In the freezing dark of the sunken shuttle, Darrow cuts free of his crash webbing and finds Mustang doing the same. They wordlessly coordinate like trained Grays, grab an emergency kit from the cockpit, and accept that their cargo and gear are gone with the torn-off sections that held Ragnar and Holiday. Knowing light attracts the engineered Carved predators, Darrow ties them together with crash webbing and they swim blind, saving oxygen and composure.

Something massive ripples beneath them as they grope upward, collide with the ice crust, and carve a circle with razors. They mince the plug, shove the emergency box through, and force their way up onto a wind-blasted shelf between a jagged coast and a black polar sea under twilight. A storm builds as wreckage burns on the distant coast.

A geyser erupts inland when someone fires a pulseFist from beneath the ice. Darrow and Mustang rush over as Holiday hauls herself out, bleeding from shrapnel in her thigh, half-suited against the cold. She tourniquets the wound and reports a creature below; Ragnar pulled it off her, but he did not surface.

Darrow moves to dive after Ragnar, but Holiday blocks him, firing a warning shot and vowing to shoot his leg rather than let him die. As Darrow hesitates, Mustang sprints past, grabbing a lit flare and her razor, and plunges back through the hole into the black water to find Ragnar.