Sami brings the wounded to Taro-duend and turns arrival into negotiation. The Kav settlement has reasons to refuse an exiled pilot, a broke captain and a Monoist carrying a causal weapon. Yet rescue has created obligation, and the local code recognises the lives returned. Tannuk obtains fuel while Sami searches records that might connect Sigma's erased colony to the stone.
Alpharael's memories refuse a stable shape. He recalls a sister, an assault and a choice to live, but each recollection may be the tool by which the Endstone prepared him. If the artifact can reach backward from contact, even Raphaella's plunge might belong to its design. That suspicion offers no comfort: it makes grief both authentic and potentially engineered.
Haliya and the Free Company close in. Her goal remains recovery, but contact with Kavaron complicates the clean division between faithful allies and corrupted enemies. The settlement is not a tactical surface. It is a community already injured by extraction, exile and competing outsiders who claim that the future authorises whatever they need in the present.