Sasha Vesna collapses beside the EPR pod, wailing over the body inside: Dr. Brigita Gessner. Her grief quickly turns to panic as she realizes something is wrong and she begins to hyperventilate.

Sasha suffers a seizure, and Robert Langdon searches her purse for medication but finds none. Remembering Gessner’s claim that Sasha’s temporal lobe epilepsy had been “cured,” Langdon instead protects Sasha from injury, cradling her head and letting the seizure run its course. As he waits for Sasha to recover, Langdon reflects on epilepsy’s historical links to altered states, creativity, and religious visions, while the larger crisis remains unresolved: Katherine Solomon is still missing.

Aboveground, Lieutenant Pavel anxiously searches for Captain Jan1dek, who has vanished after making a phone call. Pavel discovers the hidden elevator that likely explains Langdon’s earlier disappearance, then hears a crash from the makeshift alarm at the lab stairwell and assumes someone has entered or exited the lab.

Inspecting the lab door, Pavel notices the biometric panel is now green and blinking and realizes the door did not relock because a shard of safety glass jammed the jamb. Instead of immediately reporting it, Pavel decides to take initiative and go down alone, imagining he can hold the unarmed academics at gunpoint and redeem himself in his captain’s eyes.

Far below the ridge, Captain Jan1dek lies broken in a ravine, fading in and out after being shoved over a low wall by an unknown attacker. As he bleeds out, he recalls that he fabricated finding a bomb (there was only a bomb threat) after a powerful American caller instructed him to escalate the situation to arrest two prominent Americans, promising to manage the U.S. ambassador. Jan1dek remembers the ambassador’s devastating confirmation—em>We know there was no bomb—and drifts into an eerily calm, detached acceptance of death.