Portia arrives at Great Nest at the head of survivors from Seven Trees, ashamed that she failed to slow the ant colony’s advance. She surveys the vast city, its silk-reinforced pillars stretching into the sea, farms ringing its outskirts, and a cautious partnership with stomatopods supported by diving bells.

Portia brings warriors and many surviving males, briefly contemplating training males as fighters to swell their numbers. She rejects the idea as destabilizing and still insufficient against the ants’ vastness, and sends warriors to await orders while males seek work or courtship.

She travels to her peer house, reflecting on spider society: communal crèches, tight peer bonds, and males’ peripheral roles as attendants and laborers. Exhausted, she joins her peers attending a senior sister’s moulting, a communal rite that contrasts with males’ lonelier ordeals.

Portia recounts the destruction of Seven Trees—flames, collapsing reservoirs, and ants overwhelming the fallen—then calculates the time to the Messenger’s passage and goes to the temple. There, amid refugees, she watches the priestess translate the celestial message through geometry, but the dance stutters, unsettling the congregation and suggesting a troubling variance in the eternal signal.

After the rite, an insistent male messenger finds Portia with a summons: Bianca, a learned member of her peer group, needs her. Portia agrees to go, sensing that both earthly and celestial signs point to a shifting, perilous moment for her people.