Miller scavenges oxygen and pushes deeper into Eros’ transformed corridors, listening to the station’s many voices and seeing silver swarms of protomolecule. Realizing he cannot search everywhere, he follows a new line of reasoning: Julie never “went” anywhere. With imagined prompts from Holden, Havelock, and Muss, he deduces Protogen would have stashed her in a secure, low-traffic facility near the radiation shelters—the backup environmental controls.

He reaches the overgrown control complex, leaves the bomb cart outside on the ankle-deep biological carpet, and moves through a grotto of blue firefly lights and dark filaments. In a hazmat analysis node, Miller finds Julie alive, merged into the station’s alien lattice, breathing and dreaming, her body transformed yet unmistakably herself.

Miller gently wakes her, explains who he is and how he failed to bring her home. To keep the bomb safe, he places his hand terminal’s dead man’s switch under her thumb, then removes his helmet and gloves, knowingly exposing himself to infection. He takes the terminal back and holds her hand, grounding her in the moment.

He tells Julie that Eros is racing for Earth and asks her to choose a different target: Venus. Appealing to her independence and her ethics, he warns Earth would be consumed as she was. Julie recognizes the danger, wrestles with a vast alien urge, and chooses. The blue lights surge, then settle; Miller senses a change and believes he’ll have time to deal with the bomb.

With Eros redirected toward Venus, Miller reassures the frightened Julie that she isn’t alone. The immediate catastrophe for Earth is averted, but Miller has begun to succumb to the protomolecule as he commits to share whatever fate awaits them at Venus.