Ground control teases the crew that they are no longer the farthest-flung humans: a four-person lunar mission has just raced past the station’s 250-mile orbit. Pietro jokes back that it is better to be yesterday’s news than tomorrow’s, while Chie thinks bitterly that everything left of her mother is on Earth below and she would rather keep “lassoing” the planet than watch it recede. Anton, sleepless and exhausted, searches the starfield for familiar constellations and thinks about someday reaching the moon himself.

The chapter moves into the crew’s daily struggle to keep their bodies functional in microgravity. Anton and Roman work out in the Russian segment; elsewhere Nell bench-presses while watching her muscles strain without real definition, Pietro runs harnessed to a treadmill listening to Duke Ellington and imagining Emilia-Romagna, and Chie cycles hard while counting her cadence. The narration underscores the stakes: without relentless exercise, weakened legs and bones would fail them when gravity returns, leaving them unable even to stand after landing.

As days blur into sixteen sunrises and sunsets per Earth day, a different transformation takes hold: each of them is “ambushed” by happiness and by an intense desire never to leave. Their sense of home distends and collapses into something unreal, and the crew’s idea of family shifts from people on Earth to the small group aboard the station who share the same wordless experience. Space itself seems to erode ordinary time, turning their minds “dayless” even as their bodies cling to a 24-hour schedule for sleep and survival.

Tracking from eastern Russia across the Sea of Okhotsk, Chie watches Japan appear in a muted afternoon haze, the Kuril Islands like fading footprints. Floating upright after exercise, she imagines that staying in orbit would keep her mother’s death at bay: as long as the “music” of motion continues, the loss cannot force a final reckoning. She lingers on details she can still see from above—Mount Fuji’s first snow, the Nagara River—while telling herself not to go back.

On the next orbit the crew notices how, from this distance, humanity seems to exist mainly as night lights; by day, the planet looks almost empty. They follow a largely oceanic night-pass and then watch sunrise burst over West Africa, revealing a sweeping, luminous world of seas, deserts, forests, mountains, and ice with few visible signs of life. The chapter ends with the crew playacting as intergalactic explorers who have found an apparently uninhabited, possibly post-civilizational Earth.