Ethan would’ve thought that, after a day like this, one more piece of shitty news would crash into his psyche like a wave against a seawall, but it penetrated. Deeply.

He left Alan and went back out into the corridor, started up the steps toward the Level 4 dormitories, but then stopped.

Turning back, he descended the last flight of stairs to the first level.

Margaret, the abby whose intelligence Pilcher had been testing for the last few months, was up, pacing in her cage under the glare of the fluorescents.

Ethan put his face to the small window and stared through, his breath fogging the glass.

Last time he’d seen this abby, she’d been sitting peacefully in the corner.

Docile. Humanlike.

Now she looked agitated. Not angry, not vicious. Just nervous.

Because so many of your brothers and sisters have come into our valley? Ethan wondered. Because so many have been killed, even in this complex? Pilcher had told him that the abbies communicated through pheromones. Used them like words, he’d said.

Margaret saw Ethan.

She crept on all fours over toward the door and stood on her hind legs.

Ethan’s eyes and the abby’s eyes were just inches away, separated by the glass.

Up close, hers were almost pretty.

Ethan moved deeper into the corridor.

Six doors down, he looked through the window of another cage.

There was no bed, no chair.

Just floor and walls and David Pilcher sitting in a corner, his head hung as if he’d fallen asleep sitting up. The lights burned down through the window and lit the left side of the man’s face.

He hadn’t been allowed to keep any personal effects, including a razor, and white stubble was beginning to overspread his jaw.

You did this, Ethan thought. You ruined so many lives. My life. My marriage.

If he’d had a keycard to this cell, Ethan would’ve rushed inside and beat the man to death.

Everyone—townies and mountain people—came down for the burials.

The cemetery was too full to accommodate all the bodies so an open field on the southern border of the graveyard was annexed.

Ethan helped Kate with Harold.

The sky was gray.

No one spoke.

Tiny flakes of snow swirled through the crowd.

There was just the constant sound of shovels stabbing into the cold, hard ground.

As the digging finished, people crumpled down in the snow-frosted grass beside loved ones, or what was left of them, the dead wrapped tightly in once-white sheets. The digging had given them something to do, but as they sat motionless and cold beside lost fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, friends, and children, muffled sobs began to rise up from the crowd.

Ethan walked out into the middle of the field.