she locks herself behind the blast door to wait out the initial firefight.

This is where she is stuck for two months. Sarah eventually finds her in the computer system, and the two engage in a sixty-day battle of wits. They almost seem to be frenemies during this time period, Sarah casually chatting with Min while simultaneously demanding her location and surrender. Min continually refuses until Derrick Morris comes knocking at the blast door to tell her how bad the fighting has gotten. The two of them fall for a trap Sarah set, and are locked in the computer chamber until Min finds an emergency exit and they escape from the silo. After stopping at the liberty camp and joining forces with a handful of classmates, Min goes to speak to the Guardian and find out the true purpose of the Program. She finds out that he is her father, and he reveals that their ultimate destination is rebirth back onto the planet. Sarah interrupts their conversation to inform the entire valley that she has manipulated the system in a way that sets a deadline for those with a negative ratio of lives. Min, with negative four lives, learns that she has less than forty-eight hours to pick them back up or she will die at midnight the next day.

With the clock ticking, Min rounds up her growing band of survivors and decides to wait out Sarah's snowstorm at Noah's house. There, she reunites with Noah, who was going the same direction, and they light a signal fire to alert others to their location. More than twenty people join their group, including Tack, who is overjoyed to learn that Min is alive. When Sarah announces that she has eliminated reset zones, he comes up with an alternative to Min's suicide mission of reasoning with her and suggests that people with excessive lives give them to people who don't have enough. Under these conditions, Min shoots Noah in his garage four times so that she is safe from the deadline.

The group disintegrates when Ethan manages to plant a bomb under the deck and blow up the house, killing several people. They lose even more when Sarah causes an earthquake while the group is crossing the frozen lake into town. By the time the class has been broken down to just twenty-one people, they learn that they have to lose one more person. Min decides to speak to her father, threatening to be the one to sacrifice herself if he doesn't cooperate, but Noah offers to take the sacrifice for her. Before he can, Tack takes the gun and shoots himself in the head, effectively ending Phase Two and saving Noah and Min.

When Juilliard informs Min that the eliminated codes are placed in a loop of a single day, she seizes the information with the blind hope that she can somehow bring Tack to life with the rest of them. With Sarah's help, the two coerce Juilliard into letting them add all sixty-four codes into the regeneration process.

Chrysalis
When Chrysalis begins, Min is leading the village of Home Town six months after their reemergence onto Earth. She details the story of how the class split up and her responsibility for the deaths of several classmates. When the silo blows up and the lake drains, Min fights to regain control but things fall apart when she and Derrick are locked in a shed by a group of unknown humans.

Reconvening in Ridgeline, Min and Sarah deduce that the unknowns are members of another Nemesis group. They break into the silo through a ventilation duct, attempting to beat Toby and his team there, but find them already living in it. Sarah sneaks out a secret exit in her room and floods the silo, killing seven of the eight people living there, including four Nemesis 3 kids. Min, forewarned that Sarah might try something to get them out of the silo, barely escapes with her life through the ventilation duct.

The two return to the cave complex to reunite with their classmates and Derrick brings Cyrus Haq, a Nemesis 3 insurgent who sneaks their group out of the Terrarium undetected and reveals the truth about Chrysalis. In the hideout, Min reunites with Noah, her father, and even has a brief exchange with Tack, whom she has not seen for four months. Soon afterward, they are raided and captured by Chrysalis personnel.

Min wakes up in a dormitory cubicle with an AI and soon after is reunited with fifteen others from her class. At orientation, they meet Sophia, who introduces them to the concept of repurposement. Min is forced to play puzzle games against members of the Nemesis 3 class, winning every single competition, including a ropes course against Rose Valenti in which she outsmarts the other girl. Sophia meets with Min after this, explaining the origin of Chrysalis and that most of her class would be selected for repurposement, but Min was likely to be one of the ones to leave the station and colonize Mars. She offers a deal to Min: get the class on board with the testing process, and Min can choose one other person to join the colonization team.

Before Min can agree to this deal, her friends and father attack the testing center and free her from Sophia's clutches. After a battle, she watches her father and some of her classmates die before the group is captured. She is then forced to go through another series of tests, this time life-or-death, before she discovers the true process of repurposement. Sophia offers Min one final shot at survival, in exchange for Noah's life, but she refuses and is sent to repurposement.

Min puts up a fight but is soon rescued by Noah, Rose, and Tack. The group reunites with their surviving classmates and runs to the command center to figure out a way to shut down Sophia and land Chrysalis on Mars. The only way to do this, however, requires Noah to attack Sophia and push her into outer space, killing them both.

On Mars, Min builds a home away from the other fifteen survivors of Livingston Colony. She is deadened by Noah's loss and refuses to even pull weeds from her garden, reasoning that taking any life feels wrong. She also notes that Tack is living in a cabin directly under hers, keeping his distance so that she can heal in peace, but that she wants him to someday be her home again.

Trivia

 * Min always kept her hair short because her mother liked it that way
 * She likes Vampire Weekend, Halsey, and The Walking Dead
 * She has read the Virals series by Kathy and Brendan Reichs
 * Hogwarts House: Gryffindor