In a liminal version of Landfall, Liff senses the execution crowd only as shadows and glimpses the scaffold, the First Tree, and the town at multiple moments at once. Two black birds, Gothi and Gethli, remain with her while Avrana Kern waits for them to solve the crisis. Liff asks what they are, and they explain that their people survived Rourke by combining memory and analysis into a collective problem-solving system.

Gothi and Gethli tell Liff that she has become central to Imir’s broken reality: wherever they go, there Liff is. They point out the impossibility of Liff having Heorest Holt, founder of the colony centuries ago, as her grandfather. Liff asks why she matters, but when the birds admit they know the answer and warn that Liff will not want to hear it, Liff refuses to be told.

The birds multiply into a vast flock, borrowing Liff’s influence over events to create enough collective intelligence to solve the puzzle. Gothi and Gethli say they need Liff to identify the pieces that do not belong, so that they can take those pieces away and retrieve Miranda and the others. Liff worries they will harm Miranda, but the birds insist their goal is to save Miranda, who came to observe but became trapped when things went wrong.

Liff gives up her fixed sense of self and helps assemble Imir’s history from multiple versions of events. Liff sees Miranda arriving from the Urshanabi with Heorest Holt and the Enkidu colonists, along with disguised outsiders: Fabian, Portia, Paul, and others who do not behave like true settlers. Liff also sees Miranda later as a beloved teacher during Landfall’s expansion, and later still at the scaffold as the colony collapses because Imir’s engineered ecosystem was never stable enough to last.

Once the pattern is complete, Liff recognizes the outsiders by the wrongness of their shadows: Portia’s arachnid nature, Paul’s alien difference, and Miranda’s vast devouring otherness. Gothi and Gethli explain that Miranda is a real woman from another world who made a bargain with something other, but not truly the teacher Liff knew. After the misplaced pieces are removed, Liff understands that she will not remember these events, Miranda will not have enriched her life, and Heorest Holt will no longer have been her grandfather.

The flock dwindles back to Gothi and Gethli, who depart without answering whether everything will be all right. The Wolf is forced back into the landscape, and Liff is left alone in silent Landfall. In the distance, Miranda begins to scream.