Darrow and his team are blasted through a shattered viewport into open space, tumbling over Phobos at high speed. As vacuum seizes their bodies, he recalls Academy training on ebulism while watching Sevro and Victra grotesquely swell, all of them linked by hands and wire to stay together. The physical trauma intensifies and Darrow drifts toward unconsciousness, reflecting on human frailty beneath Mars’s looming silhouette and the nuclear wounds on its surface.

Time stretches as darkness closes in. Darrow sees Sevro and Victra clinging to each other, their faces distorted by pressure, while the Howlers’ chain keeps them from dispersing among debris and corpses in the sector. The rotation of Phobos brings a sliver of dawn, but the team’s oxygen-starved bodies begin to fail.

Darrow wakes blind on cold metal, hearing engines and frantic movement. Thermal blankets and rough rubdowns restore circulation as Pebble calls for Clown and he answers groggily. Sevro frantically rouses Victra and she comes to, the group coping with temporary blindness from optic nerve trauma.

Holiday explains they were exposed for about two and a half minutes and describes the improvised rescue: emptying a cargo bay, flying the ship backward into the drifting chain, and pressurizing on the fly. She notes their linkage saved most of them amid floating rubble and swarming HC crews. When Darrow calls for Ragnar, Ragnar answers, laughing that "The Abyss will not claim us yet," confirming the warband’s core survived the escape.