With the ring gates open amid rising OPA extremism, Marco Inaros's Free Navy has devastated Earth with asteroids and shattered the old order. Holden's crew, scattered across the system and reunited on Luna, have come through: Naomi escaped Marco and finally unburdened her past to Holden; Alex and Bobbie delivered Prime Minister Smith; Amos crossed a dying Earth with the fugitive Clarissa Mao. Avasarala has struck a deal, immunity for the Rocinante's crew for full intelligence on Marco, and means to raise a joint policing task force she wants Holden to lead. Naomi has spotted the deeper mystery: colony ships vanishing through the gates for no gain anyone can trace, as if something in the rings is eating ships. This closing chapter turns away from the crew to reveal the truth behind it all. Aboard the Donnager-class battleship Barkeith, Captain Sauveterre serves in a disciplined breakaway Martian fleet commanded by Admiral Duarte, the real architect who armed and used Marco Inaros as a disposable front to keep Earth and Mars busy, and who received the stolen protomolecule sample through his unnerving scientist Cortazar. Duarte's fleet, its ships being reshaped with disturbingly organic alien modifications, transits Medina and the ring hub bound for a hidden new system called Laconia. As the Barkeith passes through the Laconia gate, matter itself seems to dissolve into clouds of atoms, and the unseen entities that once annihilated the ring-builders sweep through the space between spaces and kill the ship and everyone aboard. Sauveterre does not notice his death, and the true and vaster danger waiting behind the gates stands revealed.