When the three survivors finally return to the diminished group, they find machines have come to harvest the Plants' crop. Without the pulp to live on, the group returns to the surface, where they discover that a new crop of Plants has been sown by the mysterious aliens. The malnourished group has no chance of survival, and the novel closes on Jeremiah and Blossom leaving them to travel into the wilderness. The pair, starving and mismatched in age, are portrayed as a distorted mirror image of the biblical Adam and Eve and herald the end of humanity instead of the beginning.