Pike escorts the young First Servant of Majalis home and discovers that the planet's paradise depends on sacrificing a child to a machine.
The Enterprise rescues the passengers of a shuttle under attack: a boy known as the First Servant, his father Gamal, and Alora, a Majalan leader with whom Pike once had a romance. Pike agrees to take them home, and Gamal's attempt to fake his son's death to keep him from going back fails.
At the boy's ascension ceremony, Pike learns that the First Servant is connected to a machine that sustains the planet's paradise, and that a child is sacrificed to it in each generation. Horrified, he cannot stop it. Gamal, who had joined rebels opposed to the practice, helps M'Benga with a treatment for Rukiya before leaving to fight for future First Servants. The premise recalls Ursula K. Le Guin's story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.