Twenty-Seven

At Tonner Freis's memorial service, Dafyd gives a speech while grappling with memories of his own mother's death and the weight of his role managing the human captives for the Carryx. After the ceremony, a union organizer named Brun confronts him with demands that the alien overseers be removed or the research team will strike. Later, Dafyd discovers that the spy—the swarm creature that has been inhabiting multiple bodies—has taken on Else Yannin's physical form and is hiding in Jellit's cell, fundamentally transforming its understanding of itself and the humans it has consumed.

Dafyd sits through Tonner Freis's memorial service in the common room, reflective about his own inability to remember his mother's funeral despite vivid memories surrounding it. He delivers a speech written by Uuya Tomos that frames the gathering as an opportunity for the displaced humans to grieve not just Tonner but all their collective losses—homes, families, loved ones who died without ceremony. Uuya Tomos later tells him the speech was strategic, designed to shift focus away from how Tonner was killed. She remarks that people already hate him as the Carryx's enforcer and notes that Jellit Kaul, the spy, did not attend the service—a fact that concerns Dafyd. As Dafyd walks to confront Jellit about the absence, Brun catches up with him and, as the new workgroup leader, delivers an ultimatum: the team demands that the aliens (both Soft Lothark and Rak-hund) be removed from their workspace, or they will initiate a work stoppage. Brun invokes union organizing principles and claims the team has leverage because the Carryx need their work. Dafyd agrees to speak with Uuya Tomos but recognizes the dangerous naivety of Brun's position. At Jellit's cell, Dafyd finds not the spy but Else Yannin, transformed into physical form. She reveals that the swarm creature has been with her and Jellit all along, and that she has used her shapeshifting ability to manifest a body resembling Else so she can exist visibly. She proposes a cover story—that the Carryx revived her as a test—and suggests she can answer for Jellit when needed. Dafyd's response is brutal: he refuses her sexually and emotionally, telling her that while he needs her strategically, he now understands that she murdered his friends. The spy protests that Else and the others are still alive within her, but Dafyd insists she is not them. After he leaves, the swarm is alone with its grief and confusion. It engages in an introspective moment with the voices of Else, Jellit, and Ameer still present in its composite memory, only to experience a profound realization: by fully inhabiting Else's consciousness and then Jellit's, it discovers that human selves are not unified entities but rather discordant collections of voices and patterns—yet in doing so, it also recognizes that it has killed them. The beings it absorbed are genuinely gone, consumed into itself. It stands before the mirror and begins to reshape its physical form, searching for what its true appearance might be, experiencing a disorienting mix of horror and ecstatic self-discovery as it becomes aware of its own singular existence separate from its absorbed hosts.