As the Ministry remains in lockdown, systems malfunction across the building: servers are migrated, communications fail, key cards glitch, and Simellia is briefly trapped when a lock melts and showers sparks. The narrator, heading to meet Adela, helps get Simellia out and learns Simellia’s access has been quietly curtailed. When Simellia presses for an explanation—about cancelled meetings and Arthur’s blocked medication review—the narrator reveals that the Brigadier tried to kill the narrator; Simellia recoils when she notices the narrator’s concealed gun.

On a monitored outing approved by Adela, the narrator takes Graham Gore, Arthur, and Margaret to a Turner exhibition, partly to test how much latitude the narrator still has and partly out of concern that Arthur and Margaret are being deprioritized by the Ministry. The “ghost hunting” game quickly turns tense: Graham fixates on Turner’s seascapes and becomes visibly shaken when a painting’s caption invokes the Erebus and the Franklin expedition’s doomed fate. Graham deflects questions, using controlled conversation to hide the extent of his distress as they return to their separate safe houses.

Back home, Graham pushes the narrator against the door and initiates sex, begging not to be questioned about what he remembers. The narrator, trying to imagine what it feels like to be the sole survivor returned to a future that knows his expedition only as catastrophe, recognizes how Graham’s grief and shame press against their intimacy.

Feeling physically vulnerable in their shabby new lodgings and threatened by the Brigadier, the narrator joins the field agent program’s unarmed combat course. Adela personally sparrs with the narrator, criticizing telegraphed punches and remarking that attackers do not warn before striking. The narrator admits Graham has been studying grim twentieth-century history after the narrator mentioned “Auschwitz” without context; Adela reacts with sudden alarm at what Graham has and has not been told, then exploits the narrator’s lapse in vigilance by punching the narrator in the face.

With Adela’s permission, the narrator takes Graham on a monitored bike ride to Greenwich to see the Franklin expedition memorial, hoping for closure and stronger “hereness/thereness.” At the chapel memorial, Graham quietly registers posthumous promotions and confronts the reality of his dead shipmates, asking for time alone. Over lunch afterward, Graham forces the conversation to cannibalism; the narrator confirms Inuit testimony and archaeological evidence, and Graham’s relief suggests he fears what he himself might have become.

The next morning, Graham lies awake and admits he is never going back and that everyone he knew is dead, making him a stranger with no shared past. The narrator tries to reassure him, while privately reflecting on displacement through the lens of family history and recognizing how the narrator has become both Graham’s supposed anchor and a demanding need of her own. Their morning sex is interrupted by the narrator’s work phone, and when the calls finally stop, Adela texts: the narrator must come to the Ministry immediately.