Years after the ambush, Tomas Nau paces duty cycles to match Arachna’s recovery. OnOff settles into a bright curve, and within a day of Relight the humans hear military radio from the surface, implying a war interrupted by darkness. Over the next few years, transmission sites multiply into the thousands, prompting Anne Reynolt to increase the linguists’ duty time.

Trixia Bonsol builds data representations to align written physics texts with the speech in most broadcasts, and her translations quickly outstrip the others. Reynolt deems her indispensable, denying any early release. Reading the streams, Ezr Vinh sees living culture emerge—and a striking absence: the Spiders mention no prior high-technology era, and archaeology seems marginal. Ritser Brughel frets that this means little to salvage, but Nau cites Dr. Li’s work and the Qeng Ho library as continuing avenues of payoff.

As Trixia’s output grows more fluent, Reynolt accuses her of figurative distortion—odd orthographies, quaint units, and simplified names like “Sherkaner Underhill” and “Jaybert Landers.” She threatens to bar Ezr from Trixia’s workspace. Ezr argues that trade requires grasping meaning and mindset, not just literal parsing; the names and units help humans internalize Spider intent. Reynolt relents, and Nau favors the simplifications, which other translators begin to adopt.

Yet Ezr grows uneasy. Trixia’s “meta-trans” echoes Dawn Age narratives he once shared with her, and it downplays Spider physiology, smoothing radical differences. A popular broadcast—translated as “The Children’s Hour of Science”—becomes their best cultural window, whether for children or conscripts. Its innocence colors the team’s worldview, and Ezr wonders if Trixia, trapped in Focus, is crafting a hopeful dream that risks biasing humanity’s understanding of Arachna.