Isako is escorted through the warehouse by two freelancers. She’s surprised to find a functioning community with children. Her escorts lead her to Waterboy, a prematurely aged former gas-field worker, who is delivering a zealous anti-Company speech to a small crowd. He claims that the terraforming project is a lie and that the Great Silence, the Company policy for refusing any contact with other human settlements and colonies, was enforced by the Earth’s elite.

After the crowd is dispersed, Isako speaks with Waterboy, who reveals that he is one of six survivors from Field 93; they had left to find water just before the airshield collapse. He says that the other five survivors were “terminated” and “evicted” but asserts that these terms are just euphemisms for silencing dangerous voices before the next Company hearing. 

Waterboy and his companions are members of United Freelancers, the group behind a failed assassination attempt on Uchi the previous year. Now an “extinctionist,” Waterboy says that his goal is to build an army of freelance workers. Isako suggests an alliance to stop Uchi. 

On her way out, the female escort tells Isako that they’re on the same side. Isako notices lockers that likely contain explosives and warns the escort about their methods.

Isako tells Kob what she has learned, confirming that Waterboy believes Uchi orchestrated the Field 93 disaster and that he’s a radicalized figurehead for United Freelancers. She decides that her next priority is to investigate Martim’s death, convinced that it’s the key to the conspiracy. Kob offers to help out of a desire to work with Isako one last time, though he states that he will not engage in work as a “shadowcon” (an informal contractor). Isako accepts anyway, seeing it as a chance to save Kob by pulling him back into the contractor life that she believes is his only chance of survival.

They use Isako’s client expense account to dine at the Cove, an expensive restaurant. During dinner, Kob experiences a severe migraine and leaves the table. While he’s gone, Crater calls Isako with research. He reports that there were no warning signs before Martim’s death, but he discovered that Uchi had visited the Executive, the Company’s highest directing officer, and brought Martim along. Separately, Martim purchased a massive amount of secure data storage. 

Kob returns, and over a meal of rare seafood, he explains that he has turned to religion for the guidance he once found in the atier’s Code. He also reveals that his kith (or family) has disowned him for losing his license. They reminisce about their past partnership, and Kob tells Isako that while he would be honored to witness her resignation, he doesn’t want to lose her.

Isako and Kob spend the night platonically in her hotel room. In the morning, as Isako struggles to write her coda (or resignation statement), they decide to visit the crematorium where Martim’s body was taken. 

On the way, Kob stops at a water fountain that marks the resting place of Elk Thomas, a man whose dismissal notice he served early in his career. Isako discovers that Kob keeps a list of every person he has ever dismissed or terminated and is systematically visiting their memorial sites to apologize. Isako is angered by this, viewing it as a self-indulgent guilt trip and arguing that he was merely doing his job. Kob explains that his perfect memory, once a professional asset, is now a curse that prevents him from forgetting the faces of those he condemned.

At the crematorium, a clerk confirms that Martim’s cause of death was recorded as a drug overdose, though no autopsy was performed to verify this. He tells them that Martim’s remains and effects were collected by a woman who was a “jarbrain” (a pejorative term referring to a second stager) with an unusually realistic appearance. Kob shows the clerk a lifestyle-magazine photo of Fern Madison, Uchi’s ex-wife. The clerk confirms the resemblance. However, the woman had identified herself as River Thea, a representative of SoCon GasPro.

Back at the hotel, they identify Thea as Uchi’s personal bodyguard. Kob recalls seeing Fern Madison on a talk show threatening to sue Uchi for giving away her synthbody, one he had commissioned and paid for before their divorce and thus still owned. Isako concludes that Martim was murdered to silence him about the Field 93 cover-up before Uchi’s Board confirmation. Using her Agency authority, Isako calls Uchi’s office and demands an urgent meeting, revealing her knowledge of Thea’s involvement in disposing of Martim’s body. Kob warns that by showing her hand, she has made them both targets.

Isako and Kob go to SoCon GasPro headquarters, where they’re escorted by River Thea to meet Sandbar Uchi. Uchi, now a second stager himself, is dismissive. He states that he fired Martim for having a drug addiction and adds that Martim subsequently died by suicide. Uchi claims that he concealed the death to avoid a scandal during his Board confirmation hearings. When Kob accuses him of using Martim to sanitize his role in the Field 93 disaster, Uchi’s demeanor turns menacing. He accuses them of being ronin sent by his political rivals to sabotage his confirmation. He gives them 26 hours to leave his division or face the consequences.

Thea and Isako exchange taunts as they leave the facility. In a car provided by Uchi, Kob notes that the director seemed unusually “nervous.” Isako questions him about his conversation with Martim, but Kob states that he was on contract at the time and thus it can’t be discussed. Crater then calls to report that Uchi’s medical history has been professionally scrubbed, eliminating a potential avenue of attack.

Suddenly, they realize that the car isn’t taking them to their hotel. It stops in a deserted alley and is blocked by two trucks. Four masked assassins emerge and advance on the vehicle with their longknives drawn.

Trapped in the car, Kob kicks out a window, allowing them to escape just as the four assassins attack. In the ensuing fight, Isako kills one assassin but sustains wounds to her collarbone and forearm. Kob, though also injured, fights ferociously. They retreat to turn the tables on their attackers in a more open area. Working together, they kill a second attacker, and Kob beats a third into submission. The fourth assassin flees. When they interrogate the beaten man, Kob promises him his life for information, but the man refuses to name his client and dies by suicide using a pill. Bleeding and exhausted, Isako vows to destroy Uchi.

Isako and Kob seek medical attention at a nearby clinic. As a freelancer, Kob has no health coverage, so Isako intimidates the staff into treating him and billing all the expenses to her client. 

They take refuge at Kob’s apartment. The next morning, while looking for soap in his bathroom, Isako discovers a large cache of prescription medications, including several injection pens of Sudexatrine 02. She’s shocked to recognize it as the same medication she found in Martim’s apartment.

Isako confronts Kob, who reveals that Sudexatrine 02 is an experimental drug for Gray’s Waste, a fatal neurodegenerative disease. He was diagnosed a year ago and has only a few years left to live; this is the real reason why he gave up his contract and became a freelancer. He stopped taking the drug because he didn’t want the side effects, which include paranoia, aggression, and hypomania, to change who he is, preferring a shorter lifespan over an altered identity. 

They realize that Martim must have also been experiencing early-onset Gray’s Waste. This discovery provides Uchi’s true motive for getting rid of him: Martim was a dying, compromised liability who knew too many secrets. Just as they piece this together, Isako receives an urgent call from her client, Savannah Minto.

Minto is furious, having learned from the Agency about Isako’s unauthorized confrontation with Uchi. Isako explains that Uchi sent assassins after her, but Minto is unmoved, demanding actionable evidence. Isako forms a new plan and asks Minto to schedule a fake appointment at Elite Renewal, the exclusive clinic where Uchi was recorporalized and became a second stager, to give her access. Minto agrees. Isako then calls Crater, who provides blueprints for the clinic but quits the assignment thereafter, deeming it too dangerous.

Isako tells Kob that she needs to go back to the Old Warehouse to talk to the United Freelancers. Kob refuses to participate, stating that he won’t cross the line into becoming a shadowcon. He reveals that his career ended when his final contract required him to terminate a man who turned out to be the son of someone he had dismissed 24 years earlier. He couldn’t go through with it and abandoned the contract. 

Isako and Kob acknowledge that their paths must now diverge. In a painful farewell, Kob tells Isako that he had hoped to convince her not to go through with her own resignation and promises that he will wait for her once her contract has ended.

Isako returns to the Old Warehouse and proposes a plan to Waterboy and the United Freelancers. She will assassinate Uchi herself during his appointment at the Elite Renewal clinic; she needs them to create a diversion by setting off explosives nearby, trapping Uchi inside during the lockdown. 

Waterboy announces that they should give her one of their guns, and a woman named Selene retrieves the weapon and explains how it works. Though it violates her principles as a longkniveswoman, Isako accepts the firearm as a pragmatic necessity. Selene reveals that she was once a contractor who was betrayed by her client, creating a moment of understanding between them.

Isako surveils the Elite Renewal clinic from a nearby rented room, spending her final days practicing her skills. On the day of the appointment, she sees Uchi arrive with his security team. Using Minto’s fake appointment as cover, she enters the clinic. 

Just as the United Freelancers’ bomb detonates outside, triggering a lockdown, a message from Kob begins playing: Martim’s medical records show no genetic markers for Gray’s Waste. The explosion cuts off the message before Kob can finish relaying his finding.

Isako fights her way through the building, surviving a security scangate’s electric shock and killing Uchi’s two bodyguards. She confronts River Thea, whose advanced synthbody gives her the advantage of speed. Isako lands a disemboweling blow that, while not immediately fatal, causes Thea’s body to malfunction and collapse.

Isako bursts into the procedure room to find a horrifying scene: Uchi’s original, biological body lies still in a cryogenic capsule, while the second-stage Uchi stands nearby. Stunned, Isako raises her gun, hesitates for a moment between the two bodies, and pulls the trigger.