Nona wakes from another dream when Camilla drops a wet sponge on her as an alarm. Camilla records Nona’s recollection: Nona is sitting with her feet in water, speaking to a faceless woman, touching hands that feel like Nona’s own but are not hers, surrounded by red eyes in the dark, and feeling intensely hungry. Camilla asks whether Nona likes the hands, and Nona says she hates having hands, but Camilla still has no answer about Nona’s identity.

At breakfast, Pyrrha serves cold mush and describes worsening violence in the city, where ordinary arguments are escalating into killings. When Nona asks why We Suffer hates Pyrrha, Pyrrha answers that she reminds We Suffer that God was human and fallible. Palamedes then surfaces in Camilla’s body and argues with Pyrrha after learning Pyrrha spent food money bribing people for access to Site C. Pyrrha says she did it to stop Palamedes and Camilla from taking dangerous risks, warning that their overlapping places terrible stress on Camilla’s brain and that soul work cannot be fully measured or controlled.

After Palamedes’ timer ends and Camilla returns, the household exercises together and walks toward school. Pyrrha and Camilla discuss Nona’s coming six-month anniversary, and Nona asks for cheap colored hair bands as a present. Pyrrha briefly alludes to Nona’s possible hometown and Anastasia, but Camilla sharply stops Pyrrha from leading Nona toward any prompted memory. Pyrrha leaves for work, and Camilla takes Nona to school by a changed route to avoid a body or injured person under a car.

At school, Nona finds Honesty with a severe black eye. The teachers and the Angel treat him, while Honesty refuses to explain what happened. Hot Sauce arrives and, during break, silently pressures Honesty until Honesty admits he ran face-first into a streetlight while fleeing a job gone wrong. He says he joined adults expecting to steal air-conditioning parts from megatrucks, but one thief dropped onto the wrong vehicle.

Honesty explains that the thief saw people with white, eyeless-looking eyes inside a cargo trawler, and that all of them looked up at the thief at once. After shots were fired and militia trucks followed, an older woman told the adults to get Honesty out, and Honesty ran until he knocked himself unconscious. Hot Sauce reassures Honesty that he is her boy and she will protect him. Before class resumes, Honesty identifies the target as the Convoy, something he says he could have warned the adults not to rob.