Before leaving Lower Dispatch, Mission decides he needs help from people he trusts in the Nest. While Morgan tries to push everyone back to cleanup work, Mission slips into the smoky sorting room with Lyn and Joel, hoping to use a computer. The terminal is dead, likely because of the recent outage, so Mission turns to the hard-line radio instead.

Mission first tries Central and gets no response, which deepens his fear that the disruption is larger than a local fire. He finally reaches Robbie at an upper waystation, and Robbie reveals that people are actively searching for Mission, Cam, and others after some kind of fight at Central. Because the computers are malfunctioning across multiple levels, Robbie has been using the mayor’s office terminal, and Mission orders Robbie to send wires to three trusted friends telling them to gather at the Nest, or at least find each other there if Mission cannot come.

After the call, Mission concludes that moving openly will be too dangerous, so he starts searching the sorting crates for different coveralls. Lyn and Joel insist on coming with him despite Mission’s warning that a group will attract attention. Joel then finds a large stock of new white Security coveralls that recently came down from Garment, and Mission connects them to the suspicious new hires and the violence spreading through the silo.

The sight of the uniforms crystallizes Mission’s suspicion that someone is deliberately setting different groups against each other and may simply want mass death. That realization makes him abandon the idea of a simple disguise. Instead, Mission finds a black hauling bag like the ones used for grim porter work and offers Lyn and Joel all 384 of his chits if they help him with “one last tandem,” signaling a covert plan to move through the silo under the cover of a body haul.