Hidden in the closet, Asphodel watches John Boyet choking the Antidote. Drawing on Party Line gossip about Boyet's affair with the late Annelise Roethke, Dell impersonates Annelise's ghost, terrifying Boyet into fleeing Room 11. The Antidote, marked with bruises, thanks Dell, who accidentally calls her 'Mama' and is shamed; the Antidote forbids the term but offers her a place on her payroll.

The Antidote confesses her bankruptcy: every deposit was torn from her on Black Sunday, and she still cannot enter a trance. She refuses to leave Uz because she has been waiting decades for someone to find her. As an experiment, Dell makes a deposit, surrendering the painful memory of Coach abandoning the team. The transfer works while the Antidote is awake, but she cannot return the memory through trance—only retell it as a clumsy story. Dell proposes a scheme: invent counterfeit memories to give customers, anchoring them like windbreaks against the dust.

On Tuesday, Wilma Wheeler—who profited from foreclosed Black homesteaders' land—arrives to withdraw a 1927 deposit. The Antidote performs a fake trance, reciting Dell's invented memory of a teenage angelic vision; Wilma leaves delighted. Dell exults that the past can simply be fabricated.

At basketball practice, the Dangers awkwardly express sympathy about the failed electrocution of Dew, the man convicted of killing Dell's mother. Tensions flare when Thelma calls Pazi a 'dirty squaw'; Pazi quits, throws down her knife, and reveals her stolen Ponca grandmother and her plan to find family in Oklahoma. A miraculous flock of tiny birds appears and disappears, and Dell declares it a sign that winning the tournament will end the dust. Pazi rejoins but vows to leave for Oklahoma.

Over three weeks, Dell and the Antidote—'the Counterfeiters'—thrive as panicked townspeople flee Uz and withdraw secrets. Dell hides in the closet recording real deposits in a notebook (the Antidote insists on honest records) while feeding the Antidote fabricated memories to recite. Dell records confessions of violence, complicity, joy, and grief, learning the buried history of Uz County.