Ethan smiled. “You’re right, son. It would take a long, long, long, long time.”

He turned to face the abby. She sat peacefully in her cage, eyes still heavy from the sedative Ethan had ordered the scientists to administer.

Pulling his Desert Eagle from the holster, he climbed up into the bed, threw the locks on the cage, and eased the door open several inches.

Something between a purr and a growl rumbled in the abby’s throat.

Ethan said, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

He backed slowly away, climbed down out of the truck bed.

The abby watched him.

After a moment, she pushed the cage door open with her long left arm and crept out.

“What if it does something?” Ben asked. “What if it attacks—”

“She’s not going to hurt us. She knows my meaning.” Ethan caught her eyes. “Don’t you?”

He started toward the fence, the abby following sluggishly, several paces behind.

At the gate, he typed in the code for the manual power override, and waited as the bolts unlatched.

The fence went silent.

He shoved the gate open with his boot.

“Go on,” Ethan said. “You’re free now.”

The abby watched him warily as she slunk past, squeezing herself through the opening, out into her world.

“Dad, you think we’ll ever be able to live side by side with them?”

Ten feet out, the abby shot a glance back at Ethan.

Her head tilted.

She watched him for a beat, and he could have sworn she had something to say, her eyes brimming with intelligence and understanding.

There were no words.

But Ethan understood.

And all at once, it came to him.

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

He blinked—

And she was gone.

Ethan sat with Theresa on one of the park benches, watching Ben, who stood in the middle of the field, staring up at the sky. A couple hundred feet above, a kite skirted along on the breeze. It had taken the boy several tries to get the kite up and out of the still air near the surface, but the patch of red was now a fixture against the perfect blue, twirling around on the currents.

It was a nice thing to sit and watch a child with a kite, and it was the first morning in days, maybe weeks, that didn’t feel like winter.

“Ethan, that’s insane.”

“If we stay in this valley,” he said, “we all die in a matter of years. There’s not even a question. So why put it to a vote?”

“You let the people decide.”

“What if—”

“You let the people decide.”

“People get it wrong.”

“That’s true, but you have to figure out what kind of a leader you’re going to be.”

“I know what the right decision is, Theresa.”

“So sell your idea to them.”

“It’s a hard sell. It’s risky. And what happens if they make the wrong choice? Even you’re on the fence.”

“It’s our wrong choice to make, honey. If you’re willing to force this on people, then what was the point of ever telling them the truth about Wayward Pines?”

“I caused all of this,” Ethan said. “All the death. The suffering and loss. I turned our lives inside out. Now I just want to fix it.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m terrified.” She took his hand into hers. “You’re not just asking me to trust the people with their fate. You’re asking me to trust them with yours. With Ben’s.” Their son sprinted across the field, dragging the kite behind him, laughing. “The day I broke into the superstructure, Pilcher told me that I would come to understand the things he did. The choices he made.”

“And do you now?”

“I’m starting to feel the weight that was on his shoulders.”

“He didn’t trust his people to make the right choices,” Theresa said, “because he was afraid. But you don’t have to be, Ethan. If you do what you know in your heart is right, if you give people the freedom to choose their own fate, their own destiny—”

“We could starve to death in this valley.”

“That’s true. But you won’t have compromised your integrity. That’s the only thing you really have to fear.”

That night, Ethan stood where it had all begun, on the bare stage in the opera house, under the burn of the lights, with the last two hundred fifty people on the planet looking on.

“Here we are,” he said to the crowd, “humanity at the end of the world. We’re here right now because of the choice I made to tell everyone the truth about Wayward Pines. Don’t think I’ve missed that. Many of you lost loved ones. We’ve all suffered. I’ll live with my decision and what it cost for the rest of my life, but right now, it’s time to consider the future. In fact, it’s all I’ve been thinking about this past week.”

The core group of Pilcher’s inner circle sat together off stage left—Francis Leven, Alan, Marcus, Mustin—all watching him.

The quiet in the theater was absolute.

A coiled silence.

“I know we’re all trying to figure out where we go from here,” he said. “What happens next. What our lives might look like. We have some hard truths to face, and we need to face them together. Right now. Here’s the first one. Our food is running out.”

Gasps and whispers trickled through the crowd.

Someone shouted, “How long?”

“About four years,” Ethan said. “Which brings us to the second hard truth. We can’t stay in this valley. I mean, we could. Until the next fence failure. Until a winter comes like we’ve never imagined. Until the food supply is exhausted.

“Francis Leven is here from the superstructure and he can walk you all through the particulars, explain exactly why our lives are no longer sustainable in Wayward Pines.

“But I didn’t drag you down here just to be the bearer of bad news. I also have a proposal for a new course of action. Something radical and dangerous and daring. A leap in the dark.”

Ethan found Theresa in the crowd.

“To be honest, I debated even proposing this as a choice. A friend of mine recently said to me that sometimes we find ourselves in situations that are so life and death, one or two strong leaders need to call the shots. But I think we’re all finished with having our lives controlled. I don’t know how, but we’re going to find our way through this. What it comes down to for me is that I’d rather us make bad decisions as a group, than to live in the absence of freedom. That was the old way. That was Pilcher’s way.