The chapter opens with an exchange of letters between Roy Stryker and Cleo Allfrey. Stryker accuses Cleo of submitting forged 'utopian' photographs and refuses to publish them. Cleo resigns from the Resettlement Administration's Historical Section, explaining that her Graflex camera, bought in a Dannebrog pawnshop, captures images across time—past and possible futures—rather than what she sees through the viewfinder. She describes prints showing Pawnee farmers, future children, migrating bison, and divergent tomorrows ranging from abundance to apocalypse, arguing that the future is unfixed and that human choices matter.

Now living at the Oletsky farm because she is broke, Cleo works in Harp's root-cellar darkroom. While developing prints from her first day in Uz County, she discovers a horrifying sequence: Sheriff Vick Iscoe digging a grave, then he and a curly-haired deputy rolling a dead woman's body into the hole and burning it. The image is exact and irrefutable.

Asphodel ('Dell') descends into the cellar and immediately identifies the dead woman as Mink Petrusev. Cleo explains the camera's time-bending properties, showing Dell prints of future children, bison, mud lodges where Harp's house stands, and a prehistoric ocean over the wheat field. Dell is shaken but believes her.

Their conversation turns to the murders. Dell reveals that the Antidote believes Sheriff Iscoe invented the Lucky Rabbit's Foot Killer to cover his incompetence and used Clemson Louis Dew as a scapegoat. Dell then confesses that she and the Antidote have been planting false memories—'counterfeits'—into 111 customers whose deposits were lost on Black Sunday, and that this complicity helped Iscoe bury the truth and condemn an innocent man.

Cleo, sickened, refuses to absolve Dell but channels the girl's shame toward action. Recognizing that the photographs constitute evidence that could free Dew and indict Iscoe, Cleo resolves to act, even though she has no trustworthy authority to turn to. She asks Dell to help carry the prints up the ladder, knowing that for the first time her photography requires her to risk her life.