Departure does not restore certainty. Sami and Tannuk remember incompatible crews, motives and sequences of violence. Details that should anchor the contract—how many people Tezzeret hired, what the colony extracted, why it fell silent—change depending on which chain of cause the stone currently permits. The ship remains damaged, yet even that damage may belong to more than one past.
Sami recognises the practical horror before its cosmology. A device that can improve the present by editing the road behind it has no visible victims until somebody remembers the discarded version. Success cannot prove consent. Failure cannot prove innocence. The Endstone does not need to order anyone; it can make a chosen action feel like the only action that has ever made sense.
The Seriema sets course deeper into Sothera. Tezzeret still expects delivery, Mirri remains missing and fuel remains scarce. Those ordinary pressures give the artifact useful leverage. Sami secures it as well as the ship allows, but containment aboard a wildcat freighter is mostly a promise that nobody will touch it until desperation supplies a reason.