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Vittoria, the camerlegno, and Swiss Guards move through the dark vastness of St. Peter’s Basilica toward the Vatican Grottoes. Vittoria stays close to the group, unsettled by the church’s darkness and by the grim purpose ahead: to seek information from the dead Pope’s body, possibly through a papal autopsy.

As they pass the sunken sanctuary beneath the main altar, Vittoria assumes the golden coffer contains St. Peter’s bones. The camerlegno corrects her, explaining that the public display holds palliums and that St. Peter’s actual grave lies deeper below, inaccessible to visitors. Vittoria questions the deception, and the camerlegno argues that imagined contact with divinity can still comfort believers.

The conversation turns to the Vatican’s resistance to change and the late Pope’s attempt to reach the modern world. When Vittoria suggests science as part of that outreach, the camerlegno says science itself is irrelevant compared with the soul of the person using it, because science can either heal or kill.

The camerlegno then reveals personal history. He says he always felt called to serve God, served two years in the military as a medevac helicopter pilot because he refused to fire a weapon, and still flies occasionally. He also offers Vittoria sympathy for her murdered father, prompting a more intimate exchange about loss.

Vittoria learns that the camerlegno never knew his father and lost his mother in an accident when he was ten. A bishop from Palermo took him in, became the father figure he remembered, and later rose to cardinal before leaving the College of Cardinals for another office. As the group reaches the stairs into the grottoes, the camerlegno reveals that this man died exactly fifteen days ago and that they are now going to see him.