Nineteen

Following Irinna's funeral wake, the group salvages equipment from the damaged lab while grappling with grief and loss. As they reassemble their workspace in the common room, tensions flare over past decisions, but Dafyd offers a reframing theory: the Carryx may be testing them not on lab performance but on their ability to self-organize and survive—suggesting the attack itself was part of a larger, hidden evaluation.

The chapter opens with Rickar, Campar, Synnia, and Dafyd holding an informal memorial in the common room, sharing memories of the kind and friendly Irinna before alien guards arrive to collect her body. After they depart, life resumes its mundane demands. The next morning, Campar, Rickar, Tonner, and Dafyd undertake salvage operations in the ruined lab, recovering equipment despite encountering hostile alien creatures. They transport the centrifuge and sampling arrays back to the common room, where Else has begun splicing power cables for the resonance imager. Tension erupts when Tonner blames Jessyn for keeping her medical condition secret, implying her absence from the lab led to the security breach that killed Irinna. Campar nearly attacks him, but Dafyd intervenes with a provocative reinterpretation: the test the Carryx imposed may not be about lab work at all, but about whether humans can self-organize, produce their own medicines and food, and build networks without external support. He suggests Jessyn's need for medicine—the very thing Tonner resents—may have inadvertently revealed the true nature of the evaluation. Tonner reluctantly accepts this analysis, and the power dynamic in the group subtly shifts from Tonner's leadership to Alkhor's (Dafyd's) authority.