On Nod, Baltiel reflects on how the Silence virus destroyed the orbiting module’s vast archive of biosphere data. A partial copy survived aboard the Aegean, and now that Baltiel, Lante, Lortisse, and Rani are established on the ground with a new shuttle, the team is rebuilding its knowledge through remotes, specimen collection, and laboratory study.

Lante continues planning how to create new modified humans from the genetic material available, but she struggles with the practical problem of raising infants in a tiny, unsocial group of stranded terraformers. Baltiel, meanwhile, works with Lante to integrate new observations with recovered records and studies Nod’s radically unfamiliar life, especially its radial symmetry and distributed, ring-like nervous systems.

Baltiel becomes particularly interested in the shelled marsh creatures listed as species 3 after Lortisse records nine of them standing in a coordinated ring and swaying together. The display may be mating, disease, or something else, but it suggests behaviour more complex than the passive grazing Baltiel had assumed.

Senkovi contacts Baltiel from Damascus with unexpected news: the octopuses he sent to the damaged faultline sensors have repaired them. Senkovi admits he does not understand how the creatures failed to demonstrate competence in the lab yet succeeded in the field. Baltiel notices that Senkovi has sent male-female pairs, implying that Senkovi may be seeding Damascus with breeding octopuses, and the conversation ends tensely when Senkovi dismisses Baltiel’s concern.

After the call, Baltiel turns to Lortisse’s footage of the Nodan fliers. The predators show unusual, energetic hunting behaviour, including one attack on a shelled animal and another dive that inexplicably fails. Baltiel recognizes that he and the others are searching for signs of intelligence because, cut off from humanity, their work feels unseen and purposeless; he ends by longing irrationally for Nod itself to acknowledge his presence.