After fleeing their habitat, the team debates where to hide and chooses a dense jungle valley with rocky hills and abundant animal life that will interfere with scans. Mensah and Pin-Lee conceal the hoppers among the cliffs while SecUnit deploys drones, checks sight lines, and establishes a perimeter. As SecUnit scouts outside, it wrestles with whether to abandon the humans now that they know it lacks a governor module, but concludes that leaving them to face hostile SecUnits is both emotionally intolerable and practically pointless.

Back at the hoppers, Mensah privately asks SecUnit to retract its helmet so the others can see it as a person trying to help rather than as a machine. SecUnit reluctantly agrees. The group then discusses why the attackers are killing survey teams, and they connect the violence to the blank areas on the maps and the unexplained data from those regions. When Ratthi asks whether the attackers can really expect to avoid scrutiny, SecUnit points out that the plot only works if the victims' political backers do not care enough to investigate. This leads to an awkward exchange in which the team realizes SecUnit never learned who they really are, Gurathin tests whether SecUnit is acting freely, and Arada intervenes to calm the situation.

SecUnit reveals that it secretly left three drones at the abandoned habitat to record anything the attackers do there. The team decides SecUnit must return close enough to retrieve the data, and Pin-Lee prepares an added scanner for a drone. During the night watch, Ratthi explains that Mensah is not just a scientist but an elected administrator of Preservation Alliance, a non-corporate polity whose bots are considered citizens. SecUnit realizes that if Mensah dies, both the company and Preservation will launch serious investigations, and that the attackers may not understand how dangerous that is for them.

The next afternoon SecUnit flies the little hopper back toward the habitat with Mensah, Pin-Lee, Ratthi, and, over SecUnit's objections, Gurathin. On the covert approach, Gurathin questions SecUnit about the massacre at the mining facility, and SecUnit explains that the company responded by shutting it down and trying to purge its memory rather than by punishing it in human terms. Once within range, SecUnit reconnects with all three hidden drones and begins downloading their recordings. The footage shows a large hopper from GrayCris arriving at the habitat with five armed humans and five armed SecUnits, including two surviving DeltFall units now reused by the attackers.

While reviewing the recordings, Gurathin finds a more urgent clue from the drone hidden inside the hub: a woman has left a message saying the beacon has been destroyed and ordering the team to meet at specified coordinates and time for a possible arrangement. Mensah asks SecUnit's judgment, and SecUnit concludes the offer is a trap: if the team goes, the attackers can kill them; if the team refuses, the attackers must spend the rest of the project searching. Mensah then realizes the attackers assume PreservationAux learned something in the unmapped regions, which means the survey data from those areas may explain the motive for the killings and give the team leverage. SecUnit immediately thinks of a way that leverage might be used.