Caeror tests Djedef by driving an obsidian Instruction Blade through Djedef’s chest and ordering Djedef to answer only his questions. Djedef says he fled Duat with help from someone named Netiqret, was killed by a Gleaner in the desert, and was questioned after death. When Caeror asks how many days have passed since Duat’s last restday, Djedef abruptly tries to break free and begins to reveal more, confirming Caeror’s suspicion that the Concurrence altered Djedef’s memories and set him up to reenact his death for observers.

To stop that hidden command from endangering them later, Caeror breaks Djedef’s neck and then destroys Djedef’s brain with the blade. Caeror explains that Ka can erase memories in an iunctus but cannot create false ones, so Djedef’s account was true but incomplete: Djedef must have been recaptured, returned to Duat, and programmed to mislead or attack them. Caeror and Vis quickly bury the body because Ka’s forces will already be searching the area and may use the body’s disappearance to trace them.

As Vis and Caeror head back across the desert while erasing their tracks, they spot figures approaching from Duat and realise they cannot reach safety in time. Caeror leads Vis onto broken rocky ground, buries Vis beneath sand, and leaves him hidden while the search passes overhead. When wind exposes Vis’s face, Vis sees one of the Gleaners: a hovering dead person in white robes with blade-limbs, one obsidian and one stone. After the danger passes, Caeror explains that Gleaners are a form of iunctus controlled by Ka and linked together, likely powered by Will taken from other iunctii.

Once they resume walking, Vis returns to Caeror’s earlier claim that Vis is here to kill a god. Caeror says Ka is not literally a god, but an ancient ruler whom most people worship because he controls Qabr through the Concurrence and the iunctii. Caeror connects Ka to the ancient project that used pinned iunctii to bypass the Gate’s protections and explains that one man preserved control by existing in all three worlds at once, a state called Synchronism. Caeror believes that if Vis can help remove Ka from Qabr, Ka will no longer be Synchronous in Res, which may stop the coming Cataclysm. Horrified by the idea of killing anyone but unable to dismiss the stakes, Vis finally agrees to keep listening.