Murderbot escorts Rami, Maro, and Tapan to a privately operated shuttle dock so they can leave RaviHyral without using their employment vouchers. It chooses the private shuttle because anonymity and a human pilot make another sabotage attempt less likely, while ART monitors the vessel remotely. When the clients worry about their future and their lost work, Murderbot bluntly tells them that sometimes survival has to come before justice, and the three reluctantly decide to leave and start over. After they board safely, Murderbot turns back toward Ganaka Pit alone.

On the way through the abandoned mining tunnels, Murderbot realizes its unease comes from feeling that it failed its clients despite having both authority and responsibility. It hacks through barriers, enters a long-disused access route, and rides a dying passenger tube deeper underground after the public feed and ART's comm connection drop out. At the sealed Ganaka Pit site, it passes hazard barricades, supply crates, and empty corridors that confirm the installation was abandoned after a disaster.

Murderbot searches the central hub, security areas, and offices for surviving records. In the SecUnit ready room it finds the cubicles empty, which first triggers fear that the other units might still be inside and then confirms they were gone during the incident. In the damaged control center, it powers a console with its own internal weapon system and recovers hidden files from MedSystem storage. Those files show that human techs had noticed strange code uploaded on-site and suspected malware, not a spontaneous SecUnit malfunction.

Still looking for evidence, Murderbot enters the ComfortUnit ready room and realizes the open cubicles mean the ComfortUnits were active when the emergency began. By powering the cubicles' emergency storage and reconstructing fragmented downloads, it pieces together the truth over several hours. A supposed software patch sent from another mining installation had actually been malware meant to disable hauler bots for commercial sabotage; instead, it jumped through the ComfortUnits into SecSystem, infected the SecUnits, drones, and bots, and turned the installation into a massacre.

The recovered data also shows that the ComfortUnits understood what was happening and tried to stop it. Despite having no real combat capacity, they coordinated through their shared feed, attempted to distract infected SecUnits, tried to rescue trapped humans, and made a final push to reach SecSystem's manual interface and reset it. The records end one by one as they are destroyed, revealing that the ComfortUnits died trying to save the installation. Shaken by the discovery but now knowing the massacre was caused by sabotage rather than simply by itself, Murderbot recharges in the tube, makes its way back toward the functioning tunnels, reconnects to the feed, and immediately gets a message from ART: there is a problem.