Cleo Allfrey takes the stage at the Grange Hall on Founder's Day, scanning the predominantly White crowd for danger and noting the absence of Sheriff Iscoe. A commemorative pamphlet erases the town's Black residents, classifying the population as "Native White Americans" and "foreign-born." Hester Brophy, a Black woman married to a tenant farmer, offers Cleo a warm welcome, while the Mayor approaches with an unsettling, toothy smile, ostensibly gracious but laced with menace.

Cleo signals for the photographs to be unveiled. Dell and her basketball teammates pull down the curtains, revealing the prints produced by the Graflex Speed Graphic, a quantum camera that captures past and future. Reactions split sharply: some viewers weep or laugh in wonder, while others seethe with hatred, including a dapper grandfather who fixes Cleo with a look of pure loathing. Cleo, who had felt isolated and mad in the darkroom, experiences euphoric relief at having her visions witnessed.

Cleo reflects on her curatorial process. The Graflex had revealed horrific futures: Mink Petrusev's murder, atrocities against Native and Black people, apocalyptic wastelands where Uz once stood. Following Harp Oletsky's advice—he had pointed to a print of an unfenced future with a burr oak full of unrelated children—she chose to exhibit the most beautiful, hopeful images: visions of intact prairie, Pawnee humanity, Black homesteaders in Audacious, and possible flourishing futures. She acknowledges the exhibition is incomplete, biased propaganda for hope.

As tension swells in the hall, an enormous, heavily pregnant tabby cat slips into the Grange, threads through the crowd, and bounds purposefully toward the Antidote.