The narrator runs back to the Ministry, exhausted and filthy, and is intercepted by Simellia before reaching Adela. Simellia hustles the narrator into a sealed “vestibule” near the time-door and reveals she is the mole, claiming she was convinced by future-climate and racist-collapse projections relayed through Salese and the Brigadier. When Simellia keeps the narrator at gunpoint, the narrator uses Ministry combat training to injure Simellia’s knee, disarm her, and force her to open the way to the time-door room.

Inside, the narrator sees the doorframe apparatus and the grotesque core machine that “fires time,” realizing this is what Quentin likely witnessed when teenagers were killed. The Brigadier is there, battered, and says sending him back would only restart the war; he also confirms Salese was his beloved. As armed Ministry “heavies” approach, the Brigadier states London is gone in his era, and Simellia panics about endless historical repetition.

Determined to prevent Graham Gore being taken, the narrator empties a gun magazine into the time-door machine. Alarms and terrifying distortions erupt; then the Brigadier is suddenly annihilated into a star-like, boxed “galaxy” remnant. In the chaos, Simellia grabs the narrator’s other gun, takes the narrator hostage, and—using the narrator’s unique connection to the project—bluffs her way out past armed teams in a smoke-filled, improvised escape.

In a nearby car park, Simellia refuses to return, insisting she will expose the truth and that there will be “so many more” like her; she disappears on the run. The narrator goes home and finds Graham waiting with a gun. Graham accuses the narrator of betrayal, says Adela told him everything before she died, forces the narrator to use Adela’s passcodes to delete all project traces, and then leaves with Maggie, warning the narrator not to help the Ministry find them.

Ministry officers arrest the narrator; a mistaken disclosure that Adela was from the future leads to house arrest in a new safe house. The Secretary later confirms Adela arrived first through the seized time-door in Defence, personally recruited him, and the project used expats as trainable assets while others were culled as “redundant.” He offers the narrator a redundancy payout, warns the damaged time-door cannot be destroyed by gunfire, shows Adela’s body and the hovering “galaxy,” and says Gore, Kemble, and Maggie have fled while Cardingham is detained and cooperating; the narrator is ordered never to return within 500 feet of the Ministry.

Cut loose and grief-stricken, the narrator moves back in with her parents, reads Arthur’s notebook and poetry, and slowly rebuilds a life with small work. Months later, a parcel arrives: Graham’s returned copy of Rogue Male and a photograph implying Graham and Maggie are alive somewhere near Sitka spruce in Alaska. An underlined passage is marked with a handwritten note: “Of course I loved you,” and the narrator decides to use the payout to travel and search. The chapter closes with a reflective address about changing history through hope, forgiveness, and choosing to be better.