“There isn’t one,” Leven said. “Five-year models confirm this valley will become uninhabitable. If we catch a really bad winter, possibly sooner. We’re all from the modern age. If push came to shove, we might have been able to adopt an agrarian lifestyle in a more temperate climate. But with weather like this? The only lifestyle that might support us is the nomadic hunter-gatherer.”

“Except we’re trapped in this valley.”

“Precisely.”

“What about the abbies?” Ethan asked.

“As a food source?”

“Yeah.”

“First off, gross. Secondly, we’ve run models, and there’s too much inherent danger in venturing out beyond the fence to kill them. If we did that on a regular basis, we’d lose too many of our own. Look, I get that you’re just finding this out now, but trust me, I’ve been grappling with this problem for three years. There was no solution before. There’s even less of one now.”

“Did you know what David was planning?”

“You mean with killing the power to the fence?”

“Yeah.”

“No. I was sitting right here the night the fence went down. I called him. He wouldn’t answer. He did it from his office and he locked me out of the system.”

“So he didn’t consult with you beforehand?”

“David and I haven’t been on the greatest of terms these last few years.”

“Why’s that?”

Leven pushed his chair back from the controls and rolled across the floor.

“The David Pilcher you know wasn’t the same man who hired me away from Lockheed Martin. The end of Wayward Pines has been coming for a long time, but David didn’t want to face it. It’s arrogance, I think, a refusal to admit that he missed this potential crisis. That he didn’t foresee it and steer us all out of the way. Recently, he’s become increasingly withdrawn. Erratic. Emotional. He killed his own daughter. That was the first major fracture. Then when you took control of the town and told the residents the truth, I think he just couldn’t deal anymore. Said ‘screw this’ and hit self-destruct.”

“So you’re telling me it’s over. We’re all going to starve to death.”

Leven smiled. “If the abbies don’t get us first.”

Ethan rose to his feet, watched the monitor scroll the list of depleted provisions like the writings of a doomsday prophet. He said, “You’ve got access to every database in the superstructure?”

“That is correct.”

“Did you know a nomad just returned? Adam Hassler?”

“I heard rumblings of it.”

“Do you have access to his file here?”

Leven tilted his head. “I don’t really feel too hot about where this conversation is going.”

“I want you to pull his file.”

“Why?”