After the virus attack, Gav Lortisse begins keeping a private audio journal as a way to preserve his sanity. While Baltiel sends him out across Nod’s salt marshes to gather specimens, Lortisse records his thoughts, suspecting that Baltiel may know about the journal and that Senkovi could have hacked into it.

Lortisse collects tortoise-like native creatures for Lante to dissect, using a hauling remote to carry them. As he works, Lortisse reflects that Earth and the wider human network have gone silent since the attack, leaving the survivors emotionally adrift and without the larger purpose that once held them together.

Lortisse describes the others’ coping mechanisms. Kalveen designs vast future habitats the remaining humans can never realistically build; Erma discusses breeding a new generation in artificial vats but cannot move from planning to responsibility; Yusuf continues studying alien life as if normal scientific work can still matter; and Senkovi, in Lortisse’s view, may be saner than the rest because Senkovi’s focus on the octopuses at least feels concrete.

As Lortisse walks among Nod’s pools and strange organisms, he contemplates how alien the planet’s life is, with blurred distinctions between plant and animal and possible life stages that defy terrestrial categories. He considers returning to the Aegean to swim with Senkovi’s octopuses because that had felt meaningful in a way Nod no longer does.

Suddenly, one of the tortoise-like creatures stabs Lortisse in the calf with a hardened tentacle. His suit seals the puncture, but the pain rapidly worsens, his leg swells, and his suit signals a medical emergency to the habitat. As his colleagues’ alarmed voices come through his comms, Lortisse realizes the creature has apparently poisoned him and notices the search result for the word he had forgotten earlier: haruspex, one who reads the future in entrails.