Miranda reflects on what it means for the Nodan collective to inhabit a human persona. The entity uses a vat-grown body engineered to match the original Miranda’s self-image because mismatched embodiment can fracture its identity and awaken older predatory instincts. Miranda embraces human sensations and memories, including the original woman’s love of exploration, while remaining aware that some in the wider civilization still distrust Interlocutors.

Aboard the Skipper, Miranda describes the ship and its mixed crew as they prepare to receive possible new crewmembers from the planet below and depart for another world. Portia is Miranda’s close Portiid friend, Fabian another trusted companion, while Bianca is more reserved. Paul, an Octopus and old associate, accepts Miranda, and Miranda’s ability to understand many species’ communication makes Miranda suited to work with newcomers.

Miranda also identifies Jodry, the only true Human aboard, as someone who fears and dislikes what Miranda is, despite his politeness. Miranda understands his revulsion because the original Miranda once felt the same horror toward the Nodan entity before choosing partnership and allowing herself to be copied into its living archive. The last and constant member of the crew is Avrana Kern, whose ancient knowledge connects the expedition to old terraforming worlds.

The narration then turns to Rourke, the world the Skipper is leaving. Rourke is one of the old terraforming sites and, unlike many failed or lost colonies, has a thriving civilization that preserves the terraformers’ language and computer systems. Yet its inhabitants respond to alien contact with eerily perfect textbook procedure and ask no questions, making Miranda and others suspect an ancient AI rather than a living society.

When Miranda, Portia, and Fabian descend as an embassy, they find not humans or halls, but thousands of black birds in the snow. The Corvids swarm the shuttle, dismantle it with tools, and subject the visitors and Skipper drones to intense investigation. While Kern accesses Rourke’s unsecured systems, she learns enough to intervene, provide schematics, and help the birds reconstruct the shuttle perfectly; afterward she explains that, although they can reverse-engineer astonishing technology, it is not clear they think at all.