Shaun puts away his Las Meninas postcard and turns over the question of humanity’s future, deciding that people are not authoring it so much as being carried by larger forces. He reduces human exceptionalism to a narrow difference and sees spaceflight as an animal act: a territorial song and a migration into the last wilderness.

He silently offers prayers for the lunar astronauts, for Chie in her grief, and for those facing the typhoon. Memories of animals and the natural world crowd in, and Shaun arrives at a conviction that any single creature’s story contains the story of Earth—its past and its likely future.

Later, Chie checks the mice and sees they have finally adapted to microgravity, “flying” in circles around their enclosure. Moved by the sight, she takes them out simply to hold them, and the moment triggers her first full, suffocating wave of grief for her mother, whose funeral will coincide with the moon landing.

Chie curls into a ball and drifts through the noisy station, the machinery’s constant whir making her feel time grinding through her. As Earth’s night falls over the Atlantic outside, she somersaults, turning her body in weightlessness as a way to endure what she cannot stop.

A brief tableau shows the others doing the same kind of coping: Shaun flipping in the small space outside his quarters, Nell and Pietro setting up a film, Roman and Anton playing poker with magnets as chips, and Chie returning to the rack where the mice keep circling. The chapter closes by explaining their weightlessness as continuous free fall—seventeen thousand miles an hour around a curving Earth—so that all their work and play happens inside a perpetual plunge.