The scene replays with corrections. When Nastia again delivers the evacuation pitch, and he asks who they are, she is partly honest: Masha sent them, and she is Masha’s colleague. He dismisses this—Masha works alone from an attic. Nastia pivots to Masha’s matchmaking agency; he laughs it off as another of Masha’s fabrications, narrows the door to a crack, chains it, and recounts how similar pretexts were once used to rob an elderly neighbor. The steel door slams shut again.

The scene shifts to first person. The visitor is now Masha, and seven years have passed since she and her grandfather last saw each other. He goes pale at the sight of her and hurries her inside, scolding her for the dangerous journey and warning that Russian checkpoints are forming to trap civilians as human shields. Masha takes in the apartment’s familiar smell of old paper, her sister’s childhood school photo, and watercolors painted on the wall.

He makes tea and asks whether she will take the photo albums, rolls of film, and the notebooks in which he has recorded their family history. She agrees to everything, joking they will fold the entire apartment and unfold it somewhere safe. He laughs. She warns him the Russians will bomb the Kakhovka Dam and destroy the dacha; he thinks she has gone “mad.” When she repeats they will take anything he wants, he asks who “we” is and declares he is not going anywhere.

The author pauses to question her own account, wondering whether the steel door would truly swing open or only crack ajar. She realizes she cannot recall whether the door even has a chain, despite having worked those bolts herself during childhood visits. She concludes the door does have a chain and states her belief that if she gets every detail exactly right, her grandfather will leave Kherson.

After the failed attempt, Nastia sits on the concrete floor outside the grandfather’s door while Sol and Yeva alternate between pleading and threatening to leave. The grandfather opens the door, surprised she is still there, and returns with a bowl of mushroom soup, leaving only one lock turned. Nastia reflexively lies that it tastes like her mother’s cooking; he senses the lie and shuts the door. A rocket screams overhead, and she curls up tight; he reappears to explain it is outgoing fire, then goes back inside without relocking the door.

Masha calls with orders, then offers information about Nastia’s mother as leverage: She lives with a marriage-industry client in Nevada with a golden retriever and a young stepdaughter. Nastia insists it is a lie but recalls her mother’s unexplained nightly absences and the small glass figurines she used to bring home. Following Masha’s instructions, she moves toward the door; the grandfather opens it himself.

He brings fresh soup with oil-salted bread, and Nastia understands he is settled in for the duration. When he asks why she is really there, she abandons all pretense and tells him everything: her missing mother, the kidnapping scheme, the deal with Masha. He says the story sounds exactly like a novel Masha mailed him, about a girl who kidnaps foreign men to recover her activist mother—and in the novel’s ending, the mother simply fell in love and then phones to invite both daughters to visit. He asks whether that ending would be believable. Nastia says it would be a start. He acknowledges that a grandfather in the novel also refuses to leave Kherson and suspects Masha wrote it to persuade him. He brings out a stool and sits beside Nastia in silence.

When Nastia finally walks out alone, the mobile lab is waiting: Yeva is cleaning the dashboard while Sol is slumped in her seat. Nastia reflects that the whole scheme has been a childish fantasy Sol indulged. When she climbs in, Yeva asks if she is certain. Nastia says the grandfather is where he feels safe, and they drive away without him.

The 11 bachelors remaining from the original 13 have unlocked the trailer’s bar fridge using a SIM card ejector tool. No longer hoping to break out literally, they believe they are solving a larger riddle about their ordeal, connecting the fridge to earlier incidents—a dark highway, a burning field, scenes of apparent violence. Whether the surrounding war is real remains disputed. Their later accounts of the fridge’s contents diverge, and they disagree on whether anyone smelled or drank from what was inside. All agree, however, on their subsequent shared realization that the prison they truly needed to escape was their own desire. They joined hands and took a vow of celibacy, planning communal life on a remote steppe. The narrator speculates the vow may not fully hold, but a lasting transnational brotherhood will form, and all 11 will spend their remaining years with a sense of dislocation, feeling that the peaceful surfaces of their lives are illusory.

The chapter is a dialogue transcript between a mysterious group called the “Yurt Makers” and a restrained woman going by “Mrs. Brown”—revealed to be Iolanta, the mother of Nastia and Sol. She is found zip-tied in a theater tent within a gated Nevada community called Tranquil Tides. The Yurt Makers press her on her dark children’s plays, which no children ever attend, in a local theater tent. Iolanta says she left Ukraine believing she was being surveilled while trying to rebuild her activist group, and that silence protected her daughters. The Yurt Makers inform her that her only pursuers were Nastia and Sol.

She describes meeting Mr. Brown, an American, at a subway kiosk; she already liked him before learning he had come to Ukraine through the marriage industry. He offered her run of the underutilized neighborhood theater tent, and she saw the gated community as temporary protection, but married him instead. She describes life as Mrs. Brown—HOA president, dog owner, desert suburbanite—as her final role and says she performs her plays for an imagined audience of her daughters as they were when small. She questions if her daughters have given up their search for her. Fifty-two hours into the war, she still has not called them. She admits fearing they will not forgive her. Pressed to call, she agrees—once they untie her.

Driving out of Kherson, Yeva hears a faint vibration from the front passenger-side wheel and suspects a loose nut that could eventually cause the wheel to detach. Multiple checkpoints follow: Soldiers strip-search the bachelors at one stop and block civilian traffic for a military column at another. At a later stop, a car is let through and then shot at without apparent cause. Between checkpoints, Yeva glances at the specimen jar and finds the two snails still apart; she catches herself feeling vindicated by their indifference, then scolds herself for projecting human feeling onto creatures without brains. The vibration worsens until Sol and Nastia notice, and Yeva eases off the accelerator.

Russian soldiers Lyosha and Valik wait beside a stand of willows with no orders, no working radio, and confiscated phones. One of their two tanks cannot move, and the other cannot fire. Lyosha spots the mobile lab stopped on the road and, through his scope, sees Yeva crouching beside the front wheel with a lug nut in hand. His partner Valik holds that the entire civilian population is the enemy; Lyosha feels no such conviction and is simply doing a paid job. He decides to shoot out the lab’s tire and force the occupants to walk. He fires and misses the tire. He turns to find Valik awake and watching. Valik congratulates him on a clean shot, implying something other than the tire was hit.

Concurrent with Yeva being shot, the two snails in the specimen jar finally mate. One drives its dart into the other’s underside; the second retaliates, narrowly missing a vital organ. After a stunned pause, they couple fully, shells interlocking. The narrator closes by stating that Yeva will persist in the future instincts of their left-coiling descendants, who will have an inherent attraction to stale coffee, sunburned hair, and latex.

Nastia experiences the shooting’s aftermath in a dissociated state, perceiving each action as a direction issued from above. She climbs out of the cab, finds Yeva on the ground in pooling blood, and lifts her while Sol reaches through the passenger door to pull Yeva onto the middle seat. Nastia kisses the top of Yeva’s head, takes the wheel, and floors the accelerator. The chapter ends with the detail that Yeva had taught her to drive.

Yeva drifts between consciousness and a waking dream of lying naked in a swamp between Nastia and Sol, insects swarming their bodies, while her mother’s voice repeats its old instruction to think of something nice and let go. She keeps sensing she needs to rise but cannot hold onto the impulse. She cannot determine when the swamp memory happened, realizing the mosquitoes would not have hatched before the spring. The swamp softens beneath her and seems to pull her down.

Nastia races toward a town 39 kilometers away, hoping for a hospital. Her phone lights up with a long international number. She is instantly certain of two things: her mother is calling, and Yeva will survive. She does not reach for the phone, recognizing that her ability to let the call go marks a fundamental shift in what she values. Sol locates the wound in Yeva’s coat. Nastia points out a decomposing log along the roadside, drawing on Yeva’s teachings about rotten logs as cradles of ecological renewal. She chooses to believe Yeva saw it. She keeps her hand in Yeva’s as her phone screen goes dark.