KILO counts. It is good at counting. The IMU’s story plus the frozen state plus the clock rebuild an oval that is not the oval from this morning.

“Periapsis,” KILO says, and Mira translates because she wants the word in your bones. “Periapsis is the low point of the orbit, the nearest we come to Earth each lap. Apoapsis is the high point. Our periapsis is in the soup. A geomagnetic storm heats the thermosphere—the thin air at the top of the sky. The air puffs up like a marshmallow. The dead burn was a periapsis raise at the high point of the oval, meant to lift the next low pass above that puff. The shove quit. Drag grabbed us. We are lower than the plan, and lower is not automatically safer.”

The number is a height that would make a weather balloon nervous. Not death this minute. Death in the next low pass if you do nothing, or the one after.

Jax traces the oval. “To raise periapsis you burn prograde—along our motion—when we are at apoapsis, the high point. That lifts the far side of the oval, which is the low side from up there. Retrograde—against our motion—would drop periapsis more. A giant climb away from Earth can miss the air and lose the magnetic shield.”

Mira watches you, not the screen. “We can build the careful apoapsis stitch. Or we can do something loud right now because loud feels like steering.”