In a flashback, Lee and Annie speak after the Choosing Ceremony. Lee worries the new people who’ve replaced the dragonlords are bad, too. Annie urges him to think about it from a different perspective; they will be the ones riding dragons, and thus they’ll make the rules and they’ll never be bad.

In the present day, Annie and her peer, Rock, go on their first collection. Lee witnesses their return, and Annie is sobbing. Rock reveals that they were forced to make an example of someone by burning them with dragonfire, and Annie carried out the punishment. In the following days, Lee and Annie make separate rounds of collection. Duck begins to worry that Annie isn’t sleeping.

Lee, Annie, Cor, and Power are summoned to the Inner Palace after collections are finished. Callipolis’s chief physician describes his findings: If resources are split equally, survival rates will be undesirable. However, if variation in ration size is permitted based on the metals test, losses can be contained to certain populations. The physician shows different calculations to Atreus, General Holmes, and the dragon riders which depict different survival rates based on the distribution of rations.