Six hours into the journey on February 24, Pasha and his 12 fellow bachelors remain locked in the trailer. The group includes Lee, an Oregon-based CEO whose charity converts plastic into fishing nets; Laurent, a French investigative journalist; Raj, a London-based scientist close to a medical breakthrough; Kyle, who builds prosthetic limbs for dogs; Bill, the eldest, who mentors at-risk boys; Tim, a Hollywood plastic surgeon; and Bertrand, a crypto and NFT investor. Several others—Liam, Hans, Carlos, Jerome, and Steve—are present but less defined.

For the first two hours, the men cheerfully assumed the trailer was a reward, the next phase of the romance tour. By hour three, unable to crack the padlocked fridge and aware of a hidden camera, they fell into tense silence. Bill finally voiced the suspicion that something was wrong. When massive explosions hit, the men panicked and pounded the walls. The PA system’s calm female voice assured them it was a national fireworks competition, and the trailer resumed moving. Bertrand broke the remaining fear by telling a comic story, sending the group into relieved laughter. He becomes the group’s designated storyteller, keeping silence—and dread—at bay.

Eight hours into the westward drive, Yeva navigates back roads while the radio delivers fragmented war reports. The broadcast feels abstract to her, whereas minor physical details around the trailer feel viscerally real. She privately reproaches herself for thinking the war is new; the Donbas conflict has been ongoing for eight years.

Yeva’s mother calls for the second time in an hour. Rather than expressing fear, she delivers practical advice: With a coming shortage of eligible men, Yeva must secure a husband immediately and put it in writing before a military draft takes them all. She suggests that being a war widow is preferable to remaining single. When Yeva starts to say something emotionally significant, her mother cuts her off, tells her not to be dramatic, and promises they will see each other again.

Still on the westward drive, Nastia answers an unknown number, hoping it is her mother, Iolanta Cherno, but the caller is Efrosinia, an administrator at the romance agency Romeo Meets Yulia. Nastia hangs up immediately and ignores the subsequent texts, telling Sol it was spam. When Yeva asks whether Nastia needs to contact family, Nastia deflects. A former activist from Komod—her mother’s old protest group—texts from France to check on her, which only sharpens Nastia’s frustration at her mother’s silence. She wonders if Iolanta engineered the chaos to test her daughter’s loyalty. After another message from Efrosinia, Nastia silences her phone in a signal-blocking bag. She draws comfort from Yeva’s composure, trusting that Yeva has contingency plans—though Nastia cannot imagine the future beyond reaching the Carpathians.

Pasha endures the physical misery of the long journey and distracts himself by fantasizing about a future life with a Ukrainian bride he has already mentally named Olya. When the other bachelors call on him to tell a story, Bertrand suggests the one about a female jogger in Vancouver. Pasha begins, but the men quickly overlay it with their own grievances, constructing a version in which the woman rebuffed him. Pasha goes along with their revision, and the group arrives at a shared conclusion: that men and women have lost the ability to connect. Bill, the eldest, then reframes their entire ordeal as a necessary trial—the cramped, uncomfortable journey being precisely what separates real love from the hollow kind found in parks or on dating apps. The men feel solidarity with one another.

During a roadside bathroom break, Nastia turns on her phone and finds a stream of messages from Efrosinia. The agency reports at least 10 bachelors unaccounted for and is actively trying to evacuate them—a concern Nastia attributes to the agency protecting its reputation rather than genuine care. Efrosinia reveals that a witness spotted two women in animal masks and that Nastia and Sol were identified from photographs by their body shapes. Later messages warn that the kidnapping endangers Ukraine’s international standing at a moment when the country is appealing to the world for support. Nastia reflects that provoking exactly this kind of scandal was always the point and turns her phone off again.

The narrative steps back to reveal that Pasha fabricated his version of the jogger story for the other men. In the actual sequence of events, the red-haired jogger stopped him on the trail and, slightly out of breath, directly asked him out for a drink. Her height, her physical intensity, and her straightforwardness unsettled him. He concluded that something must be wrong with anyone who approached a stranger so boldly. He held up his earbuds as if he could not hear her—though he was holding them in his other hand—and ran. He never went back to that park.

At midnight, Yeva drives alone while the sisters sleep. The Carpathian village is close. The radio begins broadcasting strings of numbers, and Yeva slowly recognizes the voice as Kevin, the American conservationist. He has located her through her two-way radio by reading extinction time stamps—her particular weakness. She picks up.

Kevin describes a viral photograph of a Ukrainian teenager fleeing with a pet rat. In the background, on an acacia tree trunk, a C. surculus snail has been identified whose shell coils to the left—the same rare trait as Lefty. Kevin provides GPS coordinates placing the tree near Kherson, in southern Ukraine. After the call ends, Yeva climbs out of the cab and releases her tension in a roar that scatters nearby birds. A potential mate for what she believed to be the world’s last of its kind has just appeared, roughly 900 kilometers south—directly in the path of the advancing Russian military.

Yeva wakes the sisters and outlines a plan: They will walk to a nearby village, where a contact will shelter them for the night and drive them to a train station in the morning. She returns their passports, declares their arrangement fulfilled, and states plainly that she is heading south alone. The sisters protest, and the bachelors knock from the trailer—which Yeva admits she had forgotten about, handing responsibility for them to the sisters.

Nastia stalls by raising the hostage video, but Yeva dismisses it as irrelevant. When Nastia proposes they all go with her, Yeva reveals her destination, Kherson, which Sol points out is about to fall to Russian forces. Yeva hauls both sisters physically out of the cab.

In a last attempt to hold Yeva, Nastia reveals she knew about the wedding dress and Yeva’s earlier suicidal intent, claiming she saved her. Yeva turns this around sharply, accusing Nastia of manipulation—of using Sol, of engineering Yeva’s dependency, of having no real self beyond her attachment to her absent mother. Nastia is shocked and, unexpectedly, relieved that her plot is over. Yeva starts the engine and orders them to remove the bachelors from the trailer.

Seventeen hours into their captivity, a masked Sol opens the trailer and announces that the getaway is canceled due to a full-scale invasion. She directs the men to walk to a nearby highway and catch a bus toward the Romanian border. The men refuse. Tim demands a refund, and others point out they have no passports or cash. Bertrand calculates the collective value of their confiscated phones at around $15,000 and accuses the women of running a theft operation.

As the lights are flipped on and off, the three women are revealed: Sol in a fox mask, Nastia in a long-nosed mask, and Yeva in a wolf mask. Yeva explains she is going south for a snail, which provokes laughter. Bertrand lectures the women about inequality and claims he had planned to offer them jobs.

Sol quietly offers Pasha a full refund in Russian if he can get the others out. He relays this to the group but publicly declines. Nastia then tells the men they are free to bring their complaints to the press. Pasha realizes the publicity would expose them as romance-tour participants, inviting public mockery. The other men seem to reach the same conclusion. Bertrand demands to be returned to Kyiv to retrieve their phones, passports, and dignity, a demand Pasha formally echoes in Russian.

Defeated, the three women drive south toward Kherson with the 13 bachelors still locked in the trailer. Before setting off, Yeva moved her jars of preserved snail specimens from the trailer to the cab after Kyle tore out the hidden camera. Sol proposed lying to the men and telling them they were headed back to Kyiv; Yeva gave reluctant approval, instructing the sisters to keep the men fed. The cab is frigid because Yeva has turned off the heat to keep Lefty dormant in his jar on the dashboard. Nastia, looking at the jar, briefly considers smashing it against the road—which would eliminate the need for the Kherson detour—but stops herself, knowing Yeva would abandon her and Sol on the spot.

Author Maria Reva steps out of the narrative to address the reader directly. The Kherson of her story no longer exists: The city has been occupied, liberated, and shelled more than 2,000 times. The Kakhovka Dam has been blown up by Russian forces, flooding neighborhoods and the countryside, uprooting land mines and submerging her family’s dacha—a wooden house her grandfather built by hand. The area’s guard, stranded since the occupation, is found dead in his flooded attic.

Reva reflects on the moral complexity of watching a war from abroad and describes a 2023 trip to Ukraine with her sister, during which each city they visited measured its own danger against somewhere else. They reached Kharkiv but could not continue to Kherson.

The chapter then rewinds to February 23, 2022—the morning before the invasion—and describes Kherson intact: tap water, electric light, residents going about ordinary routines. The perspective narrows to a lone female C. surculus snail waking from hibernation on an ancient acacia tree in a fallow field, her camouflage so effective she has never been found by another of her kind. The chapter ends by foreshadowing the arrival of gloved hands—Yeva’s—searching for her.

Nastia drives them into Kherson, a job Yeva assigned her after nearly falling asleep driving. They navigate against a massive outbound flow of evacuees. In the city, residents wait in long lines at banks and pharmacies. A shared laugh at a gas station over a diesel-converted electric car briefly relieves the tension.

Nastia’s phone rings with an international number: Masha, the founder of Romeo Meets Yulia, has identified Nastia as Iolanta Cherno’s daughter, linking the kidnapping to Komod’s history of disrupting the agency. Nastia insists the plan was entirely her own and that she has not known her mother’s whereabouts for eight months. Masha claims she does know where Iolanta is; in exchange for this information, she demands the bachelors be delivered to a landmark near the Romanian border within 24 hours. Nastia inadvertently reveals they are far in the south; Masha repeats her ultimatum and hangs up. Nastia demands they turn around immediately. Yeva refuses, insisting the snail comes first.

Pasha wakes inside the locked trailer to nearby explosions and a wailing air-raid siren. As panic rises, Bertrand calmly shares facts about Zelensky’s background as a television comedian, then proposes that the war is a fabrication engineered by the United States to profit from weapons contracts—the explosions merely sound effects, the videos online staged. Pasha is skeptical but cannot dismiss Bertrand entirely, given the man’s record of being right about things others mocked, such as cryptocurrency and NFTs. The men settle into uneasy laughter, accepting the more comfortable explanation: The women are simply thieves, nothing more.

At sunset, Yeva tells herself the nearby blasts are aimed at a military airport and focuses on the search. She has found the ancient acacia in a fallow field between apartment blocks. She climbs and combs the tree for hours while air-raid sirens blare, sending the sisters away to find supplies rather than risk them inadvertently crushing the snail. Descending at dusk, doubt sets in. She applies beer to the bark as bait, since snails are attracted to fermentation. She locks the cab and goes looking for a kiosk, leaving a note for the sisters on the windshield. It occurs to her briefly that the bachelors have been unusually quiet, but she sets the thought aside.

Using Tim’s metal credit card, the bachelors quietly unscrew the skylight. Pasha, the smallest, is hoisted through by Bertrand and emerges onto the roof alone. He tells the men it looks peaceful and might be the outskirts of Kyiv. The other men attempt the opening in turn but are too large to fit. Pasha promises to return with a tool to free them and sets off alone.

He walks toward the river and across an empty Soviet-style bridge. A deep, unexpected nostalgia for the concrete architecture of his childhood overtakes him; for a moment, he feels genuinely at home. He stumbles and reaches for what he takes to be a dropped glove but is actually a human hand. He looks up and sees something on the bridge that the chapter does not describe.

Returning from a kiosk, Yeva, Nastia, and Sol spot Pasha sitting motionless on an overturned milk crate a block from the trailer, after vomiting. He greets them calmly and tells them he saw soldiers’ remains on the bridge. He now fully accepts the war is real. He confirms all 12 other bachelors remain in the trailer and advises keeping them locked in and the skylight sealed so they do not witness what he has seen.

He recognizes Yeva from the opening social—she had described how mason bees sacrifice their male eggs to predators first—and recalls Nastia from a brunch, noting she seemed bored and is too young for him regardless. He shakes Sol’s hand.

The women confer quietly. Nastia argues that Masha never specified she needed all 13 men back, making Pasha expendable. Yeva agrees on practical grounds: Putting a visibly traumatized man back into the trailer with 12 others would be dangerous. They decide to leave him where he is and hope he drifts away on his own.