The narrator, posing as Sadie, spends her first night at the Dubois country house in the Guyenne, sleeping deeply with the help of Xanax and Ambien after her drive from Marseille. She wakes at dawn, eats bread with old Nutella, and exchanges joking texts with Vito, who is filming at the Calanques with his crew. She sets up an expensive new satellite router and monitors news of a southern European heat wave.

She turns to the task of locating Bruno Lacombe's property, somewhere in the hills above Vantôme. From a thin dossier and court records, she pieces together a tragedy Bruno never mentions in his emails: in 1988, while teaching his eight-year-old daughter to drive a tractor on a hillside, the tractor tipped and crushed her. His marriage collapsed, and his wife left with their two surviving children. The surviving daughter now lives in the old farmhouse, while Bruno moved progressively further from civilization—first into his barn, then into a five-hundred-year-old dry-stone hut, and finally into the caves on his land.

Through Bruno's emails to Pascal Balmy and the Moulinards, the narrator follows his philosophy of retreat: he sees revolution as foreclosed and believes capitalist civilization must be left behind, not dismantled. He describes the sensory richness of barn life, the swallows, and his discovery of an enormous cave system beneath his property—chambers coated in moon milk bearing what he believes are a child's footprints, underground rivers with translucent crustaceans, guidance from his hydrologist son.

Bruno also denounces the French state's high-speed rail tunnels and the Tayssac megabasin excavations, whose vibrations he claims to feel underground. Just as the narrator expects him to turn to sabotage, Bruno veers into mysticism: after twelve years in the caves, he says he hears voices across all eras—Homo erectus, Neanderthals, sapiens, Cathars, Cagots, lost cavers, wartime partisans—an atemporal polyphony accessible only through long deprogramming. He compares cave listening to shortwave radio, insisting one is never alone underground, that the earth holds the entire human community.