The Last Town (Wayward Pines, #3)

by Blake Crouch

This had been her routine going on three years now, and she thought it had been wise not to break it tonight. When your world falls apart, cling to the familiar.

And isn’t that all we want in the end? To feel useful? Of value?”

He reclines in the hundred-and-four-degree pool, the snow pouring down, letting his eyes close for little bursts of euphoria that remind him of what it felt like to be human. To live in a civilized world of convenience and comfort. Where the probability of death didn’t shadow every moment.

Life in the superstructure shook out in a strange rhythm of work and leisure, and it generally took people years to find the balance. Regardless of department, work shifts were onerous. Ten-hour days, six days a week. And still, things just barely got done. For Ted, as head of surveillance, there wasn’t a week in recent memory when he had worked fewer than seventy hours. The challenge had come with finding what to do, beyond sleeping, with the other seventy hours of free time in the week. He wasn’t an extrovert, and even though they existed for him only on surveillance monitors, Ted felt he spent every working second with the residents of Wayward Pines. So in his time off, he wanted nothing more than to be alone.