Nell studies Earth’s circular weather systems from orbit, seeing with unusual clarity how rotation and trade winds shape cloud columns and storms. As a former research meteorologist, Nell watches the Western Pacific typhoon grow larger each ninety-minute pass, and photographs its tightening spiral and punched-out eye as it closes on land.

Pietro joins Nell at the window, and together they track the storm honing in on the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Pietro remarks on how frail the Philippine islands look from space, as if they could wash away. Nell and Pietro trade vivid memories of diving there—reefs, wrecks, shark sightings, frogfish, and the streaming underwater light—turning their worry into a shared tenderness for a place now in the storm’s path.

The narrative briefly shifts into a list of “surprising things,” before moving to Chie’s private grief. After learning of her mother’s death, Chie goes to one of her few personal items in orbit: a photograph her mother gave her before the mission.

Chie studies the image of her mother at twenty-four on a beach near their family home, wearing a coat on “Moon Landing Day, 1969,” scowling up at the sky as a blurred gull streaks past. The photograph’s inscription has been expanded by her mother—“For the next and all moon landing days ever to come”—and the unexpected sentiment makes Chie wonder whether her mother anticipated death and smuggled affection in at the last moment. Chie misses her mother’s toughness and emotional distance, and recognizes that her own daring and resilience were inherited from that hard steadiness.

Chie’s thoughts widen into family history: her mother survived infancy only because her grandfather, too sick to work at the Nagasaki munitions factory, stayed home with the baby while Chie’s grandmother went to market and vanished in the atomic bombing. Chie tries to decode what her mother’s scowl meant—pride in human possibility, warning about male-dominated “progress,” or fear of what technological triumphs cost—but concludes she may be projecting meanings she cannot prove. Alone in her quarters, Chie nods to herself, uncertain whether she ever truly understood her mother, even as the photograph’s past continues shaping her future.