Miller forces open a growth-choked door and drags the nuclear bomb cart into Eros’ transformed corridors, keeping Naomi’s dead-man trigger pinned with his hand terminal. He pushes through the casino level’s grotesque alien remodeling, steadies himself amid the realization that the black crust is remade human remains, and decides to find the station’s “brain” by following rising heat.

He moves inward and upward, noting stranger biologies, climbing radiation, and a measurable temperature gradient. As Eros’ broadcast loops and warps, Miller tracks toward hotter levels, reasoning that the drive or control center must be nearby.

Hearing the phrase “You can’t take the razor back,” Miller has an epiphany: the protomolecule isn’t speaking languages it knows, but echoing the minds and software it consumed. Eros’ intelligence and navigation derive from its human victims’ cognitive structures—roads laid over Roman legions—and Julie Mao persists within that composite mind.

Realizing Julie is effectively alive inside Eros, Miller boosts his weak comm link through the surface ship and reaches Holden. He reports the new, dire implication as the guided nuclear strike closes in: “We have a problem.”