Cleo Allfrey sets up her darkroom in Harp Oletsky's root cellar, an eerily cool, primitive space filled with hanging beans, buried potatoes, and shelved preserves glowing under her red safelight. Harp lingers awkwardly, clearing space and apologizing for the modesty of what he can offer. Cleo politely insists she works better alone, but she finds herself unexpectedly comfortable with the nervous farmer.

Harp confesses, his voice trembling, that he cannot explain his run of luck since Black Sunday—the dust has somehow swerved around his land, leaving his skies clear. Cleo gently acknowledges how strange good fortune must feel after such hardship. Harp, moved, tells her she may use the cellar as her darkroom for as long as she needs, and shares that vernalization—a long dormant sleep under snow—is required for winter wheat to grow.

That night, Cleo develops her negatives. One frame, taken at Asa T. Hill's WPA archaeological dig at the Pawnee village site by Guide Rock, initially appears as a milky cloud. On a second pass through the fixing bath, an impossible image emerges: not the desecrated open grave she photographed, but a vivid bird's-eye view of a living Pawnee city from an earlier century—children swinging from silver branches, women raising mud lodges, fields of sunflowers, corn, beans, and squash flourishing across the grassland.

Cleo is stunned and frightened, unable to account for how her Graflex Speed Graphic captured a scene far outside her own sight. The chapter establishes that her camera, like Harp's wheat and the Antidote's vault, possesses an inexplicable power—seeing through time itself.