Ten

Jessyn and other captives from Anjiin are held in a crowded metal chamber aboard an alien ship. As time passes in the featureless prison, a security officer named Urrys Ostencour begins organizing a group to overpower a guard and escape, while Jessyn struggles with dwindling medication and the psychological toll of confinement. A mysterious entity inhabiting Jessyn's body experiences relief and satisfaction at being aboard the alien vessel.

Jessyn sits with Else Yannin in a crowded, low-ceilinged metal chamber holding approximately two hundred captives from Anjiin's elite—researchers, security personnel, artists, and administrators. The aliens have provided food and water dispensers and an absorbent mat for waste, suggesting they intend to keep the prisoners alive. When new batches of captives arrive, the group anxiously searches for missing colleagues and loved ones, including Jellit, whose whereabouts remain unknown. Jessyn learns that Nöl has been executed as part of a systematic killing pattern (one in eight). When the ship transitions to asymmetric space, the prisoners experience a horrifying temporal distortion where causality becomes malleable and memory inverts.

Time becomes meaningless in the chamber. The captives form cliques with those they know, sleep huddled together for warmth, and maintain basic hygiene at the cost of profound humiliation. Jessyn secretly takes medication from a hidden supply of capsules to manage her mental health, rationing them carefully as her supply dwindles. She observes others coping through dark humor, intimacy, and rituals of cleanliness. Urrys Ostencour, a security officer, begins organizing escape preparations, collecting string and shoelaces from the prisoners to fashion rope, with help from Synnia. Meanwhile, an alien consciousness inhabiting Jessyn's body—described as a swarm—experiences contentment in the captivity, pleased by the intelligence it has gathered about the invaders. As Jessyn's medications run critically low, Synnia reveals an escape plan: when the guard comes to change the waste mat, the group will attempt to overpower it.