Inside the maze, Sylveste and Pascale are gassed and fall asleep. When they awake, they hear people approaching with lights, forcing them deeper into the maze. Reaching a dead end, Sylveste confesses to Pascale that it was his mind, not Lefevre’s mind, which began failing near the Shroud, and that he was too frightened to blow the separation charges himself. He was paralyzed by fear near the Shroud, and gravity forces, not deliberate action, separated the craft, killing Lefevre. Before he can say more, a second dose of sleeping gas hits them and an attacker stuns Sylveste with a directed weapon aimed at his eyes.

Aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity en route to Resurgam, Khouri and the Mademoiselle’s implant discuss the crew’s mission. The Mademoiselle acknowledges that bringing Sylveste aboard complicates matters. She instructs Khouri that the killing of Sylveste must happen in isolation, without cybernetic systems nearby, using a weapon without complex cybernetic components. She also demands physical remains as proof. In exchange, she promises to return Fazil. The Mademoiselle also describes how her bloodhound programs—cybernetic agents she inserted into the gunnery via Khouri’s neural interface—have returned with a disturbing finding. They have detected a hidden data entity already residing inside the gunnery architecture. The entity evaded the bloodhounds without attacking them. The Mademoiselle concludes it is highly sophisticated, yet seems to be laying ominously in wait for something, avoiding contact with her programs.

Sylveste regains partial consciousness after being exposed to a focused magnetic pulse that has crashed his artificial eyes, the implants crafted by Calvin’s beta-level simulation. He is in an aircraft with captors who identify themselves as True Path Inundationists, the faction that has staged the coup against Girardieau. They tell him Pascale is alive, but refuse to allow him to be with her. The aircraft lands and Sylveste is escorted through underground tunnels, blindfolded by his own damaged vision. In a sparse room, a woman touches his eyes and orders them left damaged. She reveals herself to be Gillian Sluka, the former colleague Sylveste believed died in a crawler crash many years earlier. Sluka survived by escaping into the canyon system with a small group. A surgeon named Falkender performs partial repairs on Sylveste’s eyes; he does his best to restore a degraded monochrome vision. During the surgery, Sylveste admits to Falkender that he sold his father’s alpha-level simulation to the Jugglers. After the surgery, Sylveste recognizes he is being held in Mantell, a former Amarantin research outpost.

Aboard the Nostalgia for Infinity, Volyova continues warming Captain Brannigan’s brain. She notices that one of the cache-weapons appears to have moved from its original position.

Khouri is roused from her reefersleep by the Mademoiselle, who reveals that a mysterious entity named Sun Stealer has infiltrated the gunnery systems and has also tried to infiltrate Khouri’s implants. During the two years in which Khouri has been under reefersleep, the Mademoiselle has waged a cold war inside the implants against Sun Stealer. At the same time, she has sent a ghostly avatar of herself into the gunnery computers.

Volyova sits alone on the bridge, monitoring a holographic orrery as the ship approaches Delta Pavonis. She orders the release of 1,000 small sensor probes called pebbles, which accelerate ahead to survey Resurgam months before arrival. Volyova reviews the pebble data. Resurgam has no orbital defenses, minimal spaceflight capability, and a single dominant settlement. She also detects an unexpected weak neutrino source in orbit around a rocky body near the neutron star Hades, a signature only a machine could produce. This puzzles her.

Volyova wakes Khouri from reefersleep and shows her a recorded holographic playback from 2460 featuring Sajaki and a younger Sylveste arguing. Sylveste denied any interest in Resurgam during that meeting, yet the expedition departed for Resurgam 30 years later. She cannot determine what information led Sylveste to choose Resurgam before the Amarantin were even known. they are interrupted by the sound of an alarm: one of the cache-weapons is arming itself.

On Resurgam, Sylveste is assured that Pascale is safe. Sylveste meets with Sluka, who survived the crash and is now part of the True Path’s coup. Falkender mentions rumors of visitors. Sluka shows Sylveste a small antimatter weapon called a pinhead, purchased from the trader Remilliod. She explains that True Path used one against Cuvier, breaching its atmospheric domes. She still holds eight remaining pinheads for covert infiltration. She has not yet decided what to do with Sylveste, so she permits Falkender to continue to work on restoring Sylveste’s vision.

Volyova and Khouri sprint toward the cache chamber as alarms pulse. Remote shutdown protocols fail. The cache-weapon is moving toward an exit aperture. Volyova remotely pilots a shuttle to block the space-door, but the weapon’s secondary systems destroy it. As Volyova searches for a solution, Khouri gains entrance to the gunnery systems.

The Mademoiselle’s implant admits that her own avatar, previously downloaded into the gunnery, has seized control of the cache-weapon. The avatar intends to fire at Resurgam to kill Sylveste; Khouri is shocked that the Mademoiselle would be willing to destroy an entire planet to kill one man. In the gunnery chair, Khouri attempts a manual override. Inside gunspace, Khouri perceives both the Mademoiselle’s avatar and a separate entity called Sun Stealer fighting for control. When Khouri demands to know the truth about what is happening, the Mademoiselle unlocks a series of implanted memories in Khouri’s mind. She is suddenly on a battlefield on Sky’s Edge, meeting Fazil in a command post. The memory is uncanny; Fazil explains that the Mademoiselle has repurposed this memory to tell Khouri about a war that happened long ago.

Sylveste continues to be subjected to Falkender’s treatments. The immense pain and the lack of progress make him question whether the treatment is worthwhile. As the treatment draws closer to completion, Falkender hints that something is imminent, but does not specify what he means.

Inside gunspace, the Mademoiselle uses a constructed memory environment to communicate with Khouri. The environment takes the form of a military briefing room on Sky’s Edge, and the guide takes Fazil’s form. Fazil leads Khouri into a vast briefing room containing a representation of the entire galaxy, approximately 1 billion years in the past. The galaxy was then populated by roughly 1 million spacefaring civilizations. Two expanding empires collided, drawing in thousands of other cultures in a conflict called the Dawn War, which consumed entire star systems and spiral arms. In the aftermath, one surviving hybrid machine-chimeric species emerged dominant: the Inhibitors. Fazil explains the Inhibitors existed for a specific purpose, which he is about to reveal, when Khouri grasps the full significance. The Knowledge arrives complete and immediate.

Volyova then runs the Palsy program, a set of counter-insurgency firewalls she installed decades earlier. Palsy works partially but locks out the shuttles entirely. Volyova detaches the spider-room and pilots it manually toward the armed cache-weapon, intending to drag it into the lighthugger’s propulsion beam. She attaches using grapple lines but cannot break free. Khouri, exiting the memory and now inside gunspace, uses the ship’s lighter hull weapons to sever the spider-room’s legs and grapple lines, freeing Volyova. The cache-weapon drifts into the drive beam and detonates catastrophically, but the blast is partly contained. As Khouri attempts to disengage, something rushes toward her.

On Resurgam, Sylveste is escorted to a different cell and reunited with Pascale for one hour. For the first time since their marriage was interrupted, they are intimate together. They speak about his confession regarding Lefevre’s death, with Sylveste unsure how or even if Lefevre died. Pascale reassures him. Sylveste also tells Pascale they are being held in Mantell and that Cuvier has been attacked, though he does not tell her the full extent of the antimatter attack. Based on the hints from Falkender, they speculate that Ultras may be arriving.