At night, Yeva waits at the base of the acacia with a beer-soaked rag as bait. Despite her intention not to, she drinks nearly all the lager. She calls Kevin. He warns her of a Russian column advancing on Kyiv and urges her to flee, but she refuses. When he presses what she will do afterward, she reads him the full list of species she has lost and tells him only Lefty remains. When Kevin revisits his romantic interest in her, Yeva tells Kevin she has no interest in sex. He responds without judgment and proposes a relationship in which he may occasionally sleep with others; Yeva, to her own surprise, feels relief rather than jealousy.

The call deteriorates into a political argument, with Kevin claiming the Ukrainians should try to understand the Russian perspective for the sake of making peace. Mid-conversation, Yeva watches a column of Russian tanks roll into the street, one cannon trained on a civilian van, before the convoy moves deeper into the city. She hangs up on Kevin. Nastia then emerges from the lab and suggests placing Lefty directly on the tree to draw out a potential mate by scent.

Early the next morning, Pasha wanders Kherson, lost, having never located the weapons. Random objects on the street trigger unwanted memories of the bridge. When he approaches a pensioner for directions, she accuses him of being a Russian saboteur marking buildings for airstrikes; nearby men turn hostile, and Pasha flees.

He stumbles into a staged Russian propaganda shoot. White trucks and buses have brought in Russian civilians, and a soldier is filmed declaring the Special Operation a success. Realizing the entire crowd is Russian, Pasha slips away. A Ukrainian couple filming the deception explains that real humanitarian aid is being blocked while the Russians manufacture footage of a liberation. Pasha borrows a phone and calls his parents. They speak to him in Ukrainian—a language they have never used at home—expressing grief for their homeland from a distance but entirely missing that he is physically trapped inside it. Pasha hangs up in frustration. The couple points him back toward the field.

At the field, Yeva warms Lefty until he wakes and places him on the acacia. Pasha has returned hollow-eyed and empty-handed. Sol checks her phone and reports that soldiers have just taken down the Ukrainian flag from city hall. Lefty begins to crawl upward.

Two Russian soldiers arrive and demand identification: a younger one, Krylov, and a senior one, Ovechkin. They discover the sisters and Pasha hiding behind the trailer and force Yeva to open it, revealing all 12 bachelors. Bertrand, still convinced the war is a performance, taunts the soldiers and waves a gun barrel aside. Ovechkin shoots him twice, killing him.

Pasha improvises, claiming the whole group is stranded extras for the documentary filming nearby. The soldiers call the director, who decides to relocate his production to the field. Yeva glances back at the tree and can no longer see Lefty. The bachelors carry Bertrand’s body behind a large recycling bin while Ovechkin scuffs dirt over the blood trail.

The Russian military convoy, white buses, and film crew arrive at the field. The Russian civilians aboard consider themselves not tourists or paid extras but pioneers settling land they believe is historically theirs. The director announces the pioneers will play grateful Ukrainians presenting bread and salt to the arriving soldiers for the documentary’s climactic liberation scene.

The director selects Nastia to present the bread and salt, judging her face ideal for projecting wordless gratitude. Sol and Yeva step in front of her. Nastia talks back, challenging the director’s snail metaphor on the grounds that snails are nearly blind—information Yeva had shared on the road—which sharpens his interest in her. At that moment, Yeva looks to the acacia and spots two C. surculus moving toward each other on the trunk.

A brief chapter occurs from Lefty’s perspective. He can barely see, but the scent of another snail reaches him—at once new and deeply familiar, recalling an early memory of being carried on his mother’s back. The smell draws him forward.

Pasha flees the field, consumed by guilt over Bertrand’s death and convinced he has made everything worse. He runs into a public square where Ukrainian protesters face off against soldiers outside the occupied administration building. Watching a baby in the crowd, he receives what feels like a wordless message about chaos and the will to resist it. He turns back toward the field.

As the director counts down, Nastia weighs the cost of taking the bread: She fears being permanently branded a collaborator and publicly connected to her mother, the activist Iolanta Cherno. She briefly imagines a public act of protest, then releases the idea. Noticing that Yeva has spotted both snails on the acacia, she understands that accepting the bread and holding the crowd’s attention is the best way to give Yeva a chance to retrieve them. She reaches for the loaf.

Pasha leads the protesters—whom he rallied by giving a speech—toward the field, reciting a poem about soldiers who survive retreat to fight again. A flag-wrapped woman named Olya catches up beside him and says his impromptu speech had genuine feeling beneath its broken grammar. Pasha becomes immediately infatuated with her, mentally setting aside his earlier fixation on Sol.

From the perspective of the Russian civilians, the liberation scene proceeds as planned. Nastia presents the bread stiffly, a soldier steps forward to embrace her, and the two groups converge in handshakes. The participants experience the moment as authentic, concluding they are not newcomers to this land but its rightful inhabitants.

While attention is fixed on the staged scene, Yeva climbs the acacia and removes the second snail, slipping it into a breast pocket. Before she can retrieve Lefty, she slips down the trunk. The director then announces that the tree should be set on fire as a symbol of chaos for the camera. Yeva clamps herself to the trunk to stop them, but gasoline is poured around the base and the crowd cheers. Then a column of voices singing a Ukrainian folk song grows louder across the field. Yeva hears one voice lagging a beat behind the rest and suspects it is Pasha. She starts laughing and cannot stop.

The Russian pioneers watch the approaching crowd with growing alarm. At its head are Pasha and Olya, followed by priests, students, and a pensioner carrying a baby. As the group swells to roughly 100, the pioneers identify them as the hostile nationalists they had been warned about. When soldiers open fire, some pioneers find themselves caught in the shooting and realize the soldiers cannot distinguish them from Ukrainians.

As Yeva drives the mobile lab out of Kherson, Nastia recalls the chaos, including how Yeva and Sol lifted her up to retrieve Lefty from the burning acacia. Yeva repeatedly checks the jar now holding both snails. Knocking from the trailer reveals 11 bachelors have sheltered themselves inside; Pasha is not among them, though Yeva thinks she spotted him in the crowd with a woman.

Nastia calls Masha and reports that Pasha has found love and Bertrand has found peace. The original deal is in ruins. Masha now proposes that if Nastia brings Masha’s grandfather out of Kherson alongside the 11 remaining bachelors, Masha will share what she knows about Nastia’s mother, who has changed her last name. Nastia accepts the detour.