Heorest Holt personally pilots the damaged Urshanabi, the Enkidu’s last heavy lifter, down through Imir’s hostile atmosphere. Because the shuttle is old, overloaded with colony supplies, and receiving unreliable guidance from the ark ship, Holt must rely on his own skill while Olf continually adjusts failing systems behind him. During the descent, Esi detects the mysterious signal from the hills, but Holt cannot respond because landing safely is the only immediate priority.

After the Urshanabi lands, Holt insists on being the first person to step onto Imir, treating the moment as historic despite the danger and exhaustion. The signal has stopped, and Holt senses it will not return, though he believes whatever sent it is waiting somewhere in the hills. The colonists begin unloading equipment and prepare to complete the Ancients’ unfinished terraforming work.

Over the following years, Holt repeatedly flies between Imir and the Enkidu, bringing down machinery, supplies, and awakened colonists. Gembel slowly proves that soil, plants, fungi, and worms can survive, but progress is painstaking. Holt and the other Key Crew remain haunted by the sleeping cargo still in orbit, because calculations show that waking too many people too soon would doom everyone to starvation.

As Landfall grows from prefabs into a small working settlement, the colony gains farms, power, water purification, and routines for surviving Imir’s seasons and storms. Esi becomes pregnant with the first child to be born on Imir, forcing Holt to confront the moral cost of new native-born children when so many original colonists remain unwoken aboard the Enkidu. Holt keeps promising himself he will search for the signal once the colony is stable, but practical needs always delay him.

Decades pass, and Holt’s occasional expeditions with Helena Garm fail to find the source of the signal. The Urshanabi becomes a rusting monument, Holt leaves leadership to Gembel, and Landfall survives as a hard-working but technologically limited colony rather than the automated Eden once imagined. In old age, when Holt learns he will become a grandfather, he leaves for one final expedition into the hills, suggesting the name Liff for a girl after his Earth-born grandmother. Holt never returns, and the chapter closes on the possibility that whatever truth he found was too poisonous to bring home.