On the morning set aside for Juliette’s cleaning, Lukas wakes in misery and struggles to function. He sits with one of his star charts and fixates on a five-pointed badge shape he once drew while Juliette spoke to him, which shows how deeply he has attached himself to her. Remembering how Juliette tried to push him away in her cell, Lukas feels emptied out by grief and considers forcing himself to go to work simply to avoid thinking about what is happening outside.

As Lukas gets dressed and leaves his room, his thoughts keep returning to Juliette and to the routine of climbing to the cafeteria to see her. That habit turns painful, because Lukas now imagines seeing Juliette’s body on the screen after the cleaning. Thinking of Marnes dying alone and recalling Juliette’s plea that he should not end up isolated, Lukas leans over the stairwell railing and seriously imagines killing himself by jumping.

A porter then races downward past Lukas, looking alarmed rather than celebratory. Because the porter’s urgency does not fit the usual pattern of a cleaning day, Lukas senses that something has gone wrong or changed. Hope interrupts Lukas’s despair, and he joins the upward traffic to learn the news for himself.

On the stairs, Lukas meets Deputy Marsh, who is exhausted from carrying a box of Juliette’s belongings up to Bernard on level thirty-four. Lukas presses Marsh for the truth and learns the crucial news: Juliette did go outside, but she did not clean, and she walked over the hills and out of sight. That revelation destroys Lukas’s expectation of watching Juliette die on the screen and replaces it with amazement and renewed purpose. Lukas takes the box from Marsh, promising to deliver it carefully, and hurries upward holding Juliette’s things as the silo begins to react to her impossible defiance.