At ten in the morning, Sadie consults her offline map and decides to take a connector path down to the D43, the shortest route back to the Dubois house. She has prepared carefully, also carrying a satellite phone since there is no cell service in the countryside.

As she descends the switchbacks past walls of limestone, she is struck by the rock's unnaturally vivid colors—lavender, turmeric-gold lichen, lemon yellow, blood red, candy-pink, and baby blue. Suspecting paint, she touches the warm stone and confirms the color is intrinsic to the limestone itself.

She passes a barred, locked grate over an opening in the rock, recalling Bruno's claim that the caves seem to end but do not. Pressing her ear to the grate, she hears trickling water and feels cool air, reinforcing the hidden depth of the cave network and its relevance to locating Bruno.

Farther down, she finds a lavoir, a communal stone washing pool fed by a spring. Washing grape residue from her hand, she reflects that touching the water is touching what lies inside the earth. She feels the unsettling presence of the long-ago women who gathered there—an eerie companionship she attributes, with mild self-awareness, to the heat affecting her.