In September, the narrator helps Margaret Kemble revise for her acclimatization exam in Pimlico, alongside Arthur. Graham Gore arrives with Lieutenant Cardingham; Cardingham is openly contemptuous toward the narrator and patronizing toward Margaret, sharpening the narrator’s sense that not all “historical figures” will acclimatize with Graham and Arthur’s flexibility.

The narrator reflects on childhood fear and control through a story about learning to coexist with a garden spider (“Missus Legs”), then applies the same strategy at the Ministry: seeming open while hoarding information. After months of unanswered messages, Quentin finally makes contact via a coded postcard. Meeting him on the heath, the narrator finds Quentin unwell and paranoid; he claims Graham’s sketch is a future weapon and insists the time-travel project is a weapons program. Worried Quentin is either a whistleblower or delusional (and dangerous either way), the narrator encourages him to bring proof, betting that the Ministry cannot easily “touch” her because Graham is the most successful expat.

In early October, Margaret catches a common cold that has mutated over centuries and becomes severely ill, triggering frantic debates among Adela’s team about wards, consent, and forced exposure. A group video call to the Ministry ward retraumatizes the expats by recalling the extraction process. Margaret recovers; Arthur and then the narrator fall ill. Graham tries to downplay the illness, but when he develops a high fever he begs the narrator not to inform the Ministry, and Arthur, Margaret, and the narrator care for him at home until he recovers.

After weeks of avoiding the office and hiding both Graham’s illness and her meeting with Quentin, the narrator returns to learn Adela is now her handler because Quentin has defected. Adela reveals Quentin tried to contact a supposed brigadier and an associate, Salese; the “brigadier” is a foreign intelligence agent the Ministry had been monitoring, but he has gone underground along with Quentin. Adela also warns the narrator that biting her thumb is “a dangerous tell.” Soon after, Graham and Arthur cross the boundary on a motorbike trip; Adela reprimands the narrator for not enforcing permission, and Graham presses the narrator on how the Ministry tracks him.

In early November, the narrator discovers Graham is practicing a field-agent exam on his laptop, implying the Ministry may be preparing to use him as an operative who evades scanners. The realization makes the narrator nearly faint, and the moment turns intimate as Graham steadies her; later they dance awkwardly in the kitchen, flirting that stops short of a confession. As winter storms arrive, the narrator sits through Wellness briefings about monitoring expats’ pornography searches and realizes Graham knows the laptop reports to the Ministry when he uses search terms to message her directly.

During a flood on their street, Graham appears with high-vis gear and a powerful light—apparently unissued Ministry equipment—coordinating sandbags and neighborhood help, deepening the narrator’s suspicion that Graham is quietly acquiring tools and autonomy. Before Christmas, the expats gather for dinner; Arthur demonstrates a sensor-based “theremin” that responds differently to “hereness/thereness,” and Margaret and Arthur show they can sometimes control their detectability while Graham can barely trigger it. The narrator spends Christmas with her family amid a bitter conflict with her sister over a published childhood story, while worrying that the brigadier’s access could endanger them. Over the break, Graham texts warmly and calls; on the phone he almost admits how unreal the narrator feels when she is away, and asks her to tell him everything about her life, while the narrator recognizes she is carefully shaping how he imagines her and how stories—personal and imperial—bind people to power.