Din and the others are met at the River Tarif by an imperial barge and Apoth militii, who respond to the signal rocket and escort them and their recovered goods back to Yarrowdale. In a preparation room at the fermentation works, Din gives his full report to Thelenai and Ana while Pyktis's corpse and the six recovered crates are laid out before them. Although the raid appears to have ended in success, Ana's expression shows that she does not believe the matter is settled.

Ana immediately questions why Darhi would have kept Pyktis's body sealed and stored so carefully. Din suggests that perhaps someone else killed Pyktis and hid the corpse in the Yarrow vaults, and that Darhi may have stolen the chest without understanding what it contained. Thelenai finds the simpler answer more convincing: that Darhi killed Pyktis himself. Ana does not argue the point for long, because she is more troubled by whether the recovered crates still contain what Pyktis needed.

At Ana's insistence, the Apoths test the concentration of the fertilizer in each crate. Four crates are normal, and a fifth is only slightly diluted, but the sixth contains only forty percent of its expected concentration. Thelenai calculates that more than four stone of the critical reagent has already been removed and replaced with common fertilizer, which means Pyktis had enough material to create a warping far worse than the one seen in the jungle clearing. The apparent victory collapses into panic as everyone realizes that another weapon may already be hidden somewhere, prepared to strike even if its maker is dead.

As Thelenai presses for answers, Ana names the problem as apophenia: Pyktis buried her under so many motives, clues, and mysteries that her mind is struggling to separate pattern from noise. Concluding that ordinary analysis will no longer work, Ana says she must "dine" in a different way in order to think differently. She asks Thelenai to obtain regulated kizkil mushrooms and sends Din to fetch two raw calf livers, explaining that this strange meal may help her divine where the hidden weapon lies.

By evening, Din returns with the livers and finds that Thelenai has already provided the mushrooms. A table has been prepared with only the mushrooms, utensils, and the bloody package, while Pyktis's corpse and the altered fertilizer remain nearby. Ana asks everyone to leave except Din, whom she keeps as her engraver and witness in case the meal brings revelations. As the others depart, Malo quietly remarks that Ana smells especially strange, underscoring that Ana is about to undertake an unsettling and dangerous method of inquiry.