At breakfast with Deanna and Dio, Darrow avoids crowds and savors rare coffee before Sevro and Ragnar arrive. Sevro barrels in, ecstatic and crude, while Ragnar’s calm presence steadies the children’s excitement. Sevro reveals his new red eyes are Darrow’s, taken from Mickey’s lab, and asks to borrow Darrow for “martial matters.” Deanna consents, pressing coffee and laundry on them as Sevro offers candy to the children.

As Ragnar pushes Darrow’s wheelchair through Tinos’s corridors, Sevro boasts about a sea-demon escapade before Ragnar silences him with a playful toss. Ragnar shows off new teeth and literacy, both gifts from Mickey. In the hangar, Howlers Pebble and Clown greet Darrow warmly, pledge their continued service despite his past deception, and depart for medical attention.

Darrow then sees the true scale of Tinos: a stalactite citadel above a roofless underground city teeming with refugees. Ragnar cites 465,000 displaced Reds, driven there by the Jackal’s achlys-9 purges. Sevro explains their secrecy—deep location, jammers, and falsified maps—and the mounting crisis: insufficient food, disease, and riots. Ragnar, the “Shield of Tinos,” is beloved below, while Dancer bears the unpopular burden of rationing.

Confronted with crime, squalor, and a murdered boy, Darrow laments that this is not Eo’s dream. Sevro replies that war is harsher than dreams. He then asks about Cassius and reveals the bitter truth: Cassius is the one who killed Ares, deepening the war’s personal stakes.