Rosabelle reflects that she misjudged James Kent. Expecting him to be careless and easy to manipulate, she realizes he follows a moral code and is cautious about killing her. Recognizing that his conscience is all that keeps her from being ejected midair, she decides to offer a controlled truth to maintain their truce.

When James presses her about her expertise, Rosabelle admits she used to oversee assembly of mini choppers—PEARLs—and memorized their schematics, and that she knows the military variants from Ark’s militarized environment. She downplays any hacking prowess, calling it an overstatement. James grows uncharacteristically quiet, unsettling her.

Rosabelle tries to treat James’s arm, but he challenges her motives, asking why she was sent to kill him if he is more valuable alive. She explains she did not know his identity at the time. He needles her about abandoning her fiancé and sister and a “career as a murderer,” and the repeated thought of abandoning Clara overwhelms Rosabelle, forcing her to shut down emotionally.

James refuses treatment, reminding her she slit his throat and watched him die. She invokes their current truce and he offers a trade: answer one honest question and he might let her examine his wound. The question—when she last ate a proper meal—disarms her and triggers tremors and dissociation.

Rosabelle flashes back to Clara’s hunger and illness, recalling years of starvation and her coping mechanisms. James asks if Ark is starving her; she shakes her head reflexively, which he interprets as defending her captors and considers grounds to throw her overboard. This threat snaps her attention back to the present.

Rosabelle internally catalogs her deprivation: three days without food, chronic lack of sleep and warmth, worsening tremor, limited gear and clothing, and the Reestablishment’s downgrading of her assignments as she weakens. She recalls her last assassination of a professor and that this mission’s directive is not to kill James but to use him, which requires winning his trust through truth—at the cost of reconnecting with her own humanity.

The scene closes with Rosabelle meeting James’s eyes, aware that engaging with him honestly may be the only path to survival, even as it terrifies her.