Pilcher had wrecked the place. Two of the monitors were smashed, and the architect’s miniature of Wayward Pines had capsized, the glass that had once covered the model town shattered across the floor, houses and buildings crushed amid the shards.

“I woke you, didn’t I?” Pilcher said.

He hadn’t actually. Ted couldn’t have slept tonight if someone had injected him full of tranquilizers. But he said, “It’s fine.”

“Let’s sit together like old friends.”

There was a thickness, a deliberation, behind Pilcher’s words. Ted wondered how drunk he actually was.

Pilcher staggered over to the leather couches. As Ted followed him, he saw that the monitors had been turned off in here as well.

They sat on the cool leather, facing the dark monitors.

Pilcher poured two healthy glasses of scotch from an expensive-looking bottle with the word Macallan on it and handed Ted the glass.

They clinked the crystal glasses.

Drank.

It was the first alcohol Ted had sipped in more than two thousand years. When he’d been homeless and drinking himself to death in the wake of his wife’s passing, old scotch like this would have been a religious experience. But he’d lost his taste for it.

“I still remember the day we met,” Pilcher said. “You were standing in the soup line of that shelter. It was your eyes that called out to me. So much grief in them.”

“You saved my life.”

The old man looked over at him. “Do you still trust me, Ted?”

“Of course,” Ted lied.

“Of course. You shut down the surveillance hub when I told you to.”

“That’s right.”

“You didn’t even ask why.”

“No.”

“Because you trust me.”

Pilcher stared into his glass at the swirling amber liquid.

“I did something tonight, Ted.”

Ted looked up at the dark screens. Felt something go ice cold in the pit of his stomach. He looked over at Pilcher as the man raised a control tablet and typed something on the touchpad.

The screens flashed to life.

As head of surveillance, Ted had spent a quarter of his life watching these people eat, sleep, laugh, cry, fuck, and sometimes—when a fête was called—die.

“I didn’t do this lightly,” Pilcher said.

Ted stared at the screens, his eyes locking on one in particular—a woman crouching in the shower, shoulders heaving with sobs as a fist of talons punched through the bathroom door.

He felt suddenly ill.

Pilcher watched him.

Ted looked over at his boss. Eyes welling up with tears, he said, “You have to stop this.”

“It’s too late.”

“How so?”

“I used our abbies in captivity to draw a swarm to the fence. Then I opened the gate. Over five hundred abbies have entered the town.” Ted wiped his eyes. Five hundred. He could barely comprehend such a number. Just fifty abbies would have been an unqualified disaster.