Fabian is returned to Portia after slipping his guards and visiting the lower reaches of Great Nest, where unwanted males live and die. He challenges Portia’s assumptions, arguing that countless male minds are wasted by a system that denies opportunity and safety, and that he could have been killed simply because he is male.

Pivoting, Fabian reveals his discovery: a primary chemical architecture in ant colonies that accepts rapidly distributable secondary instructions, enabling instant, multi-threaded reconfiguration of tasks. Portia grasps its revolutionary potential for computation and industry. Fabian refuses to share it unless Great Nest enacts a law granting males the right to life. Portia rejects the demand, insisting his value is exceptional, not universal, and departs in anger.

Determined, Fabian activates ants he has quietly reprogrammed across the city to cut him an exit, revealing he has tested his architecture on maintenance and prison colonies for months. He infiltrates the prison by cascading new behaviors through the guards’ colony and searches for Bianca, the imprisoned heretic whose ideas have troubled Portia.

Fabian proposes fleeing to Seven Trees, valuing freedom over patronage, and deduces Bianca’s covert contact with that city. Bianca warns Seven Trees may face Great Nest’s wrath but agrees to go. Fabian reconfigures the prison ants into miners to dig an escape route, and by morning he and Bianca are already on the road to Seven Trees, taking his transformative knowledge with them.