As the station descends through Orbit 14, the crew sleep and their inner lives surface in dreams and remembered childhood habits. Chie’s old coping mechanism returns: she makes lists of “anticipated things,” a reflex from childhood anxiety that once even shaped her ambition after learning there were no female military pilots in Japan.

Anton’s sleep is threaded with early memories of building a toy spacecraft and “spacewalking” peg astronauts through dust motes lit by his father’s torch, turning play into a desire to catalogue ever more distant stars. In the present, Anton’s recurring moon dream returns again: drifting alone near the moon, Anton hears a murmur become violin music that bends space; overwhelmed by love, Anton peels out of the spacesuit and finds the helmet becomes a hat crowned with a red flower.

Nell dreams she is diving with Shaun to find the Challenger astronauts, carrying a candle whose flame persists underwater. What they find becomes a circular bonfire on the seabed, which they bring back to a rock that serves as a boat, where Nell’s mother holds a small monkey from Nell’s remembered Cape Town. Nell feels she finally understands why she came to space, but grief blows the dream apart, leaving Nell awake with a familiar, old abrasion of loss; as Nell falls back toward sleep, the mother in her mind shifts to Chie’s.

Unknowingly, Shaun also dreams of the same circular, microgravity “doughnut” of fire; it disturbs Shaun with dream-logic that seems to negate God, then transforms into a typhoon spiral like a galaxy. Roman dreams of speaking to an audience, insisting he decided to be an astronaut in the womb; the crowd laughs and applauds, and Roman feels unguardedly happy, seeing his parents and Anton among them.

Chie, half-asleep, dreams she is back at her parents’ seaside house in Shikoku during a typhoon, holding her mother as if her mother is a child. Chie whispers reassurance and promises she will never go so far away again, even as the dream turns cosmic—moon-landing day becomes the moon blown off course and the earth colliding with it—while Chie clings to her mother through the passing millennia. Pietro, by contrast, does not dream: Pietro sleeps deeply, his body calm, as if resting in a wordless acceptance that life and death are separated by only a thin layer of metal, and that existence is both trivial and momentous.