Back in Moss’s hotel room, she’s visited by an uncanny AI simulation of her childhood friend, Courtney, exactly as she looked at age 16. The AI identifies itself as a simulated consciousness created by Driscoll. The AI changes forms—first to Courtney’s murdered corpse, then Driscoll’s own angular white-haired appearance, and finally the likeness of Russian chess grandmaster, Garri Kasparov. The AI explains that Phasal used time travel as a way of “mining the future” (280) to help technology achieve immortality and escape the Terminus. Driscoll’s company, Phasal Systems, was traveling to IFTs to bring back future technology to figure out how to stop the Terminus. The AI tells Moss that Driscoll took her own amputated leg from the William McKinley to the Naval Research Lab to study how QTNs burrowed into organic material. It tells her Hyldekrugger is killing everyone involved in Driscoll’s project. The AI fears the Terminus is inevitable and Driscoll’s project was a failure.

The next day, Moss meets with Nestor and Special Agent Vivian Lincoln, whom she recognizes as Shauna, who saved her from getting ambush after Jared’s funeral in another timeline. Vivian remembers Moss as the agent who inspired her to join the FBI 20 years prior. The three compare information about Hyldekrugger. Nestor mentions that he’d enlisted Nicole Onyongo as an informant. He refers to her as “Cole,” and the familiar nickname gets Moss’s attention. Vivian recounts her undercover work, attempting to infiltrate Hyldekrugger’s group. Through Nicole, she forged a relationship with Harrier, who got her in deep with the former crew of the Libra, even tattooing a white supremacist symbol of the Black Sun on her arm, which Harrier told her was a map to the “Gate and the Path” (289). Moss identifies the tattoo map as the Vardogger in Blackwater Grove and agrees to take them there.

When they reach the site in West Virginia, Nestor shoots and kills Vivian, revealing his allegiance to Hyldekrugger. Moss realizes that, in this IFT, he was in a relationship with Nicole, who showed him the Vardogger tree, where he saw the Terminus and an inverted eternal forest of crucifixions, transforming his faith into a belief that God is a parasite and eternal life is worse than death.

Nestor turns Moss over to Cobb, who brutally beats her face as revenge for Jared’s death. A group of men surrounds her, and Hyldekrugger steps forward. He frees Moss from her handcuffs and uses a large hunting knife to cut off a lock of her hair. Moss frantically warns him that if he kills her, their whole world will disappear since she is from terra firma. Hyldekrugger leads her into the thin space that blurs the lines between time and space. They pass through a sudden winter landscape filled with floating crucified bodies, before arriving at the crashed USS Libra. Hyldekrugger explains his mission is to sever all ties to the Terminus by killing anyone who might lead the NSC to rediscover the planet Esperance. His group targets government and military operations and personnel investigating what happened to the Libra. He went after Driscoll to keep Phasal Systems from discovering Esperance.

He leads Moss past a trail of his own echoes’ corpses and boards the USS Libra. The walls of the ship are covered in the hair, nails, and blood of Hyldekrugger’s victims, which Moss recognizes as a reference to “the ship made of nails” (307). Onboard the Libra, a loop of Hyldekrugger’s mutiny and murder of Elizabeth Remarque repeats over and over. He takes Moss’s prosthesis and imprisons her in a zero-gravity cell aboard the ship. Moss hears a young woman enter the cell whom she recognizes as a teenage echo of Nicole. Moss introduces herself as Courtney Gimm, the alias she was using when she and Nicole were friends. Nicole tells her she’s hiding to keep Hyldekrugger’s men from killing her for her loyalty to Remarque. Moss begs Nicole to help her escape, but Nicole leaves.

Hours later from Moss’s perspective, a much older Nicole reappears and tells Moss she’s been imprisoned on the ship for 12 years. She explains the ship is an ouroboros—a snake eating its tail. She says a separate echo of Moss had visited Nicole’s apartment with Nestor years earlier and warned her to run. Nicole had recognized her as the woman called “Courtney Gimm” in the brig of the Libra and returned to free Moss in gratitude for saving her life. Moss herself was never at Nicole’s apartment and realizes that Nicole had seen another echo of her. 

Nicole runs to distract the men and is killed by the sentinels, enabling Moss to crawl to safety. Moss flees the ship and witnesses Cobb murder another version of herself in the woods. A night passes before a forest ranger finds her; Navy surgeons leave her with a misaligned nose and missing teeth, and she does not recognize herself in the mirror.