Dafyd and Else walk the crowded common room with the translator device, wondering why it took them so long to find other captive peoples and what the Carryx allow or forbid. Dafyd’s excitement at finally being able to understand others clashes with Else’s tension as they begin approaching aliens to talk.

Through a series of brief conversations, Dafyd and Else hear radically different responses to Carryx rule. A horse-sized chitinous builder species describes a vast lost empire and explains that they built much of the Carryx’s infrastructure, framing submission as survival and even “gratitude.” Other beings refuse contact, claim to have no meaningful past or home, fear being killed for speaking, or declare themselves indistinguishable from the Carryx through total ideological assimilation.

The volume of new information overwhelms Else. Sitting with Dafyd, Else admits how much there is still to learn and how little agency they have, asking who they could even tell. The talk turns intimate: Else warns Dafyd she will not be “good” for him and that he doesn’t know who she really is, but Dafyd insists he wants what they can have and admits he is in love.

The moment breaks when Else spots their Carryx librarian moving with an escort. Dafyd and Else follow and find another Carryx waiting at the Night Drinkers’ alcove. The notch-headed Carryx performs an act of surrender, and the human moiety’s librarian snaps and breaks one of its legs in a ritualized-seeming exchange before directing the Rak-hund forward.

The Rak-hund tear open the Night Drinkers’ fungal home. The Night Drinkers surge out armed with crude spears that can wound the soldiers, but they are quickly and systematically slaughtered. Over more than an hour, the Carryx and onlookers treat the extermination like a public lesson while the Rak-hund dismantle the alcove and pile bodies and amber eggs; fleeing Night Drinkers carrying eggs are cut down. Afterward, Dafyd asks Else if the massacre was caused by the humans forcing the Night Drinkers’ surrender, and when Else answers only “What is, is,” Dafyd vomits.