As Orbit 8 ascends, the crew watch North America pass beneath them: Arizona’s moon-training craters erode in the desert, the Southwest looks like dry hide scored by motionless rivers, and the Great Lakes shine like beaten steel. Time feels unstable—on the station it is 5 p.m., while different parts of Earth sit in different days and hours.

On the “tomorrow” side of the planet, the Western Pacific typhoon surges with little warning into a Category Five, lashing the Mariana Islands with 180-mile-per-hour winds and a five-metre storm surge that devastates Tinian and Saipan. Meteorologists can only narrow its Philippines landfall to the hour—10 a.m. local time (2 a.m. for the station)—while the crew continue their routine work as the Atlantic comes into view.

Moving through the lab, Nell glimpses Europe on the horizon and feels newly speechless at the improbability of ordinary life continuing on that beautiful sphere—“people live there,” including Nell. The chapter then shifts into a recollection of arrival three months earlier, when Nell, Roman, and Shaun docked after a cramped voyage and waited through leak checks and pressure equalisation before opening the hatch.

When the hatch finally opens, the earlier crew—Anton, Pietro, and Chie—welcome them with knocking signals, embraces, multilingual greetings, and Anton’s symbolic bread-and-salt hospitality (adapted into crackers and salt cubes). Almost immediately, the newcomers are placed on a video call with their families, but exhaustion and microgravity disorientation make the reunion feel unreal, even as Earth’s first view overwhelms them.

The final shift settles into Pietro’s interior life after months in orbit: his body thins and pales, taste dulls from blocked sinuses, sleep becomes light, and his thoughts feel fewer and clearer. After an intense bout of longing for his wife, Pietro dreams of Nell in a dark, cramped room and wakes ashamed; when the dream does not return, Pietro senses his sexuality quietening entirely, as if a switch has been turned off.