During harvest in early Landfall, Miranda’s intended school is postponed because every hand is needed. As a newcomer with no family ties, Miranda is moved from task to task by the Council, listening to colonists such as Esi Arbandir Holt, who talks obsessively about Earth, Gembel, who drinks under an unnamed sorrow, Olf, who struggles to keep failing machinery alive, and Halena Garm, who warns Miranda that Imir has no room for slackers.

Miranda uses Miranda’s outsider status to become a Council note-taker and spy. In meetings, Miranda hears arguments about whether scarce resources should go to repairing the grounded Urshanabi shuttle, maintaining the last industrial printer, or supporting Gembel’s agricultural expansion. Olf argues that each generation of manufactured tools loses precision, while Gembel’s crop figures and Garm’s harsh pragmatism reinforce the same point: Landfall cannot afford anything that does not immediately preserve survival.

Esi insists the shuttle repairs are a duty, though the others avoid naming the real issue. Garm invokes Esi’s granddaughter Liff and says the colony has already chosen to live like people rather than machines, exposing a moral conflict between practical survival and the ideals Esi brought from Earth. Holt then announces that after the storms, when the new arrivals are assimilated, he, Garm, and others will undertake an expedition, apparently not a trip back to the Enkidu but a long-delayed search connected to memories from Landfall’s first year.

Later, Miranda eavesdrops on Holt and Esi. Their private argument reveals that the colonists have abandoned people still aboard the Enkidu, and Esi fears those people might one day wake, repair a shuttle, and come to Landfall as enemies who know they were left behind. Holt tries to deny this possibility and deflect toward his expedition, but Esi refuses to let that hope excuse the moral weight of the abandonment.

Miranda reports the discovery to Miranda’s fellow infiltrators, framing Landfall as an extraordinary chance to study a colony across generations. Miranda also recognizes that the colonists’ fear of future strangers may become a dangerous and recurring paranoia. Yet as Miranda reviews how easily Miranda supposedly infiltrated the Enkidu, Holt’s list, and the Urshanabi, Miranda feels a disconnected mass of memory and cannot explain it to the others; the chapter ends with Miranda wondering what they are all forgetting.