In a storm, Lyria reaches her family’s cramped hut, where Ava cooks thin stew and shows off gifted blue shoes from a soldier. They discuss absent loved ones—Varon and the older brothers serving with the Free Legions—and worry over Liam’s recurring ear infections. Lyria tends their near-catatonic father, recalling the man he was, and wrestles with guilt and resentment.

Tiran returns from the burning stacks with Conn and Barlow, and the family crowds around the table. They debate heroes on the HC while Lyria splits a rare chocolate, watching news that lauds the Reaper’s triumph and predicts a Venus push. Ava silently scans casualty rolls. Tiran, nearing sixteen, dreams of leaving; Lyria sees the spectacle as false promise masking their squalor.

Deep in the night, engines rumble. Ava fears the Hand; Tiran insists on checking as “man of the house.” Lyria grabs a frying pan and follows into the humid dark, leaving Ava to ready supplies for an emergency.

At the landing pads, Lyria hides as two pelican transports blaze their lights. Armed Reds disembark with rifles and bandoliers and demand the Gammas. A scuffle breaks out; a Gamma rushes them and is incinerated by a plasma shot. Tiran and two other Gammas flee, but sustained gunfire cuts them down. Tiran stumbles, then falls, half his head gone; the shooter rakes his body.

The leader—a scarred Red woman—amplifies her voice across the ships, declaring, “Justice to Gamma! Death to the collaborators! Justice to Gamma!” The proclamation and the executions shatter Lyria’s fragile home life and signal a brutal escalation of targeted violence in Camp 121.