Nika and Dashiel visit Ebisu, where Nika baits a Taiyok assassin who is tailing her into a trap then gives the alien a message to deliver to the Guides: that she will kill every assassin sent after her, but if instead they want to talk, she is willing to listen.

On Mirai, Adlai and Spencer confiscate limb augments from merchants in an attempt to prevent more people from being infected with the virutox. Later, Maris confronts Adlai and demands he tell her where Dashiel and Nika have gone and why, and he agrees.

The next morning, Adlai interrogates Iona to determine how she caught the virutox. She admits she interacted with a man named Tristan McLeros at a Disuta game. That night, Tristan breaks into the Mirai One transit hub, intending to fiddle with the transportation system as a prank. Instead, he accidentally overloads the power distribution system, causing the building to explode.

Adlai reviews surveillance footage and identifies Tristan as the perpetrator. He confronts the Guides with evidence that the virutox is responsible for the explosion and demands to know why they continue to allow it to spread. They refuse to tell him, and he in turn refuses to stop confiscating the limb augments, daring them to come after him.

The Guides confer on what to do about the deteriorating situation and the increasing number of rebelling Advisors; they elect to continue guarding the Rasu Protocol secrets. One of the Guides, Delacrai, privately believes this course will result in the destruction of the Dominion and decides to take action.

Later that night, Nika receives an anonymous message containing the location of the next outpost to be raided. She and Dashiel visit the Taiyok homeworld to purchase a stealth module for their ship, which they’ve named Wayfarer, so that they can track whoever attacks the outpost. To prepare, Nika accesses an encrypted memory of the first Asterion meeting with the Taiyok leader 12,000 years ago. Afterwards, she confides in Dashiel about the memories she’s been recovering and tells him she believes her former self deliberately encrypted the memories, then made him the decryption key.

Nika contacts Grant for help in installing the stealth module. While he talks Dashiel through updating the ship’s systems to accept the module, Dashiel lets slip that Nika had been psyche-wiped 5 years earlier, which Grant did not know.

Adlai’s people are able to create a vaccine against the virutox. He and Spencer debate how best to distribute the vaccine, given that the public no longer trusts Justice. Spencer confesses that he has contacts in NOIR and suggests asking them for help.

Spencer contacts Joaquim and asks him to meet with Adlai. Joaquim is deeply suspicious, and he and Perrin argue about whether they should do it. Joaquim reveals why he despises Justice: that Justice officers on Synra killed the love of his life and destroyed all her psyche backups.

The meeting takes place, and Adlai gives Joaquim a copy of the vaccine for NOIR to distribute. On the way back home, Joaquim is hit with a tranquilizer dart and kidnapped.

Perrin flees in a panic and returns to The Chalet. She and Ryan study the vaccine to ensure its genuine, then she meets with Adlai again. She tells him about Joaquim’s kidnapping, and they reluctantly decide that they have to focus on getting the vaccine distributed before trying to rescue him, since Adlai is already in danger of being fired. Despite all the angst, they instantly hit it off and agree to work together.

Nika and Dashiel arrive at the outpost in time to see two ships show up; Gemina gases the outpost then orders dynes to transport the inhabitants in stasis chambers onto the larger ship. Nika sneaks onboard and tells Dashiel to track her. An interference field blocks her signal, though, so Dashiel plants a tracker on Gemina’s personal ship, then barely escapes as the outpost is destroyed.

The ship Nika has stowed away on arrives at a space station, and she sneaks off to investigate. The Tabiji is docked there, and she breaks into its navigation records and copies its travel history. Then she steals Gemina’s personal ship and meets Dashiel and the Wayfarer on a nearby moon.

They quickly tie the Tabiji’s journeys to the historical route of the Shorai, deducing that the Shorai must have discovered something at the terminus point of the Tabiji’s trips.

They follow the path the Tabiji has been taking and discover the stronghold of the Rasu. The aliens have built a Dyson lattice around a star to siphon off its energy. Thousands of city-sized platforms orbit the star, from where countless ships arrive and depart. They observe Rasu ships joining together to create larger vessels in a seamless fashion. This triggers a recollection by Nika, but when a Rasu ship opens a wormhole vortex that nearly drags the Wayfarer in, they decide they should leave.

Once they’re safely outside of the Rasu stellar system, Nika recounts the story of something that happened to her 3 years earlier. She and Perrin went to a club, where a man offered them a simex depicting an alien invasion in which they are tasked with disabling the alien ship.

In the simex, they found themselves in a jungle as a ship—what Nika now recognizes as a Rasu ship—descended from the sky while burning the jungle with a laser beam. The ship landed and machine-looking aliens disembark. Several natives attacked and were quickly captured. The aliens transformed into a variety of shapes and tools, the metal they were made of liquifying and resolidifying as needed. Perrin got injured, and they tried to exit the simex, but the exit command didn’t work.

They sneaked on the ship and came upon the native prisoners just as the Rasu killed them all. Perrin screamed, and the Rasu pursued them on a chase through the ship. They made it to the command center, where a huge plasma chamber powered the ship’s main weapon. Before they could try to disable it, Rasu surrounded and killed them.

They woke up in the club and tried to get a refund for a defective simex, only to learn the man who gave it to them didn’t work there. As they were leaving, Nika heard a voice in her head saying, ‘Remember this. When the time comes, you must remember what you have seen.’

Dashiel and Nika conclude that someone deliberately targeted her with information about the Rasu. They speculate that it might have been the Sogain, a mysterious, technologically superior species Asterions encountered 200K years ago. In the encounter, an Asterion vessel was forcefully ejected from the Sogain system by a cosmic force and warned by a disembodied voice never to approach again. Armed with their new knowledge of the Rasu threat, they decide to return to Mirai.