Prax returns to Ganymede’s security center for the twelfth time in a week, hoping for information about Mei. The exhausted clerk has nothing for him, and Prax leaves through lines of frightened refugees as the devastated station tries to flee the aftermath of the Earth-Mars battle.

Prax’s days have become a grim routine: he sleeps at home in case Mei returns, eats whatever he can scavenge, checks the recovered bodies to make sure Mei is not among the dead, and then revisits every possible source of information. He questions security, military personnel, doctors, other parents, parks, shops, and even bars or brothels, but finds only dead ends. Several other sick children from Mei’s support group, including Katoa Merton, are also missing.

Prax visits Basia Merton, Katoa’s father, for the fifth time. Basia tells Prax that his family is leaving Ganymede on a relief ship arranged through a cousin on Luna. Prax feels betrayed because Basia has accepted that Katoa is dead, while Prax insists the children must have been taken by people who knew they needed medicine.

The conversation becomes a fight when Prax accuses Basia of abandoning Katoa. Prax hits Basia, and Basia beats Prax down until Basia’s daughter intervenes. Basia tells Prax he would be better off gone, and Prax leaves injured and humiliated.

On the way home, Prax thinks about ecological collapse and Mei’s immune disorder as cascades: small failures that trigger larger, irreversible breakdowns. He notices that park plants are being fed improperly mineralized water, a sign that Ganymede’s life-support ecology may soon fail. At home, pain and despair overwhelm him, and Prax nearly accepts that Mei is gone and that he should flee.

When Prax wakes, he prepares to seek passage away from Ganymede and apologize to Basia, but his habits reassert themselves. Prax checks his search schedule, adds a task to fix the park water problem, and decides to keep looking for Mei because there is still hope.