Meanwhile Marce Claremont, a scientific advisor and eventual secret fiancé to Grayland, discovers a possible new method for controlling the evanescent Flow streams which may allow for the transport of whole habitats to the End system, thus preventing an overburden on the planet itself.

Kiva escapes her captors and returns to Hub where she finds Nadashe occupying the imperial palace.

Grayland, whose consciousness is able to live outside of the Memory Room and has broadly infiltrated Interdependency communications and control systems, stages a remote jailbreak of Kiva, provides recorded evidence of the coup plot, and reveals she had secretly named Kiva as her successor to the imperial throne prior to her assassination.

Grayland unilaterally ends the regulated monopolies of the Noble Houses, releases their trade secrets in order to aid the soon-to-be isolated systems, dissolves the House of Nohamapetan, and reveals a long-term plan to save the people of the disparate systems of the Interdependency over many decades and centuries through the use of evanescent Flow.

The Publishers Weekly review is very positive and saying that "Scalzi knocks it out of the park with the tightly plotted, deeply satisfying conclusion to his Interdependency Sequence space opera trilogy.