Miranda watches Gothi and Gethli after Kern successfully revives the Corvids from cold sleep using Renee Pepper’s notes and the birds’ own modifications. The Corvids stop dismantling the ship and instead begin exploring the Skipper’s data systems, filling a reserved archive volume with a jumble of Rourke records, star maps, journals, manuals, Octopus and Portiid art, and other material. Miranda suspects a pattern is being built, but cannot tell whether the birds understand their situation or are simply driven by novelty.

Miranda tries to communicate with the birds, but their responses are mostly apt quotations from the Rourke archives. Kern dismisses this as parroting rather than proof of sentience, while Miranda remains uncertain because the quoted lines seem relevant to the questions asked. The birds also behave differently when separated: Gothi follows novel flight paths, while Gethli often iterates on Gothi’s patterns, producing results that could suggest mathematics but prove nothing.

Paul is awakened next, and Miranda briefs him on the lack of progress. Paul attempts communication through Octopus color, movement, and gesture, which fascinates the Corvids enough that the birds start recording his moods and movements in their archive. However, there is still no sign that Gothi and Gethli understand Paul as a sentient being, frustrating Miranda, who is accustomed to comprehending alien minds through the many selves within her.

Kern suggests testing the birds with puzzles and even treating them like experimental subjects, arguing that they may be pets or stowaways rather than ambassadors. Miranda resists that framing, but the birds voluntarily solve puzzles with enthusiasm. When Miranda, frustrated, tries to lock them out of the computer system, Gothi and Gethli rapidly find workarounds, turning the restriction into another challenge until Miranda asks Kern to confine them to their own archive.

The Corvids then approach Miranda formally and demand restored access, again using language that Kern identifies as recycled quotations from Rourke cultural records. Miranda restores their access while still unable to recognize a clear selfhood behind their bright-eyed behavior. Meanwhile, the Skipper nears the inner planet, and Kern’s first readings show a brown world with ice, dark seas, oxygen, and only an early stage of terraforming, suggesting another failure.

As Miranda tries to maintain hope and Paul suggests using the birds as survey tools, Gothi and Gethli make cryptic comments about discovery. Then Kern abruptly manifests in the crewspace and reverses her pessimism: she has detected signals from the planet, turning the apparently failed world into a new mystery.